"...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery

[George Thompson]

>From Wikipeida, in an article on the career and downfall of Tex
Antoine, a TV meteorologist in NYC:

On November 24, 1976, his weather spot came up just after a report of
a violent rape of a five year old girl. Tex thereupon quipped: "With
rape so predominant in the news lately, it is well to remember the
words of Confucius: 'If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.'"
Roger Grimsby led the 11 p.m. newscast that night with the official
apology from WABC.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Stephen Goranson <goranson at DUKE.EDU>
Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 6:39 am
Subject: "...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery

> A fine new scholarly book by Peter Jeffery has occasion to assert
that
> the late Prof. Morton Smith (Columbia), in presenting to the
> public a purported
> ancient Christian text, included a vulgar joke. Prof. Jeffery
> (Princeton)argues. in my view this is the second book to do so
> persuasively, that Smith
> fabricated the supposedly-ancient text and offers that the vulgar
> saying was
> widespread by the time Smith wrote his book. I mention this here
> in case it's
> of interest.
>
> Smith claimed he found in 1958 in Mar Saba monastery an eighteenth-
> century copy
> of a letter of Clement of Alexandria that quoted from a Secret
> Gospel of Mark.
> Jeffery's book is The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined
> Rituals of Sex,
> Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (Yale U. P, Nov. 2006);
> book synopsis
> and reviews are available at amazon.com. Smith vistited the
> monastery in the
> Judaean wilderness twice. The first time, he was religious (he
> became an
> Episcopal priest); the second time, he was an atheist, and anti-
> religious. The
> first time he appreciated the chanting. the second time he
> described (in his
> 1973 book The Secret Gospel p.6) the chanting as disorienting and
> hypnotic:"I knew what was happening, but I relaxed and enjoyed
> it." Jeffery, an expert
> in history of music and liturgy identified this as a vulgar joke,
> a reference to
> the line, "if you're getting raped, relax and enjoy it." Jeffery
> (128f and
> endnotes) duly mentions coach Bobby Knoght (1988) and a Texas
> politician(1990), though they are too late. He located a 1954
> courst case:
> http://www.lawskills.com/case/ga/id/18745
> "Q. Do you remember when the deputy sheriff made the statement to you
> that--Confucius say, "The rape being unavoidable to relax and
> enjoy it"?'[....]
>
> And a 1970 rock album title.
> But there are other written traces, e.g. (g-bks) The Long Voyage
> (1959), by
> Adrian Hayter p.97, "...the Chinese proverb...."
>
> Stephen Goranson
> http://www.duke.edu/~goranson
>
>
> Jeffery wrote that such words are mostly passed along orally, but
> found
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org