Archive Listing
January 7, 2011 - December 31, 2010
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Feast of Stephen
2ND
DAY OF CHRISTMAS. Everybody wishes you a Merry Christmas. I'm
wishing you all a glorious Feast of St. Stephen. To me he was always
the one of the more troubling martyrs. (Next to St. Sebastian. All
those
arrows. Now that I'm older I understand those arrows, though maybe not
the look on his face.)
But getting
stoned to death is, uh.... [shiver]. He prayed for his executioners. On
some other day I couldn't be okay with that. Today, I am.
The idea of a feast in remembrance has become okay too. For today.
UPDATE.
And a belated Christmas gift. Doctor Zero finally has his own website, and his first post is a
lovely paean to Christmas. Enjoy.
Now. Where were we?
THANK
YOU ALL. Being human for a few days every year is a challenge.
Productive, rewarding, and positive, I guess. Then I revert. Duty calls.
Happy New Year.
UPDATE.
I know Lake means well but his proffered photo of LocoPunk is a
mis-identification.
TruePunk.
LocoPunk is comparatively mild-mannered.
And just to round out the set, here's CountryPunk.
Are we all clear now? (btw, this is IP post No. 1984. Get ready for 2010.)
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Welcome Christmas.
IN THE SPIRIT. So Mrs.
CP and I are at an impasse. We got snowed in. Big time. We managed to
get the gifts for everyone else but not for each other. We were
planning low-cost stocking stuffers, some kind of brilliant spending of
$20 apiece. You know. Tough economy and all. Then Mother Nature weighed
in:
But barring some last-minute desperation buying spree, we're not going
to have gifts for each other. So our backup plan is learning the words
to the Whoville Christmas song "Welcome Christmas." Which we'll sing,
badly, to each other on Christmas morning.
Things could be a lot worse. And we're also going to New York City over
the holidays. Which is pretty much as good as it gets. Merry Christmas.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Split. And Why It
Matters.
THE
WISDOM OF (PLUMP, CUTE) BABES. Sometimes, politics and religion
converge. That's what's happening with me now, and I'm not handling it well. Let's set the
scene. Here's a NYT essay by the new enfant terrible of the
conservative elitist class, Ross
Douthat. I apologize for pushing the 'fair usage' practice by
borrowing the whole thing, but my defense is that in this case 'the
whole thing' is nothing more than the posing of an incredibly important
question:
Heaven
and Nature
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at
Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic
is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply
felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all
blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long
apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and
calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the
blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic
existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human
invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine,
but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,”
described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every
living thing.
If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has
been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the
truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves.
It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King”
and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose
mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy
together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans
respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the
“religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded
with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on
how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed
Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and
mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in
the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s,
leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not
content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a
creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand
and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one
great whole.”
Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal.
We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is
an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society.
The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature
qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a
rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.
At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for
people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic
religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their
virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek
Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps
“bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of
recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence
but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human
affairs, this is an ideal combination.
Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can
support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He
means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End
of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from
immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert
Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of
the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”
The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response.
Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is
good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering
and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is
really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest
to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond
imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish
and short.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid
these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half
outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with
ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no
God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it —
a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an
abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the
natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
I don't mean to demean Douthat. Putting the right question is a
spectacular feat if you can do it in a single op-ed column. Answering
that question is everyone's individual responsibility, not Douthat's.
His last four paragraphs frame an existential crisis for anyone who's
paying attention. For those of us who have significant parts of our
personal identities bound up with our citizenship as Americans, the
current political situation is also an existential crisis.
Have you wondered why your response to the Obama administration is so
severe that it impinges on your personal life? This is why. For me, I
must admit, it has amounted to panic. Because I know what is at stake.
Call it a perfect storm of assaults on faith. I cannot do the things,
physically, I once did. When I shoveled snow the other day, I thought I
was going to die. For real. I hid it from my wife but the dogs were
concerned. They surged around me as I sat gasping for breath. I pushed
them away. I push everyone away. Even my wife and closest friends. Especially my wife and closest
friends.
Yes, I had the mid-life crisis the MSM convinced me I would experience.
Back when I turned forty. But that pales in comparison to the
end-of-life crisis you experience when you confront the fact that you
are growing old and, worse than that, frail. It's easy to beat a
mid-life crisis. You buy a Harley. It's not so easy to beat the
end-of-life crisis. You look to philosophy, religion, family, country,
humanity itself for a context that makes sense of your life and its
inevitable approaching end.
For many, family is enough. Which is good. If you have it, embed
yourself in it. It is its own kind of salvation. But some of us
don't. Some of us have only the illusion of family, blood relations of
spouses whom we love fiercely but know to a certainty regard us as bit
players on the stage of births, baptisms, Thanksgivings and other
holiday dramas. There will be attendees at our funerals, but only
because they are honoring someone else they care about more.
Which is fine. The way of things. There are other relationships. I have
had a life-long relationship with God, specifically Jesus Christ. I
thought it was a unique relationship. I thought if I did His work, in
my own particular way, He would wink at my manifold sins. But my sins
are still sins. And I also thought, for way too many years, that my not
quite believing in Him was
somehow (roughly) analogous to Him not expressly condemning me. Talk about
your hubris.
But I am still a Christian. If not blindly at least philosophically,
historically, and ritually. And I'm an American. These two, however
qualified, used to be more or less synonymous. I was also a rational
being, convinced that being part of the Long March Toward a Better Life
Through Science and Other Forms of Educated Thinking would count for
something at the, uh, end. You see, I also knew that being a Christian
meant that you were also a participant in the LMTBLTSOFET that bound me
up with the brotherhood of American exceptionalism.
But here, toward the end of my life, I have become, suddenly, a pariah.
Friends turned on me for things I said here. I needed my country to
sustain me in my beliefs. I knew that the Christianity-based U.S.
Constitution had been a force for good in the world, which was part of
my faith, such as it was, in the gospels. Have I mentioned the word
'frail'? I needed my country to bolster my religious faith.
And then came Obama. Not his fault, I guess. Back in 1999 I heard my
own dad tell me, in the full knowledge of his own imminent death from
cancer, that the country he had fought for no longer existed. Those of
you who have read this blog all these years know that I rejected his
angry, dying dismissal. Still do. BUT...
Even he never anticipated
that a president of the United States would take the position that
human existence was somehow wrong in the scheme of things. Which, no
matter how you boil it down, is the position -- nihilist in the extreme
-- of the supposed savants of western civilization. Note that the
Chinese exhibit no such enlightenment. That's why they'll own the 21st
century. Problem is, I don't want China to own any century. Especially
one I'm living or dying in. Which means it's time for me to die. And
I'm having trouble with that idea. My wife saved me from dying. Now she
can't understand why a mere Obama is undoing her good work. She blames
me. All I can do is
apologize. And try to explain that it's bigger than anything she or I
can control.
The Split. Yeah. Have you ever had the feeling that people are arguing
about matters YOU settled long ago? I
do. Every day. (Book of Andrew, Book of ASSUMPTIONS.) What is with
this idiotic notion that Nature is good and Mankind is bad? Fact is,
Nature is cruel, even demonstrably vicious, and Mankind is, uh, more kind than not. That's why Mankind
has prospered and proliferated. DUH. Consider this: Christianity is the
biggest ever departure from Nature. Its central premise is that we all matter. Odd. Wrong? Perhaps.
But absolutely right in human terms. It has led to the extension of
human thought, lifespans, and a kind of beauty and accomplishment no
other culture has ever dreamed of. No other kind of human philosophy
has produced such sheer gorgeousness. Now we are being asked to regard
ourselves as vile, a scientifically verifiable pollution on the face of
the earth, something akin to the AIDS virus. The President of the
United States subscribes to this view. Let me repeat that. The President of the United States
subscribes to this view.
While I am struggling on
matters of faith, patriotism, and survival. My response? Fuck him and
the horse he rode in on. The Split does
matter. Not just because I'm going to die, but because we all know we're going to die
and we all still care about what happens after Human
religion is by definition
the Split with Nature, the
proof that we are better than lions, hyenas, wolves, and black mambas.
Most of us
live every day with the proof -- the species that remade themselves
just for the privilege of living with us and acquired a moral sense
along the way -- dogs. Now we're on the "precipice" of taking better
care of our dogs than ourselves. It's called ObamaCare.
Obama has made me a monster. I confess it. I thought I was part of a
national tradition that would move from strength to strength regardless
of my own personal failings. I was wrong. I thought Jesus Christ was
strong enough to withstand both the dashboard totemism of the
fundamentalists and the politically correct nonsense of the Catholics
and Episcopalians. I was wrong. I thought I could soldier through my
doubts and fears -- Obama's deliberate assault on my country and its
freedoms -- without anyone knowing the depths of my despair. I was
wrong.
But -- and here's where I appeal to my brethren -- how do you explain
to loved ones that "mere" politics can be the driver of your distance
from "Christmas spirit" and threaten everyone else's enjoyment of the
season?
Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not blaming it on Obama.
I'm talking about my own loss of family and lack of faith. I have
failed in every way possible. The Obama adminstration found all those
cracks and turned them into the personal disaster I now face.
I AM sorry. I am also, truly, in despair. I love my wife, I love my
(her) family, I love my country, and I'm not serving any of them at the
moment. That's the definition of my despair.
UPDATE.
Thanks to Eduardo. Psalm 31:
10 For my life is spent with
grief,
and my years with sighing:
my strength faileth because of mine iniquity,
and my bones are consumed.
11 I was a reproach among all mine
enemies,
but especially among my neighbors,
and a fear to mine acquaintance:
they that did see me without fled from me.
12 I am forgotten as a dead man out of
mind:
I am like a broken vessel.
13 For I have heard the slander of
many:
fear was on every side:
while they took counsel together
Thanks to others, too. It does all matter...
The Future
DEE-TROIT.
I actually know this city. Had a car stolen there once.
(An SUV I didn't want but had to buy because I was a GM consultant and
they hated my MR2.) While I was working as a consultant to the -- wait
for it -- UAW. Who didn't want to hear
it. How to not kill the industry they were sucking the life out of,
that is. Things like not
beating the crap out of auto workers who took jobs with Japanese
companies in America. Or keying their cars in their driveways, at home.
Didn't. Want. To. Hear. It.
But. Here's your future under the Obama administration. Just imagine
health care Detroit style. Lots of money flying around and death at
every turn. HUH! (Does this git me a Peace
Prize?)
I'm working on the Christmas spirit thing, though. My friend Chain Gang
made it simple enough that even I can understand it. He pointed out
that nobody ever believed all
of Jeremiah's correct predictions. Am I as good as Jeremiah? No. So cut
it out during the Christmas season, okay? Save the gloom and doom for
the New Year, okay?
Okay.
Monday, December 21, 2009
A good and true Tip
for our sci-fi junkies.
MTV,
uh huh. Also, he's from southern New Jersey.
A NEW FONT OF INFO.
There is actually an
InstaPunk-certified movie reviewer. Since we don't always see movies
the moment they come out, where are you supposed to turn? Well, Kurt
Loder would be the guy.
Not that we always agree. He liked Watchmen,
for example, which we didn't, not at all and by a whole lot. BUT.
Here's what you get with Loder. He knows his movies, the whole history
and all the references and antecedents. His reviews are literate but
column length. He takes movies on their own terms, which is to say that
he doesn't expect a Pixar movie to be an Ingemar Bergmann film, even
though he knows Bergmann inside out. Nor can you wow him with sheer
money, celebrity, or hype (He worked for MTV, don't forget.) He's also
a good enough writer and reporter that he tells you why he liked, or didn't, a movie,
in ways specific enough for you to decide whether his opinion is
relevant to you or not.
Finally, I have found him to be the best of all reviewers at confirming
my own viewing of a movie I've actually seen. He sees what's good about
it, what's bad about it, and he almost never spoils it with his review.
Imagine my surprise to discover that he grew up less than fifty miles
from me, is a libertarian, and employs his experience with saltwater as
a source of philosophical wisdom:
I grew up on the Jersey Shore, on a
little barrier island. The Atlantic Ocean was on one side, the bay was
on the other. Everyone there hunted and fished and clammed and got
crabs out of the bay. And one day my brother told me someone had come
down from the Bureau of Petty Harassment or something and they measured
the temperature of the water and had decided it was a little too warm
and a certain type of bacteria might incubate in it and there was a
chance that might harm the clams. And so, from now on, no one was
supposed to take clams out of the bay anymore. Which everyone ignored.
And no one died. That was before the government got tenacious about
this stuff. So I thought that was pretty stupid right there
I know exactly what he's talking about. But I didn't know it when I
discovered his reviews. I
thought he was the pseudo-intellectual of
MTV. I was wrong. Fortunately, I found I was wrong by reading his
writing, not his biography. Now I am happy to report I've located his review page on the
Internet, thanks to Big Hollywood. I commend you to do the same. Here's
a sample of his review of Avatar:
There's a lot to look at here: the
luminescent glow of the jungle in which the Na'vi live, the ancient
Tree of Souls with which they commune, a spectacular range of mountains
hanging high in the sky up above Pandora — and there's a lot going on.
The director and his battalion of digital technicians have cooked up a
fantastical bestiary of Pandoran creatures — futuristic hammerhead
rhinos; dogfighting battle dragons; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a
vicious six-legged thingy that chases Jake through the jungle and off
the edge of a cliff (see trailer). The meticulous detail in which these
creatures have been rendered, and the complexity with which they're
arrayed in the film's exotic environments, are undeniable marvels of
moviemaking art.
Unfortunately, whenever the action lets up and we're returned to the
piddling story, the picture slumps like a failed soufflé. It's
also heavily laced with political instruction of a most familiar sort.
Cameron, who's now 55, is a self-acknowledged aging hippie, and his
boomer worldview is strictly by-the-numbers. Quaritch and Selfridge are
evil Americans despoiling the Na'vi's idyllic planet in exactly the
same way that the humans have (we're told) trashed their own native
orb. The invaders are armed with deplorable corporate technology (an
odd animosity in a major-studio movie that reportedly cost more than
$300 million to make), and they speak the familiar — and here rather
anachronistic — language of contemporary American warmongering. ("We
will fight terror with terror!" "It's some kind of shock-and-awe
campaign!")
The Na'vi, on the other hand, with their bows and arrows and long
braided hair, are stand-ins for every spiritually astute and
ecologically conscientious indigenous population ever ground down under
the heel of rampaging Western imperialism. They appear to have no
warlike impulses themselves, and they live in complete harmony with
their environment. (They even talk to trees.) Why, the movie asks, as
if the question were new, can't we be more like them?
You see? He's not as political as I am. He doesn't get as pissed about
ideology as I do. But he still knows that a superficial crap script is
bad moviemaking.
I know more than that. But in the interim, Kurt Loder will do. And when
he likes a movie you probably wouldn't, he gives you enough
information about his own viewpoint and arguments to let you decide for
yourself. What more could you ask than that?
