The Ark and The Dove

Little Brudder Theological Moment

"I can make it on my own," is the motto of Homestarrunner.com's hyper-maudlin one-legged dog, Little Brudder. The quintessence of bathos, Little Brudder swears he will perform all sorts of deeds that are clearly impossible for his shattered frame--perpetually eliciting helpless tears from the rest of the Homestarrunner cast. He obviously can't make it on his own, but there is something cathartic in his delusional hopes that he can. He's the American dream gone too far--a belief in hoisting himself up on his own bootstraps that flies into the realms of absurdity. He quixotically clings to the impossible dream that really is impossible--there can be no happy ending for Little Brudder despite his indefatigable hope.

There's something about Little Brudder, though, that makes me think of the current state of religious vocations in the Church. I'm assuming we've all had that moment sitting in the pew thinking: "Who could really think that guy was being called by God?" or reading the news and thinking, "How could God let him become a bishop?" (Of course, we don't usually then ask the next obvious question: "Why would God let such a judgmental person like me attend Mass...")

Even as numbers are growing, we've still a dearth of religious vocations being followed here in the U.S., and between scandals of the newsworthy sort and just political (often liturgical) conflicts on a parish level, it can seem as though many of those who have pursued vocations aren't always making the best of it (friends and present readers excepted, of course, lest I get steely glares the next time we go out to dinner).

It seems as though the Twentieth-Century crippled the Church vocationally. Now she appears to hobble along like a one-legged dog trying to make it on its own.

And maybe that's precisely the point. The Church can't make it on its own. It survives solely by the grace of God.

If the Church was abounding in vocations, and if everyone who followed a vocation was a charming, attractive, saintly figure who always followed orthodox rubrics and gave sound advice, then the Church's success and survival would appear to be due to the charisma of its religious leaders. However, if vocations are filled by people who do not always live up to the high expectations of their offices, then the perpetuation of the Church depends solely on God's mercy.

Again, I'm not saying all of our religious are jerks. I personally know far more holy men and women in vocations than not. Really, I'm just reflecting on how often it seems I hear people complaining about local parish life or failures of bishops to take stronger stands or actual tragedies that strike us from within. In the larger scope of history, these times of weakness within the Church's members will only make God's protection of the Church appear all the more striking and miraculous.

Safe Space Signs...

Every year I threaten my academic future. I toy with the idea of putting up a "Dangerous Space, Dangerous Person" sign on my door; it would rival all of the pink triangles on the office hallway.

This year, I face a different temptation. What if teachers started posting "Safe Space, Safe Person" stickers expressing students' freedom to religious speech?

At the moment, though, my future is safe if only due to a lack of design concept...

(I know some clever person is going to post a reply saying that a religious Safe Space symbol already exists and that it's called a crucifix, but something tells me that doesn't exactly convey the idea I was striving for. It would, however, be ironic to make the statement of religious freedom through an image of religious persecution.)

Define "Design"

BBspot linked to a blog post by novelist John Scalzi about design flaws in Star Wars technology (and biology). Essentially, it's gripes about user-friendliness in the Star Wars Universe. For instance, Scalzi complains that it makes no sense for R2-D2 to have been designed with arms, inputs, rocket thrusters, and periscopes, but no beep-to-speech software. He observes that C-3PO is supposed to be a translator, but that he is incapable of translating any language requiring physical gesture since he can barely move his arms most of the time. Then there are the safety issues, like the lack of seat belts, and the inexplicable need to have unshielded core reactors in the Death Star.

I might have a lot of Star Wars junk lying around my house, but, if anything, that just makes me all the more ready to agree with Mr. Scalzi...but I do have some bones to pick with his approach...

Some New York Thoughts

Isabel and I set out on an adventure to New York last weekend to attend a wedding, and it was quite the shwanky affair, I might add.

Along the way, some thoughts struck me that I will now post largely at random...

New Yorkers form Communion lines in the same manner in which they drive.

French people are the best bet for pointing you in the direction of the nearest museum.

You don't know good sushi until you've had it.

During cocktail hours, do not eat more food than you would expect to be served at dinner.

And now, for the extended cogitation...

While jaunting about the Empire State, Isabel and I decided to cut through the Bronx and go to the Cloisters. It's a satellite to the Metropolitan Museum of Art consisting entirely of medieval artifacts. Indeed, some of the structure itself was relocated Gargoyles-style to the Big Apple...

Movie Rec: The Fall

Isabel and I undertook one of my favorite pastimes of late -- rooting through the four-for-$20 used movie bin at Blockbuster (I am quite disappointed to see that the newer movies usually classified as three for $20 have gone up to two for $20).

Usually, these are movies from two summers ago...and most of them are movies I didn't bother seeing anyway. Every now and then, though, you find some diamonds in the rough. For example, today's film recommendation: The Fall, directed by Tarsem. He likes to go by just "Tarsem." Evidently, it's his thing.

The movie is set in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles during the rise of the film industry -- I usually don't take well to metatheatrical movies about movies, but this one plays the meta-factor pretty low-key, until the movie concludes with extended tribute to the stunt men of silent films. That's not really a spoiler -- the movie literally ends with a collage of what are probably now public domain black and white clips. It could have been saved for ending credits...but there is some narration in the background that preserves its integrity to the rest of the film.

Anyway...where was I?

LA...1920s...right.

The main story follows an immigrant girl who has broken her arm and is recuperating in a religious hospital (assumably Catholic) where she befriends an infirmed stunt man. Their friendship centers around an improvised fantasy tale that he contrives to entertain the girl, and she visits him every day to hear the next part. The fantasy then becomes an episodic film within the film, and provides the director an opportunity to show off his cinematographic talents as the cast is whisked from one exotic location to the next. The sequences are very stylized, using minimalist special effects -- any computer graphics have been hidden well if there are any. The film's take on imagery is a refreshing return to a more elegant age, proving that delightful spectacle does not require giant killer robots, freakish creatures, or urban devastation. The fantasy sequences also play well off the completely believable and gritty presentation of 1920s healthcare. Actually, the film is so visually effective that I started to forget that the hospital scenes, with their sets, costumes, and props would have required as much if not more art to construct as any of the fantasy bits.

And, of course, the fantasy narrative also serves as an effective distraction from the main plot, or framing device, depending on your perspective. As charming and whimsical as the premise appears to be, one quickly discovers that the real world as darker, more...well...realistic problems going on.

The director makes extremely creative use of dramatic irony, forcing the viewer to have to assemble information about the main plot from bits and pieces of information that the little girl hears, but most likely does not understand. For instance, one of the most charming scenes in the film happens when the little girl, who is, I think, a Russian Jewish immigrant (but I could be wrong on that), steals an unconsecrated communion wafer out of a sanctuary and feeds it to the injured stunt man. He at least recognizes it as the Eucharist and thinks she is trying to save his soul, but she doesn't have clue what he thinks she has done (it doesn't help that her English is broken and faulty). As a Catholic, I also appreciated that the director took the time to make sure we see her stealing an unconsecrated host...otherwise, I would have obsessed over the scene for the rest of the movie.

In other scenes, there were important pieces of information that were pretty much delivered as through away dialogue by people in the background of the scene--in some cases, during dialogue that was actually being spoken over by other characters. That probably makes it sound far more confusing than it is...

The movie is also a tear-jerker. I don't think Isabel saw me crying, though. It gets very dark, very quickly--and you realize that most of dramatic suspense and conflict comes from anticipating whether or not the little girl will achieve what Aristotle calls the tragic recognition -- an understanding of just what has been going on around her. It is rated R, so it's not for the kids -- but the rating mostly comes about because of the darker themes which start to manifest. Like I said -- they are very, very dark.

To conclude: the movie boils down to The Princess Bride meets Pan's Labyrinth meets Last Action Hero (the good parts) meets Life is Beautiful.

The Fall: Recommended.

It Takes "The One" to Know One

Drudge linked to a Breitbart article headlining Obama's attack on TV networks.

The thrust of the article is that Obama is running scared from all the cable TV news clips of townhall protests. What really captured my attention from the article, however, was this quote:

"We are held hostage, at any given moment by health insurance companies that deny coverage, or drop coverage, or charge fees that people can't afford at a time when they desperately need care," Obama said.

Obama is saying that people feel enslaved by their insurance companies -- they are afraid of the power they wield over them through their ability to provide or deny health coverage. Of course, the supremely ironic part of this is the way he is describing the health insurance companies in the same terms that we should be describing Islamic jihadists and terrorists. Americans have in fact been literally held hostage and actually been murdered by their captors...Maybe Obama should be more worried about those who physically behead their prisoners rather than those who only do so metaphorically...but I'll move on so as not to get too sidetracked.

What I really want to focus on is Obama's attention to the power that insurance companies wield.

He's trying to pull a classic absolutist argument -- he's suggesting that there is this more or less aristocratic class of insurance CEOs that stand over the poor commoners. These aristocrats lord their power over the helpless masses and tyrannize them with their wealth oligarchies. The commoners stand no chance in a revolt against these corrupt lords. Rather, their only hope lies in transferring their fealty and obedience to someone who stands above the aristocracy -- to a single man whose love and commitment to the people will guarantee the toppling the fatcats and the truly common good. It's how French absolutism got itself entrenched in government policy. The oppressed love to put their hope and trust in heroes. Obama is depicting his government as the ferocious royal lion that will tear apart those who stand between him and the people. Of course, we all know how well French absolutism worked out.

I digress, again, though.

What most concerns me is that Obama is acknowledging that he who controls healthcare essentially controls the people needing healthcare. If health insurance companies hold the people under them as hostages, what will stop the government from holding hostage those subscribing to government healthcare?

Consider the following scenario: Three years from now you suddenly find yourself losing your private health insurance because the economy has tanked even more. Your employer can't afford to offer you the benefits you once had, and you can't afford to buy it on your own. Your only affordable option is Obamacare. Election time comes. You can vote for Obama -- the guy who dictates your healthcare options...or you can vote for some conservative who has been running on a platform of dismantling government healthcare. You still have the freedom to vote against your own health insurance provider...but it seems to defy common sense to do so.

Obama is right -- those who control health insurance do hold their clients hostage. Under Obamacare, it seems as though it's more than just the client that would be hostage--it would also be the hostage's vote.

This is precisely why you don't give slaves the right to vote.

The Tudors: Season One

Isabel and I just finished watching the finale to the first season of Showtime's The Tudors.

She is quite upset about the portrayal of Thomas More in the series as a whole, but particularly in the last episode.

I'd probably be more upset about the portrayal of Thomas More, but I'm still too busy trying to block the image of Henry VIII engaged in auto-eroticism over a servant boy while fantasizing about Anne Boleyn's breasts undulating over her neckline. Needless to say, I don't feel comfortable recommending the program to anyone. It's pretty much Renaissance pornography.

But back to More...
We got the sense that the writers were very confused about his character. He is a nervous, shy, fumbling figure whose religious devotion borders on fanatical. The series makes him directly responsible for the ferreting out, capture, trial, and burning of heretics...which he seems far too eager to perform. Most damning, however, he is portrayed as an impractical optimist whose idealism blinds him to the court intrigues surrounding him.

Nothing could be further from the jovial, prankster of Renaissance legend (sources claim that he was known to have jumped in the middle of dramatic performances by professional and improvised parts for himself on the spot) or the shrewd, worldliwise visionary that composed the politically jaded Raphael Hythloday in Utopia. While More depicts his fictional self as rather naive in Utopia, it is often thought that he does so as a satirical dodge from the biting critique of Hythloday (that is, if anything Hythloday says sounds treasonous in the text, he can point to passages where he explicitly disagrees with the character...even though it is obvious to the reader that Hythloday is usually--but not always--right).

I suspected we were going to be in trouble when Henry VIII's character praises Machiavelli's Prince and then chides More's Utopia for being (I kid you not) "too utopian." The whole point of Utopia is to satirically call out the very real social, political, and theological problems England was facing by proposing an imaginary place that had solved all of those problems. I had hoped that the point of the line in the show was to suggest that Henry didn't get More...but I think, in the end, it was really the writers who didn't get him.

I don't expect historical fictions to get all the history right...and I've appreciated the various Tudor Wikis online that keep a running tally of the gross inaccuracies of the show that I haven't caught on my own. Still, the point of altering a narrative, even a historical one, should be to either create a clearer sense of the character or experience of the time. Instead, the Tudors seems to obfuscate More's character and replace it with something that feels more like a modern evangelical misunderstanding of Renaissance Catholicism.

And did I mention there were far too many naked bosoms flopping around the screen? And the problem wasn't just that they were flopping, but why they were flopping...

Naming the Demon

Collecting toys is a weird hobby. I know that. Being a weird hobby, it tends to build one's tolerance for weirdness in general. That's why, when some weird guy starting talking to me in the Walmart toy aisle the other day, I tried to be as polite as possible and let him do his thing. It wouldn't be the first time a stranger tried to talk shop while browsing through G.I.Joes.

After trying to talk shop, though, it became painfully evident that this guy had no idea about anything geeky and was merely bluffing his way through the most basic of pop culture references. Indeed, he seemed more interested in asking me what kind of work I did for a living than in talking about the travesties of Michael Bay. I began to suspect the motives for the chap's seemingly random desire to talk to me (I even began scratching my nose with my left hand out of a narcissistic homophobia).

Fortunately, Isabel showed up out of bathwares and managed to whisk me away.

As we neared the exit of the store, however, Isabel noticed the man had begun following. He eventually intercepted us, told us his name (and blinked awkwardly when I would not tell him mine), and then asked whether my job permitted me enough free time to make some extra money on the side doing some "marketing." I explained that my job took about 110% of my time, wished him luck, and briskly departed.

It spoiled an otherwise enjoyable trip to the toy aisle (I never managed to take advantage of the sale Walmart was having on their G.I.Joe Anniversary figures).

Stranger, yet, however, is that this is the second time this has happened to us. Down south, we were once accosted by a fellow in a Target with a similar routine (what do you do for a living, how do you like your job, am I from the area, etc.). He was a bit more aggressive and less friendly, though...as he became indignant when I refused to hand him a business card after he shoved his at us.

Subsequent to this second encounter, I grew more curious about what had happened (I was willing to dismiss the first case as a crazy person). It turns out that this is a fairly common phenomenon, and it has a name, as I learned from a blog post (following a very exhausting Google search): Network Marketing/Multi-Level Marketing. According to Ramit Sethi's blogpost, it's essentially a low-level (and legally spurious) ponzi-type scheme where people sign up to sell legitimate but usually worthless products for a fly-by-night company. The sellers are then pressured into / rewarded for recruiting new sellers as well as typically buying the products they are supposed to sell (and they will usually try to sell them to friends and relatives). It's kind of like the Avon Lady system gone bad...or a hybrid offspring of Tastefully Simple Parties and Scientology.

These guys had all the aggression of evangelical cult members, only without any of the spirituality.

So the next time a random person in a store asks me what I do for a living, I think I'm going to cut him off at the pass and tell him I make $100,000 a year as a network marketer selling power juice to my neighbors.

Health Care Reform and Arrested Development

Take a trip down memory lane back to grade school.
Remember what would happen when someone would sneak in a few pieces of candy either for himself or to share with his circle of friends?
The teacher would admonish the sugar smugglers with a line similar to: "You can't have any unless you bring enough for the class."

At least, I'm pretty sure I remember something like that happening. To other people, of course. I was a good kid.

Anyway, it seems to me that there is something of this mentality at work in the rhetoric behind health care reform. Either everyone is supposed to have the same, or else the person who has more is going to get punished.

There is something appealing in the argument -- why should little Tommy get something that the rest of the class...or country...can't have? It just doesn't seem fair.

On the other hand, when the teacher demands that student surrender their sweets, the point usually has less to do with justice than it does with preventing the other students from getting distracted when they see someone else eating something they can't (and, perhaps more likely, to prevent kids from going into a sugar-rush in the middle of class). The actual logic of the argument doesn't really fit. Why should one child be deprived of candy just because the rest of the class doesn't have any? What if little Tommy bought that candy with money he earned doing chores when the other kids were playing on their NintendoDSes? What if little Tommy had been saving that candy after other kids had eaten all of theirs? Ultimately, the argument that one person or a group of people can't have something unless everyone can have it is fraught with peril in the real world. Neither is it a sincere argument, since we can be pretty confident that most teachers wouldn't suddenly let their classes gorge themselves on candy every day just because someone was willing to provide them with a high fructose cornucopia.

It would, however, be unfair and unjust if kids started bringing in enough candy to share with everyone but chose wittingly to discriminate against certain classmates out of irrational prejudice. If little Tommy chose not to distribute candy to kids who wore glasses, just because they wore glasses...then an important social lesson would be taught by scolding Tommy. However, what does it teach Tommy to tell him that he shouldn't have things simply because other people happen not to have them? What does it tell the other children?

I think something of this mentality is currently at work in health care reform. People seem to get upset that some have better health care than others...or that some people have no health care at all. But are differences in the quality of healthcare necessarily unjust? Of course not, so long as everyone is playing fairly by the rules. Why should it be unjust if one company offers better healthcare than another as a means of luring better employees? Why should it be unjust if one man puts his resources into making himself and his offspring more competitive candidates for better jobs?

If the teacher says that Tommy can only have candy if he has enough to share with the rest of the class, his response should be to tell the teacher that it's not his fault that the rest of the class didn't think to bring their own.

Democrats -- Meet Machiavelli

Oh, politicians...
When Machiavelli penned his treatise, The Prince, he was fairly universally questioned for his morality. The idea that a government sometimes had to do bad things and get its hands a little dirty in order to serve the best interests of the state wasn't necessarily new, but it certainly wasn't anything that anyone wanted to admit. In a Platonic-Christian philosophical outlook, the best ruler would be the philosopher-king -- the upstanding, selfless, good guy, who always chose the moral high ground and reaped the benefits of God's Providence. In reality, however, statecraft is often a game of compromise--both on policy and morality. Sometimes protecting the people might mean the king must lose his soul -- at least according to Machiavelli's viewpoint.

But Machiavelli was often misunderstood as somehow advocating tyranny. He didn't. He rather famously argues (as Cliff's Notes might reductively put it) that it is better to rule by love than by fear, but fear is far more efficient and reliable, and therefore the safer course.
Perhaps more importantly, however, he warned those who would wield fear to be careful of the kind of fear they wielded.
Killing people, Machiavelli felt, was one thing. Bump off some competitors early on, and people will easily forget...or, at the very least, they will get out of your way. Murders, assassinations, trials...those are fair game, especially early in a reign. Those whom you don't kill won't necessarily bear a grudge, and those whom you do kill can't do anything about it after the fact.
What a tyrant should never under any circumstances do, according to Machiavelli, is mess with people's stuff (including their women).
People won't necessarily revolt if you kill their neighbors -- what's it to them if you do?
People will, however, react passionately if you take their stuff or threaten to take their stuff.

What the Democrats are doing now is threatening to mess with people's stuff -- their health insurance and their money.

Nobody wants poor people to die from sickness (except for liberal Malthusians). It's one of the reasons why Americans are so generous to charitable organizations. But this is about the government taking money away from its citizens by compulsion. Ask me to give you ten bucks so you can buy tylenol, and I'll probably do it. Go into my wallet when I'm not looking and take the ten dollars, and I'll call you a thief.

It is a pretty basic aspect of human nature that more people are worried about protecting their own property than whether or not a stranger they've never met will or will not be able to get free medical treatment.

From the scads of newsclips I've seen, many Democrats can't believe that individual citizens could possibly be so impassioned about protecting their wealth -- these Democrats are convinced it must be part of some kind of Republican conspiracy. And yet if they spent more time reading their Machiavelli than their Marx, it would seem the most obvious thing in the world.