Randomness

What a drag it is getting old
I find it humorous that as the Boomers age, the thinkers and artists among them by and large still cling to their youthful pronouncements, unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge their often painfully apparent callowness.

I guess honest introspection hurts your chances of your work being reissued and distributed by Starbucks.

The Politicization of Culture, or "It's 1968 All Over Again (Except Without the Idealism)"

"I am Legend as Political Manifesto"

Why Serious Films Aren't Making It At The Box Office


The Progressive movement hasn't been given as much to be angry about since Ronald Reagan. Deciding to embrace new media rather than ignore it, progressives in a position to advance their agenda feel that everything from sports articles to popular movies to advertising is fair game to carry the message. The messages try to grab you by the lapels and scream in your face:

Don't you see the awful things that are happening?

Our President is the triple embodiment of Pure Stupidity, Religious Hypocrisy and Pure Evil!

Global warming will kill us all in a few years!

Everybody hates us because we are so greedy and stupid!

Christianity is even worse than Islam and Israel is even worse that us, so shut up about terrorism already!

Our military atrocities mean we are worse than our enemies!

It would be flip to dismiss these sentiments out of hand. Progressives are the Canaries in our Coal Mine, sounding the alarm and speaking (selective) truth to power. I should and do consider their arguments. George Bush has a worldview antithetical to many on the Left, and his strengths are often blunted by his arrogance. In addition, his checkered record as president makes him an even better target than Reagan, whose many successes eventually silenced a few critics. War is a terrible thing, and this foreign proxy war seems like another Viet Nam to those for whom Viet Nam was a rallying cry, a clear sign that the people in power are evil and despise us. Christians are unfortunately people and as a result possess many of the failings of people - greed, sloth, anger and hypocrisy being just a few. I can see how it is tempting to lay much of our country's problems at their feet since the majority of our citizens (especially - as Progressives are wont to point out - the stupid ones!) profess a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

By and large, people are not buying the Progressive line. But that just makes the Progressives even angrier. The rhetoric gets shriller and more unreasonable.

I am not sure where it all will end.

Norman Mailer

What is the Christian response to the death of a man who spread as much spiritual damage through the culture as Norman Mailer? The writer is dead, but his legacy of unbridled egotism, vanity, lust and depravity will continue to lure thousands of fragile intellects down his dead-end path for years to come.

He wasn't even a good writer.

Vonnegut's Last Laugh

Slaughterhouse Five was for me, like many of my generation, a seminal book by a guy I could relate to. Kurt Vonnegut, the "above average" geek who wrote science fiction stories, the sensitive, childlike man who found himself adrift in the very adult activities of World War II, who weathered all those grown-up trials and came through the other side still a child and convinced of the absurdity of life, was a character after my own heart. His Billy Pilgrim placidly observed the horrors of war and Vonnegut's imaginings of a postwar America. One of the things Vonnegut foresaw in late twentieth century America was that it would be balkanized into several smaller nations to reduce its power and hence its threat to world political stability. While his vision was never realized and politically naive (what historical precedence is there for any nation, much less the most powerful nation on Earth, relinquishing any of its power voluntarily?) the balkanization of American Culture continues apace. American intellectuals, among other groups, have moved from imagining themselves a demimonde of like minded spirits spread among the population at large to "the Society" itself, with the rest of the population as phantom observers. How else explain pundits like Daniel Lazare, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Carlin Romano confidently proclaiming the end of faith and scoffing away the last vestiges of our religious trappings in a country where 98% of the populace believe in God? Intellectuals, like celebrities and the very rich have often felt that their reality and/or morality have little to do with the rest of the world. Technological innovation has made it progressively easier to actually create an insular and alternate reality, given sufficient means.

Vonnegut's success as a writer allowed him to remain an outsized misantropic child to the very end (comparisons of Vonnegut to Mark Twain I think focus more on outward resemblances than actual philosophies of life, ignoring Twain's humanitarian core) surrounded by fans who shared his worldview. His balkanized America, while never a political reality, has become a societal one.

The Subtle Poison of Gould's NOMA

My kids were watching the film "Facing the Giants" in the car the other day. It's an inspirational sports film with an overtly Christian message shot in Georgia on a budget of $100,000 using mostly amateur talent. Listening to the coach unabashedly use Christian concepts to inspire and motivate his players, I was struck by both the strangeness and rightness of what what was unfolding. The solidity, depth and "rightness" of his Christian viewpoint resonated much more deeply than any standard Hollywood feelgood humanist dialog, but at the same time I thought "in the real world, this coach would be considered a kook and fired on the spot".

Looking into the film online, I discovered that it had done well (eventually grossing $10,000,000 in very limited distribution) while being savaged by the critics. This review from the Austin Chronicle really hit home:

"...its feel-good storyline, shopworn message, and bottomless sermonizing would have played better in Sunday school than on the big screen, which is — let’s face it — Babylon’s turf."

Here is the reality of Life in 21st Century America, the result of the triumph of cultural humanism, as put forward by people like Stephen Jay Gould in his idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA):

"the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."

I'm sure for many in this country (sadly, even for many Christians) the above sounds not only temperate but fair and reasonable. The catch, as I'm sure Gould knew, is in the way things are divided. Anything dealing with Reality or Truth is the province of Science. The sly assignation of questions of "ultimate meaning" to religion appears to venerate it while at the same time stripping it of any of its intrinsic value in our life. The result of NOMA's tacit acceptance in our culture is that God is put in a very small box. Any reference to Him outside church is now unwelcome, and any reference in the larger culture must honor "equal time" commitments to any and all competing religious views, further weakening its impact. A film like "Facing the Giants" flies in the face of that, and it produced a visceral and negative reaction from secular critics precisely because it chose to ignore Mr. Gould's rules. Well, I'm all for pissing off the right people. Bravo to director and star Alex Kendrick.