I found this the other day at the HuffPost:
Tim Jones, English Priest, Says Shoplifting Okay At Times
I guess this is another indication of how bad the economy has become. When priests start sounding like anarchists, you know the situation is serious.
Christmas is coming up, and I just haven’t been able to get into the holiday mood. I’ve been thinking a lot of dark thoughts lately. I guess there’s just not much for me to be merry about this year. The Democrats are about to pass a health care “reform” bill that will force working class people to buy medical insurance they can’t really afford (to add to the credit cards they can’t really afford, and the mortgages they can’t really afford.) Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan. Oh, and Tiger Woods cheated on his wife. I’ve been repeatedly told that this last point is a matter of great importance, perhaps of equal, if not greater, importance than the first two points I mentioned. (I’ve been told that the New York Post devoted 19 consecutive front pages to this, which is more than they devoted to the Sept. 11 attatcks. Maybe this is one indication of why people are no longer reading newspapers.) I must confess that it’s not at all clear to me why I should care about Woods’s sex life. Am I missing something here? I have that feeling one gets when one is at a party and there’s a joke going around that everyone is clued into except oneself.
They say that at this time of year people get depressed because the days are shorter. It doesn’t help that I have gotten into the habit of staying up late surfing the Internet. I now get only a few hours of daylight every day. I try to find things to cheer me up. I can perhaps find some grim satisfaction in that I was right in expecting the Copenhagen climate conference to be a complete failure. It’s ludicrous to think that the world system as it presently exists could possibly come up with a rational plan to deal with an issue as complicated as global warming. And I can enjoy some schadenfreude at the fact that Al Gore embarrassed himself at the conference. I can tell myself that it’s perhaps just as well that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election from him.
Still, I can’t get myself out of this funk. I just read Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire. I enjoyed it a lot, and it even had a happy ending, but still I had dark thoughts after I had finished it. I was at the supermarket today and the cashier told me how the Christmas music that the store played all day long was driving her crazy. All I could do was smile stupidly at her. Afterwards, I tried to cheer myself up by doing some photography, which is one of my passions. I like to take pictures at night, because of the interesting effects of lighting and color one can get. I pulled over on a country road – not far from where I live – to take a picture of an old building that looked abandoned. A man who apparently lived nearby came up to me and all but accused me of being a burglar. He seemed to think I was casing the area. I smiled and explained to him that photography is a hobby of mine. This didn’t seem to make much impression on him, so I got in my car and drove away. After I had driven a ways, I felt a sudden impulse to turn around, so I did. When I drove past the spot where I took the picture, there was the same man having an animated conversation with several other men. It seems the photograph I took stirred up a hornet’s nest. Perhaps I injected some excitement into their lives.
Update: I’m sorry if this sounds like a messy and confused post, but it reflects my feelings when I wrote it yesterday. My mood has improved somewhat since then. I went to the supermarket today and I was actually able to have a conversation with the cashier. Perhaps what has cheered me up is the news that the health care “reform” bill may be in trouble because of the possibly illegal promises that were made to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, just to get his one lousy vote. This may be too much to hope for, but for now it has cast a ray of sunshine in my life.
Oral Roberts has died. He was a famous television evangelist and the founder of Oral Roberts University. He was an advocate of “prosperity theology”, which claims that if you’re faithful, God will reward you with material wealth. Roberts also claimed to be able to heal people through prayer. Strange to say, none of the obituaries that I’ve read mention what, to me, is the most interesting thing about him: he saw a 900-foot tall Jesus (or at least that’s what he said.) And he saw Him more than once. The second time, Roberts was having trouble raising money for a medical center he wanted to build. (If he could cure people by praying, what did he need a medical center for?) According to the Tulsa World, when Roberts talked about his problems, the 900-foot Jesus said, “I told you that I would speak to your partners and, through them, I would build it!” (The wording here suggests to me that Jesus felt that Oral was starting to nag him.) I don’t know about you, but if a 900-foot tall Jesus showed up at my door and told me to give money to Oral Roberts, I don’t think I would be in a position to say “No”.
To me, there is something quintessentially American about all this. I doubt that it ever occurred to Bernadette Soubirous that her accounts of meeting Mary would have sounded more impressive if she said that the Holy Virgin was 900 feet tall. A predilection for gigantism seems characteristic of Roberts. In the 1980’s he built the City of Faith Medical Center, which included a 60-story building, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; even though the local medical community said it wasn’t needed. It went out of business in 1989. (When he was raising funds for the place in 1987, Roberts told people God would kill him if he didn’t raise the necessary money. It seems that God doesn’t mess around.)
Out of curiosity, I went to the website of Oral Roberts University. What do they teach at a Pentecostal Christian university? I found that they have colleges of Art and Cultural Studies, Business, Nursing, and Theology. I’m pleased to find that they also have a college of Science, though it is unclear whether they teach evolution – or geology, for that matter. Discussing the accomplishments of the school’s graduates, the website notes: “One of our recent French language students was hired by the CIA.” That’s not something I would brag about.
In 2007, ORU was the scene of a scandal involving Roberts’s son, Richard Roberts, who was then president of the university, as well as Richard’s wife, Lindsay. According to the Associated Press:
Lindsay Roberts is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”
Maybe they thought that God was rewarding them for being faithful. Just a suggestion.
A while ago I saw the film The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). I found it sufficiently interesting that I then read the John le Carré novel on which it is based. The book was written at the height of the Cold War, which provided fertile ground for spy novels, since it was essentially a war of bluff.
Alec Leamas works for British Intelligence. He is in charge of British agents in East Germany. His plans are all foiled by the head of East German Intelligence, Hans-Dieter Mundt. When Mundt kills Leamas’s last operative, Leamas returns to London, expecting to be sacked. Instead, his boss persuades him to undertake an audacious operation. Leamas will pretend to defect to the East. He will then spread disinformation meant to make the East Germans think that Mundt is a double agent working for the British. I can’t tell much more without giving things away. Suffice it to say that, like any good spy novel, it is essentially a story of betrayal.
The British agents in this novel are shown as being no better morally than their East German and Russian counterparts. They justify their actions to themselves by saying that they must use the same tactics as their opponents. (One can perhaps detect a foreshadowing here of the arguments later used to justify torture in the “War on Terror”.) At one point, Leamas says that such methods are necessary so that “the great moronic mass… can sleep soundly in their beds at night.” He expresses contempt for the people he is supposedly serving. Indeed, a contempt for people in general seems to underlie the operation he is carrying out. Leamas says of his fellow spies: “They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards. People who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” Le Carré was reportedly working for British Intelligence while he was working on this novel. One can only wonder what his colleagues thought about this book.
The communists in this book all sound like religious fanatics. (An exception is Fiedler, an East German spy who is one of the few sympathetic characters.) I read somewhere that when le Carré was working for MI5 in the 1950’s, he spied on meetings of the British Communist Party. I take it from this book that they didn’t make a very good impression on him. Also, it is implied that Mundt is actually a Nazi. I find this a bit far-fetched. It seems that le Carré wanted to make Mundt as repulsive as possible, but I think this was over-doing it somewhat.
There’s a general belief that movies are never as good as the books they’re based on, but I don’t believe that this is necessarily true. When the source is a mediocre novel, the film version can actually be better. A good example of this is The Shining. Hitchcock’s Rear Window is based on a barely competent story by Cornel Woolrich. (The Tarzan movies, as silly as they are, are actually better than the even sillier novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.) There’s an episode in the novel in which someone tries to kill Leamas, which is never really explained. This is left out of the movie, with the result that the story hangs together better. However, in the novel there’s a wealth of detail that’s lacking in the film, and the motives of some of the characters are clearer in the former than in the latter.
I’m told that in recent years le Carré has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy. I will have to check out some of his recent works. If they are anywhere near as good as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, they will be well worth reading.
I recently saw the film, Battles without Honor and Humanity (1973). It is a Japanese yakuza film directed by Kinji Fukasaku. It tells the story of Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara), an ex-soldier in post-World War II Hiroshima, who joins a yakuza family. The film, which is reportedly based on real events, details the struggles between and within yakuza families. It was both a critical and a popular success when it was released in Japan, and it has been called the “Japanese Godfather.”
Throughout the film, the yakuza talk about their “honor”, though it’s clear that they have none; they are continually betraying one another. An implicit connection is made between the savagery of these gangsters and the destruction of Japan during World War II. At the beginning of the film, the title is shown over the mushroom cloud of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, thereby drawing an explicit connection between that event and the events in the film. In the opening scene, some US GI’s try to rape a Japanese woman in the middle of a crowded marketplace. They are attacked by a couple of men who will go on to become yakuza. The implicit message here is that the violence of the yakuza is rooted in the brutality of the US occupation. (Also, many of the yakuza are former soldiers.) Later, we’re told that the yakuza have gotten rich off the black market during the Korean War. War is shown as a corrupting influence.
The is film is shot in a lurid, semi-documentary style. Every time a gangster is killed, his name and date of death are splashed across the screen. This has two effects. First, it reminds us that the story is based on real events. Second, it tells us that ultimately the most important thing about these people is the fact that they are killed. It is a comment on the emptiness and futility of their lives.
On one level, this is a fast-paced action film, but on a deeper level, it is a thought-provoking and somewhat disturbing social commentary.
It now looks as though the Republican party and a few right-wing Democrats are the only things that stand between us and a truly terrible health care “reform” bill that will actually be a huge hand-out to the insurance industry. How did we get into this situation? People had the naive belief that the Democrats would “do something” about the health care crisis, unlike the Republicans, who prefer to do nothing. Many figured that even if the Democrats came up with something lame, it would better than nothing Yet now the Democrats are threatening to pass a bill that is worse than nothing.
At times like this, one really must question the assumption that the Democrats are a “lesser evil”. Not only are we getting screwed over on health care, but Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan – something that Bush refused to do. Because we’re locked into a two-party system, people assume that one party can’t be as bad as the other. However, it’s not a matter of one party being better or worse than the other. This is the wrong way of looking at the matter. The two parties are bad in different ways. This is because they simply represent different tendencies in the corporate elite.
The essential problem with our health care system is that it is if for profit. However, the Democrats can only come up with “reforms” that are meant to protect profits. This means that the Democrats will come up with “reforms” that will make things worse, not better.
Obama never served in the military, yet I don’t hear any liberals calling him a “chicken hawk”. This is not a minor point. If Bush and Cheney deserved this epithet, then Obama and Hillary Clinton deserve it just as much. Obama has just announced in his speech at West Point that he is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Many of these troops will be killed, and many of them will kill Afghans who may or may not be aligned with the Taliban. What Obama is doing is no better morally than what Bush did in Iraq. True, Obama has not invented any phony-baloney stories about “weapons of mass destruction”. His argument, however, is more subtly dishonest. He says it’s necessary to send troops to Afghanistan to keep Al Qaida from re-establishing itself there. In fact, it’s because of US policies in the Mideast that groups like Al Qaida exist. Since Obama has made no change in these policies we can expect there to be more such groups. Obama can send all the troops he wants to Afghanistan, and it won’t change this fact.
Obama says in his speech: “We do not seek to occupy other nations.” This is a lie. The US is currently building permanent military bases in Iraq. We have military bases all over the world. The US is currently negotiating with the Columbian government to build seven military bases in Columbia. I doubt that they’re going to find Al Qaida there. Perhaps these military bases have something to do with the fact that much of the US’s oil supply comes from South America. Obama says in his speech: “We will not claim another nation’s resources..” No, instead we will prop up corrupt governments that give us whatever we want. That is the more principled thing to do.
Once again Thanksgiving is upon us. Although I no longer pay much attention to it, Thanksgiving was a big part of my childhood. Every year my teachers would tell me about how the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving dinner, to which they invited their Indian friends, who had helped them survive their first year in North America. Somehow my teachers always neglected to mention that 64 years later the Pilgrims fought a genocidal war against their Indian friends. I suppose they were afraid that might take some of the fun out of the holiday. My teachers struggled mightily to make the Pilgrims seem interesting, but somehow the impression they gave was that the Pilgrims were just a bunch of people who wore dorky clothes and carried funny-looking firearms. Oh, and they liked to eat turkey! My teachers were hamstrung by the fact that they didn’t want to talk about 1) the Pilgrims’ ingratitude toward their Indian friends, and 2) the Pilgrims espoused a virulent form of Calvinism that most modern Americans would find repugnant. For example, it would be awkward for a teacher to have to explain to Catholic children that their Pilgrim forefathers believed that the Pope is the “Anti-Christ”.
My teachers only had one story to tell about the Pilgrims, which they told over and over again. It went like this: John Alden has a crush on Priscilla Mullins, but he can’t bring himself to approach her. One day, John’s commanding officer, Miles Standish, tells him to go to Priscilla and convey his own request for her hand in marriage. Being a spineless chump, John does this. Priscilla responds by saying, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” That’s it. That’s the story. Pretty exciting, eh? I’m told that Longfellow made an epic poem out of this. It must have been a slow week for him.
My family celebrated Thanksgiving every year, despite it being politically problematic. Since my parents were atheists, it wasn’t clear to me whom we were thanking, or even what we should be thankful for. It eventually became apparent to me that the holiday was just an excuse to eat turkey and stuffing – and watch football in the middle of the week. In a funny way, though, Thanksgiving did teach me something about life. When I was a child, nothing appeared to me to be more mouth-watering than a big, fat turkey hot out of the oven. I would have a feeling of eager anticipation as my father would carve it. My heart would beat faster as he put big slices of white breast meat on plate. I would eagerly thrust a large piece in my mouth. I would then be perplexed to find myself chewing on something dry and tasteless. What I learned here is that appearances can be deceiving, and don’t believe the hype.
I found that by covering the white meat with gravy or stuffing or mashed potatoes – or a combination of the three – I could make it edible. (Another lesson: be resourceful.) I eventually figured out that the good meat is the dark meat (legs, thighs, wings). As Louis Prima once put it, “The closer to the bone, the sweeter is the meat.” Although I don’t think he was talking about turkeys.
Oprah Winfrey has announced that she is bringing her long-running TV show to an end. One of the factors that apparently led to this decision was her discovery that her own father is writing a tell-all book about her. (Ah, the life of a celebrity!)
If you ask me, Winfrey’s decision doesn’t come a moment too soon. In recent years I’ve come to the conclusion that Winfrey is an evil influence on our society. Among other things, she started the media hysteria over the absurd New Age book, The Secret. This learned tome claims, among other things, that thinking positive thoughts will cause good things to happen to you. Conversely, bad things will happen to you if you have negative thoughts. I suppose Winfrey believes that all the people in Hiroshima were having negative thoughts just before the atom bomb was dropped on them.
Newsweek has documented Winfrey’s practice of featuring dubious “alternative” medical ideas on her show – including the unproven claim that vaccines can cause autism. I know, people will argue that she isn’t as bad as Montel Williams or Maury Povich, who have had all sorts of quacks and frauds on their shows. I would argue that Winfrey is worse than these two precisely because she has a patina of respectability. People are more likely to believe nonsense when it’s on her show.
Late night talk shows don’t pretend to be anything more than entertainment. (Dick Cavett was accused of taking himself too seriously when he began having writers and intellectuals on his show.) Yet there is a widespread assumption that daytime talk shows can’t be just about celebrity chitchat, they have to be in some way educational. (I have no idea why people think this.) The problem is that, for the producers of these shows, “educational” usually means self-help books, fad diets, “alternative” medicine, New Age sophistry, and, of course, “psychics”. Sylvia Browne is a popular guest on these shows. In earlier days, it was Jeanne Dixon. The claims of these people are always treated uncritically.
Mike Douglas, who was sort of the Oprah Winfrey of his time, would bring Criswell on his show. (Yes, that’s the same Criswell who will be forever remembered for his deliriously bombastic speech at the beginning of Plan 9 from Outer Space. “Some day we will all live in the future!”) Douglas enthusiastically promoted the book, Criswell Predicts, which, among other things, prophecied that the world would come to an end in 1999. I seem to recall that Criswell also predicted that World War Three would be fought using insects that drill through people’s skulls, and that the first human on the moon would be a pregnant woman. Truly, this man was uncanny.
One thing I will say for Douglas is that he didn’t take himself too seriously, at least not nearly as seriously as Winfrey takes herself. One thing that really always annoys me about Winfrey is the attitude of moral seriousness that she exudes. One of the silliest things I have ever seen was the contrived outrage that she showed when it was revealed that James Frey had embellished some incidents of his life in A Million Little Pieces. Of course, people often change details of their lives in their autobiographies. Yet Winfrey reacted almost as if Frey had committed rape. Interestingly, after Winfrey excoriated Frey on her show, sales of his book skyrocketed. Perhaps this shows that some people can recognize grandstanding when they see it.
To be fair, Winfrey did express reservations about the impending invasion of Iraq, which is more than can be said for the execrable Jay Leno. (I’m pleased to note that Leno’s new show is bombing. Heh-heh.) It’s unfortunate that Winfrey can’t show a similar skepticism towards pernicious trash like The Secret.
Update: on Counterpunch, Ishmael Reed has a revealing article about Winfrey’s association with the film, Precious. Worth reading.
Japanese cinema has always been an interest of mine, going back to when, as a child, I watched Japanese monster movies on Saturday afternoon TV. My tastes have evolved over the years. I recently saw a film by Akira Kurosawa, High and Low (1963). It tells the story of a wealthy businessman, Kingo Gondo (Toshirō Mifune), who is looking to seize control of a shoe company from the other stockholders. Suddenly he receives a phone call from someone who says he has kidnapped Gondo’s son. Gondo tells him he will pay the ransom, even though it means giving up the money he needs to buy out his enemies in the company, and he will be forced out of the company and into poverty. He subsequently learns that the kidnapper took the son of his chauffeur by mistake. Gondo then begins to waffle about paying the money. Only after pleadings from his wife, Reiko (Kyōko Kagawa) and from his chauffeur does he relent and pay the money. The rest of the film is mostly taken up with the police search for the kidnapper.
What makes High and Low interesting is its portrayal of class dynamics in Japanese society. Gondo has worked his way up from the factory floor in his company, and he takes pride in its product. He finds himself at odds with the other shareholders in the company, who don’t have his background working in production. Their desire to increase profits by making shoddily-constructed shoes offends Gondo’s sense of craftsmanship and pride in his work. Later, when these shareholders learn of Gondo’s predicament, they show no sympathy for him whatsoever. Instead, they openly relish the fact that they will now be able to push him out of the company, much to the disgust of the police detective who interviews them. When Gondo’s wife, Reiko, urges him to pay the ransom money, he contemptuously tells her that, being from a rich family, she has no idea what it’s like to be poor. Gondo’s chauffeur behaves in a craven manner towards him, even though Gondo lets his son play with his own.
The kidnapper is motivated by jealousy. He lives in poverty while he can see Gondo’s sumptuous house on a hill. (In one scene, a policeman comments on how the house seems to look down on the poorer city below.) It is this which motivates his crime, but ironically he kidnaps the chauffeur’s son instead. The kidnapper is portrayed as cruel and pitiless, nevertheless his anger is real. In the film’s final scene, he tells Gondo how much the sight of his house tormented him, a rebuke to Gondo’s vanity in buying the place. He then impotently claws at the glass dividing him from Gondo. He might as well be clawing at the economic system that separates them.
I’ve always known that Kurosawa was a pacifist. However, watching this film makes me think that perhaps his politics were more left-wing than I previously realized. I feel motivated to re-watch the other Kurosawa films that I’ve seen.
The Spanish Prisoner 