Part of the spiritual landscape of American religion is the sizable role played by choice in a culture shaped in the free market - with freedom as a mythic symbol. It is not unusual to hear American politicians describing solutions to social problems as a matter of “trusting Americans as consumers.” It is as though we could “shop” our way out of life’s difficulties.
And thus it is that Calvinism, as a Protestant option, has never quite captured the mind of the American religious “consumer.” Our culture has long been driven by its own sense of freedom and the inherent right of every individual to make his or her own choice. Thus Christian teachings which do not give heavy weight to the importance of free-will (such as classical Calvinism) have never come to the place of dominance in American life. For Americans, religion is about a choice.
This is not all wrong - human beings do have freedom and it plays an important role within the life of salvation - even in Orthodox understanding. However, Orthodoxy sees our freedom as something flawed - we do not always choose as we should - nor do we always know what the good is to be chosen. Freedom has a role to play in the life of salvation - but is not itself what constitutes salvation. Indeed, our freedom is itself in need of salvation.
This brings me to the title of this short piece: the Kingdom of God is not a choice we make. There are many ways to describe the Kingdom - a variety of metaphors employed in the New Testament - but in every case the Kingdom is God’s Kingdom - not our response to God.
I occasionally state in sermons that “the Kingdom of God is coming whether you like it or not.” In this sense, particularly, it is not a choice we make - it is a gift that is given from God. In Christ, particularly in the fullness of His death and resurrection - the Kingdom of God has come. Though we still pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” we are not devoid of its presence now. “Thy Kingdom come” is a prayer for its fullness - but not for its inauguration.
The Kingdom of God is a reality already among us - though we frequently are oblivious to its presence. The heart of secularism is its assurance that the Kingdom of God is not here now, not yet, and perhaps only refers to something somewhere else or even nothing more than a utopian vision of the future. Of course, secularism and its infection of Christian thought is commonplace in modern culture. The world is not seen as sacramental, capable of bearing the Divine, but at best as a neutral playing field in which human beings choose sides in the religious contest of Christianity (or other religions or none of the above).
But the fullness of Christian truth and revelation is that the Kingdom of God has already broken forth among us, and the Christ who brought it forth promised that it would remain. Thus we eat and drink His Body and His Blood - not reminders of a historical event - but a foretaste of the fullness of the Kingdom. It is the Bread of Heaven - food, though not of the world yet in the world.
The whole of the sacramental life has this character of the Kingdom. And the sacramental life extends far beyond the Seven Sacraments that are traditionally described. The Kingdom has a quality that breaks into all of life unable to be restrained or hindered by man. We are not in charge of its arrival nor are we the masters of its growth. We may participate in its life and serve as its witnesses - even as citizens - but it is not our creation or something we offer to God. It comes from God and bears God.
I reflected on the song shared in the last post, written by St. Nikolai Velimirovich. There it seems clear - “Christ is risen, joy has been given.” Everything is made bright with the resurrection of Christ. It is not a choice other than for us to say: “Indeed He is risen!”
It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.
When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.
No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?
The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.
But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.
Are you sitting down?
Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.
These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.
The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.
“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”
It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.
While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.
In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”
The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
Bush Made Permanent by Paul Krugman, borrowed from the New York Times
As the designated political heir of a deeply unpopular president — according to Gallup, President Bush has the highest disapproval rating recorded in 70 years of polling — John McCain should have little hope of winning in November. In fact, however, current polls show him roughly tied with either Democrat.
In part this may reflect the Democrats’ problems. For the most part, however, it probably reflects the perception, eagerly propagated by Mr. McCain’s many admirers in the news media, that he’s very different from Mr. Bush — a responsible guy, a straight talker.
But is this perception at all true? During the 2000 campaign people said much the same thing about Mr. Bush; those of us who looked hard at his policy proposals, especially on taxes, saw the shape of things to come.
And a look at what Mr. McCain says about taxes shows the same combination of irresponsibility and double-talk that, back in 2000, foreshadowed the character of the Bush administration.
The McCain tax plan contains three main elements.
First, Mr. McCain proposes making almost all of the Bush tax cuts, which are currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, permanent. (He proposes reinstating the inheritance tax, albeit at a very low rate.)
Second, he wants to eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which was originally created to prevent the wealthy from exploiting tax loopholes, but has begun to hit the upper middle class.
Third, he wants to sharply reduce tax rates on corporate profits.
According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the overall effect of the McCain tax plan would be to reduce federal revenue by more than $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s a lot of revenue loss — enough to pose big problems for the government’s solvency.
But before I get to that, let’s look at what I found truly revealing: the McCain campaign’s response to the Tax Policy Center’s assessment. The response, written by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, criticizes the center for adopting “unrealistic Congressional budgeting conventions.” What’s that about?
Well, Congress “scores” tax legislation by comparing estimates of the revenue that would be collected if the legislation passed with estimates of the revenue that would be collected under current law. In this case that means comparing the McCain plan with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expired on schedule.
Mr. Holtz-Eakin wants the McCain plan compared, instead, with “current policy” — which he says means maintaining tax rates at today’s levels.
But here’s the thing: the reason the Bush tax cuts are set to expire is that the Bush administration engaged in a game of deception. It put an expiration date on the tax cuts, which it never intended to honor, as a way to hide those tax cuts’ true cost.
The McCain campaign wants us to accept the success of that deception as a fact of life. Mr. Holtz-Eakin is saying, in effect, “We’re not engaged in any new irresponsibility — we’re just perpetuating the Bush administration’s irresponsibility. That doesn’t count.”
It’s the sort of fiscal double-talk that has been a Bush administration hallmark. In any case, it offers no answer to the principal point raised by the Tax Policy Center analysis, which has nothing to do with scoring: the McCain tax plan would leave the federal government with far too little revenue to cover its expenses, leading to huge budget deficits unless there were deep cuts in spending.
And Mr. McCain has said nothing realistic about how he would close the giant budget gap his tax cuts would produce — a gap so large that eliminating it would require cutting Social Security benefits by three-quarters, eliminating Medicare, or something equivalently drastic. Talking, as Mr. Holtz-Eakin does, about fighting waste and reforming procurement doesn’t cut it.
Now, Mr. McCain isn’t unique in making promises he has no way to pay for — the same can be said, to some extent, of the Democratic candidates. But Mr. McCain’s plan is far more irresponsible than anything the Democrats are proposing, and the difference in degree is so large as to be a difference in kind. Mr. McCain’s budget talk simply doesn’t make sense.
So what are Mr. McCain’s real intentions?
If truth be told, the McCain tax plan doesn’t seem to embody any coherent policy agenda. Instead, it looks like a giant exercise in pandering — an attempt to mollify the G.O.P.’s right wing, and never mind if it makes any sense.
The impression that Mr. McCain’s tax talk is all about pandering is reinforced by his proposal for a summer gas tax holiday — a measure that would, in fact, do little to help consumers, although it would boost oil industry profits.
More and more, Mr. McCain sounds like a man who will say anything to become president.
Recently I visited my Nana, the most beautiful 82 year old in the world. We talked, ate, talked, sat outside in the warm rain, watched America's Funniest Videos, and Star Wars: A New Hope, which I spent most of explaining the plot to her.
Obama: The Know-too-much candidate? by Roger Simon, borrowed from Politico.com
Having had the national media at his feet for more than a year, Barack Obama now finds them at his throat.
The fault is his. He has disappointed us. He is not winning every voting bloc in every state. He cannot close the deal.
Running against an older, white candidate, Obama has been losing the older, white vote.
Zounds. What did we ever see in this guy?
The Bubba voters, the NASCAR voters and the Joe Six-Pack voters don’t seem to like him. (This is according to exit polls, whose accuracy is an open question but whose results are the crack of media analysis.)
Pennsylvania proved to be the turning point. Even though it had been clear since the earliest polls that Obama would lose Pennsylvania, the press was shocked by Obama’s loss of Pennsylvania.
The significance of this loss becomes clear when you see it as part of a larger picture: The superdelegates, the party insiders who will decide the nomination, are watching events very, very closely. And what do they see?
Obama has now lost the popular vote in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. He has been hurt by the irresponsible statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama insulted small-town Americans when he accused them of “clinging” to guns and religion.
Hillary Clinton has accused Obama of being “elitist and out of touch.” (And Clinton should know: She lived in a governor’s mansion for 12 years and in the White House for eight, and you can’t get more in touch with real America than that.)
So far, however, there has been no great stampede of superdelegates to Clinton. (Since Super Tuesday, Obama has picked up 87 and she has picked up seven, according to his campaign.) Which just goes to show how out of touch and elitist the superdelegates must be. Or else, how politically savvy they are: They don’t find it shocking that Obama can’t win every demographic group in every state.
Not that he has to. No Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has won the white vote. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton found that if you win enough of the white vote and an overwhelming percentage of the black vote, you can get to the White House.
But what about Obama’s bigger problem? Comparisons are already being made between Obama and Adlai Stevenson, who was an intellectual (read: loser). Obama used to teach law at the University of Chicago, one of the brainiest universities in the country.
And Americans don’t want presidents who are too brainy. (Obviously.) We would rather plunge into foreign wars or fall off economic cliffs than have presidents who know too much. That is because braininess is elitist, and being an elitist is the worst thing you can be if you want to be president.
Obama now gets this. Since his loss in Pennsylvania, he has been emphasizing his non-elitist roots. At a recent news conference at a gas station in Indianapolis, he said, “I basically buy five of the same suits and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly.”
(I guess Obama thinks this is supposed to appeal to the working classes, but my father was a truck driver, and he would have thought that owning five suits was a lot.)
At the same news conference, Obama said that what he ate while growing up also reflects his non-elitist upbringing: “I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small-town Kansas, where the dinner table would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana: a lot of pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds.”
That settles that, I guess. Diet is destiny. But does anybody besides me find it a little dismaying that a person feels he has to campaign for president in this country based on whether he ate Jell-O molds as a kid? (Though, now that I think of it, how did my mother actually suspend those little marshmallows in the Jell-O? Wires?)
Wouldn’t it be more refreshing if Obama was saying what he used to say: that it is wrong to “slice and dice” voters into isolated groups and that it would be good for America to emphasize what unites people and not what divides us?
But Obama’s new approach is valuable for one thing: It teaches us that everything our parents told us was wrong.
“Study hard so you can go to a good school and get a good job,” parents say. “And stop dressing like a bum!”
But not if you want to be president.
I have a new love in my life: Peter Kreeft. I've been listening recently to some free audio on his website. Several are fascinating, but it all began with this one. It's not that his arguments for God's existence are new. Rather, they are takes on what Christian philosophers have long said in the debate. But as of late, in especial regard to all the heavy blows various scientists and thinkers have tried to land on God, I think the soundness of these old arguments on Kreeft's lips ring quite clear. It's about 75 mins long, which isn't exactly brief, but I'd say about half an hour in, things really start rolling, and he articulates a few of the arguments in ways I've never heard, and powerfully. And interestingly, the question and answer session at the end is the best I've ever heard, with intelligent, relevant, and difficult questions. I'll let you decide for yourself what you think of his answeres to the direct questions.
Faith has been taking a difficult route for me lately. It's really hard to articulate what's going on with me. I suspect, however, that my understanding of my life, hope, and goals are very much oriented around myself, what makes me happy, what stimulates me and challenges me, what I think I should be doing. It's been a difficult transistion coming home, and I still feel very much in limbo about where I'm supposed to be or what I'm supposed to be doing. Furthermore, my trust in God to handle these issues has wavered, and as I've pondered these things, I'm realizing that the lack of trust is as much the struggle's source as it is the result. As a Christian, one bound to Christ, how is it that my life of faith should be oriented around my own desires, bound by the limits of my intellect? Am I not to entrust my life to God, the one who created me and everything else out of nothing? Is he not the very purpose for which I and everything else was created? The natural equation of Creation? Therefore, whose life am I living really, and whose desires am I to be centered on?
Lots of questions, but perhaps the answer is more simple than I've thought it would be over these last several silent months. Interestinly, yesterday's sermon held a few poignant & challenging quotes that spoke to this very issue of trust, which I'll be wrestling with for a while, I think.
"A real Christian is an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen, talks familiarly everyday to someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong in order to be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest, and happiest when he feels worst. He dies so he can live, forsaken in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which passes knowledge." -- A.W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous
"Uncompromising trust in the love of God inspires us to thank God for the spiritual darkness that envelops us, for the loss of income, for the nagging arthritis that is so painful, and to pray from the heart, 'Abba, into your hands I entrust my body, mind, and spirit and this entire day -- morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Whatever you want of me, I want of me, falling into you and trusting in you in the midst of my life. Into your heart I entrust my heart, feeble, distracted, insecure, uncertain. Abba, unto you I abandon myself in Jesus our Lord, Amen.'" Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust
"The natural world overwhelms us with its splendor, its beauty, its immensities and fragilities, its incalculable diversity, its endless combinations of the colossal and the delicate, sweetness and glory, minute intricacies and immeasurable grandeurs. It is easy, and among the most spontaneous movements of flowered meadows, the emerald light of the deep forest, the soft, immaculate blue of distant mountains, the shining volubility of the sunlit sea, the pale, cold glitter of the stars. This is a perfectly wise and even holy impulse.
"But, at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the natural world is everywhere attended -- and, indeed, preserved -- by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yield its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings. It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creative and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life. Considered 'from below,' from within the system of nature, the force that drives and animates and shapes the whole of the organic world seems to achieve an almost perfectly transparent epitome of itself in those lavishly floriferous but parasitic vines that -- urges always upward by a blind, thrusting, idiotic heliotropism -- climb toward the light of the sun by constantly struggling out of the shadows in their thirst for the light, extending one tenuous tendril after another toward the sun to swell and slowly suffocate the boughs they entwine, until they burgeon forth at the last in such gorgeous and copious flowers that one might forget what had to perish to make such a triumph of beauty possible."
From The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart
From the university sermon "What is Truth", by Rowan Williams, at the outbreak of the Gulf War (1991)
It would not be difficult to say of our present conflict that is large measure the price being paid for self-delusion on a massive scale by both sides -- a delusion that could be summed up in tediously simple form by defining it as the refusal to believe that acts have consequences. There is the refusal to believe that a ruthless enemy could have both the skill and the resolve to engage in steady but unpredictable escalation of the scope of conflict: the dismissal as alarmist of threats to other parties, or threats of what we are learning to call ecological terrorism. There is the underlying illusion that technological sophistication guarantees control of the course of a conflict. There is the foolish supposition that the presence of an enormous military force will allow diplomatic and economic pressures to operate effectively. On the Iraqi side there is the illusion that the promise of further inhumanities will simply intimidate and the assumption that, because this is a world in which brutal aggression is habitually ignored by the self-appointed guardians of law, democracy, or justice, this particular blow to political pride and economic greed will be passed over too. Further back still are the idiotic habits of supporting the enemy's enemy as a friend, whatever that country's morals (a habit tried and tested in what was once South Vietnam, and brought to near-perfection in Central and South America), and the infantilism of the arms trade pursuit of markets in detachment from the flesh and blood of actual international politics -- and from flesh and blood simpliciter.
As we're all well aware, the US was at war in Iraq some time ago. I remember it vaguely, seeing General Schwarzkopf a hero, even going to a parade of sorts in Louisville where he passed by in a motorcade. I wonder if the simple victory the US found in that war was what we were expecting this time around, too. I was fascinated to read today William's summation of that war in that time to be as untruthful and fruitless as many of us see the war we're in today. In this first bit, he lists five key elements of that war. I think we can argue those same elements, though tweaked, can be found in our war today.
1. "There is an underlying illusion that technological sophistication guarantees control of the course of conflict." -- How many of us have heard the rumor about laser-guided missiles? You know, the kind that will always find their mark with no loss of civilian life? In the last month, I have heard two separate reports of our own bombs falling on civilian functions. I wouldn't say this is common, but then again it isn't uncommon. It has happened before and may happen again. Furthermore, our enemy's tactics pay no heed to "technological sophistication." They are about creating havoc and death and taking whomever they can with them, but all the while with the occupying American troops in mind. Indeed, there has been little if any controlling the course of conflict in this war.
2. "There is the foolish supposition that the presence of an enormous military force will allow diplomatic and economic pressures to operate effectively." -- This is generally the thinking that backs last year's surge in American troops. The idea is that with more troops, insurgents will be better contained and the consequent peace will allow Iraqi politics to function. But the effectiveness of the surge goes only so far as the troops themselves. Remove them and chaos erupts again, or don't and it erupts all the same (Al Sadr case in point).
3. "On the Iraqi side is the illusion that the promise of further inhumanities will simply intimidate and the assumption that, because there this is a world in which brutal aggression is habitually ignored by the self-appointed guardians of law, democracy, or justice, this particular blow to political pride and economic greed will be passed over too." -- In their insatiable thirst for terror and glory, the insurgents perpetuate inhumanities and enforce "brutal aggression", not so much because they believe it will be ignored (obviously, we're at war with them), but indeed because they intend to incite and arouse the political pride and economic greed of the "self-appointed guardians" who thought it a good idea to appropriate a little justice in a part of the world that does not understand nor seeks the promises of our democratic justice. This is not to say that there are not individuals who know of it and would love to have it, but this dream of justice will never be reached by invading militarily a nation because of falsified claims and untruthful intentions. I was horrified yesterday to read a reporter's conjecture that the Bush Administration's long-term goal is not peace but permanent military presence in the Middle East. God forbid it.
4. "Further back still are the idiotic habits of supporting the enemy's enemy as a friend, whatever the country's morals..." -- Martin Luther King, Jr. could tell you quite a bit about what the US was doing in South Vietnam. But Vietnam wasn't a one-off situation. More recently, of course, there are the allegations of how the CIA backed Afghan militants with arms and funds to assist them in their fight against the Soviet threat of the time. The same has been said about Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi war against Iran, et cetera.
5. "...and the infantilism of the arms trade's pursuit of markets in detachment from the flesh and blood of actual international politics -- and from flesh and blood simpliciter." -- One example of this that comes immediately to mind is how the US currently supports several nations world-wide whose governments engage in conscripting children for war. Consider also the recently arrested "Merchant of Death", who dealt in arms to all sorts of people, including the US Pentagon.
Williams continues: How are we to confront such a tapestry of deceit and self-indulgent fancy? This is a sermon and not a political essay, and so it must be said here that we confront it by examining it in ourselves: by excavating our own passionate deceits, our own preferences for believing that the world is not, after all, independent of our will, and that we can clear an innocent space where the discharged arrow of our actions can fall. We shall not truthfully see the web of lies in which our public life buzzes away until we have recognized where the fissures of the same untruthfulness run across our own moral vision. The decay of peace begins with me and you, though alas it is far from true that our individual penitence will restore what has been globally fractured. Still, to try to identify the sin of the politician without identifying, bitterly, with it is simply to treat the world's untruth as something that does not touch me. And that denial of belonging together is precisely, precisely, what the untruth of our public and international life consists in. If you wish to know the pertinence of religious faith to the political realm, here is one answer, in a recognition of the need and the possibility of shared repentance.
"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) It's easy to point our fingers at our politicians failings. I don't think the fact that we're all sinful exempts them from their own responsibilities, yet peace does not begin with pointed fingers. As Williams shows, we can't expect that our small sins will fall harmless without consequences. Rather, it's those "small" sins that are complicit in knitting the first threads of the "tapestry of deceit and self-indulgent fancy", so that we do peace little honor when we willfully forget that. Can it be that peace is the first casualty of untruthfulness?
Right now in the other room I'm can hear on the radio a British reporter grill a Chinese diplomat on something or other. It's funny how these interviews sometimes go so smoothly and respectfully, while other times the interviewer will spring for the jugular. One question I heard him ask was "Do you think your party is always right, and their party is always wrong?" What a brilliant and mature question.
With the death of Charlton Heston I was thinking recently about that movie Michael Moore made which culminated in THE interview that probably discredited Heston as a human being for all time among all those who might disagree with his stance on gun control. My Austrian friend Chris even mentioned the other day that he must be a "bad person" for the portrayal you come away with in the film. Yesterday I was sifting through photos of the man on New York Times, and one was of him and other white men walking around with signs with painted slogans like "All men were created equal" and "God is love; Prejudice is hate", a photo taken from the civil rights days when Heston called MLK a prophet and a Moses for the American black folk.
Thinking about Heston the other day I really wondered how long it took Moore to decide to ruin this man in the eyes of the public, a man we might not agree with on all matters but who I can respect for having done good work and good works among Americans. I was thinking of how that film paints him cold and unfeeling, an old codger unwilling to recant on his destructive stance. This of course led me to think of Moore's other films, or at least the first three (I can't remember 9/11 that well and haven't seen Sicko), and how each culminates with a high-profile dismantling of a man's character. There's something to be said for hassling men in powerful positions whose power works to oppress the lives of others. But sometimes I wonder if the cost of doing so in "immortal" film is equal to the outcome. It's hard to say really. The N.R.A. hasn't changed its position. Nike has to some degree, I think. But for as pernicious a film as Roger and Me, Flint is still a pile of rubble.
Here's part 2 of the highly anticipated pictorial recap of home in the last few months.
When there's money to be spent, I've been spending time (and money) at various pubs around town, trying to get a better sense of my hometown of Louisville's various cultures: night culture, beer culture, film culture, etc. I've also been taking the opportunity to hang out with my uncle Spencer, given we're both in town and it's something I've probably wanted to do my entire life. Below you can see Josh (my bro) and Spencer, and me with huge hair and a beer. I'm thinking this was just before Christmas:. Where were we having such a merry time, you ask? None other than the renowned Irish Rover, of course:
I've been doing some walking in my neighborhood, on sunny days, on snowy mornings, and at night.
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Rebecca said:
[this is good]your struggles are exactly what I fear about my own return, as it were, in 9 days. my faith is... read more
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miss mai said:
[this is good]Hey, I just discovered Peter Kreeft too, thanks to one of my co-workers. You should read "The Snakebite Letters" it's... read more
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R. Justin said:
[this is good]Man! Where was this when we were laboring over the liner notes for WTWT? We could've used this instead. read more
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