The American Culture

Jason Mitchell's "Father Fearless" character on YouTube shows how Christians can engage the culture with love and without rancor and scoldings. It's a message that could make a huge difference in the American Culture. TAC correspondent Dean Abbott reports.

The digital media age is opening new avenues for Christians to seek influence in the culture, but speaking as a Christian, I think it's important that we become smarter in how we go about it. To make the most of these opportunities we must think carefully about how we craft our message. One young filmmaker offers us a lesson in how effective a winsome reply to serious opposition can be.

In late 2006 a group of atheists calling themselves The Rational Response Squad decided to promote director Brian Flemming’s film “The God Movie” by issuing a challenge, a blasphemy challenge, to be exact.

Participation in the project required only a video camera, a few minutes uploading video to YouTube, and a willingness to risk eternal damnation. In exchange for their blasphemous efforts, the Rational Response Squad promised to send the first 1001 people posting video of themselves saying they deny the Holy Spirit, something they believe to be the “unforgivable sin,” a DVD of Flemming’s movie.

Thousands responded. A simple YouTube search for “blasphemy challenge” will bring up countless videos. Some are clever, some bitter, but most just consist of people spouting nonsense in somber tones. About all they share is their authors’ eagerness to deny the Holy Spirit’s existence.

It wasn’t just unbelievers who responded. Believers and even the undecided decided to chime in. One of the best responses came from Jason “Molotov” Mitchell, actor and founder of Burn Film School.

In the video, Mitchell portrays Father Fearless, a priest who repeatedly declares in a thick Scottish brogue [or is it Irish?—ed.], “I love the Holy Spirit!”  Mitchell’s use of humor expressed through a likeable, compelling character like Father Fearless represents a step forward in Christian cultural engagement and a step away from the antagonistic tone of much of what has come from Christian quarters in recent years.

Mitchell said he was “floored” when he first encountered the blasphemy challenge videos. In his quest for a lighthearted means of countering them, Mitchell came up with Father Fearless and his "Servant's Challenge."

Humor is an essential ingredient when trying to develop a winning approach to engage an issue such as this, Mitchell said. “Humor's a big key to disarming people so we can actually communicate with each other,” he said. “People who charge in with nothing but a Bible may be noble, but less strategic. Life is supposed to be a mission to advance God's Kingdom, that's true, but we're also supposed to live life more abundantly. And for me, that means balancing righteousness and kindness. Live, laugh, love . . . and tear down every idol you come across.”

In the video, Father Fearless not only asks people to say they love the Holy Spirit but also to show it, and he shows viewers how by performing some acts of service himself. We see him, for example, go up to a homeless person on the street and say, with great enthusiasm in a Scottish brogue, "I'm lookin' for someone to give some food to! Are you hungry?" He then gives him a bag of food, including a footlong hot dog, one of the funniest foods there is.

If it was conversation Mitchell was hoping to spark, his hopes were more than fulfilled. The video’s YouTube page carries more than 700 comments. The video has been viewed more than 15,000 times since it was posted a little more than a year ago. Still more have posted their own video responses to Mitchell’s work.  

Mitchell has been pleased by the response, especially since part of his goal is to offer his audience an example of what effective Christian cultural engagement might look like. “That’s important,” Mitchell said, “because if the Church gets its act together, we'll win. Win everything, you know? So part of Father Fearless’ mission is to get Christians thinking indirectly, when it comes to reaching the world around us. Strategy. That's the million dollar word.”

—Dean Abbott

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As you've seen if you clicked on the link in the story immediately below, the film Fitna was removed from the Livelink site because of threats of violence against the proprietors. We've embedded a new link that should work, as numerous sites are carrying the film, in the grand tradition of liberty that the Internet has already developed.

Those who dislike the film—whether they have seen it or otherwise—are trying to ensure that it gets lost on the internet, by posting other videos with "Fitna" as the title.  Those who wish to make sure others can see the film should point them to this permalink: http://stkarnick.com/blog2/2008/03/post_120.html.

We will monitor the situation and continue updating the link as necessary. If it should prove necessary in future, we'll download the file and save it to our own site.

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The Jennifer Lopez 'message film' Bordertown is seriously mixed up about the causes of crime, but it does manage to entertain—and it includes some real libertarian lessons. TAC correspondent Thomas M. Sipos provides the details.

Bordertown, starring Jennifer Lopez, reviewed by Thomas M. Sipos

Hundreds (some say thousands) of women have been murdered in the Mexican town of Juarez over the years. Their raped and mutilated corpses scatter the desert. This is not fiction. The "women of Juarez" are real. Their murders continue to this day.

Who murdered them? NAFTA!

In this case, Jennifer Lopez is a Chicago reporter assigned to cover the Juarez murders. Her editor (Martin Sheen) rattles off statistics, sounding less like a jaded journalist than an activist/actor lecturing to the audience—perhaps becasue that is precisely what he is.

Lopez's character dislikes the assignment because Mexico is a career dead-end. But after she relents, she reconnects with her Mexican roots, discarding her blond hair dye to accept her authentically black tresses.

The intrepid reporter learns that Juarez, just across the Texas border, is a creation of NAFTA. It is a town full of maquiladoras, factories that assemble TVs and computers for the U.S. market. Maquiladoras exist all along the Mexican side of the border.

How are they to blame for the murders of women?

It's complicated.

Bordertown informs us that maquiladoras "hire mainly young women because they work for lowers wages and complain less about the long hours and harsh working conditions. Most maquiladoras operate 24 hours a day. Many women are attacked while traveling to and from work in the late night and early morning. The companies provide no security for the workers."

You see, factories are responsible for workers' safety, not only on the job, but while they're commuting. (And perhaps at home, too?)

Yet there are libertarian nuggets in this film. By morally obligating businesses to protect their workers offsite, this film admits that the state has failed in its core duty. And Bordertown pulls no punches in this regard—its corrupt Mexican police not only fail to protect, they also cover up murders and frame innocent suspects.

So much for relying on the government—these women need guns! Yet when Lopez enters a dangerous situation undercover, she arms herself . . . with rocks. I'm not making this up!

Bordertown offers other libertarian insights. One rape victim/factory worker (Mexican actress Maya Zapata) says she'd rather live on her farm but the government keeps raising taxes to push people off their land, pressuring them to accept low-wage jobs out of desperation:

We cannot pay the taxes, so they tell us, go to the border and work in the maquiladora. Make money to keep your land. But there is no money here. The government and the factories take everything. All the money is for them. For us, nothing.

Actually, she gets $5 a day, so when she says she gets "nothing," she presumably means wages are so low that she can't pay her taxes. And these taxes are clearly raised not for revenue (people can't pay them), but to create cheap labor. Thus does the government collude with business—perhaps for kickbacks.

Marxists call this market exploitation, but the rest of us will recognize it as market distortion.

The film also condemns the U.S. government, for not mandating worker protections in NAFTA. Lopez's character writes in her news story,

The screams of the women of Juarez are silent because no one will listen. Not the giant corporations who make their profits from the labor of these women. Not the governments of Mexico and the U.S. who benefit from the free trade agreement. All the evidence points to the fact that there are many killers. A whole culture of murder that gets worse the more it's denied and covered up. Covering it up is less expensive than protecting these women. Everything is about the bottom line. And so the death toll mounts."

She is right about there being many killers. "You want to kill a woman for any reason, you come to Juarez," a local journalist tells her.

Juarez is a bad town. Most slums are. And police rarely expend resources on poor victims. But this is an old story. It has nothing to do with NAFTA.

A U.S. Senator and the newspaper's corporate owner pressure Sheen's character to kill the story. They want to expand NAFTA to Central America, and they don't want bad press. Sheen's character tells Lopez's reporter that corporate America's news agenda is "free trade, globalization, and entertainment." Lopez's character snaps, "It isn't free trade. It's slave trade. It's a goddamn scam."

She means low wages and no police protection, yet she inadvertently makes a good point. The late Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne too opposed NAFTA, as a form of managed trade (i.e., a scam), saying, "Free trade cannot be achieved through committee negotiations and lengthy regulations."

A Mexican industrialist tells the reporter, "I buy politicians on both sides of the border." Thus state and industry collaborate in Bordertown. Marxists see this as global capitalism, but libertarians recognize it as statist corporatism, also known as economic fascism.

I recommend this DVD. It highlights important issues. The women of Juarez are real and deserve attention, irrespective of Bordertown's confused politics.

Special features of the DVD include a video of Jennifer Lopez accepting an Amnesty International award for Bordertown at the Berlin Film Festival; a documentary about a murder victim and the innocent suspect arrested and tortured by police. (Most of the maquiladoras shown here are Asian—Sony, Sanyo, Hitachi—so it's a failure of the film that it doesn't condemn the Japanese government for its part in all of this); and a documentary that follows a woman's attempt to cross the border into the United States illegally.

Thomas M. Sipos is editor of California Freedom, the newspaper of the Libertarian Party of California.  His bio and contact info are available here.

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The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released Fitna ("Fatwa"), his short film about Islam's plans for the west and for world domination (see earlier article here).

Most of the footage in Fitna is relatively well-known, but it remains powerful nonetheless.

The theme of the film is simple, as expressed in text displayed on-screen at the film's end:

"Islam wants to rule, submit, and seeks to destroy our Western civilization"

"Now, the Islamic ideology has to be defeated."

"Stop Islamisation. Defend our freedom."

Wilders points out that Islam in itself, not "radical Islam" or "Islamofascism" or "Muslim fanatics," is the problem.

He observes that those who hold to the tenets of Islam as explicitly expressed throughout the Koran are obligated to pursue the overthrow of all non-Muslim people and individuals and their conversion to Islam, with violence as a legitimate and indeed honorable means of doing so.

Thus, he argues, Islam itself, as expressed in the Koran, is the great threat against the peace, safety, freedom, and indeed the very existence of the West. 

Wilders' argument against Muslim violence emphasizes freedom and voluntary action on all parts. He calls upon Muslims the world over to repudiate all verses in the Koran that advocate violence and jihad, saying that they have a moral obligation to tear those pages out of the Koran. (Not that there's any likelihood of that.)

He applies the same logic to the West, arguing that governments should reject all policies that encourage Muslim separatism and enforcement of sharia law among Muslim populations in Europe or that encourage Muslim immigration. (Not that there's much more likelihood of that, either.)

The structure of the film reflects these ideas.

Violence-advocating verses from the Koran are shown on-screen, followed by the consequences of those verses, shown in video footage of carnage created by Muslims against the West and one another in the name of their god, Allah.

Although none of the video footage should surprise anyone who follows the news, it is still powerful when placed in the form of an argument as direct and pointed as Wilder's.

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Two crime movies based on the same play nicely illustrate the change in the mind of the American elite during the twentieth century.

Two movies shown on Turner Classic Movies last night beautifully illustrated the change in the American mind, especially among the nation's elites, between the first and second halves of the twentieth century.

The films, The Dark Past (1948) and Blind Alley (1939), were presented as part of the movie channel's month-long look at psychologists in cinema. Both films were based on a 1930s play, Blind Alley, in which an escaped criminal and his gang take over a group of people gathered at a hunting lodge, to use the place as a hideout while they wait for a boat to take him and the gang to safety.

During a long night of waiting, the head of the household—a psychiatrist and college professor—psychoanalyzes the gang leader and figures out just what drives him to commit crimes.

The two movies are very similar in plot, but quite different in their meanings. The Dark Past exemplifies the common mindset among American elites during the second half of the twentieth century: that  criminal behavior is caused by bad environmental conditions that set people off on the wrong path, and that crime can be reduced by curing criminals of the mental pathologies caused by these conditions.

Hence in The Dark Past the psychiatrist, played by Lee J. Cobb, sets about to cure the gangster, Hal Walker (William Holden), through use of Freudian techniques. Ultimately, he discovers the single traumatic event that set Walker down the wrong path, and although the gangster must be taken into custody at the end, the psychiatrist announces rather proudly and with great certainty, "He'll never kill again."

He's probably right, in that Walker will undoubtedly be executed for having murdered a prison warden earlier in the film, but that's not what the psychiatrist means, of course. In fact, to drive the point home, the filmmakers bookend the movie with a scene in which Cobb's character, who works as a police psychiatrist, uses the film's main story line, this event from his past, to illustrate his claim that people would not commit crimes if someone would just "give them a break" at some crucial tiime in their life.

The 1939 version, Blind Alley, takes an entirely different approach. In this one, the psychiatrist, Dr. Shelby (Ralph Bellamy), analyzes the gangster, Hal Wilson (Chester Morris), with something entirely different in mind. The psychiatrist tells his wife, "I'm going to stop him. . . . I'm going to see that he doesn't kill anybody else. I'm going to destroy him—take his brain apart and show him the pieces. It's the only weapon I have."

Dr. Shelby knows full well that the gangster will have to kill the hostages, including Shelby, his wife, and their son, in order to avoid their informing the police as soon as he leaves, and also to ensure that they can't testify that he killed one of their party earlier in the evening.

The Dark Past simply ignored the issue of the hostages' likelihood of informing the police if left alive when the gangster leaves, and Walker has only wounded one of them in this version, not killed anyone in their presence.

It is interesting to note that the more "realistic" film makes less psychological and logical sense then the more frankly entertaining earlier movie. Some of the scenes in The Dark Past are nearly identical to scenes in Blind Alley, in fact, yet the meaning is entirely different—the very opposite, actually.

For in Blind Alley there is never any doubt that Wilson chooses to do the things he does, regardless of how circumstances may have pushed him about in life. And alIn The Dark Past, by contrast, Walker is forced into crime by an inner torment caused by a single trauma in his early years. It was, to be sure, a serious trauma, and it came on top of (and surely sprang from) physical (and, one presumes, mental) abuse by the boy's father.

Hence, The Dark Past explicitly asserts that the criminal is ultimately not fully responsible for what he has done.

The ostensibly more realistic and sophisticated film, The Dark Past, actually reflects a need for certainty and easy answers, whereas those who made and appreciate the seemingly simpler and less ambitious film, Blind Alley, are more comfortable with ambiguity and philsophical complexity.

The Dark Past, after all, represents a belief that people aren't ultimately responsible for their actions, and hence we must seek cures for what drives some of us to commit crimes. That makes things very simple: just cure these people, preferably before they harm others.

Blind Alley, by contrast, reflects the understanding that even if there are philosophical dilemmas to be considered, people will run wild if we don't hold them responsible for their actions. So we will.

In addition, Blind Alley does not present Wilson as a monster; during the psychotherapy scenes he is shown quite sympathetically. However, while according the gangster the basic sympathy due any human being, Blind Alley refuses to whitewash his actions. Whereas in The Dark Past Walker's trauma—his commission of a terrible betrayal while a young boy—is motivated by physical and mental abuse, in Blind Alley the same abuse is present, but Wilson admits that he committed the betrayal because the police offered him money to do so. In other words, he made a conscious choice to do it.

Another crucial difference is in the vitally important flashback scene in which the boy's betrayal occurs. In The Dark Past, the man he betrays looks vicious and cruel. In Blind Alley, by contrast, he looks fearful and vulnerable. The betrayal is thus much less likely to be seen as justifiable in Blind Alley than in the remake.

All of this shows a far greater ability to tolerate ambiguity and philosophical complexity than is manifested in The Dark Past.

Finally, in the end of Blind Alley, Dr. Shelby uses the "cure" as a means of disarming the gangster Wilson, to render him psychologically unable to shoot the police in effecting an escape. In The Dark Past, the cure is real, as noted earlier—which means the fortuitous circumstance of Walker having spent some time with a psychiatrist transforms him from a criminal into a better man. Hence circumstances, not individual choices, are once again shown to be responsible for human actions.

Thus the two films represent two antithetical philosophical positions that have warred throughout modernity. On one side is the Rousseauian notion that human beings are inherently good and are corrupted only by society. On the other is the idea that people are neither born perfect nor perfectible, and that society is necessary to constrain people's darker desires.

And this dilemma plays out even in the most seemingly simple places in popular culture. 

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Hollywood actor Richard Widmark dies at age 93, represented Hollywood's heyday.

Richard Widmark, best known for his Academy Award-nominated performance as a giggling, grinning gangster in the 1947 film noir classic Kiss of Death and as an NYPD policeman in the 1970s TV program Madigan, represents a Hollywood long gone and greatly missed, where on-camera performers and others involved in making films saw themselves as professionals, not artists—and succeeded in creating real art much more often than today's more overtly ambitious and politically active generation.

Madigan was based on a very good film directed by Donald Siegel, which is well worth seeing.

For more on Widmark and his career, see the AP story.

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A new TV network, Planet Green, is about to provide a forum for allegedly "eco-friendly" lifestyle choices. In reality, this entire movement will make money for opportunists and phonies and hurt everybody else.

Emblematizing the takeover of the Green movement by commercial interests, Discovery Communications LLC has announced the launch date for the transformation of its low-rated Discovery Home network into Planet Green, a network devoted to, you guessed it, "green" lifestyle choices.

The intent is certainly decent.

Or is it?

In reality, it's just another moneymaking scheme as businesses take advantage of the environmental movement to encourage consumers to throw out perfectly good and usable products and replace them with more expensive ones. Similarly, businesses are using "eco-friendly" claims to encourage consumers to use services they don't need and that they would otherwise dismiss as poor uses of their money.

The examples of green products and services that actually harm the environment when used as replacements for traditional items are legion. It's nice to save water, for example—if you live somewhat west of the Mississippi. But a great number of means of doing so are entirely unnecessary and in fact stupid if you live in the Great Lakes region or the South. Why? Because the efforts to save water in such places require more energy and resources than what we have been doing.

Consider, for example, the absolutely brilliant federal law banning homes from having toilets with a flush capacity above the government-mandated maximum. That means that most people will simply flush two or three times to accomplish what one flush used to do. They end up using much more water than otherwise.

The same is true of the government-mandated switchover to fluorescent light bulbs. It will make tons of money for GE and other manufacturers but create much inconvenience for householders and end up using significantly more electricity—because the bulbs do not achieve full radiance immediately, which incandescents do, which means that you have to leave the light on if you intend to go into and out of a room, instead of switching it on and off each time. And there are numerous other problems with the bulbs.

That sort of inefficiency is repeated throughout the entire realm of "eco-friendly" products and services. Environmental activists may pretend that efficiency is just around the corner, but they've never trusted American industry to make the right choices before, preferring intstead to impose government mandates whenever possible, abridging the freedoms of businesses and individuals alike.

This is no different, and as businesses attempt to go with the political flow (always the wise course) and find a way to profit from the nonsense we're all forced to live with, endeavors such as Planet Green are not something to be lauded but instead to be lamented.

Freedoms lost are extremely difficult to regain, and the economic destruction that will come from our current-day environmentally motivated loss of freedom will hurt everyone.

Everyone, that is, except those who can make money off of it or already have so much that they won't even notice the inefficiency and higher costs of falsely claimed "eco-friendly" business.

The rest of us will suffer the consequences of their arrogance.

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Two former members of the legendary rock group The Beach Boys have settled a lawsuit over the use of the band's name. Details of the settlement were not released to the public.

Singer and lyricist Mike Love, who never misses an opportunity to claim false credit for the band's success, had sued longtime bandmate and childhood friend Al Jardine (singer and guitarist) in 2003 for using variations of the Beach Boys name for a touring band that included neither Love nor Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson.

Wilson, who was the band's primary songwriter and producer during its most successful times, was not involved in the legal battle, having moved on to a successful solo career and basking in well-deserved public admiration for his musical accomplishments of the past half-century.

The ironically named Love had sued Wilson in 2005 for the songwriter's use of the name "The Beach Boys" in promoting his brilliant 2004 album SMiLE, Wilson's long-awaited completion of the record that was supposed to follow Pet Sounds in the mid-'60s but was set aside after he began to suffer psychological problems and fell into drug abuse, from which it took him decades to recover.

Love responded to the outpouring of admiration and affection for Wilson's Smile with a lawsuit.

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TAC correspondent Michael D'Virgilio analyzes the cultural implications of the political journey of David Mamet, another modern liberal mugged by reality.

There has been quite a little hubbub created by a confession written by David Mamet, the great theater and film writer and director, in which he claims he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal.” This confession was made in the Village Voice no less, a left wing rag if ever there was one.

As I was reading the piece I couldn’t help thinking this was some kind of a joke. He can’t really be serious, I thought.

Yet he was making a very solid argument for conservatism. When he praised the writing of Thomas Sowell and called him “our greatest contemporary philosopher,” I became fairly certain that he wasn’t joking. Mamet also mentioned Paul Johnson and Milton Friedman, two towering figures of the right.

Maybe he really was being serious. I think in psychological terms I was experiencing cognitive dissonance.

What interested me most was that it seemed his whole rationale for leaving the left is a proper understanding of human nature. He was, like other liberals who’ve come right, mugged by reality:

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I too have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

Mamet understands now that although people are generally decent, they are not fundamentally good. This is a crucial distinction that has been the fault line between the right and left for over 200 years. [This idea comes directly from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a point that I have made frequently (such as here and here), as I consider it a critically important aspect of what went wrong with the West during the past couple of centuries.—Ed.]

The left side of that line dividing two fundamentally different views of human nature gave us the bloody, cataclysmic failure of the French Revolution, and the right set forth the still successful American Revolution.

Those on the left side of this divide see human beings as perfectible and their behavior as fundamentally determined by social structures, while those on the right side see flawed human beings requiring the guidance of law, social mores, and traditions while naturally owning rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This point of view rejects social engineering and government fiats dictating what to do in every area of life.

Of government Mamet further writes:

Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

After saying this. Mamet is certainly out of the club now. He says that he thinks government intervention in individual choices (other than those that clearly and directly harm other people) is usually deleterious, which is certainly correct, but the modern political left, embodied in the Democrat Party, believes government can do no wrong. So maybe Mamet has always been a bit out of step with his comrades on the left. [This is exactly what I had thought about Mamet all along, based on the evident meanings of his plays and movies.—Ed.]

Culturally and creatively, some on the left are reacting angrily to the loss of one of their most prized possessions as a powerful creative spirit seemingly possessing a leftist worldview. That is laughable. The left loves to look at itself as infinitely nuanced, as not stuck in looking at the world as black and white the way Neanderthal conservatives do.

An amusing example of this is from the English newspaper the Guardian, in which a British leftist laments the terrible loss Mamet's confession represents:

I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right. In an essay for the Village Voice, Mamet claims he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal" and increasingly espouses a free-market philosophy and social conservatism. As a citizen, Mamet is free to do as he likes. What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.

Is this not rich? Only conservatives can be locked into a “rigid ideological position”. No wonder there aren’t any talented conservatives in our world. They are just all locked up!

It so happens that I’m reading a book on Shakespeare, and he was actually one quite conservative fellow. He lived in Elizabethan England, after all, and was quite religious. Back then, depending on which government happened to be in power, the wrong religion could cost a person their head, or maybe charred flesh. After all this, he still became Shakespeare! Miraculously, those creative juices were somehow not all locked up by his religion or his “conservative” views.

In fact, ideologically rigid best describes what passes for modern liberalism. Have they even changed a fundamental position in the last 40 years? [They're the true conservatives, as I've written elsewhere.—Ed.] And everyone across the political and cultural spectrum would agree that there is an awful lot of crap and political cant in the movies, books, TV shows, music, art, etc., produced by supposedly flexible and open-minded liberals.

This is what the British leftist and many others on the left (and a bunch on the right, too!) just don’t understand: except for totalitarian points of view, ideological predispositions or assumptions have very little to do with the quality of one’s art. Great artists, no matter the medium, are great observers of the human condition. They refuse to make their art a propaganda vehicle for their political agenda, to fit it into a mold that reality just won’t fit.

Mamet, a great observer, finally saw reality for what it is, and he decided he needed to leave his “brain-dead” liberalism behind. We should be happy for him, and for ourselves.

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The acclaimed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was difficult to categorize. That's a compliment, but it also means much important critical work remains to be done.

As no great fan of science fiction (not a detractor, just one who has less interest in the form than in others) I have read only one novel by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday at the age of 90, but I find his legacy very interesting. He was one of the three great figures in the early years of the modern blossoming of science fiction, with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

Clarke's background in science lent his stories special credibility, as John J. Miller notes in an excellent essay in the Wall Street Journal, and the author's interest in religious thought was part of a strong strain of that impulse that has manifested in science fiction throughout the past six decades.

Miller characterizes Clarke as thoughtful, inventive, optimistic, good-natured, politically classical liberal (supporting low taxes and an appreciation for peace and comfort, for example). Given that appealing characterization, I hope some day to read the works Miller recommends in addition to the one I've already read (2001: A Space Odyssey, of course): The Sentinel, Childhood's End, and Rendezvous with Rama.

Doing so, it seems to me, will be necessary in getting a handle on Clarke's legacy, as some critics have strongly asserted that Clarke was an opponent of religion in general (which may be a good thing) and of Christianity in particular.

For example, Regis Nicoll writes:

From a futuristic perspective in 2500 AD, Clarke looks back at 2010 as the year the human race averted its gravest danger. No, it wasn’t thermonuclear war, global warming, or an earth-bound asteroid; it was the “mental virus” of organized religion.

The “good” news is that before our worst fears were realized, science came to the rescue. The wonders of technology enabled minds across the globe to be linked into a “supermind” causing religion, and all other divisive ideas, to meld in cosmic oneness. Once the distinctions of thought and personality dissolved into the universal, impersonal entity, the utopian promise of peace and prosperity was fulfilled.

However, Nicoll fails to note that Clarke's point in this passage explicitly assumes the existence of both God and Satan:

This was summed up in a famous saying: "All Religions were invented by the Devil to conceal God from Mankind."

That's is certainly facile and indeed a bit silly, but if we remove the word 'all', few reasonable people would object to it. Again, it appears that Clarke does not deny the existence of God while being strongly opposed to people's use of religious faith as a means of obtaining power over others. That is a perfectly reasonable position, although placing too much emphasis on the latter and not enough on the former tends to make people into annoying cranks.

Also, Clarke uses the term 'A.D.' to mark the year in which the story is ostensibly written, which is anathema to real haters of Christianity. This may have been inserted by the editors, but I have never heard of Clarke complaining about it, and obviously he did not ask them to take it off, as it is still on the Web version of the story.

Clarke has certainly said some things that suggest he did have a strong streak of the annoying crank about him on the subject of religion:

So, Clarke's religious vision is certainly a topic meriting discussion and further investigation, with a reasonable amount of skepticism toward him but without ignorant dismissal or facile categorization, either.

Additional Resources:

"The Nine Billion Names of God," by Arthur C. Clarke

"The View from 2500 A.D.," by Arthur C. Clarke 

An interesting compilation of sources of information religion and science fiction

Peter Edman's list of religious affiliations of sci-fi writers (does not mention Clarke, however)

A definition and discussion of science fiction from a Christian perspective

Wikipedia article on Religious Ideas in Science Fiction

Note: In our Comments section, Hunter Baker suggests that we include Ray Bradbury and make the list of mid-century scifi greats a Big Four. I concur.

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The mid-century mystery and science-fiction master Fredric Brown deserves much greater recognition, and his works should be brought back into print.

A story in the Chicago Tribune brings some well-deserved and in fact overdue attention to the mystery and sci-fi writer Fredric Brown.

Brown, a Chicago native who lived in Milwaukee much of his life, lived the classic story of a newspaperman "graduating" to the writing of novels and short stories, producing a couple-dozen novels and numerous highly regarded short stories.

His writings are not nearly as well known as those of contemporaries such as Dashiell Hammett and Robert Heinlein, but they compare favorably to the very best in both genres. Brown was imaginative, inventive, funny, and restless. His plots skillfully walked the line between plausibility and zaniness (beautifully exemplified by his Night of the Jabberwock), and his characterizations were topnotch.

His best-known characters were Ed and Am Hunter, an unlikely pair of private detectives in the Chicago of the 1940s and '50s. Brown smartly and accurately characterized the city as The Fabulous Clipjoint, the title of the first Ed and Am mystery, published in 1947 and winner of a well-deserved Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

The first four Ed and Am mysteries were recently reprinted in a one-volume set, Hunter and Hunted, which I highly recommend.

Brown also produced some taut thrillers, such as His Name Was Death, The Screaming Mimi, and the suspense masterpiece Knock Three-One-Two.

The Screaming Mimi is a personal favorite of mine, with its masterful blend of suspense, mystery, and humor. The book opens with a crowd gathered before a glass apartment door at which a beautiful blond woman strips off her clothes while guarded by an angry attack dog—and it gets more bizarre and surreal from there, as alcohol-abusing but likeable and brilliant reporter Bill Sweeney goes on the track of a serial killer known as the Ripper, pursues the stripper as a love interest, gets put in an insane asylum, and meets a homeless man named God.

The book exemplifies all that's best about Brown, in particular his ability to invent the most improbable situations and then give them all a rational explanation at the end. In this regard and in the similar intellectual playfulness of his science fiction Brown was a master of the surrealism that some of the best American mystery writers incorporated into their work in the decade and a half after World War II—notably Ellery Queen and Anthony Boucher, both of whose mysteries I recommend quite highly.

These writers (and others working in the same vein) recognized the disturbed and disorienting nature of much of American society in the second half of the twentieth century, and they depicted it vividly in their works. But they never gave into despair. Instead, they offered an alternative to the personality-driven political and social cults of the time: rationality, common sense, and a scientific willingness to follow the evidence wherever it might lead. We can still learn much from them today.

This movement of popular surrealism brought advanced art and intellectual acuteness to a commercially successful genre of fiction, exemplifying the impressive things popular art can do. Brown was one of the most accomplished masters of the form.

Mystery and science fiction of Fredric Brown: Highly recommended.

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TV networks and other mainstream news sources hardly ever mention that Democrats embroiled in sex scandals are Democrats, but they always, emphatically identify the party affiliation of Republicans that get into such trouble.

As Newsbusters notes:

My colleague Brent Baker has painstakingly documented how the big three broadcast networks have gone out of their way to avoid labeling scandal-scarred New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as a “Democrat.” An examination of the fifteen ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows through Wednesday night finds Spitzer was called a Democrat just 20% of the time — twice on CBS, once on ABC, and never on NBC.

So how do the networks treat Republicans involved in sex scandals? Always, always as Republicans, and as problems for their party.

The Newsbusters item goes on to document the phenomenon thoroughly. It is indeed more evidence of media bias against the right and for the left:

The list of examples goes on, but the bottom line is that in the early days of their scandals, Vitter and Craig were labeled as Republicans on every broadcast news program—100%—that mentioned their wrongdoing. For Democrat Spitzer, four out of five news programs (80%) have skipped his label. On NBC’s Today and Nightly News through Wednesday night, reporters never once acknowledged that Spitzer was a Democrat.

The media’s message: Republicans enmeshed in personal scandal are a moral stain on their entire party; Democrats in similar circumstances are just individuals, not “Democrats”—and certainly not representatives of the liberal cause.

The continual complaint that the mainstream media are biased lost its piquancy long ago—but it's still accurate and still very much needed. We must keep it up as a service to the mainstream media, lest they continue to drive their audiences away and force their viewers, readers, and listeners to move to alternative sources of news and analysis, such as The American Culture.

Hey, wait a minute . . . 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. James Dobson, former head of Focus on the Family, says the Christian Right needs new leadership, as older leaders are retiring.

Dr.James Dobson is quite right to point out that there is a leadership void on the Christian Right today. The coming change will do much good if the new leaders have a better understanding of the culture. They must realize that culture is not their enemy but a realm in which Christians must compete as in any other area of life.

Doing so will win many more converts than most sermons could ever hope to do.

For a sampling of articles showing how Christianity can engage culture and how religious faith can manifest itself in unexpected ways in cultural offerings, see the following items from The American Culture's archives (and there are countless others available on this site): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Evangelicals who think the contemporary American culture is fundamentally hostile  to religious faith, and particularly Christianity, would do well to consider this avalanche of evidence to the contrary.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 

Nacho Libre, an unacknowledged, broadly comic remake of Rocky, is a real surprise. The film, a ludicrous comedy dealing with Mexican professional wrestling, is suffused not only with Christian imagery but with Christian ideas as well. It is full of religious faith and  expresses it with surprising and pleasing lightness.

The protagonist, Ignacio (Jack Black) is very religious, having been brought up in a Mexican orphanage run by Catholics. His father, he says, was a Catholic and his Mother a Lutheran, and they decided to stop trying to convert each other and get married. And then they died, which is how he ended up in the orphanage. As the film begins, he is working there as a cook.

While talking with a beautiful young nun named Encarnacion (Incarnation), Ignacio tells her that the monks at the orphanage don't respect him: "They think I don't know a buttload of crap about the Gospel—but I do!"

And when he decides to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a professional, tag-team wrestler, he becomes very concerned when he learns that his partner has not been baptized. "I believe in science," the dirty, disheveled, slackjawed young man says, and that claim has never sounded more ridiculous. Later, Ignacio takes care of the problem by sneaking up behind him with a bowl of water and baptizing him.

Throughout the film, Ignacio frequently is shown wearing a cross necklace, and he and Sister Encarnacion both frequently make the sign of the cross over themselves.

With the money from his first fight, he buys delicious, healthy salads for all the children at the orphanage, who have been living on repulsive bean stew.

Ignacio has to keep his job a secret from the others at the monastery, because, as he notes, "It is in the Bible, not to wrestle your neighbor." Yet this is not depicted as hypocritical on his part, nor as excessive legalism on the part of the church; instead it is simply shown as a perfectly natural case of conflicting goals.

In search of worldly power, however, in the form of not being a hopelessly bad fighter, Ignacio goes against his beliefs at the behest of his partner, and eats eagle eggs because they will give him magic power.

Naturally, they don't work at all, and the boys end up getting beat up by their next few opponents, including a couple of females.

The turning point for Ignacio comes in a conversation with Encarnacion, which the film handles quite seriously. Encarnacion tells him, "If you fight for something noble, or someone who needs help, only then will God bless you in battle." Up until this point, Ignacio has been fighting solely in order to gain fame and fortune, which have proven elusive, to say the least.

The very next scene shows Ignacio praying in the sanctuary, asking God to guide him. His prayer (heard in voiceover) is rather awkwardly expressed, and he accidentally starts his clothes on fire by knocking over a prayer candle, which returns the film to its main comic tone.

On the eve of the most important fight of his life, the one that could establish him as true professional, Ignacio gives an inspired speech: "Tonight I will fight the seven strongest men in town—maybe the world. And I will win, because our heavenly father will be in the ring with me. And he and  I will win 10,000 pesos. And with it, I will buy the orphans a big bus, to go on trips to parks, and places like that. I'm serious!"

Throughtout this scene and espcially noticeably as he walks away with determined steps, Ignacio's clothing beautifully illustrates the film's point about using worldly things in order to do God's will: from the waist down are his flashy wrestling tights, and from the waist up are his monk's robes, the bottom half having been burned off when they were set afire in the sanctuary.

The fire, of course, is well known as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, thus adding further religious imagery to the scene.

Before the climactic big fight, we find out that Ignacio's former partner, Esqueleto, has become a Christian. They pray together, at Esqueleto's suggestion, and Esqueleto in fact leads the prayer.

This is all done in a suitably zany way fitting in with the film's comedic tone, yet throughout all the humor the film shows a strong and abiding respect for Christianity.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the greatest pure rock and roll bands of all time, the Dave Clark Five, was honored yesterday by induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The London-based band first hit it big in the wake of the Beatles' rise to popularity in the early 1960s, constituting one of the most popular bands in the British Invasion.

The DC5, as they were widely known by their vast legion of fans during their brief period of mass popularity during the mid-1960s, played a pure brand of straightforward rock and roll, with bandleader Dave Clark on drums, skilled rock singer Mike Smith on organ, Denis Payton providing hard-rocking guitar backing, bassist Rick Huxley rounding out a pounding rhythm section, and Lenny Davidson providing solos and fills on saxophone.

The band's music was all about entertainment, not changing the world or challenging people's perceptions; their songs were about good times and how to keep them going, and how to get through the bad days that inevitably come along from time to time. Their appeal to the working classes was analogous to the Beatles' and Rolling Stones' appeal to the middle classes and more artsy types.

The group's music exemplified all that was best about the Swingin' '60s London scene, before it all went sour as newfound liberty (in the form of a long-overdue liberalization freeing the British peoples from stifling social and economic constraints) devolved into license and social decay. Although the band made adjustments to its music in the late 1960s to appeal to audiences no longer interested in straightforward, entertaining rock and roll, the Dave Clark Five never fell in with the tsunami of pomposity, willfullness, and antinomianism that swept all before it at the time.

The band's lyrics weren't deep at all, and the music wasn't overly adventurous, but the band's skill at songwriting and performing made for amazingly infectious hits such as "Glad All Over," "Bits and Pieces," "Come Home," "Any Way You Want It," "Can't You See That She's Mine?", "Over and Over," "Because," "Having a Wild Weekend," "Here Comes Summer," Everybody Knows," "Do You Love Me?", "At the Scene," "I Like It Like That," "Whenever You're Around," "Red Balloon," "Maze of Love," "Live in the Sky," "Little Bitty Pretty One," and "Try Too Hard."

The band members' ability to compose brief, distinctive, enjoyable musical passages that could grab a listener's attention and stick in the mind made their music, at its best, as strongly entertaining as the Beach Boys' and Beatles' early songs, which is of course saying a lot.

Mike Smith—who died a couple of months ago but did hear that the band had made the Hall of Fame—was a very underrated singer. His bold voice—somewhere between a high baritone and a very low tenor—worked equally well on ballads (where his performances resolutely avoided sentimentality and epicenism, the great banes of rock music ever since the late '60s) and rockers (where his enthusiastic shouts were much more powerful than Paul McCartney's excellent Little Richard imitations).

The DC5's sanguine outlook and refusal to pretend that their music was anything but good, clean fun ensured that the DC5 would be left behind in the rush for the next big, important load of nonsense as the late 1960s came on and politicized rock music immeasurably, and as audiences and critics began to see rock and roll as an art form requiring revolutionary attitudes and aggressive displays of personal eccentricity and narcissism, which dimwitted rock critics falsely imagined as constituting creativity.

But the group's fans never forgot the simple beauty and great fun of the Dave Clark Five's music, and the band's long-overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a great day for rock music.

(Leaving aside, of course, any discussion of whether there should be such a thing as a Hall of Fame for what is supposed to be a populist and continuously socially transformative and indeed transgressive form of popular art.)

Also receiving well-deserved honors in yesterday's ceremony were folk-rock poet Leonard Cohen, surf-music instrumentalists The Ventures, and soul music producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

The ceremony was unfortunately marred by awards to the odious Madonna and asinine John Mellencamp, but the good feelings created by the Dave Clark Five far outshined the attention paid to such petty poseurs.

For more information about the Dave Clark Five and a terrific jukebox of the band's hits, visit the group's official site.

For other song samples and purchasing information, click here. 

For more on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, see the AP report here.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Could this be the start of a new trend toward greater optimism and positivity in the culture? HBO, for two decades the home of dark, unhappy, "edgy" TV series, is debuting a new show with a light touch.

HBO has announced that it has ordered 13 episodes of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The new series will be based on the series of mystery novels by Alexander MacCall Smith, which have been huge bestsellers in multiple countries. The series pilot will be a two-hour movie filmed in Botswana and directed and co-written by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain).

As the Washington Post reports,

Grammy-winning soul crooner Jill Scott stars as Precious Ramotswe, the sensible proprietor of the only female-owned detective agency in Botswana, in the two-hour "No. 1 Ladies' " movie, which will serve as the series pilot. It was filmed on location in Botswana, directed by Oscar winner Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient") from a script by Minghella and Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings and a Funeral").

In an interview last year in the Christian Science Monitor, Scott said that when she saw the movie script "I thought, 'Wow, a whole script with no sex, no violence, nothing that a child couldn't watch. That's really nice."

This sounds like a definite change from HBO's programming choices of the past couple of decades, and is quite welcome, given that other networks tend to follow HBO's lead.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fox TV comes up with two new drama series featuring troubled geniuses.

The Fox network developed an unexpected hit series with House three years ago, as the irascible, curmudgeonly, obviously troubled genius medical diagnostician struck a chord with viewers. Or, more accurately, solid story lines, likeable characters (even House himself, thanks to actor Hugh Laurie's charisma and likeability—he played Bertie Wooster in the superb BBC comedy series Jeeves and Wooster in the 1990s), and interesting, life-or-death situations.

So it was hardly unexpected that the network followed up with another troubled, traumatized genius, the forensic anthropologist in Bones. Now the network has offered a couple more, in the new shows Canterbury's Law (Mondays at 8 EDT) and New Amsterdam (Mondays at 9 EDT).

Both shows are quite skillfully written, performed, and produced, and the stories deal with interesting subject matter. Also, both have the same sort of generous, classical liberal sort of thinking behind them. In both shows, there is a concern both for the innocent accused and for the victims of the crimes, and in both shows there is no false sympathy for the real perpetrators of the crimes.

Each show's protogonist, like Dr. House, has a serious problem.

In Canterbury's Law, the lead character, a genius criminal defense lawyer played by Julianna Margulies, drinks too much and is involved in an extramarital affair. The reason behind her bad behavior is sadness and anguish over the death of her young son.

Margulies does a splendid job of portraying the character's anguish and also her brilliance as a lawyer. The whole thing is good, solid TV. I doubt that I'll watch any more episodes, but I wouldn't fault anyone for doing so. 

Death is likewise central to New Amsterdam. The lead character, NYC homicide detective John Amsterdam, who has been alive for five centuries since saving the life of an Indian shaman woman during the first years of European settling of what is now New York City. He cannot die until he finds his one true love, she tells him, and sure enough, he's still around today.

Obviously, Fox has hit on a formula here, but it's not a bad one at all. The central characters' weaknesses keep them from ever seeming priggish, and they help sustain audience interest and sympathy, and the concern for those not blessed with genius or riches gives the protagonists' lives real purpose. Great art it's not, this is very decent and well-meaning entertainment—and that is a big compliment.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fox TV network debuts a sitcom that imitates Seinfeld—and actually works.

Given that the new Fox comedy series Unhitched is executive produced by the Farrelly Brothers—makers of lunatic and politically incorrect comedy films such as Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary, Stuck on You, and The Heartbreak Kid—one would be forgiven for expecting the show to be "edgy," slapsticky, frequently obscene, and rife with somewhat disturbing ideas and images.

The show does have its share of Farrelly moments, but overall it tends to reflect the filmmakers' sweeter, goofier side. In fact, more than anything it's reminiscent of Seinfeld.

There are four central characters, three male and one female, living in an urban location and running into odd situations that play out in a leisurely way. In Unhitched, as the title suggests, the four characters are divorced, not single as in Seinfeld, but everything else is very similar: the persnickety guy, the ineffectual sidekick, the woman who keeps getting involved with weird and unsuitable men, and the crazy guy pal.

Also as in Seinfeld, Unhitched tends toward a tone of, "Gee, people sure are nutty, aren't they?" Not a deep thought, of course, but a true one when thinking about the atmosphere around unmarried urban Americans of our time.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 

Review of Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, by Thomas S. Hibbs (Spence, 336 pp., $27.95)

ONCE the Sixties generation began its Long March through the institutions, conservatives started to despair of ever being able to counter what they saw as the uniform degradation of American culture. In the past couple of decades, however, more and more critics on the right have looked past the surfaces of seemingly antinomian and relativistic popular art and found serious and often positive meanings in it.

One such writer is Thomas Hibbs, a Baylor University professor of ethics and culture, film critic for National Review Online, and author of Shows About Nothing, a 1999 study in which he found Nietzscheanism to be rampant in American pop culture. In Arts of Darkness, Hibbs examines the distinctively American popular art form known as noir.

The term "noir" was first applied to a group of taut, tense, and often bleak crime films of the 1940s. Movies such as The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Out of the Past, and The Killers merged arty techniques derived from German Expressionism with conventional, gritty, strongly American story lines stemming from the hardboiled detective novels of the 1930s.

The films featured astonishingly cynical characters, commonly motivated by greed, sexual desire, envy, revenge, and other generally unwholesome impulses. American society, in these films, is consistently corrupt under a facade of respectability: People in power routinely exploit others simply to gain more power, and protagonists become increasingly enmeshed in a trap they cannot escape. A sense of dread and fatalism is omnipresent.

These movies brought a new level of cynicism to American popular culture, reflecting a society jaded by a long economic depression and horrific war. Since their era, as a result, "noir" has come to describe not a genre or style but really an attitude, even a philosophy: a perspective that has persisted in American culture in a variety of media and genres. (Although Hibbs does not mention it, there was a long tradition of "dark" fiction in American literature before the 1940s--e.g., Melville's The Confidence-Man and Moby-Dick, Mark Twain's later works, and Hawthorne's novels and stories.)

Hibbs writes that although noir seems bleak and cynical on the surface, the meaning behind the phenomenon is a good deal more complex and significantly more positive: "What is significant about these films is not just that they present a dark and dismal world but that they display their main characters as on a quest for love, truth, justice, and even redemption."

What interests Hibbs is "the convergence of noir with the religious quest": Noir arises from the same impulses that prompted Pascal to write of the hiddenness of God, and of the faithful believer who seeks "with groans."

Hibbs sees noir as engaging and critiquing the two major philosophical dangers of modernity: nihilism and Gnosticism. He writes: "Enlightenment theorists promise liberation from various types of external authority: familial, religious, and political. But an unintended consequence of the implementation of Enlightenment theories is the elimination of freedom." The film noir vividly expresses this truth, as the protagonists find themselves ever more deeply enmeshed in the complex, bureaucratized, soulless modern cities and webs of uncaring institutions that are the consequence of the Enlightenment passion for controlling the world through science.

In portraying the tragic limitations of the Enlightenment project, Hibbs argues, noir shows liberal modernity as "a potential source of nihilism, a human existence devoid of any ultimate purpose or fundamental meaning, where the great tasks of inquiry and the animating quests that inspired humanity in previous ages cease to register in the human soul," a place where the very notion of a soul is suspect.

The problem of the soul, Hibbs notes, is a central concern of sci-fi noir, a subgenre that includes some of the most popular films of the past quarter century: the Terminator series, Blade Runner, Dark City, Minority Report, and the Matrix series. These films often center on the difficulty of knowing whether an entity is a human or a machine, and flirt with the mechanistic notion that human beings are nothing more than material objects, and thus lack free will.

Hibbs faults sci-fi noir for evincing a Gnostic desire to escape the limitations of the body, but the films actually fit his overall thesis better than he realizes. For example, the goal of the central characters in the Matrix series--which he criticizes as Gnostic--is to free people's bodies from the alternative-reality Matrix, where they are used as power sources for machines.

Given that the trapped individuals experience a reality all but indistinguishable from physical reality, there is no reason to free them other than to allow them to use their bodies and thus be complete human beings. (In addition, the Matrix trilogy is, like most sci-fi noir, suffused with Christian imagery--suggesting the real alternative to nihilism and Gnosticism.)

Hibbs writes that the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer "depicts its characters struggling to recover a lost code of good and evil and longing for a kind of redemption." Like classic film noir, Buffy demonstrates a conservative respect for the limits of hu