Filmmaker Michael Bay will make a new thriller centering on use of a Ouija board. This is more important than it may sound.
I'm not one to get paranoid about the occult, but the latest news from the Hasbro toy company strikes me as more than a little odd. The toymaker reports that filmmaker Michael Bay will produce a film called "Ouija" for Universal Studios. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film will be "a supernatural adventure with the Ouija board playing an integral part."
Bay's most recent film as director was the immensely successful Transformers, released last summer. Hasbro is the maker of the popular toys on which the movie was based.
Bay's production company, Platinum Dunes, has produced numerous horror films in recent years, including remakes of The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hitcher. The company plans to release a remake of Friday the 13th next year.
As the Reporter story notes, the ouija board is marketed as an innocent toy, but the premise behind it is very strange indeed: "Players' fingers are placed on a small planchette that mysteriously moves to letters and numbers in order to spell out messages from beyond the earthly realm."
Because of this aspect and the Christian and Jewish objections to what is called divination, Hollywood depictions of ouija board use have typically been cautionary, suggesting that dabbling with them is dangerous. Particularly notable is the centrality of ouija board use in laying the groundwork for the demonic possession of young Regan in the book and film The Exorcist.
It looks extremely unlikely that a film made in cooperation with a firm that has sold millions of ouija boards worldwide since 1966 will take that approach. If the film is a success, interest in and use of ouija boards can only increase. That, of course, is Hasbro's intention.
Special Report: Cosby, Watts Revive Booker T. Washington's Legacy
Bill Cosby and J. C. Watts are working to make the dream of Booker T. Washingon real--100 years later.
In the past couple of decades, when American celebrities have increasingly offered up politics as the solution to everything, and when by politics they inevitably mean more government control, the situation for black Americans in particular has become increasingly dire.
Although black Americans have made distinct advances since the Reagan revolution opened up the economy to greater entrepreneurship and stronger payoffs for individual initiative, a divide has opened up, as the burgeoning middle class of black Americans has left behind an underdeveloped and direly challenged group of poorly educated, culturally bereft individuals whose ability to participate in productive employment is woefully inadequate.
An outrageous percentage of young black American males is currently incarcerated or has been in the past. It is outrageous that our society has decided to allow conditions in many urban neighborhoods to devolve into such gross lawlessness as to ensure that a vast number of young black Americans will end up in jail.
A good deal of the responsibility for this appalling situation lies with America's urban school systems, which are controlled by powerful leftist unions and disgracefully fail even to attempt to provide a solid education for urban children whom they consider uneducable, a situation the denizens of the education establishment blame on the children, the children's parents, popular culture, stingy taxpayers--anybody but their own damned selves, the real culprits.
Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.
Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”
Yet things were, if anything, even more awful a century ago, when blacks were routinely denied rights others enjoyed, and the law protected and reflected racial prejudice. Then, as now, there were many black and white Americans who offered government as the solution to blacks' problems, but except for the great accomplishment of breaking the legal stranglehold of Jim Crow, government has done much, much more harm than good, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out four decades ago.
Washington's vision, offered in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, was to provide black Americans with a model that could get them out of poverty and into a productive society of their own creation. His idea was to encourage black Americans to develop skills that would make them more useful members of society and contributors to the economy, to ensure that they would not have to be dependent on whites.
Through his Tuskegee Institute and other endeavors, Washington worked for black entrepreneurship, labor skills, personal responsibility, and strong families. His work involved charitable contributions from whites, to be sure, but it was all about equipping blacks to help themselves and succeed in the world as it was.
Unfortunately, as Moynihan noted in the 1960s, over the course of the twentieth century both racial prejudice and inept government efforts to help blacks made them, if anything, more dependent on government than they had been in Washington's time. And as taxpayer money poured into efforts supposed to help black America, a large, greedy class of hustlers and pro-government flacks arose and took control of black Americans' leadership.
Individual black Americans fought on, however, following (knowingly or otherwise) the prescription laid down by Washington decades earlier, making themselves so valuable to society that the remaining racial prejudice in American society could not hold them down.
Two of these are in the news now.
The comedian and actor Bill Cosby has increasingly come under attack from the leftist black establishment for his comments and speeches criticizing black Americans for not living up to the responsibilities required of those who would achieve personal success in a free society. The previously mentioned Atlantic Monthly article (aptly subtitled “The Audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism”) outlined the conflict:
The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.
There was much more to Washington’s philosophy than agrarianism, however, and Cosby has increasingly expressed the vision in recent speeches, as noted in the Atlantic article:
“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said [at a summer 2007 speech in Detroit]. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal.… When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’
“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these [white] people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.” . . .
He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.
Politics, Cosby notes, is not the answer. (Are you listening, Barack Obama? Cosby does not think so.) The Atlantic story recalls Cosby’s speech at the 2004 NAACP awards:
He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”
There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience.
Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”
Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa—with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock.
The reaction of the black leadership and white leftists was the predictable firestorm of denials and contempt. In the overall black community, however, the reaction was much more positive. As The Heartland Institute’s Lee Walker has noted, black Americans in fact have an inherent conservatism, with which Cosby’s speech resonated greatly.
The author of the Atlantic Monthly article on Cosby ultimately sides with the elitists, dismissing Cosby’s claims and Washington’s philosophy, saying they are based on racial self-hatred and belief in false myths about whether blacks can overcome institutional racism that the author says pervades America society.
Yet the very success of the Atlantic Monthly author himself, not to mention that of Cosby, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Will Smith, Robert Johnson, and countless other less-famous black Americans belies that notion. Cosby is right.
Perhaps the effort of former congressman J. C. Watts, a black Republican and solid classical liberal/Reagan conservative, will help bring that message to black Americans. As AP notes, Watts is starting a cable TV news network pitched toward black Americans:
Black Television News Channel, scheduled to launch in 2009, will provide "original news programming with a distinctly African-American perspective," according to a news release. It recently announced a multiyear agreement with Comcast Corp. . . .
The news release said BTNC expects to be added to Comcast systems in key markets for black audiences such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Baltimore.
This endeavor is a great example of the entrepreneurship recommended by Booker T. Washington and other wise leaders. If it reflects Watts' values and ideas (which are similar to those expressed increasingly by Bill Cosby in recent years), the Black Television News Channel will be a worthy and welcome addition to the American culture, not just black America.
Soderbergh Film Bio of Che Guevara Draws Critical Raspberries
Che, Steven Soderbergh's film biography and tribute to the Cuban revolutionary and American t-shirt icon Che Guevara, disappointed critics in Cannes. Being pro-Communist just isn't enough nowadays.
Steven Soderbergh makes entertaining films, such as Ocean's 11 and its two sequels (well, one of the two was good), and he also makes boring, dreary films--most of his output, as it happens. He's one of those cultural creators who is immensely talented and equally arrogant. He assumes that everyone should be interested in everything that interests him and should like everything he likes.
In sum, he appears to be a talented narcissist.
In addition, his politics come off as conventional Hollywood left wing bilge, the same form of hedonistic utilitarianism that drives what passes for thinking on the left today and somehow coexists with the American left's enormous elitism.
Thus it makes perfect (albeit perverse) sense that Soderbergh decided to make a four-hour movie about the Cuban communist revolutionary and former male model Che Guevara in Spanish and without any "movie moments," which is how Soderbergh smugly dismisses the use of filmmaking craftsmanship to entertain, touch, and enlighten audiences.
Two decades ago Soderbergh's film would have been a hit, at least with the critics, no matter how self-indulgent, false, and silly it turned out to be. (Remember Reds?) And as recently as a decade ago the critics would surely have given it credit for good intentions if not aesthetic success, and would have politely glossed over most of its shortcomings.
Not today, however. As noted in recent articles in this august publication, the attitude toward communism in American society and culture has taken a decidedly Reaganesque turn in recent months, a trend that I believe will only strengthen in the years to come. (I will be publishing a full essay on this subject, shortly.)
As a result, Soderbergh's film has generated a good deal of disappointment and derision among critics who attended its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last week. Even the Washington Post, no hotbed of right-wing conspirators, ridiculed the film:
Comrades, it is our duty to report: There were deserters.
Traitors! Too weak to sustain the continued emotional investment necessary to survive the long, tragic, long, doomed Bolivian campaign of Benicio Del Toro in Part 2 of "Che." The most highly anticipated movie of the Cannes Film Festival took a heavy toll. The premiere got underway at 6:46 p.m. and ended at 11:25 p.m. Upon seeing on the screen the words "Day 328," a faint moan could be heard in our section. But the struggle will continue. It must. Soderbergh does not yet have an American buyer for his film. Distribution or death!
Reaction to the movie was, as they say, mixed. It appears that some support Soderbergh and others have joined the résistance. At the film's conclusion, the audience at the world premiere rose and gave Soderbergh, Benicio and their cast of internationalistas a sustaining ovation, shouting "fantastico" and "bravo!" Soderbergh, stone-faced during intermission, finally broke into a smile and waved.
But Todd McCarthy of Variety expects it will be "back to the drawing board" for an "intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic" work that not only avoids the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, but forgets to include "any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure."
Meaning "Braveheart" it's not.
The Post article acknowledges that a couple of highly obscure American critics praised the film (for Indiewire and Cinematical, whatever those are), but it made it clear that both the general critical reaction and the Post's writer's reaction were extremely negative:
"The film reeks of authenticity but also self-indulgence. A potentially great performance by Benicio Del Toro in the title role is buried beneath Soderbergh's stylistic tics and an almost complete lack of dramatic tension," wrote Peter Howell in the Toronto Star. "An incredibly ambitious, highly detailed mess," according to Roger Friedman at FoxNews.com.
Interestingly, the Post article reports, Soderbergh doesn't speak Spanish and does not really care about Che's politics:
It seems as if the weight of history weighed them down. All these details, which the film obsesses on, like they were going to be graded by Fidel. The director said he himself was not a true believer, nor was he really interested in the Cuban revolution. He was interested in Che. "He's great movie material," said the director. "Who lived one of most fascinating lives of the last century."
Regardless of Soderbergh's opinion of Che's politics, it's clear that being communist or praising communists and communism is no longer a free ticket to American cultural acceptance.
Anti-Communist Indy Jones Film Rakes in Huge Audience in Opening Weekend
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull hauled in an estimated $311 million in global ticket sales over the Memorial Day weekend--a near-record performance, and strong evidence that audiences will respond well to a film with an anti-communist attitude.
The film's U.S.-Canada domestic gross of $151.1 million constitutes the second-biggest Thursday-Monday Memorial Day weekend opening ever. (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End brought in $153 million during the same period last year.) Parents with children composed almost a third of the U.S. audience, according to AP, quoting Rob Moore, president of Paramount Worldwide Distribution:
"Adults really drove this opening. This is one of their favorite franchises and they couldn't wait to take their kids with them," Moore said.
Paramount, which produced and distributes Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is also distributing the other big success of the spring-summer season so far, Marvel Studios' Iron Man.
Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, did rather well, finishing second, though it brought in just a fraction of the Indiana Jones take, at $28.6 million in U.S. domestic gross ticket sales. Iron Man stayed strong, finishing third with $25.7 million. The other big-budget action-oriented film of the season, Speed Racer limped along in fifth place with just $5.2 million.
New Indiana Jones Film Shows Evolving Cultural Attitude Toward Communism
After the film's underwhelming opening on Thursday, the makers of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are hoping the film will do better over the weekend. We should hope so, as the film exemplifies an improving cultural attitude toward communism and America's role in its eventual defeat.
The film deserves to do well, as it's a good entry in the series. It reprises all the great themes of the series and acknowledges the many recurring characters in addition to Indy, while creating the possibility of a new series featuring a character played by Shia LaBeouf. A nice touch is Indy's reference to his father and his good friend Marcus Brody, both of whom have died by the time the film begins, with the story set in the mid-1950s.
There is somethinng of an elegaic feel to the film, especially with the presence of Karen Allen, Ford's costar in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first film in the series, plus some plot points that I won't reveal, in deference to those who have not seen the film. In addition to this interesting sense of seriousness and concern about roads not traveled, the film also has a strong sense of fun and good cheer, perhaps more than in any Jones film since the first.
The film bursts with allusions to the earlier films in the series, as well as to other films and cultural items. For example, Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) stops to comb his hair regularly, including at decidedly inappropriate times, like the character Kookie in the 1940s-'60s TV show 77 Sunset Strip. The villainous Soviet agent Irina Spalko sports a brunette pageboy hairstyle clearly modeled after that of Louise Brooks's Lulu character in G. W. Pabst's silent film Pandora's Box. (Brooks and the film are widely admired by cineastes.) Despite a faintly absurd (though probably fairly accurate) accent, Blanchett's performance is quite diverting.
Allen gives a strong performance and is a great asset to the film. Although she is no longer hot stuff in the looks department (if she ever was), her performance and her chemistry with Ford as Indy Jones are spot-on, even to the extent of creating some rather poignant moments.
The 1950s time setting helps explain Ford's age (the actor is 65) as he plays the adventurous character (although how he has retained his ability to perform amazing athletic feats goes unexplained, being, well, inexplicable). The film does a very good job of capturing the atmosphere of the 1950s, including the Cold War, the burgeoning youth culture and delinquency problem, the fear of atomic warfare, the concern over communist infiltration of American institutions of power, and much more.
The story line resembles those of the Indiana Jones novels even more than those of the prior films, especially in going so far as it does in imagining that various legends are true.
In distinct contrast to the crazy mythological mishmash that constitute's the film's central premise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull includes some nice moral implications, such as the conclusion that knowledge is more important than gold. That has been a common theme in films and TV dramas of this decade (such as in the National Treasure films, the most obvious follower of the Indy format), and one certainly can see the Indiana Jones character and film and book series as having laid the groundwork for cultural treatments of the issue. (The popularity of the theme, however, rests very much on changing values in American society, not just the great popularity of the Indiana Jones films.)
The greatest contrast with the earlier films in the series is that in the present case the enemies are not Nazis but communists. Moreover, the film essentially endorses the idea that the Soviet Communists were a very bad lot and could imagine nothing better than the destruction and subjugation of the United States. At one point Indy even says, "I like Ike," and does not convey irony when doing so, miracle of miracles.
This attitude is in highly distinct contrast to the common Hollywood treatment of communism since the early 1950s, which basically held that however bad communism might be, Americans' opposition to it was much worse, and which strongly questioned the notion that there was anything particularly bad about communism anyway.
The attitude toward communism in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is particularly significant because we happen to be in the midst of a rising cultural acknowledgment of the war on communism and the essential rightness of our part in it. For it to be taken up by Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood's most successful and influential filmmakers, can only cement the trend further in the national consciousness.
The forthcoming Mike Meyers film The Love Guru is under attack by U.S.-based religious leaders. The mainstream media will tell them to back off, right?
No, not those pesky Evangelical Christians—the American religious leaders complaining about Mike Meyers' forthcoming theatrical film comedy The Guru are Hindus.
The odd thing about the movie, which hit the theaters in 1968, was that the character Sellers plays is a native of the Indian subcontinent. Sellers, an Englishman, affects a not particularly convincing but acceptable Indian accent, and his skin has been darkened for the role. Other than that, he just plays it as a generic funny, bumbling character with charming sincerity and basic gooodness.
There was nothing about either the role or the film that condescended to India or Indians, but I remarked at the time that no Caucasian could undertake such a role today.
How wrong I was, yet how right, ultimately. In The Love Guru, due to hit U.S. theaters June 20, Mike Meyers plays India's second-best guru, who is called to the United States to help a brokenhearted hockey player recover from his romantic trauma so that his team can win the Stanley Cup.
According to reports, Meyers's character, Guru Pitka, is actually an American raised in India, so Meyers does not have his skin darkened for the film, but he does adopt a comical Indian accent.
What has them in such turmoil is the film's depiction of Pitka's spiritual order, an oddball amalgam of traits from various Eastern religions, E! Online reports:
On Love Guru's MySpace page, he refers to himself as "his holiness . . . a spiritual teacher with no one faith." He has a penchant for yoga and his mantra is "Mariska Hargitay."
Not funny, say representatives of Hindu organizations:
A handful of Hindu higher-ups are voicing concerns, based on the trailer and promotions already released, that the movie will unfairly play into stereotypes and potentially ridicule their beliefs.
"The movie appeared to be lampooning Hinduism and Hindus and using Hindu terms frivolously," Rajan Zed, president of the Nevada-based Universal Society of Hinduism, told India's Hindustan Times.
The Hindu group Shri Ramayan Pracharini Sabha issued a statement saying "that portrayal of Hindu characters like buffoons is not acceptable."
Zed has said the film will lead unenlightened audiences to believe "most of us are like that."
What that is: a flowing-haired, long-bearded, caftan-wearing, sitar-strumming guru played, as usual, to exaggerated comic effect by Myers.
Paramount, the studio behind The Love Guru, correctly observed that Meyers's comic performances are not to be taken as authentic, according to the E! Online report:
The studio also said made note that the film was hardly meant to be taken as a documentary, calling it a "nondenominational comedy" and "a satire created in the same spirit as Austin Powers."
One might well wonder whether the New York Times and other openly anti-Christian mainstream media outlets will take the same hostile attitude toward the Hindus' complaints as they consistently have done toward Christians' protests of unfair treatment in media depictions. If they are at all consistent, they will tell the Hindu leaders to shut up and stop threatening our sacred First Amendment right to free expression.
Personally, I don't wonder about it at all. They'll treat the Hindus with kid gloves and sympathize with their concerns. You can count on that.
Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Will Have Enormous Consequences—Intended or Otherwise
The California Supreme Court's decision to establish same-sex marriages in the state in direct contradiction to the will of the people (as expressed strongly in a statewide referendum) is not only illiberal in the extreme but also will have enormous consequences that few people expect. It is truly no exaggeration to say that California and indeed American society will never be the same if this trend is not reversed.
The consequences of same-sex marriages may well be intended by those advocating using government power to force individual citizens and organizations to recognize such marriages, or they may not, but they will be certainly immense and appalling to the great majority of the population. The estimable Mr. Dennis Prager outlines the coming catastrophe in Real Clearl Politics. Here are some excerpts:
Outside of the privacy of their homes, young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming -- to do so would be declared "heterosexist," morally equivalent to racist. Rather, they will be told to imagine a prince or a princess. Schoolbooks will not be allowed to describe marriage in male-female ways alone. Little girls will be asked by other girls and by teachers if they want one day to marry a man or a woman. . . .
Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.
Companies that advertise engagement rings will have to show a man putting a ring on a man's finger -- if they show only women fingers, they will be boycotted just as a company having racist ads would be now.
Films that only show man-woman married couples will be regarded as antisocial and as morally irresponsible as films that show people smoking have become.
Traditional Jews and Christians -- i.e. those who believe in a divine scripture -- will be marginalized. Already Catholic groups in Massachusetts have abandoned adoption work since they will only allow a child to be adopted by a married couple as the Bible defines it -- a man and a woman.
Anyone who advocates marriage between a man and a woman will be morally regarded the same as racist. And soon it will be a hate crime. . . .
We have entered something beyond Huxley's "Brave New World." [So true!—ed.] All thanks to the hubris of four individuals [the California Supreme Court majority that imposed this decision]. But such hubris never goes unanswered. Our children and their children will pay the price. . . .
That is why Californians must amend their state's Constitution.
Given the long record of people in power manipulating and openly defying the constitutional amendment process in the states, don't count on this happening. But you can indeed count on the consequences Prager predicts, and many more. Brave new world indeed!
Profits Down Again for New York Times, Washington Post
Angry Americans are voting with their media choices, and the news is very bad for complacent leftists. The mainstream media continue their downward slide as the New York Times and Washington Post report continuing drops in profits and stock values. That's great news for the rest of us.
Pressed hard by an evolving marketplace in which access to potential readers is becoming much more evenly available through the internet and proliferation of TV channels, old-media giants have been caught flat-footed. Their values are falling, and where they will stop, no one knows.
The corporate cultures of these media giants became arrogant and sclerotic during the decades when they faced little real competition, when, as the saying went, freedom of the press was true for those who owned a printing press (and the corresponding distribution system).
The same was true where there were only a limited number of channels distributed through the broadcast airwaves. Media giants such as the New York Times, Washington Post, the three major TV networks, and CNN never developed entrepreneurial, competitive, audience-oriented internal cultures like those at newer competitors. They are now paying the price in decreasing readership/viewership, lower earnings, and declining stock values.
All of these lumbering media giants have begun trimming their staffs, as the Washington Post has done again in recent days by giving generous early retirement packages to more than 100 employees, including the prestigious investigative reporter and fantasist Bob Woodward. This is in fact the third buyout offered hiim in this decade, an indication of how serious the money problems at the Post have become.
The Washington Post Co. reported a 39 percent profit drop in the first quarter of this year, as newspaper circulation and revenue continued to decline. Advertising revenue was down 11 percent, driven by a large fall in classified ad sales. Online revenue grew 8 percent over the previous year (not a very fast pace, actually, for a Web site). The company's education publications and cable television units are doing well, but the newspaper and magazine (Newsweek) divisions continue to decline.
Given that the New York Times Co. is highly diversified, the downgrading based on declining ad revenues at the New York Times and the firm's other newspapers (such as the likewise openly leftist Boston Globe) is a further indication that the mainstream leftist newspapers are in dire trouble.
This is good news for the rest of us, of course, as the greater competition the marketplace is currently creating means that consumers will have increasing choice among equals.
That means the leftward journey of the media and allied intelligentsia will either end or, if it continues, will bring to a blessed conclusion the slow suicide of the leftist American mainstream media.
'Prince Caspian' Tops U.S. Box Office in Opening Weekend
Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian opened strong at the U.S. box office over the weekend—though not as well as expected.
Walt Disney Co's second film based on C. S. Lewis's beloved Narnia books, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, was number 1 in U.S. box office receipts over the weekend, with three-day sales of $56.6 million, according to company estimates.
That's a good deal less than the $80 million industry sources had expected, and is short of the $65 million The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first film in the projected series, took in during its opening weekend in 2005.
Despite these unexpectedly low numbers, it's too early to suggest the film will not ultimately do about as well as originally expected. Warner Bros' $160 million would-be blockbuster Speed Racer took in only $18.6 million during its first three days, as the Iron Man juggernaut has continued to fill theaters, earning more than $225 million in only 2 1/2 weeks. It brought in an impressive $31.2 million last weekend.
In addition to having to lure Iron Man-bound moviegoers, Prince Caspian labored under less enthusiastic reviews than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. According to the Rotten Tomatoes website, 66 percent of top reviewers approved Caspian, whereas 76 percent liked its predecessor.
However, lower audience appeal tends to be the situation with second installments in fantasy film series such as these, as they typically do not open as strongly as the first film. That happened with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series.
Although Caspian is darker and more action-oriented than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and is burdened with a decidedly uncharismatic performance by Ben Barnes as the title character, it is an interesting and entertaining film with some very good moments. It should do well even if it does not approach the success of its predecessor.
Given that Prince Caspian is widely judged to be the least interesting and effective of Lewis's Narnia novels and not an easy story to bring to the screen, it seems likely that the series will continue strong with the next installment.
California Court's Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Is More Government Coercion, Not Freedom
A California court's ruling that the state of California must approve of same-sex marriages is being hailed as a blow for freedom. In fact it is exactly the opposite.
Although radical statists continually refer to same-sex marriages as a civil right and a matter of liberating society from hidebound prejudices, such policies are actually government imposition of a small group's sexual values on a reluctant and indeed strongly resistant population.
After all, such laws and court rulings would not be necessary if the public already agreed with them, would they? The public would accept such marriages without government forcing them to.
The California Supreme Court's ruling that the people's expressed will, shown powerfully in a state referendum opposing government establishment of same-sex marriages, should be overcome by government force is in fact an outrage, an act of gross oppression.
It's important to bear in mind that what Dungy is doing is defending a liberal position: he wants the government to refrain from forcing people to acknowledge unions between [same-sex] homosexuals as marriages.
This is the essential point. Where the use of force is proposed is against those who don't want to have anything to do with [same-sex] homosexual marriage.
The matter at hand is whether the government should force people to accept and acknowledge "marriages" between same-sex individuals.
No one—repeat no one—is making any effort whatever to stop homosexuals from having marriages performed in any kind of ceremony they may choose. That is not at issue.
What people do object to is changes in the law that would force people to acknowledge these unions as marriages.
There is no practical need whatever for such laws. Insurance companies, for example, can allow benefits for such couples if they wish, but the government doesn't force them to do so. That is exactly as it should be.
The ones who are trying to force these "same-sex marriage" laws on a decidedly unreceptive population are the ones who are against liberty in the matter.
And they should be characterized as the tyrants they are.
In an earlier article, I showd that a truly liberal position on same-sex marriages would refrain from forcing individuals to recognize "marriages" they consider invalid:
Classical liberals would surely deny that there is any "right" to homosexual marriage. Rights are negative, not positive. That is, people have a right to be left alone by the government to do anything that does not harm others.
Applied to homosexual marriage, the argument following from this principle is clear: If homosexuals want to live together and get married in churches, they have an absolute right to do so, unless their way of doing so harms the community in some real and measurable way. But do they have a right to force others to acknowledge their choice? Absolutely not. The government has no right to force insurance companies, churches, schools, neighbors, etc., to acknowledge homosexual couples as marriages.
Why, then, does the government force these institutions to acknowledge heterosexual marriages? The answer is simple: It does not. These institutions acknowledge heterosexual marriages on the basis of historical and cultural preferences developed over centuries. The government didn't decide this; society did. In pursuit of social order, governments have required institutions to acknowledge marriage in their dealings with married couples (by creating marriage licenses, etc., with force of law), which from a classical liberal perspective makes sense as it did not infringe on individual liberties because people were already agreed that marriage was a valid institution.
Moreover, even homosexuals agreed, and still agree, that marriage is a valid institution, which they confirm by trying to alter it so that their own couples can be included. The key factor is that the government, in acknowledging heterosexual marriage, does not force anything on the society, instead merely enforcing a contract that all or nearly all people accept as valid and sensible.
Homosexual marriage has no such status in society, as evidenced by the fact that it has little support in law nationwide and that nearly all of the moves to legalize it have come from the courts, not the democratic process. Hence, while the government has no call to prevent such marriages from occurring, it also has no valid authority to force individuals and organizations to acknowledge them. . . .
Homosexuals are already free to marry in America, they just aren't free to force others to acknowledge those marriages. That seems a reasonable position at this time in human history and is most conducive to both liberty and social order.
An excellent Media Advisory from The Heartland Institute (where this author serves as Director of Research) sums up the issue superbly:
Polar Bear Decision Defies Scientific Evidence
(Chicago, IL -- May 14, 2008) The U.S. Department of the Interior decided today to list polar bears as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act. The decision was based on predictions that future global warming will negatively affect polar bear populations.
Experts contacted by The Heartland Institute note global temperatures have not risen in the past 10 years, and scientists with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict temperatures will cool for at least the next 10 years. Moreover, polar bear populations have been increasing during recent decades. . . .
"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has just taken its place alongside Miss Cleo and the Psychic Friends Network in terms of a complete divorce from scientific reality. FWS apparently believes it has the clairvoyance to forecast sharp declines in polar bear populations even though temperatures for most of the past 10,000 years have been warmer than today and polar bears have flourished. Moreover, global polar bear populations have been rising for decades, even as temperatures have recovered from the end of the Little Ice Age 100 years ago.
"The only plausible basis for ruling polar bears as threatened is blind faith in alarmist computer models that have been no more accurate than Chicken Little's claim that the sky is falling. Compare the alarmist computer models to the real world. Global temperatures have not risen one bit during the past decade. Before that, for 30 of the preceding 50 years, global temperatures fell. And now even IPCC scientists are predicting global temperatures will cool for at least the next decade.
"Only by completely ignoring real-world scientific evidence and jumping head-first into the world of special-interest group propaganda can one justify listing polar bears as a threatened species."
James M. Taylor Senior Fellow for Environment Policy, The Heartland Institute
"This decision represents a conflict between politics and science. Polar bear populations have been increasing in recent decades, so there is no current problem. The concern is based on forecasts. However, the government forecasts used to support the decision violate basic scientific principles, and thus provide no scientific support for the listing.
"There are no scientific forecasts that would suggest a reduction in polar bear populations. It would be improper, then, to designate polar bears as endangered. Application of proper forecasting methods suggests a small short-term rise in polar bear populations followed by a leveling off. We provide full disclosure to support these statements at publicpolicyforecasting.com and at theclimatebet.com. In the long term, science will prevail."
Scott Armstrong Professor, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
"Canadians, who manage two-thirds of all polar bear populations, just reviewed their listing status and decided not to up-list the bear to a more serious status. Activists are attempting to politically interfere and change that reasonable and informed decision so today's U.S. listing would not look extreme, unwarranted, and political, which it is.
"The listing is lunacy because carbon dioxide emissions--the real target of activists--are surging worldwide, and unless all other countries cut their carbon emissions, atmospheric concentrations will continue to rise even if the entire West shuts down its emissions. If the United States were to go 100 percent CO2 emissions-free, just the projected growth in China's and India's emissions would replace U.S. 'savings' in about a decade.
"The self-inflicted economic wound of making the use of carbon fuels more expensive in the United States than in China will merely transfer carbon emissions and jobs to that regime, which already has one of the worst environmental records in the world, and will deploy the profits toward the continued expansion of its own network of uniquely dirty, coal-fired power stations, to the detriment of the environment, without any benefit to the climate or polar bears whatsoever."
Robert Ferguson President, Science and Public Policy Institute
Nothing in this Media Advisory is intended to influence the passage of legislation, and it does not necessarily represent the views of The Heartland Institute.
The Destroyer series of novels, featuring all-American hero Remo Williams, continues with a new installment, The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning.
The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning is a continuation of Warren Murphy's long-running series (37 years with several different co-authors, nearly 40 million copies sold) of rousing adventure tales featuring hero Remo Williams.
The Remo Williams books feature massive political incorrectness, much humor, strong stories, interesting characters, real villains, action and adventure, unabashed patriotism, clever and often prescient insights into international affairs, an unapologetically right-wing point of view, and much more. They're well worth reading.
Note: Remo Williams is called The New Destroyer in this book because after the 1980s, publishers put out several years' worth of rather inferior installments in the series after the new book's co-author, James Mullaney, stopped writing for the series. Now that Mullaney's back and the series has a new publisher, they've renamed the series to convey this new beginning.
We all want to do our best to help ensure polar bears don't go extinct, but the current push to list them officially as threatened exemplifies the tendency to ignore unintended consequences, argues S. T. Karnick in an op-ed published today in the New York Post.
The common human response when confronted by something we don't like is to say, "Somebody should do something!" And in the modern era, that means government, and "something" means whatever most strongly suggests that the people behind the proposed policy really, really care.
This is a cultural issue in that the mentality currently dominant in our schools and media values feelings over thoughts, and gestures over common sense. Until we change our culture, our politics will continually be corrupted by such foolish gestures.
The reality is that all actions have consequences, as Newton discovered about the physical world and James Burnham pointed out about the political realm. And often those consequences are things we didn't expect at all.
But when we know in advance what the negative consequences of a policy will be, we have only ourselves to blame.
That's the case with the current concern over polar bears and whether to list them as an endangered species, as I note in my oped in today's New York Post. One, polar bears are absolutely not threatened with extinction from manmade global warming. And two, falsely listing them as threatened with extinction would set in motion a process by which economic growth across the entire country could be stymied by a powerful new burst of regulation.
Unexpected, unintended negative consequences of a necessary action are a tragedy. Expected and therefore intended negative consequences of an entirely unnecessary action are a disgrace. Read it here.
'Grand Theft Auto IV' Tops Half-Billion Dollars in Sales in One Week
Grand Theft Auto IV has achieved sales of over $500 million during its first week. Will the nation survive?
After just one week, the video game Grand Theft Auto has sold more than six million copies worldwide, earning its maker, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., more than a half-billion dollars.
The entire Grand Theft Auto game series has been widely derided by critics as harmful to children because of the violent activities in which the characters engage. The critics are apparently operating on the theory that adolescents are too stupid to recognize that the rules of video games do not apply in real life.
Positing an allegedly deleterious message of Grand Theft Auto IV, AP reports, Mothers Against Drunk Driving have "complained that the latest version includes the ability to drive while intoxicated."
Here they are just being silly: that ability is embedded in the human Y chromosome.
After the immensely successful opening weekend box office performance of Iron Man,Marvel Studios has announced plans to release a sequel in April 2010.
The Marvel Studios head of production, Kevin Feige, said Downey will return to play the title character. He credited the actor for much of the film's success, according to Reuters.
The next Marvel film scheduled for release is The Incredible Hulk, based on the same angry green superhero that inspired a popular TV series and the awkward and commercially unsuccessful 2003 Ang Lee film Hulk. The previews for The Incredible Hulk, now showing in theaters, suggest that it is very much better than Lee's effort.
The studio will follow the Iron Man sequel in June 2010 with Thor, an adaptation of a Marvel comic-book series about a hero based on the mythical Nordic god of the same name.
Marvel's plan is to follow that film with The First Avenger: Captain America in May 2011 and The Avengers (based on a Marvel team that has included Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America) in July 2011, according to Reuters.
Marvel Studios' Iron Man dominated the movie box office during its first weekend, at a near-record pace. Even more surprisingly, it has some serious thoughts behind it.
As expected, the big-budget Marvel Studios release Iron Man opened strong at the U.S movie box office, bringing in $104.25 million during its first weekend, according to studio figures. It was the second-biggest domestic opening tally ever for a non-sequel film (bested only by Spider-Man). What makes the film's performance even more impressive is that Iron Man is the first film ever released by Marvel Studios, a new division of Marvel Entertainment.
As is common among summer blockbusters, Iron Man has numerous spectacular action sequences and impressive special effects that don't just strain credulity but shatter it into a billion pieces. But unlike many other summer releases it also has much more. Director Jon Favreau (Swingers, Elf, Zathura) has obtained superb performaces from Robert Downey Jr. (as the title character, mumitions magnate Tony Stark), Jeff Bridges (as his business partner, Obadaiah Stane), Gwyneth Paltrow (who invests her formidable skill and charisma in the character of Stark's personal assistant, Virginia "Pepper" Potts), and Terence Howard (as "Rhodey Rhodes," military liaison to Stark's munitions company).
As with the Spider-Man films, the people behind Iron Man devote a laudable amount of energy and screen time to a spirited and reasonably sophisticated discussion of the ideas behind the film's premise. Stark is the genius son of a late, brilliant inventor who became the world's greatest munitions magnate. The elder Stark appears to have had few concerns about the morality of his business--reflecting, it seems to me, a laudable (and long overdue) revisionist view of the Cold War on the filmmakers' part, in which the Americans are now seen unambiguously as the good side and the Soviet Union and its satraps as an implacable enemy necessitating a strong national defense.
Tony Stark correctly sees the current threat facing the United States as dire, and the enemy as unwilling to be turned away through reason, bribery, or any other means except brute force. He is living the American Dream: doing well by doing good.
He comes to have serious doubts about his role in all this, however, when he is captured by enemy forces and threatened with death unless he creates for them a copy of his latest superweapon, using parts from weapons made by his own company. Of course, he gets out of this fix by using the opportunity to build himself the superpowered uniform-weapon that makes him into the superhero that comes to be known as Iron Man.
But the discovery of his weapons being in the enemy's hands sobers the formerly happy-go-lucky Stark (his last name is the German word meaning 'strong'). The experience of having his weapons on both sides of a war--while an evildoer's dream--disturbs him greatly and makes him call into question the validity of his life's work.
At this point, conservatives concerned about having a strong national defense will protest (as Peter Suderman did, albeit without much evident enthusiasm, on National Review Online) that the film is veering toward a pacifist vision suggesting moral equivalence between the United States and enemies dedicated to destroying us. They needn't worry. Stark's concern is valid: if his weapons are indeed the only thing that is making the violence possible, then he is responsible for it and must do whatever he can to end it. In this case the political is the personal.
But of course Stark's weapons are not the only thing behind the violence. Before the current incident in which his weapons have been made available to the enemy, his latest superweapon showed promise of bringing peace soon by destroying the enemy without harming innocents.
Certainly such a peace would have been only temporary, lasting just until an enemy managed to obtain the same weapon (as the Soviet Union did with the atomic bomb) or a suitable counter to it (as the Soviets could not do with President Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which ultimately led to the Evil Empire's downfall). That's the way it always works, as Stark would surely realize in time, given his intelligence and apparent grasp of history.
In any case, the process of devising an escape from his Arab captors gives Downey the idea he needs to solve the overcome the enemies both foreign and domestic. As always, freedom, entrepreneurship, and ingenuity enable Americans to overcome all obstacles. And as so often appears to be the case in real life, in Iron Man the main battle is actually between two factions within the United States. Far from suggesting that there is something fundamentally wrong with America or with the idea of national defense, this aspect of the story reinforces the greatness of this nation: we are so strong that the only worldly force that can stop us is ourselves.
Thus Iron Man is to be praised for a strong pro-defense stance and willingness to portray our current main enemies as Muslims. (Although the film does not explicitly identify them as such, it's perfectly clear that these Arab-ethnic characters holed up in caves in Afghanistan are meant to represent Al Qaeda and America-hating Muslims in general.)
It is true that the main antagonist in the film is an American, but that takes nothing away from the fact that the people out to get us in the film are the Muslim terrorists. The fact that an American is willing to take advantage of the situation in order to increase his own power simply brings an interesting complexity to the situation, reflecting something rather more like the complex politics of the real world.
At its heart, however, Iron Man is a story of redemption. Robert Stark opens the film as an unregenerate hedonist (at one point he cheerfully greets former Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner), but after his captivity in Afghanistan and the discoveries of betrayals at home, he begins to take life much more seriously, even beginning to suggest interest in a monagomous romance with Pepper. The parallel to pre- and post-9/11 America is clear but neither forced nor clumsy.
Casting Robert Downey in the role is thus an inspired choice. Not only is he a highly talented actor, and one who can play both the frivolous and serious Starks with equal convincingness, but he is also a real-life embodiment of the character, having suffered through drug addictions and then rebuilding his career to its current apogee. He brings to the role and the film both humor and something that looks very much like wisdom.
It's no surprise that Iron Man benefits from impressive special effects and action sequences, but it is somewhat surprisng and pleasing that it has some truly serious ideas and characterizations and explores them with sincerity, wit, and sophistication.
Customers are flocking to big-discount clothing stores such as Steve and Barry's, and celebrities are lining up to endorse them. Is it a welcome rejection of materialism and slavery to fashion, or simply making a virtue of limited expectations in relatively tough economic times?
Once upon a time, people prided themselves on being able to afford luxuries. It's a good thing that such materialistic pride appears to be on the wane—but it's ironic that it is being replaced by a sense of pride in one's shopping ability.
The New York Times reports that big-discount clothing stores such as Steve and Barry's are having great success by keeping expenses low and charging bargain-basement prices:
Steve & Barry’s, for the uninitiated, is to fashion what Tower once was to music. Steve & Barry’s is manna, a store that sells stylish celebrity-branded clothes at prices that are absurdly inexpensive, lower than those at Old Navy, H & M or Forever 21, undercutting even Wal-Mart by as much as half.
The fact is, clothes tend to cost a good deal more than most other fashionable cultural items such as movies, books, music, and the like. The celebrity culture and social pressures, however, always incite people, especially the young, to emulate the styles they see in media presentations, as an easy way of establishing a quickly readable identity for themselves.
Thus the rise of budget-friendly clothing fashions. The owners of Steve and Barry's have found success by making a virtue of necessity and selling aesthetic beauty on a budget, by keeping expenses to the bare minimum. Whereas most clothing designers charge a huge fortune in licensing fees, the designers stocking Steve and Barry's stores make their money on volume, as do the stores themselves:
[Steve and Barry's owners] Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor, dressed in chinos and rumpled shirts, frequently described the company as “the Google of fashion” and rattled off several ways they had devised to make a high-quality product at the low prices. The clothes appear to be well made — several of the Bitten dresses, made in India, were lined, and the strapless dress Ms. Parker wore is constructed with an internal elastic band to hold it up. And the basketball shoes appear sturdy, although they are made with fake leather (well, so are Stella McCartney’s).
Steve & Barry’s saves big, for example, by opening stores in underperforming malls, where the owners are more likely to negotiate rents and offer other incentives; by building its own bare-bones store displays; by maintaining only a small public relations office in Manhattan; and by manufacturing in countries like China, India, Madagascar and more than 20 others, including the United States.
This is surely no return to the early years of the Christian church or an expression of Buddhist self-denial. It's simply a smart way for young people to do what they have always done: use every possible means to give themselves a strong and hopefully likeable social identity. The Times story quotes actress Sarah Jessica Parker, whose inexpensive clothing line is sold at Steve and Barry's as acknowledging that point:
“What has changed,” Ms. Parker said, “is that now people have bragging rights about what they paid. I admired a woman’s pair of pants at a party recently and she said, ‘Fourteen dollars! H & M!’ It really is, among the people I know, part of what they do now.”
Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor again likened the change to a revolution.
“When you look at clothing now,” Mr. Prevor said, “price is not the arbiter of what is good. It’s the clothes themselves.”
Valuing things on the basis of their real benefits is indeed a good thing, and good fashions do bring aesthetic beauty into the world. That is certainly better than utilitarian drabness, provided it isn't done wastefully, and that is clearly the point behind the cheap chic—beauty on a budget.
Best-Selling Book Shows Market Power of Christian Media
A strange, spiritually infused novel by a troubled Oregonian tech representative has hit the best-seller lists, thanks to plenty of free publicity in Christian media outlets. But it may be a very un-Christian book.
As USA Todayreports, a novel aimed at the "spiritually interested" and employing Christian ideas and imagery in decidedly eccentric ways has hit the best-seller lists:
A little novel written by an Oregon salesman and self-published by two former pastors with a $300 marketing budget is lighting up USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list with a wrenching parable about God's grace.
First-time author William P. Young's book The Shack, in which the father of a murdered child encounters God the Father as a sarcastic black woman, Jesus as a Middle Eastern laborer and the Holy Spirit as an Asian girl, is No. 8 on the list.
Published a year ago and promoted by snowballing attention on Christian radio, websites and blogs, The Shack ($14.99) is now in mainstream bookstores and Wal-Marts nationwide, and the trio behind it are talking to Hollywood about a possible film deal.
The book was rejected by Christian publishers as too "edgy" and by secular publishers as too "Jesus-y," co-publisher Brad Cummings said, according to the USA Today story. Thanks to the free publicity on Christian media, the book has sold three-quarters of a million copies.
Here, for example, is the enthusiastic product description from one of those places, Christianbook.com:
Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his "Great Sadness," Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!
Unlike the Christianbook.com blurb, the USA Today story strongly implies, but does not document, that the book's theology is decidedly unorthodox, and it emphasizes that people connect emotionally with The Shack. The book does seemperfectly pitched to reach people harmed by the disturbed family and social relationships of our divorce-prone and publicly antinomian era:
He wrote the book to explain his own harrowing journey through pain and misery to "light, love and transformation" in God to his six children, ages 14 to 27.
Eleven years ago, Young says, he was hanging on by a thread, haunted by his history as a victim of sexual abuse, by his own adulterous affair, by a life of shame and pain, all stuffed deep in his psyche.
"The shack" was what he called the ugly place inside where everything awful was hidden away. The book is about confronting evil and stripping the darkness away to reveal a loving God within, he says.
Apparently The Shack is reaching a large number of people with a message of personal responsibility and redemption. If so, it would be a very good thing indeed.
Unfortunately, there are strong reasons to believe that The Shackis not doing that at all.
Despite its value as a form of literary therapy, the book may be doing much harm by spreading false ideas about God. In particular, it is easy to see in the book's plot description a strong element of syncretism. A review by Berit Kjos on the Kjos Ministries website confirms this and outlines what Kjos identifies as some of many doctrinally false aspects of the book:
For example, this new "Jesus" never returned to heaven. Was there no real resurrection? Not according to the female "God":
“Although by nature he is fully God, Jesus is fully human and lives as such. While never losing the innate ability to fly [which he demonstrates in the book], he chooses moment-by-moment to remain grounded. That is why his name is Immanuel, God with us...."[1, p.99-100] . . .
But the Bible tells us that Jesus did return to His heaven after His crucifixion.
This does seem an unnecessary and wrong claim for author Young to attribute to God the Father, and it probably would muddle the thinking of anyone who tried to reconcile it with the biblical teachings on the matter.
Kjos then goes on to identify another unorthodox aspect of the book:
Besides, neither God our Father nor the Holy Spirit made themselves finite or visible to man. "No one has seen God at any time," said the true Jesus. (John 1:18) Yet, here we see all three in human form -- on earth! "
Although Kjos makes a valid observation here, Young's narrative choice in this instance strikes me as within the bounds of allowable fictional license—although perhaps only just within those bounds.
Kjos continues his indictment with a direly serious charge:
Unlike the true God, this false trinity exercises no authority over man. That should please today's postmodern church leaders! They seem to shun words such as "sovereignty" and "authority." After all, a reigning God who sets the moral standard for all time could cause division. He could impede their main purpose: inclusive relationships and "authentic community."
Kjos follows this with evidence from the book, making a strong case that The Shack does indeed suggest that God approves of antinominism, a thoroughly unbibilical claim. As part of this analysis, Kjos notes the following:
Notice how The Shack's false "God" mocks our true God by minimizing His sovereignty and judgments:
"I'm not a bully, not some self-centered demanding little deity insisting on my own way. I am good, and I desire only what is best for you. You cannot find that through guilt or condemnation...."[1,p.126]
"You don't need me at all to create your list of good and evil. But you do need me if you have any desire to stop such an insane lust for independence.... Mackenzie, evil is a word we use to describe the absence of Good, just as we use the word darkness to describe the absence of Light. ...evil and darkness can only be understood in relation to Light and Good; they do not have any actual existence."[1,p.136]
Clearly the attempt to create a God more attractive to people who are not yet ready to let go of their sins has led Young to take the idea of forgiveness far beyond its real meaning into an acceptance of evil by defining it out of existence. That, however, destroys the very notion of forgiveness, for if we are not responsible for our wrongdoings (which is what Young clearly implies), then we have nothing for which we need to be forgiven.
In which case, Christ's sacrifice was for nothing.
Kjos aptly quotes another author in this regard:
These absurd claims remind me of Ray Yungen['s] wise words, "Satan is not simply trying to draw people to the dark side of a good versus evil conflict. Actually, he is trying to eradicate the gap between himself and God, between good and evil, altogether."[6]
Noting the similarity between ideas in The Shack and the New Age spiritualist book A Course in Miracles, Kjos analyzes this perversion of the notion of forgiveness:
Both books demonstrate a perverted kind of forgiveness -- the world's way of promoting unity and healing apart from the cross. Not only does Mack learn to "forgive" all who have hurt him, he also forgives "God." As if God had done something wrong!
Following the same reasoning, ACIM's "Jesus" offers this bit of twisted theology:
"Forgive, and you will see this differently.... These are the words which end the dream of sin, and rid the mind of fear. These are the words by which salvation comes to all the world."[8]
It may sound loving to claim universal salvation through human forgiveness. But it's not Biblical! This counterfeit "Jesus" has totally divorced himself from God's Word -- the living Word which is the true Jesus. (See John 1:14)
However much we may sympathize with those who have been bruised and broken by the disturbed conditions of our society, giving people temporarily comforting falsehoods will just spread the misery. There appears to be strong evidence that that is exactly what The Shack is doing.
T
noted, black Americans in fact have an inherent conservatism, with which Cosby’s speech resonated greatly.
