205. moiety

I did not watch the Oscars last night. Something about watching institutionalized, self-congratulatory narcissism makes me nauseous. Ellen DeGeneres’ quip in her opening monologue about rain in Los Angeles dampening the evening seemed to sum it up. “We’re fine,” she joked. “Thank you for your prayers.”

Frankly, I haven’t seen any of the films that were nominated this year, aside from 12 Years a Slave, which made me feel guilty about having complained about anything, ever, in my entire life. For one, I don’t have the money. When faced with having to pay rent, groceries, phone bill, car insurance, and other essentials, spending what little discretionary funds I have available on what amounts to flimsy, cardboard representations of reality seems pretty ridiculous. Which brings me to the other reason I don’t go, which is that I find most films these days to be formulaic and predictable, as well as shallow and dull, and not worth my time.

Author Carlos Stevens wrote of the role of movies during the Great Depression: that they “offered a chance to escape the cold, the heat, and loneliness; they brought strangers together, rubbing elbows in the dark of movie palaces and fleapits, sharing in the one social event available to everyone.”

I don’t understand wanting to herd into darkened theaters to sit with strangers, or the desire to mingle gregariously. But I get wanting to escape from reality. It’s why I spent so much time with books as a teenager, preferring fictional universes where heroes overcame their demons. But it’s hard to relate to most of the stories presented for entertainment these days. Where movies of the 1930s were meant to give us hope in dark times, movies of the twenty-first century seem purposed only to numb us to the meandering banality of our own times.

Today I came across an article that explores the evolution of the horror genre and its use as contemporary commentary. The author writes of Wes Craven’s 1972 The Last House on the Left:

Scenes such as our female protagonist being raped and executed are meant to remind you of Mi Li or the notorious photograph of a Vietcong suspect being shot in the head outside a Buddhist Temple. Craven is telling us that the cinema is no long a safe heaven from suffering. ‘Look,’ his films seem to be saying. ‘This is what’s happening outside your door. Do something!’

Rather than attempt to hold a mirror to reality, most movies today promise shiny solutions to difficult solutions in fifteen, easy-to-follow “beats” (as per Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat). From opening image to that pivotal “dark night of the soul” at the end of Act 2, these stories promise that everything will be okay, no matter how impossible the situation.

Right now, it’s difficult to find much hope in these stories given my current circumstances. Sure, I’m not in living Russia, Uganda, or Nigeria, in real danger for my life. But I’m still looking for a job, my unemployment insurance runs out this week, and I’m not sure where money is going to come from in the next few weeks. My car is falling apart. I’m not sure how I’m going to force my unscrupulous landlord to return the security deposit without hiring a crackerjack legal team.

So you’ll forgive me if the avaricious characters in The Wolf of Wall Street or the charade of Dallas Buyer’s Club doesn’t assuage my anxieties. Hollywood loves to glorify the myth of the lone hero, the man or woman who overcomes villains and all odds to achieve his/her goal.

What’s so seductive about a story like 12 Years a Slave is that we know how the story ends. Even in its darkest moments, we know from the historical record that Solomon Northup will be freed. We know that Frodo will succeed in his quest. That Harry Potter will defeat Voldemort.

There is mythic truth in these stories. But that truth is only found in hindsight.

We are all heroes in our own narratives, which means that we are constantly in medias res – in the midst of the story. So I don’t know when life is going to calm down for me, and allow me to live a mode other than near-constant crisis management. As I said to a friend of mine today, it feels as if I’m always waiting for something awful to happen or expecting to be disappointed. One could say that this is how self-fulfilling prophesies are written, yet I’m tired of trying to play Pollyanna and paint a smiley face on a bleak situation.

What little hope I have actually comes from my atheism, and my layman’s study of cosmology and natural selection. In a recent NPR interview, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective … leading nations into battle. No, that doesn’t happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there’s this little speck called Earth and you say, “You’re going to what? You’re on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?” … Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

It’s hard to look at the Hollywood elite gathering in Los Angeles to give themselves awards in light of knowing how utterly insignificant we are, especially when there is so much need in the world and so much progress left to make. As Piper Chapman says in Orange is the New Black, “I cannot get behind some supreme being who weighs in on the Tony Awards while a million people get whacked with machetes.”

It could always be worse. And it’s a miracle that any of us are here at all, given how it could’ve gone countless times for our planet throughout its history.

But it’s difficult to stay hopeful or plan for the future when storm clouds seem to be permanently camped on the horizon.

129. appertain

appertain, verb: To belong as a part, right, possession or attribute.

It’s days like this that it seems entirely possible to make a career just out of covering the insane things that John Piper says and does. Because if the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church isn’t hating on gays, he’s hating on disaster victims:

It wasn’t all that long ago that Piper, in his officious capacity as proxy head of the Baptist General Conference (the Protestant Pope, if you will), was ascribing blame for a tornado that struck downtown Minneapolis on 19 August 2009 to a gathering of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America that was voting to allow openly gay pastors to serve. (They voted in the affirmative.) Here are a few choice words from what he had to say that day:

• “The church has always embraced those who forsake sexual sin but who still struggle with homosexual desires, rejoicing with them that all our fallen, sinful, disordered lives (all of us, no exceptions) are forgiven if we turn to Christ in faith.”
• “The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin.”
• “Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture.”
• “Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality.”

The very notion that Piper thinks he has the god-given right to chime in on every matter, that people actually listen to him, and that he thinks that people should listen to him (on pain of excommunication, or the Protestant equivalent thereof) is offensive enough. It’s as obnoxious as the tendency for actors and other celebrities to take to the media to share with everyone their important opinions on everything from politics to the horrors of genocide.

Tell ya what: When you live in a regular house like the rest of us instead of your McMansion or McCondo because you give the lion’s share of your multi-million dollar fortune that comes from pretending for a living, then maybe your opinion will be worth something.

Now, to be fair, more recently there have been actors who participate in and support charity work—and not just for the sake of humblebragging either.

Brad Pitt (an outspoken atheist), for example, actively supports local and global charities (including the ONE Campaign, Alliance for the Lost Boys and the Mineseeker Foundation), worked to build housing for New Orleans hurricane victims, and is on the forefront of promoting green and sustainable housing (because he’s actually somewhat knowledgeable about architecture). He’s also vocal about promoting fact-based scientific education, advancing medical research (including research into embryonic stem-cells), and curtailing religious propagandizing.

Ellen DeGeneres has used her visibility as a talk show host and comedian to promote gay rights, and supports organizations such as Feeding America (formerly Second Harvest), Malaria No More, and Project Zambi, a foundation that provides support for African children orphaned by AIDS. She was recently made spokesperson for JC Penny, which prompted the formation of the group One Million Moms (a subsidiary of the homophobic and ironically-named American Family Association), who threatened to boycott the store (yes, all 40,000 of them) but succeeded only in bringing more visibility to the issue of gay rights and homophobia. Thanks! The group recently attacked the Archie comic and Toys R Us for a comic featuring a gay marriage, and just yesterday launched a boycott campaign going after Hardee’s for a “sleazy” ad that they call “an affront to all decent men, women and children!”

You know what I call an affront (aside from actively promoting hate, homophobia and bigotry)? Preaching at victims of a natural disaster.

In his most recent blog posting, John Piper had the following things to say to us, and to the people of Maryville and Henryville:

• “If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.”
• “Perhaps God chose Job for that deadly wind because only the likes of Job would respond: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).
• “This is a word to those of us who sit safely in Minneapolis or Hollywood and survey the desolation of Maryville and Henryville. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Every deadly wind in any town is a divine warning to every town.”
• “God’s will for America under his mighty hand, is that every Christian, every Jew, every Muslim, every person of every religion or non-religion, turn from sin and come to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and eternal life. Jesus rules the wind. The tornadoes were his.”

And lest Piper come off too judgmental (if such a thing were possible):

•  “But before Jesus took any life in rural America, he gave his own on the rugged cross. Come to me, he says, to America — to the devastated and to the smugly self-sufficient.”

Did you catch that? “Before Jesus took any life in rural America.” Then he has the effrontery to defend his homicidal Jesus for killing 40 people in Indiana—including a 15-month-old infant who was sucked up into the tornado as it killed her parents and two siblings.

This is the consequence of having a toxic worldview, let alone a toxic theology: Namely, that we are all wretched, disgusting sinners in the hands (and at the mercy) of an angry god. And if you’re on the “right side” of this god (which comes at the cost of opposing science, human rights, and apparently human decency), you have the privilege of telling everyone else how terrible they are and that they need to “get right with god.” And Piper and others like him (my entire family included) thinks they’re doing the human race a favor by “proclaiming the Truth” (yes, capital “T”) and the “good news” of Salvation for all of us rebellious, profligate degenerates.

It’s like they’re trying to make atheists of us all.