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.

126. bandy

bandy, verb: 1. To pass from one to another or back and forth; give and take. 2. To throw or strike to and fro or from side to side, as a ball in tennis. 3. To circulate freely.

Some days I stare forever at a blank screen and wonder what to write about.

Some days social media just hands it to me in a neat little package with a bow.

I was tipped off to the fact that this weekend (on Friday around noon, to be precise), John Piper, the homophobic pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in downtown Minneapolis, went on the following homophobic rant:

I’m not really sure what set him off this time, aside from Maryland’s upcoming vote to approve same-sex marriage, but I love the fact that he started his rant with a self-fulfilling prophesy. And that all this translates to: “The sky is falling!”

To briefly address each of these tweets one-by-one, as I just said, by quoting 1 Corinthians 4:12, he’s giving himself license to throw up his hands later and say, “We told them they were going to hate us!” He’s refusing to take responsibility for the wrong-headed, offensive nature of his theology that prevents him from accepting anyone who doesn’t live up to his notion of what a decent human being is supposed to be.

As to his second tweet (which rings mildly treasonous), as the Fifth Doctor said of the Daleks, “However you respond them is seen as an act of provocation.” Conservative fundamentalism is and has been living in a wartime mindset for quite some time, convinced as they are that we are living in the End Times and that the return of Jesus is nigh. They are also convinced that the person of Satan is actively working in the world to pervert it and incite the human race into rebellion (deliberate or inadvertent) against god. This tweet won’t make make sense unless you understand that very important point.

To the third—well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

To the last one, his definition of marriage is so narrow and based on something that is itself a fiction that to tie it into something as insoluble as “the glory of god” would be laughable if it wasn’t tragic. If you aren’t familiar with that phrase, one of the central themes of Piper’s teaching is the primacy of the Glory of God, a concept that is found throughout the bible, but may be more familiar to Catholic and Anglican readers from the answer to the first question from the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

What is the chief end of man?
Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Now, I may not be a deity, but if I handed you a list of ways I felt were acceptable for you to show your love for me, you’d be quite right to call me a narcissist. After all, that’s in the very DSM-IV criterion for narcissism.

I don’t have to tell you that I think Piper terribly wrong, or that he’s dangerous and a societal menace. But through his Pie In The Sky theology, he is directing everyone who listens to him (and there are a lot of them who literally hang on his every word) to be precisely the opposite of the qualities that the figurehead of his religion exemplified in the Gospels (if you leave out the crazy bits like cursing fig trees)—namely, showing love, acceptance, charity and generosity towards your fellow human beings.

And these are the people of my state who will be going out in November in droves to vote in the affirmative for the constitutional amendment defining marriage as only being between a man and a woman.

Tell me again that religion is harmless.

Now, to that pesky third tweet. The insanity of these reformed theology fundamentalists is how they pick and choose which parts of their bible they will apply to the rest of the world—as if the rest of the world was somehow supposed to recognize the authority of a 2,000 year-old book authored by a xenophobic Bronze Age tribe obsessed with blood and sexual purity. For instance, since they’re so hot for quoting Leviticus when they’re bashing gays:

“You shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it. You shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes. You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the Lord.”
— Leviticus 19:26-28 (English Standard Version)

How many Christians do you know who openly sport tattoos, trim their facial hair, read horoscopes and eat rare steaks?

“But that’s the Old Testament” the contemporary Christian whines. “Jesus came to fulfill the law and the prophets. We don’t have to follow those old laws anymore.”

Then it stands to reason that if he fulfilled the ones above, then he also fulfilled all the rest, including Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13; and if those have been nullified, then the whole rest of the case for homosexuality being a “sin” falls apart. And what is John Piper and that third tweet of his left with at that point other than prejudice and bigotry? For that matter, what is the American Family Association, Peter LaBarbera, James Dobson, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann and the denizens of fear and ignorance left with?

The sad truth is that they, along with the rest of America that refuses to progress, will be dragged kicking and screaming into obsolescence, watching in a prison of self-imposed horror like Elizabeth Báthory as their influence withers and wanes before their little despotic eyes.

If gays are allowed to marry, will that endanger heterosexual marriages? Nope. As it’s been observed, the only people threatening heterosexual marriage are heterosexuals.

If teens are taught about safe sex or *gasp* the existence of homosexuals in school, will they turn gay? Nope, although apparently the American Life League would seem to disagree slightly.