Unchained Logos

I really should quit reading/writing about politics so much and get back to poetry. But:

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

NYT

I wonder if this isn’t by itself enough reason to support Obama’s candidacy? Shouldn’t it at least be something American nationalists consider? Is the international prestige of the nation of no consequence? Perhaps not.

This Corner posting is just plain factually wrong, obviously so to just about everyone who has lived outside the USA. Considering that essentially every single person in the Philippines speaks multiple languages…is every single one gifted and talented?

Sure, if you start trying to teach every American schoolchild Spanish starting at age 12, not that many would ever be fluent. But there are benefits to speaking multiple languages non-fluently. I would guess that more than half would be capable of reaching some level of fluency, if they kept with it–but isn’t the real nature of this complaint that we shouldn’t be so demanding of our poor children?

More fascinating than the lead Barack Obama holds over John McCain is where current President Bush sits. Below Dennis Kucinich. Oh, also a dead guy.

That’s right, there are three times as many people on Facebook willing to declare their support for the long dead first president of Turkey over the Leader of the Free World ™.

Also, I feel very sorry for the politician on Facebook with the least supporters, Stephen Chase of Canada. Last may he was re-elected to Saint John Common Council and no one even said anything! He has all of four supporters, which has got to be depressing, despite his wildly successful career. Well, thanks to my support, Mr. Chase has now moved into a tie for last place, rather than having it to himself. Be a Canadian patriot! Support Stephen Chase in his ride of the Facebook charts!

Is the paid journalist on her way out?  From a recent WaPo article “The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?“:

This assault on the lowly — and mighty — sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.

Setting aside the obvious Luddite hysteria–for Linton Weeks the demise of the sentence is caused by text crazy teenagers, troglodyte advertising copy writers, and (naturally) blogs–the most enraging thing about this article is that Weeks’s writing suffers from the same maladies it decries.  His polemic, tucked away in the “Style” section of one of the nation’s preeminent newspapers, has no style.  Is full of fragments.  Like that one.

But it’s cool.  Perhaps he is being ironic.  Or maybe fragments are now considered good form?

I’ve seen the light!  I should probably write every subsequent post in fragments just to show how great a writer I am, huh?  But I never be as Hemmingwayesque a writer as Linton Weeks’s fragments show he is:

I just finished reading Catch-22 for the second time in my life. I don’t think there is any other novel that pivots so wildly from hysterical laughter to the depths of depression. Reading it must be something like being manic-depressive.

It’s a terribly beautiful novel, and I can’t help thinking that if more people had read it the US might not be embroiled in war right now. Perhaps it should be required reading for anyone who wants to join the military. Then again, for all I know Dick Cheney loves the book and sees himself as Cathcart, or Peckem, or Milo…

About halfway through I decided to mine it for quotes but never did, mainly because I found myself (again) too engrossed in reading. But here’s one from near the end that I think represents the book well, in an odd way.

Yossarian quickened his pace to get away, almost ran. The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!

A welcome sight indeed. Run on Yossarian, but never stop jumping; jump all the way to Sweden.

My best guess is that most of these kids are simply guessing and have no idea what the bold words mean. Then again, it is possible that they are playing highly ironic games with the vocabulary sections of their exams instead of attempting to pass. Yes, that seems the most likely scenario now that I mention it.

• The teacher told him the ideas in his essay were rustic, because he repeated the same idea three times.
• My friend died Friday and was moratoried yesterday.
• He takes a temporal amount of time in the morning.
• A man with a redundant look on his face lives alone in that house.
• They obdurate/pontificate/flux in England and France for a few months each year.
• The audience gave a standing ovation at the end of the redundant piano concert.
• She duressed when asked to take a pay cut.
• The laws of physics are constant and caustic.

Have I disguised myself from myself? And for what purpose? To bury deep the self that hurts myself so deeply? Is it possible to forget the self? Is their freedom in forgetting? In disguise? How long can the disguised self go until it can no longer unmask itself? Which is stronger, the hurt of eternal disguise or the hurt of reentry deferred? Is it better to seek the sacred impossibility or the mundane necessity?

Not everyone can see what K saw or do what F did. Can I?

What is the hero? Simply formulated, the hero is who human beings aspire to be like. If I could change some aspect of my body or personality, my heroes are defined as those individuals that would model my new person. Traditionally, our heroes are strong, intelligent, funny, and confident. And ethically? Traditional heroes are morally good. They embody temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice; faith, hope, and love. We portray and choose virtuous heroes because human beings desire to be virtuous themselves.

Superman is a perfect example of the hero. He is physically gifted with superpowers, but he also (in most renditions) holds tightly to traditional ethics and morality. Superman will save the damsel in distress, hand the villain over to the legal authorities, and work to bring justice to those criminals oppress. Superman, by design, is everything humanity aspires to be.

So why is he so boring?

Perhaps it is because virtually every conflict he is involved in is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps he is simply too dated, so that every conceivable variation on the few weakness he has to exploit has been done. He is boring because we cannot relate to him. Superman is so perfect, so extremely invulnerable, so virtuous, that the conflicts that beset him are either not true conflicts or strain our ability to suspend disbelief. We want our heroes to triumph over their real weaknesses, real temptations, and real conflicts, because it is more like our everyday lives. A brief survey of the literary canon reveals that this perfect hero is extremely rare. The most famous and abiding heroes in our culture are almost always far more complex and weak. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Hamlet, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Churchill: they are all intensely flawed heroes. We can relate to them in their weaknesses, making their strengths and victories all the more admirable and inspiring.

The perfect hero then, exists only in some abstract way or theory in our minds. We might desire those qualities, but we do not find a human being who perfectly embodies all of them realistic. We might even be offended by them.

I am not writing this from a partisan perspective. I do not identify with either major US political party. But when I read of yet another shift in who the US military in Iraq considers most dangerous, I have to wonder, where does this end?

US forces have alternately identified Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite militants as the greatest threats to peace in Iraq. It’s changed so many times I can’t help but feel at least a little sorry for John McCain, who can’t keep the differences straight in his head. The truth is, the vast majority of Americans would have no idea who the enemy of the moment was in the media didn’t keep them up to date. As for the actual theological or cultural differences between them? That’s too boring to cover. Irrelevant. They just hate each other.

When will it end? Will US forces simply keep yo-yoing back and forth, continually helping whoever is on the wrong end of the stick? Is it any wonder when civilians are killed in cases of mistaken identity? The average US citizen (left or right) just knows one enemy now: Iraqis. Ironic, isn’t it, since one of the stated goals of the original invasion was to “free the Iraqi people.” I don’t think anyone will end up any more free than when it began. Maybe the Kurds will, simply because no one bothers to notice them at the moment.

The whole thing sings of rotten ironies. The president who vowed to end nation-building (remember that, anyone?) has gotten the United States involved in possible the most complex and dangerous form of it. The war to bring freedom and democracy to an oppressed people looks more and more like something out of 1984. The calls to defeat the enemy and win the war at all costs begin to resemble the call of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes.” Or even the Kurtz of Apocalypse Now: “Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!”

I weep for the Iraqi child who does not understand why his world has gone crazy, why everything is coming apart around him. I do not write this as an American or one beholden to the Stars and Stripes. I write this as a child of God who sees only a multiplication of nakedness, hunger, and fatherlessness.

That title is just too long. I can tell I’m rusty.

The point is that I perceive there to be shortage of the above. There may be millions, but if so, then they aren’t promoted. The sad reality is that too many Christians think Art is quite useless (and not in a Wilde way), and…vice versa.

So when my wife bought me Faith, Film, and Philosophy I was a little skeptical that the various authors might come out swinging against movies for portraying a sinful world or promoting a pagan philosophy. So far, I have been pleasantly surprised. A few of the movies discussed: Citizen Kane, Big Fish, Pretty Woman, The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, Pleasantville, Bowling for Columbine, Mystic River, Silence of the Lambs, Contact, 2001. All quality flicks. And that is what has impressed me most in reading so far: that quality films are being acknowledged as works of art, their underlying philosophical presuppositions are being analyzed, and that these assumptions are intelligently discussed in their impact on culture and their relation to Christian principles.

I can’t wait to read the chapter on Charlie Kauffman’s films.