UNEXPLAINABLE MIRACLES OF FREEDOM – PART ONE!

A couple of days ago I innocently picked up a 2011 book entitled The Miracle of Freedom: 7 Tipping Points that Saved the World. A quick look at the book flap told me the authors (two men who have the same last name! Chris and Ted Stewart) point to seven decisive moments in history that allowed both the idea and the fact of individual freedom to survive. Being an enthusiastic history buff who agrees that freedom is a good thing, I checked it out. But I quickly discovered this wasn’t real history, but a perplexing chimera with parts both light and dark. Starting from the unarguable position that individual freedom has been rare throughout history, and is something to cherish, it quickly devolves into propaganda for the worldview of the Fox News-Tea Party Axis.

I faced a fork in the road; a turning, if not a tipping, point. One choice was to return the book from whence it came. The other, read the damn thing and review it. I chose the latter, because this book is a good opportunity for me to confront the heart of darkness that troubles the American psyche on just who can take credit for American freedom. What fateful impact my choice will have on history, only time will tell!

Chapter One: Two Gods At War

One of these gods is Jehovah, of the ancient kingdom of Judah. The other is Anu, the Assyrian king of the gods. And this first key turning point in the history of human freedom is the Assyrians’ decision not to destroy the capital city of Jerusalem in about 700 BC. But I should mention that neither god makes an appearance in the story.

No, the two main characters in this chapter are the brutal Assyrian general Rabshakeh, and his stern master, King Sennacherib. Both of them star in a blood soaked epic of war, cruelty, and barbaric splendor straight out of Cecil B. DeMille. Rabshakeh is, and I quote from the book here:

“…a large man: tall, straight, strong as the ironwood trees in Mesopotamia, with a tightly curled beard and hair that hung below his shoulders, also tightly braided. He had a broad face and strong arms, with metal bands around his enormous biceps that were designed to show them off… and the general was as handsome as he was cruel. And he had not become captain of an army by being stupid, weak, or kind.”

An accurate historical reconstruction of what general Rabshakeh looked like.

Things stay hot and heavy as Rabshakeh sacks Judah’s second city, Lachish, complete with detailed and bloodcurdling descriptions of all the horrible things the Assyrians did to their defeated enemies. Then it’s off to the imperial splendor of the Assyrian capital Nineveh, where he is to report to his king. We are treated to a tour of the great city that climaxes at Sennacherib’s fabulous palace, which is described by the authors thus:

“1,650 feet long, almost 800 feet wide. More than 160 million bricks had been used in the palace foundation alone…Atop the deep foundations were eighty rooms, most of them guarded by magnificent rock figures, thirty-ton sculptures of winged lions and bulls with human heads. Throughout the mighty palace, the stone walls were inscribed with the stories of various military campaigns.”

The splendor of Sennacherib’s mighty palace!

Proud and arrogant though he is, the general is troubled because he must report that Jerusalem is still holding out. It is lead by a charismatic young king named Hezekiah who sounds a bit like David Koresh of the Branch Davidians:

“He believes he has spent his entire reign preparing for this moment. He has purged heresy from his people, bringing them back to their true religion. He believes that he is called of their god, Jehovah. This has given him moral power, which brings him foolish courage.” (Here I would like to compliment the authors’ dramatic restraint, as they do not have a peal of thunder rumble mysteriously from a clear blue sky when Rabshakeh intones the name of the Hebrew god.)

This report does not go down well with Sennacherib, who flares his nostrils and barks:

“Have I ever undertaken to destroy a city, then changed my mind and let it be? Never have I, general. Not once! You understand? And I certainly don’t intend to start such a habit now, especially with such a weak and insolent people as the Jews. You will destroy them. You will kill them. You will scatter their people to the far corners of the world. Then the memory of their religion will die with them, the world forgetting the God of Israel before my son is old enough [to] sit upon this throne.”

OK, so after this tremendous buildup we’re ready to meet Hezekiah and his brave band of freedom loving, God-fearing warriors, right? Wrong. In fact, Hezekiah doesn’t even have a speaking part, he’s always off stage! We get no vivid evocation of Jerusalem. No colorful dramatization of its king and the fateful choices he must make, and no discussion of the role that freedom plays in the religion of the Hebrews. Instead, steam leaks out of the narrative as we follow a pointless history of the tawdry conflicts between the two Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah before the Assyrian invasion. This includes such useful information as:

“Both Judah and Israel possessed certain strengths. Judah controlled copper and iron resources. Israel had better rainfall and more fertile land, especially in the Jordan and Jezreel valleys.”

Copper mines and farmland where just two of the advantages enjoyed by either Israel or Judah.

What this has to do with the history of freedom is your guess as well as mine. When we finally return to the siege of Jerusalem, it’s over, and Rabshakeh is riding home in a mood of deep frustration because Sennacherib has called the whole thing off. Which is amazing after that big speech that the authors imagined he made in his palace, right? What could the reason be?

The authors have a theory, which they float in the title of a chapter heading, “The Sword of an Angel?” That sword would be an outbreak of plague, which the Bible says decimated the Assyrian forces as they laid siege to Jerusalem. Noting that the Assyrian records mention no such thing, the authors show some one-sided skepticism by explaining that Assyrian records are prejudiced in favor of the, ah, Assyrians. Good point!

The authors also note that many historians see evidence that Sennachirab struck a political deal with Hezekiah, but they dismiss this as unlikely – didn’t they proved in that dramatic palace scene that both rulers were religious fanatics? Then these two men, who would like to consider themselves historians, wrap up their brief for Jehovah with this astounding summation:

“Why Jerusalem and the culture of Judaism survived was because of either a mysterious plague or the softened heart of a brutal Assyrian king. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Both were miraculous and unexplainable events. And as we will explain in subsequent chapters, without the foundation of Christianity, the freedom and democracy that we enjoy in this golden age would not be possible today.” (Emphasis is mine.)

WTF!?! A plague in the ancient world is miraculous? A king changes strategy and this is “unexplainable?” The reason doesn’t matter??? All of this sorry nonsense is grim proof that they cannot prove their assertions, but refuse to admit it. As to their bold claim that freedom and democracy rest on a foundation of Christianity, we’ll get to that later. But before we leave Chapter One, I want to note another astounding thing: the authors approvingly quote a historian who contradicts their central thesis about this historical “tipping point.”

He is Robert Cowley, and the quote comes from a book he edited called What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. It regards the Babylonian captivity, which happened in 586 BC when the Babylonians conquered and destroyed Jerusalem. (No miraculous plague or unexplainable softening of a foreign king’s heart this time – which proves nothing!) Whereas the Assyrians uprooted and scattered everyone when they conquered Israel, the Babylonians left the farmers of Judah where they were, and only dragged off the city folk. What’s more, they let the Judeans retain their own culture while in captivity. In fact…

“(The exiles) flourished by the waters of Babylon, and reorganized their scriptures to create an unambiguously monotheistic, congregational religion, independent of place and emancipated from the rites of Solomon’s destroyed temple in Jerusalem.”

So while Judah’s narrow escape from the Assyrians is historically important, the actual turning point, the thing that ensured the survival of Jehovah in human memory is, ironically, the Babylonian captivity. Because it was there that the people of Judah created a new kind of religion; what we know today as Judaism. In so doing they made something that has endured for over 2000 years, which is extraordinary. But not a “miracle.”

Next up is Chapter Two: How The Greeks Saved The West!

Cranky Notes From A Space Holocaust

Back in 2004 I was blown away by the amazingly good pilot of the re-vamped TV show, Battlestar Galactica. In addition to a strong cast, striking production design and good effects, it had the guts to make the Cylon villains a bunch of religious fanatics. I was all the more surprised because the trauma of 9/11 was still raw. But now I think it was that very catastrophe that enabled TV to deal with such a big taboo. Alas, the pilot was the high point.

First, full-disclosure here, I have only watched a sampling of the 4 seasons. I faithfully followed season one back in 2004, but the Cylons were so superior to the humans in technology, numbers, resources and all around savvy that I couldn’t take it anymore. Every episode showed our bunch of squabbling heroes out maneuvered to the point of extinction, only to bounce back with one “Hail Mary Pass” after another. I stopped being entertained, and started feeling manipulated, so I dropped out. Now, 10 years later, I’ve just sampled seasons 2 through 4 on Netflix, and despite some good stuff sprinkled throughout the series, my dissatisfactions have grown into disgust. Technically, not having seen all the episodes, I have no right to critique the series, but I’ll forge ahead because so much of the excruciatingly detailed coverage this series has gotten on the Internet avoids the central point: the Cylon’s use of God to justify a holocaust. There is a staggering amount of fan analysis out there, and most of it appears to be a happy obsession with the details of the show’s fictional history and the Cylon’s technology and biology. Concentrating on the trees, they miss the forest, so I’d like to write about the Culture War at the heart of Battlestar Galactica.

The original Battlestar Galactica from the 1970’s – which I remember seeing during the original broadcasts! – was a godawful, cheesy rip-off of Star Wars that gave us a Pearl Harbor style sneak attack in space. The villains were an alien robot race called Cylons, and the heroes were our space ancestors who lived on 12 planets with names like Caprica and Aquaria. The Cylons were the simplest cartoon villains imaginable, and their only goal in life was the complete conquest of the human race – just because! They got their big break with military information from a traitor, and the well-meaning foolishness of a president committed to appeasement with a ruthless enemy. The upshot was the destruction of the 12 worlds. Only one human warship, the Galactica, survived, and gathering a rag tag fleet that had escaped the Cylon attack they fled into space looking for a mythical “earth,” on which to settle. Apparently this story line wasn’t inspired by the Erich von Doniken bestseller “Chariots of the Gods,” but by executive producer Glen Larson’s Mormon faith! At any rate, the show tried, and succeeded, in achieving a simple good vs evil adventure feel. So much so that it made Flash Gordon look sophisticated.

The original Cylons who, according to Commander Adama, “Hate us with every fiber of their being!”

…And why shouldn’t they?

The 2004 reboot added moral complexity by making the Cylon robots creations of human technology. Used as slave labor they revolted, and after much bloody fighting won an armistice that allowed them to seek their own home out in space. That would seem to be a happy ending for the Cylons, but the reboot opens 40 years after the cease of hostilities, and they come back with a vengeance. Why? Well, it’s not any trickery or aggression from mankind, which is happily enjoying the good life on it’s 12 colonized worlds, where the problems of civil war, poverty and environmental degradation seem to have been solved. Mankind doesn’t know where the Cylons are, and it doesn’t care. But the Cylons care. Somewhere along the way they have picked up a messianic faith in a single God that runs against the polytheism of the 12 worlds, and “they have a plan” which requires that they wipe those 12 worlds out. And so we get a spectacular atomic holocaust that leaves billions of human beings dead.

Nuclear explosions go off all over the planet Caprica.

This time the fault does not lay with pro-appeasement politicians, but with a happy carelessness on everybody’s part. For 40 years there has been no apparent Cylon threat so – oh the fools! – the human race gets sloppy in its military preparedness. Not enough Cold War paranoia, in other words. That, and key inside info handed over by an unwitting traitor named Baltar, dooms the 12 Colonized worlds of mankind. (Baltar is a tricky, hollow, amoral self-promoter. He’s a good character, but I object to the way he’s used, and to the excessive fascination the script has for him. I’ll return to this point later.)

One of the strong points of the show is that it often highlights the rifts and tensions that erupt among the human survivors during their desperate flight, and so we don’t get a sentimental celebration of saintly orphans weathering a cruel storm. But we do get another kind of sentimentality in the show’s worship of the military. Speaking roles for civilians are few and far between, and that goes double for members of the press. Aggravating. But I’ll give the show credit for openly addressing the debate between a democratic government versus a military dictatorship. Well, kinda.  In the climax of season three the heroic Commander Adama stages a coup against President Roslin because he’s afraid she MIGHT might a bad choice in the future. A bold script choice that could have equaled the moment when Annakin Skywalker goes over to the Dark Side – only we are all saved a great deal of emotional trauma when a Cylon operative interrupts the coup by shooting and wounding Adama. I didn’t watch the following episodes, but by the middle of season four we are back to where we started with Adama in command of Galactica and Roslin still the president. (In the reboot, the Cylons have an elite corps that look just like people, and so can infiltrate human society.)

Not withstanding the stronger dramatic elements, I couldn’t watch the entire series because of the horrible amount of slow-moving soap opera that constantly engulfs the hot, hot-headed and horny crew of the Galactica. Particularly, the hot, hot-headed and horny “Viper” pilots. Any chance it gets, the camera is down in their mess area watching the well-muscled team lounge around in their tank tops as they drink, smoke, curse, argue, flirt, fight and fuck. (RE: fucking – it’s always with the wrong one! Or it’s with the right one – just before they die!) Nothing wrong with any of this, but we get waaay too much of it, and the script follows all of these shenanigans with the awed reverence of a dweeby freshman.

The delicious Jamie Bamber plays hot Viper pilot Lee Adama.

Probably we are subjected to so much melodramatic filler because of the producers’ hope to keep the show running for as many seasons as possible. This is a particular curse of American television, unlike the BBC, which isn’t afraid of a limited series that gives us a strong story line, and then wraps everything up with gusto. It’s probably this aspect of American show business economics that is also responsible for a major felony in my book – and that’s the constant changing of the Cylon back story as the series progressed. I actually discovered this complaint on the blogs of some enthusiastic fans. So while season one tells us that the Cylons are a fairly recent creation of human technology, season four gives us some “special” Cylons who are thousands of years old. I don’t know the details, but it sounds like a big mess. A mess I don’t care to investigate.

The very cool and creepy Cylon war fleet.

Cylon history is not the only thing that gets muddy, so does their reasoning. At first it is crystal clear; they are a bunch of vengeful zealots that, despite the fact they have won their independence, are bent on wiping out the “heathens” that created, and abused them. Talk of “God’s Plan” inspires them with holy fire, provides a rationale for murder, and hides from view their obsession and insecurity regarding mankind. A bad thing, right? Well…as the show progresses, it seems to drink the Cylon kool-aid, and “God’s Plan” becomes real. The series doesn’t go so far as to show a divine manifestation, a la God speaking to Moses in Cecil B. DeMill’s “The Ten Commandments. (Why not? Because it would look ridiculous? Because hearing God tell the Cylons to wipe out the 12 human worlds would make him look like a psycho?) What we get instead is a Nostradamus-like sage called Pithious who lived some 4,000 years before the Cylon attack. (Documented history is in short supply in the world of Galactica, so our high-tech, space-faring humans must rely on vague holy books that speak in riddles.) Happily, the vague riddles of Pithious all come true, thus “proving” that God (or the gods?) and his (their?) plans are real.

The conflict between a belief in one God and many gods is not adequately addressed – not in the episodes I watched, at any rate. Officially the humans worship the classical Greek gods Zeus, Apollo, Athena, etc. But most of the time they are actually modern-day agnostics or atheists. I never saw a scene where a human shows any emotional investment in any of the gods of the pantheon. I also never saw a debate between a devout polytheist and a devout monotheist. In fact, I never saw a Cylon suffer any intelligent push-back what-so-ever when it came to their endless talk about God and his plan . (If anyone who reads this blog knows of any such examples in the series, I’d be happy to know about it!) What passes for religious debate happens mostly between a sentient Cylon hologram and Baltar, the traitor. She’s a smarty-pants know it all with inside information, and he’s the sleazy a-religious operator who screwed the human race with his careless greed. And now, by default, he’s the voice of “reason.” Can you guess which side wins the day?

Sexy Cylon “Number Six” teaches feckless Baltar about “God’s Plan.”

So anyways, jumping over many, many plot points, our human survivors and some Cylon “rebels” finally reach earth. (The Netflix episode guide tells me that late in the day the show fixed one of it’s major problems by giving the Cylons some arguments amongst themselves.) On earth they find tribes of Stone Age humans which they, amazingly, decide to join. For now all the humans, as well as the Cylons, want to be “agents of God’s plan.” So they all voluntarily agree to trash their space ships, to abandon cities, culture, and advanced medical care, all for the moral thrill of starting over with a “clean slate!” Wow. Where to begin? First, by observing that the enthusiastic cooperation of 100% of the survivors for following “God’s Plan” sounds like something you’d encounter in a Scientology compound, or in North Korea.

As shown in the pilot, the 12 Colonial Worlds look to be fabulous successes. If we here on earth reach anything close to them we will be very, very lucky. So where does the disgust with civilization come from? From the surprisingly dark and reactionary heart of “Battlestar Galactica,” that’s where. Disgust with cities, and the freedoms they give their inhabitants, has a long history with authoritarian types, and destroying them for the “good of mankind” is a wet dream that goes back to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, what we have here is a sci-fi retelling of that tale, done on a scale to surpass Noah’s Flood. The Cylons, devout agents of God, destroy the decadent and heathen cities of mankind with fire from the sky. And while this leads to 12 radiated planets and billions of deaths, that’s OK, because it enables the 38,000 survivors to discover the joys of Faith, and living in pious stone-age villages! So whatever the original intentions, “Battlestar Galactica” ends up celebrating the horror of 9/11 by giving us a happy ending that any Muslim Jihadist, or Moral Majority Christian Soldier, can approve of.

It’s not a cult, it’s God’s Plan!

“Controlling Fandom”

Earlier this month I visited the old homestead in Ohio, and during that time visited the nearby town of Yellow Springs, which I have started calling “The Hippie Village That Time Forgot.” It’s a delightful place, and they have a wonderful new and used book store called Dark Star.

I ended up buying a copy of “In Memory Yet Green,” Isaac Asimov’s entertaining 1979 autobiography. As a young man in 1938 Brooklyn, he started writing science-fiction stories and submitting them to magazines like Astounding Tales. He also entered the world of science-fiction fandom, which was then in its infancy. His hilarious, and tragic, description of what he found will resonate with anyone who’s ever done anything, either cultural or political, in a group:

“Though science-fiction clubs were small, they were contentious. The membership tended to consist of intelligent, articulate, argumentative, short-tempered, and opinionated young men (plus a few women) who got into tremendous power struggles.

You might wonder how power struggles can possibly arise in small clubs devoted to something as arcane as science fiction, and I wonder, too – but it happens. There are arguments over what happened to the thirty-five cents in the treasury, who is to run the fanzine, and other equally momentous problems. I believe there were even arguments as to how best to “control fandom” or, on a lesser scale, the world.”

Of course, now it is 2014, and the dream of “controlling fandom”  has migrated to the corporate boardroom. Progress!

 

SOMETHING FISHY IN BRUSSELS

I just gorged on a 2011 political thriller from Belgian television called “Salamander”. It reminded me of  post-Watergate thrillers like “The Parallax View,” but with the added twist that many characters share an earnest fear that the country itself might disintegrate if too much dirty laundry becomes public. I found this kind of shocking, and then I remembered that Belgium is made up of different ethnic regions. I guess they still have nightmares that what is now happening in Iraq could happen there. To which I would like to give this comfort and reassurance – you don’t have anything to worry about unless the U.S. invades because we want to “liberate” you. So go ahead and get a good night’s sleep.

Back to the TV series: it begins when 66 safety deposit boxes belonging to members of Belgium’s power elite get robbed, but the bank that housed the boxes, and the victims themselves, seek to suppress any police investigation. This doesn’t stop our honest, bull-headed, and idealistic hero, a cop named Gerardi, from plowing on ahead, especially when several related murders happen. Who is behind the robbery, and why are they going after these 66 people? And what is the special connection, besides wealth and power, that binds them together? The mini-series, which has 12 episodes in all, does a good job of dramatizing the various power centers that get involved, and in showing how they react under stress. Our hero is soon targeted by powerful forces that want to stop him, but the script gives him some creditable allies – as he would need, not just to succeed, but to survive.

This is a handsome production, and I enjoyed the mise-en-scene, not having seen anything produced in Belgium before. Director Frank van Mechelen keeps the pace brisk, but not frantic, which helps pull the viewer into the story. The entire cast is solid. But I do have some complaints (I always do!) – The forces of evil in stories like this always take out a lot of sympathetic people once they “know too much,” but I think this plot device is overused in “Salamander.” Several characters who have their guard up prove to be frustratingly easy targets. This series is also “Old School” when it comes to gay characters. That means no speaking part for a gay character – unless you count that loathsome boy-rapist who works in the orphanage. (FYI – he is NOT a priest!) Gay sex does appear, when it rears its shocking head late in the series as part of a blackmail scheme. Shocking! Finally, while the fascist ideology of the villains is nicely sketched in, a deep unease with the public learning the truth hobbles the script’s commitment to democracy. This is perhaps why the press plays almost no role at all in “Salamander’s” long and drawn out battle for the future of an entire nation.

Still, worth a look!

 

SHAMELESS REGURGITATION

I’m following a theme. Kinda. And that theme is “disaster.” My last post worried about what to do if North Korea invades the United States. This post worries how a disaster movie can survive its turgid second act. I have no original thoughts on this, but I do want to “quote” the mysterious woman Australian scientist behind “And You Call Yourself A Scientist!” blog.

“…the greatest hurdle that a disaster movie has to overcome is the question of what to do with its second act. Screenwriters usually have no difficulty figuring out how to set up a disaster, or how to resolve it; the problem is what to do with the middle part of the story. Disaster movies that fail tend to fall at this hurdle, resorting to character scenes that in context are rarely other than padding, the film twiddling its thumbs while the clock runs down. And while pointless “character stuff” may be tolerable when we’re talking about what people like John Wayne, Clair Trevor, Dana Andrews, Glenn Ford, Burt Lancaster, Myrna Loy and James Stewart could do, by the time it’s being dished up by the likes of Avery Schreiber, Jimmie Walker and Charo, we’re dealing with something that could rightly be condemned as a crime against humanity.”

See the full review of the 1960 extravaganza “The Last Voyage,” at….

http://www.aycyas.com/thelastvoyage.htm

And here is a web page with information on the scrapped ocean liner Ile de France, which was partially destroyed in the process of shooting the movie.

http://www.oceanliners.com/reading/reviews/last-voyage

Should North Korea Invade…

If you don’t stay awake at nights worrying about an invasion from North Korea, the 2012 remake “Red Dawn” should set you straight. In the 80’s original it was the Soviets who invade, and are resisted by a group of sexy, white, American teenagers. That was far fetched enough, but North Korea?!? (Horrible government & nuclear program aside, they can’t afford to adequately feed a quarter of their own population, so I was amazed this film wasn’t a comedy.) None of the Member Reviews on Netflix I saw get into this, however, as that would spoil the fun. Below is the best one I came across. You’ll learn we have 2.5 military-style assault weapons that are “accounted for.” You’ll learn the relative merits of the M-16 and the AR-15. And you’ll learn that “99.999% of gun owners aren’t looking to kill any of their fellow citizens – just invaders or oppressive governments.” – Thank goodness all the gun massacres we have only come from that .001%!

Here’s the review:

“…there are roughly 2.5 million military-style assault weapons (accounted for) in the U.S. alone. In the area they’re in, Washington State, I’d say they – if you include Montana and North/South Dakota, which you would if you had ever lived there…which I have – then you’re looking at a good third of those weapons. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of rifles, shotguns and modified semi-auto handguns and rifles that are off the books. I concede readily that the M-16 is superior weapon in that it can fire single shot, a 3 round burst, or full auto, but from everything I’ve read, pretty much any AR-15 (the civilian equivalent and just as powerful) can be modified to do the same. And just when you thought I was done….nope. We can also outfit our SKS’s, AR-15’s and AK-47’s with nearly every single mod that the military and police can, which is to say laser sights, flashlights, smoke grenades (yes, smokes grenades) and a number of other accoutrements. Final point being, those boys and girls shouldn’t have had to take out so many of the enemy just to get their weapons (or at least not have such a hard time doing it) since their parents were likely well-equipped already. And that, ladies and gentlemen is WHY we outfit our weapons like that – 99.999% of gun owners aren’t looking to kill any of their fellow citizens – just invaders or oppressive governments. Tanks or no tanks, unless they’re planning to nuke us – which our U.S. military is well-prepared for, I might add, a foreign invader seems much less likely to me than our own. Pshah!”

GOD, MAN & GODZILLA

Writing for the New Yorker web site, Richard Brody has a thoughtful essay entitled “Godzilla’s Gray Credo.” He enjoyed the new movie, but his piece is mainly a list of things that disgruntled him. Since those are precisely the things I loved, I thought I’d write a response.

First is his assertion that “the giggly delight in [the monsters’] design, is completely absent.” Huh? Not for me.

The second “problem” is that Godzilla has no overtly sexual overtones, and therefore cannot properly terrify us, for it holds no “lurid fascination that reaches into forbidden or unconscious zones of pleasure or pain.” Sex is indeed a preoccupation of horror movies, but Godzilla movies have never been about horror. Like movies about volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, they are about the terrifying awe we experience when confronted by natural forces much larger than ourselves. This lack of concern about sex is one of the things I found refreshing, even liberating, as a kid and a teenager. Being gay and closeted I had ample daily experience with “forbidden or unconscious zones of pleasure or pain.” Sex, all of it heterosexual, also saturated movies, TV, and books. Homoeroticism only surfaced in those horror stories Brody is celebrating, and they mostly used the taboo in a cruel and sleazy way that didn’t produce insight, but policed viewers into conformity through fear. Not something to celebrate Mr. Brody!

Building on his argument about sex, Brody continues, “In the absence of a human realm with recognizably tangled inwardness, the shudderingly vast quasi-religious kick that this “Godzilla” offers…[is] an empty religiosity: grandeur without depth, complexity without insight, mystery without resonance.” – Hmmm. The “human realm.” This reminds of me a scene in “Enter The Dragon.” Bruce Lee is teaching a kung-fu student about understanding the nature of reality when he holds his hand up and says, “It is like a finger pointing to moon.” The kid looks at Bruce’s finger and gets a bop on the head as a reward. “Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory!”

I think the real horror story here is watching introspection turn into narcissism.   Godzilla movies have always been a corrective for this by bopping us on the head to stop our navel gazing. “Look to the world around you, and remember that it is greater than you are!” is the message. How can that be empty, or lack depth and resonance? I think the answer lies in how one approaches religion. Brody seems to live in a monotheistic world where God is only concerned with people: in short, a Christian world. But Godzilla comes from a Shinto (meaning Pagan) and Buddhist tradition. Where Brody wants only to look inward for meaning, Godzilla pushes us to look outward, for everything we see is charged with a power we must respect. I think both approaches are essential, as embodied by the philosophy behind the Yin-Yang symbol, which evokes the essential play of opposites that together build the universe. It frustrates me that such capable thinkers as Brody value one side, but not the other. This is a form of hubris, and a kind of cluelessness.

So Godzilla is not “quasi-religious,” it’s religious – just not in a Christian sense. That “quasi” irks me, becomes it implies a certain chauvinism. To wit, Brody also says this, “[Godzilla’s] scale may feel Biblical, but it doesn’t risk the crises and ecstasies, the sheer moral turbulence provoked by existential menace (cf. “Noah”).” Full disclosure, I haven’t seen “Noah.” But I know the plot, and the “moral turbulence” Brody speaks admiringly about comes from a twisted story where a “good” and “loving” God destroys the people he created for unspecified moral transgressions. The Biblical account does not spell these out, so we are forced to project something into the void. In so doing we justify God’s action and save his reputation. This in turn leads to that “recognizably tangled inwardness” that Brody so appreciates. Indeed, the transgressions we project onto the people of Noah’s time are often sexual in nature, so we are also back to Brody’s “forbidden or unconscious zones of pleasure or pain.”

Godzilla does not trade in such nonsense. Man acquires great, in fact god-like power through his technology, and unleashes it into the world for his own purposes. But it doesn’t stop there. The unintended consequences come back to haunt us, and in so doing remind us that we are not the only game in town. Godzilla is fantasy, but it reflects the way the world actually works. Radiation poisoning and environmental degradation are no fun, but giant monsters are – they are the “spoon full of sugar that helps the medicine go down.” And that medicine is a healthy dose of humility. And by humility I don’t mean free-floating guilt or shame. I mean a mature awareness that our actions have consequences that we will have to live with. This approach to life leaves plenty of room for feeling good about ourselves, by the way, because we don’t need a constant struggle to “redeem” ourselves. Which means we don’t have to anguish over masturbation, etc. We merely need to take care not to fuck things up. (Easier said than done, I know, but still.)

The Biblical story is also fantasy, but does it reflect reality? Only if you believe that God creates natural disasters in order to punish mankind for its sins. Which is ridiculous. No, it’s the Noah story that is gray, empty, and offers no insight. Give me the thrilling spectacle of a 400-foot radioactive dinosaur battling Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms amongst the skyscrapers of a modern city any day. Or, to paraphrase Bruce Lee – “It is like a finger pointing to Godzilla…………”

Why the new Godzilla is Great

One reason, at least. This is a quote from Andrew O’Hehir’s review in Salon, and he zeroes in on something important:

“Any number of monster movies preach karmic sermons about war or prejudice or environmental destruction or whatever; the hidden message in the genre is nearly always that we had it coming. But “Godzilla” never defaults to the myth of the heroic individual, in which one man stands outside the mass of human mediocrity, and can bring down any opponent with pluck, ingenuity and a few well-timed zingers.”

 

Post-Eurovision intrigues in the Caucasus: what happened in the public vote?

Voters in former Soviet Republics voted heavily for Conchita in the Eurovision contest! That’s the main message in this fascinating blog from an Irish woman who now lives in the Caucasus.

Blast From The Past – Part Two

More atomic bomb stuff, in honor of Godzilla Opening Weekend! Here’s a fascinating post about a 1952 photo of the instant an atomic bomb test went off – in California.

http://atomic-annhilation.blogspot.com/2014/05/1952-moment.html