I went to see "Religulous" tonight. I had forgotten, and my mom reminded me, that when I was in high school I was totally into Bill Maher and would stay up to watch (or program the VCR - god what a NERD) "Politically Incorrect."
Some ladies sitting next to me got up and walked out about a third of the way through, which is fine. I remember really wanting to walk out of "Sin City" and realizing after it was over that Sean had kind of hated by it too. Officially the only movie I've left in the middle was "The Nutty Professor" - that was with my parents - we got our money back and I remember being glad to know that you could actually do that. My point is that a LOT of movies suck way worse than this one, but it's your right if you wanna leave.
I've been thinking about Catholicism, not any more than usual, probably, but because the election is coming, and once again I have to hear first hand about my grandmother's church telling them they have to be single issue (re:abortion) voters. Also one of my undergrads has this amazing story of how she was born Baptist and converted to Catholicism, got kicked out of her parents' house, and then eventually moved back in and then converted them as well! I've been Catholic all my life, of course, and haven't made much of a move to slow the exodus of my family away from Catholicism. I am always fascinated by the energy converted people have, I guess I have the luxury of secret laissez-faire uncertainy that being born into a religion you can stomach affords.
Maher, 1/2 Catholic and 1/2 Jewish, makes fun of everyone he talks to in the movie except ex-Mormon musician Tal Bachman, and these two guys who are skeptics, who he gives a wider berth - an astronomer and this round headed old man he meets outside the Vatican - and they're both Catholic priests. He seems to respect them more than the other people he talks to, and doesn't (at least in the film edit) tape their answers to questions about isn't it crazy to drink wine-blood of a dead guy. It's not fair, but it was funny to me.
The astronomer points out that the scientific revolution occurred after the major religions of the world were already firmly in place. That's a pretty Eurocentric argument, but I do think it's a fun thought experiment to imagine living in a world where being a theologian would have put you on the cutting edge of inquiry.
The NYT review thinks the weakness is at the end, when Maher criticizes Islam. I felt that part was as fair as the rest, but begs the question of other religions - no mention of Hinduism or anything. Well, maybe they aren't a violent religion like the others, but in that case, his premise that religion itself is always dangerous falls apart. So I guess that's a reason to skip it.
My real two problems with the movie popped out, rather, near the beginning. Five minutes in, Maher says to a bunch of guys in a church made out of a trailer that he's privileged enough to not need religion - that a guy in prison or homeless, sure, needs god, but not Maher, and not, he says, seeming to think he's flattering his Christian hosts, You Guys either. I found that cynical in just the way that people depicted Obama's clinging-guns-religion gaffe to be - in fact, he goes even further and conflates this well-off-ness with intelligence: "you guys aren't dumb" he says "why do you need this?" That was one of the only parts of the movie that offended me, because while many of the people he talks to are arrogant and utterly defensive of their certitude, I think there are actually (1) smart people in prison who still need God (2) people who are affluent who, Christian or non-Christian, aren't that smart and (3) people who are religious who don't "need" religion.
Maher proclaims himself as a sort of prophet of doubt, and I do think it really is helpful to have someone saying what he does - I never would have walked out of this movie, "Dogma" or "The Last Temptation of Christ." But he has a couple examples of when he "turned to faith" - when he got dumped at 17 and when he quit smoking at 40. He talks about being glad to have the idea of God as a powerful figure as someone to turn to. I'm flabbergasted because, well, I haven't had a hard life, but I've gotten dumped hard, and you know, I never prayed to God to win the guy back, or to smite him, or whatever - it just seems cheap, like hitting up your rich uncle that you barely know for money. Also, if you admit that people in need turn to God, I'm not sure why the fact that people like Maher or myself, probably in the 5% most comfortably living people on the planet, should be able to assume that their freedom from want liberating them from a state of spirit-seeking is "natural" or "correct."
Ok, so this really brings me round to my number one problem with the movie. Right at the beginning, Maher says two things, one that it's too bad man learned how he could destroy the world with nukes before he learned to share and love and whatever across the globe. And sure, that does suck. But it also sucks that for all the evil religion has caused, no tool of religion will ever destroy the world completely - my money's on the way that will happen will probably be when the environment collapses as a result of technology and lack of human stewardship, which has happened globally and the Christian tinge of Manifest Destiny notwithstanding, irrespective of faith. Even if we do blow each other up, I'm not sure it will be a religious country that drops the first or second bomb. China's not religious, nor were fascist or Soviet states.
The real problem with the movie is when Maher says "people are rational about everything else, why not religion?" Well, you know what, people aren't rational, at least no person is all the time. They're not rational about love, about sports, about what they eat, how they dress - this woman at a MoveOn phone party today started talking to one of her contacts about vaccines and autism, and secular humanist though I am sure she must have been, she didn't have a clue what she was talking about scientifically. Even without religion screwing people up, Freud says we still have all this envy and jealousy built into our relationship with our parents, and that seems like it's true. People crafted religion, and whether there was a divine inspiration guiding that craft, human beings screw up everything they do. Everything. The movie was pretty funny and I learned some factoids, and I guess I probably still have a slight crush on Bill Maher like I do on all smart lapsed Catholics, but blaming religion for the world's problems, it doesn't getcha outta jail free. *wink*
I'm not a person who is particularly quick to anger, but I don't know what to do with my feelings of actual rage when I hear Rudy Giuliani say Barack Obama has "kind of almost a socialist notion" to use the tax code to "redistribute wealth," while in the same sentence saying that his plan "would actually deprive the federal government of revenues." First of all, the federal income tax redistributes wealth every time it is revised in any way. When any tax law, including a "tax cut" such as George Bush's which favors the very wealthy, is put into effect, THAT IS A REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. So, that's an empty statement. Also, whenever you cut taxes, you are cutting the amount of money the federal government takes in, because people will be contributing less money. So I don't understand how someone can be socialist-ish while claiming less money for the government. Isn't it the Republican platform that it's "your [the citizen's] money?" SHOULDN'T the government BE DEPRIVED OF IT? These are either empty statements, or self-contradictory.
Giuliani also dodged the question of whether the now famous "Obama Sex Ed" McCain ad was misleading - rather than addressing the insinuation that the plan would teach kindergartners about sex, he says twice that "it also talks about HIV-AIDS education for children K through 12," which apparently is ALSO, now, a horrible thing to teach children at any age before they graduate. Yeah, it seems like a pretty irrelevant topic since cases of teenage HIV infection are have recently increased.
David Foster Wallace, who was my favorite living writer, hanged himself this weekend. I told my mom, who I never got around to asking about how to be happy earlier in the week, about it this morning. She didn't know who he was but my shorthand bio was that he was a writer who I really liked, who taught at Claremont (a few hours from my parent's house) that I heard he was a really good teacher, and that he wrote the 1,000 page book that I brought the time our family went to Hawaii. She said something about how some people feel trapped by the world and like they just can't stand to be around other people anymore. I guess I wasn't expecting HER to say it in such a way that it sounded like a sad, but perfectly understandable emotion.
I watched Charlie Rose's 1997 interview with DFW last night in a sleepy melancholy haze, and I find it amazing, though not surprising, how honest and self-conscious and careful he seems to be about diction, even compared to the other not-overly-slick people who are also on that show. At a couple of points he winces when he catches himself saying something which he seems to feel was accurate, but has come out sounding overly nuanced or mannered or qualified, but it doesn't seem like he can be any other way.
In the interview, Rose asks Wallace what a David Lynch moment is, and they go on to talk about movies like "The English Patient" as a way to talk about something besides Wallace's own writing. I can't describe what it means for something to be David Foster Wallace-ian, because I simply identify with the way he wrote about the world too much. I can see anger vibrating out of Dave Eggers, I can see the sometime slackness of Thomas Frank's prose when tighter writing might weaken the emotional power of his argument. I can see the lack of real understanding of how scientists do research when Wendell Berry writes about science rather than topics he owns fully, and I've read only enough Phillip Roth to know he has written some really really bad books. Kakutani's obituary today was appropriately critical, but to me, David Foster Wallace's writing is just as exactly exhausting and confusing as waking up every day and trying to figure out what the hell to pay attention to; who to talk to with candor, what to get done at work, what aspect of yourself to try to improve, and what it wouldn't be a sin to ignore. I'm really glad Hawaii was actually, not just supposedly, fun enough that I've only ever got 1/3 of the way through Infinite Jest.
Well, I've spent the first two weeks of my life as a 28 year old listening to the Democratic and the Republican conventions. It's 10:05 here in Austin and John McCain has just finished his acceptance speech, and I'm going to go take a shower soon.
It's a long shallow slope since I was little and my mother used to reprimand us for saying bad words. I can't remember ever spouting any Pacificas when I was small, but I would still get in trouble for calling someone "stupid," telling someone to "shut up," or for saying "whatever" (the kind that's a whole sentence, not an adjective.) I say these things every once in a while now, but in the 7 years I've had a radio show, I'm pretty sure I've never said any of the 7 words-you-can't-say on air. Off-air, when I do, it seems to have great effect, which I think is sort of cool. And it still shocks me when people use the N word, or the C word, or they call each other sluts or tell their friends to eat a dick. I don't doubt that there have always been crass people in the world. But I can't help but think less of people when they say ugly stuff they needn't, because they think it makes them sound cool.
I went to watch that movie with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley tonight, mostly because I didn't think I could handle, but wouldn't be able to resist, listening to the last night of the RNC's speeches. I made sure the movie would get out in time to hear John McCain's though.
I admit to crying far too much on this blog. I cried the entire drive home listening to John McCain's speech.
I was thinking today while telling Stevan what a "wedge issue" was about how excited I was a whole year ago, when the debate cycle was beginning - to hear all these people I didn't know speak and to figure out whether any of them had any real new ideas I had never heard of before. There were, at that time, something like 18 people running for president. There was no one I thought was perfect, but you do learn something about people even in the sound-bitey format on a very full stage. Now, a year later, I feel pretty exhausted and the details between the two guys left standing are starting to blur.
Last night after Sarah Palin's speech, which I also listened to in the car, on my way to buy drugs for my cold, I was struck by the anger in the voice of this person I've barely ever heard speak before. I was amazed that someone who joined the race a week ago, who has never debated and never campaigned outside her own state and doesn't have any real feelings about the Iraq war and certainly doesn't know John McCain as well as even I do, could pick up so smoothly on the trail of attacks beaten earlier in the night by Giuliani, Romney, and Fred Thompson. I was scared that the way she talks will work, and I was scared that I've convinced myself the way she talks is bad, when maybe the people I think are "good" are really just the same.
Then I remembered two things, and I pounded some TheraFlu, and went to sleep.
The first is that the chick who read those multiple insults about the guy who "gives a good speech" was giving a speech herself. And she didn't write it. And the people who did write it, wrote nearly all of it before they ever knew who would read it. She's a very attractive and convenient seat-filler, and I hope she'll stay that way.
The other is that Giuliani, and Romney, and Thompson all got cheers and creepy chants of "USA" last night, but that was in their own house. A house whose seats they couldn't fill until their celebrity showed up last night, and a house so divided that McCain kicked all of those guys asses so fast he wrapped up his nomination three months (maybe 5?) before Obama.
All of them are saying stupid shit to look cool and sound cool to the angry little knot of people in that stadium who have made known what they think cool is.
I remembered feeling a genuine rush of relief when Mitt Romney dropped out of the race in the spring. I said to myself that whoever wins the election in November will be a better man/woman for the job than George Bush is. I have some reservations about McCain - if he wins, I will pray every day for his health, and pray that - even though the same bastards who beat him in 2000 ran his campaign this time and forced this VP choice on him - he has the strength to get them off his back once he takes office.
I think I was worried that I would listen to John McCain tonight and feel instantly, reflexively angry, and realize that I'm just as biased as all these people who've been creeping me out all week. I'm really glad that when I heard his voice coming through the radio, that it reminded me of the debates and how a couple of things he said were all right. I remembered hearing how much some Republicans hate him, and I didn't hear him say anything as execrable as
"Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... [Obama]'s worried that someone won't read them their rights?"
I don't know the heart of John McCain (I'm not able to look in someone's eyes and do that like our idiotic president). I think he's said some things that are weird or stupid, and then said they were jokes or apologized ($5 million dollars and Janet Reno respectively)
But I think there's a difference between the people I heard speak last night, spewing the same filth about "those people who don't put America first," about anyone who doesn't share their religious views, about people who "think we're in a Great Depression," and even about themselves - I am continually astonished by the self-hatred put on display by Republican politicians, their ability to deride everything government does and to call for its destruction. I heard John McCain speak tonight about public service and about growing to love his country when he didn't before, and I didn't hate him, and I believed him even when I didn't agree with him.
I know they are just words, and I know that when I look at their records and their goals, I'll still choose Obama. But John McCain at least made me feel tonight that I'll make it through the next two months and beyond O.K., and reminded me that he already beat the worst of the worst in a primary (VP back-door entry notwithstanding). I didn't hear him say anything that made me want to spit. A speech is just a speech but I think sometimes you can tell something about a person by what they won't lower themselves to say.
And I still have hope, because they finally made a TheraFlu that doesn't taste like barf. (the apple one)
