I love the one sentence article summaries in the Guardian’s RSS feed. Some examples from the last couple of days:
Silly me, thinking the Cats That Look Like Hitler blog from a while back was the sort of esoteric Internet one-off that couldn’t be repeated. I wonder if everyone who tries to claim they invented the Internet (see Snopes’ debunking though) or to patent a hyperlink realizes that they’re also taking responsibility for Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians. [via kottke.org]
I save up online comics in Google Reader and read a month’s worth at once because I’ve always preferred reading comics in compilations. To provide a light-hearted alternative to my religion-themed previous post, here are two October delights from Sinfest: read this one first, then this. I love the third panel of the second strip.
Revolution in Jesusland is a fascinating new blog questioning and challenging the cynicism behind that “Jesusland” map which was widely circulated after the 2004 US elections. I’d suggest you read its introductory post for a full explanation of its goals and motivation, but in summary, it explores a growing movement among American fundamentalist Christians who, despite the strident intolerance of some of their number, are far more deeply concerned with issues of social justice and welfare than hating on gays and evolution. These Christians have taken on local yet hugely ambitious goals such as “eliminating” homelessness and poverty in their cities and have been prepared to make radical personal choices – such as moving their families into bad, violent neighbourhoods – in order to emulate how Christ engaged with the poor.
One of the blog’s two authors spent his life in left-wing progressive circles, leaving college to become a union activist. The other spent her life in conservative Republican circles and left college to become a missionary. They are married to each other. Beyond telling the story of this movement, the blog hopes to illuminate and analyse the often unexpected similarities and contrasts between these “fundies” and the secular left of America which generally despises them. It is incredibly refreshing to read something which departs so radically from the tone of debate on religious issues elsewhere on the Internet (where it often seems an unwritten rule that nastiness and en-masse straw man construction is OK as long as you’re an atheist dismissing something religious) but still doesn’t proselytize or pontificate.
Apart from the pure human interest aspect of the stories about what people are doing, on a personal level I find the motivations behind the stories truly inspiring. I’m cool with secular humanism even if I’ve chosen Christianity as my truth, and I certainly believe religion has no monopoly on the creation of exceptionally good people. But I’ve also always felt that for quite a number of us humans, there’s something about Christianity’s approach (I don’t know enough about the other religions to speak for them, but it may well be the same) that can force us to leave our comfort zone and do things where a non-religious perspective could not. (By “us humans”, I mean those of us who are essentially decent but not exceptionally virtuous – we are generally ethical in the things we do and minimally committed to good causes in that we might give them some money or sign a petition or two, we live lives that make us and our loved ones happy and are more or less harmless to other people, but it doesn’t go much further than that. We are not actively bad, but we are passively lazy and self-absorbed. This is me, and I think it’s also the average human being. If it’s not you, all power to you.)
First, there’s the idea of doing good because it is God’s will that we do so, and not simply because it’s good to do good. I’m a selfish lazy-ass, in all honesty. Without any sense of carrying out God’s purpose in the world, there’s little chance I’d ever go to the bother of doing something of real consequence (as in, beyond donating money or a few hours of time) to help the less fortunate. Following on from this, there’s the need to keep thinking about the good things in our lives and what we should be using them for i.e. the idea that the good things in my life are not things I did on my own or deserve; they are God’s blessings which I should use to do his will. For me, this works against the lazy complacency of being smugly happy with my awesome life but then dropping the “awesomeness ball” instead of passing it on.
Hang on a minute, you ask – here’s Michelle being all preachy about the wonders of Christianity, but does she demonstrate any of what she’s just claimed it can do? In all seriousness the answer is that I demonstrate very little. But while it’s certainly possible that things other than Christianity can motivate people like me to go beyond their essential selfishness, personally I’ve always believed it’s my best hope of transcending my suckage. (Seriously. I may not be saving the world yet, but without Catholic guilt I would be completely insufferable, and at least that’s something.) Here are excerpts from some posts which, to me, especially capture this:
I asked, “Why is it that the Christians we’re meeting are so humble about the programs they run, even though some of them are incredibly impressive? In the [secular lefty] movement I come out of, we’d be bragging and sending out press releases and winning awards and all kinds of stuff for these kinds of achievements.”
And he said, “Well, I have seen that among many non-believers and many Christians who’ve lost their way too. And I have a theory about it.”
“Tell me!” I said.
He explained (and I’m paraphrasing, unfortunately) “God made humans in his image. And so we’re walking around with this huge, God-sized sense of meaning and purpose and importance in us, and a feeling of being entitled to that sense importance.
In addition, we walk around with all these amazing God-given abilities. It’s amazing what I’ve seen people do. Just amazing. And you’ve seen that too.
Now, if you know God, then you know where that power comes from. And you know where that feeling of importance and purpose comes from: you know you’re here to do God’s purpose.”
(Earlier he had explained in no uncertain terms that “God’s purpose” is for people to take care of each other.)
“If you think all that power comes from you, then you’re going to get pretty cocky about your successes. And if you think that your purpose belongs only to you, then you’re going to get pretty vicious any time anyone gets in the way of you and the exact way in which you think you’re supposed to be doing good in the world.”
It’s so interesting, because, of course, many Christians throughout history (including very powerful ones) have been incredibly arrogant and have even killed for what they believed was God’s purpose. (So have non-believers.) But this rising movement among Christian born agains and evangelicals today is obsessed with humility and “giving it all to God” is the way they seem to pull it off and maintain it, even when their heads should be swelling according to their successes.
I’m Doing This For God Not You:
The struggle burning in these white folks’ lives is: How can we eliminate poverty and tear down the barrier we’ve built up around ourselves WITHOUT veering into paternalism and doing more harm than good.
I haven’t seen any counterproductive white guilt here yet. I think there is something about these folks’ spirituality that cancels it out. It’s already part of their theology to accept and confess that they are utterly flawed sinners – broken people living in a broken world. That’s a pretty humble platform from which the Haves can go make relationships with the Have Nots. It seems to work pretty well for them (despite the mishaps they’re confessing, there’s a foundation of unmistakable, astounding success at helping huge numbers of people and developing communities).
…
Yesterday during a break from Bob Lupton’s talk, I was talking to a young guy (maybe 25 years old) who’s working as a missionary in Mexico, in an operation that provides all kinds of services and development assistance in a small community across the border. He looked a tiny bit overwhelmed as he was thinking out loud about the implications of what he was coming to grips with at this conference:
He said something like: “It’s easy being down there. I mean, it’s draining physically and emotionally. But I don’t have to change to be there. And it’s cool. You know, it sounds exotic. People back home get why I’m there, and think it’s cool. The whole church is behind me. But, living in a poor neighborhood in my own city in America – no one’s going to think that’s cool. And I don’t want to do it. It’s going to be awkward for all kinds of reasons. Being a foreigner in another country is one thing, but being a foreigner in your own neighborhood – that seems like that’s going to be really hard.”
But it sure sounded like he was headed for exactly that. Why? Because Jesus wants him to do it. I said something about how I have already seen more comfortable people in the Christian world make that uncomfortable decision than I ever had in 20 years in the secular left. (Mind you, they’re not just moving into the neighborhoods, they’re crossing boundaries and becoming responsible, as members of communities, for their neighbors’ lives.)
He said, “Hmmm. Yeah, that makes sense. The ONLY reason I’d do it is for Jesus.”
My friend Yi-Sheng was supposed to be participating in an IndigNation (a gay pride festival) short story reading event today, but because the Media Development Authority (read: censorship board) classified the event as an arts performance requiring prior licence, as part of the licence application Yi-Sheng had to submit the story he had been intending to read. So he decided to give them something to get their censorial teeth into, and submitted the extremely naughty Lee Low Tar, which I would advise you neither read at work nor while consuming any beverages which are harmful to computer screens or keyboards.
Of course, it was banned, the official reason for which being that it went “beyond good taste and decency in taking a disparaging and disrespectful view of public officers”. You just can’t make this shit up.
Sometimes the Onion still gets it so right. From Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended:
In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in 16th-century Venice.
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According to Hiles, everything in the production will be adapted to the unconventional setting. Swords will replace guns, ducats will be used instead of the American dollar or Japanese yen, and costumes, such as Shylock’s customary pinstripe suit, general’s uniform, or nudity, will be replaced by garb of the kind worn by Jewish moneylenders of the Italian Renaissance.
I only ever buy Threadless tees at sale time, but for any of you less stingy than me, this new spoiler tee is quite funny and shouldn’t reaaaally get you beaten up too much unless your friends are so woefully out of touch with popular culture that they don’t already know every famous movie on the shirt.
Also, they’ve reprinted the super awesome Robot Dance Contest tee. Robots are unfortunately one of those recent hipster fixations along with dinosaurs and pirates so there’s way too much robot paraphernalia around and most of it’s rather pointless, but this one gets me right in my awww spot. It reminds me of the sad robot graffiti I always loved on Brick Lane, none of which I could find any more in my recent visit. :(
[If you decide to buy a tee and do it through one of the above links, I get a little credit in my store account. It would make me very happy, but it’s up to you. :) ]
(Via kottke.org.) David Remnick follows Bill Clinton on a multi-state visit to Africa in support of his AIDS/poverty relief post-Presidency initiatives and profiles Clinton for The New Yorker. It’s a long article but there’s much to find fascinating here – apart from more examples of Clinton’s now-legendary abilities in political communication, there’s a good analysis of the various strands of the will-she-won’t-she Hillary candidacy web, a visit to Lucy’s bones (as in, the African hominid Lucy) in Addis Ababa where Clinton’s fun facts on bonobo group sex result in awkward silence, and a rather endearing last paragraph which I won’t spoil for you.
Here’s an excerpt about Clinton’s official apology to Rwanda for his inaction during the genocide:
We landed at the airport in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, after dark. This was Clinton’s fourth visit in eight years. The first was in 1998, when, in the middle of an extended Presidential tour of Africa, he came to the airport to apologize for American inaction during the hundred-day genocide, four years earlier. “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family,” he said that day, “but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”
(…)
Later, when I asked Clinton about Rwanda, he said that the calamity in Somalia and the crisis in the Balkans had been distractions but that his inaction in Rwanda was the worst foreign-policy mistake of his Administration.
“Whatever happened, I have to take responsibility for it,” he said. “We never even had a staff meeting on it. But I don’t blame anybody that works for me. That was my fault. I should have been alert and alive to it. And that’s why I went there and apologized in ’98. I’ve always been surprised at how much they wanted me to come back, accepting my help on their holocaust memorial. Every time I ask, they say, “You know, we did this to ourselves, you didn’t make us do it – I wish you’d come.” And then they always say, “Besides, you were the only one who ever apologized. Nobody else even said they were sorry.” So all I can do is – I just have to face it. It was just one of those things that happen. It is inexplicable to me looking back, but when we lived it forward, in the aftermath of Somalia, trying to get the support from a fairly isolationist Congress at the time – including some elements in both parties – to get into Bosnia, where I felt we had an overwhelming national interest and a moral imperative, we just blew it. I blew it. I just, I feel terrible about it, and all I can ever do is tell them the truth, and not try to sugarcoat it, and try to make it up to them.”
Here’s a bit about Clinton’s opinion on Bush Jr:
When opponents of the Bush Administration express nostalgia for the Clinton era, it sometimes has less to do with policy than with the stark contrast between the two men as public speakers, as intelligences. Even Clinton’s critics who feel that he squandered his promise never speculate, as Bush’s critics often do, that he is stupid. When I asked Clinton if he thought intellect was an essential part of being President, he proceeded carefully.
“I think it’s important to be curious, I think it’s important to ask questions, I think it’s important to be secure so that you like being around people that know more about every subject than you do and still in the end you trust your own judgment once you hear them out,” he said. “So I think intellect is a good thing, unless it paralyzes your ability to make decisions because you see too much complexity. Presidents need to have what I would call a synthesizing intelligence.”
“I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,” Clinton went on. “So I can’t give him a bad grade on curiosity. I think both he and his father, because they have peculiar speech patterns, have been underestimated in terms of their intellectual capacity. You know, the way they speak and all, it could be, it could just relate to the way the synapses work in their brains.
“I’ve never been worried about his intellect so much as his ideological bent. I think he believed – and perhaps correctly – that his father was defeated in ’92 because he lost the right. And he made up his mind that he’d never lose it. Kind of like George Wallace did when he was beaten for governor.
“I also think that he was genuinely more conservative on questions like concentrations of wealth and power, weakening of environmental and health regulations – things of that kind – than any President we’ve had in a very, very long time. Even more conservative than Reagan, probably, and way to the right of his father and Nixon and Eisenhower. But the thing that bothers me about having an ideology as opposed to a philosophy is that, if you have an ideology, then the outcome is dictated before the facts are in, before the arguments are heard. And that, I think, can cause problems.”
Clinton said that Bush, despite employing the slogan ‘compassionate conservatism,’ never hid his radical-right agenda. “He said, ‘Vote for me, and I’ll give you judges like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia,’ and that’s exactly what he did.”
I was wandering round City Plaza and spotted this shop.
I normally keep random camphone shots like this for my own amusement and don’t bother to post them here, but since I only just discovered last week that you can play Super Mario Brothers and about a million other old console games online without having to do the whole emulator thing, I figured spotting the shop might have been a karmic directive from the cosmos to share the link. Just to make sure all your lives get ruined too, you understand.
In Amy Benfer’s exploration of why adolescent females love Ayn Rand she wryly observes that for a certain kind of girl, the “Ayn Rand phase” is a rite of passage, that the extremism of Rand’s collectivist villains against her gloriously individual Howard Roark antiheros is quite easily re-interpreted by bright emo teenagers as “the tyranny imposed on the smart, misunderstood girl by the rest of the know-nothings she is forced to contend with in high school”. I’m not gonna lie, when I read The Fountainhead as a teenager, I was pretty keen on it. I do still think it’s an interesting read for anyone who can bear its haranguing and smugness, just to see how violently you react to it. (And whether that violence is in embrace or repulsion.) Anyway, I like to think I eventually grew up and got the hell over myself but if the anecdotes in this article are true, it appears Ayn Rand unfortunately remained a joyless bitch her whole life. Extracts:
In taped interviews with Barbara Branden that would later appear in Branden’s book The Passion of Ayn Rand, Rand recalls feeling an acute protectiveness for anything she held dear. “This is my value, and anyone who shares it has to be extraordinary. I was extremely jealous – it was literal jealousy – of anyone who would pretend to like something I liked, if I didn’t like that person. They have no right to admire it, they’re unworthy of it.”
…
In another especially poignant anecdote, Rand recalls admiring another child in her class from afar. Curious as to what made the girl as compelling to her as she was, [Rand] approached her and asked her what the most important thing in her life was. The girl answered: “My mother.” “That killed the ideal for me thoroughly,” Rand recalled as an adult. “My emotional reaction was like an elevator crashing – enormous disappointment and contempt. I had thought she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional, ordinary, a mediocrity. She didn’t mean anything as a person.”
…
In 1955, Rand, then in her forties, insisted that she take Nathaniel Branden, twenty-five years her junior, as her lover. She expected both O’Connor [Rand’s husband] and Branden’s wife, Barbara, to realize that it was the only “rational” outcome to their relationship. (According to Barbara, Rand’s exact words were: “Whatever the two of you may be feeling, I know your intelligence, I know you recognize the rationality of what we feel for each other and that you hold no value higher than reason.”) Thus ensued a hellish fourteen-year period, which ended when Nathaniel, after a brief break from Rand, decided that despite his intellectual respect for his mentor, then sixty-one, his sexual needs were better met by a young model named Patrecia…To Rand, for whom sexual love was a direct result of intellectual respect, this was heresy. “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years!” she screamed at her former lover, in front of his wife, her husband, and Allan Blumenthal, a psychiatrist who had been asked to come down to mediate the situation. “And if you achieve any potency, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”