Saturday, April 10, 2004
Nobody mentions the Romans
A group from my church went to see The Passion of the Christ again today, and I decided to watch it with a much more careful eye to anti-Semitism. I felt my initial impressions were reinforced: there are many Jews in the story who show how unjust they think the whole thing is--if one watches carefully it becomes apparent that the agenda played out in the film is that of a very few individuals.
It seems, at least from my perspective, that the movie has not done much to inflame anti-Semitism among Christians, at least the ones I know and have been able to talk to about it. I hadn't even considered what the Arab world's response might be to the whole issue of anti-Semitism, and that's been the big shocker I felt I should have guessed about the whole time.
So maybe they're right--Ol' Mel's film is going to spark a new wave of anti-Semitism. But maybe not among whom most people thought.
Interestingly enough, as I watched the film I couldn't help but notice the pure ferocity of the Romans who tended to and beat Jesus throughout. These thugs have no emotional investment in the man they scourge; they are simply into the brutality for the sport of it, and take it so far that even Jesus's avowed Jewish enemies cannot bear to stick around and watch. In many cases these Romans keep beating Jesus even after it's obvious he can't move a single more step. Despite this, I haven't seen one thing that suggests the movie flings wide the real truth about Romans (and, naturally, all the cultural children of their civilization): that they are horrible, brutal, senseless, base, violent, abusive creatures.
Whitey's off the hook again.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
When cute and cuddly = beaten and bloody
We have cable and high speed through the same company, and last night was the first time since we've had it that both have been out. I wonder what happened, and almost wish you could click on something to find out what the problem was.
Last night a couple of kids were over from Church, and I asked them to show me some funny websites. The first one they took me to was Happy Tree Friends. This is, perhaps, in the website category of "mutilating animals." I think this definitely furthers my understanding of the digital circle of hell that includes animals. Formerly I had confined the notion to singing and dancing animals. Today, the Happy Tree Friends have definitely shown me that the circle of hell that has webdesigners who make cartoon animals sing and dance is a sub-circle of the cirlce of hell that also includes those clubbing baby seal webpages and Joe Cartoon--ah, how the wonders of Flash have given us the chance we always wanted to beat the living stuffing out of really cute things.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Take off
Susanne leaves tomorrow for San Antonio for a conference down there. She's presenting on the brokenness of the male landscape in the fine novel, A Thousand Acres. It's really cutting-edge stuff, because no one has yet looked at the characters Ty and Pete as being victims of the patriarchal system. Everyone looks at the women in the novel as victims of it, but the women are the ones who escape with their lives. Susanne's angle is more representative of the newer strain of gender criticism that examines how males are also injured by the inherent problems of patriarchy--and I say it's about darned time!
So anyway, I go get her quite early for her flight down to Houston and transfer to San Antonio. She's flying on Continental, and we double checked her flight status using the flight number from the e-ticket. How I love the e-ticket. Isn't it magnificent that now your computer paper print-out is just as good as the fancy-schmansy fraud-protected special boarding pass they normally send you? And isn't it cooler that, if you lose that computer paper print-out, you can simply print the darned thing off again?
I wonder what Susanne will be wearing when she goes to the airport. If you dress up they treat you better. I won't be dressed up to drive her to the airport, though. Nobody checks the drivers.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Hole in time
Yesterday I was thinking about how I couldn't remember when the last time was I had actually blogged. Turns out, now that I look at it, that it was Friday, and I believe that's what I guessed it was yesterday.
As I thought about the couple-day neglect of this exercise, I thought about how easy it can be to lose a good habit. Then I realized that I had not failed to blog out of laziness. I actually had no idea where those two days had gone.
I feel a little like that today, though the feeling was strongest yesterday. I honestly feel like there's a hole in my history that approximates no less than one whole day. I know I had a Saturday, and that it was good, and I even remember what I wanted to blog about from Friday, but my grasp of the actual time I expended on the day is completely lost.
It's like this cd I owned, for which I still have the jewel case. The jewel case is the proof I owned the disc at one time, and I remember several of the songs in detail, but I have not seen the actual compact disc itself in three years--I know approximately when I lost it, but have not the slightest idea what happened to it or where it went.
While it's not an exact parallel, a similar thing always used to happen to me when I would eat lunch at college. By dinner I could never remember what I had eaten for lunch, and it took a very sincere effort to reconstruct the circumstances of lunch before I could recall the actual food.
I've been able to rebuild the hole in my memory from two days ago, but I strangely remember each event of Friday night in stark detail, including names of the servers we had at dinner and desert, though I'd never seen them before in my life.
Memory is weird.
