The stock market falls off a cliff again, this time by more than 376 points.
So much for the economy being in "full recovery." The economy will recover when people are back at work, making good wages, and spending money. I don't see how austerity measures in the middle of the worst economic slide since the 1930s is supposed to accomplish that. I should think we would be wanting to put as much money as possible INto the economy instead of taking it out with drastically reduced spending.
I suppose we could always start another war. Hitler and Tojo scared the bejeezus out of everyone, and so the USA embarked on a massive government spending program called World War II that finally pulled the country out of the Depression. Thank God we won that one.
How about a 7 billion dollar bailout for all the rest of us?
"The United States is deeply disappointed in today’s conviction of same-sex couple Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza in Malawi," said assistant secretary Phillip J. Crowley at a press briefing Wednesday. "We view the criminalization of sexual orientation and gender identity as a step backward in the protection of human rights in Malawi. The Government of Malawi must respect the human rights of all of its citizens. The United States views the decriminalization of sexual orientation and gender identity as integral to the protection of human rights in Malawi and elsewhere in the world."
Three Cheers for Hillary Clinton and the US State Department for so clear and unequivocal a statement! I'm especially pleased to see gender identity so explicitly included here.
Weren't churches and Christian bishops the ones who were supposed to make clear and unequivocal moral statements on humanitarian issues? I suppose that they are too busy these days sniffing everyone's underwear, or hiring lawyers to protect them from the parents of molested children to notice. Maybe it's time for a one-way ticket to the museum and a glass vitrine for the mitered old bastards.
Steven and Tiwonge were sentenced to the maximum, 14 years of hard labor. They were forced to run the gauntlet of a jeering mob calling for longer and harsher sentences.
To every bishop in Christendom who holds his/her tongue at this, I have only 2 words...
The remote and spiritual Christ Pantocrator of Byzantine art, from the Cathedral at Monreale, Sicily, 12th century.
The suffering human Christ of Renaissance art, by Albrecht Durer, 16th century
The personal, accessible, historical, and Jewish Jesus of the Protestant Christian, Rembrandt, 17th century
The Christ of our own day and our own conflicts in a new cosmopolitan world, Christa by Edwina Sandys, 1975
Adam Gopnik has a long and fascinating essay on Jesus, the mysterious historical character, and about all the various roles created for Him by both faith and doubt, by His worshippers and His detractors. As usual with Adam Gopnik, it is very well written. For those who are looking for a clear mandate to believe or not, this essay is not for you. You will find it maddeningly even handed in its consideration of believers (like WH Auden), and unbelievers (like Thomas Jefferson).
Gopnik, like a lot of writers from outside the Christian faith, appreciates the originality and the revolutionary character of Jesus' teachings; for example, their radical egalitarianism by the standards of the ancient world, and by our own standards (I would also add His radical pacifism). I've always found it striking that so many Christians (conservative and liberal) downplay the originality of Jesus' teaching. I've always heard the line that His message is little different from that of the great rabbinic sages of the time like Hillel or Gamaliel. For many Christians, what matters are not Jesus' teachings, but His death and resurrection. And yet, Jewish and secular authors insist otherwise. Hannah Arendt always insisted upon the radical originality of Jesus' command to forgive the sins of others. Arendt pointed out that in the ancient world, only the gods and their chosen representatives, priests and kings, could forgive sins. Arendt says that Jesus put that divine power into the hands of ordinary people. Gopnik points out how Muslims appreciate Jesus' radical teachings and claims, and even find them offensive at times. Karen Armstrong points out in her writings that there were many early Muslim sages who very much admired Jesus' teachings while rejecting His claims for Himself.
Gopnik points out the wildly varying images of Christ within the Christian faith, from kind sage, to radical outsider, to charismatic liberator, to mysterious cosmic man, to vengeful world-hating apocalyptic fanatic. Gopnik says that those dramatically varying characters are all there in the one person described in the Gospels. He also notes that so much of the Gospel narratives are about failure and disappointed expectation, especially in the Passion narratives. Jesus declared to His disciples that they will not taste death before they see the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven. That did not happen. It still hasn't happened. So much of the conflict within 2000 years of Christianity is over those frustrated expectations and over those wildly conflicting personas in that one person described very differently in each of the four Gospels. He also points out the uniqueness of the Christian claims about Jesus, how different they are from the Classical concept of a demi-god like Hercules, and how different they are from Hindu teachings about the Godhead, the gods, and their many avatars.
He concludes with the idea that belief in the post modern era chooses to embrace the abiding conflicts, mysteries, and doubts about Jesus instead of trying to resolve them.
The USS Maine Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery
Here are the names and faces of all the dead from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Note the very large number of immigrants and immigrant children in this list.
This war is being fought for us by a lot of people who are not yet citizens of the USA. Some of them are the children of illegals. They are doing a job we just don't want to do ourselves, like working in a poultry processing plant for $5 an hour.
So far as I know, this is the biggest immigrant fighting force since the Spanish American War.
I've known such people myself. One of my former students was from Gambia, and a veteran of the Marines. I've known lots of ex-Marines, and a few of them were White Protestants. Some of them were Filipinos. Another was from The Dominican Republic. One was from Pakistan. Another was from Thailand.
To no one's surprise, a court in Malawi convicted the two of "gross indecency" for announcing their marriage (they were arrested before any ceremony took place). Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga now face a 14 year sentence. Hell, they might as well have robbed a bank while they were at it.
"In Malawi, we don't allow men to marry men or women to marry women," said Dickens Mwambazi. "I think 90% of the crowd here agree with the ruling."
And I'm sure that if 90% of the crowd said that the earth was flat, that would make it so.
I hear nothing but crickets coming from Canterbury, from the Vatican, from just about every Christian bishop on earth. Their silence on this matter bears witness against them and voids any moral authority on any matter that they would claim as far as I'm concerned.
I will assume that this is what all of these bishops in their heart of hearts want to see for me and my kind.
The NY Times this morning points out that there is a sharp and growing generational divide over immigration. Those under 45 generally are comfortable with it and are for it, both legal and illegal. Those over 45, even those who consider themselves "liberal," feel very threatened by immigration. The Times reporters I think rightly point out that this is largely a consequence of experience.
People in my generation grew up in an exceptional period in American history where the population was unusually homogenous. People were either white or black. In the 1950s and 1960s, foreign born immigrants of all kinds made up only 4.5% of the population, and most of those were older and European.
Since the 1970s, the USA is returning to something like the polyglot population of the late 19th century, from roughly 1850 to 1912, when perhaps as much as 15% of the population was foreign born, and from everywhere. The current estimate for foreign born population, legal and illegal, is about 12.5%, still short of its height in the late 19th century.
People born after 1965 experienced a very different America from my generation, and are themselves much more diverse, and much more comfortable navigating across cultural differences. I see this in my own students. I notice students from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, West Africa, and Eastern Europe freely socializing and even dating each other. For me, this is astonishing. For them, it is a commonplace barely worth noticing.
Once again, I'm out of step with my own generation. When they were reading Abby Hoffman, I was reading the Boy Scout Handbook. When they were going all corporate and Ayn Rand, I was exploring socialism. And now, when they are panicking over the invasion of the swarthy hordes, I'm actually happy about it and see it as testimony to the success of the United States. In my own small way, I'm involved in this transformation as an educator, and I take tremendous satisfaction from it. I am confident that the USA will endure and be renewed. I'm sure that the future population a century from now will be very different in appearance and customs from the population I grew up with. But then, the population I grew up with was sharply different from the population from the previous 100 years.
***
I agree with those who think that this could be a big loser of an issue for Republicans in the coming elections. People for whom immigration really is a big threatening issue would probably vote Republican anyway. The people who will most likely be motivated to turn out in droves to vote because of immigration are Latinos and other immigrant groups. They will almost certainly not vote Republican.
Has it really been that long ago when Ronald Reagan declared that Latinos were naturally Republicans? I can remember when Lee Atwater urged Republican candidates to actively campaign for Latino votes with Spanish language ads. But then, that was back in that far off time when American Muslims were among the Republicans' most loyal and reliable voting constituencies.
Michael and I went to see the newly restored Metropolis today. More than a quarter of the movie was considered lost forever until a 16mm copy of a very dusty and poorly maintained 35mm complete original surfaced in a film archive in Buenos Aires (of all places) about 2 years ago. The movie is now about 95% of Fritz Lang's original release at its premiere in Berlin in 1927.
We loved it. Michael and I share few things in matters of culture and entertainment, but Metropolis, to my surprise, is one of them (the other is Annie Lenox). I show part of this movie to my students when I teach modern art. I use it to introduce architecture and design between the World Wars. It's an old black and white silent movie, and I assume that they will hate it or sleep through it. To my surprise, they love it and are riveted to the 20 minutes or so I show from the movie. They always beg to see the whole thing. Eighty three years after this movie premiered, it has lost none of its power and fascination. It is very dated. The acting can be histrionic (although in some cases such as Alfred Abel and Heinrich George, it's excellent). The technology is 1920s high tech (which only adds to its fascination over time). And the Christian symbolism can be very heavy handed. It is fun to see what it does and does not predict. It predicts television, which was invented in 1927. It does not anticipate computers or jet engines. The recently restored scenes can be very grainy, but they are wonderful and a revelation. The movie is now so different, and so much more dramatic and complex than the one I've known for decades. Its story line is also a lot more coherent and comprehensible now.
I find it remarkable that its class-struggle plot seems to be finding a new resonance with some people. Michael exclaimed about how little has really changed in 83 years. Modern capitalist society is still very widely split along lines of class. We don't put our workers underground. We put them in undeveloped countries, or in poultry processing plants working for $5 an hour.
Metropolis was history's first great sci fi epic movie, and the brilliant grandpa of every sci fi epic movie made since. Fritz Lang and Ufa studios spared no expense on this production. Huge complex sets were built. Hundreds of extras were hired (at German inflation era wages). Lang was a tyrant as a director, filming multiple takes of the scene of the flood of the workers' city with hundreds of extras and the film's stars slogging through spouting water in a very cold studio. The scenes that you see in the clip below of the great city of Metropolis are all filmed in stop-action animation, long before the days of special effects computer animation.
The movie was a commercial flop. The original movie was 3 hours long. The release copies were sometimes edited down to 90 minutes. The movie was considered too politically controversial for American audiences, and edited even further for its US release. Metropolis bankrupted Ufa Productions.
Fritz Lang and his wife, Thea Von Harbou, according to some accounts, came up with the idea for the movie after a trip to New York in 1922. It began as a serialized novel by Harbou. The movie was very controversial on its release and for a long time afterward. Among the movie's detractors was HG Wells who hated it. Among its admirers were the architect Walter Gropius (who sympathized with its very ambivalent attitude toward technology) and, unfortunately, Joseph Goebbels. Lang himself hated this movie in later years dismissing it as so much commercial twaddle. Indeed, a movie like "M" is probably more representative of his work, and anticipates the work he would do in Hollywood. And yet, I'm not sure I believe him. There's just too much conviction and clear labor of love in this unusually long movie for its day. The idea and initiative for the movie was his, and not Ufa's or any other studio executive. It is a vision of a world reshaped by technology that resonated with audiences still feeling the trauma of World War I and reeling from the social and technological transformations that followed. Eighty three years later, we are still reeling from those very same transformations. We still have yet to find our footing in a world that seems to be completely remade every 5 years. Our world, just like the one in Metropolis, is so vastly out of scale and impersonal. Perhaps that is why this movie still speaks to us despite the now very quaint technology of telephones, biplanes, and ticker-tape. Metropolis is the best kind of science fiction that uses fantasy and spectacle to reflect our world back to us, and to embody our hopes and anxieties about it.
In 1933, Thea Von Harbou became an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party. Lang refused to work for Hitler. He and Harbou divorced in 1933. Lang joined the exodus of the once huge German film industry to Hollywood. He had a brilliant second career in the USA making some very original and innovative movies, now largely forgotten by everyone except film mavens.
I absolutely love this movie, and have for many years. I'm delighted that we have most of Lang's original once again by a miracle of good luck. I've seen some great sci fi movies in my time, but this one remains my favorite.
Working on the stop action animation on the miniature models for the great city.
Actress Brigitte Helm, who played Maria (good and evil), also played the robot and Death. Here she is being dressed and made up to play the part of the robot.
Here is one of the most famous and spectacular sequences in Metropolis with the original orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz:
ADDENDUM:
Another one of my favorite parts is the "Tower of Babel" sequence. The film score here is, once again, the original one for the movie by Gottfried Huppertz.
My friend David Kaplan points out that this interpretation is much closer to the Jewish understanding than to traditional Christian teaching about this story. In Jewish commentary, the Tower of Babel is not just about pride and vanity, but about oppression. He says that there is a story in the Midrash that tells how the bodies of dead workers were thrown on trash heaps to feed the vultures, while funerals were held for broken bricks.
Further ADDENDUM:
Here's the famous lab scene. I love this cross between a laboratory and an alchemist's shop.
Even Further ADDENDUM:
One of my favorite essays on Metropolis was written in 2002 by J. Hoberman when he worked at the Village Voice.
He discusses the political controversies that surrounded the movie at its premiere in 1927. It was heavily edited for American audiences because of its socializing theme. He points out that there are some definite Marxist influences in the movie. And yet, the German Left hated this movie and attacked it. The Nazis, however, loved it. They were drawn by its idea of a charismatic messianic leader bridging the gap between labor and capital. Thea Von Harbou apparently agreed and Fritz Lang certainly did not.
To me, this movie, by the standards of its day, is very centrist in its politics, going out of its way to avoid identifying with either of the 2 extremes that would soon be fighting it out on the streets of Berlin again (they did so before with guns and artillery in 1919). Even in its heavy-handed religiosity, this movie is pure Obama Administration in its reconciling view that labor and capital need each other. Ideological left critics of this movie still complain about how labor comes off as dangerously resentful and volatile. However, capital, in the person of Joh Federson Master of Metropolis, comes off as cold and menacingly predatory. This is especially true in the newly rediscovered scenes of Federson's agent, The Thin Man. He comes across as a reptile who enjoys his job too much.
As far as I'm concerned, in that final scene where Grot and Federson shake hands, they might as well be saying "Yes we can!"
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