Rustin 2023 Movie Review

 

Rustin 2023
A new Netflix film draws attention to a "lost prophet."

 

I didn't plan on watching Soviet Communism die, but I did. The child of Polish and Slovak immigrants, I had traveled to my ancestral homelands a few times before I left to study for a year, 1988-89. I didn't know in advance that I'd be attending meetings with Jacek Kuron, the "godfather of the Polish opposition," or marching in the street chanting "Soviets go home," or running from riot police and being tear gassed and shot with water canons. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

 

I returned to the States. Before shouting slogans at communism's riot police, I had previously been a Peace Corps volunteer, a nurse's aide, a volunteer with the Sisters of Charity, an inner city teacher, and a door-to-door canvasser. I'd had ample opportunity to consider how one "saves the world," or to be less grandiose, how one attempts to right wrongs.

 

I'd learn to distrust what I dubbed "virtue celebrities." My rule: the more a person in our group became known for his "compassion," the less reliable that person was in the trenches. You can't predict in advance who the hero will be once you are in a foxhole. Chances are it won't be the person whose face is Velcroed to reporters' cameras.

 

In the all-night strategy sessions debating how to right wrongs, two moments stand out. The first moment occurred one night in Nepal when we were sitting around the Momo Cave, a dingy hole-in-the-wall where men drank raksi, a foul moonshine. A beautiful young Peace Corps volunteer, accompanying herself on guitar, began singing a song written by Donovan about Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

"If you want your dream to be

 

Take your time, go slowly

 

Do few things but do them well

 

Heartfelt work grows purely."

 

I thought, my God, that's it. We all wanted to "save the world," to perform some grand gesture. We couldn't bring clean water to every Nepali village, but we could teach one kid to read. In Poland, we used to say, "Everybody wants to die for Poland, but who is willing to live for Poland?" Who was willing to do the thankless, anonymous, unglamorous day-to-day work?

 

The second moment occurred in a living room in Bloomington, Indiana, when I found myself sitting face to face with Lech Walesa. Walesa was the son of a man imprisoned and ultimately killed by Nazis. Walesa was himself a former auto mechanic, shipyard electrician, TIME man of the year, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Polish president. By the time I met Walesa in 1998, the Soviet Union was an historical fossil and Poland was doing better and better everyday. I asked Walesa how Poland had avoided the traps so many other post-revolutionary populations had fallen into. He didn't hesitate. He immediately and thoroughly credited Christianity for Poland's revolutionary and post-revolutionary successes. 

Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy by Graham Linehan. Book Review.

 

Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy
Graham Linehan's memoir is, by turns, horrific, informative, and a hero's journey

Graham Linehan is 55-year-old Irish writer and director of sitcoms. He's the winner of five BAFTA awards, that is awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He has also won awards from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the Irish Film and Television Academy. In recent years, Linehan has made public statements disagreeing with trans extremism. For this, he has been canceled. Friends and colleagues rejected and abandoned him. Work dried up. His marriage ended. The LGBT website Pink News, he reports, has published 75 hit pieces on him – they've published more since that tally.

On October 31, 2023, Eye Books Limited released, in the US, Linehan's memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy. The book is 288 pages long. It includes black-and-white photographs. Most of the book addresses Linehan's comedy career and comedy and popular culture in general. Much of the book is a meditation on the impact of the internet. The second half of the book addresses Linehan's canceling and the extent of trans extremism in the UK. Irish identity in the twenty-first century and Linehan's jaundiced view of Catholicism are constant themes.

Linehan created The IT Crowd, a British sitcom that ran 2006-2010, with a farewell broadcast airing in 2013. In an episode entitled "The Speech," there is a comedic fight between Douglas (Matt Berry) and April (Lucy Montgomery). April – the character, not the actress who plays April – is a man who identifies as a woman. Douglas becomes uncomfortable dating April, and he breaks up with her. April is crushed to be rejected. At first she pleads in a hyper-feminine way for Douglas to recognize her as a woman. Douglas, apparently distraught and speaking in an exaggerated melodramatic style, insists that the two must part. April changes from sad to enraged and punches Douglas in the face. The two engage in highly choreographed, hand-to-hand combat typical of an action movie. The setting enhances the comedy. They are duking it out in a sterile laboratory as masked, white-coated workers look on. Eventually their fight breaks through a wall and into the resolution of another subplot in this episode. The combatants crash onto the stage where another character is delivering a speech she's been anxious about. The scene is funny. It can be viewed here.

How We Understand Anti-Semitism

 

How We Understand Anti-Semitism, Christianity, and Islam
 Let's avoid popular misconceptions

 

The atrocities Hamas committed on October 7, 2023, and subsequent worldwide support for the genocidal "judenrein-from-the-river-to-the-sea" ideology revealed the prevalence of widespread anti-Semitism. Terrorism has a worldwide reach. The Israel-Hamas war affects international markets and geopolitics. Anyone on the planet, Jewish or not, might suffer from anti-Semitism. It is important, therefore, to understand anti-Semitism.

 

This essay rejects supernatural or genetic explanations for anti-Semitism. Jews are not a different species of human being. Humans are more alike than different. Children born black or white, Muslim or Jewish, offer the same potential.

 

Both anti-Semites and philo-Semites repeat the same formulaic phrases: "Jews are the most persecuted minority," and "Anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred." Anti-Semites like these phrases. There must be something wrong with Jews, they insist, since Jews are hated everywhere. My friend Alex, a philo-Semite, repeats these phrases as well. He sees them as proof of a unique and romantic quality to Jewishness. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the seventeenth-century Ukrainian leader Bogdan Chmielnicki, and Hamas are all identical because they all killed Jews. I disagree. The pharaohs, seventeenth-century Ukrainians, and Hamas are not magical reincarnations of each other. They had different motivations, methods, and goals. No supernatural thread connects them. To understand them, one must understand their particular historical context, not presumed supernatural curses.

 

Anti-Semitism isn't the world's oldest hatred, nor is it the hatred with the highest body count. Misogyny has a longer history and has claimed more victims. The caste system in India "has existed in some form for at least 3000 years." Recent estimates are that there are 200 million Dalits, aka untouchables. The suffering Dalits have endured is unspeakable.

 

Westerners, living in a world strongly affected by Christendom, associate anti-Semitism with Christianity. The standard approach is to blame Christianity, the religion, and to ignore historical context. If discussing anti-Semitism among Muslims, the standard position is to argue that historical context, rather than religion, caused the anti-Semitism. This essay argues for a reverse of these approaches.

 

These approaches distort reality. When Christianity is understood as inherently anti-Semitic, Christians, even those who support Israel, are assessed as inescapably anti-Semitic. Anthony Weiner is a former congressman who currently broadcasts via WABC. In October, 2023, he made a comment that shocked me. I requested clarification. Did he really say that "Christians support Israel because they want all the Jews to be in one spot so that God can kill them all more easily"? Weiner did not respond with a yes or a no, but with a link to a Washington Post article.

 

In the "Christianity is anti-Semitic" worldview, Christians who are not anti-Semitic are understood to be "modernized." In this view, the more Christian you are, the more anti-Semitic you are, and the more "modern" or "secular" you are, the less anti-Semitic you are. Data does not support this assumption. In Russell Middleton's peer-reviewed publication, "Do Christian Beliefs Cause anti-Semitism?" Middleton concluded that "Religious orthodoxy was uncorrelated with anti-Semitism" and that "the well-springs of anti-Semitism today" may be "largely secular." A 2019 Gallup poll suggested that those who attend church regularly are more likely to be sympathetic to Israel. "Highly religious Americans continue to be much more sympathetic toward Israel than those who are less religious." Worldwide anti-Semitic protests in autumn, 2023, are not populated by visibly Christian protestors. Rather, these protesters appear to be more Woke than Christian.

 

This distortion of Christians and Christianity matters. Some start from this false assumption and go on to apply a distorted lens to Islam. That distorted conclusion goes like this, "Christians were anti-Semitic when they were devout, but as they modernized they became less anti-Semitic." We can't assume that anything like this process will change the hearts and minds of Muslims. "Modern" Muslims might turn out to be just as anti-Semitic as "old-fashioned" Muslims.  

 

This essay will argue that to understand anti-Semitism among Christians, one must factor in historical context. To understand anti-Semitism among Muslims, more attention must be paid to religion.

Splinters from a Broken Heart: Israel, Hamas, and Social Media

 

Splinters from a Broken Heart
Israel, Hamas, and social media

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a sixteenth-century star in the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance. He's most often associated with paintings of peasants and other common people doing everyday things: hunting in the snow, ice-skating, dancing at a wedding, eating, sleeping, and playing children's games. In one painting, a peasant is doing what peasants have been doing for over ten thousand years. He is plowing. The earth rises up in furrows. The horse trudges forward. The plowman keeps his gaze directed at the ground beneath his feet. On a terrace beneath the plowman, a blank-faced shepherd, surrounded by sheep, leans on his staff and directs his gaze toward the sky. Further down, a fisherman casts out his line. In the distance, the wind puffs the sails of a galleon. Only after learning the name of the painting does the viewer search the scene beyond these prominent features. And there the viewer finds them: two pale, naked legs are plunging into the water. This is "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Icarus was a character in Greek mythology. His father manufactured wings so his son could fly. The wings gave way and Icarus fell to earth. Many other artists have depicted Icarus' fall. They usually place him in the center. Bruegel did not.

In 1938, almost four hundred years after "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," poet W.H. Auden visited Belgium's Royal Museums of Fine Arts. He wrote a poem about the paintings he saw there. Auden observes that the Old Masters were never wrong in their artistic depictions of human suffering. In Nativity scenes, there are some children who don't much care about the birth of the Messiah; they are off ice-skating. In scenes of martyrdom, "the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree."

And then there is that boy falling out of the sky.

"the ploughman may

have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

but for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

The human ability to ignore shocking data and to carry on with the business of every day life is an important survival skill. Perhaps nothing is as shocking to an individual as losing a loved one to death, and yet we get up the next morning, make breakfast, clock in at work, and march dully forward into a future void where our departed loved one will never again play any part. The problem is, of course, that evil people count on this human ability to stroll past atrocity. The internet seemed, at first, to promise that that most precious of commodities, human attention, would be focused on wrongdoing. Evil people, thus exposed, would hesitate to commit crimes, or would stop committing crimes once those crimes were filmed and witnessed by others.