George Takei, Candace Owens, and the Keffiyeh

 

George Takei, Candace Owens, and the Keffiyeh
Social media reveals the power of the West's new religion

The West has retreated from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Atheists and Marxists demonize that tradition. Their new worldview is not an absence of religion; humans cannot live without religion. All humans believe in dogma; practice rituals; quote scripture; embrace a tribe; elevate teachers, healers, and saviors; model themselves after saints; interpret patterns from apparent chaos; and insist on a larger meaning.

A new religion practiced by many in the West is distinguished by several features. Genesis and Talmudic commentary insist that we are all equally made in the image of God; and we all equally descend, literally or spiritually, from the first couple, Adam and Eve. That is, the Judeo-Christian God did not create better or worse versions of humanity. In Christianity, all humans are flawed because all humans have free will and use that free will to choose away from God. Thus, we are all responsible for the problem of evil. All humans are in need of the salvation offered by Jesus. All humans benefit from humble self-reflection, confession, and repentance. Through God's grace, we are all capable of manifesting God's love in a broken world, no matter how low we have fallen.

In the West's new religion, equality is rejected. Some are good and some are bad based on their ethnicity, sex, or skin color. Guilt, shame, and the problem of evil are assigned to the West. Beneficence is found as far from the West as possible. Non-whites are better than whites. Jews are better than Christians and Muslims are better than both. Human value is relative and depends on context. A black Christian is of greater value than a white Christian and of less value than a white Muslim. Islam is prioritized because it is recognized as a greater threat to the West.

Those influenced by this new faith view moral questions through the lens of relativism. Relativism is applied selectively. Relativism is used, for example through whataboutism, to excuse atrocities committed by Muslims. "Sure, the Muslim Conquest of India is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of eighty million people, but what about the Europeans killing Native Americans?" Leftist relativism, which appears to be a flexible system that encourages open-minded tolerance of human failing, is in fact rigidly intolerant. Leftist Atheists never use relativism to relativize the West's failings. Followers of the Church of the Anti-West never say, "Sure, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas resulted in the deaths of Native Americans, but what about the Muslim Conquest of India that is estimated to have killed eighty million people?"

Atrocities committed by non-whites are often attributed to whites. The Rwandan genocide is all the fault of the white man. "The Rwandan Genocide must first be seen as the product of Belgian colonialism," insists the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In contrast, the same institution's page devoted to the Armenian Genocide never mentions the word "Muslim" and mentions "Islam" only once – as a great monotheistic religion, but not as a factor in the genocide of Christian Armenians, as well as Christian Greeks and Assyrians, by Turkish Muslims.

The Hindu caste system, one of the worst human rights abuses in history, is rooted in the myth of Purusha in the Rig Veda, composed over three thousand years ago. Anti-Western voices, though, blame the Hindu caste system on British colonialism. Again, the reverse process never takes place. No one points out that, for example, whites in North America committed atrocities against Native Americans after the whites' loved ones were kidnapped, killed, or tortured by Native Americans. Similarly, if you mention antisemitism, you must pair it with "Islamophobia." You can, though, mention Islamophobia without mentioning antisemitism.

The Church of the Anti-West renders judgment taboo. One must not judge – non-Westerners. Cannibalism, clitoridectomy, tribal warfare, child marriage, honor killing, and, perhaps most ironic of all, unquestioning adherence to irrational dogma, are all excused with "don't judge," and, of course, with relativism. I've been told numerous times that clitoridectomy is comparable to the Catholic confirmation ceremony.

The Judeo-Christian tradition addresses the problem of evil with the process of confession, repentance, and reintegration. The Old Testament king David sinned grievously, murdering Uriah to gain sexual access to Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David. David confessed, was punished, repented, and was reintegrated. The new religion rejects confession, repentance, and reintegration for whites and for the West. Muslim terrorists can be received back into society. White men must always remain outside the circle of community.

I had three encounters recently on social media that demonstrated these features of the West's new religion. I title these encounters "The Keffiyeh and the Rainbow," "George Takei and Japanese Internment," and "Candace Owens and Catholicism."

Fleabag BBC and Amazon. Review

 

Fleabag

 

Is the BBC series the feminist masterpiece critics claim it to be?

 

Back when I was a grad student I thought someday I'd have a tenure-track job and I'd be teaching popular culture courses so I need to keep up. I was so dedicated to this mythical tenure-track job that I sat through films that bored me silly. I'm talking to you, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. I never got that tenure-track job and, furthermore, popular culture splintered like a dropped mirror. When I was a kid, families watched movies together. Suddenly pop culture was a prison; each inmate occupied his own cell sealed off from society. Two people could live in the same home and dance to different music, laugh at different jokes, fear different monsters, and never have any idea what the other person is feeling.

 

The splintering of pop culture coincided with the West's increasing rejection of traditional beliefs like Judeo-Christian morality. A newly Paganizing, newly splintered pop culture knew it could break all the rules. I remember the first time I heard the F-word in a broadcast, and the first time I saw the F-word in print. Do I say all these bad words? Sure. Do I want them in my cultural products? Not unless they are needed. Somehow Sophocles, Shakespeare, O'Neill and the Marx Brothers never needed any of them . Movies like Saw include scenes that I do not want inside my head, or anybody's head for that matter. Splintered media now includes niche markets for the death-to-America demographic, the school-shooter-wannabe demographic, the torture-porn demographic.  

 

I would insist to my students that studying film, fairy tales, and internet memes is every bit as important as studying physics. The movie someone watches, and the internet memes someone shares, are a "royal road to the unconscious." Have you ever lost a friend because of the meme she shares? I have. I liked Gert a lot. Then I saw her social media memes. So sexually graphic they could illustrate an anatomy lecture, but always sadistic and always disseminating some deadly conspiracy theory. I learned more about Gert from her memes than from eating lunch with her. Goodbye, Gert.

 

Do cultural products create reality or do they reflect reality? Does a TV show become popular because it is telling audiences who they are, or do media puppet masters jerk the audience's strings and manipulate behavior? It's a feedback loop.  

 

A few years ago I began to hear of something called Fleabag; Fleabag is a groundbreaking feminist masterpiece, cultural arbiters wanted me to know. Fleabag was telling women who they are, who they should want to be, and who they should become. The sources telling me this are sources that are hostile to women like me, and they are sources that promote art that I find worthless. So I avoided Fleabag during its run, 2016-2019.

 

The other day, 47-year-old Irish actor Andrew Scott appeared on the NPR talk show Fresh Air. He mentioned that he'd played a character named "Hot Priest" on Fleabag. And I thought, okay, I have to watch this show. I'll never get that tenure-track job, but I'm still interested in how popular culture depicts Catholicism.

Irena's Vow 2023 Film Review

 

Irena's Vow

A new film dramatizes the life of an almost unbelievable heroine

Irena's Vow is a 2023 film dramatizing the World War II heroism of a young Polish nursing student, Irena Gut. Irena's Vow is a two-hour, color film. It was shot in Poland. The film is in English. It received a limited US release in April, 2024. Irena's Vow has an 86% professional reviewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% fan reviewer rating. Veteran reviewer Rex Reed calls Irena's Vow "One of the most astounding holocaust stories." He says, "It’s true, if fantastic." The film is "anchored by the powerful, heartfelt performance of Sophie Nelisse as an innocent girl whose integrity and resolve turns her into a woman of maturity and strength." Roman Haller, a Holocaust survivor, says, "It is a very great film. I expected a good film, but it is even more than I expected. … I saw my mother. I saw my father. I saw Irena … She was like a mother to me … I want to tell you there were people like that."

Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi wrote the 2007 book, World War II Survivors: Lessons in Resilience. He devoted a chapter to Irena Gut Opdyke. She was, he writes, "a diminutive, elegant woman with warm, radiant blue eyes and delicate features. She is one of the kindest, most loving women I have encountered. She reminds one of Mother Teresa. As she spoke, I often found myself choking back tears."

Dan Gordon is a veteran screenwriter and also a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. Gordon says, "About 25 years ago, I was driving to my home in Los Angeles and listening to the radio. I heard a woman, Irene Gut Opdyke, telling her story. When I got home, I sat in the car in the driveway for another hour and a half, because I couldn’t stop listening." He worked for years to get the film made.

Director Louise Archambault is a French Canadian. When she first viewed the script, she says, her reaction was "Wow. What an amazing woman. If that script had been fiction, I would have refused it" because no one would believe it. But, "I fell in love with that character." Irena's story is "relevant. We want to tell that story today in 2024." Even though many films have been made about WW II, we haven't seen, Archambault says, WW II from the eyes of a young Polish Catholic girl forced by Nazis to work for them. Approximately 1.5 million Poles were forced to work for Nazi Germany, often under slave labor conditions and at the cost of their health and their lives.

Because Archambault had a relatively meager budget of five million dollars and only twenty-nine days for shooting, she developed an intimate, rather than epic style. Irena's Vow isn't Saving Private Ryan; the deaths we see are of individuals; they are murdered in a sickeningly intimate way. Yes, there is horror in the story, but there is also genuine "love, hope, and light." Archambault benefited from filming Polish actors, with a Polish crew, in Poland. They all know the history, she said; their grandparents lived it. They brought their personal experiences to the film. Also, "I put my energy on character, on human behavior."

Events in Poland contributed to the set's atmosphere. Refugees from Ukraine were arriving with their belongings in their hands and on their backs. "Every day we were reminded that war was going on next door." There was a "big van" with "big guys" on the set necessary for insurance purposes. "If shooting starts here" – shooting with bullets not with cameras – "we need to get everyone out of here."

Given how good this movie is, and how remarkable Irena's story is, one has to wonder why the film has received so little publicity and such a limited release. I have my suspicions as to what cultural trends may have sidelined Irena's Vow. More on that, below.

On Seeing Gone with the Wind in a theater for the fifth time

 

On Watching Gone with the Wind in a Theater for the Fifth Time

 

Gone with the Wind is universal art misunderstood by elite book burners

 

On April 7, I attended an eighty-fifth anniversary theatrical showing of Gone with the Wind. In recent weeks, I've been through an earthquake, seen a solar eclipse, and spent hours in church for Easter. Even so, watching GWTW for the fifth time in a theater was a religious experience.

 

Manohla Dargis, the New York Times chief film critic, interrupts her April 12 review of a new movie to restate her righteous indignation against an unrelated film. Gone with the Wind, she insists, is a "monument to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause."

 

Yes, both the book and the film are racist. No, GWTW's racism is not the works' alpha and omega. And, no, GWTW is not the only flawed work of art. Have you heard any rap lyrics lately? Rather, GWTW addresses universal themes. Audiences from diverse ethnicities and social classes recognize these themes and even just the film's soundtrack reduces listeners to tears. GWTW brings the power of myth to a universal experience: growing up, leaving childhood innocence, and entering a world that isn't invested in your survival, and that can engineer relentless freight trains full of misery and steer them right at you. It's about who survives the collision, how, and why, and at what cost. "Hardships make or break people," as Rhett Butler says.

"One Way Back" by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Book Review

 

"One Way Back" is a good book. It's not just a "celebrity memoir." Even if author Dr. Christine Blasey Ford were not famous, this book would be worth reading. It's well-written and like any good book it causes the reader to feel, to think, and to understand the human race a bit better. "One Way Back" is also brief and an easy read. The sentences are short and the vocabulary is basic.
 
"One Way Back" is no less beautiful for its ease of reading. Ford uses surfing as her overarching metaphor. Surfing is dangerous but it is also, for the surfer, like life itself. Yes, it entails risk, but in undertaking that risk the surfer enhances the experience of being alive. The book's title, "One Way Back," is a reference to surfing. The surfer paddles out into the ocean, and must ride the wave the ocean presents. There's only one way back to shore – riding the wave that life hands you.

 

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was not famous before summer, 2018. US President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the SCOTUS. Ford contacted her elected officials to report that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at an informal high school gathering when she was 15 and he was 17. Ford passed a lie detector test administered by a former FBI agent. Ford was asked to testify before the Senate, and she did. In initial reactions, even FOX news, and, indeed, even Donald Trump himself assessed Ford as credible.

 

Later, the White House devised a strategy whereby Brett Kavanaugh would perform an opera similar to the one presented by the similarly accused Clarence Thomas. Thomas claimed he was a victim of a "high tech lynching." Kavanaugh said, "This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups." What Kavanaugh said here was not true. Kavanaugh spoke other untruths, see, for example, his untrue comments about "boof," about "Devil's Triangle," and about how much he drank and what parties he attended. He spoke these untruths while under oath.

 

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and her family have been subjected to murderous harassment ever since. She has had to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in security fees. For the past six years, people have been actively threatening to kill her and her children. Even animals are subjected to this rage. Dead animals have been thrown onto her property. Brett Kavanaugh has a lifetime ride on the SCOTUS, a position as close to royalty as America awards.

 

"One Way Back" is a quiet book. Dr. Ford records these events, but quietly. She never adopts the histrionic, fever pitch screech of Kavanaugh in his testimony, revealing temperament so totally unworthy of a judge that Saturday Night Live parodied it in one of their most popular routines.

 

Rather we get an account of a woman who apparently never wanted the spotlight, but who marched – or surfed – into it when she thought doing so was her civic duty.

 

I liked this book, but I didn't feel that I could ever get close to Dr. Ford. She is very unlike me. Her father was a self-made man. He was successful enough that he managed to send his three children to exclusive prep schools and to see them go on to advanced degrees and successful careers.

 

Young Christine didn't have to work. She went to an exclusive prep school and spent her extracurricular hours swimming and diving. It seems that her dad bankrolled her advanced education that included time spent in Hawaii. With that foundation, Dr. Ford became a successful professor and employee at two California universities. She is happily married and her sons followed her into the water and she spent her summers standing by as they received training at the beach.

 

Dr. Ford is frank about how she differs from others. She is a very sensitive person and she sometimes feels shy and out of place with others' values. Reading about her decision to come forward, I felt as if I were reading about Dr. Ford being put through a food processor. So many different people gave her so much different advice. Testify, don't testify, protect yourself above all, do your civic duty above all, align yourself with this or that person … it must have been hell for her. Through it all, she was true to her own sense of civic duty. And for that unhinged, hateful misogynists defame her and encourage really bad people to continue to threaten her life and the life of her children.

 

Ford's misogynist enemies lie about her. Many of those lies have found their way into influential publications. "One Way Back" corrects those lies. Read the book.

 

Finally – Thank you Dr. Ford.

 

 

One Life and Nicky's Family: Two Films Dramatize WW II Rescue of Refugees from Prague

 

One Life and Nicky's Family
Two films depict the rescue of over six hundred children from Nazis

 

The 2023 biopic One Life concludes with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene's power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn't even try to apply the emotional brakes.

 

If only the rest of the movie were as good as that final scene.

 

One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting, inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the "dump months" when movies that haven't tested well are released.

 

One Life is not a bad movie. It's just not good enough. I'd give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton deserves an eleven out of ten.

 

As I left the theater, I asked, "Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?" One Life didn't answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I'd never heard of before. Nicky's Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky's Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.

The War on Children by Robby and Landon Starbuck: Movie Review

 

The War on Children by Robby and Landon Starbuck
A new documentary takes on too much and offers simplistic solutions

 

The War on Children is a documentary addressing various social trends that damage children. The War on Children premiered on Twitter in February, 2024. War is two hours, twenty minutes long. The War on Children cites the following trends that damage children: child trafficking, trans extremism, online pornography, Marxist domination of public education, greedy corporations, and water pollution. The documentary recommends the following solutions: parents spending more time with their children in outdoor activities, limiting children's internet access, attendance at Christian churches, men reclaiming their masculinity, and voting Republican.

 

War was produced and directed by 36-year-old Robby Starbuck, aka Robert Starbuck Newsome. In 2022, Starbuck ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for a Tennessee congressional seat. Before that, he was, according to his Vimeo bio, a video and film director. Interestingly, that bio states his preferred pronouns as "he/him." The bio says he has worked with the celebrities "Akon, Smashing Pumpkins, Sarah Bareilles, Metric, Megadeth, Snoop Dogg, Machine Gun Kelly & Yellowcard." Starbuck identifies as Cuban-American.

 

War also features Starbuck's wife, Landon Starbuck, and their three children. On her website, Landon Starbuck says, "I'm passionate about faith, family, freedom, truth and justice … I speak, write, make music and advocate to protect all children. I left the music industry as a Billboard charting artist to focus on fighting child trafficking … I started my own non-profit combatting child abuse, exploitation and trafficking in 2021 … All glory goes to God. I love Jesus [and] my family." 

 

I follow movie news but I had heard nothing about The War on Children. I also follow Andrew Gutmann. In 2021, Gutmann received national attention when he published a protest against Woke education at Brearley, a private K-12 school for girls in Manhattan that charges $61,500 in annual tuition. Gutmann's letter is here; a 2024 update is here. Gutmann recommended The War on Children, and Gutmann's recommendation made War a must-see film for me.

 

I watched The War on Children on Twitter, straight through, twice. Though I share many of the filmmaker's concerns, the film did not work for me. Both times, after watching it, I felt agitated, depressed, and powerless. War shares much in common with Matt Walsh's 2022 documentary, What Is a Woman? I review What Is a Woman? here. What Is a Woman? worked for me in ways that The War on Children did not.