Thursday, June 28, 2007

Evan Almighty: The Torture of God's Love

I'm not really sure who miffed the critics on this movie to make them hate it so much. I found the film to be pretty boring, but no more so than 90% of the rest of the "stuff" Hollywood shovels. At least this one tackles a few moral themes.

If you ran out to be amused, there are enough scenes to keep you from walking out of theater altogether. Personally, I think I laughed more during the trailers. If you went to see it just to find out how badly Hollywood butchered and riddiculed the Noah story, then you probably got your money worth.

I had no expectations for this film. So, given such low standards, I was impressed in a few places that were somewhat unrelated to the overall plot. And in spite of being a minister who probably should have loved the moral message of the film:

"You can change the world with one small, random act of kindness at a time"

I was instead put off by the cheese of such a statement that reflects an utterly naive world view. I doubt offering to help the Taliban cross the street would keep them from blowing themselves up once they reached the other side. The movie doesn't take into account that there is umambigious evil in the world, that human beings are basically selfish, and that "no good deed goes unpunished." A random act of kindness makes for a great bumper sticker, and certainly a noble goal for each of us, but it is hardly a solution.

Nevertheless, I was impressed to see a movie that hinted at the idea that God still works. Beyond that, I was very impressed to see a movie that supported the notion that God doesn't work the way we want him to.

Evan was stubborn, self-centered, and self-absorbed. You don't just change a person like that from the inside-out. Like peeling back layers of an onion, Morgan Freeman's portrayal of God attacks Evan's appearance, his job, and seemingly his family. This movie demonstrated to me how far God sometimes has to go to get our attention. Granted, none of us are growing eternal beards, nor are we being followed by pairs of animals, but the metaphor remains true.

Ironically, these theological truths are bathed in a twist on the Genesis Flood narrative. It is the torture of God's love that drives so many people away from faith. As Evan discovers, the more attention God gave him in the movie, the worse things seemed to get in his life. At one point, after trying to run away from God, Evan just begs God to go away.

It seems pretty true in our human relationships as well. The closer someone gets to us, the more of us they see, even the messy things. That can make us really uncomfortable. When it comes time to change some of these things, we resist. Unlike God, our families and friends don't have the ability to peel away our layers the way God does.

I was recently talking with a friend of mine who is having a very difficult time. I can't imagine the stress and sadness surrounding her. After a few "listening" sessions, she asked me what I thought. I said, "I have no idea, but I'm sorry. What do you think God might be saying?"

The question had never crossed her mind. God's love can feel like torture. He knows where He wants us to go and He knows that nine times out of ten, we won't go there on our own. So he begins to peel back the comfort zone one layer at a time. We either get it or we don't, but most of it boils down to whether or not we are looking.

Admittedly, Evan had the advantage. God performed supernatural activities around Evan's life to get his attention. He started slowly, with alarm clocks stuck on 6:14, but then He just appeared in person. I doubt seriously any of us will ever have that luxury. But even natural events tend to speak to us. Science can tell all day long what something "is" but when it comes to what a thing "means," we need a different set of glasses. Evan found his... and by the end of the movie, the seeming torture made sense. I believe deep down the same is true for each of us.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Apocalypto: God, Humanity, and Combat

Last night, I was up really late watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I wanted to avoid this picture in a big way because I knew what Mel was going to make me watch: human sacrifice. I wouldn't put Apocalypto up there with Schindler's List, but occasionally there are movies that I make myself watch, even if only to push me to places I don't want to go.

On the surface, I enjoyed the movie. It was everything a good movie is supposed to be about-- a) really bad guys do really bad things; b) good guys fight back; c) good guys win. But like Schindler's List, the movie leaves you feeling hollow inside. During the gruesome scenes of human sacrifice, my mind wandered to Romans 1:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Maybe I am just naive, but it seems "plain to me" that abducting people from their homes, cutting out their hearts, and chopping off their heads is evil. We live in a culture that wants to make excuses for this kind of behavior, we'd like to rationalize it away as the product of bad upbringing. Even so, it's difficult to imagine how this sort of activity isn't patently evil.

My culture wants to tell me that if I lived in the ancient Mayan empire that I too would advocate for the slaughter of innocent people. My culture wants to tell me that I'd not know that what I was doing was wrong. My culture is misguided.

I understand predisposition. I understand that kids raised in certain environments are conditioned and desensitized to violence. But I also understand the "gut," the root of conscience, the Spirit of God -- you call it whatever you want. I understand mercy, love, and grace. My culture wants to tell me that these things inside me are part of the tapestry of human existence... we are apt to follow delusions, apt to act magnanimously, apt to save life and take it. "It all depends on how you are raised," they say. It's my human situation that makes me weak, and my human situation that makes me strong. Because of this duality, I'm in no position to say what I would or wouldn't do. I'm in no position to pass judgment.

Personally, that sort of jive makes me want to puke. Whether it is a terrorist beheading a Western reporter, or a Mayan chief cutting the heart out of a captive, evil is blatant. I admit there are subtleties. I admit that gray areas can make it difficult at times to know what to do. I admit that morality does have a contextualization component.

But we are without excuse when it comes to outright evil. There are choices to be made when it comes to wielding the knife. When torture enters the picture, it's about the killer, not the victim. If all our ethics are situational, and there is no set law of morality, then someone tell me in what situation is acceptable to torture a child? In all possible worlds, it is not permissible to torture children. I dare anyone to say otherwise. There is an absolute truth, hazy though it may be at times. But we do in fact know it when we see it.

I watched this movie basically thanking God that I was born in a different time and place. You see, I couldn't stand back and watch that sort of thing. I'd change it or die. Which brings me to the topic of combat. I'm a martial artist who has never, and probably will never, use my training. I'd rather take a dozen black eyes than ever use a single technique.

So why did I take this art form upon myself? The answer is really simple. Should this morally ambiguous culture of ours ever get to the point of beheading people for kicks, I'll die fighting it. I watched Apocalypto with great interest as the victims were marched up the steps to their slaughter. None of them fought back. Even the hero of the story, when they marched the remaining captives out to target practice, ran away from the enemy. The hero's hands were freed and he ran. He didn't fight until the final 20 minutes of the movie.

I wanted to take an art form and learn it so well that if I ever found myself in that kind of situation, I could look a man in the eyes and resist him with my very best efforts. I'd rather take my chances with an evildoer's hands around my neck, than his spears in my back.

It's not what Jesus would do. He would allow men to slaughter him on the off chance they'd see how evil they had become. But it seems pretty "plain to me." Evil is to be resisted. Not that morally gray area that the Christian-Right wants to get you fired up about. I'm talking about genuine evil. The kind that grins while it tortures. The kind that enjoys pain. You know it when you see it. The question is probably less about what Jesus did. He was on a specific mission. The question really is, what would God do? And whether Jesus would or not, I believe we should fight evil when it is as utterly blatant and sickening as murder for pleasure.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Green Arrow: Wedding Bells and a Failed Generation

BACKSTORY

My favorite comic book character of all time is Green Arrow, a.k.a. Oliver Queen. He's a DC Comics character. The real irony of my love for this character is that he is a flaming liberal. I tend to lean right in my politics, so it's an odd match between me, as reader, and Ollie, as a character. We share however a common idealism: the belief that a utopian society (while perhaps never possible) is still something worth fighting for.

Oliver Queen's history is rich. Originally written as Batman with a bow (replete with his Arrow Cave and Arrow Car), one fine author took the Emeral Archer in a daring new direction. Denny O'Neil began writing Oliver in tumult of the late sixties and early seventies. I was still in diapers.

At the age of nine, I used to frequent the local flea market for bargain comic book deals. Denny's Green Arrow was a decade old when I read my first issue. I bought it for the cover, which displayed Green Arrow's ward Roy Harper being carried down a dirty alley. Roy had overdosed from heroin.

Denny and a phenomenal artist, Neal Adams, conjured up an incredible story in the mind of this nine year old kid. Lives were ruined and remade-- usually in a matter of three or four issues, (quite unlike the ruined life that is working on a four year pit to climb out of). Oliver was forced to look at what his abandonment did to feed his ward's drug addiction, to honestly evaluate his hard-line environmental stances, to examine his beliefs about a variety of social ills, and then make personal changes at the end of each story arc. Needless to say, I was hooked. At nine year's old, I started gobbling up as many of these back issues as I could find.

Green Arrow was appearing monthly in the Green Lantern title starring Hal Jordan. These two best friends decided to travel America together and gain a deeper appreciation for each other's opposing political views. Oliver was an idealist, and I loved him for it. He was loud and obnoxious-- barking out about the poor, the oppressed, racial discrimination, the lure of big business, over-population, gang violence, drug abuse, and the environment. Hal was his sounding board, and Ollie was Hal's.

It's probably safe to say that in spite of being right leaning as an adult, my early childhood years were bathed in social justice thanks to Denny O'Neil's writing. One thing that libs and conservatives should be able to agree on no matter what is social justice. We might disagree on how to get there, but our target is the same moral place, or at least it ought to be.

Now the hippie, goatee wearing archer has popped the question to his lover of over thirty years of stories. Seems like a good thing, right?

It might have been. It might have been the best comic book ever written, but this won't happen now. You see, for the past four years DC Comics has decided to humanize Oliver Queen a bit more. Like we needed that. I mean, it's funny to me that everytime someone needs "humanizing" they are drug through the muck. Why not humanize a villian and make him/her more kind? Making Oliver more of louse is akin to making the Joker love puppies.

The avalanche began when it was revealed to us first that Ollie walked-out on a newborn son. Later he flagarantly cheated on his lover with a young woman who was killed off an issue later. The next three years gave rise to failure after failure for Mr. Queen. The best this once noble character has been able to offer readers in the face of his failures is a handful smuck one-liners saturated with MTV slang and American Pie flavored humor. I'm sure some people enjoy it, in between X-Box games and watching their Paris Hilton videos.

In three short years, Oliver was so beaten down by crooks, that he needed to be rescued in his own title four times. Besides getting bested by almost every villian he faced, Oliver Queen made a run for Mayor of his hometown and won. That's a good thing, right? Well it would have been if had done anything while in office. Editorial decisions had Ollie forced out of office due to a scandal for funding a rogue superhero group -- while the biggest scandal of all -- Oliver Queen's illegal stock trading still lies in a unwrapped package for some future author to dig up and sully his character with.

During his stay as Mayor, Oliver Queen didn't use one red cent of his own money to support the poor and oppressed in spite of being a billionare. He called in Bruce Wayne and used his money. He didn't advocate for anyone (except homosexuals, and that was because he wanted their revenue dollars). His core values went AWOL and Oliver Queen became "The Man." He joined the system since it was apparent the staff of DC Comics weren't going to let him beat it.

COMMENTARY

So this was about a wedding... his lover has apparently said "Yes" to his proposal, in spite of the cheating, the lying, and the failures. But given the track record of the past four years, who honestly would want this guy? Green Arrow went from being a political activist who quoted Hemmingway, understood Latin, and spoke intelligently about social justice, the Greek Gods, economies, and other significant issues of our day to becoming a loser dad and an unfaithful twit with a big "Duh" stapled on his forehead.

Did the character need to be dumbed down to appeal to new readers? I was nine years old when I began my journey with Oliver Queen. I doubt seriously that making him more "hip" will do anything other than give the mindless generation behind me just one more thing to outgrow. Sadly, I suspect we can add a failed marriage to Oliver's list of woes, because I don't see his fiance lasting long with him either. She outgrew him years ago.

In a sad realization, it came to me the other night, that Oliver Queen really is the child of the tumultous sixties and seventies. You remember that generation that was so bent on changing the world that they neglected their marriages, their children, and dropped the ball in social justice? Yeah, that's them. He epitomizes a group of world-changers that just upped and joined the system when free love got old and their marriages got stale and their parenting responsibilities started cutting into their down time.

Green Arrow has become the voice of the impotent Left; devoid of anything exept a few fancy speeches, he is a rich bastard-making womanizer who wants everyone else to use their money to serve the poor, while still hanging on to his own. He's bent on telling the rest of us how to live while wearing a hypocrite's mask. (Al Gore's house eating up four times more energy than mine comes to mind.) Oliver Queen has become what he once hated, what he fought against, and what a little boy at the flea market prayed he'd never become:

A milk-less teat on full display in a hungry world.

There's something to be said about life imitating art. I just wish we could set the bar a little higher and have something put before that is worth imitating. Is that too much to ask?

All-Stars: In Children and in Comics

Tonight, my son will engage in his first ever "All-Star" baseball tournament. I'm proud of course. He was selected from a pool of 15 boys on his regular season team to represent the city's Boy's Club in an area wide competition. He was selected because, at the age of 5 years, he listens well and generally does what he's asked to do. He's not a phenomenal ball player, he strikes out as much as he hits, and he can barely throw a baseball 20 feet. (Long story there). But he does listen.

I've been gobbling up issues of the "All Star" DC Comics line-up since they started printing them a little over a year ago. I've had two very unique and very different experiences with the titles.

1st up to bat: All-Star Superman.

I'd like to just go on record as witnessing a home-run comic book. Morrison and Quietly have given us truly something to cheer about in the fan section. The stories have been stellar... they've been one-shots that all sort of loosely tie together, so new readers don't feel like they are playing "catch-up." Each story has been unique and very meaningful as Clark deals with dying, his secret identity, and the death of his father. I highly recommend grabbing up back-issues, or the compilation which I think just hit shelves in a prestige hardback form.

2nd hitter to approach the plate: All-Star Batman and Robin

I'd like to go on record as witnessing a train-wreck. As much as I loved Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City, I'm just not caring much for anything he's doing in the DC Comics Universe. I suppose to be fair, he's writing in a universe of his own. As the stories stand, they are first and foremost late-- I mean major league late. If you like waiting a year between your comics, then by all means take up collecting All-Star Batman and Robin. They aren't bad stories they are just hardly worth it and by the time you get your copy, you've forgotten why you were reading in the first place.

My complaint is minor for sure. It's mostly just that I don't dig his take. Miller's Batman is more than just dark, his character is uber-creepy. Batman has all but tortured the young Robin-In-Waiting in the first five installments of this title. From kidnapping him, to slapping him around, to driving at top speeds and scaring the kid to death, I'm just not liking this title at all. Miller's Batman is an ego-manic who doesn't just struggle with the death of his parents, he is illogically consumed by it. It's hard to see anywhere in Miller's work the intelligent Batman, who has been dubbed, "The World's Greatest Detective."

We started this affair with my son's All-Star game this evening.

Will my son step up to the plate and knock one out of the park? I highly doubt it. You see, he wasn't chosen for All-Stars because he is such a great ball player. He was chosen because he listens and follows instructions. As it relates to comics, we have two world class series at play: one that listens to the history of the character and creates; another that has pretty much ignored the history and has taken off writing his own instruction manual. It's obvious which type of All-Star I prefer.

As much as I loved so many different Frank Miller creations, I am ready for him to take his hands of "The Bat."

Thursday, June 21, 2007

A New Blog, A New Day...

I'd like to think these little tidbits of mine will be interesting to someone other than myself. Hmph. Let's call the whole thing what it is from the get-go. It is self-indulgence. A little piece of me that just wants to be heard.

Today I sat drinking Hefeweizen with a guy I'd never met. He is, of all things, a turtle tracker. I'm not lying. He tracks turtles and does whatever turtle-trackers do. His name was John and we quickly delved into what was for me, a beer-induced conversation about life, deism, and the future of humanity.

I write about this here because you don't meet too many people like John. Chit-chat and idle chatter tend to fill up most of my non-work related conversation. Life just seems a bit too short for such things, hence the Blog.

I'm an idealist in my heart and soul. Facts are great and people that ignore them tend to fall off buildings or burn their houses down. But facts without meaning are trite little survival mechanisms missing the very thing that makes survival worth its salt in the first place.

I subtitled this Blog, and my webpage: A Place for Deeper Swimmers.

Let's hope we do more than scratch the surface.

Peace and love,

SB