No Nation, No Beast

Having read much in the genre of African Literature, I knew what to expect from Uzodinma Iweala's book Beasts of No Nation—things we Americans know absolutely nothing about in our, even those of us in the toughest of neighborhoods, in terms of capital S suffering. So the whole thing wasn’t really all that shocking, especially to anyone who has read a JM Coetzee novel (which are, in this reviewers opinion, along with Farah and, of course, Achebe, [who are all significantly more disturbing btw] the best of the bunch) despite the fact that that was one of the two things most people site in positive reviews.

The other thing, which in my opinion is way over the top, is Iweala’s voice. It is basically that of Okunkwo (the spelling here is, I am sure, butchered) from Things Fall Apart taken to the stereotypic extreme. These two things combined for what seemed to be a parody of the typical African novel that was written by a guy who, as one sees in the “P.S.” section of the book, is an American, born and raised.

To make the book more dubious still is the fact that the author is a child of extreme privilege unknown to almost everyone outside of the top 1% in the US, which I believe is telling in a profound way. (I mean what authority does he really have?). He ends up romanticizing Africa in a bizarre way; instead of writing about a small part of African culture that is unknown to us, he takes something he read and knows nothing of as a first hand experience and confirms what white elites think they know about what is going on in the “Dark Continent.” This sort of thing directly contrasts the work of Achebe, the one who not only began the literary movement, but also the one who brought it into the mainstream, thus obliterating (Achebe did) the lense through which English writers such as Denison and Conrad made us see the this strange place.

In that Iweala perpetuated the belief that Africa is incredibly violent and scary and inhumane and just completely FUBARed, I would have to call the book a “disappointment” in almost every way.

A Semi Blow

Semi-Pro, the Will Farrell box office flop, proves a total waste of film and not even worth your time as one of the worst sports movies ever made with no redeeming qualities.  There were maybe two points in the film that I smirked but never once did I laugh during its duration.  The film seems to have been made with the sheer intention of marketing Budweiser.  You will no doubt recall the Superbowl spots which ran one of a number of ads featuring Farrell, in character, bumbling through the beer commercials’ dialogue with a off screen voice that were just as awful and irritating as the actual feature.  Good God, everything about it sucked.  I think my old man’s reaction to the film pretty says it all saying “It caused me to lose all faith in movies” and swearing them off for at least a while. 

The only memorable thing about this movie besides making my father damn near physically ill was the film’s one-song soundtrack, “Love Me Sexy”, a song that (unfortunately) stays in your head for an incredibly long time it being hummed by your reviewer a month after watching it.  On occasion I even find myself singing its atrocious lyrics “Baby wake up, we’re naked.” to everyone’s terror and my better judgment. 

The ludicrous plot line runs thus: Jackie Moon (Will Farrell), player/coach/owner/marketing genius, attempts to resurrect his Flint Michigan Tropics (Let’s Get Tropical!) failing franchise by getting fans in the stands.  Only thing is, he has clearly never touched a basketball, among other problems.  With talk of merger, the owner will do anything to make a buck—e.g. dress his team in tropical themed costumes, shave points to avoid having to give away free corndogs on “Free Corndog Night”, volunteer his wife (who seems to be a real slut sleeping with every Mark Spitz stache in the film yet apparently never letting Moon stick his penis in his whore of a wife) for XXX halftime shows, wrestle a bear, etc.—except learn the basketball basics.  This changes after Jackie trades the teams washer for former NBA champ Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) and led by star player Coffee Black (Andre 3000) aka Clarence Withers/Downtown “Funky Stuff” Malone/Sugar Dunkerton/ Jumping Johnny Johnson the team defects in a mutiny that leaves Monix head coach. 

Monix proves to be a real hard-ass despite the fact that he more or less gets everything he wants with complete creative control—respect from fans and players, wins back the girl (Lynn played by the ever lovely Maura Tierney) he cheated on back when he had game , etc.  So they start winning games, believing that the NBA will merge with the ABA’s top four teams.  This, however, like in real life, never was the case and going into their final game having made a miraculous turnaround from last place are now a half game back from their fourth place goal with a game against the team in that spot, conveniently, the San Antonio Spurs.   But as they set to play, they are told that their team is as dead as a doornail no matter the final outcome.  Apparently there are no playoffs or trade deadlines/restrictions with Jackie trading his star Coffee Black for God only knows, I suspect either money or a hotdog cart as he’s about to be unemployed.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth remembering.

So nobody gives a shit and they sure as hell play like it in the first half.  With the Spurs up by some quit-at-halftime type sum, some asshole who mysteriously is on every team they play (actually, the opposing teams seem entirely comprised of the same players, sort of like the Washington Generals if they put on different colored uniforms every night and sucked worse than usual) cheap shots Moon (with no flagrant foul shots apparently) and nearly kills him just before heading to the locker-room. 

This is when things go from incredibly stupid, witless, and foolish to unbearable and pointless and irresponsible and just plain sad.  After his near-death experience, Moon retells his team of his time in Heaven where he just visited with his deceased mother who by the way is an explained black woman who he stole his hit “Love Me Sexy” from after her unfortunate death from which the precedes allowed him to purchase the Flint team.  The sage wisdom bestowed from mother to son in the standard heavenly clouds was to use this great new play that would bring the team back from their incredible deficit—the alley-oop.  But they don’t have anyone with more than a ten inch vertical; luckily, their athletic former teammate Coffee Black has just traded himself back to the Tropics to finish the year with his former comrades in a reckless career decision that burns all his NBA bridges.  For the rest of the game, the Tropics mount a comeback based on Black’s dunks (clearly on a goal that is significantly under the regulation ten feet) from perimeter passes.

Forget the fact that the oop was already in use for at least a decade at that point, even if the play had been revolutionary, don’t you think they would have wised up before the final play of the game?  Well, they don’t and down by two the game comes down to the final ticks of the clock whereupon Moon gets fouled and is sent to the line with one second left in play.  Moon, who has yet to go to the line all season it seems despite never leaving the floor, shoots granny style to Monix’s utter disgust.  The thing about this is that the best free-throw shooter of the era was one Rick Barry who shot underhand which made it at least somewhat acceptable for players at any level.  So, of course, he sinks the first one but the second rattles around and out and with no time left Monix flies in and tips it in for the win.  They win fourth place, woo-hoo!  Who cares?  Right?

But the movie goes on for 20 more minutes in which it is revealed that Moon’s wife’s vagina is “for sad people”, Coffee Black or whatever he calls himself at that point resigns with the Spurs, some pot-smoking $10,000 shot winner gets part of his drug purchasing money from the NBA (not too different from what goes on with players in the league today), Monix and Lynn decide to keep getting it on, Moon is offered a high exec job in the NBA but it is dubious whether he actually gets the job since the bear on the loose who he wrestled in a failed publicity stunt attacks the commissioner of the NBA.  After the bear attack, Jackie screams “Everybody panic!  It’s just like Titanic, but it’s full of bears!”  What an appropriate way of ending this piece of shit movie.  Mercifully the credits begin to fall.

This is the second of three crappy movies (You Don’t Mess with the Zohan being the first with Fools Gold [sic] as the third) viewed in my week home last month that were so bad they made me wonder what, if anything, some actors won’t put their names to just to make a buck.  With that though, one thing is clear, Will Farrell’s popularity has reached a plateau.  Soon people will no longer go to see variations of Ron Burgundy and he will end up going the way of Paulie Shore.  Do yourself a favor and get a new act, otherwise, people are going to wake up and say “fuck Will Farrell” just like we collectively did with Shore after BioDome.  And this is going to happen sooner rather than later.

Men and Their Toys

The documentary Guys and Dolls, which deals with the recent phenomenon of men purchasing Real Dolls that are the equivalent to a very realistic and very expensive blowup doll—something like a plastic woman—takes you into the lives of five men who own these inanimate people. The film itself, fine as far as it goes[1] in depicting this particular subculture, ends up showing you basically what you would expect from the lives of men who have sex with dolls. But it does ask the expected questions and seems to answer them in a somewhat straight forward manner from the mouths’ of the owners of said sex dolls.

The first of the five men that we meet, a guy unfortunately named Davecat, seems to be one of the more screwed up of the bunch. Davecat lives at home[2] and his Real Girl is the cause of much family feuding. This guy, more than anybody else, seriously gives me the creeps. His dad, who is understandably freaked out about his son’s affinity for plastic people, proves unsupportive of his son’s extracurricular activities wishing that he would go out with an actual human being. All of this gets told to us second hand by Davecat, presumably because his father is embarrassed about the whole thing and wants nothing to do with it. Anyway, he explains that he has always had a fascination with manikins and has stories of when he was younger wondering off at the mall to talk to “synthetic women” in miniskirts or something.

The next gentleman featured in the film is Everard, a 50-year-old man who is incredibly lonely and sad and a guy you can’t help really feeling for. Everard, who also lived with his mother for a suspiciously long time, has been alone since her death eleven years ago and has (creepily) kept his mother’s room exactly the way she left it then. What makes this even weirder is the fact that she died in a nursing home and like recreated her room there Norman Bates style.

Next up is Gordon and he is just as unsettling as Davecat just in a slightly different way. Whereas Davecat has my vote for most likely to be a serial killer, no small feat among these men, Gordon is most likely to be a mass murderer. Don’t be surprised if you see this guy on a killing spree a la postal sometime in the future. Gordon, who admits to having an attachment to “inanimate objects,” also owns three guns two of which are assault weapons and not to be fucked with. “Three guns and two girls,” he boasts. Like the other two men thus far mentioned, Gordon has an interesting family background, his father left when he was less than a year-old and his mother buys him things like four-and-a-half feet tall medieval-looking swords. No correlation is ever proposed between this fact and the men preferring the company of dolls.

Two of the few men anywhere, one would guess, that have Real Girls and girl friends are the last two featured in the documentary. The first, Mike from Texas, is in the early stages of a relationship with a woman named Jody; he has be upfront about having at least one Real Doll and hasn’t scared her off yet, and now that he has a girl friend, claims to no longer use the dolls to get his rocks off. Jody remains unconvinced. So do we for that matter. Nonetheless, he contests that he will “give up the dolls for the right women” which he believes could very well be this woman Jody whom he met over the internet. He has began attending Sexoholics Anonymous meetings at the local Catholic church and even sees wedding bells in their future. At one particularly stomach wrenching point in the film, Mike cleans out his favorite (Lexi) of the eight dolls that he owns. He sticks a cleaning utensil that looks like a feather duster into the doll’s vagina saying that it is beginning to “smell like fish” and, pulling the vag-duster out of the artificial womanly orifice, there is a grime that is truly indescribable and almost made my female companion throw up. Despite his persistence that he is not having intercourse with any of his “girls,” he does admit that sometimes he “wakes up with a raging hard on” and wants to have sex with something while his living sexual partner is either asleep or away. So Mike gets this seemingly brilliant idea, rocket scientist he is not, that springing a proposal of a foursome between him, Jody, and two of his favorite dolls for his birthday would further their relationship. All of this, however, proves to be far too confusing for Jody who splits a week after filming.

The other guy who is currently in a relationship, Slade, may or may not own a Real Doll himself,[3] is known as a quote unquote “doll doctor” who fixes them when they get old and flabby. Seeing his workshops sends chills down the spine. In Slade’s garage are five or six dolls[4] hanging, in a row, from chains that fit noose-like around their necks and makes you recall images from the dungeons of serial killers you see on Real TV. The effect is kind of surreal. Anyway, when having sex with a Real Doll, he says “it comes alive.” It is so lifelike, he contends, that “when you push it feels like it is pushing back.” Somewhat grounded in reality though, he recognizes “it’s just a doll—a high form of masturbation.” It is his girl friend, Rebecca, though who expresses an obvious fact that none of the men seem to have realized—that the Real Girls have set an unrealistic standard for the female form. This typical feminist rhetoric is very true as can be seen with many men and their affinity for porn, this, however, is an actual manifestation of the fantasy into the 3-D world we as human beings live in making it all the more likely that these men will set standards that no woman apart from some .01% could measure up to, literally.

The result of all this ends up being a special kind of sadness in that you just know all of these men will ultimately end up being hopelessly alone. Gordon, for instance, speaking of an ex-girl friend, says that the nicest thing she ever did for him was leave him right before Christmas, that allowed him to spend the money he had been saving up on himself rather than buying gifts for her. He admits “if you are 39-years-old and haven’t found anyone by now, you’re probably not going to.” Well, you certainly won’t now with a couple of freaky life-like dolls hanging in your closet. It seems that these men have sort of just given up. “It looks like it is just me and my dolls from here on out” Everard says, adding “But there are worse things in life.” And one would have to agree that there are worse ways to live. I would strongly suggest not judging these men, I mean more power to them, but it is all pretty weird. All of the men, with the possible exception of Slade, have serious self-esteem issues, clearly. With that said, if they aren’t hurting anybody, why not let them live this bizarre fantasy out to the fullest. However, one of those things that are worse than living with the dolls, Everard says, is “living alone.” But sadly, he is living alone. This points to the two major psychological problems in living out a fantasy, namely that (1) these men have chosen an inanimate Real Girl over a real girl which makes actual person-to-person connection impossible which leads (2) to their constructing such a detailed fantasy that they have blurred the lines between that fantasy and reality in such a way that they are having trouble distinguishing the two.

Living in your own fantasy 24/7/365 makes actual human connection impossible and unless they stop, they are going to have their dolls and nothing else. “I know what to expect, with real girls[5] you don’t get that,” Davecat says pointing to a fact that while it is true, people with thoughts do tend to be pretty unpredictable, is really the problem itself. From time to time, he makes half-hearted attempts at dating “organics” but will always go back to “living in a Barbie world” because “It’s Fantastic!”[6] What he ultimately wants is a constant, and “you can’t get more constant that a doll.”

Which brings us to the second problem, all the men, on some level, tend to think of their dolls as being living things. Gordon again sometimes thinks “I hope I don’t get her pregnant” or “she doesn’t give me any diseases.” Likewise, we see Davecat experience real grief in having to part from his doll for any amount of time.

Unfortunately for Davecat, he has to take his “sweetie” in for some repairs which will take three weeks, the longest they have been apart for the past six years. What this really involves, however, is his putting her in a cargo box and shipping her across the country as you would say a book or a television. An obvious sadness is going on he admits. He sure has that right. He doesn’t mean it the way you would hope though, he says “they’ll be missing each other” and that he “has never had anyone to say good bye to.” But absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, and “when she returns it will be like a second honeymoon,” which implies a first honeymoon which is heartbreaking.

Despite the film’s tagline, that “For some, money really can buy love,” ultimately it doesn’t. It never does. These inanimate lifelike recreations of a human being do not offer any of the psychic consequences, neither positive nor negative, of being with an actual living and breathing human being. All they are and all they ever will be is an elaborate fantasy that perpetuates the loneliness and alienation that we already experience way too much of.

[1] In that generic documentary way.
[2] Go figure.
[3] Though he does admit to having sex with them on a few occasions, which if he has never actually owned one is even grosser and creepier considering that he repairs them for a living so would have to like barrow another guy’s sex toy. What does that say for cheating btw? I assume most of the men in this film anyway would be pretty upset indeed if they thought their artificial partners had some other man’s dick in their nether regions.
[4] One of the dolls doesn’t have a face, having been removed for detailed painting, which exposes the plastic underneath the area you wish the face was. With teeth and eye sockets, the plastic does resemble a crude skull which makes the scene horrifying if for only a brief moment until you realize the girls aren’t real. This does, however, make you wonder how many serial killers own these things. Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance, didn’t want to kill his victims so much as have the living equivalent of a Real Doll which he attempted to create by drilling holes in the heads of young men and pour acid down into their skulls so as to make them “zombie-like”—i.e. turn them into sexual partners that do not themselves have the ability to think or act much like these men seem to themselves want.
[5] As in women with an actual pulse.
[6] In case you don’t recognize them, these are the lyrics to Aqua’s song “Barbie Girl”. I am so funny I just threw up.

Of Course the Candidate Caught Doing Prostitutes Thinks America’s a Theocracy

Gary Hart, former U.S. Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate, offers some of the most insightful critiques of American democracy and the current state of affairs. As one who has studied Law and had a life long history in politics as well as a degree in divinity from Yale, Hart is one of the most qualified individuals on the planet to deliver such an outstanding blow for American politics. In masterfully asking that his critics offer him as much forgiveness for his past discretions with prostitutes as they have with W and his former use of cocaine, Hart effectively regains much of the authority that would most certainly have been quested had he ignored it all together. This thoughtful and beautifully written essay on religion and politics is the most insightful and thought provoking account published since Thomas Paine.

Right now, according to Hart, there is a religious revival undergoing in the United States that has proved damaging to our country’s democratic principles, especially when it comes to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Evangelical and Nondenominational churches are currently increasing in their numbers of attendees while all other denominations are either at a plateau or declining. The former often times have eschatological beliefs and contend that America is a quote unquote Christian nation with the right to fight Crusades against “evil” and govern by the principles of the Bible rather than those laid out by our Founding Fathers. In fact, most people see evangelical ideals as actually being one and the same. And what Hart is quick to point out is that our current President and his administration are among this group of people. People who when we see them holding signs on the street we think they are insane and when we walk by them when they are holding court—usually on city corners they consider secular, a term synonymous with evil in this day and age—they tell us we are going to Hell to burn for all eternity because we eat shrimp or smoke pot or kill hookers or whatever. These are the kinds of people running our country according to Hart. And he’s right.

Hart is tired of this Bush shit that all of us have had to deal with for the past eight years. He is sick and tired of rewarding the wealthy for being wealthy with tax cuts, Health-and-Wealth gospels, and our present Crusade which has brought us back into the period of Christian v. Muslim in hand-to-hand warfare reminiscent of medieval Europe when the Pope controlled national policy and declared war on Islam. He believes our leaders should be helping the poor instead of republicans and should actually listen to the United Nations before going off and fighting in the name of Christ.

What’s going on now is that the line between politics and religion have been blurred and its been done without many taking notice, or at least hadn’t noticed it was happening. Much of this is the result of the “code words” our leaders use all the time that can mean anything the audience wants them to mean instead of the freaky stuff that the evangelical right really knows them to mean.

This minority, a minority not only within this country and their religion but also within their own party and their denomination, has taken control of country and established what Hart calls “the tyranny of the faithful” comparing them to another minority political group with freaky religious beliefs that hijacked their nation’s government: the Nazis. He explains that the greatest danger in the politicization of the early twenty-first-century religious revival, aka the religious occupation of politics, is that both religion and politics are corrupted. He says:

Organized religion that seeks to occupy political power loses its purity and its purpose. Jesus sought to change people’s hearts, not their political parties… When any faith becomes an instrument of politics, it no longer is a religious faith. It is simply a political instrument like all others. And that is the way it is being used today. (34)

So now the U.S. has been reconstituted on religious lines and this group was the one responsible for Gulf War Redux which makes our government look more like a theocratic empire rather than a political democracy. In other words, everything is fucked.

With our “modern theocracy,” we have taken on the role of Avenging Angel with detrimental consequences all because of American hubris. When a government thinks it is ordained by God and therefore must be right and then implements those sentiments into state policy no matter how many oppose it or however unreasonable or opposed to reality and then insisting that those who oppose them are wrong or stupid or evil or insane, then things end up getting pretty scary. It’s pretty obvious that this is what is going on now, there is an Us, which means conservative-fundamentalist-Christian-free-market-capitalists, and a Them, which includes everyone else.

Jesus taught us that where your head is, your heart is as well. As everyone knows, there is no such thing as atheism, everybody worships something whether it is money or power or intellect or beauty or the Four Noble Truths or JC or Allah or whatever. Something else that everyone knows, Hart points out, is that there is no worshipping more than one God in a way that allows for you to worship them both in an equal and accurate way. Either you worship God in the way that Christ intended or you worship money or power or one of those other things that will eat you alive. There is no reconciliation between the Kingdom of God and the thrown of Caesar. It just cannot happen.

Fundamentalists who are running our country seem to care about one thing—money. Fundamentalism and wealth are proving insufficient and things are not going well for our country. Not well at all. This is because, as Hart makes clear, we are being forced to adopt these ideas that are by no means mainstream. Faith cannot be coerced and still have a salutary effect; it does not fulfill our longing in anyway to have a faith forced on us just as it didn’t a thousand years ago. They are judging us but not themselves. They judge and prescribe who is evil and what is good for us. They do this because they are among the Elect and are absolute in their convictions. This, however, is extremely dangerous national policy because it makes a decision without lateral dialogue and sticks with it no matter the outcome—ah la Iraq. This is reverting back to “pre-enlightenment ideals,” Hart explains, where absolutism reined supreme. Bush’s God policy has reverted us back to the centuries before the French Revolution in a belief that seems to say Reason is the Enemy of Religion. Faith is a very personal thing, yet now it is something people use to get votes and to go on crusades.

Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, wanted us to be our best by empowering others, he said nothing about apocalyptic end of days or partisan values or trampling on others for our own financial gain. In fact, Hart believes, these were the things that Jesus spoke out against. In our capitalist system, some people are in need of help, yet these supposed Christian don’t give two shits about the poor. It is easy for those with inherited wealth to talk about the American Dream and bitch about the poor and do nothing for those in need. We need to work on social issues and we need to do this now. The need is now and must take place through justice, mercy, and humility.

However, there is little to suggest that we live in a just, merciful, or humble society. The idea is to be righteous, not self-righteous by forcing others to accept their own policies. This would include, Hart declares, ceasing the demonization of liberals which was just getting out of hand for a while. But liberal doesn’t seem like a dirty word anymore; not in Indiana and not in the South even, at least North Carolina that is, which is saying a lot since when I told people I voted for Nader in 2000, I got looks from my high school classmates that you could just tell they thought I was either an idiot or crazy or both. This goes to prove Hart’s last assertion of the book—that the system won’t let this continue to the point of a all in all theocracy—as people start wanting to know what our politicians mean when they say “values” and how they are going to influence policy. There are checks and balances built in so this won’t happen.

Not only is a shift to more secular politics taking place as a result of our three branched system, it is happening because, as history has taught us, it is inevitable (or at least seems to be [especially in a democracy]). According to JC’s old adage, what’s Caesar’s is Caesar’s and what’s God’s is God’s; that is, the state controls the secular and the church rules the spiritual. With that he warns the Religious Right that it ultimately can’t win. People are getting tired of their medieval mindset, their covert advances toward making this a Christian Nation, their unwillingness to negotiate, the lack of lateral dialogue, Bush using the word crusade, etc., etc. The Religious Right’s strong-arm over the political landscape, Hart believes, isn’t going to last much longer, and neither do I. The Founding Fathers, feeling divinely inspired themselves, set up roadblocks against greed, power, and terror. They knew that the future leaders of this great nation would be only human and thus susceptible to error as well as the aforementioned evils. Nobody is perfect so they made it impossible for one man to change the nation to the way he see’s fit. Now, it seems that we have returned to our inevitable moderate center which, trust me, is really for the best. This is what makes the current attempt of combining religion and politics so incredibly pathetic and stupid and pointless because someone is going to come along and undo all the religious mess that we are now left with. But we are still going to truck along, as Americans that is what we do and will continue to do.

What makes Hart’s book so impressive is the way he shows us that Jesus was an awfully warm and caring guy and the way the Religious Right has shanghaied Him for political ends and pretty much done everything in their power to twist his words into things they were not in order make their own worldview fit into that of Our Lord and Savior’s. But after closer inspection, this isn’t what they are doing at all, what they are really doing is twisting His words and taking His words out of context so as to fit them into their belief structure. Isn’t that blasphemy? Isn’t our present situation the sort that Jesus sacrificed his life to speak out against? And hey, doesn’t our country suddenly, when you think about it, start looking an awful lot like Rome? Shit, if some guy knocked on Pat Robertson’s door and contested his faith as he understands it and claimed he was the son of God, don’t you think he would probably scream that the guy be thrown in jail? Don’t you think just maybe we would crucify Him again? After reading Hart, you start to ask yourself some of these very tough questions.

Living in Sin

Robert Lanham (The Hipster Handbook), with his 2006 publication The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right, has created a humorous and pretty smart beacon to shepherd those outside the know into some comprehension of what the “The Base” of the Republican Party is all about. And what the Religious Right is all about, more than anything else, seems to be free market capitalism with a second and third being ushering in the Second Coming of Christ and antigay agendas. The book focuses on a number of the televangelists we can see on many cable channels and internet podcasts in depth and unapologetically. Like most satirical literature, within the tongue-and-cheek jestings there is a great deal of truth and insight making this a more valuable and intelligent book than its title would imply and much of the assessment made on the more famous of the bunch tends to be pretty spot on.

First there is James Dobson. What can you say about this bigoted “Focus on the Family” founder who got his start as a psychologist focusing on, well, the family, other than this man is ridiculous? This nut job, according to Lanham, speaks to former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove on a regular basis and has had access to privileged government info since Bush came into office. James Dobson seriously hates gays. I mean hates them with such a passion that one would have to think something a bit suspicious is going on there in the old Dobson brain since the thing that which you most hate… as the saying goes. In the film For the Bible Tells Me So, Dobson is spreading his message of antigayness all over the place at a rate that would appear more or less constant and homosexuals an “A-BOMB-A-NATION” which apparently is calling for the government to nuke places like San Francisco where gayery and sympathy is rampant. With his base camp set in Colorado Springs just a stone’s throw away from the Air Force Academy, Dobson runs his ever hating message and eschatological BS to folks that are fighting a crusade against Islamist powers reminiscent of all the other crusades people generally thought were behind us. Now that we have the power to totally anialate ourselves through our WMDs, it seems insane to want to usher in the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ. But this maniac has political pull and is known to distribute voting guides to churches and members of evangelical Christianity.

But not all of them get involved politically, or so they claim. Joel Osteen, who pastors the absurdly large Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, says he is beyond all that bullshit since he is all about Jesus and what-have-you. Yeah, I can’t really agree with Lanham on this one, I don’t really think Osteen has some anterior motive have to do with the whole destruction of church and state separation. I don’t think that his ultimate goal is really one of political power; no, his seems to be more financially based. Nor do I really seem him as evil since I really do think that he is furthering the Gospel in a way that is not quite as controversial as people make it out to be. As a Div School student at a supposed liberal Div School, I hear my classmates[1] bash a worldview that most of them are participating in everyday with mommy and daddy paying to fulfill any desire they may have making it pretty easy for them to denounce this shit or that since they don’t make the money that feeds off the human misery which their spending causes.[2]

But, I do think that Osteen is sort of missing the boat here with the core Christian message. What Osteen tells us is that his listeners or viewers or whatever should pull themselves up by their boot straps and make shit happen on their own. While this is pretty accurate as far as it goes, what one should really take from the message of JC is that we should all abolish this money and greed BS in favor of something that is beyond what we are born with which as a megachurch PK, Osteen was. This prosperity crap just confirms my longtime suspicion that richer and more powerful people are happy, better, and more interesting than I am, which, of course, is not something I want from my religion.

While Osteen doesn’t all out ask for money, televangelist and churchwatch.org investigatee Creflo Dollar has no shame and Lanham rips him a new one. He doesn’t run a church so much as a pyramid scheme saying that when you give “God will provide” making things like welfare sort of unnecessary and thus social issues irrelevant. As Lanham makes clear, it is apt that Creflo’s last name is Dollar since that is the only thing that he seems to really care about.

Next on Lanham’s evangelical hit list, is the wildly popular author of The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren. I read the purpose driven life a while back and sort of found it helpful but had a few major critiques with the book—namely that Warren’s use of scripture which was almost entirely taken out of context[3] and never cited in text but instead in end notes. This sort of makes the work suspect in my opinion since many times passages are used in the same section that have nothing to do with one an other which together add up to support a given claim that they do not make on their own or in their biblical context. But this work is the best selling work of nonfiction ever.[4] As such, Warren has some political pull since that sort of thing illustrates his influence on what people think and believe and has ministered to people such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Rupert Murdoch. He stress happiness in this life, as Lanham points out, but does not agree with Osteen and Creflo Dollar’s prosperity gospelling, which Lanham does not make clear.

Warren, as reported in Mark Pinsky’s January 2008 Miami Times article “The Gospel of Money”, “is vociferous in his opposition to prominent Pentecostals' embrace of the prosperity gospel,” in which he is quoted as saying “Success in any area often creates a spirit of entitlement – ‘I deserve this’ - that is the exact opposite of servant leadership,” Warren says. “It is evidence of insecurity and low-self esteem. Insecure people show off. Secure people serve.”

Like Osteen, Warren takes no salary from his church because he can afford not to but he has also returned every penny he earned before his success. Not only that but he also refuses to speak for money and one important fact that goes unreported by Lanham is that 90% of the book royalties from TPDL has been given away to charities in what he has termed “reverse tithes,” as reported in the Pinsky article. In that piece, he also says that “the opulent lifestyles of televangelists make [him] sick” as they do Lanham.

What Warren emphasizes instead are the social issues which I agree are at the top of the list of things Christians should be striving to improve. Quite noble, however, he does seem to have a conservative agenda despite claiming to be apolitical-- he has been known to motivate church members to register as voters and sent out 150,000 letters to pastors saying to encourage votes for W in 2004 (56). Plus, Lanham points out, he has some pretty freaky apocalyptic beliefs about actually ushering in the Second Coming of Christ making it a little unsettling that his programs receive more federal funds than any other non-government organizations (58).

Turning back to the megachurches, Lanham makes some of his most articulate and insightful claims. As a corporation that more resembles Wal-Mart than the small town corner congregation, megachurches desire more than anything else to keep growing. Lanham reports that in the 1970s, one megachurch pastor named Bill Hybels became the first pastor to employ market research to figure out how to grow more effectively by “knowing” their demographic. Since Hybels’s success, distinguishing their demographic has been priority #1 for the pastor-preneur and preachers like Osteen have been getting degrees in marketing or broadcasting rather than theology ever since. And as a result of all this research, the megachurch has cultivated a theology that gives their demographic what it wants most.

As social critic and communications theorist Neil Postman makes this all too clear in his extremely popular study Amusing Ourselves to Death, “There is no great religious leader… who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is ‘user friendly.’ It is too easy to turn off.” In other words, the megachurch pastor/televangelist ends up walking on eggshells so as to shatter their large congregational numbers and continue to grow. They must then avoid “scary religious symbols” like the Cross and refrain from “fire and brimstone” language and remain nondenominational.

Like most televangelists, Warren supposedly has a seeker sensitive style of preaching designed to be general enough not to offend. Thus many stay clear of things like hell fire and eternal damnation and even social problems (as explained above) since anything difficult could alienate the audience; Warren does not, however, ignore such problems and often talks about hell. They use ads and gimmicks to fill up the seats while often times ignoring social issues posing the greatest problems to the global since existence. Such televangelists then pull the old “bait-and-switch” forcing things like antigay and antiabortion agendas that Lanham implies Warren does with the lot of them, something little evidence is given to support.

Evangelicals, to support their antigay stuff as well as anything else they claim, partake in what is commonly referred to as “picking-and-choosing” which Bible passages suite their needs and use that as evidence to denounce this or empower that. Skillfully employing this practice, in the late 1970s, pro-business republican became synonymous with evangelical because of this. For example, many evangelicals will say “The Bible says ‘an eye for an eye’” while ignoring “Thou shall not kill” which they use to support the death penalty but then they will quickly quote that particular commandment in protest of abortion rights.

To the sinner, Lanham then introduces the most powerful evangelicals in what is and evangelical role call that identifies them, says what they believe, and what kind of influence they have politically. Some of those discussed: Philip Anschutz (the multibillionaire owner of Walden Media that is responsible for the “Narnia movies”, primary share holder of Regal Entertainment, named the nations “greediest executive” by Fortune magazine), Michael Gerson (nicknamed the scribe by W, became a Bush policy advisor in 2005, convinced Bush it was a good idea to call the war on terror a crusade, coined the phrase “axis of evil”, and said “Just because some don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s a plot or a secret” when responding to allegations of Bush using religious code words in his speeches which is so stupid it practically drools), Jim Bakker (exposed as a phony and did time for fraud and conspiracy, opened a Christian theme park called Heritage USA, married Tammy Faye), the infamous Pat Robertson (good God where to begin, the 700Club host, ran for president, is totally insane, will be remembered as the most important evangelical leader of our time, said that homosexuals “want to come into our churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the faces of ministers”, God help us), Billy Graham (most popular evangelical preacher ever who has advised every president since Eisenhower, pretty inclusive as far as he goes, thought Hillary would make a good president) and son Franklin Graham (his inept piss and vinegar son who is also a minister), Jerry Falwell (the famous fucking fat bastard who started Liberty University and pretty much hated everybody, God smote him down a year ago so we wouldn’t have to hear anymore shit about gay kids’ shows or stuff like after 9/11 when he said “ I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'”[5]), Luis Cortez (idiot Hispanic televangelist who said “this is what I tell politicians… you want an endorsement? Give us a check, and you can take a picture of us accepting it”), Paul Crouch (a gay bashing evangelical who turns out to be, you guessed it, gay), Benny Hinn (exclusively in ministry for the money), T.D. Jakes (supposedly apolitical minister of the largest black megachurch in the U.S. who was the keynote speaker at Bush’s National Day of Prayer), Joyce Meyer (Tammy Faye wannabe televangelist who actually said—I shit you not—“make your checks payable to Joyce Meyer Ministries/Life in the Word. And million is spelled M-I-L-L-I-O-N”), Jay Sekulow (Jew for Jesus who heads the conservative answer to the ACLU—the American Center for Law and Justice), Ralph Reed (oh this asshole is going to hell), and Jimmy Swaggart (televangelist who had the infamous breakdown on television after getting his rocks off with a prostitute and said “if one [a gay man] ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died”).

5. Ted Haggard/Evangelical Vatican City
Oh my Lord. Unfortunately, the Sinner’s Guide was published a couple of years before the incredible downfall of Ted “the Duke of” Haggard; but still, Lanham manages to make the Duke look like the absurdity that we now know he has been all along as he turns to this evangelical and what has been termed “the Evangelical Vatican City” of Colorado Springs, CO. The facts about Haggard, which one would have to hope are outdated since he has proved to be a hypocrite in his antigay ramblings after getting forcibly tossed out of the closet by his long time male escort for his deep (and I do mean deep) affinity for purchasing hot man-on-man-meth-enhanced-pillow-biting action breaking at least two federal laws as well as numerous unwritten evangelical ones, is that he talks to W every Monday giving him an unknown amount of influence on legislation and that he really, really hates gays. Jimmy Kimmel (of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live) seems to have hit the nail on the head when said “This is a good rule for life: Look for whoever is the most against anything and you can almost guarantee they are that something they are against. The guy who devotes his life to fighting gay rights is gay. The guy working to pass the laws against child pornography is sending sex messages to teenage interns.” The point of this is pretty clear and often tends to be true: guys like Haggard who appear way too opposed to any issue or lifestyle to be human possible must be treated suspiciously and often have those overtly overcompensation type reasons for being so anti anything.

It is difficult here not to relate any Haggard self hating gay jokes since he is such an asshole and has been so vocal about the sinfulness of homosexuality. I mean, what kind of a person hates what he is so much that he would make the number one group that he puts all his energy into depriving of supposedly God given rights is actually the group he secretly identifies with and finds himself a part of. People really thought he hated gays, and following his bigoted rants, the people who listened to him and had misguided trust in what he was saying as being true, he brought others into his hateful nook and cranny. He put true meaning into a fight that is all about flagrant injury to fellow human beings. The message he spread is toxic and hurtful and noxious. And for all his maniacal moralizing, he couldn’t live up to his own code of heterosexual conduct. Oh fuck it. The Sunday after Haggard was caught paying a gay male prostitute for sex, his congregation, clearly shocked, wanted an explanation because he had always been such an outspoken critic of gay matrimony. In defense, Haggard exclaimed “Hey! It’s not like I married the guy!”[6] With stuff like this, Haggard has no doubt learned that when you claim moral high ground and you fuck up by exposing yourself for what you truly are, you are going to be portrayed as idiotic, your supporters irrational, your denials comical, your apologies ludicrous, as you are mocked and humiliated and parodied seemingly without end with your entire outraged oration unmasked as the sanctimonious bullshit that it has always been. Such was the case with “the Horrible Haggard” and so it will always be; as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker can verify, once that holy-than-thou persona is invalidated, there is no relegitimating that fragile trust that their transgressions have shattered. Mass media giveth, mass media taketh away.

Haggard, who implores his evangelical listeners to not do anything “weird”, sure as hell shot that to shit. Forgetting all the stuff I just mentioned which honestly doesn’t really have much to do with this review, pretty much all we have seen of Haggard is him doing something weird. For example, Lanham, illustrating a Haggard oddity, sites the reverend’s appearance on Dateline when he Barbara Walters she was going to Hell on national television, bitched about some fictitious liberal tyranny while being obvious about his goal to influence political legislation, and also swore that “God is not a peaceful God” numerous times evidently confusing Jesus with Kali from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or something (plus stuff I am not even going to get into about his outdated fanatical support of Trickle Down Economics which makes me think “What?”).

In this chapter detailing Haggard’s antics, Lanham also recounts his journey to the city Colorado Springs nicknamed “the Evangelical Vatican” where Haggard and Dobson call home base. In your reviewer’s opinion, at no time is Lanham more on point or more hilarious as he is when relating this pilgrimage to the evangelical headquarters which sounds just awful, I mean just awful, as a place to live. The pamphlets passed out by one Christian organization asks it’s barer to ponder the question “If you were to die today, do you know where you’d spend eternity?” and Lanham pleads to God that it won’t be Colorado Springs. Their itinerary here should clue you in (128-132):

Evil Shenanigans in Colorado Springs: Lanham and his group of godless pagans walk the mean streets of CS where they are advised by evangelical well-wishers to avoid downtown CS and the neighboring town Manitou like the plague since both are apparently filled with “sex fiends, drunks, and drug addicts,” which they took as an endorsement after too much megachurch hours logged. This promising news, however, was ill-advised as their “vodka-paved tour” of downtown was met be more evangelizing. After leaving a dance club with a frat-boy-and-date-rape theme, Lanham and crew dump into “Jesus fiends” instead of the elusive sex ones that no one can ever seem to find. Bummer. They then reluctantly accepted some church literature which they might as well have been saying “here, you throw this away” but the lack of sex starved chicks with drugs were no where to be seen.

Tour of Focus on the Family: Visiting the home of the Pope, Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Lanham describes the building’s contemporary architecture as a hybrid with the theme being a blend of an “elegant Citibank Corporate office” that meets Six Flags in one unholy marriage of indecent tastes; evidently, the place feels more like a mall than anything else—it has its own bookstore with a book titled (no kidding) Really Bad Girls of the Bible, a movie theater playing continuous loops of W’s greatest moments (?), and a three-story children’s slide strategically positioned (this is not bullshit as it turns out) next to the buildings antiabortion and antigay initiatives. The art that hangs from the walls throughout is really just kitsch by this guy G. Harvey described by some as “Norman Rockwell meets Hallmark” and looks to me like that repellent hotel-art-type that is just so bad and stupid it actually makes your head hurt you think about how shitty it is so much it is so bad and stupid. An example of one titled Early Boston Market that reminds me of something from the work of Pam in The Office that only Michael would love is incredibly bad. Other Harvey paintings have names like Genteel Nation and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that are just as bad and insipid as this one. They are just bad. Anyway, the tour’s apex comes after giving the FF history stuff, is visit to the recording studio found right there on the compound. We are told that plenty of shitty little name approriations are deployed for names of different areas of the compound like the “Chapelteria,” where visitors socialize, pray, and feast on the stuff evangelicals eat. In this auspicious room, there is a hole that is visible for all to see that eventually leads to a bullet that stands a reminder of the time a guy came in to the FF Center and went postal: taking hostages and what have you.

Debriefing: Apparently, Dobson’s people run a paranoid ship as the group was stopped before they were able to slither away by his PR manager, one Gwen Stein (sounds awfully Jewish to me Pope Dobson), when she was notified, presumably by the Holy Spirit, that there were reports in their midst. After being questioned about the “perspective” of his research, he ballsidly asks for an interview with good old JD. Piss-and-vinegar not withstanding, the PR lady tells him that Dobson “chooses to do the press that best promotes the beliefs of his ministry.” So, unfortunately, until he gets caught with his dick in some guys ass or does something otherwise detrimental to his image, he is going to come out looking like he doesn’t have a direct pipeline to Hell.

Getting the Fuck Out of Dodge: On their way out the door, after receiving the standard “God bless you”—which, like “aloha,” means hello and good-bye in Christianese—the group was approached by some old broad on their tour who was probably like every crazy old lady you saw talking about their screwed up theology of retribution and God’s Will taking one of her kid’s life because it was his plan to make her stronger and they should elect Benny Hinn President and only God knows what else that you ever saw. Turns out, she too wanted to know what perspective their book was going to take. They responded with vagary, telling her it was going to be “comprehensive.” This wasn’t the correct answer.
Flailing about wildly, she barks that “There is only one perspective. Christian and not Christian,” and then she probably, I don’t know, ascending into heaven or something. Or more likely, as indicated by the flailing, she was possessed.

6. Tim LaHaye/2nd Coming of Christ
Turning his sinning stare to the incredibly shitty evangelical writer Tim LaHaye, who has crapped on our literary tastes with the apocalyptic Left Behind series which in the little I have viddied, am able to surmise that the man has constructed a large body of work that proves little more than an encyclopedic example on how not to write an English sentence. In this blasphemy, LaHaye tells of the rise of the Antichrist and the resulting Rapture where fundamentalist Christians are magically taken up to Heaven via Tinkerbelle Jesus who sprinkles pixy dust on those who buy, read, and believe this absurd reading of the opinions of some guy.

Despite his incessant literary output that is equivalent to me putting shit to paper just after defecation and insanity, he unfortunately found the time to architect the Moral Majority with other notable shit-for-brains and founded the political group Council for National Policy attempting to abolish the separation of church and state. He doesn’t think that women should work but rather should be a good Christian wife and cook him dinner or whatever. However, LaHaye doesn’t really have his wife in check like he should since she heads a Christian antifeminist movement that is working to set women back to the dark ages. Maybe he should take her to the back porch overlooking the plantation, fetch a good switch for spanking, and teach her a lesson. But I am sure that she assures him that once her mission is complete and woman are once again property without any of those pesky civil liberties, she will gladly go back to the kitchen and shut her fucking mouth once and for all. While I would normally whole-heartedly support anything that would get LaHaye’s cum dumpster to just shut the fuck up, I believe that women are more than just subhuman. The scariest and hardest book to get out of your head written by LaHaye, so terrifying that once read (so I am told) is like there haunting you for all time, happens to be coauthored by this bitch-from-hell wife of his Beverly. The book, (Why Lord?) is titled The Act of Marriage and is a self-help guide (The horror! The horror!) of the couple’s formula to sexual (GOD NO!!! NO!!!) satisfaction which is more than enough to make anyone throw up. I can think of no better advise given by JC in light of this than “tear out [your eye] and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29).

Plus, LaHaye has got to be clinically paranoid; he pretty much hates everybody and says enough hateful things to offend us all. Don’t fool yourself just because you believe in this mythical, non-biblically Rapture; he hates you too. Some of the groups LaHaye’s tirades alienate include homosexuals (no shocker there), Jews, Muslims (surprise surprise), the wicked (code for liberals), women who work, Catholics, and non-fundamentalist evangelicals. Fuck it, the man is insane. Yet some believe his work to be gospel (It is unclear to me how literally you should take this last statement of mine [that people take this as gospel—a.k.a. good news—truth, not to be confused with I-don’t-know-how-factual-you-should-consider-the-Left-Behind-books-to-be since it is antireal and antichristian and wrong] which itself scares the hell out of me [again not the Rapture because I see no evidence to suggest that Jesus ever even remotely referred to this event] to even think about).

So where does he (or anyone for that matter) come up with all this Rapture shit? Uh… the Scofield Reference Bible, maybe, fun fact/reality check LaHaye, no King James Version or New Revised Standard Version ever once mentions the Rapture. That’s right, it’s not even in the Bible, this Rapture thing. So by fundamentalist logic, wouldn’t that mean if you believe in Rapture you are going to Hell to burn with Gandhi and Mohammed? And by the way, Calvin and Luther would be appalled.

7. Paul Weyirch
LaHaye’s homey is up next for Lanham to take down a peg or two. But with the wheelchair bound Paul Weyirch, that is damn near impossible to do since this man’s machine half is pretty solid. Like most evangelicals who support W and those conservative fuckers in power, Weyirch believes there is a vast liberal conspiracy out to get him headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton who is trying desperately to run shit (coming up is what I think is the real reason Hillary want just fucking concede already like everyone wants her to) so she can push Weyirch down the stairs of Capital Hill to watch him tumble comically on his face a la Walter style in The Big Lebowski, which after learning about this evangelical Dr. Strangelove, actually sounds pretty sweet. But instead of this happen, fulfilling what has become my number one desire since making it up twenty seconds ago, Weyirch counters by creating a rightwing conspiracy which is sort of factually discussed by Lanham.

Facts about Weyirch are he is Catholic but still has love for the Protestants who dissed his beloved RCC beginning with Luther and continuing to this day, he was integral (along with LaHaye) in founding the CNP, created the Religious Right, and believes that God is a republican. Fuck this guy. I can’t even talk about this asshole without getting all worked up and pissed off so just take my word for it that Lanham lays it on thick with his Weyirch critique that was more than deserved (the guy has ties to the Nazi Party for fuck’s sake).

8. Rob Bell/Emerging Church

This quasi-liberal sure as hell gets one thing right on the money—Christian rock is an abomination. He wants to make the church relevant again and he wants to do it with crappy gimmicks or messages of hate. He goes so far as to say that Focus on the Family is toxic to the Christian message and that is tragic; he is batting two-for-two here. The church should be countercultural not an extension of the mainstream. There shouldn’t be distinction, in Bell’s theology, between the religious and the secular in ways that label one and the other bad—salvation means universal harmony. I believe, however, above all else, Bell wants to be “hip” which is probably the reason why he went on record for a guy who wrote a book called The Hipster Handbook. Bell isn’t alone out there, there are others who are doing the Christian Left thing like Jim Wallis and apparently BioDome star Billy Baldwin—Good Lord. But doesn’t Baldwin’s skateboard ministry seem pretty gimmicky? And for that matter, doesn’t all of Bell’s hey-look-at-me-being-cool stuff seem pretty gimmicky? Lahan doesn’t go into the irony about this, which is legion, instead focusing on Bell’s conservative stance regarding homosexuals since he isn’t as forward thinking enough to think gay-marriage is an acceptable institution. Too bad, until this stuff is brought to light, Bell is batting a thousand. I guess he is just better than the alternative.

Speaking of which, did you know there are such things as evangelical videogames, comic books with the hero (I shit you not) Bibleman, and Bible-zines with questions on their covers reminiscent of Cosmo with a Jesus flair like “Top 10 Ways to Please Your God!” which makes me just want to throw up. That is just awful. I mean awful. Well now you know I guess.

Postscript/Mark Driscoll/Evangelical Quiz and Dictionary
But the craziness doesn’t stop there, there is now a newer rightwing church bringing youths over to the dark side in a sort of back lashing answer to the Emerging Movement. This guy Mark Driscoll, who is universally hated among my div school friends, is at the forefront of this shit. He claims to hate the term fundamentalist and thinks fundamentalists of any sort are dangerous but ends up being one when you come down to it since he believes in the inerrancy of the Bible. FYI, another guy in this camp is the guy who brought you the Dominos Oreo Dessert Pizza Mustache, owner of Dominos, and founder of Ava Maria University Tom Monaghan. Yeah, what a guy.

My Assessment

Although Lanham does seem to know his Bible thumping shit specks and is for the most part pretty funny, there are two and a half complaints I have with the book none of which are theologically or politically based. The first of these complaints is the one that only gets a half complaint status and it has to do with jokes that never take off the ground or explode midway through their run in a way that makes the reader cringe. While many of the book’s jokes are life-out-loud funny, the ratio of side splitters to totally bombs are just about 1:1. (At first I tried to keep track of duds like “Pass the sweet-‘n’-sour sauce. These McOsteen Nuggets is Yum-Mee,” when Lanham satirizes the franchising of megachurches, but they eventually became so frequent that it seemed like a huge waste of time to even bother.) But, as we all know, they can’t all be winners. The second complaint is the artwork that literally liters pages and looks something like a cross between Mad Magazine and shopping mall airbrushed tee-shirts. One of the only things I find creepier than rightwing evangelicals would be caricatures that resemble the ones people try to sell of Tupac holding hands with Christ and Scarface people always try to sell you on the street of any big city. Needless to say, I could have done without the visuals. But the most annoying thing about the book were the two cents thrown in by the “Cast” consisting of everyday evangelicals and one “Devil Rocker” named Ronnie James Dio who was apparently in Black Sabbath with Ozzy, and like the five “true to God” evangelicals, offers little insight that supports any of the claims Lanham makes in Sinner’s Guide. These “so whats” as I call them were basically the equivalent to popups that are one of the few things pretty much universally agreed upon as a serious pain in the ass.

Those things aside, I did find the book pretty helpful in teaching the laymen about this fringe group that has hijacked national policy and station airtime. As a divinity student writing a research paper on rightwing televangelists discussed in great detail in the book, I found most of the facts presented in it to be accurate if only a bit out of context. His sources are surprisingly good and he at times is extremely entertaining. If you can stomach the cheesiness of it, there is a great deal to learn from this book and from the website that furthers the study of this radically bizarre theocracy advocating religious minority.

[1] All of whom are extremely rich and accustomed to that lifestyle I want to point out.
[2] Don’t get me started.
[3] Which it should have been grammatically and referentially and makes the most since one would sort of think.
[4] Unless you are a fundamentalist Christian in which case that would be the Bible.
[5] For the entire Falwell and Robertson post 9/11 insanity, visit http://www.commondreams.org/news2001/0917-03.htm

[6] As a public figure made to look ridiculous by his own doing, the late night talk shows are true to form in exploiting Haggard’s ridiculous. If you are interested, here are some of the better shots taken by late night pundits.
Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show jests “Haggard, president of the 30 million member National Association of Evangelicals, resigned his post this weekend after a three-year relationship with a gay hooker. And he also used and purchased crystal meth. Because if you're the head of a gay-hating organization and you're having a gay affair, why not go nuts?” and “Haggard was exposed by a male escort named Mike Jones, who said he was troubled by the hypocrisy of Haggard's public support for a Colorado initiative to ban same-sex marriage. And you know you're in trouble when you've ceded the moral high ground to a drug-dealing prostitute.”
The unfairly (in my opinion anyway) treated network television martyr and notorious liberal host of HBO’s Real Time, Bill Maher tells his audience that Haggard “resigned because a gay male prostitute said that he and the reverend had been having lots of meth amphetamine-fueled sex. Now the reverend did the Christian thing earlier this week and denied it. Now he says, ‘Okay, I did hire a gay male prostitute, but only for a massage.’ To which Mark Foley* said, ‘I’m even calling this one bullshit.”
A slew of quips from NBC’s Tonight Show host Jay Leno: “Haggard released a statement saying he's a deceiver and a liar. See to me, I think it's way too soon to announce you're going into politics”, “Haggard ... has compared his gay sex scandal to John Kerry's botching of a joke last week. You think they're the same? To be fair, they both involved a slip of the tongue”, “Haggard, who has close ties to the Bush administration, has resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after a gay male hooker said he had a three-year paid relationship with him. In fact, this is such a huge crisis for Republicans they are now offering John Kerry $1 million to tell another joke,” and “They say (Haggard) used church funds to pay for the male prostitute. That's like robbing Paul to pay for Peter.”
But, as has been the case circa October 2005, the most damning and critical comments came from Stephen Colbert as a satirical “defense” saying “Do you know how stressful running a megachurch is? It is mega-stressful. And he is supposed to get a massage from a woman? Any kinesiologist will tell you big muscular men get deep into your tissues, women don’t have the strength, getting a massage from a guy doesn’t make him gay, it makes him an educated consumer. Men know what men like. And as for the meth, I buy that stuff all the time and toss it out. To get it off the street and protect the kids.” I could literally go on days.

* This reference and the one made by Jimmy Kimmel has to do with the former U.S. Republican Congressman from Florida Mark Foley, who was one of the foremost opponents of child pornography serving as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. An all-round, world-class fuckhead, in 2006, Foley was accused of sending email and text messages to a former underage male Congressional page asking his for his age and photos. Freaking the hell out of the kid, he forwarded the emails to congressional staffers. The staffers proved useless as congressional staffers are wont to be and claimed they were innocent and Foley’s only crime was being “too friendly and too engaging” with the boy. Way to blame the victim there. The page remained unconvinced of Foley’s seraphicism forwarding yet another email during Hurricane Katrina asking “how are you weathering the hurricane…are you safe?” Innocent, sure, but then the email immediately takes the creepy turn telling him to “send [him] an email pic of you [sic] as well.” Responding as many an angsty teen would, the page replied by typing the word “sick” five or six times to get the old pederast off his youthful back. When the allegations went public, Foley claimed that his office has a practice keeping a photograph on file of pages who desire recommendations, which what the hell is that, but when another page came forward with more sexually explicit Foley requests, he was thoroughly fucked and in that sort rock-and-a-hard-place situation, it is either admitting to perversion/resignation or swallowing a bullet (if not both). So Foley is both an idiot and a terrible liar among other things.

You Might Wanna Just Stay Away from the Zohan

Oh this movie is RIDICULOUS. The worst movie I’ve seen in years, this “film” is an affront to all that is descent and holy (literally) in a way that is an achievement in its ability to embarrass its audience and make Adam Sadler look desperate for our laughs and our money. Having paid $9.50 for this waste of film, there is no way to explain the actual shitiness that is You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. All I can say is You Just Don’t. You Just Don’t.

This movie represents an absolute first for me. I have walked out on a number of movies—The Fifth Element, Superstar, FeardotCom—and I demanded my money back after finishing a few films—Boys and Girls for piss poor quality (unsuccessful), The Cable Guy for a kid, apparently, breaking in to the projection booth and messing with the projection system for part of the movie (successful), and Ocean’s Eleven for a screaming kid and getting hit with a pickle I am told was unrelated to the kid (unsuccessful), but I have never both walked out on a film and then demanded my duckets back until Sandler’s new film.

Not only was the film so painfully asinine and its plot ludicrous, it manages to be extremely culturally insensitive—making light of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, akin, in this reviewer’s opinion, to turning The Diary of Anne Frank into a comedy or apartheid into a Broadway musical—, sexist (as my female-movie-going companion complained), and, umm, racist, not only is it anti-Arab, it also manages to be anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic to boot. The film feeds off stereotypes on both sides implying that all Palestinians (at least in the case of all the ones depicted in this film) are terrorists and that that all Israelis are basically Euro-trash. Holy shit.

While I won’t even go into my female companion’s tirade on the way the Zohan treated women (his way of showing any sort of gratitude was with sexual favors in the fashion made famous by dogs world over) suffice it to say, was involved and correct in its viciousness. Just take my word for it, it was one of outrage.

I understand that Sandler made the conflict absurd because he feels the conflict is inherently absurd to begin with. While I do agree that both sides are pretty much insane and the U.S.’s blind support of Israel equally crazy, Sandler’s use of self-reflexive irony and sarcasm are symptoms of that disease furthering what makes them absurd from the get go. It takes a very serious issue that this reviewer would argue is beyond parody (who thinks, for instance, riding a bus in Israel could ever be a funny thing?) and treats it the same way comedies would the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry.

Upon leaving this show (which cannot with a straight face likened to anything remotely cinematic—lets call it what it is, it's a waste of film). For the first time ever, I left the theater and got my money back. It was that bad. This reviewer could not financially support such a disgrace. Shame on Adam Sandler and shame on Happy Madison Productions. This was beyond unentertaining. It was anti-entertaining. Don’t even encourage the bastards.

McShakespeare: Something’s Rotten in the State of Pennsylvania

Billy Morrissette’s Scotland, PA transforms Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, into a dark comedy set in the 1970s yet maintains many important Shakespearean themes at the film’s core. Unlike film versions which convert social structures from the original Shakespearian settings into more recent times, Scotland, PA is set in a working class town in Pennsylvania. As the film makes clear, greed and lust can transcend any class. Duncan, the blue-collar king of the town, owning a lucrative donut shop humorously titled Duncan’s Donuts which has become the towns most popular diner. Underappreciated Joe Macbeth, who goes by Mac alongside his wife Pat, work for the donut mogul in a dead end job that pays little and gets no respect. Mac remains behind the grill, making suggestions to Duncan like serving little chunks of chicken with dipping sauces that go unheard. However after informing his boss that the manager has been stealing from the establishment and breaking up a fight between two groups of customers, Mac becomes a hero. Three hippies then tell Mac he is unhappy and can do better for his wife which sets into motion the acts that turn Scotland upside down. Mac and Pat become driven by greed and decide to seize the restaurant and sit atop the burger thrown. Their plan, however, does not go down as smoothly as a Mcshake and their lust for power and guilt bring about their fall from the top.

One of the themes from Macbeth which resonates the strongest in the film is Lady Macbeth and Pat’s ambition for success which will stop at nothing until their husbands reign supreme without any potential threats to take away their power. In the play, Lady Macbeth is aware of her husband’s desire for power but knows he is not prompted to commit heinous acts. Unlike her husband, Lady Macbeth pursues her aspirations with no regard for the consequences but is less able to deal with the effects of their evil deeds. Pat sees her husband in a similar way: she views him as a man who longs for power but is “not man enough” to obtain them, yet, to her, he is someone she can manipulate to get the things that she wants. She advises Mac to be strong but she is incapable of handling her husband’s growing body count. From the beginning of the film Pat criticizes Mac for not showing more ambition and not standing up for her. Being unhappy with the way life is going, she is bored with Mac and their low paying jobs. When Duncan shows them the blueprint for the world’s first drive through, Pat seizes her opportunity to gain wealth and power. Upon leaving Duncan’s, she decides Mac must murder Duncan in order to get ahead, telling her husband, “We have to aim higher… I am the fucking assistant manager’s wife… We aren’t bad people, just underachievers making up for lost time. Don’t you think you deserve it?” In this scene, Pat skillfully exhibits her disdain for their current lifestyle saying they need better goals, while belittling Mac and justifying to him the act she wants him to commit. She believes that they are simply coming to their senses, taking what she believes to be up for grabs, and begins devising a plan. Suggesting they make it look like a robbery and pin it on a homeless man, she gets Mac to agree to her plan since neither believes they will get caught. Ultimately, however, the burden becomes too great and she loses her once guilt-free mind.

Before she commits suicide the roles in the Macbeths relationship are reversed with Mac taking the initiative while Pat is scared of taking further action. Mac tries to console her, saying “everything will be ok” because the hippies have told him that he has nothing to fear. Now Mac will stop at nothing to keep his power while Pat just wants the bloodshed to stop. She sees their reign coming to an end. The murder and mayhem no longer seem worth the wealth and status that is quickly coming to an end. Mac, on the other hand, feels immortal, he believes nothing can harm him and he can easily extinguish all the threats to power that come his way. This is only a false sense of security, however, because there is nothing Mac can do to “get to the source of the problem”. In other words, he cannot undue what has been done, but Mac interprets the warning differently believing the source to be Macduff. In a comical moment, the film plays on the course of action Macbeth takes in the play when a male hippy suggests he should kill Macduff’s entire family. Responding to this thought, the other male hippy states “yeah, that would have only worked like a thousand years ago”. This seems to be in response to when the play is set, which illustrates the time gap between the film and the play. Killing a detective’s family does not seem to be a good idea to the modern viewer and gets a laugh at how inappropriate it seems in this context.

In an attempt to make the film more humorous and appeal to the indie genre, the three witches who inspire Macbeth to murder Duncan and to order the death of Banquo are replaced by three hippies. Like the witches, the hippies place in the cosmos remains a mystery. Further more, both hippies and witches have been marginalized, never totally accepted into their respected societies. Instead of the storms that accompany the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, symbolizing the lack of order that rules the day, the carnival atmosphere in Scotland, PA does a good job illustrating the same concept. When Mac comes across this trio, he is usually drunk giving the viewer the impression that he could be imagining the whole scenario. Unlike the play, only Mac sees these figures; Banquo does not accompany him in the telling of his fortune, accomplished with the help of a magic eight ball. The Carnivalesque setting, where the three hippies speak to Mac is speckled with star like lights and a merry-go-round spins in the center of a room. In this framework, from the first time one sees Mac speaking with the counter culture prophets, it is apparent that they do not exist in the world. These characters are not bound by the rules of science or social norms; instead they appear and disappear when they please, make themselves visible only to Mac, predict the future, and speak in riddles. In these ways the hippies parallel the witches in Macbeth who come as quickly as they go and take delight in using their premonitions to destroy the lives of others.

Pat’s hand is not covered in the blood of Duncan, but giving the film a modern twist, her hand catches a grease splatter when Duncan goes head first into the fryer, giving her a visible burn, in arguably Morrissette’s most ingenious move. Rather than washing the brand, as Lady Macbeth tries to clean her blood-soaked hands in the play, Pat constantly applies burn ointment to her sore even after it heals. Three scenes in the film show Pat’s progression from slight paranoia to full-blown madness as her conscience proves overwhelming. The first indication that Pat is losing it comes when Pat runs out of skin cream and is asked who the tubes are for by the pharmacist and his assistant. Pat tells them they are sweet for pretending not to notice the mark she describes as “disgusting”. Having seen a quarter sized burn just after the murder of Duncan, the audience begins to question the mental state of Pat. Obviously fixated on the burn, thinking it draws attention to her, Pat is being consumed by her paranoia. Later, when she again attempts to buy more salve, insisting on “the bigger tubes,” the audience sees her hand without any bandages for the first time since Duncan’s funeral and there is not even a scar where her hand had once been scalded. Losing the strength and confidence she once possessed, Pat now finds herself terrified of the future and gives up on the idea of getting away scot-free, so to speak. She eventually becomes so overtaken by guilt and the painful reminder only she can see on her hand, she decides to remove the sore by chopping her own hand off. By letting her extreme paranoia dictate her actions, Pat goes to drastic measures in order to alleviate her conscience, an act that kills her similar to Lady Macbeth’s suicide due to her guilt.

Mac, like Shakespeare’s character Macbeth, sees many threats to his status, including his best friend and confidant, Banquo; the son of Duncan, Malcolm; and the homicide detective on the case, Macduff. All three of these characters develop growing suspicions about Macbeth’s quick rise to power. Initially, Macduff believes Malcolm to be behind his father’s death because he has fled the state and had never wanted to work in his father’s restaurant. This is similar to the people suspecting Malcolm in the play when he traveled to England and when he led on that he was not interested in being king saying he would be a worse ruler than Macbeth. Banquo, however, suspects Mac and Pat from almost the beginning, questioning the two about things he felt were “strange.” Mac recognizes Banquo as a potential hazard, indicating to the audience that Banquo will soon meet his demise since the couple cannot afford to leave any loose ends.

Another scene that corresponds to the Shakespeare tragedy comes from this problem after Mac kills Banquo. After the murder, Mac has a press conference to promote his restaurant which is doing very well. At this meeting, Mac begins to deliver a speech to the cameras and awaiting crowd, which includes Macduff and Malcolm among others. In this scene Mac sees Banquo’s ghost and begins speaking to it as Macbeth spoke to the spirit at a banquet. Everyone in the town now sees that Mac is beginning to go mad so Pat, quick to react, makes excuses for her husband’s odd behavior. Illustrating the effects of Mac’s guilty conscious weighing down on him, the scene shows that things are only getting worse for the couple as the death toll escalates. It soon becomes apparent that to stay in power the couple can never cease their murderous ways. This point is driven home at the end of the film when Mac is trying to kill Macduff and the threat forces Mac to realize the truth of his situation: there will always be challenges to his power and he will never be able to rest easy. After Macduff, Mac will have to kill Duncan’s two sons, Malcolm and Donald, then there will be more dangers to his prosperity and the murdering will never stop until Mac is dead, which comes at the hands of Macduff.

At no point in the film does Morrissette play with Shakespeare’s dialogue. The film could have been much stronger if he had, for example, used phrases like “there is something rotten in the state of Pennsylvania.” While this is a corny attempt, there are times when the movie begs for some of the original Shakespearian dialogue with a modern twist. In an interview Morrissette confesses that the film appeals more to those that have worked in a fast-food drive thru than a Shakespearian looking for the drama of the Globe Theater. In that way Scotland, PA and Macbeth work analogously to other films that are based on books from a different time period like Ten Things I Hate About You being based on The Taming of the Shrew, Oh Brother Where Art Thou based on the Odyssey, and Clueless finding its basis in Jane Austen’s Emma. The dialogue and setting are different but the plot remains more or less the same. For Scotland, PA, the foundation still remains murder, unchecked desire, and guilt that are so fundamental to Macbeth, but the modern twists and language are simply added for comedy.

Sor Juana's Poetry and Prose

When studying Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz—her poems, letters, autobiographical stuff, biographies written about her, the Penguin edition’s introduction to her body of work, etc.—it becomes pretty clear that while spiritual in nature, her real identity is that of a scholar.

Sor Juana’s “Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” which appears in letter form, is apparently written with the intention that Sor Filotea would not be the only person to read the work but instead is written with an awareness that it would circulate throughout the Catholic community, at least in New Spain (present day Mexico) in any case. In this regard SJ seems to be Keats-esque in that when she pens a letter to an acquaintance, here being an acquaintance whom she never meets for interesting reasons (see below), its contents become well known indeed. The entire work is predicated on an important point that cannot be overlooked which she makes clear by mentioning it numerous times throughout the text. The fact is, SJ never really intends for the original letter that prompts Sor Filotea’s letter that “Response” depends on to circulate as widely as it does since she (1) did not herself have it published and (2) not intended for a wide circulation it lacks the necessary arguments and support for those arguments and fact checking that her exposé the “Response” has in plenty.

Throughout these little revelations of fact, she reflects on the question of who would do such a thing as publish a letter without the author’s permission. This is where things get pretty interesting in a behind-the-scenes sort of way. “Response” is a letter that is a response to the Athenagoric Letter which is a response to another letter that she had written earlier. SJ’s original letter had been mysteriously published by one Don Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz y Sahagun, the Bishop of Puebla, who, as the introduction suggests, probably penned the AL himself under the Sor Filotea pseudonym.

Arguably, SJ’ s knowledge of the letter’s true author is clear in that she goes way beyond what would normally seem excessive in terms of flattery into a kind of meta-flattery which comes off as ironic if not patronizing. Opening her letter with overemphasis on the “loving letter” and her “appreciation” of that letter in which its author openly tells her that her poet pursuits are frivolous and that her time should be spent studying theology seems a bit over the top. Even in its body the constant humility (at times) descends into a holy-than-thou-turn-the-other-cheekiness yet these instances, which do admittedly develop into an effective form of deceptive mockery, point to self-protection. After awhile, the apologies and the unworthinesses start to look like hidden contempt.

At times in “Response”, SJ basically all but screams she does not want to write anymore like a John Barth Lost in the Funhouse character who would just as soon give up the task of writing down the events that transpire as, well, weave through the obstacles that impede them.[1] However, though she would like to discontinue the writing of letters, specifically this letter, the impulse to go on does not relinquish itself because it has been, she claims, placed there by God.[2]

A student at the age of three, SJ begins to experience the inequalities and inferior status that her sex requires her in New Spain and by the Catholic Church. SJ’ s status as a woman (as opposed to a man) and later as a nun (as opposed to a priest) means that obstacles and societal expectations persist throughout her lifetime. The two inequalities which most affect SJ are her inability to study at the university level which only men are privileged and the authority that the male clergy have over her as a nun. She becomes so despondent due to the former that she attempts (unsuccessfully) to convince her mother to dress her as a man with fake mustache and all and send her to Mexico City to study. Despite the inability to earn some sort of an advanced degree, this unfairness actually (in some ways) ends up being a sort of blessing in disguise depending on how one looks at it.

While denying anyone the right to attend school is pretty high up on the scale of evil and/or manipulative control units that are degrading and corrupt in every sense; surprisingly, SJ finds that the impotent situation actually has some advantages. This becomes apparent when she writes “as I was not directed by preferences, nor, forced by the need to fulfill certain scholarly requirements, constrained by time in the pursuit of any subject, I found myself free to study numerous topics at the same time.”[3] When one thinks about what everybody says about contemporary universities and liberal arts colleges, that they “teach you how to think”, her little statement here in an odd way forces you to really think about what on earth this really means. It is clear that SJ, like most of us, already knew how to think, but the thing is, what they really do is teach you what to think about. They show one what has meaning and what does not and that you can choose to place it where or on what. The fact that she does not follow a set curriculum then means she can study anything she has a passionate interest in and leave the things she does not to others. However, having not attended university, she has to find what is important by trial and error which it appears she does very well. In other words, hers really is an education of a lifetime; hers is one that no amount of diplomas can illustrate and no amount of words can express.

One of the more interesting episodes described by SJ is the time limit with specific consequences she sets for learning rules of Latin grammar which relate to gender and societal expectations. The reason this is gender related is because she cuts off her hair, of which women’s are typically longer than men’s, and if she doesn't learn such and such a rule by the time it grows back, well, it gets cut off again. Thus she writes “there seemed to me no cause for a head to be adorned with hair and naked of learning.”[4] Hair today, gone tomorrow, as it were, but this statement makes an interesting point. While teaching herself Latin, she enters into the male world of scholarship because despite the fact that she makes later on in the text that she had no teacher to guide her nor can she ever become a teacher because of her female status, what she does in fact do is become a teacher: she does, after all, teach herself. In cutting off her hair she symbolically enters into the male dominated academic world while at the same time taking up a scholastic path which marks a literal entry into that world.

Another way SJ basically gives the middle finger to the way the RCC perceives the world comes as she writes about context in literature within the play “Loa for El Divino Narciso.” In said play she raises the question of whether things change when a work of fiction changes when taken from one culture to another. Taken literally, her words say that culture has little or no relevance in interpreting the text as a whole. In the examply she uses, when a piece of fiction is taken from New Mexico to Madrid; the text does not become something else but retains the same value even though the world is vastly different for the two groups. In contemporary understanding, this way of looking at literature is totally insane. Context is everything and I suppose that SJ knew this to be unquestionably true. To say otherwise would be equivalent to one saying that on 9/11/2001, the terrorists who commandeered planes and then crashed them into the World Trade Centers were bombing the same America that my grandmother with her innocent, sixth grade education, whose only method of birth control was the rhythm/pull out method is the same America as my angsty, graduate program, Generation Y with our vaginal ring BC which makes the female’s menstrual cycle optional. In other words, in the age of the meme machine, the only thing that divides our issues is that our medias have gotten more complex.

The fact that everyone in the play “[worships] the all-powerful God of Seeds!”[5] makes the point that everyone within the play has the same God when you come down to it. The Gods, great in number, worshipped by Occident, are not without their theological problems—i.e. with the “cruelest sacrifice:/ two thousand gods are satisfied,/but human blood must be the price”—but the whole practice of Zeal and Religion of forcing their beliefs upon Occident and America is imposition of the rankest sort and reminds the contemporary reading of African colonialism (AC). Like the twentieth century phenomenon of AC, when colonization came to the Americas it started out as a force to be ignored. After all, the people who lived in these lands were many and the colonizers were few. But they came in in greater numbers and their technologies had their advantages.

Because this is an allegory, the fact that Religion actually antagonizes Zeal, asking how he can “tolerate [the]… Idolatry”[6] of the people they happen upon, it is difficult to see the Church here in a positive way. Yet at the end of the drama everyone sings and is happy in way that is pretty creepy since the manipulative practices of both Religion and Zeal destroy the culture that it imposed itself on in the first place. While constantly professing peaceful resolution and mercy, Religion lets Zeal first break these people after reason fails and then after they have been conquered, Religion goes about reasoning again. After being forced to bow down to “boom-sticks” and men on horseback that are referred to as “Centaurs”[7], I suppose Religion’s original offer doesn’t seem too bad considering the alternative: death. So when Religion says to Zeal “allowing her to live/ is witness to my clemency,”[8] she is really taking part in the same kind of systematized control that Christianity has a long enduring reputation for. However, SJ is a nun and is a part of that system, which in part explains the happy ending. The fact that she is both a colonizer and among the colonized makes her both critical of Christianity and a part of it: thus she writes about the way Christianity came to the Americas negatively but stresses that its results of it have been positive.

When reading SJ in 2008, it is almost impossible not to think of the African fiction stuff—that has been so articulate and eye opening and interesting and depressing and cool since Things Fall Apart and so many more that it is probably better to just take my word for it—since many of the same issues facing the African continent since at least British imperialism have come about , are the same things that SJ writes about several hundred years before anyone even heard the phrase “blood diamonds” or anything like that. When you think about it, isn’t it the same? When cultures clash, the results are often conformity at the price of both blood and the loss of identity. SJ knows this, the Church knows this, indigenous people figure this out, and the modern reader knows this. With such a dark history it has become increasingly harder for people to rally around the Roman Catholic Church if not the entire Christian faith which has serious complications for postmodernity.

[1] If this comparison survives the final cut, considering the issue of length here, the less said the better, maybe, except it should be known that the two writers make so many references to the process of writing as a craft and are so eerily similar in the way they say it that it is hard to decipher who specifically writes what. To be frank, while reading both at the same time it’s almost impossible for me to separate the two, which maybe you have to be studying them simultaneously to see. Ok, the heck with it, here is a particularly relevant example from SJ to illustrate the similarity from page 11 when she talks about how she, being called to write in order to defend herself, has not the desire to triumph: “If, then, I err, I suffer neither blame nor discredit: I suffer no blame, as I have no obligation; no discredit, as I have no possibility of triumphing—and no one is obliged to do the impossible.” And just one random example here from Barth on page 39 of LF in his story “Autobiography” when the narrator contemplates giving up the story (thus life) and says “May the end come quietly, then, without my knowing it. In the course of any breath. In the heart of any word. This one. This one.” The point here is that in that same tone/voice, both narrators are pushed to write not by their own hands but those of other people.
[2] “Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” p. 11.
[3] “Response…,” p. 23.
[4] “Response…, p. 15.
[5] Loa for the Auto Sacramental, p. 197.
[6] Loa…, p. 201.
[7] Loa…, p. 213.
[8] Loa…, p. 215.