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What I love about this video is just how dejectedly nineties it is. Hole’s whole modus operandi if not its raison d’etre was to take traditional superficial femininity and toss it in the garbage, mussy it up, and parade it about as something corruptible. Grunge did that left and right, with everything it touched, but it was particularly notable when it came to how it treated girls and girlishness. I remember high schoolers parading about in ripped up prom dresses and poor makeup jobs and Doc Martens. It was the DIY aesthetic taken to a very particular, strange place.
But I seriously love this song. I can’t believe it came out when I was thirteen.
Americans have been misunderstanding Iran for decades now. At this point, it’s almost tradition.
True, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the people directly surrounding him are known quantities in the U.S. intelligence community. Both Mousavi and his most powerful ally during the campaign, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were key interlocutors in the Iran-Contra affair. (It was Mousavi’s office–working through a deputy named Mohsen Kangarlu–that arranged the details of the exchange of TOW missiles for the release of American hostages kidnapped by Hezbollah in Lebanon.) We also know that Mousavi was a strong supporter of Iran’s modern nuclear program. In 2007, Tehran handed over documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency showing that Mousavi approved a decision to purchase centrifuge technology from A.Q. Khan’s clandestine black market in 1987. Meanwhile, the Mousavi campaign’s head of “voter protection” is Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, who is generally credited with helping to found Hezbollah. During the Lebanon war, he lost his right hand when he opened a book on Shia holy places laden with explosives.
And yet, for all these details, we know very little about the movement that seems to have sprung up around these men almost overnight. “We think we know about Mousavi’s organization,” one intelligence official told me. “But it looks like he is linking it up with something deeper.” A U.S. diplomat who has been monitoring the situation put it this way: “We are getting plenty of reports. But we have no idea what is going on.”
This is not the first time U.S. intelligence has been caught off guard by an Iranian movement. A CIA estimate from August 1978 concluded, “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” Five months later, the world watched the first Islamic revolution.
This is the inevitable result of seeing everything in turns of power and not human experience, in terms of security and economics and not culture. The great mistake is and always has been the belief that the only people who drive history are politicians and generals. Meanwhile, the state is and always has been at the mercy of its people. It’s how God made the world; don’t forget that he gave Israel government only reluctantly.
Zompist blows the lid off of language-learning myths!
This [the idea that children learn language easily] is a popular commonplace, and one asserted by linguists as well, mostly due to Noam Chomsky’s belief in an innate ‘language organ’. (Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct popularizes Chomsky’s ideas.) Unfortunately, the evidence is against it.
Children begin learning languages at birth (infants pay attention to their parents’ voices, as opposed to random noises or even other languages), and haven’t really mastered it subtleties before the age of ten years. Indeed, we never really stop learning our language. (See David Singleton, Language Acquisition: The Age Factor, p. 56.) This isn’t exactly the sort of behavior (like foals walking an hour after birth) that we call ‘instinct’ in animals.
But at least it’s effortless, isn’t it? Well, no, as we can see when children have a choice of languages to learn. What’s found is that, to be frank, children don’t learn a language if they can get away with not learning it.
Many an immigrant family in the U.S. intends to teach their child their native language; and for the first few years it goes swimmingly– so much so that the parents worry that the child won’t learn English. Then the child goes to school, picks up English, and within a few years the worry is reversed: the child still understands his parents, but responds in English. Eventually the parents may give up, and the home language becomes English.
That saddens me, but it’s true; there’s a story of a man who decided to raise his child bilingually English and Klingon. Seriously, Klingon. Anyway, the mother would speak English to the child, and the father Klingon, and for a while there was the usual commingling, and then the strict separation, until around age three, when the child violently rejected the most famous fake language in the world. It seems he found it frustrating, because 1) nobody other than he and his father spoke it; 2) he realized his father spoke Klingon; and 3) Klingon has a vocabulary well-suited to a race of interstellar warriors but entirely inadequate for a young human child. There are no words for “teddy bear” or “Oscar the Grouch.” There are no words for his favorite foods or countless other things he’s bound to encounter in his daily life. Meanwhile, there’s a wide, wide vocabulary for things like warp drive, phasers, repulsers, disrupters rays, implements of ritual combat, and so on.
I launched this blog at the end of June, 2008, partly as a project for the Pauline Year. And now, as of yesterday, the Pauline Year is over. I’ve tried to proclaim the Gospel here to the best of my ability, but, of course, the only people who would ever actually read this are already Christian; that in mind, I’ve tried to make it a point to preach and proclaim against the excesses of our culture and propose radical faith as a way to live both wholly and holy. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in that. But here I am, ushering the second year of Saint Superman, and I know that, if nothing else, this blog has helped me inch my way closer to the Lord. I hope it’s done the same for you.
Absolutely stunning, amazing post over at First Thoughts on the death of Michael Jackson, or more properly, the insanity that is the popular response. Essentially, it maintains that the cult of celebrity represents a failure to preach the Gospel, and as such, people (who are drawn to worship and will worship anything) will find something to place at the center of their lives. For many people, it seems, that thing was Michael Jackson, or at least anybody famous enough. The veneration of Michael Jackson, then, is a failure of the Church to do a good job of knocking down idols; oh, we can rail and complain, but we have not done much to put anything better before the people deserving of worship, such as, I don’t know, maybe Jesus?
As with the angels, we are created as creatures of praise. We seem to be hardwired to praise something, to worship anything. Just as we will eat rotten food and filthy water if no healthy food and clean water are available, we will venerate dogs and celebrities if we see no truly worthy objects of veneration before us.
Etienne’s effort to stamp out the cult of Guinefort failed because he did not address the need of the people to venerate. Their impulse was good; it was simply directed at the wrong object and without providing a new object for veneration, Etienne was dooming the people of Sandrans to eventually drift back to their old ways.
It does the Church little good to cluck and shake our heads at the dismaying display of veneration for Michael Jackson, for in truth he is a martyr, a martyr to our culture’s true god: Celebrity. If we simply cut down Celebrity’s Asherah poles—John & Kate, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama—we leave the job half-completed, ensuring new idols will spring up in their place. If we take away rotten food and filthy water, we must replace it with healthy meat and milk. The worship of false saints, be they greyhounds or pop stars, needs to be replaced by the worship of the Lord. As the Philistines found with their idol Dagon, false idols cannot stand in the face of the one true Lord (1 Sam 5:2-5)
Alright. So I caught two movies this past weekend, Transformers 2 and Away We Go. Tonally, these could not have been more diverse experiences. I mean, The Seventh Seal would have been a more appropriate followup to Transformers’ grim bombast than the twee, indie-rock experience of Away We Go. The first movie isn’t even worth commenting on; it’s two-and-a-half hours of explosions and fighting. It was fun, but if I never, ever see it again, that’ll be perfectly fine with me. I hadn’t been terribly excited about seeing it as it stood, and for all it strengths, it had the glaring weakness of not having a story worth telling. That’s usually the case with these sorts of things.
Away We Go, though, was different. I went in deeply suspicious; see, I have some issues with Sam Mendes. As much as I can appreciate his skill as a director, it seems his pet subject is the movie about how life in the suburbs is endlessly empty and stifling, that there’s something wrong with going into work every day, that unless you’re high on romance and adventure, your life is meaningless, without passion, without force or fortitude, and certainly without breadth. This was his thesis in American Beauty, although he ended up rejecting it at the end, and in Revolutionary Road, which has the added bonus of taking places in that stretch of horrorshow history we shrilly shriek “The Fifties,” and from everything I’d heard, this was the case with Away We Go.
I’ve read some bitter reviews. TIME Magazine said the movie was nothing but a scathing denunciation of Americans, as an endless parade of imperfect people were held up in comparison to Our Heroes, a sort of liberal fantasy about what sort of person your supposed to be. It further maintained that every episode of the picture was trying to paint normal life as not worth a damn as Burt and Verona crossed the country trying to invent their family. One reviewer said it “takes the boorishness of Americans as a given and valorizes nonconformance for its own sake,” and even the positive reviews merely call the movie “pleasant” and agree that it’s still somehow a self-important, narcissistic picture. “Indulgent bore about a freeloading couple who visit their friends. Nothing happens.”
Were we watching the same movie?
I haven’t read a single review that caught the movie’s basic idea: Burt and Verona, who is pregnant are traveling across the country to try and figure out what family means. Every friend they visit, they visit in the context of a family, trying to find a model for how they’re supposed to be, and every family offers them advice on their vision for the same: first, for the Allison Janney-Jim Gaffigan set, marriage and family is difficult and depressing, the children don’t listen, the mother’s a nutcase, the father doesn’t care; then, Burt’s ultra-liberal hippie friends who think its a good idea to have sex in front of the children and consider strollers “pushing your children away from you;” the happy family in Montreal, struggling to balance a little adventure and (adopted) children, while masking the ugly pain of five straight miscarriages, the then, Burt’s brother, whose wife up and left him and his daughter, without anybody knowing where or why.
It’s family after family after family after family, and in each one, Burt and Verona are trying to uncover what sort of family they’re supposed to be. Completely untethered, they want to find their place, their purpose, and their personal vision of family. It’s a postmodern couple trying to find meaning, trying to find something eternal, in a world that always tells you life is whatever you want it to be. And in the end, they find that meaning by plugging right back into the past. Our Heroes embraced, after a fashion, their own pain and used at as the foundation of love on which they’d build their lives in a very special home.
For the third straight day, CCN.com’s frontpage is dedicated to the death and memory of Michael Jackson. If this was a slow news period, I wouldn’t mind. If nothing really important was out there in the world, if no climate bill had passed, if the governor of South Carolina wasn’t in the Star Chamber, if Iran wasn’t on the verge of bloody revolution, I wouldn’t mind. I’d appreciate it, in fact; he was a singular figure in the shaping of modern popular culture.
But that’s not the case, is it?
CNN, even TIME Magazine has moved on. Please, for the love of God, get back to Tehran!
I have spent several years running from the simple fact that I am incontrovertibly American. I’ve tried to deny it; I’ve cultivated cosmopolitan interests, questioned our unquestionable myths and unquestionable wars. I’ve become a soccer fan and decided I liked non-American politcal systems better than our own. I’ve rejected the two-party system, I’ve listened to foreign music and condemned much of American culture as vile and anti-Christian. I’ve taken as my primary identity that of a Christian, a Catholic, before all things, and tried to allow that to raise me up above the fray, to find the good among liberalism and conservativism, to find the ill in both, too, and to cement myself to ancient values and beliefs above and beyond the simple political ones we adhere to so ferociously. I’ve said that human freedom is not found in civil rights, and that our culture in this country raises up political values as its only values, which is true to an extent. I’ve even begun pursuing citizenship with Italy.
In short, I am not at peace with the reality of my nationality, but as much as I try to deny it, it’s something absolutely core to who I am. I suppose this is true of everyone: everyone is from, well, where they’re from. Everyone is reared in some kind of community, and takes from that an immense part of who they are and how they live.
I suppose this is the case because I joined the Church in my formative years, which must have thrown much of my developing identity out of whack or something. Or not. I’m not entirely sure, but truth be told, the biggest conflict has been between my nationality and its political and cultural values and my Catholicism and its political and cultural values. How can I be a Christian in a country that seems to place war above peace? How can I serve the poor in a country that believes the poor get what they deserve? How can I be a Christian where wealth is supposed a sign of God’s favor? How can I be a Christian in a country that discourages you from even talking to people you see on the street or who are eating across from you at Burger King?
And yet, I am an American. I believe in democracy and popular sovereignty. I’m sort of an old-school New England-style patriot, believing that political freedom necessitates the formation of sound moral character, and in this, I echo and acknowledge my Puritan forebears more than the Virginia planters of my present home’s past, who believed liberty was having freedom from domination alongside the freedom to dominate. I am brash and rebellious and utterly ungovernable. I am egalitarian and hopeful in revolution. I am steeped in its history and mindful of its future. And though I am neither conservative nor liberal, I am am invested in its politics. It is the world I live in, and the world that has formed me.
Somehow, I have to be both. Catholic and American. And while I know this has been done countless times with some success, I am not sure how to walk this path. The two seem so opposed to each other at times. Where does America end and the Church begin? For a country as marinated in civil religion as ours, that can be a difficult thing to figure out; for many, love of the flag is a core part of their Christianity, and for years, this weak Christianity has been subtly subverted into being an engine of democracy and capitalism instead of holiness and charity. And while the Catholic church in America has always been one of rough-and-tumble immigrants, always suspected and always defamed, it is still, itself, the American church, as much subject to the same forces that gave stratified pews in much of the South.
So how is this walk made? How conducted? How does one be Catholic in an American way?
This will either make me very happy or deeply and bitterly disappointed. But I’d love for all my regular readers to post a little introduction here. I’ll even give any of yous with blogs a link on my underpopulated sidebar. I generally get between around 120-200 hits a day, sometimes as high as three-hundred. I’m assuming there’s some refreshing going on there, and that not all of you will actually reply. But still! Who out there is, um, out there?
TIME has a wonderfully ambivelant retrospective on the late Mr. Jackson.
Right now we could all use a selective memory wipe — a magical eraser to remove all the misery Michael Jackson endured and caused. Just for a minute, we’d like to have pure recollections of the thrilling dancer and singer who dominated ’80s music, created the all-time best-selling album of new songs (Thriller) and seemed the very model of the cool dude with the sensitive soul. And we wouldn’t mind feeling some uncomplicated warmth for the young Jacko who, as the Cupid and Kewpie doll of the Motown brother act the Jackson Five, displayed the charisma that marked him for future and, we thought, perpetual stardom. Why can’t a pop icon’s life and legacy be as easy as ABC?
On the evening of his death from cardiac arrest, fans by the thousands convened at impromptu memorial sites. Unable to commemorate his passing at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — it was covered by a red carpet outside the Chinese Theatre, where a Brunopremiere was to take place — the pop phenom’s admirers placed notes and flowers further down Hollywood Boulevard on the star of a much less famous radio host who happened also to be named Michael Jackson. Newscasters mostly observed the rule of decorum in such matters: speak only good of the dead. As Josh Tyrangiel noted in his TIME.com obit, there was much good, much brilliance, to speak of. Hail to the King of Pop; rest in peace.
And yet, as Tyrangiel also pointed out, Jackson’s memory is complicated, compromised, tainted. In some ways his decline was familiar: the star attraction whose star fades. Once the richest of pop idols, he flirted with bankruptcy in the past decade, selling many of his assets to Sony to wipe out huge debts. For years his main income came not from his own music but from royalties from much of the Beatles’ catalog, which he owned. (He may have relinquished some of these rights in a financing deal with Sony; details were not made public.) Jackson was also forced to sell his Neverland ranch outside Santa Barbara, Calif., and auction off many of its treasures. Some antics, like dangling his infant son Prince from a balcony, tested the limits of what an eccentric celebrity could get away with.
Like Brian Wilson before him, he was an innovative nutcase. Unlike Brian Wilson, he never got past the nutcase part.
Can we get back to talking about Iran? How many times can we repeat the same awkward, uncertain eulogy, that the man was a genius, a marvel, and a creep?
