We was never much for yer books n such . . .

Writer and teacher Nancie Atwell on the distressing need to convince government education officials of the benefits of literature:

“. . . giving corporate interests a role in setting education policy is like letting foxes supervise the henhouse. These foxes are not vested in children’s reading books. They are interested in profitmaking—in selling prefab curricula, standards, and the diagnostic, formative, and summative tests that measure them.”

A blind choice

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Pro-abortion activists oppose a commercial featuring a woman talking about how thankful she is that she didn’t have an abortion. They also oppose laws requiring women to see their babies via ultrasound before executing them. And they oppose laws requiring that women considering abortion be given a full picture of what it is they are about to do, rather than a biased pitch by a for-profit abortionist. So what exactly is “pro-choice” about working hard to keep women from being given complete information? These positions aren’t pro-choice, they’re pro-abortion.

A truly pro-choice conviction would mitigate in favor of measures that make completely clear the ramifications of the decision: photos of what is to be aborted, interviews with abortion survivors, complete information about potential medical complications, publicly available data about any injuries or deaths caused by one’s potential abortionist.

A pro-abortion conviction, on the other hand, will reveal itself in steady opposition to measures that more fully illuminate what is to be done on that table. It will wrap itself up in language about rights and access, while steadfastly ignoring whether the true long-term interests of its putative clients are actually being served.

And this, friends, is why I call NARAL and the Center for Reproductive Rights and their various hangers-on pro-abortion, not pro-choice. Now enjoy the Superbowl, and if you like the Tebow commercial, consider a donation to your local pregnancy crisis center.

The verisimilar edge

Listening to a local film critic’s tired dismissal of the new film, Edge of Darkness, I was struck by the need, in film, literary, and art criticism just as much as in theological or architectural or epicurean criticism, for a foundational sense of what makes something good. All else flows from that. For some critics, this implicit definition will carry bits of rubbish: It can’t have swear words, for example, or, It shouldn’t feature that Jew-hating Mel Gibson.

A piece of rubbish that seems to jut from this local critic’s first principles — and one carried about by too many critics, for that matter — is the notion that for a film to be good, it shouldn’t contain familiar plot elements. You pick up on that foundational notion in complaints like, in this case: “Edge of Darkness is the same old revenge melodrama about the lone man with a personal grudge going after the people who have done him harm. . .”

When exactly did the revenge drama (there’s very little in Gibson’s dead-eyed performance to warrant the label “melodrama”) come to merit abandonment? When Odysseus covered the walls with the blood of his wife’s suitors? When Hamlet satisfied his mad bloodlust? When Johnny and Henry took Lonnegan’s money?

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with hewing to a traditional plot. Revenge, unrequited love, a quest, killing a monster, rags-to-riches — we’ll watch them over and over again, if they are good.

So what makes them good? You could start with Aristotle and work your way through to John Gardner and still have trouble answering that question. One element necessary for good drama, I’ll submit, is verisimilitude. I don’t mean that every element of the film must be true to life. This, paradoxically, is very likely to make for a very bad film. If we want complete fidelity to life, we’ll save ourselves nine bucks and wash the dishes. We want adventure and peril and romance and despair and salvation, and we’re willing to believe, for two hours, in aliens or magic swords or unstoppable Everyman heroes who never need to use the restroom in order to get these things.

But in drama, we must have verisimilitude in the small things. What makes us quake for the otherwise loathsome Woody Harrelson in his final harrowing scene in No Country for Old Men? The single tear that escapes from his eye while he tries to look brave. What makes us want to hug the otherwise creepy Donald Sutherland when he finally evicts his detestable wife in Ordinary People? His recounting of a small detail about her criticism of his clothes on the day of their son’s funeral. And in a bit of a twist on this theme, why do some of us feel grief, when Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash explains why he stopped talking about his dead brother in Walk the Line? Because we know full well that Phoenix knows what it means to lose a brother.

Edge of Darkness won me over, then, in the early scenes. I won’t recount the plot here, except to say that Gibson plays a police officer whose daughter is gunned down beside him. Over the course of the movie he gradually uncovers the people who are responsible, and wreaks vengeance. It’s a passable plot, based on a BBC mini-series. It shouldn’t win an Oscar, but neither should most enjoyable films.

Back to verisimilitude. Gibson stands in his bathroom after his daughter’s body has been carted away, after the dozens of police have come and gone. His face and neck are spotted with her blood. He wipes his face with a washcloth, and then, pausing, he tucks the washcloth into a cup to save it. He washes the blood from his hands, and the camera is now directly above the sink, so that we see the water and blood swirling down the drain. This is his daughter, disappearing.

It’s hard to find a nice touch like that any more. There are several in this film. The father clutching his just-murdered daughter, trying to speak, then trying to pray, and none of it coming out right. His transition from rage to sorrow in a single scene, as when he holds a gun to the throat of someone he suspects. The way he talks to his dead child without it becoming overly sentimental. Running through it all is a Big Powers conspiracy, meanwhile, that is refreshingly told insofar as the bad guys are neither all-powerful nor incompetent. They are realists, seeking not tidy ends but enough space to obfuscate and sufficiently evade full detection. Things unravel for them, which I imagine is what frequently happens when Big Government works with Big Industry.

There are many things to admire, in other words, in this film. Some critics complain that it becomes too formulaic and violent at the end, but sometimes the bad guys just need killing, and the writers can be forgiven for making it happen on occasion. And I, for one, am happy to see Mr. Gibson back on the screen. I kinda missed him.

The gift horse’s mouth

So here’s what irritates me about the Haitian government’s decision to prosecute Baptist missionaries for child abduction and criminal conspiracy. First, this is, according to the news report, the first criminal case to receive a hearing in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake. Really? Looting, rape, and beatings across the capital, and this is the one you decide to prosecute first?

Second, we have the U.S. ambassador claiming that the U.S. can’t interfere. Again, really? Last I checked, the Port-au-Prince airport is chock full of American planes, what order exists in the streets is because of American troops, and the only reason anybody in the Haitian judiciary has a bottle of water to drink and a sandwich to eat is because of American aid. It seems entirely reasonable to remind them that with a snap of our fingers they can go right back to the state of nature, red of tooth and claw.

I’m not saying the missionaries need a hero’s welcome. But I’ll bet they’ve learned their lesson. This grandstanding by a Haitian government that has never been anything but a farce is a bit hard to take, in the face of worldwide altruism from which it and its citizens are benefiting.

Book it

I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the unofficial New Yorker film critic handbook there’s a rule that goes something like this: If Christian faith is central to a film, don’t be afraid to stoop to name-calling and character assassination. Thus it wasn’t surprising to see in what manner David Denby unleashes his ire on The Book of Eli, the story of a man in post-apocalyptic America trying to find a safe place for the last Bible. Denzel Washington plays this faithful man, who is one part Shaft, one part Kwai Chang Caine, and one part Moses, with the capacity for blood-spilling sufficient to warrant a commission in the Army of the 300. His nemesis, played by Gary Oldman, is ruler of a wasteland fiefdom that appears to be a cross between a Western frontier town and modern-day Detroit. Oldman has been searching for a Bible, because with it he believes he can rule the remaining vestiges of humanity.

It’s a suitable plot: good guy is on a quest, bad guy wants to stop him, the struggle ensues. There’s twists up until the very end, and the acting throughout is adequate and entertaining. It’s a decent-enough movie in its own right, and an exceptional movie insofar as it treats the Word as something incarnational, which is all but absent in modern Christian thought, not to mention popular entertainment. I’m telling all my Christian friends, and my friends who enjoy action flicks, and my friends who like Denzel (if you find yourself at the drop-dead center of that little Venn diagram, you’d best run not walk to the nearest theater) to see this film.

Denby, on the other hand, begins his New Yorker review with a little old-fashioned smearing. It seems that notable conservatives Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg want more Christian values in movies. Boo that, of course. It sounds kind of like censorship. Or something. Just, well, boo.

Denby’s not so subtle implication, of course, is that if Douthat and Goldberg want it, then it can’t be art. The Hughes brothers, directors of The Book of Eli, must be in some way fatally compromised. Denby then complains about the film’s coloring, the seeming plethora of apocalypse movies lately, the fact that the Christian faith in this movie isn’t suitably expounded upon and justified (because, yeah, that would have made him enjoy it a lot more). It’s “daft” and “liver” colored and a form of American “religio-exploitation.”

Very clever writing, and very predictable, and quite irrelevant. As for me and my house (to make an allusion to the Bible and get all religio-exploitave on you), we’ll give this one two thumbs up — one from Wife and one from me, with our remaining thumbs firmly clutching the rim of our ginormous popcorn tub.

Animal control

My thing with these people who keep unstable or outright dangerous breeds of dog is that they’re always shocked when their monsters break loose and, I don’t know, maul three small children. A five year-old girl remains on life support, and the owners of the mastiff and pit bulls haven’t even received a ticket. But, says the officer interviewed for the story, “they are very sorry.”

My longstanding policy, which I’ve made clear to family members and others, is that if your dog hurts my child, I will shoot your dog. I don’t care if he’s always been sweet and loving, I don’t care if he got his paw stepped on or his ear pulled, I don’t care if my kid smells like bacon and your dog hasn’t eaten in a week — if his teeth make contact with my child’s skin, I will turn him into a colander. And maybe you, too.

Make that clear to people, and suddenly they’re much more diligent about keeping their animals chained up.

Gotcha

I always hate to see thoughtful, well-meaning people get mau-maued into apologizing for lucidity.

Intent

On the one hand, I can appreciate the fear that nefarious people will spirit away Haitian children for wicked ends. On the other hand, I doubt this class of people includes Baptists from Idaho. And there is the sticky question of what constitutes an orphan in Haiti, where parents and other relatives routinely hand over their children to such places. People who want to adopt these abandoned children then have to submit to the cumbersome bureaucratic process of waiting on the Haitian government to track down the very people who abandoned the children in order to make certain that they really meant it.

There is, of course, the fear that children separated from their relatives in the earthquake and who wind up at an orphanage will be wrongly considered potential adoptees, and that do-gooder types sweeping into the country with little local knowledge will do more harm than good. Still, it’s a bit odd to see an attempt at the rule of law on the part of the notoriously inept and corrupt Haitian government as it holds these church members in prison, trying to decide their fate. In countries like Haiti, “trying to decide your fate” often means: “that’ll be as much cash as you can spare, in American dollars, please.”

Whether or not there’s a payoff, it seems sensible to let these folks go with a warning, and get back to the business of prosecuting real criminals.

Updates

The New York Times hosts a debate by the experts on this subject.

And CNN reports from the perspective of Haitian parents who willingly gave away their children to the Baptist missionaries.

Just like John Wayne would have done

“What are you doing?” I ask Wife. This is not an honest question. I know full well what she is doing, she is staring down the barrel of an old lever-action pop gun. The lever part is important. We’ll come back to that part. Remember that part. For those of you who don’t know what it is, think of the rifles John Wayne used to carry.

So, Wife is staring down the barrel. In our house, we try to treat pretend guns like they are real. “Quit staring down the barrel,” I fuss.

“Well, your youngest son has learned that if he puts a Nerf dart in the barrel and shoots, it will fly out. So he crammed three in there.”

“Let me see it,” I say with authority. I say it like guns are a man thing, even though Wife owns a .380 Beretta with knurled walnut grip and soft-tip Glaser rounds and is fully prepared, and sometimes even itching, to make a salt shaker out of someone. I say it nonetheless like she is a novice and might hurt herself with the Nerf-loaded pop gun. She rolls her eyes and relinquishes the pop gun.

I piously announce something or other about gun safety. I point the rifle at the floor and shake. No Nerf dart. I whack it on the barrel and shake again. No dart. I look down the barrel. I see the dart hiding in there.

Ever hear the phrase “half-cocked”? Don’t go off half-cocked, people say. I’m not sure where that phrase comes from, but maybe it refers to when an idiot cocks the lever of a rifle and leaves it extended, perpendicular to the rifle, rather than returning it to its closed position. Why would an idiot do such a thing? Perhaps because he is trying to get Nerf darts out of the barrel.

So I am holding the pop gun half-cocked, and I give it another shake, and then I pull the trigger. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you fire a half-cocked lever-action rifle, I can tell you. That innocent-looking lever becomes a little guillotine, is what happens.

I’m not sure what I bellowed when the lever tried to amputate my finger at the cuticle, but it got the attention of everyone in the house. Blood. Bruising. Torn flesh. Persistent, throbbing pain five hours later. I’m pretty sure my finger’s broken, but I’m too embarrassed to look a medical professional in the eye.

I’m sure there’s a lesson here, and I think it’s not that you should remain indifferent when your wife is looking down the barrel of a rifle. Maybe the lesson is that we’re never as smart as we think. Or perhaps that nothing is safe enough in the hands of a fool. Who knows. I’m pretty sure, however, that if you injure yourself with a cowboy rifle, you’re obligated to treat your wound the way a cowboy would, which is why I’m typing this beside a whiskey bottle.

Because

This is why I write to you, boys with me, girl who is gone. I write to you because when I am with you, when I look into your soft brown eyes, I do not have the words. They come to me in pieces, in a thought or a dream, and always our time is so filled up with things I fear one day will not matter. I am too often irritated at you or impatient with you or indifferent toward you, and the days will not wait. They never wait.

I write to you, Caleb, because you became my steadfast shadow when I was wandering senseless.

I write to you, Eli, because you are tender-hearted and shy and maybe most in need of words.

I write to you, Isaac, because you are brave and fierce and I wish I were more like you.

I write to you, Isaiah, because you spread joy like a prince scattering coins.

I write to you, Caroline, because there were many things to say, and a broken world cut us short.

I write because I am afraid I will die before I am finished. I lie awake in the quiet night, thankful for the quiet, because you all have so much to say, afraid of the quiet because it is then that I think. I lie awake and ashamed, because I did not listen, because I did not teach you anything enduring on this day, because I forgot, again, that the end comes without relent.

I write because I hope you will find something of me in these words, one day, and smile. I hope you will know from these words how sometimes, when I hear you breathing in your deep childhood slumber, my chest fills up and I think to myself that heaven must be something like this, like listening to your babies breathe and dream. I hope you will know how I repent when I have failed, that I fail because I’m weaker than you thought, that even when I am a passable father it is only with great struggle. I struggle to be meager so that you have the chance to be great. Know this too.

I hope you know, not from these words but from your memories, that I wanted to give you all I have, and that sometimes I actually did it, when I was able to love myself less than I normally do, which is far more than I should. I hope you will know that something broken in me makes it easier to write these things down than to say them, though I will try to say them too. I write because maybe I will fail at this, at the saying of these things.

But it’s easier to say things than to do them, as you are learning, sweet ones. Your mother knows this, having endured me the longest. So I guess my great prayer is that none of these words will tell you anything you don’t already know deep in your flesh, but perhaps only give voice to what before was voiceless but ever present, the love of your father. May I diminish that you may increase, my brown-eyed boys. This is the prayer of a father.

Bad faith makes bad medicine, and so does bad math

The doctor who claimed a link between child vaccinations and autism has been rebuked by British medical authorities for irresponsible and unethical conduct. The folk theory will continue for generations, unfortunately, because autism tends to emerge around the time children receive vaccinations. For a time my family was in the anti-vaccination camp, until I looked at the data used to support that position and realized how vaccine opponents misinterpret it.

The vaccination-autism correlation is one example. Another is looking at outbreaks of a disease like measles and concluding, because a majority of those sickened were vaccinated, that therefore vaccines don’t work. The problem with this reasoning, of course, is that in a population where 95 percent of children have received the vaccine, any outbreak is bound to include a good many children who were vaccinated, insofar as the vaccine, while highly effective, isn’t 100 percent effective.

Still another error can be found in the claim by vaccine opponents that their kids remaining healthy in spite of no vaccines is somehow proof that plenty of veggies/mega-vitamins/no television can ward off life-threatening illness. The reality, of course, is that they are coasting on the herd immunity afforded by everyone else having their own children vaccinated. And so on.

In any event, it’s good to see bad science punished. I didn’t know this guy, for example, used a sample of twelve kids for his study, that opposed to a random sample he paid kids at his son’s birthday party for their blood, and that he took payments from lawyers engaged in suing vaccine manufacturers.

Why do professors hate markets?

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Laurie Fendrich attempts to divine from her own experience why college professors tend to be left-wing. She reaches the puzzling conclusion that her parents’ emphasis on education and culture over wealth accumulation somehow steered her toward the professorate and leftism. This is puzzling both because professors have higher than average compensation (especially adjusted for workload), and because there’s no evidence that conservatives value wealth accumulation more than do liberals. They certainly tend to be betterat accumulating wealth, but for all we know this leads to a bitter focus by leftists on their lack of income, and a concomitant focus by conservatives on objectives beyond income — the exact opposite of Fendrich’s implicit hypothesis.

The jumping off point for Fendrich’s rumination is a just-released study claiming that the cause for professorial leftism is, among other things, that leftists tend to want — much more than conservatives — to become professors in the first place. It’s certainly an interesting theory, though the methodology underlying the guts of the paper are shaky (finding that professors are more liberal than non-professors because they are educated, atheistic, and enjoy controversy is like determining that more Southerners have a drawl because they drink sweet tea, like NASCAR, and own a Bible — all you’ve done is find some variables highly correlated with the variable of interest).

All the same, I prefer Robert Nozick’s explanation for why intellectuals hate markets.

Prosperity matters

Professor Perry ranks European prosperity against U.S. states, with eye-opening results. Who would have thought, for example, that per capita income in North Dakota is so much higher than Germany? I’m sure between cap and trade and health care mandates and auto company bailouts, however, we’ll find a way to level the playing field with our friends across the ocean.

Tip: Trent S.

What’s good for the goose…

For the most part I like members of law enforcement, when they aren’t murdering people in drug raids or ignoring evidence that doesn’t suit their preconceived notions or harassing nuns outside abortion clinics, but still, this video of Oklahoma City University police getting tazed is kind of fun to watch.

Free to choose

A German homeschooling family has received political asylum from a U.S. immigration judge after enduring legalized home invasion and kidnapping by bureaucrats in their own country. Now we’ll have to see if U.S. Immigration and Customs tries to countermand the judge’s decision.

Because names are not snowflakes

The Texas Board of Education strikes a blow against communist tracts cleverly disguised as children’s books. In other news, the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is discovered to be a former manager of the New York Yankees.

Genuine reform?

President Obama, The Washington Post tells us, will propose a major increase in education spending tonight. At first glance, one might be tempted to roll the eyes. It’s not like we haven’t been trundling along on this up-escalator long enough, after all. In the past twenty years alone we’ve doubled education spending.

Yes, you read that correctly. Doubled. Even when controlling for rising enrollment and inflation, that’s still a hefty increase. Average per pupil spending in U.S. government schools now tops $9,000, which means with an average class size of roughly 20 students, we’re dropping $180,000 into every classroom into America.

The latest assessment of U.S. student performance by the National Center for Education Statistics reveals, meanwhile, that American fifteen year-olds continue to perform poorly compared to the rest of the developed world in science and math, and at best mediocre in reading.

In short, the National Education Association’s recent complaint that “there are not sufficient resources” to improve schools is laughable, as is its tired collection of pseudo-reforms and arguments against actual reforms (like alternative teacher certification, paying teachers for performance, and charter schools).

But here’s where I think we can begin to take hope. For all his government-is-the-solution-to-all-that-ails-us thinking, Obama seems poised to really shake things up in education. Assessments of individual teachers versus school-level accountability. Merit pay. These seem to be the kinds of things that a good portion of his proposed education spending increases will go toward. Even if you aren’t familiar with the details, you need look no further for proof than the fact that he’s really starting to irritate the NEA. When the teacher’s union gets upset, that’s usually a good sign.

Reading Amanda Ripley’s excellent article on Teach for America research into what makes good teachers, meanwhile, I was struck by a heartening similarity between welfare reform and education reform.

Think about it. In both cases you have a Democrat with the capital within his coalition (disregard the loony fringe for the moment) to do something significant, in much the same way that Richard Nixon could go to communist China. You have credible centrist and leftist intellectuals who admit the system is broken, and who are beginning to recognize the merits of a system of individual autonomy and accountability. We’ve also seen a flip since 2004, such that a slight majority of Americans are dissatisfied with schools.

The legal environment for home-schooling, private and charter schools, and school choice has never been better. Details about shoddy government school performance are more widely accessible. Large foundations are finally pouring real money into reform efforts. And now you have a Democrat president pushing for merit pay and teacher accountability. What’s more, after the mid-term elections you can count on a resurgent, quite possibly legitimately conservative Republican contingent in Congress — exactly the same mix, in other words, that we saw produce welfare reform.

I’m hard pressed to think of any reform we can make in American policy that would yield more lasting benefits than to give parents choices about where their children will be educated, and teachers strong incentives to either learn how to teach better or seek another trade. And I think there’s a chance we’ll see significant strides toward that dream under Obama. Now that’s an audacious hope.

With friends like these…

This is how the Left positions itself as a friend of working families: ensure higher taxes through dramatic increases in government spending, and then increase subsidies for those who put their children into daycare. Make it ever harder, in other words, for a parent to earn enough to take care of his family while the other parent stays home to raise and teach the children. And then dress yourself up as a hero by offering additional money to cover daycare costs — costs necessitated in part by your own profligate government expansion.

Audacity? Yes. Hope? Not so much.

Does this cape make me look fat?

My friend John Miller brings the smack on modern vampires. This may be a good way to sum it up: if your bloodsucker needs hair gel, he’s really just a big thirsty sissy with bad teeth. In general, vampires ought to be scarier than personal injury attorneys. Though both species deserve a stake through their shriveled black hearts.

Cause there’s more than one in that box

Isaiah to his mother: “Can I have some cereals?”

Mom: “You want some raisin bran?”

Isaiah: “Is not raisin bran, is raisins bran.”

Another literal child. Lovely.

Old, old, old school

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books . . . This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.”  (C.S. Lewis, Introduction to St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation.)

I like that the study circles of Lewis’s day read Maritain, Niebuhr, and Sayers, whereas today you’re an intellectual if you read Sproul and a reader of antiquity if you study Spurgeon. I’m going to try to follow Lewis’s advice more rigorously: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

Perhaps draw a random name from the phone book?

In this video news clip about a mother who ordered her son to kill his pet as punishment for bad grades (the son’s, not the gerbil’s), an investigator says the woman was raised by a good family. Maybe so. When it comes time to decide, however, where to place her three children (for she is surely going to the pokey, between this and the allegation of battery against the child, on top of her probation for a previous embezzlement conviction), I hope someone pauses.

There’s a bias, in cases where children are removed from their parents, for placing them in the hands of the parent’s relatives. I’ve never understood this. I know rotten people sometimes come from good homes. It seems to me, however, that if you’ve already raised one beast, you ought not be given any more opportunities to raise additional beasts. Even if you are good people. Some people can be good, I suppose, and still be lousy parents, in much the same way someone can be good and still have no business whatsoever operating heavy machinery.

You need a license to fish, but not to breed

Libby Purves brings the everloving smack on three gruesome cases of parenting gone horribly wrong. What I like best is her easy use of expressions like “wicked” and “natural,” words all but banned from polite media discourse on families, the one evoking religion, the other suggesting that reworking the social order according to modern fringe sensibilities flies in the face both of creation and civilizational learning. Her conclusion, after touching on examples of nightmare parents:

“You don’t own your children, even though for a good many years they do own you. You can’t ignore their vulnerabilities, exploit them or assume permanent control. It’s a serious, self-abnegating business. If you don’t get it, get a hamster.”

Charity certainly doesn’t begin at a hotel

Gary at View from the Wing offers a follow-up on Hilton’s stingy points-for-charity scheme. Their defense? Some of our point redemption offers are even worse than this one.

Update: Not long after Gary criticized Hilton, they increased the amount they will give Haitian relief for a donation of miles. Nice work, Gary.

Heresy, thy name is Legion

Perhaps you’ve seen commercials for the movie Legion, which appears to be two very different movies, depending on whether you’ve seen it advertised in the theater or on your television. On television, the premise appears to be that a host of demons has possessed townspeople, who must now be fended off by the inevitable rag-tag band of reluctant comrades. In theater advertisements, however, as well as the film’s official website, its real premise is revealed: God has “lost his faith in mankind,” and is out to get us with a legion of angels.

It’s Jonathan Edwards’s blasphemy for the modern age, only instead of an all-powerful, bloodthirsty, wrathful God we have a distant potentate who is every bit as bloodthirsty and wrathful as in Edwards’s fantasy, but who apparently doesn’t have the schedule flexibility or the frequent-flyer miles to get here himself to do us in. Hence come the angels, led by Gabriel decked out in what appears to be Kevlar.

Man’s only hope is an unborn illegitimate baby in the not so subtly named town of Paradise Falls. The bastard fetus is a fully and only human Jesus, a modern savior for a secular world beset by intolerance in the form of the Almighty Himself.

Thankfully, along comes the disobedient angel Michael to interpose himself between the baby and dutiful Gabriel and the rest of the heavenly and demonic hosts. The trailer indicates there are also some automatic weapons. It’s The Seventh Sign meets Aliens meets City of Angels. There’s also a dash of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which I think would have made an excellent movie, starring Bela Lugosi as the devil or God or both.

What’s interesting is how the television advertisements totally elide the God stuff. I’m assuming this is because Sony’s execs have rightly reasoned that the average American doesn’t cotton so well to obvious heresies. We like our heresies soft-pedaled sideways, and we like them to make us feel good. Jesus wants me to have a new car, say, or God is eager to enjoy the incense of nasty reprobates roasting in hell. That sort of thing. Don’t tell us that God is out to get a little baby, and that he’ll use armies of demons and angels to do it. Throwing babies in hell because they weren’t part of the Elect is one thing, but going after them in the womb with knives and swords is something the cowardly Herod would resort to.

So this is the thing, the thing that matters more than all the rest: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). This is the same God “who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). Any theology — out of Hollywood or your neighborhood church — which denies this essential truth deserves repudiation. God loves the creation fashioned in his image. Unfortunately, there are a good many people with a variety of motives for wanting you to forget that. So don’t forget it, okay?

Haitian Orphans

I’m happy to say that my friends whose adoptive child in Haiti was imperilled have finally claimed him. In other news, I’m not sure how I feel about children being illegally taken from the country. Words like “trafficking” and “kidnapping” sound terrible, but if the end result is that children unwanted in their own miserable country are snatched away from the inept, corrupt Haitian government and placed in loving homes, we need more kidnapping.

Short-sighted

If this really is “…the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,” then I think we’re all going to be just fine. And I have trouble seeing how a coded Christian verse on a rifle sight, while odd, is ”literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun.” Annoying misuse of the word ‘literally’ aside, that’s just plain silly. I mean, if you take a .30 caliber match-grade round right between your skeezy Taliban eyes, does it really matter whether someone who loves Jesus shot you? Shouldn’t your real concern be that there aren’t forty virgins waiting for you in hell?

Once again for the breathless Christ-haunted atheists among us: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” doesn’t mean all religion gets banned. We know full well, in fact, that this is not at all what the Founders meant. What we can’t have is the state mandating a particular religion. So clearly what we need in this situation is not the elimination of the Jesus sights, but production of Jewish, Muslim, Gaia, Wicca, and I-have-no-bloody-idea-and-please-don’t-talk-to-me-about-it sights. Let’s show these Islamofascists that we really are a pluralistic society, and sight them in with all kinds of scopes.

To rest

Alder Hey Children’s Hospital does a small but important and dignified thing in burying the organs its employees stole from dead babies. It is small because babies are small, and the parts of them even smaller, and because crimes against the weakest bodies in the name of science have a sickening commonality in human history, no matter how their advocates dress them up, such that an anonymous burial a decade after the crime seems small penance indeed. But it is important nonetheless, because we can’t afford, in a time when so much of ourselves is considered disposable, to pretend that any part of a human being is simply trash.

Previously, on . . .

The start of a new season of 24 got me thinking about that standard practice television series have of explaining what happened in the previous episode: “Previously, on ____”. Sometimes it’s a little funny because, while of course the particulars are usually quite different, in another sense what happened last week is pretty much what’s going to happen this week. Instead of telling me how many people Jack killed on 24 last time, interspersed with close-ups of villains breathing commands into their untraceable cell phones, we could just summarize as follows:

Previously, on 24: “Jack! Look out!” KER-BOOM!!

This got me thinking about what other standard previously-on’s one might look like:

Previously, on House: “That’s not lupus, it’s Dandy-Walker malformation with nasopharyngeal teratoma and diaphragmatic hernia. Now get out of my personal space.”

Previously, on Lost: “You mean the guy who was in seat 27B is actually a nuclear physicist who teleported to a secret lab in Cambodia and developed a soundwave oscillation machine that will cause everyone not wearing a shirt to avoid sunburn despite the lack of sunscreen on this island?”

Previously, on True Blood: “On the way home from taking my G.E.D. for the third time I got bit by a vampire.”

Previously, on Jersey Shore: Guido: “I’m gonna work out and then spend three hours styling my hair so nobody notices my big pineapple of a nose when I’m grinding my herpes-ridden junk up against them at the club.” Guidette: “Yeah. Me too.”

Previously, on Grey’s Anatomy: “I think I left my thong at that doctor’s apartment.”

Previously, on Melrose Place: “I think I left my thong at that struggling writer’s apartment.”

Previously, on Mad Men: “I wish they would invent thongs already. Somebody get me a scotch.”

Previously, on Frasier: “Niles, I simply cannot fathom why women do not find me attractive. Oh, waiter? Can you please freshen my latte with just a dash of lemon-infused crème fraiche?

Previously, on ER: “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to move in together when you asked for another amp of epi?”

Previously, on NYPD Blue: “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to move in together when we were rousting that skel for some information on our perp?”

Previously, on Everybody Loves Raymond: “Ray, you’re an idiot.”

Previously, on King of Queens: “Doug, you’re an idiot.”

Previously, on According to Jim: “Jim, you’re an idiot.”

Previously, on All in the Family: “Edith, you dingbat you.”

The deceptive average

A new study suggests parenting reduces blood pressure. Keep in mind that they’re only looking at averages, which means that when you spike after watching your two-year old do a back flip off the bed, and then collapse into a coma at nap time, you come out right about normal on average.