Egoism
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(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Passion transcendent

Another interesting take on The Passion, this one from The Australian:

It's always been my feeling that religious belief belongs to one's inner life, nurtured and strengthened during a lifetime of experience, observation and contemplation. Externalities just provide the scaffolding. On the other hand, religion has inspired all forms of art through all the generations, and religious art stirs the emotions.

Sometimes it brings tears, not for Jesus, because his suffering and death are awesome, but for the frail human beings in his company. For poor Judas. For Peter, bravely following Jesus to his place of trial, and then devoting the rest of his life to expiating his failure of nerve under direct threat. For the women who followed Jesus to Calvary.

Until now, the new mediums - moving pictures with sound, electronically transmitted - have for the most part resisted depiction of transcendent concepts.

Gibson may have drawn the first sketchy explorer's map. The Passion of the Christ is a true work of art, and enters the inner life.

It is utterly amazing to me to see things like this published in popular media.
posted by Greg Swann at 10:01 PM

 
Passion inspires a thoughtful reflection

An eminently sane review of The Passion of the Christ from the LA Weekly:

In the new film directed by Mel Gibson, a good man is arrested on trumped-up charges, flagellated nearly to death, then made to carry a heavy wooden cross to the place of execution as his captors continue to pummel his frail, bloodied body. All the while, the man’s own mother and disciples bear witness, watching on in pained, helpless horror. As do we.

You see where this is going: that the film in question is called The Passion of the Christ and that its protagonist is no ordinary human being, but Jesus of Nazareth. Try forgetting this, though, just for a moment — indeed, it may be necessary to do so in order to clear one’s mind of the incessant media fracas that has swirled around this production ever since it was announced that “Mad Mel” Gibson planned to film the Jesus story using dead languages — and you may well find (as I did) that Gibson has made a big, bold, nightmarishly beautiful film not just about the dawn of the Christian faith, but about the awful tendency of human communities (wherever and whenever in the world they may exist) toward self-preservation, intolerance and mob rule. The Passion of the Christ will certainly have special resonance for Christians, but even those indifferent or hostile to the film on historical and/or theological grounds may find themselves moved by its potent depiction of physical, psychological and religious oppression.

Normally we depend on the 'alternative' press to be even more hyperbolically insane than the mainstream media. It's nice to see something like this instead. Read the whole thing. It's good.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:42 PM

 
John Kennedy on The Passion

Another voice of cool reason at No Treason:

Gibson has really introduced nothing new here. He has attempted instead to revive a very powerful tradition upon which the book had been closed. Or so nearly everyone thought. He is reminding two billion christians that they're mailing it in, that they are evading the central mystery of their faith.

I reject that central mystery but Gibson is true to it and I don't know how one can see the film and not be impressed with him.

posted by Greg Swann at 11:51 PM

 
(Un)BetterVegas: Taxi companies finally kill off Vegas pedicabs

From this morning's Las Vegas Review-Journal, the two-company Las Vegas taxicab cartel finally managed to kill off the pedicab business:

Pedicabs no longer will be permitted to shuttle visitors up and down the Las Vegas Strip after Clark County commissioners voted Tuesday to ban them effective March 16.

The board ruled the proliferation of bicycle taxi companies on the Strip slows traffic and creates a danger to pedicab passengers. On sidewalks, pedicabs sometimes force pedestrians into the roadway.

"It is our duty to avoid injury and death," said Jacqueline Holloway, the county's business license director.

Pedicabs will be prohibited on the Strip between Russell Road and Sahara Avenue and 200 feet east of Las Vegas Boulevard on main thoroughfares. They also are banned from Paradise Road between Karen and Harmon avenues.

Pedicab operators see no reason to stay in business if they can't cruise the Strip.

Walter Christof Fuhrer is packing up Orient Express pedicab company, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. "There's no point. None," Fuhrer said of remaining in Las Vegas.

And if you think you don't get what you pay for from government, consider this:

Las Vegas police painted pedicab operators as unsavory characters who deal drugs, solicit prostitution and ignore traffic laws.

Presumably omitting to mention funding terrorism and hoarding kiddie porn was an oversight.

Fuhrer and other bicycle cabbies do not believe safety issues were all that prompted the board to pass the ordinance. Some pedicab operators said politically influential taxicab and limousine companies are threatened by bicycle taxis because they give tourists a convenient way to travel the Strip.

Not to mention backers of the insane nowhere train.

This is very sad, since the pedicabs represent the best solution to short-haul Strip transportation implemented so far. It is the cars and taxis that kill people, and it is the cars and taxis that must move off the Strip, as it becomes more and more a giant de facto pedestrian mall. These primitive little bicycle rickshaws are the missing link between walking longer distances and driving. But as Fuhrer says, "It's a tourist-based industry, and tourists don't vote in this town." So much the worse for them...
posted by Greg Swann at 6:12 AM

 
Kerry

He makes Clinton look honest and Gore seem interesting. If Bush can't beat this cadaver, he deserves to lose...
posted by Greg Swann at 10:19 PM

 
Compulsory freedom in the Groves of Academe...

If our ultimate criterion asks what arrangement leaves all parties better off than they are[...]

Right there, in one little sentence fragment, is the betrayal that illustrates why Utilitarians will always end up being the witch-doctors of tyranny. Only the individual is an end in himself--an "ultimate criterion."

So you don't get the idea that Utilitarian David Friedman is somehow a friend of liberty, take note:

And few libertarians, however hard-core in theory, would choose a perfectly free society of desperate poverty over one slightly less free and very much wealthier.

The Imaginary Universe Fallacy and the Static Universe Fallacy joined at the cranium in a siamese-twin mental abortion. In fact, only those hard-core libertarians who can think in principles would choose freedom over creeping Socialism.

Ayn Rand was right to despise these people.

Linked via improvedclinch.com.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:15 AM

 
The Passion, dispassionately

I finally got time to see The Passion of the Christ tonight. What can one say, unless it's that classic Irish Catholic epithet: "Oh, my sweet sufferin' Jesus!"

Here's the secret to the whole thing, so far perfectly concealed:

It's a movie.

It's not the Second Coming. It's not the ultimate Fundie-factory, churning out new hectorers and bellowers, each one loudly proclaiming the voluminous love of Jaezhus! It's not a revivolator or an epiphanizer or magical miracle repentificator. It's not an ultra-deluxe baptismatron. Your parking stub may be validated, but your soul will not be redeemed for having seen it.

And: It's not the last word in screen violence, very far from it. Nor is it an indictment of the Jews--nor even of the Romans, who effect all the truly sadistic violence.

It's a movie.

And a truly amazingly great movie, beneath all the hype. Beautifully photographed, and Icon Productions is by now the undisputed champion of iconic images--not all of them borrowed from classic religious artworks. Beautifully acted, and the subtitles were utterly unnecessary; nothing would have been lost by doing the whole thing in (pretend) dead languages. Tacking on the resurrection--I assume in response to audience testing--was a boneheaded mistake. What was obviously the original ending--Mary holding the dead Nazarene in a pose swiped from the Pieta--was much more powerful. The editing--which took a year according to Mel Gibson--was choppy in places, but the whole product--images, acting, music, script and direction--was masterful. It is an amazingly effective work of art.

But it is a movie. As I foresaw, it is essentially the Stations of the Cross, except that the Nazarene falls down a lot more. The script hews literally to the four Gospels, and every specious objection brought to Mel Gibson's door applies just as appropriately--which is to say not--to Jesus Christ, Superstar or The Last Temptation of Christ. Except for slow children like Andrew Sullivan and William Safire, the anti-semitism smear seems to be dead, but the extreme-screen-violence ploy is still gasping. Make no mistake, there is a lot of blood in this movie. Not the gratuitous violence you'll find in The Gladiator or even Gibson's own Lethal Weapon series. But the Nazarene is well and truly scourged and hounded and nailed to a tree--just like it says in the four Gospels. Catholics, at least, should not be surprised to see what they've been called upon to imagine all their lives.

And the film is very Catholic. What the Fundies find in it--and they were there in the theater, hectoring and bellowing over the credits--I do not know. I can imagine that it might work to convert people to Christianity, but I can more easily imagine people seeing it two or three times for its fine qualities as a movie, then pressing on, perhaps buying it for their DVD collections in the same way they buy Superstar--not as a religious movie, but as a good movie.

In any case, here is the full truth of The Passion of the Christ, concealed from you by rain-dancers, coup-counters, and straw-man manufacturers:

It's a movie.

See it for yourself.
posted by Greg Swann at 10:42 PM

 
DysPassion: Sullivan unravels

Andrew Sullivan, who so misapprehends the net.world that he almost never posts on Sundays, violated his form this Sunday to dig up an old quote with which to slime Mel Gibson for having made The Passion of the Christ. Again today he quarries another old quotation (dig for it; the idiot has never mastered the idea of the hyperlink), again purposing to dissuade you from seeing the film--or at least to gang-up on Gibson--by persuasively invalid means.

Mel Gibson is hyperbolic in conversation, and this proves precisely nothing. He does not hew to the standards of the life of the mind on the printed page, and it is specious to pretend that he does. This is a cheap dodge of cheap minds.

Still worse, in order to smear Gibson, Sullivan affects to pretend to misunderstand the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. The second cited passage has Gibson saying, "There is no salvation for those outside the (Catholic) church." This might be shocking to non-Catholics, but Sullivan, like all Catholics, recites the Nicene Creed every time he goes to Mass:

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

The important word is 'apostolic'--touched (by concatenation) by the hand of god. That is, if you were not baptized by an apostolic priest, you were not baptized. All believing Roman Catholics insist that all the rest of us are going to Hell. No exceptions, including Sullivan.

In other words, this is a classic smear campaign. Sullivan has no trouble identifying this sludge when someone else does it. Could it be that he thinks he can somehow escape detection?
posted by Greg Swann at 8:24 AM

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