The Ark and The Dove

Did the Clone Wars Advocate Water Boarding?

I just watched Episode 30 of the Clone Wars (unfortunately titled "Brain Invaders") on Cartoon Network.

In the course of the episode Anakin's padawan is trapped on board a supply frigate where alien parasites have infected the entire crew, including another Jedi. When Anakin receives word that his padawan is at risk of being infected herself, he tortures a captured enemy combatant to learn how to destroy the parasites.

Interestingly enough, this might mark the chronologically first use of the force choke by Anakin in Star Wars. Creepy Vader music plays in the background as he does so...but the results are effective. He is able to alert the Republic to the cure for the parasites and, more immediately, explain to his padawan how to save herself and the infected allies.

The other major moral conflict of the show is when the infected Jedi begs to be euthanized by Anakin's padawan, who refuses, hoping that she can be cured. Later, the padawan asks Anakin if she should have killed her friend...and Anakin says that he doesn't think the friend would think so now that the cure was effective. No doubt, Anakin justifies his use of torture the same way -- people whose lives were saved as a result of the information discovered by torture will most likely not condemn the person who rescues them.

Unless, of course, they are Democrats in the Obama administration.

Al Gore - Renaissance Man

Drudge linked to an article in Vanity Fair highlighting the climate change poetry of Al Gore.

Here's a snippet:

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Of course, it misses the real reason the shepherd is probably crying. Most likely his entire flock was just slaughtered after Al Gore determined they were emitting too much methane.

Any Way You Slice It

Thinking about the Tiger Woods scandal actually gives me some hope that, as talented as he is, I might be able to surpass him in at least one aspect of life.

Up-date

I was thinking about Mike's comment about how The Incredibles argues that real heroism occurs in the domestic sphere. This triggered a similar reading regarding Up. I'm just going to go ahead with the spoilers, so feel free to stop reading now if you haven't seen it.

The movie ends with a series of snapshots of the old man and the Wilderness scout. The snapshots appear in the scrapbook that the old man's deceased wife had been keeping since childhood. It was meant to be her Book of Adventure. As far as we know, the last page she entered was the picture of their house being impossibly relocated to the top of Paradise Falls. Mr. Frederickson lived his life thinking that was the adventure she always wanted, but, in one of the most catharsis inducing scenes in the movie, we find out that she had (on the sly) been using the book as a photo album throughout their married life. Marriage was the adventure.

By inserting the pictures of the Wilderness scout after the pictures of his wife, the film suggests that children are the subsequent adventure.

But I think the film is suggesting more than this Hallmark card style worldview.

Mr. Frederickson leaves in his balloon house because a court order has required him to enter a retirement home (after he bludgeons a high-rise construction worker who accidentally knocks over his mailbox). He doesn't want to go to he retirement home, but he has no children, friends, or relatives to shelter him. It's a pretty big problem in our society today--the way our elderly are becoming increasingly marginalized by our nuclear families and private lifestyles.

But there is another problem in our society--divorce and the threat of abandonment. We find out that the Wilderness scout's father has divorced his mother and remarried. The stepmother (in true fairy tale fashion) is not interested in the kid and has been discouraging the father from spending time with him. At the end of the film, when the Wilderness scout is getting his final merit badge, his father is nowhere to be seen. Mr. Frederickson mounts the stage and becomes the surrogate father. Next comes the series of snapshots of the two engaged in various paternal (or grandpaternal) activities.

This, I think, is the most provocative fantasy of the film--even more compelling and moving than a fling house. The writers detect two social problems--abandonment of the elderly and abandonment of children--and fantasize a solution that essentially kills two birds with one stone. Both ends of the spectrum of life are feeling ostracized and being pushed out of focus. Why shouldn't they reach out to one another?

Or maybe it's not so much of a fantasy. More and more families are coming to rely on grandparents to raise children, after all...so much so that there is even a government Website to offer assistance.

Up, Up, and Away!

Isabel and I just watched our first Netflix rental last night: Pixar's Up.
This was easily the best movie we've seen in a long time--and it was definitely the best movie of the summer.
But watching most of Up was something of a downer--at least for Isabel, who pretty much cried her way through about two-thirds of the movie.

I'll admit I got pretty weepy, too.

It's impressive how much Pixar pretty much blows away every other computer animation company on the scene at the moment -- and even blows away its own parent company Disney. For instance, we watched Dreamworks big-budget B-movie parody Monsters vs. Aliens last week and were bored out of our minds. Isabel decisively fell asleep about half-way through it. MvA's story was weak, loose, and contrived. We felt nothing for any of the characters, and the film reduced itself to slapstick crudity. Up, like its predecessor Wal-E, compelled emotional attachments to characters that didn't even speak.

I don't want to say too much about the movie's story as I wouldn't want to sap any of the catharsis for those who haven't seen it yet. Nevertheless, you can't expect me to blog on a work of art without some kind of critique...

The movie has at least one significant flaw (and this is something of a spoiler): it's the first Pixar movie I can think of with a bona fide villain. It's also the first Pixar movie I can think of where a villain has a classic villain's demise. This was a little disappointing to me. It felt a little cheap, especially since I've been impressed so far with how well Pixar has managed to keep caricatures of evil out of their movies. They had been following the formulae of Hiyao Miyazaki, the Japanese animator behind Studio Chibli's Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. In his films, villains are either completely absent or they have conversion experiences. People can do horrible things in his stories, but he almost always extends an olive branch and lets them become reconciled to their victims. This wasn't the case in Up where a murderous villain appears to meet a murderous end. I was rather hoping that the bad guy hunting the rare bird would have realized the error of his ways and become a conservationist or something. The villain, however, was really only a part of a subplot--and his demise functions primarily as a foil for what the protagonist was at risk of becoming. (That being said, the villain also marks the movie's largest plot hole...if the adventurer was an adult when the protagonist was a boy, how old is he when the protagonist goes on his trip to South America?)

The only other possible critique I can give the movie (other than obnoxiously the pointing out the cartoon physics necessary to lift a house with helium balloons) is that it essentially boils down to The Wizard of Oz for old people. The protagonist is lifted away through the clouds to a strange and unusual land. He has to follow a path to a geographical destination. He has three goofy sidekicks each with a quest to achieve something (wilderness scout / a merit badge, Doug / a new master, Kevin /motherhood). At the end of his journey, he discovers that the seemingly larger than life figure whose footsteps he has been following is nothing like the heroic if not magical figure he has followed. And does it matter that the "wizard" figure even flies around in a balloon? The only thing missing are the ruby slippers (I half expected the house to land on the adventurer at the end).

The Big Bang?

I was recently given a copy of The Big Bang season 1.

My parents have been gushing about the show for a year now, but I pretty much never watch sitcoms...so this was my first encounter with the program.

Isabel and I watched the pilot last night and were a little confused. Are the main characters PhD's or grad students? They talked like they had already earned their degrees, but we couldn't understand why two scientists would be sharing an apartment in a nigh-condemned apartment building. Are they teaching at a community college and making peanuts or are they supposed to be someplace where rent is so steep that even science professors can't afford a house? Also, I don't understand why they are so poor that the show opens with them attempting to donate sperm so that they can afford better Internet connections. Actually, the bigger question is why...if their connections are so slow...they aren't either sitting in a coffeeshop using WiFi or IN THEIR LABS!!!! What young, single scientist is wasting time goofing off with his roommate and neighbors when he should be in his multi-million dollar government subsidized lab trying to get tenured or promoted???

If they were graduate students, I would almost sort of get it...although then I'd be alarmed by the amount of work they seem to actually get done in their apartment.

Also, the pilot seemed to fall flat with its gross gender stereotypes. Four scientists, and they are all men? The only girl in the pilot is a waitress at The Cheesecake Factory?

Worse yet, the only "chemistry" between the guys and the girl is that she is a girl. It's just sex...although I suppose that's only appropriate since the show is entitled The Big Bang.

Of course, this was just the pilot...and pilots are often shaky starts. That being said, Isabel and I have a theory that The Big Bang started as an American attempt to import Spaced the same way the Office was imported. In my imaginary realm, the shirts at the production company just didn't get Spaced and reduced it to geeky pop cultural references. (This theory was reinforced somewhat when we find out that the neighbor was recently dumped and has aspirations to be a writer.)

Thoughts?

Taxonomy of Faith

Just for fun, I thought I'd try to list various methods or types (species if you will) of faith. Feel free to play along in the comments. I'm just making these categories up as I go along, although I'm sure wiser men have already mapped this terrain.

"Blind" Faith: By blind faith, I will assert that species of faith which is unquestioning of the source of information. It takes all statements by a subject as revelation of truth or fact. Within this category of faith, there would seem to be at least two subspecies: unlimited and limited. Unlimited blind faith would accept all statements as individually true facts, even to the point of accepting obvious or direct contradictions. This seems the least plausible faith to sustain in the real world by a mature, competent adult. By "limited" blind faith, I would assert a species of faith that limits what it accepts as true to a particular authority or individual. This seems a more plausible form of blind faith and perhaps represents the type of faith exhibited by radicals and/or cult members. It rejects contradictions or employs reason when information is presented from sources outside of the authority, but it might still accept contradictory statements from the authority itself.

Skepticism: My understanding is that classical skepticism is defined not so much by its affinity for empiricism as it is by a philosophical realization that all knowledge is based on faculties that are subject to distortion and therefore liable to error. Modern skepticism, at least in layman's terms, seems focused instead on only accepting as fact that which can be visibly observed, demonstrated, and/or reproduced. Like blind faith, I assume that very few people are actually true skeptics in this sense. It's simply too irrational. Rather, most people probably refer to being skeptics only when it comes to matters of the supernatural or cryptozoological.

Semiotic-Rationalism: There seem to be hybrids between skeptics and blind believers that dismiss with supernatural and yet still want to cling to a certain "truth" behind statements of the supernatural. These are the types of people who reject supernatural reality of New Testament miracles by abusing Augustine's discussion of figurative language in the Bible. For these people, it is not simply the uncharitable portions of the Bible that must be read allegorically or metaphorically. They would advance that anything that sounds implausible according to our understanding of modern science must also be reduced to a metaphorical description of an event (e.g. Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes, he simply guilt-tripped his followers into sharing food; Jesus didn't physically rise from the dead...but the spreading of his message was a kind of resurrection).

Synthetic-Rationalism: Synthetic-rational faith would be that faith which does employ reason to question the consistency of matters of faith with its own internal logic as well as external ideologies. This kind of faith is necessary to the belief in miracles--it accepts as historical facts events that it accepts cannot have happened under any known natural means. It is also the kind of faith that is necessary to conduct higher order theological and moral discussions within a religion itself. This is the kind of faith that prevents an institution like the Catholic Church from reducing itself to limited blind faith to the pope, and it is what prevents popes from becoming all-out Antichrists. It is also why the Church takes great care before pronouncing on matters of faith and morals. The Church recognizes that it has an obligation not to present contradictions to the faithful--and that the faithful have the capacity to recognize those contradictions. I suppose it is also this kind of faith that enables one to believe in the Eucharist--allowing me to accept the physical accidents of the bread and wine without merely rationalizing it to mere symbolism as a figure (metaphor) for Christ's body. One would also like to imagine that it is this approach to faith that leads to conversion into one's Church...but that idea would, of course, also be subject to personal bias.

I would go so far as to say that synthetic-rational faith is the most mature of the four forms listed above since it seems to demand an awareness and even acceptance of all of the preceding forms at some level. Blind faith and skepticism seem immature modes of faith due to their absolutism. They are all-or-nothing approaches that seem the product of underdeveloped imaginations. Semiotic-rationalism seems to merely ape maturity. While it is imaginatively clever in its supposed ability to read between the lines, it seems trapped to forever ride an ultimately sterile one-trick pony. The synthetic-rationalist, trapped between two seemingly contradicting ideologies, seems to occupy that abundantly fertile space of intersection.

I'm not sure, though, that I would say that a synthetic-rational faith is necessarily the best or happiest mode of faith. One might say that "limited blind faith" is the most pure form of faith. A limited blind faith renders the believer extremely vulnerable to exploitation and can lead one to become an accomplice to evil. However, a limited blind faith attached to a true and benevolent authority probably yields the greatest form of happiness. The synthetic-rationalist is always in danger of slipping too far towards extremes--giving up the project in favor of a simpler, more temptingly comfortable worldview--of either denouncing the supernatural or too aggressively (defensively) asserting it out of his own repeating doubts.