Avast there! It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!
As you were.
A post with no discernible theme
I suppose I’m being narrowminded here, missing the nuances of the situation. But it seems to me that if some Republican had hacked into Joe Biden’s e-mail account we’d have all the news media calling for a federal investigation and a special prosecutor.
By way of Conservative Grapevine, here’s a Popular Mechanics piece on 10 Kitchen Gadgets You’ll Use Only Once. Some of that stuff looks pretty neat. The only thing that keeps me from filling my house with impedimenta like that is poverty. Thank God for poverty, I say.
It’s bill-paying night for me, so that’s a good thought to keep in mind.
I note that the editors weren’t much impressed by a device that cooks chicken that isn’t messy. That idea appealed to me immediately.
I do not like messy food. That’s one of my major objections to barbecued ribs (barbecued anything, actually), pork (like the taste, hate the grease), big hamburgers with salads piled on top of them, and oranges (which I love, except for the dissection).
I guess that’s another sign that I’m not a Real Guy.
Now, bills.
Hindus Are Raging Against Christians
Voice of the Marytrs reports:
On August 23, widespread violence erupted against Christians following the assassination of World Hindu Council leader Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, the alleged mastermind behind the December 2007 attacks on believers in Kandhamal, Orissa State. Saraswati was killed with four of his followers. 30 men believed to be Maoist extremists, stormed a religious center in Kandhamal and opened fire.
Despite the evidence that Maoists killed the leader, Hindu are taking their revenge on Christians. Several people have been killed, including at least one Hindu woman suspected of being a Christian. Churches have been torched or vandalized. Police have been sent unarmed to watch the rioting as if ready to intervene, and government officials, I believe, have spoken against the rioting, but done nothing to stop it. The violence has spread to other Indian states. I am told many Christians are hiding in the jungle to avoid the militant Hindus.
Rescue us, Lord. Put our enemies to shame. Deliver us like you have many times in the past. (Psalm 71)
My favorite Jesus
Phil’s question about your favorite film Jesus got me thinking about the guy we both favor, Bruce Marchiano, who played Him in both The Visual Bible: Matthew and The Visual Bible: Acts.
My first reaction when I saw Machiano in the role was, “Wow! Finally a Jesus who looks like He could possibly be a Middle Eastern Jew!” In spite of the fact that I’m a Republican (and so obviously a racist and anti-Semite), I’ve always been irritated by blonde, blue-eyed Jesuses.* Even when Hollywood set out to produce a biting, “realistic,” debunking portrayal in The Last Temptation of Christ, they cast blonde, blue-eyed Willem Dafoe.
I suppose there’s no point throwing mud at an icon unless it’s iconographic-looking.
Anyway, I liked that about Marchiano. But even better was his ground-breaking portrayal. His Jesus is full of life–an open-hearted, easy-laughing man who clearly lives each moment to its full potential and views everyone He meets as a gift from God. His suffering in His Passion is all the more wrenching for the contrast.
This, in my view, is precisely what Jesus must have been like. That’s why people were impelled to follow Him–“In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.” (John 1:4)
*Yeah, yeah. I know Marchiano’s got blue eyes. You can’t have everything. Especially when you’re looking for a man to play God.
A banner with a strange device*
As you may have noticed if you’ve been here a while, I have strong opinions on the subject of “book banning” accusations, as made by liberal interest groups.
Michelle Malkin examines the question of who are the real book banners in this country in our time, in a column today.
*The reference is to “Excelsior,” a poem by Longfellow.
Top Ten Jesus Movies
Christianity Today published a list a couple years ago of its top ten movies about Jesus. In this list, I learned that Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings was so moving, no one made another movie about the Lord until after the director died. Not on this list are the films made by The Visual Bible, which I thought were very good.
Have you seen any of these? Which is your favorite or perhaps least disliked? What do you think generally about movies depicting Christ? Are they bound to get it all wrong from the start, or do you think it’s possible to make a good one?
More on David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) said, “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function,” he once wrote. “It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” This quoted in The Independent, which ran a final tribute today.
Nuremberg: The Reckoning, by William F. Buckley
William F. Buckley’s novels have always been a quiet, minor pleasure, at least for me. Buckley wasn’t a great novelist. He was a fine writer, and his books are well-researched and informative. But they lack strong characters, and everybody in them talks like William F. Buckley. Not a bad thing in itself, but it plays hob with T.W.S.O.D.*
I learned interesting things about the Nuremberg Tribunals in the reading, but I never worked up a whole lot of personal concern for the characters.
The main character in Nuremberg: The Reckoning is Sebastian Reinhard, a young German-born American. The book opens with a prequel, showing Sebastian’s father, an architect, as he works desperately to get his wife and son out of Germany. He succeeds, but fails to escape himself. Some time later he is reported dead.
Sebastian reaches draft age just as the war is winding down. Instead of seeing combat, he is assigned to serve as an interpreter in Nuremberg, assisting in the prosecution of a fictional war criminal named Gen. Amadeus. Through Sebastian’s eyes we are able to observe the struggles of life in postwar Germany, and the complicated legal and diplomatic maneuvers involved in conducting a series of trials for which there was no historic precedent. Most of the cast of characters are people who actually lived, and there is much to learn for those who (like me) hadn’t studied the trials (or even seen the movie).
Yet somehow, when it was done, it felt unfinished to me. Perhaps that was Buckley’s intention, in view of the moral ambivalencies of the whole project, the impossibility of making the criminals suffer proportionately to the sufferings they’d inflicted; the hypocrisy of allowing the Soviets to sit in gleeful judgment on monsters not appreciably worse than themselves.
But one way or another, there wasn’t a whole lot of satisfaction here.
*The Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
Not a lonely Hunter
Hunter Baker, a friend and supporter of my writing career, (such as it is), whose writing you’ve doubtless seen at Southern Appeal, RedState, and other places I’ve lost track of because he does so many (and my brain is full of holes), has a blog of his own now, here.
It has my coveted endorsement.
Beware, Walkers
This should be timely news to follow Lars’ last post. “Walkers, beware of where sidewalk ends.” (via WSJ)
In related news, the beautiful, kind-hearted people of America are burning wood in there fireplaces and stoves as an alternative to high-priced natural gas furnaces. Of course, some of the uglies among are complaining. We won’t name names here. They can speak for themselves.