The Illogic of Obama Fear

or “If you are truly scared then start acting like it”

I am not going to drum up support for Obama here.  Thomas Turner never endorses anyone, except for one huge exception, to paraphrase Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush and Shane Claiborne (talk about a mashup).

What I do want to do is lay the cards out on the table and say “don’t act angry and scared.”  And if you answer back, “no, I truly am!”  Then I reply, “well, start acting like it.”

It’s illogical to bemoan a socialist “USSA,” modeled after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, to start calling people comrade and stuff of this nature.  If you were really, truly, and fervently scared of a reincarnation of Stalinist regimes in the USA then you wouldn’t be saying anything.  Not one word.  Not one phrase.  Not one syllable.

Because you know what happened to people that talked bad about Stalin, socialism, and didn’t say comrade?  They were killed.  Massacred.  If lucky, sent off to Siberia.

So if you truly are scared:

A) Don’t say anything bad about Obama on the phone because we already know the NSA and other security organizations have the legal right to listen into America calls.

B) Don’t write anything bad about Obama on the Internet, because once something is on the Internet it is always on the Internet.

C) Don’t say or write anything bad about socialism, good about capitalism, or forget to address people as Comrade because that one will come find you.

Okay, I jest…but seriously, the illogic of Obama fear is that we are using the freedom we have to speak about the freedom we will supposedly lose.  So every time you complain about Obama or cry out in fear remember that in your very utterance you testify against this fact.

Okay, this may appear a bit cynical.  I am tired of Bush hating and Obama hating precisely because the issues are so complex, so intertwined, so large that it is foolish to pass judgment without time to ponder, consider, and articulate.  This is why the movie W is not going to pass historical muster, because there has not been long enough in time to even begin to pass historical judgment on what really went on in the Bush administration.  We barely understand the full ramifications of the Clinton years yet.

So be patient.  Be happy (maybe not about Obama, but that you don’t have to live in fear if you don’t want to).  Celebrate (maybe not about Obama, but that you still live in freedom and without fear).  Play in the leaves.  And be content that it is illogical to fear a future we do not yet know or realize, for we have nothing to fear about fear itself.

Does Evangelicalism Deny Metaphor?

Daniel Radosh said the following in his recent piece “The Red Hot Christian Blockbuster“:

But in making evangelism—and acceptability to the most insular Christian audiences—a priority, Christianese films all but guarantee artistic failure. Art demands an honesty that the evangelical bubble would find intolerable. (Emphasis mine)

This is something that I have been thinking about as I work on my paper discussing the influence of the Oxford Movement on Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ poetry (if that last phrase made no sense to you, just keep reading, because it doesn’t quite make sense to me yet either, that’s why I am writing a paper on it).  Anyway, this thought has kept popping up in my mind:

Does evangelicalism deny metaphor?

At the center of Art is the Metaphor: Symbol, Signifier, Signified.  In Christianity this is called sacrament.  In denying the sacramental nature of life, living, and worship, does evangelicalism deny itself art.  I think this is the root cause of contemporary evangelical music, movies, and fiction being B-grade at best: metaphor is denied, therefore art is denied.  Those who invoke the metaphor, and therefor enter the mode of art, are being truly honest in using symbols.  Most evangelicals think truth is declared in the denial of signifier and symbol, that if metaphor does not exist only the literal is left.  This is untrue.  Only the opposite is truly honest, truly art: if there is only literal there is no art and no honesty.

Fake Fireworks: Why We Can No Longer Believe Our TVs (Part 1)

The news about the fake fireworks at the Olympics has been making its way around the web. I slept through most of the fakery, so I don’t have much of an opinion as to how good the photo forgery was, but I can say that this benign example of video feed manipulation has wide effects on how we perceive reality from the powers that be.

From Slashdot:

“London’s Telegraph newspaper reports that some of the fireworks which appeared over Beijing during the television broadcast of the Olympic Opening Ceremony were actually computer generated. But hold on it’s not necessarily as bad as you think. The faked fireworks were actually set-off at the stadium, but because of potential dangers in filming the display live from a helicopter, viewers at home were shown a pre-recorded, computer-generated shot.”

Computer generated shots meshed with real shots have broad implications for news networks, and even broader applications for governments, corporations, and other powerful entities. Video has long been used as Apostle Thomas test, were the apostle famously stated he would not believe in Christ unless he saw him with his own eyes. We have used a video lens in place of our own eyes, and transferred our seeing from that of our own eyes (which have been shown in eye-witness testimony to not always be very good when it comes down to only one person) to the eyes of a camera. Seeing is believing, especially when a large group sees something, and a consensus can begin to form. When a group can be manipulated by the “all seeing eye” of a camera in such media as a movie or drama, mediums that use special effects to make something appear more real or hyper-real, the consequence is entertainment. When a group is manipulated by the camera in a documentary or live film, when everything is supposed to be raw, the ability to trust the producer is significantly altered. What else are we going to see from NBC on tape delay that we do not think might have been altered?

More coming, so stay with…