Preaching to the choir… or not

In today’s New York Times there was an op-ed piece by Nicolas Kristof entitled Jesus and Jihad. In this piece, which Kristof admits he had reservations about writing, he shares with us some scenes from the Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers. He writes:
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is Glorious Appearing, which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it’s time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In “Glorious Appearing,” Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses.”
He concludes:
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah’s son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God’s word – but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people’s religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don’t think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That’s not what America stands for, and I doubt that it’s what God stands for.
Obviously as an atheist I find the last couple of words incoherent, but overall this seemed like a very sensible – and very relevant – commentary. And so, as an inveterate blogger, I wanted to blog about it. And then I wondered who might read it. I think that most of the people I know well would agree with Kristof that the popularity of these books says something important and disturbing about America. But would any Left Behind enthusiasts read this, and if so what might they say? Could any kind of dialogue follow, or is that a futile idea? Would we even speak the same language?
Curious. And troubling. [Cached]

The Control Room

We went to see The Control Room today. Highly recommended. If you didn’t realize that the Jessica Lynch story was released in order to bury another news item, you need to see this film. If you didn’t realize that the US deliberately targeted three separate groups of journalists in Baghdad, and why, you need to see this film. If you’ve already forgotten the things that people were saying at the time of the invasion, and need to be reminded of how they sound against the backdrop of over a year of fighting, occupation, torture, and chaos, you need to see this film. In fact, you just need to see it. Period.
(And don’t just take my word for it. Last time I looked, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film was 97% fresh – 75 critics positive, 2 negative.)
Update: If you have seen the film, you might be interested in this piece in Salon about Lt. Josh Rushing, the press officer at CentCom.

Self-perpetuating stereotypes

Reading Terry’s blog (which everyone should do, not least to get an Iraq veteran’s perspective of some of the unbelievable stuff which is going down these days), I came across a link to this thought-provoking essay by Dawn Taylor on the other side of sexism: the “men are jerks, and they can’t help it” nonsense that you encounter every day. And I was reminded of the strange story on Yahoo! Oddly Enough about how blondes do worse on intelligence tests after they’ve been exposed to “dumb blonde” jokes. This stuff is not innocuous: it changes the way people think and act.

Our worst fears

Back on June 11 I posted an entry entitled This is a blog entry I hope I’ll be able to delete. Weeks went by, and I began to hope that Sy Hersh had got it wrong after all; that the things to which he’d alluded were unsubstantiated. But today Salon Magazine has posted a piece entitled Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape.
WARNING: It’s pretty upsetting stuff.
UPDATE More info here at Boing Boing, including new info from European sources.

Library

Terry Karney’s blog pointed me at this wonderful poem. Here are the first few lines….
This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
Yes, it’s vaguely reminiscent of David Moser‘s self-referential tour de force (published by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas), but it’s a much more beautiful and thought-provoking piece. Pass it on.

Kabuki review

renjishi_pic1.gifYesterday evening my daughter (Kate) and I went to see the final performance of the Japan Society of Boston‘s presentation of Kabuki at the Cutler Majestic theatre in Boston. The performance was given by the Heisei Nakamura-za Kabuki Troupe starring Nakamua Kankuro, who are touring New York, Boston, and Washington DC this summer. (There’s a fascinating interview here, in which Nakamura Kankuro talks about the challenge and opportunity to bring kabuki to the United States.)
The troupe – actors, singers, musicians – performed two pieces that showed different sides of kabuki, Bo-Shibari (“Tied to a pole”), and Renjishi (“Dance for two lions”). There’s a detailed description of each here, with comments by Kankuro. The performance was in Japanese (obviously), and there was no printed or simultaneous translation, although Peter Grilli, the president of the Japan Society of Boston, provided a short introduction to the pieces. But the language was not a barrier.
The result? It was glorious – visually stunning, dramatic, funny, clever, musically exciting, challenging, dramatic, exuberant, and just plain fun.
One point of note was that the audience included many Japanese, mostly living in the Boston area (though some had travelled a long way to attend the show). As a result there was much bowing as people met. There was even one woman in a beautiful pink kimono, with all the trimmings.

CD of the week: Schubert: The Last Four Quartets

Although this is a double CD containing four of Schubert’s quartets, I tend to listen to an iTunes/iPod playlist that picks out just one of them: String Quartet No. 15 in G major, D. 887 (Op. posth. 161). I first heard this piece on an old Deutsche Grammophon LP back in the late 60s or early 70s*, and I remember being stunned that a string quartet could have such symphonic proportions. At the time, I owned a nice LP box set called The Rise of the Symphony which explored the evolution of the modern symphony through works by J. C. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. My immediate reaction on hearing Schubert’s G major quartet was that he’d made the symphony orchestra obsolete. OK, I was impressionable – but the work continues to exert an almost hypnotic effect on me to this day. I know that Death and the Maiden gets all the attention, but to me it’s just a warm-up for the main event.
As to the performance, I’ve listened to many quartets trying to capture the combination of ethereal beauty and naked power of the work. I had great hopes for the version on CBS by Ma/Kashkashian/Phillips/Kremer, but I found it disappointing. This budget recording by the Quartetto Italiano is deeply satisfying, however. It induces the chills up and down the spine just the way Schubert intended…..
* My brother reminds me that the LP in question was an Amadeus Quartet recording that he gave me one Christmas in 1973 or thereabouts.

Better, Faster, Lighter Java

I assume that you know that feeling when you’re in a bookshop and a book title just grabs you, and you instantly know that you have to read this book – you hope that it’s good, but even if it’s crap, you need to understand that too. Well, that particular experience hit me in my local B&N this afternoon. The book in question is Better, Faster, Lighter Java by Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland. I’ll let you know how it turns out. In the meantime, it’s sent me hunting through the usual chains of blogrefs, in the course of which I happened upon Bruce Tate’s Don’t make me eat the elephant again. Curiouser and curiouser….