on protection

So many conversations lately have centered on the conflict of involvement in and avoidance of government, and the type of government created by either response.  The recent WikiLeaks publicity has prompted an even more visceral response to "invasions of privacy" and alleged conspiracy.  I'm somewhat privileged in such conversations; as a non-citizen, I'm allowed to comment at-a-distance, scrutinize, support and remain skeptical without any real need to actually take a side.  I can align myself with Republicans or Democrats, with the Tea Party movement or Constitution Party, but at the end of the day I'm not beholden to any real view, and I can redact any strong opinion without any consequences, because my vote wouldn't matter in such cases anyway.  I can criticize whatever government strategy I want, and my statements don't need to fit a certain ideological mold.  

why M. Night Shyamalan keeps getting better

"The Last Airbender" aside, I want to offer a defense of Shyamalan. He's earned it. In the years since "The Sixth Sense," Shyamalan has directed an impressive body of work, a fact made even more impressive when we consider that many of those films were written by Shyamalan himself. But I want to go back to the film that first made audiences bow in awe before the fabled storyteller. As a master storyteller, Shyamalan has mastered the very surreal element of surprise. With regard to "The Sixth Sense," for example, we didn't sit in our theater seats wondering just how this film was going to wrap up from Bruce Willis's perspective. In fact, we didn't know what to wonder in the first place. We bore witness to a heartbreaking meld of family dynamics, mourning, friendship and love--all very carnal and perpetual elements of the lives of even the youngest of us. And that is the point. As Cole and his earnest psychologist wrestled with stained, untied and even absolutely rent threads, we weren't asked to rely on the supernatural to solve the mystery or even lend some meaning to the stories. Who hasn't experienced the loss of a loved one and wished for one last conversation, one last attempt to gain parental approval, or to make peace with a friend? What was most tear-inducing about the film, at least for me, was the scene between Cole and his mother in the car in which Cole revealed that his grandmother was so proud of her daughter, which ultimately brought peace and gratefulness to Cole's mom--and a little bit of resolution for us. The strength of the story lies not in the revelation that Bruce Willis is struggling to come to terms with the mess that he will leave behind after his death, but that we all will.

A smart filmmaker, a financially savvy one (which Shyamalan has to be, as anyone in The Industry would admit) cannot afford to become cliché. When Shyamalan followed "The Sixth Sense" with (skipping a good Mel Gibson flick) "The Village" (my personal favorite of his canon), he was criticized for the lackluster and arguably predictable ending. Admittedly, the "alternate reality" of 19th-century-Covington-Woods-within-modern-day-America was not the most complex scenario Shyamalan's imagination could have wrought; however, it withdrew a creative space in which the deeply and intrinsically human could operate--and even flourish. The farce of "Those We Don't Speak of" and the moaning sounds from the woods aren't THE EVENT in and of themselves; rather, they create the tense environment in which every action could have far-reaching consequences, and in which bravery always means to venture into the forbidden.

What Shyamalan has done is construct a supernatural aspect that has to be in proportion to the contents of the story. Cole is struggling with interactions with the dead, so the context of Malcolm Crowe's limbo is, while impossible, fitting. As are the circumstances of "The Village." To have fit a similar supernatural element to the characters of Covington Woods would have been laughable--even ridiculous. And that is the absolute beauty of Shyamalan's vision. Even in light of the farce of the red cloaks and alternate reality-esque conditions, it was Ivy and Lucius who necessitated the story's unfolding, who propelled it forward. Shyamalan seems to have a superbly crafted motif in mind behind each of his films. He moves from mourning to faith/family to love to Deep Ecology to purpose to connectedness, and yet we deny him the freedom to care about how we participate in our lives and the lives of those we touch. Shyamalan wants to ensure that we become whole and real, even if he needs to bring in fantasy and the monsters of our imaginations to pound us over the heads with our self-absorption and stuck situations. It is not Shyamalan who has lost his zeal; it is his audience that doesn't like to be challenged and grown by stories that are collectively our own. We are not more discriminating in our tastes; we are in severe denial.

on disabilities, and why I believe in miracles

I'm still thinking about miracles--those events which so violently oppose the laws of nature we've formulated that they require some sort of supernatural explanation. Some suggest that certain laws can be violated, but only by other laws. For example, the law of gravity be superseded by aerodynamics. A more Christian question might ask whether God's grace supersede the laws of sin and death, a deeply serious question centered around Christ's death and resurrection. I had lunch with a professor I trust deeply and asked him point blank whether he believes in miracles. "My daughter giving birth was a miracle," he responded after a moment, suggesting that miracles been "prepared for," a thoughtful God writing their possibilities into the fabric of time and space, even if we don't understand their physics. While that didn't entirely answer my question the way I'd posed it (as a scientific one--the framing of religious questions in scientific language is another conversation), it did make me think for a very long time. I struggle with the typical scientist's ego: I have studied this world enough that I can make assumptions about its behavior, and I know enough of the world's details to understand its grandeur. We can manufacture artificial limbs, hearts, even faces. Are we engaged in creativity? or miracle-performance?

While the definition of "miracle" is necessary (as is any definition when you want to have a thoughtful conversation about its implications), it is debated. Perhaps it requires supernatural explanation. Perhaps they don't happen (indeed, some thoughtful and God-fearing churches have the official stance that miracles were limited to the apostolic age). The mere fact that there are saliences in our world, the mere fact that sometimes things don't happen as we-in-our-wisdom would predict should be so incredibly humbling, and smacks, perhaps, of a God who still smiles when we try to amass all our knowledge and turn it into official canon of biblical proportions.

I was particularly struck by this in a sermon and a small experience I had on Sunday. Again I ventured into Boston to go to Park Street Church, this time with a group of girls from my floor. We were speaking in the car of disabilities, as one of my girls' sisters has severe dyslexia and has struggled for years with learning how to read, something I so flippantly regard as simple. Park Street Church was celebrating Enable Boston Sunday this particular day, a day to remember those in the congregation and greater Boston area who struggle with all sorts of disabilities. One woman gave a testimony, speaking of her son's head injury that has since left him with severe short-term memory loss, an inability to speak, and myriad other supposed "disabilities." Mrs. McLeod, however, spoke to her son's strange interactions with God, telling us stories of finding her son awake at 3 in the morning, praying at the side of his bed. Pastor Gordon Hugenberger then got up and spoke on Ehud, a man disabled in his right hand yet who used his right hand to slay the evil Moabite king (Judges 3 v 12-30). He then pointed out that we all suffer from a certain disability--the disability of sleep. We are all limited by this crazy one third of our lives that we spend asleep. Depriving ourselves of sleep is psychologically damaging at best, fatal at worst.

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.”

(1 Corinthians 1:26-31)

I left the church in a weird mood. Moving forward with my group's lunch plans--a visit to an improvisational diner called "Fire and Ice," which lets you watch your (unlimited) choice of raw vegetables, meats, pastas, etc. and sauce be cooked by master chefs on a giant center flat grill. I was waiting for a brunch omelette to be prepared when there was a little commotion beside me. A group of disabled adults from a home in Boston had come to Fire and Ice on a field trip, and the man next to me didn't realize that you're not supposed to mix your sauce with your food before given to the chef. It makes the food more flavourful and easier to cook if the sauce is added to the mix toward the end, and so while the chef gently suggested that Tom (the man next to me) hold onto his sauce the next time so he could enjoy an even yummier plate, Tom just couldn't process what was being said to him, and he looked at me with the most sorrowful expression of guilt--what had he done wrong?? And so I gently and more slowly explained what I thought the chef was trying to say. Perhaps he was grateful for my kind voice, or perhaps he was just excited to talk to someone (and show off his nifty ID card:-)), but his appreciation was so overwhelming that I had to go to the bathroom to cry for a few minutes.

I think humility is a miracle. I think I tend SO MUCH toward pride and arrogance that any small act of gratefulness toward me that drives me to my modest knees can't be part of the way I naturally function. In all my egoism and smugness as to how much knowledge I've accrued in my short time here, I'm still at the mercy of God, and how much he knows about what I truly care about. That he knows me so well to bless me as he wills and to show me the depths of my sin--I can think of no other word than miracle.

And that I'm crying as I recall the experience is no less miraculous. I'm so grateful for the ways in which the Lord seems to say "See? I TOLD you I know you better than anyone else!" He weaves himself in and out of our stories so effortlessly and yet so powerfully, as if proving to us that we are never out of his immediate grasp. So I don't pray for evidence of his presence anymore; I pray to be battered, like John Donne's INCREDIBLE poem. Humble me, and show me why I'm little.

Worlds...and miracles therein?

For Alexander there was no Far East,

Because he thought the Asian continent

India ended. Free Cathay at least

Did not contribute to his discontent.

But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more

Serene. To him it seemed that he'd but played

With several shells and pebbles on the shore

Of that profundity he had not made.

(Richard Wilbur)

I'm taking a class this semester called "Reality with Physics and Philosophy," an exploration of the physical laws that govern this monster we call the universe and how those might accommodate an active God or exclude an inactive one--or vice versa on both accounts. Now Schrodinger's cat makes sense to me, that the quantum mechanics of the universe suggest a probabilistic universe, even if that flies in the face of intuition and instinct. I understand general relativity as a reworking of the laws of gravitation that become problematic when we leave the earth's atmosphere, and time dilation and length contraction are all understandable in terms of Star Trek analogies (a Klingon ship approaches the Enterprise at warp speed with a photon beam that can only shoot perpendicularly to its target--should Captain Kirk fear for the crew's safety, or is Spock correct in assuring the worried Captain that all will be well??). Hume and Polkinghorne and discussions on miracles, however, are all entirely bothersome to me.

"Suppose," Hume offers, "for instance, that the fact, which the testimony endeavours to establish, partakes of the extraordinary and the marvellous; in that case, the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more or less unusual. The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them. But when the fact attested is such a one as has seldom fallen under our observation, here is a contest of two opposite experiences; of which the one destroys the other, as far as its force goes, and the superior can only operate on the mind by the force, which remains. The very same principle of experience, which gives us a certain degree of assurance in the testimony of witnesses, gives us also, in this case, another degree of assurance against the fact, which they endeavour to establish; from which contradiction there necessarily arises a counterpoize, and mutual destruction of belief and authority."

I'll forgive his disgusting overuse of commas and launch right into discontent--a miracle is something with a probability of zero. Lazarus being raised from the dead directly and violently violates of physics and the nature of death. Blind people being granted sight before Jordy's goggles even planted that idea in modern audiences' minds SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. Can the superior experiences of those who have died staying that way apart from our mythologies, of those born without sight forever resigned to encounter this world differently (not inadequately, just differently) be contradicted by Hume's opposite experience of a miracle...and win? Are there miracles? I had lunch with a professor I trust very much and asked him this question. "My daughter giving birth," he said, "was a miracle." Personally, my uncle was shot over 90% of his body and given less than a 1% chance of survival. To this day he professes the miracle of healing. But he wasn't dead. Have miracles been downgraded in our scientifically-advantaged times? Are they simply "cool things that happen," or are we actually having experiences with the divine? Have miracles been "prepared for," a thoughtful God writing their possibilities into the fabric of time and space, even if we don't understand their physics?

I suppose you can infer my real question--does God interact with the world he supposedly set in motion? I wish I could say yes, but I'm afraid that more and more I lean the other way...I want SO BADLY to believe in the God who cries over our suffering, and admits no design for it in creation but works against it in our sin, but I listened to a radio broadcast with a rabbi a while ago who has struggled heartbreakingly with the death of his son forty years ago of progeria (rapid-aging syndrome) and says he and God have reached "an accommodation with each other," recognizing each other's weaknesses and yet caring deeply for each other. Do miracles even matter, then? Some churches have the official stance that miracles were limited to the apostolic age, but then I think some working definition of miracle is necessary (of course it has been from the beginning, but even more so when drawing comparisons to Jesus' ministry and ours). Is it a phenomenological one, trying to explain events? Is it an epistemological one, trying to understand facts that don't quite fit our notion of truth? Is in an ontological one, trying to understand why things are the way they are?

So Polkinghorne (who only allows one miracle: the Resurrection) and Augustine (who preaches the presence of God at all times) don't really get along. And I can see how non-Christians might see miracles as evidence of a discriminating God. But again--the first thing we need is a definition. Perhaps all things can be explained in hindsight--hands healing back, only being able to read Scripture, the Red Sea parting for the Israelites...but perhaps the timing of such events matters more than we know. Perhaps the natural processes of this world can result in phenomena, but perhaps it is the timing that has been prepared for by God--those "one in a trillion" chances--that lay the foundation for God's dealings with humanity, and allow us to struggle with the ways we think he interacts with a fallen world that claims no need of him...

stuff white people think

In 2006, Smirnoff's viral video "Tea Partay" became one of youtube's most-watched videos. A satire of the New England "preppie" culture, it features P-Unit, a cohort of three pastel-colored polo shirt upper-middle class "old money" white rappers talking about their Ivy-league educations, croquet games, yacht rides and Martha's Vineyard vacations. An undeniably hilarious commentary, it exposes quite a startling truth, and raises an often unasked question: what, exactly, is white culture?

One of comedian Daniel Tosh's routines combats this quite bluntly. It's easy, he says, to imitate the "hispanic," "asian" and "black" stereotypes, or at least create a caricature that is fairly recognizable and understood as somewhere along an ethnically appropriate continuum. What is the white stereotype? Is it the plaid-clad hillbilly? Is it the glasses-wearing young intellectual? Is it the yuppie? Is it the American? the European? the Australian? the South African? Is white culture, perhaps, the most difficult to pin down? Is there an advantage in struggling to establish some identity of race and ethnicity, and how do we go about actually establishing it?

History would appear to comment on this in a tongue-in-cheek way; it was occurrences such as the slavery movement of pre-Civil War America, the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, apartheid in South Africa, the Holocaust, the establishment of Native American reservations, etc., that seem to have been most influential and formative to that end. The effects of British, French, German, Dutch and Spanish imperialism don't seem to have extended so far into the present day lives of white people nearly as much as they have for those in Rwanda, the Phillipines, South Africa and Haiti, to name a few. Is the most accurate box to check in the ethnicity portion of a census questionnaire for a caucasian, then, "other?"

The Atlantic Monthly ran an article in January of 2009 called "The End of White America?" by Hua Hsu, a professor at Vassar College. The article included the following commentary from Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University. "[These students are in the midst of a racial-identity crisis.] They don't care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, 'I don't have a culture.' They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture...They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized." Commenting on the self-deprecation which whites often employ in order to avoid external lambasting (Smirnoff's video as one example), Wray notes that "the best defense is to be constantly pulling the rug out from underneath yourself...You're forced as a white person into a sense of ironic detachment."

So it would appear that white culture is not so much bland as it is "unmarked." Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explains unmarked culture to be "a virtually open-ended archive of differences" and marked culture to be one in which "particular differences are emphasized as constituting the defining features of group identity" (from Diaspora, identity, and religion: new directions in theory and research, by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso). America's pride as the "melting pot" hasn't so much left it bereft of white culture as much as it has allowed white culture to be touched by all others, leaving its borders undefined and its constituents, well, in somewhat of a retro-diaspora.

All this to say, enjoy the two linked videos...thoughtfully, ironically and responsibly.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-4XKTHJGs&feature=related

Someone who flips you off from a moving car is a placeless coward

Read THIS now.

And I mean NOW.