Avdat

History for horndogs

Speaking of women's agency, Mrs. Avdat and I, searching for new TV programming passion, are checking out The Tudors on Netflix. It's a great show for couples. Women will appreciate the breathtaking period costumes. Men will appreciate the breathtaking ladies-in-waiting when they slip out of their costumes. Which seems to happen all the time.

Now 16th century England was quite the patriarchal society. That said, I imagine that even then and there women had opportunities for creativity and advancement apart from sleeping your way to the top. Thus far, the show permits the viewer one of only two relationships with its female characters--lust, if they're young and have the King's eye (Anne Boleyn), or pity, if they're matronly and don't (Catherine of Aragon).

But it's Showtime, so what should I expect? Howard Zinn's People's History of the English Renaissance?

Oh, I'm forgetting. There's Margaret Tudor who, in this less than historically accurate telling, is married off to the elderly and lecherous King of Portugal, much to her chagrin. When the King grasps his chest in pain after they consummate the marriage I thought, "Ah, there's your escape. Wear him out until he checks out!" But she found a quicker way, smothering him to death with a pillow, his gout-swollen big toe quivering to the very moment he expired. Now that's agency!

Still, I imagine I will continue to watch. Sam Neill is outstanding as Henry VIII's confidant Cardinal Wolsey. Neill is so good you can almost hear the gears in his brain going click, click, click as he manipulates his driven but somewhat erratic monarch at every turn. Why Neill in a red cap isn't the top hit on a Google image search of "medieval corruption" I have no idea.

Saving the innocents with a magic screwdriver

It's just as well that the congregation where I was going to fill in this morning canceled services. I was getting ready to offer a definitive answer to a question that I'm only prepared to think out loud about: why did God save only Jesus, and not all the innocents in Bethlehem?

In an article in Review and Expositor, Frank Tupper offers an interesting answer: Joseph was the only one to whom a warning would have made any sense. For example, if I had dreamed last night that my children were in mortal danger, I would not have packed them in the car that very instant and driven to Florida. I would have got up, fixed myself a glass of water, shaken the cobwebs of that nightmare out of my head, and returned to bed. And so would have the fathers of Bethlehem.

Joseph was in a different situation. Joseph knew the true identity of the boy in the crib under his roof. Joseph, like everyone, knew he was ruled by a ruthless monarch. Furthermore, Joseph surely knew that the identity of his son was known to the king, thanks to the visit of the magi. Finally, Joseph had experience trusting and acting on his dreams. So when the angel visited him one night prophesying doom unless he and his family got out of Dodge, Joseph alone was prepared to act on that information.

Thus, says Tupper, the Slaughter of the Innocents suggests that God's special providence (miracles) usually defers to God's general providence (God's creation of a world whose orderliness we call "laws of nature," conditioned by time and space, filled with human beings whose exercise of free will--embedded in the mysterious nexus of finitude sin and redemption--is the story of history). God may well intervene in a given situation to give it a nudge toward the best possible outcome, but what is possible is to a great extent already determined by what has unfolded up to that point. This is not to say that there are things God cannot do, but it is to say that when God intervenes, God does so respecting the integrity of what God has created and permitted--which is another way of saying that God is always true to himself.

Clearly this won't satisfy everyone, and if we have experienced the murder of one of our own children we might well want a bit more intervention from the Almighty. But I can't imagine that a more active intervention would make the situation any better. Chaos and evil make life unpredictable and at times  unbearable, but so would a Deity who kept stepping onto the stage of human history coaching the actors on blocking and intonation according to plot changes he's composing at that very moment.

I imagine it would be like living in the world of David Tennant's Doctor Who. As a Time Lord, the Doctor frequently intervenes in history both for its own sake and to make subsequent events turn out OK. Usually such interventions are known only to the viewer and the Doctor's lovely human sidekick, but during Tennant's run as the Doctor, he saves planet Earth from full-scale, extraterrestrial and very public invasions of Daleks and Cybermen, not to mention nudging a crashing spaceship away from Buckingham Palace. As I watched the human race experience redemption on an annual basis by a mysterious, benevolent visitor in a flying phone booth, armed only with a magic screwdriver, I couldn't help but wonder, "If this were really happening, how would the markets react?"

If the angels were to act any more overtly in their war against the demons than they do, I'm not sure we could tolerate it any better than the present miseries that make us question God's power and goodness. I do wonder, however, if a series of gentle nudges can get the universe to the place where the scriptures promise that it will wind up: where death is destroyed, and the home of God is among mortals. That would seem to require a kind of special revelation at odds with the general revelation we see on a daily basis.

On the other hand, Paul compares our present state to our resurrected state by appealing to the continuity and discontinuity between a seed and a fully grown plant. If we didn't know anything about botany, it would seem incredible that a series of small steps could lead from one to the other. Yet it does. So maybe this incredibly violent, evolving universe can be nudged toward utopia.

But if so, that would seem to require patience. If it took 13 billion years for the first resurrection to occur, it might take another 13 billion years for all the rest of them to occur.

How elite are you?

Claire Berlinski read Charles Murray's op-ed on the New Elites, and turned it into a quiz. Kevin Drum proclaimed the quiz worthy of being a meme, and I agree! So here's the quiz with my results:

1. Can you talk about "Mad Men?" No.
2. Can you talk about the "The Sopranos?" No.
3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right?" Drew Carey.
4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? Yes.
5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? No.
6. How about pilates? No.
7. How about skiing? During the Winter Olympics I can.
8. Mountain biking? I can fake it.
9. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? Both of 'em.
10. Does the acronym MMA mean anything to you? Yes.
11. Can you talk about books endlessly? Not only that; I READ books endlessly.
12. Have you ever read a "Left Behind" novel? Nope.
13. How about a Harlequin romance? Yes. I pilfered one of my mother's at the beach one summer.
14. Do you take interesting vacations? I think so.
15. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No.
16. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? No.
17. Would you be caught dead in an RV? I have filled the tank, checked the oil and washed the windows of many an RV. So, yes.
18. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? I'm not planning on being caught dead anywhere, but I know my time is coming.
19. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo? Yes.
20. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? No.
21. How about the Rotary Club? No. Does the Optimist Club count?
22. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? Yes.
23. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? No.
24. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Yes. In fact, that's our situation right now.
25. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? Yes.
26. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes.
27. Have you worked on one? Yeah, baby!

I give myself a score of 6.5 elite answers out of 27. In other words, I am 24% elite, if I did my math right. I'm a regular rube.

Murray's column reports that the Tea Party is darkly warning that a new elite--ignorant about regular folks--has taken over America. But who gets to decide who's elite and who's not? A New York Times poll last spring reported that members of the Tea Party turn out to be more highly educated and wealthier than the average American. Sounds like an elite group to me!

There are elites who actively work to maximize their plutocratic interests and those who don't. I suspect that the former try to hide their rapaciousness from themselves and others with assorted attempts to keep it real (a little MMA or NASCAR watching). And the former accuse the latter of elitism. That's chutzpah.

So, dear Elitist, I absolve you of the obligation to fly down to Talladega this weekend and slum with the rest of us. No need to display your drunken contempt for Kyle Busch by flinging a chicken bone and crushed can of Bud in his general direction. All I ask of you is that you use your outsized financial, cultural and political influence on behalf of us rubes. A progressive tax code, a living wage, universal health care, and no more rich man's wars and poor man's fights. The usual stuff. Those who do such things are by no means out of touch with the rest of us.

A longish contextual theology, or what I learn about God by waiting on the Jerry Springer crowd

Last Friday night I sold $500 worth of food and took home $80-some in tips. Not bad after tipping out the bar, the hostess and the busser. The next night I sold twice as much food but netted only $10 more in tips. Why? you ask.

It was the eve of Valentine's Day, which brought out what my co-worker calls "upgraders." People who usually don't mind eating a greasy pork sandwich out of a dirty ash tray decided to take that special someone whose name is tattooed on their neck to our casual dining establishment.

It was off the chain. The Jerry Springer Show could have held a casting call in there. People showed up drunk, and we seated them. I approached one table and all five of them started yelling what they wanted all at once, like a bunch of little kids whose Ritalin had worn off. I had to become a preschool teacher just to take their order. "OK, let's take turns, starting with you, Ma'am. What would you like to drink?" I said sweetly while thinking, How do these people function in society?

I knew my tip was doomed when I presented the check. The two couples got into an argument over who was going to pay for the kid sitting in between them. After they settled up, one guy stuffed a couple of dollars into my palm and said, "Sorry I can't give you any more, but I didn't know the bill was gonna be so high."

Well yes, three sangrias, a martini, a Long Island, two mudslides a hurricane and a margarita do add up. Thanks for chugging my tip! After my tip-out to the bar, I'm pretty sure I lost money on you. But you do get points for honesty.

Change we can believe in, BSG edition

Should the Colonials have backed the Zarek coup?

Frak yeah!

Because Tom Zarek would have known better than to think that this planet is habitable.

BSG lands east of Eden

Spoiler alert.

We finished Battlestar Galactica last night. Not everybody was happy with the finale (HT). They didn't find plausible the idea that 38,000 star-traveling humans would give up their technology to inter-marry with hunter-gatherers.

Yeah, like an aircraft carrier in space is plausible. Dude, it's a TV show. It's a science fiction TV show. Isn't a willing suspension of disbelief something like mandatory? At any rate, it's no less plausible than positing a glorious Gondor some time prior to the wretchedness of Neolithic western Europe.

I thought the ending was wonderful. Have you ever toured one of those World War II era battleships or aircraft carriers that are tied up in various ports? Can you smell the strong odor of metal and oil, activated by summer heat? I thought it fitting that Laura Roslin didn't have to die with that smell in her nose. Ahh, green grass after five years of blue-gray steel illumined by fluorescent bulbs. I was happy and greatly relieved for all of them who made it.

Mainly I was happy for myself. After the mutiny, after listening to Galactica's hull groaning, after Cavil capturing Hera, the only way I was able to watch the next DVD was when Laura pointed out that it was the last one. I'm not sure I could have taken much more betrayal, loss and the attendant despair--even though it was just a TV show.

So, Baltar and Six are Adam and Eve, right? She tempted him; he yielded out of love; their conspiracy destroys a world, but they are the god-parents of a new civilization, wandering off into the Veldt to cultivate a plot of land. That's how I took it. And thinking of it in this way added a certain power to the Christian teaching on original sin that I had not felt before. Caprica wasn't paradise by any means, but as an icon of what might have been, it helped me feel a sense of "paradise lost" that the doctrine has always failed to communicate to me. Plus, Baltar and Six, unlike Adam and Eve, experience a kind of redemption in their own lives, rather than being relegated to anti-types of Jesus and Mary, who come along much later to fix it all.

What'd you think?

The 2000s suck but the '90s were even worse

All that the talk about Inglourious Basterds has done is remind me how much I absolutely loathed Pulp Fiction. I realize I'm coppin' to a massively uncool opinion here, but coolness was never something I excelled in in the first place.

I can usually say what I think about politics and religion, but I find articulating my (dis)pleasure at the cinema more difficult, so I scanned the Wikipedia article on Pulp Fiction, and I think that Foster Hirsch gets it just right:

If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness, it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family.

Yup. And please, spare me the briefcase speculation; I don't care what's in the briefcase, and if you spend more than ten seconds speculating on "the meaning of the briefcase," then you've been punked. Pulp Fiction "means" nothing. The trail of pop culture inside jokes goes nowhere. It wasn't the violence that offended me, not even the poor spectacle of the unfortunately-named Marvin having his brains splattered all over the inside of that car. It's the proposition that nihilism is cool that offends me.

I was thinking that Pulp Fiction's G-rated twin would be Seinfeld, a show unabashedly about nothing, but I've decided that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is a better choice. The host, Regis Philbin, dresses like a gangster, and the ideal contestant is a person who gets all the inside jokes in Pulp Fiction. In other words, a person whose head is full of information but who's got jack for knowledge. Much less wisdom.

Building on this cultural quicksand is a fourth estate whose doyens fault politicians who care too much about public policy, and elected officials who dress up vacuous postmodern philosophy in the chain mail of political thuggery--who think that facts don't matter; violence is beautiful, and war criminals are heroes.

Put differently, this is an awful decade, what with war, terrorism, torture, and greed, but it was a long time coming. Doesn't a nihilistic culture deserve leaders like Bush and Cheney and a political discourse dominated by utterly cynical shouting about non-existent death panels?

God, I woke up angry! And I have to work a double!

Pseudo-Freudian torture analysis

Mrs. Avdat can't help but notice that the preferred media euphemism for torture, "enhanced interrogation techniques," reminds her a lot of another media staple, ads for "male enhancement." And isn't that what the last eight years were about? A bunch of jingoistic, militaristic bozos who'd nevertheless managed to avoid combat when they were younger overcompensating in the winter of their discontent, banishing all doubts about their masculine potency?

We're watching Battlestar Galactica on Netflix DVDs (please, no spoiler comments). Last night's episode was Fragged, in which, as you may recall, Baltar shoots and kills Lt. Crashdown. "Now you're a man," intones Six.

Maybe what's wrong with the Republicans is they're having too much Cylon sex.

wassup

Who knew that Dookie was a day-trader?

It's been a long eight years.

HT.

While channel surfing...

I discovered Jesse Ventura on C-Span 2.  I was quite unnerved by the fact that the man no longer looks like a professional wrestler.  He looks like an elementary school custodian/sex offender:

See what I mean?