Category Archives: Pop culture

If you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him!

The British comedy troupe Monty Python was admired for its movie “The Life of Brian,” an iconoclastic biopic of Jesus that ends with a song and dance number on crucifixes. Alas, Monty Python is no more, but what if they had taken on other major religious figures? Some of you may remember Monty Python’s famous “Penguin on the Television Set” skit, which begins with the characters listening to a radio drama called “The Death of Mary, Queen of Scots.” I have adapted that radio drama into an iconoclastic take on the Zen Buddhist dictum: “If you meet the Buddha on the street, kill him!”

Announcer: And now the BBC is proud to present a brand new radio drama series, “The Death of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha.”

[music: fade up and out]
[sound effect: door opening and closing]

Voice One: [deep gruff man’s voice] You are Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha?

Voice Two: [high reedy man’s voice] I am!

Voice One: Take that, Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha!!

[sound effects for 60 sec.: sound of a heavy blow on the word “that,” followed by sound of violent blows, crunching noises, smashing noises, things being broken.]
[Throughout all this, we hear Voice Two grunting and screaming in pain.]

Announcer: We will return to the new radio drama production “The Death of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha,” in just a moment.

[music: fade up and out]
[sound effects: saw cutting, with other violent sounds as before, with Voice Two screaming.]
[Then: sudden silence.]

Voice One: I think he’s dead.

[beat]

Voice Two: No, I’m not!

[sound effects: violent sounds and screaming start again, suddenly stop]

Voice Two: Hah! Missed me! It’s not so easy to stop the endless cycle of rebirth! Aauugh!!

[sound effects: violent sounds and screaming again]
[music: fade up over sound effects, then down and continue under Announcer…]

Announcer: That was episode one of “The Death of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha,” adapted for radio by Hugo Smof Gernsback. Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion.

A good day to stay home

We left Carol’s parents’ house quite late and headed down Interstate 495. It was ten thirty so traffic was light. We drove along smoothly, listening to the news from Mumbai. Suddenly brake lights flashed red in front of us. Cars around us began slowing down. Ahead of us I could see stopped traffic. “What is it?” Carol said. “Must be an accident,” I said, moving over to the middle lane of the highway. We could see blue lights of a police car. But when we got closer, we saw that it wasn’t an accident. Cars were waiting to get onto an exit ramp, and I remembered I had seen one of those flashing traffic signs with a message about parking for the outlet malls. “It’s people going to the outlet malls, the ones that are going to open at midnight,” I said. “That’s crazy,” said Carol, “and look at all the traffic jam on the other side of the highway!” It was even worse on the northbound side.

Starting at midnight (right about now) it’s Black Friday, the day when retail stores supposedly make enough money to finally put them in the black for the year, the day when millions of crazed Americans drive around spending lots of money to buy Christmas presents. As for me, I’ll be staying home.

“Palin pardon amid turkey butchery”

…is the headline of this BBC news story. I think the Brits obsess on Sarah Palin because she’s got the same last name as Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, and having two adbsurdist public figures (one intentionally absurd, the other not) is too good a coincidence for them to waste. Speaking of absurd, click the link above to see a photo of Sarah Palin smiling vapidly while behind her stands a man holding a bloody turkey carcass. There’s something almost metaphorical about that image… if I could just figure out the metaphor….

Words

I’ve been noticing some subtle criticism of Barack Obama — criticism that he is a gifted orator.

Wait, being a good speaker is bad? You’re not going to convince this preacher that the spoken word should be suspected. The spoken word has the power to transform people for the better, to inspire them, to move them to give selflessly of themselves to the highest ideals. At least, that’s what we preachers like to think we do (or try to do) when we preach.

Julius Lester puts it this way in his blog:

“To stand in the Lincoln Memorial and read the words of Abraham Lincoln, to stand in the Jefferson Memorial and read the words of Thomas Jefferson is almost a religious experience because their words lift our souls out of the day-to-day and into the realm of the ideals that have shaped our nation, ideals that have been lost, especially over the last eight years.” [Link.]

Amen, amen. Never underestimate the power of the spoken word.

Good news, bad news

Good news: Barack Obama won. Now we won’t have to deal with press coverage of Sarah Palin’s dead mooses. Instead, Sasha and Malia will be living in the White House, and their dad has promised them a new puppy. How cool is that?

Bad news: California banned gay marriage. Stupid move. This may lead San Francisco and Hollywood to secede from the rest of the state. Or maybe the best and brightest from San Francisco and Hollywood will move to Massachusetts where gay marriage is legal.

Oh, irony of ironies…

That alleged liberal stronghold, PBS, has an online poll which asks whether Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as vice-president. I just voted (you have to vote in order to see the results of the poll, and as of a few minutes ago, Palin was receiving a 51% positive vote. So the liberal PBS is going to report that a majority of their Web site visitors think favorably of the conservative Palin. That’s the first irony.

My cousin, Abbie F., let me know about this poll, and suggested that perhaps the Republican base has mobilized their constituency in order to vote in favor of Palin. No doubt she’s right, so they have sent perhaps thousands of their conservative constituents to the PBS Web site. This will cause the number of unique visitors to the PBS site to spike. I would imagine an increase in unique visitors will help PBS demonstrate to grant-making foundations that they deserve additional funding. It will also allow them to charge more for the banner ads that appear in places on their site. That’s the second irony –these conservative folks (who probably hate PBS) are helping to support it.

If you want to vote, too, here’s the link to the poll.

Monty Python and cultural commentary on American politics

Seesmic, the video microblogging site, has decided to move into political commentary — sort of. Well, really we should call it cultural commentary.

Seesmic did an interview with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, during which they asked him his opinion of Sarah Palin. You don’t have to be a member of Seesmic to watch — they’ve posted it on Youtube. Cleese is not an acute political observer, and it’s clear that because he doesn’t agree with her politics he gives her no credit whatsoever. But this interview isn’t political commentary, it’s cultural commentary. By listening to Cleese in this interview you get a sense of what a skilled professional actor sees when he looks at an American politician. Here’s a transcript of the relevant portion of the interview:

“People watching her [Sarah Palin] on television, can they not see that she’s basically learned certain speeches? And she does them very well, she’s got a very good memory. But it’s like a nice-looking parrot. The parrot speaks beautifully, and kinda says ‘Aw, shucks,’ every now and again, but doesn’t really have any understanding of the meaning of the words it is producing, even though it’s producing them very accurately. And she’s been in these training sessions with Cheney’s pals, and she’s learned these speeches, and the extraordinary thing is that so many people are taken in by it.”

Once you remove the ad hominem bits and his obvious political bias, Cleese’s cultural critique of Palin is quite interesting. He’s basically saying that she’s very good at making her hearers feel that she knows what she’s talking about. But Cleese forgets that this is exactly what every politician does, and has been doing for thousands of years; this is simply the nature of political rhetoric, and has been at least since the time of Aristotle. Here’s some of what Aristotle has to say about political rhetoric:

“Since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions — the hearers decide between one political speaker and another… — the orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind. Particularly in political oratory, but also in lawsuits, it adds much to an orator’s influence that his own character should look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings toward his hearers; and also that his hearers should be in the right frame of mind. That the orator’s own character should look right is particularly important in political speaking…. When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity….” [The Rhetoric, Bk. 2, ch. 1, 1377b21-1378a1, trans. Richard McKeon]

So a deepeer cultural commentary on contemporary American political discourse has to take into account that all the tricks used by today’s politicians are really thousands of years old. Political rhetoric is used to sway the emotions, in order to cause people to make decisions. Today politicians use mass meida to reach more people, but the basic principles remain the same. Reading through Aristotle’s Rhetoric has been making me calmer in this very stressful presidential election season — I can see that politics is not much different now than it was in ancient Greece.

*gloom*

So here’s my gloomy scenario for the presidential election: Barack Obama loses by a slim margin. Immediately, the whispers begin: “The only reason Obama lost was because he was black.” “The only reason Obama lost was because McCain used racial innuendo, called Obama a Muslim.” The country becomes more divided; the racial divide widens more than anything else. Everything gets really ugly.

Since I am (ethnically speaking) half New England Yankee, and half Pennsylvania Dutch, I am by nature a very gloomy person (this is why I’m a Universalist, I need to know that things will get better after I die). I had convinced myself that a slim loss by Obama would be what would happen. A win by Obama would be just as bad, due to the assassination attempts (being gloomy, I know there would be assassination attempts). Now I am trying to convince myself that McCain will win by a wide margin, since it is the least gloomy scenario for me.

Man, I hate presidential election season. It’s almost as bad as watching the Red Sox lose postseason games. The only thing keeping me from total gloom is that the Yankees aren’t in the World Series.

*gloom*

File under “Q”…

File this under “Q” for “Question Everything.”…

Now I’m a political naif, and I still don’t understand why a “red state” is red, while a “blue state” is blue. However, in newspapers I keep seeing maps showing that most of the states in the United States are “red states.” Therefore, since I live in a “blue state,” I must live in a political minority area, right?

The real answer to that question is — not really, or sort of. The “red states” do cover more area, but what counts in an election is population. Back in 2004 and again in 2006, for the national elections in those years, Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan created red-state-blue-state maps called cartograms, “in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population.” They created several different cartograms absed on differing analyses of election data, and you can see their cartograms here.

Their cartograms go beyond the red-state-blue-state dichotomy, showing that the political divisions in the United States are not as clear cut as those red-state-blue-state maps you see in the newspapers. Obviously, showing a deeply divided nation makes for better news graphics, but it also makes for less accurate news graphics.

I guess the moral of the story is: Question Everything, especially in the news media.

[Via.]