Luddism

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There are books you really want to read, and books you feel you should read.  There are authors who delight in telling you what’s going on, and there are authors whose writing obfuscates.  I’ve always preferred the former in both scenarios, but I felt I should read William Gibson’s Neuromancer.  I guess I’ve grown apart from science fiction.  (It’s not you, it’s me.)  Or at least some of it.  And I encounter too much jargony writing among academics.  I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.  Also, noir has never been my favorite.  Case, the protagonist, is difficult to like.  As a literary achievement there’s no doubt that Neuromancer is amazing.  And highly influential.  It’s the story of a thief/conman (Case) who’s hired for a mission that he doesn’t understand.  Along the way he falls in love (sort of), but, well, noir.  Dames.  The imaginative elements are pretty stunning, and some of them have come true.  AI being one of them.  And maybe that didn’t help sway me to liking it too much.  I’m no fan of AI.

I didn’t read the novel to critique it.  Admittedly, I’m a Neo-Luddite.  I use tech, and even enjoy it sometimes, but I prefer print books, movies (on celluloid) in theaters, and music, if recorded, on vinyl.  Old fashioned.  I do like some of the convenience, however.  Who isn’t addicted to getting tedious things done quickly?  Well, some of them.  In any case, I found the Molly character intriguing.  I couldn’t help but think of Blade Runner the whole way through.  William Gibson claimed that his novel didn’t copy the gritty texture of the movie, and  I believe him.  I’ve written books after thoroughly researching a topic only to discover, too late, that someone else had largely done the same thing already.  It happens.

The plot itself is quite good. Still, there’s an ethical element involved.  I wonder how much AI optimism comes from guys who read such novels as teens.  I have trouble thinking of any way that generative “artificial intelligence” can end well.  It seems a misguided and oversold idea.  Now commercials tell us how much we need Al, and he appears in new devices, wanted or not.  He’s not welcome in my home.  I’m slowly getting used to the idea of having a phone near me most of the time.  I use it seldom, but when I do I’m glad for it.  I don’t watch movies or read books on it.  My favorite times are when it’s sitting there, being quiet.  Some of us are dinosaurs in a cyberpunk world that’s become reality.  And dinosaurs, well, we prefer the world before the electronic revolution.  Maybe even before the rise of the primates.

The Storm

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I suppose it would be a fool’s errand to post today on anything other than the storm.  You know the one.  The snow/ice storm that has been affecting the greater part of the lower 48 for the last couple of days and is now set to target the most populous region of the country.  Power outages are expected (so if this blog goes utterly silent, you’ll know why).  Good thing FEMA has been dismantled by the Trump administration.  In any case, we’re all waiting to see what the outcome will be.  I guess we should ask AI.  In any case, our lives have become so completely tied to a constant source of electricity, we barely know how to get along without it.  I have to admit to being a bit puzzled myself.  Without electricity, the heat goes off.  The water pipes freeze up and burst, and a personal apocalypse ensues.

As my wife is fond of saying, the weather is still in charge.  A storm like this shows how fragile our infrastructure can be.  Especially since the last ten years of US history have been dealing with Trumpism or its aftermath.  And one thing that our elected officials don’t do well is deal with reality.  Nation-wide storms do occur.  Democrats do not control the weather.  The “woke” don’t have some great machine buried somewhere generating all the hot air that ultimately leads to global warming which, we all know, is really real.  And so we sit here waiting for the silence to come.  Funnily, having grown up in the Great Lakes snow belt, I remember these kinds of snow amounts not infrequently as a child.  Our house was little more than a shack and it was heated by a  single furnace in the living room, vented mainly by the leaky roof and drafty windows.  Besides, my step-father drove the borough snow plow.

Today things seem much more brittle.  What would we do without Netflix for a day?  And snow days from work are a thing of the past.  Offices never close because they never have to.  As long as the juice flows.  That is reality here in the world of 2026.  I can envision a different world.  One that might be a little more sane and focused on protecting one another instead of one percent of the richest one percent getting even richer.  A world in which snow is pretty instead of some insidious threat.  A world where being human is sufficient for the troubles of the day.

Seeing Seagulls

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It was a seventies thing.  Even though I lived in a small town, even I had heard about Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  At first I didn’t know it was a book.  (A similar thing happened to me in the nineties with a character named Harry Potter.)  It was probably in college that I learned this was a book I should read.  I did, and I followed it up with Illusions, also by Richard Bach.  Now, this was unorthodox stuff.  These novels consider what some would call superhumanities and others self-deification.  The two are related.  In any case, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a story about a seagull that overcomes limitations.  An inspirational book.  The publisher had no great expectations for it but it ended up becoming a number-one bestseller without any real marketing support, largely through word of mouth.  You’d have had to have been living in a cave in the seventies not to have heard people mentioning Jonathan Livingston Seagull, whether bird or book.

I got a hankering to read it again but alas, it was one of the books destroyed in the flood.  I went to a local bookstore and was disappointed to see that it was out in a new edition—larger, and, of course, more expensive.  Longing eventually overcame reluctance and I bit the bullet.  I’m glad I did.  The story is still as empowering as I remembered it, but the fourth part, the new one, strikes me as very necessary.  In it, rumors of the disappeared Jonathan Livingston Seagull have turned him into a god.  A god, moreover, whose followers are more interested in the orthodoxy of ritual than what he taught.  This was published before Trump’s first election, but it accurately describes what “Christianity” has become under his two-pronged reign of terror.

The idea of Christianity itself has become deified to the point that Jesus—what he did and taught—have become completely irrelevant.  Now, you don’t have to walk all the way with Richard Bach (I read the two books after Illusions as well, The Bridge Across Forever and One), but this book has a message that still rings true after all these years.  The book is over half-a-century old now and I am glad that it’s having a small resurgence.  The message, when the book ended at part three, was perhaps a little lighter.  We still, however, have to learn to overcome limitations.  And there’s a fair amount of wisdom in this little book.  Even though it was a seventies thing, it remains a good thing.

Togetherness

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Over the holiday break I watched three very good movies and I noticed that Domain Entertainment was one of the production companies for each of them.  The final one I saw (after Sinners and Weapons) was Companion.  I’m going to have to look into Domain a bit more.  In any case, Companion is sci-fi-ish horror with a somewhat comedic twist.  I say sci-fi-ish because we are rapidly approaching the point where this is possible.  What is this?  A sexbot that functions like Siri but who’s better in bed.  Josh and Kat have been planning to murder Kat’s very wealthy boyfriend and to blame it on Josh’s bot Iris.  Iris doesn’t know she’s a robot.  Viewers learn that Josh has tampered with her programing a little, allowing her, for example, to attack a person in self-defense (violating Asimov’s rules for robots).  When Kat’s boyfriend tries to rape Iris, she kills him.

Josh and Kat will blame the robot, with their friends Eli and Patrick as witnesses to corroborate their story.  Since the deceased boyfriend has 12 million dollars in cash lying about his house, it won’t be missed.  But Iris, it turns out, has a conscience.  She escapes.  It turns out that Patrick is Eli’s sex bot, and he is sent to bring back Iris after she kills Eli, also in self-defense.  A police officer who finds Iris is killed by Patrick, complicating matters.  Then, Josh changes Patrick’s programming and he accidentally kills Kat.  Planning to blame all of this on Iris, Josh calls the robot’s maker to have Iris returned.  The technicians see the holes in Josh’s story and one of them restores Iris after Josh shoots her.  Iris then confronts Josh.

This will give you a taste of the story without giving away the ending.  This is a smart, sympathetic treatment of technology, including AI.  From the beginning, before it’s revealed that Iris is a robot, the viewers’ sympathy is with her.  She seems to be the wronged party and Josh is slowly revealed to be pretty much an all-round scumbag.  While not the most profound film of this genre, Companion nevertheless raises many of the issues that merit discussion when technology outraces ethics.  We see this unfolding in real time with artificial intelligence companies deciding on profits over any sense of what is good for society, or people in general.  What makes the movie so interesting is that the robots seem to be far more morally concerned than the humans are.  Although I turn this around the other way, I do wonder if sometimes that may be the case. Especially in the context of a movie that’s barely science fiction.

Being Saved

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Historians of media will have much to contend with now that streaming services, such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon are producing their own feature-length films.  There are movies I’m still waiting to catch up on, but freebies on services already available are enticing, economically.  So it was that I watched Hulu’s No One Will Save You.  It’s an unusual horror film that has, as many recent ones do, a message.  Personally, I find home invasion films and alien films particularly frightening and this one does scare pretty consistently for the first half or so.  For me, anyway, at that point questions start to arise and curiosity about what’s going on starts to overcome the fright.  The movie is heavy on symbolism, almost to the point of being a parable.  The main character speaks fewer than ten words of dialogue in the film, another unusual feature.  The story, with spoilers, goes like this.

In chronological order (not as presented in the film) Brynn accidentally killed her childhood best friend in an argument.  She has remained in the area, living in an isolated house, and making a living as a seamstress.  Then the aliens come.  Brynn, among those in the rural area, is the only one to have successfully fought them off.  The alien home invasion is about as scary as that in Signs.  As the title already warns viewers, nobody is going to save Brynn.  She manages to kill three of the aliens, but they want to explore her mind.  They do so, finding the isolation and sadness because of killing her best friend.  She forgives herself and the remainder of the townsfolk, controlled by the aliens, welcome her back into society.

One of the features that stood out to me was that when the police chief—his daughter was the girl Brynn killed—refuses to help, Brynn goes to the church.  For all its problems, Christianity is based on the principle of forgiveness.  The problem is that the church is locked and Brynn can find no salvation there.  When forgiveness does come, it is through the manipulations of the aliens.  In the end, the people of the town are the ones who have to change their behavior and accept the one who has learned to forgive herself.  This is why it feels like a parable.  At the same time, it works as a horror movie.  It was better than I had anticipated it might be.  Even though it wasn’t on my list of films I need to watch, I’m glad I did so.

Can’t Read?

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Andrew Laties has lived a remarkable life.  He runs Book & Puppet, a local bookstore in Easton, Pennsylvania.  He’s run other bookstores before this one, but now that he’s in the Lehigh Valley he started the Easton Book Festival.  I’ve blogged about his previous books here and here.  In addition to running a bookstore and book festival, he’s also a musician and puppeteer.  In the current climate of book banning, things aren’t exactly easy for those who live literature.  My wife and I just finished reading his latest book You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read this Book?  These are the thoughts of a book seller about book banning.  Beyond the many other hats he wears, Andrew is also an activist.  It makes me tired just thinking about all of this.

I remember when the US government promoted reading.  I grew up when we were concerned about Russia and the arms race.  I was alive for (but don’t remember) the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The response, from both parties, was that Americans needed to be educated.  And that meant reading.  Reading is fundamental, so the saying went.  Since 2016, and especially 2024, we’ve taken a 180.  Book banning is in vogue although anyone who reads knows it doesn’t work.  Still, those who sell books can either sit back and worry or choose to do something about it.  Andrew is one of those who is doing something.  Reading is the way we improve human lives.  Daily I read about how some people are preferring books “written” by AI—which has never been and never can be human.  And right-wingers around the country are carrying out their war on books.

Andrew and I talk about publishing whenever I visit Book & Puppet.  His first book got picked up by Seven Stories Press, but he, like the rest of us who have jobs for a living, hasn’t found sympathetic agents or publishers, as he describes in this book.  That hasn’t stopped him from writing or from achieving remarkable things.  I was fortunate enough to be involved in the first Easton Book Festival, and a few after that.  It is wonderful to walk around a town where book events are going on all over the place.  Like much that is good, the event took a hit during Covid, but it still goes on.  And it does so because of something that reader and writers have: vision.  Part memoir and part a call to action, You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read this Book? deserves to be widely read.

In the Yard

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The search for “free” horror has a few more reasonable offerings, it seems, if you follow the reviews.  I try not to read about movies in advance, and I avoid trailers.  The Woman in the Yard had higher scores than several movies streaming on the services I use.  It’s Blumhouse horror, so it has a bit of substance.  Substance but also some confusion.  Trying to make sense of it will involve spoilers.  Here goes: Ramona and David have moved into the country because Ramona found the city suffocating.  Once there, however, she doesn’t take to farm living and becomes depressed.  She tells her husband this and on their way home from a restaurant, he dies in an accident while she’s driving.  Ramona, herself injured, tells Taylor and Annie, her son and daughter, that their father was driving.  She lives with the guilt and is still struggling with depression.

A mysterious woman shows up in the yard.  Draped in black, including her face, she tells Ramona “Today’s the day.”  Feeling threatened, Ramona tells the kids to stay inside, but it becomes clear that this woman is supernatural.  The power is out and no phones work.  The car won’t start and the nearest neighbors are a couple miles away.  The family, alone, grows frightened and the woman’s shadow begins to manipulate items in the house, threatening them all.  Ramona confesses to Taylor that she was responsible for his father’s death.  When the woman’s shadow attacks they have to get into the dark where her shadow is powerless.  Ramona is drawn through a mirror where David is still alive, but frees herself to get back to her children.  The woman tells her that if she kills herself, which she’s been praying for the courage to do, her children will thrive.  Without showing the death, the family is back together and the power comes on, only it is the mirror world.

A few things to note.  There are a few scary moments but the movie as a whole isn’t that frightening.  It is, however, dealing with suicide—it actually has, in the final credits, a note urging anyone contemplating suicide to seek help.  There’s no clear indication of what happens but the ending might be interpreted rather darkly.  Depression is difficult for those of us who struggle with it.  The movie seems to indicate that the woman in the yard is the flip, pro-suicide version of Ramona.  She appears to resist and overcome the depression, but it’s really left open at the end.  Still, this isn’t bad for “free” horror.  It’s thoughtful, if not exactly cheering.  And it gives viewers something to think about.

Winter Jogging

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Keeping healthy can be hazardous to your health.  We recently had a rainstorm, followed by a snowstorm with several days not getting above freezing.  All of this made my usual jogging route impassible—ice under snow all on top of pea-gravel is a recipe for twisted ankles or broken arms.  I’ve had my fair share of spills while jogging but I’m at an age where my doctor asks me if I’ve had any falls in the past year, so I guessing it’s a bit more serious now.  But getting out to jog is difficult in such conditions.  A treadmill might be a solution.  We used to have one and I pretty much ran it into the ground.  I used it in inclement weather, but it was too much to move from New Jersey and besides, there’s nowhere in our house to put it.  Our basement ceiling is so low you have to stoop, and that doesn’t work for jogging.

After a few days of feeling dumpy, and when the weather got back up into the twenties, I decided to jog on the streets.  That’s one of the advantages to living in a smaller municipality.  There are a few cars out at first light, but not many.  And the streets are (mostly) cleared off.  I wasn’t sure this was the smartest thing to do, but when I greeted another jogger out doing the same thing, I felt validated.  The weather is still in charge.  I’ve been interested in the way the weather affects just about everything.  For example, this past summer I wanted to do a couple outdoors projects.  It rained nearly every weekend and then turned so hot that people my age were warned off of outdoor activity.  So much for mortal plans.

When autumn rolled around it turned cold rather quickly, forestalling any bigger projects beyond a massive amount of weeding.  And this is just on a personal level.  Deliveries are slowed.  Sometimes transportation hubs are shut down.  Bad weather for crops necessitates cooperative trading between nations (ahem).  We are at the mercy of the weather.  Tech giants are planning to go to Mars but they can only launch their rockets if the weather cooperates.  We’ve been messing with it because of global warming, and pretty much anyone who’s non-delusional knows climate change is real.  The sky is, after all, bigger than the earth.  So little problems, such as having to jog in the streets, seem less of an issue.  As long as it keeps us healthy.

Surviving Ones

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Slashers aren’t my favorite horror films.  As I’ve suggested in some of my unpublished writing, horror should be dismantled as a “genre” since so many different types of movie are collected together under its rubric.  That having been said, The Only Ones is an amazing low-budget, independent slasher.  For one thing, it references so many other horror movies that it is mind boggling.  Just a few influences: Deliverance, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Blair Witch Project, and just about every movie that has a bunch of young people going to a remote location by themselves.  It’s complex and thoughtful.  A love story and a reflection on religion and horror (only in a minor way, but still).  And piecing together what led to the eight deaths would require an article all by itself.  And it’s a film with heart as well as gore.  A spoiler follows.

The basic idea is that the six young people are primed for a horror movie outcome by one of their number who’s a true crime podcaster.  They’re going to the remote house of the uncle of one of them since the uncle passed away and they are helping settle the estate.  A couple of campers have innocently trespassed in the house and a violent confrontation with them sets the tone for all of what follows.  The movie is also a reflection on how a weapon in the midst of any group leads to violence.  One of the kids has a gun and the threat of that weapon leads to people killing one another without ever really stopping to figure out what happened.  A final girl survives the two nights, and when the police ask her what happened, so honestly says she has no idea.

The movie has some flaws, and early on I was eager to note them all, but the story sucks you in.  The deaths, in the end, are all pointless.  They begin because of a misunderstanding with a violent threat being used instead of trying to understand what happened.  This brings the movie up to the level of actually having a message.  Many slashers seem to settle on “traditional values”—don’t use drugs, have premarital sex, or in any way offend the world envisioned in the 1950s.  Those who are killed have violated some principle that keeps society the same forever.  The Only Ones has something deeper to say.  The characters are self-described outcasts.  The one who survives is the one who learned to love.  And bringing weapons into any situation leads to a Chekhovian resolution.

Keep Remembering

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Books used to be, and often still are, works of art.  I can’t imagine my life without them.  I read Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse back in 2023.  A psychiatrist that’s a friend of mine recommended it.  Mackesy’s next book of wisdom, Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm just came out in 2025.  It was a stormy year and I can’t help but think this book was one of the antidotes that the world seems to hide next to the poisons it contains.  The book is a work of art.  Like its predecessor, it builds on the importance of love, friendship, and hope.  These are the kinds of things we need in difficult times.  Indeed, we are in the midst of a four year storm that threatens to tear apart 250 years of progress.  We need this book.

I wanted to save this book to be the first I finished in 2026.  To start the year off in a good way.  I’m not a maker of resolutions since I try to self-correct as soon as I become aware of a problem.  But reading a positive book at the start of the year seems like something that is smart to do.  It’s so easy to get drawn into negativity.  Doomscrolling invites itself to be shared with others.  Pretty soon we’re all mired down.  But the horse is fond of reminding the boy, mole, and fox, “The blue sky above never leaves.”  It is there waiting for us, after our self-inflicted storm ends.  As I’ve noted before, writing books is a hopeful exercise.  Reading them can be too.

Charlie Mackesy is my age.  He seems to have distilled more wisdom from our time on this planet than I have.  Reading his observations is the very definition of nepenthe.  When the headlines foreground hate, we must respond with love.  When everyone tells us the storm will never end, we must beg to disagree.  Humans are problematic creatures.  We create our own ills much of the time.  There are those among us, however, who are wise.  And we can improve our state if we choose to listen to them instead of those who loudly proclaim their own praises.  Wisdom is often in short supply in this world we’ve created for ourselves.  It is not, however, completely absent.  Do yourself a favor and find Always Remember.  No need to save it for a rainy day.

Sinning

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What can I say about Sinners in five hundred words or less?  This movie requires a book.  I’ll try anyway.  First of all, I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon.  But everyone was saying Sinners was one of the best horror movies of 2025 and it racked up enough awards to prove it.  Still I was blown away.  Fronting and centering religion and horror, this film asks viewers to think about good and evil and to think about it closely.  Twin brothers, “Smoke” and “Stack,” served in the army, left Mississippi to make it big as gangsters in Chicago, then return to Mississippi to open a club for the Black community.  They bring their nephew Sammie and hire their supporters to help a grand opening of their blues bar.  Their pasts won’t let them go, however,  and they become entangled with former lovers.  Then the vampires come.

The brothers’ two lovers, Hailee and Wunmi, come to the opening but Hailee falls victim to the vampires.  Wunmi, who’s Smoke’s estranged wife, practices Hoodoo and make him promise that if she is bit he will kill her with a stake.  The vampires can’t come into the club without an invitation, and one of the bartenders, Grace, decides they need to kill the whole crowd of vampires and invites them in.  Only Smoke and Sammie survive.  The vampires die with sunrise, but Smoke stays around to kill the Klan members who planned to murder the brothers after the grand opening was over.  Smoke gets them all but he’s shot and as he dies, he sees Wunmi and their dead child in an earthly heaven and joins them.  Sammie goes on to become a famous blues player and when he’s very aged, Stack and Hailee, still young vampires come in.  They all agree that the day of the grand opening was the best of their lives.

Both Smoke and Stack end up with their loves in an eternal life.  And this is only scratching the surface of the film.  The movie is about freedom and how African Americans never really have it.  Even in Chicago the system is stacked against them.  The vampires try to convince Smoke and Sammie that they will offer them community.  Freedom and belonging.  Both brothers, however, end up in a kind of paradise, one of them as a vampire, the other as a man who earns salvation by killing the Klan.  Wow.  On a more pedestrian note, the movie seemed to blend From Dusk till Dawn with the more serious elements of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  Including the close attention to music.  But even that sounds facile.  There’s more to say, lots more.  Sammie is the son of a preacher.  The Bible is used and quoted.  Salvation comes, however, by Hoodoo and vampirism.  No, Sinners requires a book to begin to work it all out.

Death Trip

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My own personal Wisconsin Death Trip resulted in the end of my chosen career.  I’d never heard of Michael Lesy, or his book, while I lived in the state, however.  In fact, I’ve been racking my brain to remember how or where I’d heard of this strange book.  I do know that it was suggested to me, likely by another written source, many years ago.  My impetus to pick it up at this time was watching Return to Oz and learning that the writer/director used this book to find inspiration.  Having gone through it, I suspect the reason was that this most unusual dissertation was addressing the question of rural versus urban living conditions, but in a way out seventies way.  The book is a combination of photographs from about 1890 through the turn of the century from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and snippets from the local newspaper.  But also some bits from the intake records of the state hospital at Mendota.  And also some bits from novels.  And further, some summaries apparently by Lesy.

What I found frustrating is the lack of clear explanations of what the sources were.  Nowhere in the introduction or conclusion is it spelled out that, for example, italic sections are summaries of sources by the author.  Nor is it clear why the parts of novels are used, other than adding flavor; were they written by people familiar with Black River Falls?  And the “word clouds” that begin the separate years—why are some words capitalized and others not?  Is this table of contents only to give a taste or it to spell out in detail what will be covered?  The lack of any narrative, apart from the introduction and conclusion compounds the confusion.  In other words, this is an impressionistic book for a work of history.

At the same time, it is creative and informative.  The final chapter discusses how certain recurring themes—suicide, insanity, arson, for example—demonstrate the hardships among the poor.  As Lesy puts it, they came to realize the lie of hard work (meritocracy) and had to face children dying of disease and their inability to get ahead when those who are wealthy control all the assets, and they snapped.  To me that’s the real value of this book.  I noticed while reading through it that of the notices of admission to the asylum, all but one were described as poor, often desperately so.  And we continue to allow this to happen, not just in Wisconsin, but across the country.  Maybe even more people need to read this odd history and consider its implications.

American Revolution

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In these days when America seems to be a nation purely for purposes of stoking Trump’s ego, and the Supreme Court agrees that’s our purpose, many of us are looking for some sense of balance.  I think that was behind, at least subtly, our family trip to Valley Forge this summer.  It was there that we purchased The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution, edited by Edward G. L’Engel.  Now, I’m no fan of reading about wars; I’ve always believed that “rational” beings could come up with better ways of resolving differences.  Some guys like to fight, I know.  And in the case of American liberty we had a king who only wanted to use America for his personal glory.  Wait.  What?  In any case, I would not likely read a book about war, but I feel I need to find some connection to the country that existed before 2016.

My wife and I read this book together.  It is an edited collection, which means that the chapters are uneven.  Some military historians like to get down to the details whereas I prefer a wider sweep.  Nevertheless, as a whole the book gives a pretty good sweep of what happened during those revolutionary years.  Starting with Lexington and Concord, prior to the Declaration of Independence, and moving through the campaign to take Quebec, the loss of New York City, the battles of Trenton and Princeton, Ticonderoga and Saratoga, Philadelphia, Monmouth, the battles in and around Charleston, and finally, Yorktown, the essays give an idea of the breadth of the fighting.  The authors also make the point that this was a civil war, the first of at least two in this country.

Americans have, until the internet, learned to get along with those who are very different.  Now we hang out in clusters of those like us and hate everyone else.  That’s one of the reasons why, living many years in New Jersey, that we unplugged and got out to see these sites.  I visited Lexington when I lived in Boston, and we visited the scene of the battles at Princeton and Monmouth, as well as Washington’s Crossing, when we were in Jersey.  We’ve been to New York City and Philadelphia, of course, but these cities have changed much, showing what can happen when people cooperate instead of being divided against each other.  The same is true of Charleston, which we visited a couple years back.  Although not my favorite book of this year, strangely this one gave me hope.  Maybe America can overcome this present crisis as well.

Posting

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I’ve seen The Post before.  Maybe it took recovering from a vaccine to make me realize, however, just how much we’ve lost with the rise of electronic publication.  Yes, there is now a shot at recognition by the lowliest of us, but publication used to mean something important.  Consider how Watergate, the coda to the film, brought down Nixon.  Now we have a president who could’ve never been elected without the world of the internet, and who is coated with teflon so thick that even molesting children can’t harm him.  I work in publishing these days.  I often reflect on how important it used to be.  Ideas simply couldn’t spread very far without publication.  That’s what makes The Post such an important movie.  It’s the story of how the Washington Post came to publish The Pentagon Papers.  Said papers revealed that the United States was well aware that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, even as the government sent more and more young men to their deaths.

There are many ways to approach this film, including the doubt that it instills in even free democracy, but what struck me as the vaccine was wearing off is how publication has become a more challenging and endangered as the Wild West of the internet continues to expand.  Newspapers used to be the harbingers of truth.  Early in the history of the broadsheet, however, there were those who’d make things up in order to sell copies.  (Capitalism is always lurking when skulduggery is afoot.)  Over time, however, certain papers gained a hard-earned reputation for reliable reporting and publication with integrity.  A story going out in the early seventies in the Washington Post could influence history.  Now it’s owned by Jeff Bezos.

There was a time when a book might change the world.  Now there’s a little too much competition.  Publishers of print material struggle against the free, easy access of the internet.  All that publishers really have to offer is their reputation.  Those that have been around for a long time have earned, the hard way—you might say “old school”, the right to tell the world the truth.  Now the truth comes through Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called these days and more often than not consists of lies.  Of course I don’t believe the internet is all bad.  I wouldn’t contribute daily content to it if I believed that.  Still, I fear we’ve lost something.  Something important.  And right now we have nothing to replace it.

Books and Mormons

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Some time ago we went to see Book of Mormon on tour.  I really knew very little about it other than it was consistently praised as being very funny.  I’m always a little concerned about poking fun at anyone else’s religion because I know people take their beliefs very seriously.  As I reflect on the show (which was quite funny) it seems that it wasn’t so much poking fun at the Latter-day Saints so much as it was poking fun at religion itself.  That’s less problematic as it’s not singling anyone out for ridicule.  It’s a system that’s being made light of.  Or at least any religion that is an effort to convert others.  There’s a kind of violence to it.  And if Book of Mormon is about anything, it’s about missionaries.  Amid the laughs it makes some valid points—trying to convert people without first trying to understand their culture is a fraught activity.

People want religious specialists who thoroughly understand their tradition.  I can say from experience, both as an erstwhile seminary student and a seminary professor, that the time given to become an expert is insufficient.  The older I’ve grown the wider the perspective I’ve tried to step back to see.  To be an expert on a religion really requires some facility with understanding other religions.  To understand, say, Methodism, you need to understand Anglicanism.  To understand Anglicanism, you need to understand Catholicism.  To understand Catholicism, you need to understand early Christianities.  To understand early Christianities, you need to understand Judaism.  And so the widening concentric circles go.  Nobody can be an expert in all of them, and each of these religions mentioned has, in its own right, sub-specializations that have their own experts.  Who has time to learn the religion of those they intend to convert?

Any religion that makes supernatural claims (and many of them do; it’s their nature) makes extraordinary allegations.  Those allegations, when examined closely, reveal some improbable elements.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone, two of the authors (most famous for South Park) apparently said that they had no intention of making fun of anyone’s religion and a spokesperson for the Latter-day Saints indicated that no real offense was taken, acknowledging that it’s parody and parody is only offensive if it’s taken seriously.  Many religions have thin skin when it comes to parody or satire.  The serious part is that some religions, in real life, take conversion of all others with a zeal that could (and does) become dangerous.  Still, this musical is very funny, as long as it’s not taken too seriously.