Tag: cultural musings

The Abuse of Fantasy

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

What set me off yesterday?

I’m going to review a couple of books in that “Spirit Animals” series, as part of my duties for the Chalcedon Foundation ministry. (We’re celebrating our 50th anniversary this year; visit our website, http://www.chalcedon.edu ). For this series, Scholastic Books rounded up several established fantasy writers, a different writer for each book, all telling the same story. I’ve just finished reading Book #1, Wild Born by Brandon Mull.

Earlier work by these authors has somehow landed on the New York Times best-seller list, so it couldn’t have been cheap to round them up for Scholastic. It seems an odd procedure: Scholastic has the muscle to see to it that a book sells successfully, no matter who the author is.

But I am convinced Scholastic has paid these authors well and told them what to write. And I don’t like what they’re writing.

Let me describe what I’ve read, as simply as I can: unoriginal, formulaic, cringe-inducing prose, Politically Correct, chock-full of cliches, and–most importantly–delivering a thoroughly pagan, New Age message of “spirituality” devoid of a personal God or any kind of moral law handed down by Him.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the authors sugar-coat it by focusing on children whose spiritual bonds with spirit animals give them super-powers–I hate super-powers–that enable them to whup the tar out of any able-bodied adult male. This is pitched to the sense of powerlessness that torments many teens and pre-teens, seducing them with ridiculous visions of radical autonomy. Being able to beat up a grown man, when you’re only 11 years old and weigh 70 pounds, is radical autonomy.

Scholastic’s last big push was for Philip Pullman’s atheist rant trilogy, His Dark Materials. Once parents became aware of what that was about, the book sales slowed to a trickle and the feature film went belly-up.

Having failed to catch the flies with vinegar, Scholastic is now trying to catch them with honey. Where Pullman spat venom, Spirit Animals seduces: playing on most children’s love of animals, making the animals into a kind of God substitute, and so on.

I object strenuously to this abuse of fantasy. It is being used to sugar-coat poisonous ideas. I object to there being so much of this kind of fantasy.

We have to do better than this. We just have to do better.

Yes, the Culture Really Does Matter

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

It looks like I won’t be getting the radio coverage I’d hoped for, to launch The Glass Bridge. They’ve got all this current events stuff to cover instead. Deflated footballs, for instance. The reason I get, boiled down, is, “It’s only a novel and we don’t cover novels, it’s not important enough.”

Okay–one novel, so what? Whose worldview is going to be changed by one novel? (In fact, that happened to me when I read Windswept House by Malachi Martin: changed me from somewhat pro-abortion to 100% pro-life.) My book is Young Adults fiction, which makes it even less important. Who cares what the kids are reading? And on top of that, it’s fantasy, which makes it less important still. That’s about as unimportant as it gets.

I wonder if any of our conservative, pro-family media commentators have any idea of just how much YA fantasy is out there. Boxcar-loads of it! Thousands and thousands of titles. Tons and tons of it.

And it’s only part of a larger pop culture entertainment matrix, along with movies, TV, video games, etc.

This is–and I do not exaggerate–a culture that embraces and promotes paganism, disbelief in God and His word, sexual randomness, and fosters rigid conformity (they call it “diversity”) while at the same time seducing the audience with visions of impossible personal autonomy. That’s why so many of those novels feature 11-year-old kids acquiring super powers or secret martial arts so they can beat up able-bodied adult men. That’s why The Invincible Female Warrior has become a fixture in this genre.

This is a popular culture that is shaping our world. This is the worldview being pumped into the brains of the next generation.

I don’t believe it’s possible for a child to consume thousands of hours of this stuff and still grow up to be sensible, responsible, thoughtful, and Christian.

One novel, one movie, so what–how much harm can it do?

But hundreds, or thousands, of novels, music videos, movies, TV shows, and video games–go ahead, tell me that has no effect in shaping the consumer’s mind.

I do what I can to push against the tide. What can I do? Not much. But, as Puddleglum said, that doesn’t let us off following Aslan’s signs.

The way the world is, is not decided by the stuff that’s in the headlines. It’s decided by what’s in the people’s hearts and heads.

But if you’re convinced it’s only fantasy, and really doesn’t matter… Well, please think it over. Because I’m pretty sure it does.

Oops–No Blizzard

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

It’s both fascinating and unsettling to see how little people are able to learn from experience.

Time and time again the noozies and the Weather Service trumpet forth warnings of impending snow, big-time, great suffocating masses of it. Time and again the people stampede to the supermarket and empty the shelves of milk, bread, toilet paper and batteries. Again and again this happens.

And then we get a few inches of snow, or even no snow at all, and the whole big scare turns out to be for nothing. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that this is what always happens. The forecasts almost never come true.

Please bear in mind that I am writing from a part of the country characterized by cities and highly developed suburbs, and we have no mountains, no deserts, no forests, and no vast uninhabited spaces to cross before you can find a grocery store, hardware store, or hospital. Once in a generation, or so, we have a really bad hurricane; and that’s it.

So it really is not possible that anyone around here in Panic Land will ever be snowed in, cut off from civilization, starved, etc. At the very worst, emergency services will continue to function. If you need an ambulance, you’ll get one.

Why can’t they learn? Why, every time they hear a big snow forecast, do they repeat the same behavior? It truly never turns out to be necessary, it’s a lot of wasted effort and anxiety–and they never learn to react otherwise. It’s as if they are actually incapable of learning from experience.

Now I’ll bet, if you put your mind to it, you can think of other examples of sane people, not nuts, doing the same thing over and over again even though it always turns out badly for them.

Sobering thought, isn’t it?

Gloom and Doom… in a Commercial

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

On our car radio today, we heard a commercial grimly warning of “three events” that will soon take place, that will destroy the world as we know it, cutting off the food supply and killing off “nine out of ten people” in America. The advertiser never got around to telling us what those three events will be: only that they’ll be catastrophically horrible. But if you send him a bunch of money, he’ll tell you how to survive them.

Survive to do what? Emerge from your shelter into the toxic rubble that used to be civilization, and maybe get killed by some Hell’s Angels types who want your stuff?

I don’t know about you, but it’s been years since I outgrew those Mad Max fantasies. Why would I even want to survive the total destruction of my entire way of life?

There’s a lot of apocalyptic imagining going on these days, much of it in literature pitched to “Young Adults”–The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. Well, all right, look at what Democrat and liberal government have done to places like Detroit, Camden, NJ, and Gary, Indiana. But even that falls way short of these dark fantasies.

In none of these do we find a suggestion that a sovereign God controls the fate of His creation and can, at will, intervene decisively in history. It’s all “We’re going to completely mess things up, and then we’ll buckle down and fix it”–whether it’s Global Warming, chemtrails, World War III, whatever. The Bible proclaims “The earth is the Lord’s,” but these doom scenarios say “No, no–the earth is man’s, to wreck or to restore as we see fit.” And apparently the Lord, if He exists at all, will do neither good nor evil. Instead, we get some guy who has all the secrets of survival at his fingertips, and will share them with you for a price.

It is up to God to shake the earth, to preserve the things that cannot be shaken, to establish a new heaven and a new earth from which sin and death shall be excluded. God takes His time, and God is patient: because “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness: but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

Shall we trust in Him, or trust in man?

God is not a man, that He should lie (Numbers 23:19).

Or, to look at it another way, Man is not God, that he should tell the truth.

Feeling Sick? See Your Cat’s Vet

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

I had to take my cat, Robbie, to the vet today. She has asthma, and has been coughing a lot. So they took care of her.

I’m beginning to wonder if maybe our pets are getting better medical care than we are. I try to stay away from doctors, but my sister is a nurse at a doctor’s office and we get a lot of information from her.

These days it seems the patient gets only 10 or 15 minutes with the doctor or the nurse, usually the nurse; and some of that time is used up with inane questions mandated by the government and having nothing to do with whatever the patient came in to see the doctor for. So my eye doctor is obliged to give me “anti-smoking counseling,” which makes him feel like a dickey-doo-dah and annoys me no end. You come in with an arrow sticking in your shoulder, and they demand to know how often you’ve had sex this month.

None of that with the vet. She was all business, and took all the time she needed to deal with her patient’s problem.

I think I will go there if I ever need an operation.

When TV Personalities Spout Gibberish

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Remember, back in 2011, there was a spate of TV reporters, live and on the air, uncontrollably spouting gibberish? ( http://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/judge-judy-the-4th-to-talk-gibberish-on-air/ ) The most famous victim of this mysterious affliction, was Judge Judy, who aborted a taping session because all that would come out of her mouth was nonsense. Judge Judy was immediately taken to a hospital and thoroughly examined. Doctors were unable to find any cause for what had happened to her.

There’s video, all over the internet, of this happening to reporters in and out of the studio–all of it at roughly the same time. Various explanations came and went. Reporter was having a mini-stroke; about to have a stroke; a mild epileptic seizure; some rare kind of migraine. None of these stuck. A few commenters suggested that someone was doing this on purpose, using experimental technology to interfere with the victim’s ability to function mentally. That didn’t stick, either.

So yesterday I found myself reading a novel in which the members of a scientific team working on a top-secret missile project, one by one become unable to talk anything but gibberish. Naturally I thought of that spate of on-air gibbering in 2011.

The book was written in 1957: The Electronic Mind Reader, a Rick Brant Science Adventure by John G. Blaine, the pen name for Hal Goodwin.

Goodwin, who during his career worked for just about every government agency you can think of, was on the cutting edge of his era’s technology. His Rick Brant books are full of insights into the electronics wizardry of the time–which was a lot more sophisticated than you might think.

The point is, Hal Goodwin was very well-informed and knew what he was talking about. In 1957 he described something that we didn’t see until 2011. I haven’t finished the book yet, so I don’t know how the bad guys made this happen–but what was Goodwin on to? I’m sure he wouldn’t have used his books to leak official secrets. But was there someone in 1957 who had found a way to foul up your brain by remote control? Imagine a hand-held device–something that maybe looks like a video camera–that gets pointed at you and suddenly you can’t express a coherent thought anymore. Would that be scary, or what?

Check out the link above, and watch the videos. Watch what happens to those poor reporters as they try to speak.

Hmmm….

Why Is Fantasy So Mean to Women?

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Here’s another one of those topics worthy of an entire book, and I’m trying to address it in a little tiny blog post.

But the fact is that there is a great big pile of fantasy novels whose depiction and treatment of women suggest that the author has major problems with half the human race. Not all of these authors are B Team hacks you never heard of. Some of them have written best-sellers. In Robert Jordan’s enormous Wheel of Time series, almost all the women characters are shrews, resembling nothing so much as a passel of academic feminists in funny clothes. And in George R.R. Martin’s even more enormous Game of Thrones series, all of the women seem to be either scheming witches, insatiable sex addicts, or idiots, or some combination of the three. (Well, OK, there are a few pitiful female victims in perpetual need of rescue.)

Behind these two we find a vast army of damned fools who hate women and use their art as an excuse to indulge in misogynist daydreams. Here we find an infinite procession of dark images, all of them centered on female characters being abused in nasty ways. I won’t bother to name any of these authors or their works. I couldn’t sleep at night if I thought somebody bought one of these books because of anything I said.

I suppose, if you delved deeply into some other genres–maybe film noir, or hard-boiled detective novels, or spy thrillers–you might find almost as much depiction of women as mere sex objects, deserving of maltreatment. You won’t find it in the great fantasy novels of Tolkien, Lewis, Eddison, et al. But the back ranks of fantasy are chock-full of it.

Why is this? I throw it out there as a question, because I don’t know the answer. Is it original sin and human depravity playing out in fiction, or some evil aspect of an imperfectly-Christianized culture? Or both? Beats me. All I know is, if I wrote stuff like that, I’d be a bad guy.

Any thoughts, anybody?

 

Fun With Time-Travel (in a Movie)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Based on Ray Bradbury’s often-anthologized science-fiction story, A Sound of Thunder–I read it when I was a kid, in one of those great Groff Conklin anthologies: remember them?–this 2004 movie of the same name delivers nice cheap thrills and a few good points to ponder.

What if they really invented time travel? What if you really could go way back into the distant past, see and do things, and then come back?

Although everyone involved in this time travel project is aware that the least, tiniest, most insignificant change made in the past–maybe something as trivial as a squashed bug–might drastically and catastrophically disarrange the future, they use the revolutionary technology to make piles of money, offering a canned dinosaur hunt to bozos with more money than brains. See, as long as you tightly control everything, and nothing ever happens but what’s supposed to happen, it’s perfectly safe to do this.

Just like Jurassic Park was perfectly under control until everything got all pear-shaped and the dinosaurs got out, money-grubber Ben Kingsley’s neat little time travel junket soon winds up on the fast track to Disasterville. It’s a much worse disaster than what happened at Jurassic Park, because it affects the entire world. That’s what happens when you mess around with Time. Everything gets changed.

This movie is available via amazon.com. Granted, some of the computer-generated effects are cheesy and unconvincing. The film ran over budget and they had to use some off-the-shelf effects. But the effects that really do need to be good, are good. And Kingsley is just great as a mindless, soapy, insincere twit with bad hair.

Once again, as it has been doing practically since it was invented, science fiction warns us against trying to play God. As sinners and idiots, we are just not cut out for the job.

A Few Tricky Questions

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Zen Buddhists like to ask themselves tricky questions like, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” That’s a poser, all right.

As our country stumbles and bumbles its way into a new year, here are a few tricky questions for Americans.

1. If communism is as wonderful as American college professors and media mavens think it is, how come no one is building rafts to go to Cuba?

2. Why do the vast majority of us have to trample on our own beliefs, change our laws and customs, and turn our culture inside-out because atheists and homosexuals say so?

3. Why, in the wake of a historic election in which the American people overwhelmingly rejected Democrats and their insane agenda, do the Republican leaders behave as if their party lost?

4. If “Black lives matter,” as the latest slogan puts it, why don’t people start living as if they mattered? Why all the violence, crime, gangs, and fatherless homes? That’s not how people live if they think their lives matter. But of course the great majority of normal, decent, peaceful people goes unseen and unheard–because the nooze media will have it so: makes for a better “narrative.”

Finally, here’s a rhetorical question that just might make you laugh until you have the hiccups.

5. If God wishes to bless a nation, do you really think He gives it the kind of leaders that we have today? Hick, hick, hick…

The Next Liberal Jihad

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

I smell something in the wind–the next inane, acrimonious, damaging, and totally avoidable socio-political conflict to try what’s left of America’s soul.

Much as libs ‘n’ progs would like it to be something having to do with “transgender” issues, there just aren’t enough people out there who are addled enough to have their sexual organs lopped off. And Global Warming/Climate Change, as fantastically all-purpose a stalking horse as it is, just can’t seem to seal the deal, no matter how hard they try. Not that these ridiculous controversies will go away: liberal projects never go away. But in 2015 they’re gonna need something really juicy to ramp them up for the 2016 elections.

It’s going to be Income Inequality.

It’s perfect. “Like, man, it ain’t fair that someone has a higher income than me just because he works and I don’t.” A perfect issue for minds ravaged and dulled by a college education. “You didn’t build that!” Perfect for the envious, the mean-spirited.

They’re already saying Hillary Clinton–a genuine soft-core Marxist in her own right–is too soft on the issue of Income Inequality to please the far left wing of the Democrat Party. (Is there any part of that party that cannot be described as “far left”?) So they want Elizabeth Warren, the original “You didn’t build that!” demagogue.

And the message is simple enough for even a Democrat voter to understand: “You ain’t nothin’ without the government! And all those people who’ve got more than you, they cheated to get it and the government is gonna fix them!” It is implied that every dork with a bachelor’s degree in Queer Women’s Studies, who sits on his tuchas all day at his mommy’s house, playing video games while Mommy works, will receive gifts from the government and never have to grow up.

I hope I’m wrong, but I have a sickening feeling that I’m right.