Tag: cultural musings

Not Only Dumb, but Evil

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

In describing some of the Young Readers fiction I’ve been reading lately, I’ve concentrated on its penchant for literary malpractice. The writers and editors seem to be purposely trying to stunt the readers’ mental growth.

But they’re also throwing poison darts at moral growth.

It’s not just that they have characters inhabiting exotic, imaginary worlds talk like not-very-bright middle school kids who watch too many cartoons. It goes way beyond that.

Granted, if you want to write about the daring adventures of a character who’s 12 years old, you’ll have to find a way to get him out from under the direct supervision of his parents. No parent in his right mind consents to his child being involved in life-threatening adventures.

But in these books–again we resort to Tui Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series by Scholastic Books–adults are not just inconvenient. They’re selfish and cruel, and a menace to their own children. So the juvenile dragons, because every adult dragon’s hand is raised against them, can only look to their age-group peers for love and loyalty. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” has metastasized into “don’t trust anyone over 13.” Even their own parents are perfectly happy to sell them for a cow or two, and the daughters of dragon queens are expected to kill their mothers: it’s the only way a dragon tribe can get a new queen.

In Scholastic’s Spirit Animals series, assorted authors depict an 11-year-old girl using the inevitable jumpin’, spinnin’ kicks to beat up and sometimes even kill adult bad guys. The kids in these books are always coming to blows with adults. Again, grownups are basically bad and you just can’t trust them. Only the kids in your public school class will be true to you.

Gee, that ain’t the way I remember childhood.

These books are important because they are part of the Godless, Christless, hubris-laden pop culture that gets poured into our heads every day. Children are highly susceptible to it. This bilge helps shape a person’s character. It gets mixed into his foundation.

We need to start paying closer attention to what our culture is teaching us. Adults and children both.

A Few Simple Truths

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There are times when I just feel swamped–so much crazy stuff going on, I can’t decide what to write about. So how about a little selection of simple observations?

Just because everybody says it’s true, doesn’t mean it’s true. The “appeal to consensus” is an invalid argument. But it’s the main support beam for Evolution, Climate Change, what have you.

But of course if the majority opinion is that some liberal scheme is wrong and totally undesirable, consensus then becomes irrelevant.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker doesn’t have a college degree; therefore he isn’t qualified to be president. Maybe he ought to cram for a degree in Women’s Studies. Then he’d be qualified to be president.

Every utopian scheme–are you listening, Humanist Manifesto fans?–is doomed to run aground on the rocks of sheer impossibility. They promise things that no one can give, and eventually succeed only in arousing a revolution of rising expectations. You can’t string people along forever.

If President *Batteries Not Included really loves this country, he has a mighty strange way of showing it.

If our current crop of leaders truly is the best a nation of 300 million can do, God help us.

New Words for Liberals

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We need some new words in the English language, to describe personality types and behaviors which we run into all the time since the invention of the Internet. Most of this stuff is displayed by our friends on the left side of the socio-political spectrum, but I can’t help that.

I don’t know what the new words ought to be, but here are the definitions that we need them for.

1. Visiting a website with an obviously conservative slant, gratuitously insulting the owner and his readers, and then crying “foul!” if the owner responds in kind. It’s sort of the cyber equivalent of entering someone’s living room, peeing on the furniture, and getting all wounded and cheesed off when they call you a slob.

2. Saying asinine things that are effortlessly demonstrated to be completely untrue, and becoming furious with people who don’t believe you. Like insisting that 2015 is having an incredibly warm winter, and then throwing a tantrum at people who can’t open their front doors because of all the snow piled up against them.

3. The bizarre lefty habit of flying into a rage at even the most insignificant and ineffective opposition, and being utterly unable to be at peace until that tiny bit of opposition is crushed.

4. Railing interminably against God, spewing venom against Him, while all the time asserting He does not exist.

5. Rigorously taking away other people’s choices while presenting oneself as “democratic” and committed to “diversity,” all the while trying to wipe out diversity.

Well, okay, you get the idea. It’d be nice if we could just say, “So-and-so is glumping again,” and everybody would know that So-and-so was up there storming and fuming because he declared “scientists are above ideology” and nobody believed him.

Surely our American English is equal to the challenge.

 

Wanted in Our Entertainment: Religion as Part of Everyday Life

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Frank McGrath - IMDb

Eight years later, here’s the picture.

We watched a Wagon Train episode last night and found it wonderful: Chuck Wooster, Wagonmaster, from Season 2 (you can order the whole season from Timeless Video).

In this episode, the train is trapped in the mountains by heavy snow. Before it can be extricated, characters begin to disappear mysteriously, without a trace. With the wagonmaster, the assistant wagonmaster, and the scout all gone, the responsibility for the whole train falls on the cook, Charlie Wooster (Frank McGrath)–not that he has any leadership abilities, but he’s the only one left who has any relevant experience at all.

Charlie is a garrulous, happy-go-lucky, bearded scamp who has no business leading anything; and he knows it. So what does Charlie do?

He prays.

As King Solomon asked God for the wisdom to govern the kingdom of Israel (1 Kings 3: 5-14), so Charlie prays for the strength and wisdom he needs to lead the wagon train. Meanwhile, a woman whose husband has gone missing in the snow drops to her knees in silent prayer. This is all done naturally and with dignity, not self-consciously, not hitting the viewer over the head: but because belief and trust in God is part of who these ordinary people are.

It’s quite beautiful.

I have tried to do this in my Bell Mountain books–show religious faith and practice as a natural, ordinary part of everyday life. The stories include characters who don’t believe, and others whose belief has been mis-instructed by a Temple that has lost sight of its true reason for being and become an end in itself.

Charlie’s prayer wasn’t tacked on to make Wagon Train a “Christian Western.” The characters in my books are living in the midst of a religious upheaval, so the circumstances are different. But in both, faith is part of who these people are, and they cannot be realistically depicted without it.

Meanwhile, in the stories told by nearly all our novels, movies, TV shows, and other forms of “entertainment,” we find no trace of any kind of relationship with God. There are notable exceptions, of course, for which we give thanks; but for the most part, our daily entertainment, whose content we dump into our minds unceasingly, is a God-free zone.

I can’t believe that this has had a good effect on us.

But I think, with God’s help, that it can be fixed.

P.S.: Well, I couldn’t get Charlie’s picture to display, but at least the link works. I still have much to learn.

PPS: Got it now! Live and learn.

A Strange Quirk of the Human Mind

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My wife and I have been watching Season 2 of Wagon Train (on disc). We enjoy it very much: that is, until you get to the ending theme music.

Written by Sammy Fain and Jack Brooks, and sung by Johnny O’Neill, this music, in addition to having a rather jarring Las Vegas sound, reveals in its lustily-sung lyrics a peculiar quirk of the human mind–writing or saying something that makes no sense at all, and then presenting it over and over again without ever noticing that it makes no sense at all.

Here are the two lines that jump out at us:

Rollin’ over prairie where there ain’t no grass,

Rollin’ up a mountain where there ain’t no pass…

To which we can’t help adding a third line: Find that wagon-master and fire his a**!

Really now: with the wagons being pulled by horses and mules, a prairie in which there ain’t no grass–otherwise known as a desert–would likely prove fatal to the wagon train. And trying to push the train over a mountain where there ain’t no pass–well, you know what happened to the Donner Party: trapped in the snow all winter, almost everybody died, cannibalism all around. Wouldn’t it make much more sense to roll the train over a prairie where there is plenty of grass for the horses to eat, and to cross the mountains by means of a pass? Even if you had to go a long way around?

Nevertheless, week after week, Mr. O’Neill belted out those crazy lyrics implying a suicidal wagon train full of incurable nitwits–until about two-thirds of the way through the season, when they dropped the lyrics altogether and just played the not very evocative music. And in Season 3 they switched over to the vastly-improved theme music which many still remember today.

Why did it take them so long to realize that poor Mr. O’Neill was singing poppycock? But at least they eventually corrected their mistake, which is more than we can say for some others.

But why did no one notice as soon as the lyrics were written? Someone should’ve said, “Uh, excuse me, but they’d have to have more than a few screws loose if they tried to drive their horses through a desert and then straight up a mountain.”

It seems to me that this little glitch from Wagon Train explains much of human history.

Original Loony Tunes Were a Riot

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I grew up on Loony Tunes–Porky Pig,. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd. It’s been quite a long time since I watched one of these cartoons. Just on a whim, this weekend, I discovered on the Internet the specific cartoons that introduced three of these characters.

In Porky’s Duck Hunt (1937), Porky Pig goes hunting and winds up trying to bag the prototype of Daffy Duck. Actually, I found this because I wanted to see a sequence of a group of drunken fish singing “Moonlight Bay,” and that turned out to be in this cartoon. It also featured a very wacky black duck.

This character became Daffy Duck in 1938, in Daffy Duck and Egghead. Egghead was the prototype of Elmer Fudd; the bald head and the cwazy voice would come later. This cartoon is an absolute scream, especially when Egghead has to deal with some jidrool in the theater audience.

It wasn’t Elmer Fudd, though, who was the first to hunt Bugs Bunny. It was Porky Pig, in Porky’s Hare Hunt (1937). This toon recycles some of the gags from Porky’s Duck Hunt, but what matters is that herein Bugs Bunny launched his great career. You might find it hard to recognize him in this prototype. If his laugh seems eerily familiar, it’s because a close facsimile of it became Woody Woodpecker’s trademark laugh in 1938. I guess you can’t copyright a laugh.

Great oafs from little acorns grow. I don’t know if Loony Tunes are as popular as they used to  be; but if not, well, they had a good run of several decades, and many of them–including all three of the above–are easy to find on the Internet.

Had we been in charge of the Creation, I’m sure we never would have thought of creating laughter as medicine for the stressed-out soul. But God did think of it, for which we give Him thanks.

Take a break from reading about wacked-out Bruce Jenner’s “courageous transformation” into a grotesque parody of a woman, and relax with a few of these antique cartoons.

They’re even funnier than Brian Williams.

Are We Smarter Than Our Ancestors?

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I’m having a controversy with a guy who says that, thanks to universal public education, widespread literacy, and other features of modern civilization, “People today are smarter than ever.”

Pity the poor ancients. It was all they could do to invent writing, build roads and aqueducts, sculpt out of cold, dry marble what seems to be wet cloth clinging to the skin, create the calendar, and a lot of other achievements that look pretty trivial compared to “gender reassignment” surgery. Later on they came up with other poor excuses for progress, like the printing press, ocean navigation, watches and clocks, paintings by dullards like Giotto and plays by clods like Shakespeare. You could hardly find anything they did worthy of being put in a Super Bowl halftime show.

I wonder if our ancestors, if they could see us now, would think we were clowns and oafs who can’t perform even the simplest and most necessary tasks without the aid of computers: who use high technology to predict blizzards that don’t happen, create school systems that dumb down students, news media that tell lies when they’re not tightly focused on celebrity gossip, rap “music,” and the Kardashians.

I wonder what people will be saying, a thousand years from now, about this stage of human civilization (if we can call it that) with its plummeting birth rates, whole-hearted embrace of perversions, appeasement of Islam, and its uncanny ability to turn out high school or even college graduates who never heard of King Arthur or Julius Caesar, think Switzerland is a country on the Pacific coast, get the Civil War mixed up with World War II (if they’ve even heard of either of them), read at a 5th-grade level, watch movies based on comic books, and have no idea where their food comes from.

Smarter than ever–hot dog!

A Defense of Fantasy

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By now you might be thinking, “Boy, this guy sure hates fantasy!” Not so. What I hate is lousy fantasy. And even more, I hate fantasy that serves an evil purpose, no matter how well it might be written.

If you read a few dozen current fantasy novels, you might come to the conclusion that the best you can hope for is fantasy that serves a merely idle purpose. Some Christians refuse to believe there’s any such thing as edifying fantasy. I can hardly blame them. However, the profusion of wicked or at best silly fantasies does not rule out the possibility of using fantasy in the service of God and good.

No, you’re not going to manage it with stuff like The Maze Runners or Game of Thrones.

But why use fantasy at all? Well, here are a few reasons.

1. Why not? We’ve seen it done before.

2. Young readers are crazy about fantasy, can’t get enough of it. So you’ve got a built-in audience–indeed, an audience that needs to be better-served than it is just now.

3. Like other forms of fiction, fantasy can readily be written as an extended parable. Just think of the story of the Prodigal Son turned into a novel. Warning: If you do this heavy-handedly, it won’t work. The reader will resent it when the writer tries to dominate him.

4. Fantasy is more like poetry, or even music, than most other kinds of fiction can ever be. It gets under your skin.

Look, it can’t possibly be as hard as, say, finding a constructive use for rap music.

Of course, if you’re going to write a sermon, write a sermon. Don’t write a sermon disguised as a fantasy. It won’t fool anyone. And even more of course, we’re not talking about creating a “Christian fantasy” by imitating everybody else’s fantasies and then just tacking on some scenes of characters praying or going to church or quoting Scripture at random places in the story.

Why concede to the pagans a whole realm of art, not to mention a very big chunk of the readership market? Are we not in a state of spiritual warfare?

I see John Bunyan, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien standing tall on this battlefield; and I will run, not walk, to join them.

The Abuse of Fantasy

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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.

Oops–No Blizzard

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted 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?