Tag: cultural musings

Gloom and Doom… in a Commercial

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted 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

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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.

Why Is Fantasy So Mean to Women?

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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: leeduigon(patty)Posted 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

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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: leeduigon(patty)Posted 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.

My Generation Ruined America

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It was a pretty nice United States of America that my father’s generation handed us: stable, strong, prosperous, greatest country in the world. But my generation, my peers, the damned fools who went to college in the 1960s–we’ve wrecked it.

What have we done?

We are governed by the slimiest crew of cretins that ever crawled out from under a rock, and “educated” by life-forms even lower on the scale. Not that we deserve much better. We are thoroughly convinced that there are inalienable “rights” to practice sodomy, loot grocery stores, use the bathroom reserved for the opposite sex, and to stretch out one’s hand to receive money that someone else worked for while the recipient sat around playing video games and getting high.

How did we come to this? It happened right under our noses, in the light of day; and yet I can’t tell you how it happened, and I’ve never met anyone who can. All I can tell you is that this most definitely is not the America I was born and raised in. I don’t know what it is. A freak show, I suppose.

For the sake of ten just men, God would have spared Sodom. How many do we have to come up with?

Pray, pray, and pray some more. God hears us. If we can’t see what He’s doing about any of this mess, then it must be that He’s working in a way we cannot see.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1). Go to bed in faith, rise up in faith, walk through the day in faith. Wait upon the Lord; for the judge of all the earth shall always do right.

A Tale of Two Hobbits

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Sitting in the eye doctor’s waiting room, I picked up a copy of Entertainment Weekly. It had a picture of a movie Hobbit on the cover and a headline, “Farewell, Bilbo.” I’m a Tolkien fan, so I picked it up and opened it.

Actually, Hobbits aren’t going anywhere. The magazine is celebrating the release of the  supposedly final Peter Jackson movie, the third in his film trilogy of Tolkien’s not very long novel, The Hobbit. The article featured Stephen Colbert done up as various characters in the Hobbit movies.

As I perused the article, it became clear to me that neither Colbert nor the interviewer had ever actually read Tolkien’s books. They’d only seen the movies. But they talked about the movies as if the books did not exist–as if there really were a subplot dealing with a big crush between a Dwarf and an Invincible Female Elf-Warrior.

If you had put a gun to Tolkien’s head and threatened him, he still would never have written such a thing.

So now there are all these people who think they know J.R.R. Tolkien because they’ve seen movies based–sometimes, as in the case of the Elf-Dwarf romance, very, very loosely if at all–on Tolkien’s books.

I remember one of my wife’s co-workers, years ago, insisting that Napoleon was an epileptic because she’d seen it in a TV movie. He wasn’t; but the ignorant screenwriters showed him as an epileptic, so this viewer “knew” he was an epileptic.

This is a great age for knowing a lot of things that just ain’t so.

A Good Day to be Bad

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Yesterday was a great day for Team Evil.

Our community organizer-in-chief–who probably couldn’t organize his sock drawer–unilaterally announced we’re gonna have “normal” relations with communist Cuba from now on, thus helping the communist regime hang onto power longer. Well, of course he’s going to help communists.

And Sony announced it’s not going to release its new movie, The Interview, in response to terrorist threats made by North Korea, whose gremlins hacked Sony’s computer system and released a lot of embarrassing emails by Sony personnel. But the bad guys sealed the deal by implying they were going to blow up a bunch of American movie theaters if they dared to show the film.

Remember, a few years ago, when a Canadian film company released a film about assassinating President George W. Bush? Sure, there were a lot of loud objections. But the Bush administration never threatened to kill people to keep the film from being shown. So The Interview, which is about a plot to bump off North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, will not be shown. And another run crosses the plate for the bad guys. You can get what you want by threatening to kill Americans.

One more thing to remember; and Psalm 11 says it best.

In the Lord put I my trust; how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?

For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart. If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

The Lord is in His holy temple, the Lord’s throne is in heaven: His eyes behold, His eyelids try, the children of men. The Lord trieth the righteous; but the wicked and him that loveth violence His soul hateth.

Upon the wicked He shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup.

For the righteous Lord loveeth righteousness: His countenance doth behold the upright.

The Lord is sovereign, the Lord reigneth: and it will not be a good day for the bad forever.

 

The Hit Man’s Restaurant

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Are we getting our money’s worth out of the government’s witness protection program?

Case in point, as told this month by the Daytona Beach News-Journal:

Back in the summer of 2009, a four-time murderer, servant of a prominent “family” of organized crime, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for pistol-whipping one customer and beating up another at his pizzeria–a business bought and paid for by the American taxpayer, and handed to this goon when he entered witness protection.

The court held that the restaurant owner has no right to pistol-whip a customer for complaining about the quality of the calzones: or any other reason, for that matter.

Afterward, the goon sued the Daytona Beach News-Journal for libel for its reporting of the incident. The newspaper described the goon as a former hit man, which the goon insisted wasn’t true, that not everyone convicted of murder is necessarily a hit man. Was he hinting that he committed murder without being paid for it? “I committed murder and that’s not something I like to talk about,” he said during the trial.

The goon accused the newspaper of trying to ruin his life and his business. The fact that he physically attacked his customers, I guess, should not have been reported.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it one of the first things they teach you in business school–not to pistol-whip your customers? At least not in front of the other customers.

Anyhow, there’s the federal government handing over what could’ve been a perfectly fine business to an admitted murderer. Uh, what kind of business background did they suppose he had? Did they think he became a hit man just because he saw an ad for it on a matchbook cover? Was any federal officer daft enough to think this killer would just settle down and be a small businessman?

We ignore God’s law at our peril.

What did God command Noah, when he and his family came out of the ark? After telling them to be fruitful and multiply, and forbidding them to eat the blood of living things, God spoke this law: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” (Genesis 9:6) There’s nothing there about setting up murderers in nice little businesses at the public’s expense.

Yeah, I know the arguments in favor of the witness protection program.

But I also know an absurd situation when I see one.