Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer concerns Buffy’s troubles with finding her way in the world. After dying (at the end of season five), and being resurrected, Buffy is having some problems finding her purpose in life. In the musical episode, “Once More With Feeling,” she sings that she just wants to “feel” and that she wants “something to sing about.” Spike sings to her, “Life's not a song/ Life isn't bliss/ Life is just this/ It's living.” (I know that sounds uber-corny, but trust me, the show is masterful at making the trite meaningful. Plus the way Spike – James Marsters – looks at Buffy at this moment is enough to make your socks melt).
ANYWAY, I love me this stuff, but as many times as I watch this episode, I’m always left sitting there thinking, “Come on Buffy, what the crap? You have super-slayer powers, a dreamy dude worshipping you, a stylish yet affordable wardrobe, cool friends, and perpetually shiny and bouncy hair. What is it you’re sad about again?”
And then I am spiraled into self-reflection, because I know it’s true that I complain too. But I know I shouldn’t. I have a lovely life. I am paid to read books that interest me and to talk about them and write about them in a beautiful place with smart people. I think of my friend Maggie at Mizzou who would talk about how she drove a forklift for ten years before coming to grad school. And why am I complaining again? And as much as I complain about teaching, it brings me incredible joy. Seriously. I woke up at 5:30am this morning because I was so excited about creating a lesson plan centered on Jeopardy. That’s joy.
So I’ve decided to just not complain anymore, because every time I complain, I am giving myself permission to be ungrateful for the good things I’ve got. I am giving myself permission to NOT “be here now,” to NOT “be mindful,” to live in some fantasy world where I’m thinner, have a car, and everyone thinks I’m smarter than they are.
I am currently reading Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and I find that Merton makes a similar point: “I might suggest a fourth need of modern man, which is precisely liberation from his inordinate self-consciousness, his monumental self-awareness, his obsession with self-affirmation, so that he may enjoy the freedom from concern that goes with being simply what he is and accepting things as they are in order to work with them as he can.”
So here are some ground rules:
1. I am only allowed to “complain” to people who can do something about it. So if for example, I have a problem with a professor, I am only allowed to talk to the professor about it. This will also keep me from gossiping.
2. I am only allowed to complain about things that I can change or that can be changed (the wisdom to know the difference, etc.)
3. Before I complain, I’m going to think about how my complaining might come off to someone who, for example, has to work 60+ hours a week in customer service for less money than I make. In short, I want to look at myself the way I look at Buffy.
4. I am allowed to debate, analyze, and criticize for the purpose of furthering my own beliefs or for the benefit of others. For example, I can criticize a book we read for class, and discuss what I don’t like about it, but I am not allowed to complain that we have to read it in the first place.
We shall see how this works. I’m already feeling more positive.
Showing posts with label Ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ideas. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Choosing between my money and my life
I’m reading a very interesting book called Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence, recommended by one of the productivity blogs I read, zenhabits. The book has a lot of great anti-capitalism messages, essentially showing how society programs us to want more and more while making us less happy. The goal of the book is to help you figure out how to get what you want from money. In this way, it’s very zen because you’re supposed to focus on what you want, as opposed to what TV ads or your friends tell you that you want. You need to find what is “enough” for you. It’s also filled with fun soundbites like “If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough” and “Most people have no idea how much money has entered their lives, and therefore no idea how much money could enter their lives.”
The book points out that we don’t tell people how to spend their money because it’s their “right” to spend it how they want in a free society. We take our “right” to consume to heart, sometimes even placing it above other rights, privileges, and duties of a free society. We also have the idea that it’s un-American to reject consumerism: “We have absorbed the notion that it is right to buy – that consuming is what keeps America strong … a day at the mall can be considered downright patriotic.”
I thought I was doing pretty well with money, and I thought that this book would be good “advice” but that I didn’t really need it.
Then I checked the mail on Friday and got my electric bill.
And it was $180.
Now, this is an unusual bill. LaRue was here for a couple weeks, and obviously two people take up more energy than one. And it was incredibly hot, and it’s cooling down now. BUT OH MY GOSH ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS IS A LOT OF MONEY. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I’ve slaved over grading papers this semester that have gone simply to keeping my apartment a balmy 80 degrees while I’m not even there.
I don’t have the firmest grasp of my readership, so I won’t put my earnings here, but suffice it to say I am living on a grad student salary, which cannot typically bear that kind of stress. So I pulled up my checking account online, made a budget, and decided to make some changes. I’m posting some of these ideas to hold myself accountable and to perhaps give other some ideas:
1. I read online that you can usually downgrade your internet speed and generally you won’t even notice the difference. So I called the cable company and asked how much I was actually paying (before reading this book, I would have just set up automatic bill pay and forgotten about it). I was paying $30/month for high speed internet. “I want to downgrade,” I told the woman on the phone. “I want the $15 per month tier.” “Okay,” she said, “but it’s going to be a lot slower!” Guess what? She changed it, and I can’t tell the difference.
2. I live down the street from a place that buys, sells, and trades books, DVDs, music, etc., so I’m going to go through my stuff and see what I can get rid of.
3. I’m going to buy:
a. An energy efficient showerhead
b. Energy star light bulbs (I have some, but not in all my lights)
c. Glass pans (which retain heat and cook faster, meaning that the oven doesn’t have to be on as long)
d. Pots for the stove with flat bottoms and tight covers (I’m also going to cook with the lids on)
4. I’m going to look into getting reflective film for my windows which will let in the light but not the heat. Also, I’m going to consider getting ceiling fans.
5. I’m going to try to do my cooking early in the morning or late in the evening. Last night, for example, I made pasta and tofu to take for my lunches this week. That way, I don’t have to keep heating up the stove (and thus the apartment) every day or during the heat of the day.
6. I’m going to study on campus during the heat of the day, so I can leave the AC off in my apartment.
I’ll keep you posted. Anyone have other energy-saving ideas for me?
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Why I'll Miss You
I have written in this blog previously that I wanted to be little parts of different things; specifically, I wanted to glob together a bunch of religions and make them all my religion. I have since come to consider this further and maybe I think the integrity of each religion is a good thing. In fact, maybe I think each religion should just fully strive to be what it is, instead of making concessions to other religions and therefore diluting itself.
But I have decided that when you leave people (as I will be doing in just under two weeks), you can keep little parts of them. You can keep the story they told you and tell it as an anecdote at a party when you’re getting to know someone else. You can remember the way they handled themselves in a tough situation, and when faced with one yourself, you can draw on what you saw them do. You can treat people the way they treated them. You can remember one of their clever observations and use it to view the world. You can adopt their sense of humor, their taste in movies, their delights in simple things. You can tell stories with the certain inflection they always used. In a class this last semester, we talked about the plagiarism hysteria currently sweeping the country, and leading to phenomenon like turnitin.com, which victimizes students and polices the outcomes of plagiarisms without examining its underlying causes. But I think that when you’ve really gotten to know someone, really spent time with them, you plagiarize them. Little bits of them become all of you, and in this way, it’s like they never left.
So this is why, if you’re a person I’m leaving behind, I’ll miss you because I won’t be able to cheat off you anymore; because there won’t be any more stories or movies or observations to challenge me and shape me. I’m recording here some things I’m going to plagiarize from some of my good friends who won’t be in Arizona. In short, these are things that I admire about you, and I hope that in some small way I have learned from you.
Kristin: The way you feel comfortable in any group or setting, how you laugh
JR: Your ability to make people feel comfortable, to tell a good story (usually with impressions and hand gestures)
Jennifer: Your serenity, how it seems like nothing ever fazes you
Catherine: Your ability to accept things as they come (Daoism, I think it’s called)
Emily: How you embrace, unapologetically, your “dorkiness”
Dustin: Your humility and graciousness
Elizabeth: How you always rave about others, your loyalty
Angela: Your friendliness (and neighborliness)
Aaron: Your ability to BS
Reify: How you adapt to any situation (including hordes of English graduate students)
Juliette: How you always have a smile for everyone, no matter what their story
And the list goes on! I was just going through my Facebook friends list to create this, and I only included people who I thought wouldn't mind making an appearance here. In fact, it reminds me of my favorite goodbye line, from The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia:
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
But I have decided that when you leave people (as I will be doing in just under two weeks), you can keep little parts of them. You can keep the story they told you and tell it as an anecdote at a party when you’re getting to know someone else. You can remember the way they handled themselves in a tough situation, and when faced with one yourself, you can draw on what you saw them do. You can treat people the way they treated them. You can remember one of their clever observations and use it to view the world. You can adopt their sense of humor, their taste in movies, their delights in simple things. You can tell stories with the certain inflection they always used. In a class this last semester, we talked about the plagiarism hysteria currently sweeping the country, and leading to phenomenon like turnitin.com, which victimizes students and polices the outcomes of plagiarisms without examining its underlying causes. But I think that when you’ve really gotten to know someone, really spent time with them, you plagiarize them. Little bits of them become all of you, and in this way, it’s like they never left.
So this is why, if you’re a person I’m leaving behind, I’ll miss you because I won’t be able to cheat off you anymore; because there won’t be any more stories or movies or observations to challenge me and shape me. I’m recording here some things I’m going to plagiarize from some of my good friends who won’t be in Arizona. In short, these are things that I admire about you, and I hope that in some small way I have learned from you.
Kristin: The way you feel comfortable in any group or setting, how you laugh
JR: Your ability to make people feel comfortable, to tell a good story (usually with impressions and hand gestures)
Jennifer: Your serenity, how it seems like nothing ever fazes you
Catherine: Your ability to accept things as they come (Daoism, I think it’s called)
Emily: How you embrace, unapologetically, your “dorkiness”
Dustin: Your humility and graciousness
Elizabeth: How you always rave about others, your loyalty
Angela: Your friendliness (and neighborliness)
Aaron: Your ability to BS
Reify: How you adapt to any situation (including hordes of English graduate students)
Juliette: How you always have a smile for everyone, no matter what their story
And the list goes on! I was just going through my Facebook friends list to create this, and I only included people who I thought wouldn't mind making an appearance here. In fact, it reminds me of my favorite goodbye line, from The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia:
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Delight in the Simple Things
Today’s post is derived from a line in the song “Simple Things” by The Renaissance Men. Recently, I’ve decided that true happiness in life comes from finding and appreciating small things. I mentioned to Kristin that this was one of the reasons that she was fun to be around: she finds really small things to get really happy about, like say, chicken pesto. I brought up this idea to my parents on vacation too, noting that my mom gets really excited when there’s a mini coffee pot in her hotel room.
This is not to say that large things – family, friends, weather – shouldn’t excite us, but that small things are more reliable, more consistent, and easier to control. What inevitably happens, though, is that although we don’t always take time to be conscious of our simple things. We just kind of passively enjoy them when they occur. I think that we can say that we definitively know someone when we know their simple things. If you had only $5 to buy something, or an hour or two to spend with someone you loved, do you know what you would buy or do to make them happy?
Some rules for defining simple things:
1. It’s got to be something that’s accessible; something you could make happen almost every day. So it can’t be like Christmas dinner, or that one great night out with all your friends. You can’t be happy only about things that happened in the past.
2. It’s got to be inexpensive (relatively speaking) and not especially time-consuming.
3. It can be a small physical object, or it can be a feeling or an experience, but it must be easily replicated.
4. It should be pretty unique to you. It can’t be something that makes everyone happy (finding your simple things should be a process of self-discovery). It can’t be lame, like “a child’s smile.”
5. These things must give you genuine delight. It doesn’t have to last a whole day, but there should be at least a moment when you are really pleased.
I’m going to try to be conscious of these things over the next few days to see what I come up with. Here are some that I thought of for other people.
LaRue: Petting squirrels, People’s ancestry
JR: Telling stories, doing impressions (or a combination of both)
Emily: Chatting in the EGSA lounge
Jennifer: Feeding people, Coordinating hanging out with food
Kristin: Mochas, babies
Laura: Reminiscing about childhood, bad movies, jalapenos
This is not to say that large things – family, friends, weather – shouldn’t excite us, but that small things are more reliable, more consistent, and easier to control. What inevitably happens, though, is that although we don’t always take time to be conscious of our simple things. We just kind of passively enjoy them when they occur. I think that we can say that we definitively know someone when we know their simple things. If you had only $5 to buy something, or an hour or two to spend with someone you loved, do you know what you would buy or do to make them happy?
Some rules for defining simple things:
1. It’s got to be something that’s accessible; something you could make happen almost every day. So it can’t be like Christmas dinner, or that one great night out with all your friends. You can’t be happy only about things that happened in the past.
2. It’s got to be inexpensive (relatively speaking) and not especially time-consuming.
3. It can be a small physical object, or it can be a feeling or an experience, but it must be easily replicated.
4. It should be pretty unique to you. It can’t be something that makes everyone happy (finding your simple things should be a process of self-discovery). It can’t be lame, like “a child’s smile.”
5. These things must give you genuine delight. It doesn’t have to last a whole day, but there should be at least a moment when you are really pleased.
I’m going to try to be conscious of these things over the next few days to see what I come up with. Here are some that I thought of for other people.
LaRue: Petting squirrels, People’s ancestry
JR: Telling stories, doing impressions (or a combination of both)
Emily: Chatting in the EGSA lounge
Jennifer: Feeding people, Coordinating hanging out with food
Kristin: Mochas, babies
Laura: Reminiscing about childhood, bad movies, jalapenos
Monday, June 25, 2007
Wisdom From Rich Mullins
I just finished reading a “devotional biography” of Rich Mullins, a popular Christian music artist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 1997. The book combines quotes from Rich as well as others’ stories about him. I was interested in the book because just before he died, Mullins was considering converting to Catholicism. He was inspired by the work of St. Francis and even started his own semi-monastic order called “The Kid Brothers of St. Frank.” At the height of fame, he gave up touring, gave himself a $24,000 annual salary, donated the rest of his money to charity, and moved to a Native American reservation to teach music to kids. The book gave me a lot to think about, so I’m copying a few choice selections for you below.
Quotes from Rich Mullins:
I hear people say, “Why do you want to go to church? They are all just hypocrites.” I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite because nobody goes to church because they’re perfect. If you’ve got it all together, you don’t need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning.
And this is what liturgy offers that all the razzamatazz of our modern worship can’t touch. You don’t go home from church going, “Oh, I am just moved to tears.” You go home from church going, “Wow, I just took communion, and you know what? If Augustine were alive today he would have had it with me and maybe he is and maybe he did.”
Whatever church you are in you should just stay there. They are all equally messed up.
I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people willing to be the nuts and bolts.
God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharoah’s right hand man in Egypt. What he did give Joseph was eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing people’s affairs, and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was.
Many people believe that if you give e tithe to the church, then God will make you rich. Why? If you tithe, you get rid of ten percent of the root of all evil! You should be giving ninety percent because God can handle money better than we can.
[Speaking of legalism] I think it would be really easy to say, “I think what would really please God is if I don’t dance, I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls who do.” It would be easy to say, “Oh gee I think what will really please God is if I become and evangelist and convert a thousand people.” It’s much more difficult I think for me to become who I am and who He created me to be.
Growing up protestant, I always thought of a monastery as a place where cowards went, people who can’t deal with the world. When you really begin to research some of this stuff, you find that these are some of the bravest people. Anyone who decides to face themselves head-on is a very brave person.
[To a group of Christian writers] Stop thinking of what you’re doing as a ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it messed up or not; whether you flush your toilet or not. Your ministry is the way you love people. You love people when you call your wife and say, “I’m going to be late for dinner,” instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife when you know she’s really tired. If you are a Christian, ministry is just an accident of being alive. I don’t know that you can divide up your life and say, “This is my ministry,” and “This is my other thing,” because the fruits of Christianity affect everybody around us.
Stories about Rich:
One of the most memorable things was Rich’s dedication to spending time with Jesus. One year his Lenten exercise was to stay up one hour after he wanted to go to bed so that he could spend time with Jesus. The disciples, he said, couldn’t stay awake with Jesus when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Rich didn’t do it to be heroic; he just wanted to do something Jesus asked of his friends.
When Rich lived with our family, each morning on his way to school he took a cup of coffee with him. After a month or so, I noticed that there were no mugs in our cupboard. When Rich got home that night, I said that we were missing our mugs. He said, “Oh I think I have some in my truck.” We found at least 20 mugs sitting in the truck. Some were broken, and some were not even ours. For Rich, material possessions were things to be used, not possessed.
[From Rich’s accountant] He said he wanted to live at the average working man’s wage, which at the time was about $24,000 per year. Obviously, his songs were on the radio, and his albums were selling well, so he actually made several times more than that. He told me he did not want to know how much he made because it would make it harder to give away.
Quotes from Rich Mullins:
I hear people say, “Why do you want to go to church? They are all just hypocrites.” I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite because nobody goes to church because they’re perfect. If you’ve got it all together, you don’t need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning.
And this is what liturgy offers that all the razzamatazz of our modern worship can’t touch. You don’t go home from church going, “Oh, I am just moved to tears.” You go home from church going, “Wow, I just took communion, and you know what? If Augustine were alive today he would have had it with me and maybe he is and maybe he did.”
Whatever church you are in you should just stay there. They are all equally messed up.
I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people willing to be the nuts and bolts.
God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharoah’s right hand man in Egypt. What he did give Joseph was eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing people’s affairs, and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was.
Many people believe that if you give e tithe to the church, then God will make you rich. Why? If you tithe, you get rid of ten percent of the root of all evil! You should be giving ninety percent because God can handle money better than we can.
[Speaking of legalism] I think it would be really easy to say, “I think what would really please God is if I don’t dance, I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls who do.” It would be easy to say, “Oh gee I think what will really please God is if I become and evangelist and convert a thousand people.” It’s much more difficult I think for me to become who I am and who He created me to be.
Growing up protestant, I always thought of a monastery as a place where cowards went, people who can’t deal with the world. When you really begin to research some of this stuff, you find that these are some of the bravest people. Anyone who decides to face themselves head-on is a very brave person.
[To a group of Christian writers] Stop thinking of what you’re doing as a ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it messed up or not; whether you flush your toilet or not. Your ministry is the way you love people. You love people when you call your wife and say, “I’m going to be late for dinner,” instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife when you know she’s really tired. If you are a Christian, ministry is just an accident of being alive. I don’t know that you can divide up your life and say, “This is my ministry,” and “This is my other thing,” because the fruits of Christianity affect everybody around us.
Stories about Rich:
One of the most memorable things was Rich’s dedication to spending time with Jesus. One year his Lenten exercise was to stay up one hour after he wanted to go to bed so that he could spend time with Jesus. The disciples, he said, couldn’t stay awake with Jesus when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Rich didn’t do it to be heroic; he just wanted to do something Jesus asked of his friends.
When Rich lived with our family, each morning on his way to school he took a cup of coffee with him. After a month or so, I noticed that there were no mugs in our cupboard. When Rich got home that night, I said that we were missing our mugs. He said, “Oh I think I have some in my truck.” We found at least 20 mugs sitting in the truck. Some were broken, and some were not even ours. For Rich, material possessions were things to be used, not possessed.
[From Rich’s accountant] He said he wanted to live at the average working man’s wage, which at the time was about $24,000 per year. Obviously, his songs were on the radio, and his albums were selling well, so he actually made several times more than that. He told me he did not want to know how much he made because it would make it harder to give away.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
More on Borat
On my last post about George Saunders’ take on Borat, Brady (on Facebook) makes the excellent point that it’s unfair to hold up documentaries to traditional journalistic standards, and I couldn’t agree more. This mythic “standard of truth” was what irritated me about the whole James Fry vs. Oprah debacle: Oprah got mad because James Frey was representing as “truth” was Oprah did not believe was truth, but Oprah never bothered to consider the messy meaning of truth, or what it means to tell the truth, or the circumstances under which one is obligated to tell the truth, or the artistic sensibilities of memoir as a valid genre, or the complexities of memory. No. Oprah felt that some “facts” were “wrong” and got on TV and yelled at James Frey. So I agree that Sacha Baron Cohen (creator of Borat) and Michael Moore deserve some slack.
Brady also writes that Borat is really about Borat and his stunts, and maybe that’s whence the big laffs in the movie, but the stick-to-your-ribs sinking feeling that accompanies you out of the movie theater is from the moments where Borat, with his outsider charm, forces the viewer to confront his society. As I asked myself leaving the theater, “I live in a country where people want to kill gays?” This is not information I have to confront every day (straight privilege!), and I originally thought the movie was successful at jarring me into revelations about my culture.
And this is why Saunders’ argument is so compelling. He contends that Borat appears to be “edgy” and shocking and attention-grabbing and jaw-dropping and an indictment of modern culture. But really all Borat does is make fun of people it’s okay to make fun of : (1) People in power -- middle-class people, white people, Christians and (2) People without a voice – villagers in Kazakhstan. For a movie with a backwards, anti-semitic outsider as a protagonist, its targets are surprisingly politically correct. Saunders further argues that Borat is not trying to Make A Point (as would likely be the case for someone like Michael Moore); instead, he’s trying to make a buck. In this way, the movie isn’t really compelling at all. It’s really rather mundane and somewhat mean-spirited. It’s not that Borat’s facts are wrong, it’s that his motives are impure.
Roger Ebert says that one judges a movie based on how well it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Borat was not marketed as truthful or journalistic, and we can’t hold filmmakers to a standard of Truth if they don’t represent their movies that way. But before we start revering Borat as a piece of cultural criticism, we need to examine what and who is being criticized.
Brady also writes that Borat is really about Borat and his stunts, and maybe that’s whence the big laffs in the movie, but the stick-to-your-ribs sinking feeling that accompanies you out of the movie theater is from the moments where Borat, with his outsider charm, forces the viewer to confront his society. As I asked myself leaving the theater, “I live in a country where people want to kill gays?” This is not information I have to confront every day (straight privilege!), and I originally thought the movie was successful at jarring me into revelations about my culture.
And this is why Saunders’ argument is so compelling. He contends that Borat appears to be “edgy” and shocking and attention-grabbing and jaw-dropping and an indictment of modern culture. But really all Borat does is make fun of people it’s okay to make fun of : (1) People in power -- middle-class people, white people, Christians and (2) People without a voice – villagers in Kazakhstan. For a movie with a backwards, anti-semitic outsider as a protagonist, its targets are surprisingly politically correct. Saunders further argues that Borat is not trying to Make A Point (as would likely be the case for someone like Michael Moore); instead, he’s trying to make a buck. In this way, the movie isn’t really compelling at all. It’s really rather mundane and somewhat mean-spirited. It’s not that Borat’s facts are wrong, it’s that his motives are impure.
Roger Ebert says that one judges a movie based on how well it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Borat was not marketed as truthful or journalistic, and we can’t hold filmmakers to a standard of Truth if they don’t represent their movies that way. But before we start revering Borat as a piece of cultural criticism, we need to examine what and who is being criticized.
Monday, June 18, 2007
I want to be little parts of different things
Recently, I’ve been thinking that our society allows for very little nuance or ambiguity in our beliefs. For example, you have to choose a religion. Church-hopping with my parents as a kid and then also with LaRue, I’ve found that I don’t want to commit wholeheartedly to one religion, I want different parts of different religions. I like the community atmosphere of the Orthodox church, the worship music at The Crossing, the communion at the Catholic church. How come I can’t be different percentages of different religions?
This same thing happens with politics. What if you were just given, like ten votes, and you got to distribute those among the candidates? So if you thought Barack Obama’s health care plan was great, but you wanted a woman president, and you’re pro-life, you could put in four votes for Obama, and three for Hilary and three for a Republican candidate (or something like that). This might force people to actually think about the differences between the candidates instead of just voting for someone who agrees with “most” of what they believe. In fact, I think I remember David P telling me about some kind of election reform that was similar to this. David, care to comment?
I hope I don’t seem as though I’m noncommittal. I believe that ideological commitments have many places and purposes. I just think that if people weren’t given the option of pigeonholing their beliefs in one place, they might be forced to think about and articulate those beliefs more clearly.
This same thing happens with politics. What if you were just given, like ten votes, and you got to distribute those among the candidates? So if you thought Barack Obama’s health care plan was great, but you wanted a woman president, and you’re pro-life, you could put in four votes for Obama, and three for Hilary and three for a Republican candidate (or something like that). This might force people to actually think about the differences between the candidates instead of just voting for someone who agrees with “most” of what they believe. In fact, I think I remember David P telling me about some kind of election reform that was similar to this. David, care to comment?
I hope I don’t seem as though I’m noncommittal. I believe that ideological commitments have many places and purposes. I just think that if people weren’t given the option of pigeonholing their beliefs in one place, they might be forced to think about and articulate those beliefs more clearly.
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