What this blog is.

What this blog used to be was a place for me to write about television and literature and music and movies. Slowly, however, it turned into a place for me to write about politics and religion and navel-gazing, with a little bit of that other stuff thrown in. And that's not a real good mix. Because people who want to read about television often don't want to read about the state of Christianity in contemporary American culture.

With that in mind, I've decided to separate the two main sections of this blog into two different blogs. All of my pop culture writing can now be found over at the brand new blog, Obliquely Referential. So It Literally Burns the Air is now basically a personal blog full of stuff nobody wants to read. But I'll continue writing it for two reasons. First, if I don't have an outlet for occasional political rants, they will start to seep into my other writing, which is just what they did here. And second, the things I have to say are VERY IMPORTANT, so I need as much web space as possible.

GOP: They have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize.

At this point, I can only conclude that the Republican party just doesn't want to be taken seriously. Like, ever again:

WHEREAS, the American Heritage Dictionary defines socialism as a system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy; and

WHEREAS, the Democratic Party has outlined their plans to nationalize the banking, financial and healthcare industries; and

WHEREAS, the Democratic Party has proposed massive government bailouts for the mortgage and auto industries; and

WHEREAS, the Democratic Party has passed trillions of dollars in new government spending, all with strings attached in order to control nearly every aspect of American life; and

WHEREAS, the Democratic Party and its leadership have dedicated themselves to a new taxing objective of direct income redistribution which takes additional taxes from one group of people and gives it in direct cash transfers to another group of people who pay no federal income taxes at all; and

WHEREAS, the American people are crying out for truth, honesty and integrity in politics; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee recognize the Democratic Party’s clear and obvious purpose in proposing, passing, and implementing socialist programs through federal legislation; and be it further

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee recognize that the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals; and be it further

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.

It's nice to know that the GOP is concerning itself with such worthy endeavors and not, you know, trying to help the country or whatever.

Rhetorical Tricks

When Republicans are talking about cutting spending for the sake of the budget (state, federal, whatever) and they say, "We're just going to have to sacrifice," it's useful to remember that what they're actually saying is, "Poor people are just going to have to sacrifice."

True Statements: Somalian Pirate Edition

True Statement: Somalian pirates are desperate individuals just looking for a way to feed themselves.

True Statement: Being a pirate is wrong, and if you're holding hostages and get shot in the head, you pretty much brought it on yourself.

True Statement: The only way to effectively end piracy to is fix Somalia.

True Statement: The last time we meddled in Somalia, we made it worse.

True Statement: The only people capable of fixing Somalia are Somalians.

True Statement: Somalians should stop being pirates and start organizing themselves.

True Statement: That last statement is so much easier to write than to do that it's utterly absurd.

Torture, purely.

This is pure genius:

The lyrics are directly out of the torture memos. They are pure legal reasoning.

Meanwhile, this is pure evil:


And this is me agreeing with Shepard Smith:


To be clear, these are war crimes. I've read a lot of scholarly and intelligent debate about what exactly torture is and whether it works and all that, but it just doesn't really matter. These are war crimes. And Bush administration officials (and indeed Bush himself) deserve prosecution. Because they committed war crimes.

That's not going to happen, of course, and maybe it shouldn't. Because it could be very damaging, politically speaking, for the Obama administration. Because there's still a substantial portion of the country that for whatever reason refuses to acknowledge the simple, purely ethical truth that our country committed war crimes. Which is just horrifying to me.

The state of Christianity in contemporary American culture, broadly drawn.

In America today, young people like myself who've grown up in a vaguely Protestant tradition tend to view religion as a choice between the two most vocal, culturally represented religious groupings, the fundamentalism of the Religious Right and the equally fatuous New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. This is a good thing for the New Atheists, since all they have to do is sound more reasonable than the likes of Pat Robertson, which is a very easy thing to do as long as you are not an actively insane person claiming to be a leprechaun. It's not such a good thing for the Religious Right, but it's an even worse thing for liberal Christianity, as many of the young people joining the ranks of the New Atheists are people who in other times would consider themselves liberal Protestants.

Those young people who do manage to see through the theological reductivism of fundamentalism and New Atheism too often turn to what has unfortunately become the cultural face of liberal Christianity, the theologically vacant Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, in which God is little more than an undemanding nebulous blob who wants us all to be happy. While I'm inclined to think that theological vacancy is marginally preferable to theological reductivism in some ways, it's certainly not ideal, nor is it bound to be particularly sustainable; as long as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is prominent, liberal Christianity will continue to bleed numbers to atheism and agnosticism.

As it happens, fundamentalists tend not to actually like to be called fundamentalists. There are good reasons for this. It was, for the most part, a label picked for them, not by them, and it has taken on a negative connotation. The problem is that the terms they do choose to label themselves by tend to be hopelessly vague. They might call themselves bible-believing Christian Evangelicals, for example. But I consider myself a bible-believing Christian, despite the fact that I'm hip to Darwin. And while I don't really consider myself an Evangelical, there are lots of liberal Christians who do.

It's likely, however, that their self-given labels are hopelessly vague on purpose. By using such inclusive terms to describe the acceptance of a specific set of, ahem, fundamental beliefs (biblical inerrancy, Christ's divinity, bodily resurrection, etc.) and political orientations, fundamentalists take those terms as their own and redefine them in the culture at large to be noninclusive. For many young, liberally inclined people, all Christians are presumed fundamentalists until proven otherwise.

This is what precipitated the rise of New Atheism, which is, more than anything else, a reaction against the perceived (if overstated) anti-rationalist attitudes found in religious fundamentalism of all stripes. New Atheism is problematic on many levels, but it's biggest problems are the ways in which it conflates fundamentalism with extremism and blames virtually all of the world's problems on religious belief. Less egregious, though more basic and delightfully ironic, problems are the movement's roots in Protestant evangelical imperialism and it's very literal, fundamentalist-like interpretation of holy books.

Indeed, New Atheists deal with moderate and liberal Christians in the same way fundamentalists do: by arguing that moderates warp religious texts to say whatever they want them to say instead of taking them at face value, and as such fail to take scripture seriously. It's a silly argument because it assumes that a text can be read without applying an interpretation, but it's just indicative of how theologically reductive New Atheism is. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his epic takedown of Richard Dawkins's “The God Delusion,” “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” And this is the point: as justifiably perturbed as Dawkins and his ilk are about fundamentalists attempting to refute evolution with feeble gotchas, the New Atheists are using precisely the same type of feeble gotchas in their attacks on religion.

Unfortunately, for the liberal-minded young person, there is no strong liberal Christian voice in the popular culture today. Jim Wallis has tried to fill that void, but considering that most people don't actually know who Jim Wallis is, I think it's fair to say that he hasn't exactly managed to do that. And so what has arisen from the abyss as the dominant form of culturally recognized liberal Christianity is the spectacularly rudderless Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. As described by University of North Carolina sociologist Christian Smith, MTD has five principles (insomuch they can even be called that; we're not talking about any sort of stated dogma here):

1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."
2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."
3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself"
4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."
5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

It's the second, third and fourth principles that are especially problematic, though the fifth is also frustratingly vague. What, after all, constitutes a good person? The answer I suppose is that good people are those who are “nice and fair to each other.” But, of course, what is it to be nice and fair? The third and fourth principles, meanwhile, betray a galling egocentricity. You don't believe in God because you really believe in God, or help others for the sake of helping others; you do these things so you can feel better about yourself. And so it's not really religion at all. It's just self-help.

Of course, this just sounds like some fundamentalist's caricature of liberal Christianity. And to a certain extent, it may as well be. To examine popular culture is to paint in broad strokes. But there is truth in the generalizations. And while the culture's broad characterization of fundamentalism (“just believe”) hardly presents the most demanding faith on the face of the earth, MTD (not even “just be nice to each other,” but instead “just feel good about yourself”) is even less so. It's more directly parallel, in fact, to fundamentalism’s ugly step-cousin, the prosperity gospel, which holds as its basic principle that God exists to enrich your coffers.

This version of liberal Christianity is too vague, too wishy-washy to be satisfying enough to sustain itself. Whatever New Atheism's faults, it takes stands and demands something of its adherents, just as fundamentalism does. And so what liberal Christianity needs is a new face in the popular culture, and a new voice to lead the way to a more demanding option. I have some ideas, but I've already gone on a long time. So they'll have to wait for a future post. But if you want a pretty good hint of what I'll talk about, I suggest reading that Terry Eagleton review.

This post is a slightly adapted version of a column that originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News.

Suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong: Doubt and Ritual in Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity begins with the silhouette of a crutched man hobbling slowly toward the screen as the credits roll in front of him. Following the opening credits, the audience is treated to a scene of a car driving erratically. Cut to a bloody Walter Neff (that’s “two f’s–like in Philadelphia”) entering the office building, deserted but for the janitor. He goes into an office, an office we later discover to be his boss’s, and sets up the Dictaphone. And then, of course, he confesses to a murder. So Double Indemnity isn’t a whodunnit?, it’s a what’dhedo? Or actually, a who’dhedoitto?

What the audience gets next is a flashback that lasts for pretty much the whole movie. Walter narrates the flashback, which is distinctly told from his perspective, so the audience sees what Walter has seen, and the audience knows that Walter knew at the time, plus that at some point he killed a person and got shot in the shoulder. And that all this has something to do with crutches.

The flashback begins with Walter knocking on the Deitrichsons’ door, looking to renew Mr. Deitrichson’s auto insurance. Mr. Deitrichson is, conveniently, not home. Mrs. Deitrichson is, however, and she’s wearing nothing but a towel. She excuses herself to change and Walter mills around downstairs contemplating how best to get her out of the towel without her excusing herself next time. Phyllis reemerges in a dress. Walter takes an immediate liking to her anklet. Phyllis isn’t much interested in the auto insurance. Neither, quite frankly, is Walter. Phyllis is interested in accident insurance. Walter’s not much interested in that either. Walter makes his interest in Phyllis known. Phyllis makes an appointment for a time during which her husband will be around and sends Mr. Neff on his way. Curiously, she changes that appointment and Walter and her wind up alone together. During this second meeting, Phyllis makes her interest in accident insurance more clear. Walter begins to suspect Phyllis has some not-so-nice plans for her husband and says as much. “I think you’re lousy,” says Phyllis. “I think you’re swell,” says Walter, “so long as I’m not your husband.” And this time Walter washes his hands of Phyllis.

Of course, they can’t keep away from each other for long, and shortly they consummate their affair and cook up a plot to rid themselves of Mr. Deitrichson. Step one in said plot is tricking him into signing for accident insurance, complete with a double indemnity clause. Step two is getting him to take a train. Step three is to kill him before he gets on the train. Walter boards the train as Mr. Deitrichson in the perfect disguise: a cast, crutches, and a low-brimmed hat. Mr. Deitrichson had broken his leg at work just a couple weeks before the train trip. Oddly, he hadn’t made a claim on his accident insurance. Anyway, Walter and Phyllis pull it off, leaving Mr. Deitrichson’s corpse on the tracks in the train’s wake. Everything should be smooth sailing from here, right? Well, except for that thing Walter said at the beginning: “I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money...and I didn’t get the woman.”

While Double Indemnity has no private eye character, Walter’s boss, Barton Keyes, takes on a similar role. Keyes is a specialist in sniffing out false claims, so when the bizarre case of Mr. Deitrichson lands on his desk, he knows something is not quite right. Keyes spends the second half of the movie putting the pieces together. He never does quite get there. Perhaps for the very reason Walter tells him: he was just too close to the guy he was looking for.

The construction of the film is one of its most interesting points. The voice-over, at it's used in Double Indemnity, has become very nearly synonymous with the hard-boiled noir. Virtually every parody of the genre has included a voice-over of some sort. Billy Wilder also employs the extended flashback, which lasts for basically the entire movie. This acts, impressively enough, as both a comfort and a disorientation to the audience. It's comforting because the audience is relieved to know who did it, that he's confessing and that he's not going to get away with it. It's disorienting for the obvious reason that the plot is bouncing around in time. This tension, between being comforted and being discomfitted runs throughout the film. The film manages to be clean and messy at the same time.

The affected dialogue is a part of this tension. These characters speak as only characters in a film noir would speak. “How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” queries Walter rhetorically at one point. Nobody actually speaks like this in the real world. That might be comforting, because if the characters don't speak like real people, maybe do things real people wouldn't do either. Except the exaggerated dialogue doesn’t take us out of the movie at all; it actually pulls us in deeper. The speech has a certain poetry to it, not entirely dissimilar to the way Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter or the way David Milch mixes Victorian English with egregious profanity. The dialogue, along with the flashback and voice-over, permits the film to take on almost a sense of ritual, a sense of being even more real than real, more true than material truth.

Double Indemnity is told entirely from Walter Neff’s perspective. That doesn’t mean, however, that other characters’ ideas don't get to put forth their own ideas. Most notably, Keyes gives a number of possible scenarios for what might have happened. And even though the audience is aware of what actually happened, the theories build suspense because we notice, as does Walter, that Keyes is getting closer and closer to the correct chain of events. Edward S. Norton Jr., the president of the insurance company, also throws out a red herring with the suggestion that Mr. Deitrichson committed suicide. Lola, Mr. Deitrichson’s daughter, posits yet another possibility. The audience is left to wonder just what it is all these characters are up to. What are their motivations? Who is good and who is bad?

This applies to no single character more than it does to Phyllis. She is the prototypical femme fatale. Where she goes, trouble follows. Lola exists to provide a contrast, and also a dark glimpse into Phyllis’s past. So how did she come to marry Mr. Deitrichson in the first place? According to Lola, she nursed the former Mrs. Deitrichson to death.

The visual style of Double Indemnity is, you’ll never guess, dark. The scenes are drenched in shadows. The weather is lousy. The men are tough. The women are sensual. So on and so forth. It’s everything anyone would expect from a film noir. Everything, and I mean everything, bad that happens, happens at night, from the erratic driving at the beginning of the movie to Mr. Deitrichson’s untimely end.

It’s odd how positively detached Phyllis and Walter seem. After the movie ends, one is left wondering whether they even really liked each other in the first place. There is some initial sexual response between them, and they might engage in relations once, but they never speak to each other with either warmth or passion. The seduction seems to be more about the crime than anything else, even the money. Really, how often do they talk about the money? Note how quickly they’re willing to throw it away. Walter says he killed him for the money and the woman. But I don't think that's quite right. Walter killed him to get away with it.

Of course, in the end he doesn’t. The movie begins and ends with Neff getting caught. The reason he tapes the confession in the first place is that he knows he has no way out. He’s at the end of his rope. All he can do is turn to the only person left that really cares about him and come clean. Sure, when Keyes finds him in his office, Neff makes a token attempt to run. But that’s all it is, and Neff only makes it as far as the doorway. Keyes is the moral center of the movie, and as such represents justice. Throughout the entire movie, Neff has provided the matches. But in the last scene, collapsed on the floor with Keyes kneeling over him, it is Keyes who has to light Neff’s cigarette. The tables have turned. Justice prevails. Society is reaffirmed.

This would be more comforting if it didn't feel so tossed off. If the symbol of justice had actually caught his man instead of having the man just stumble stupidly into justice's arms. If what had motivated Neff, the feeling, the surety, that he could get away with it, weren't so clearly the sort of thing that humanity's never going to cure itself of. Because, clearly, he almost did get away with it. His only mistake was doubting himself.

Graph!

When right-wing politicians say that the economy has grown like gangbusters over the last few decades, I have no doubt that they are technically correct. It's just that for the vast majority of the population it's made hardly any difference at all. In terms of income, anyway.

Whether wealth inequality is a problem or not is a matter of opinion, of course. And I can understand, to a certain extent, that when society at large gets richer, less wealthy people will see an improvement in the quality of their lives even if their income doesn't grow all that much. However, I'm inclined to think that greater income equality, even if tempered by somewhat lower economic growth overall, would lead to greater improvement in the quality of life for the majority of the population. And saying so shouldn't be treated as a call to socialism, so much as a call to moderation.

Speaking of which, one of Obama's great accomplishments thus far has been his ability to frame fairly liberal positions as reasonable and pragmatic. This is good, because America has tilted too far right for a while now. As such, it just so happens that those fairly liberal positions are, in fact, reasonable and pragmatic.

Graph via Ezra Klein.