Against the Stream

Herod's Ghost

I'm taking it easy on the blogging front these days. However, if you're interested, here's a link to an editorial I did for the Daily Southtown. For the record, I didn't pick the title. My original was "Herod's Ghost," which I still think was better.

What Orson Scott Card Hath Wrought

Matt Yglesias makes a good point about the current crop of reactionary science fiction stories:

As a result, you get an odd mishmash in the New Right Dystopianism. Liberal weakness is supposed to lead to jihad run amok. But they want to make liberals rather than jihadis the real bad guys for emotional reasons so the liberals need to be tough and repressive. But if the liberals are so tough, why are the jihadis run amok? It's well known, after all, that jihadis don't like liberals (feminists, gays, etc.) very much. If the jihadis are strong, they kill the liberals, not leave them around to repress conservatives. And if the liberals are strong enough to repress conservatives, they should fight the jihadis. The upshot is dystopias that are not only "implausible" but that don't really make sense. If your complaint about liberals is that they're too hesitant to curb individual liberties in order to attack the enemies of the state, you can't very well spin a dystopia about repressive "Coulter Laws" and so forth.

Heavy-handed EPA regulations, or onerous FICA taxes (12 percent of GDP on entitlements!) sure, but that's a different kind of ball game. At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win. Which leads to Dave's point -- these books aren't dystopian at all, they're wish fulfillment about a world in which the right gets a legitimate rationale for battling liberalism through brute force.

Orson Scott Card has apparently gone off the deep end pressing this agenda. Ender's Game is a masterpiece, but he's been flogging a right wing agenda for years. His latest offering, Empire, is apparently an exercise in reactionary revenge fantasy.

But it's not just Card. For my money, Frank Herbert was always kind of reactionary, and Robert Heinlein wrote an homage to facism in Starship Troopers (though one friend insists that it's meant to be satire). In fact, much good science fiction and fantasy is reactionary, or at least conservative in tone, in theme, and sometimes in overt argument. J.R.R. Tolkien was a serious reactionary, longing for the bucolic rural England that existed (for him at least) before industrialization and automobiles. C. S. Lewis's view of women was retrograde, at best. And don't let's get started on Michael Crichton!

On the left, you don't get much. George R.R. Martin seems to lean left, based on some posts on his blog. Michael Morcock is an anarchist, as  arguably so was Fritz Leiber. Of course, the world of Star Trek is a liberal utopia, but Star Wars, on the other hand, is not.

Perhaps it is the cynicism of our age. We either look romantically to the past or with skepticism on plans for a better future. Perhaps it is a somewhat pessimistic view of human capabilities -- republics fall, empires rise, noble ideals fall apart in the face of harsh reality.

Another way of looking at it is that these writers usually write good to great science fiction and fantasy, and if they don't let their agenda govern their narrative too much (I'm looking at YOU Orson!), it can be great fun to read even when you don't subscribe to the political agenda being pushed, whether from the left or the right.

Announcements

I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I will not be campaigning for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. I would however like to thank Time magazine for naming me its 2006 Person of the Year. My regards to all of those who were nominated and did not win. (What that? Everyone won!?! Well, good on ya, then!).

Left Behind Game

The horrifying implications of the Left Behind ideology continue to mount:

"It's an incredibly violent video game," said Stevens. "Sure, there is no blood. (The dead just fade off the screen.) But you are mowing down your enemy with a gun. It pushes a message of religious intolerance. You can either play for the 'good side' by trying to convert nonbelievers to your side or join the Antichrist."

The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville, Fla., Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, added: "So, under the Christmas tree this year for little Johnny is this allegedly Christian video game teaching Johnny to hate and kill?" 

Both groups formed in 2005 to protest what their 130,000 or so members feel is the growing political influence and hypocrisy of the religious right.

In Left Behind, set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive." 

Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story.

When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ"  --  and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game. 

"That is so obvious," he said. 

Irony is dead.

Obama at Saddleback

Some exerpts from his speach a few weeks ago at Rick Warran's Saddleback Church:

On this World AIDS day, these are the stories that the world needs to hear. They are the stories that touch our souls - and that call us to action.

I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like if Leo's family was my own. If I had to answer those phone calls - if I had to attend those funerals. All I know is that no matter how or why my family became sick, I would be called to care for them and comfort them and do what I could to help find a cure. I know every one of you would do the same if it were your family.

Here's the thing - my faith tells me that Leo's family is my family.

We are all sick because of AIDS - and we are all tested by this crisis. It is a test not only of our willingness to respond, but of our ability to look past the artificial divisions and debates that have often shaped that response. When you go to places like Africa and you see this problem up close, you realize that it's not a question of either treatment or prevention - or even what kind of prevention - it is all of the above. It is not an issue of either science or values - it is both. Yes, there must be more money spent on this disease. But there must also be a change in hearts and minds; in cultures and attitudes. Neither philanthropist nor scientist; neither government nor church, can solve this problem on their own - AIDS must be an all-hands-on-deck effort.

<SNIP>

We should never forget that God granted us the power to reason so that we would do His work here on Earth - so that we would use science to cure disease, and heal the sick, and save lives. And one of the miracles to come out of the AIDS pandemic is that scientists have discovered medicine that can give people with HIV a new chance at life.

We are called to give them that chance. We have made progress - in South Africa, treatment provided to pregnant women has drastically reduced the incidents of infants born with the infection. But despite such progress, only one in every five people with HIV around the world is receiving antiretroviral drug treatment. One in every five. We must do better. We should work with drug companies to reduce the costs of generic anti-retroviral drugs, and work with developing nations to help them build the health infrastructure that's necessary to get sick people treated - this means more money for hospitals and medical equipment, and more training for nurses and doctors.

<SNIP>

Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes - to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say "This is your fault. You have sinned."

I don't think that's a satisfactory response. My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.

My faith also tells me that - as Pastor Rick has said - it is not a sin to be sick. My Bible tells me that when God sent his only Son to Earth, it was to heal the sick and comfort the weary; to feed the hungry and clothe the naked; to befriend the outcast and redeem those who strayed from righteousness.

Living His example is the hardest kind of faith - but it is surely the most rewarding. It is a way of life that can not only light our way as people of faith, but guide us to a new and better politics as Americans.

For in the end, we must realize that the AIDS orphan in Africa presents us with the same challenge as the gang member in South Central, or the Katrina victim in New Orleans, or the uninsured mother in North Dakota.

We can turn away from these Americans, and blame their problems on themselves, and embrace a politics that's punitive and petty, divisive and small.

Or we can embrace another tradition of politics - a tradition that has stretched from the days of our founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another - and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done for the people with whom we share this Earth.

It's nice to have a Senator I can feel proud of.

Christian or Christ-Follower?

At bottom, I think the distinction is specious, but these commercials are funny!

More below the fold.

Slacktivist

It's time to endorse another fantastic site that deals with questions of religion. This time, the site to see is Slacktivist. Slacktivist writes from a moderate evangelical perspective on issues related to Christianity and society, and he always has something enormously interesting to say.

In addition, as I've featured here before, he is also engaged in the longest and most exhaustive book review of all time: His page-by-page analysis of Left Behind. Now that he's back doing it on a regular basis, I thought I'd bring a few excerpts from his most recent post over here:

One of the stranger things about LB is the way the authors seem to think that their novel, their work of fiction, serves as "proof" of their claims. They seem to think it not only illustrates, but demonstrates, that faith conquers reason and that Scofield's notes are canonical rather than heretical. They've created a fictional reality in which their weird theories are true. In this fictional world, all who disagree appear as fools. Taking potshots at one's opponents through fiction is nothing new -- the political disputes of Dante's Florence are immortalized in the Divine Comedy. But Dante didn't seem to think that he had settled the argument by condemning his opponents to a fictional Inferno.

And this:

A strange side-effect of spending so much time with Left Behind has been an increased appreciation for earlier, less-awful works of apocalyptic fiction. Before reading LB, I regarded Thief and its sequels as inconsequential, inept pieces of dreck. But by getting everything wrong, LB illustrates that Thief wasn't actually as bad as it could have been. By resetting the bar so much lower, LB enhances the reputations of its predecessors. It's kind of like the way we're having to reconsider the presidency of George H.W. Bush.

Which Revolutionary Are You?

Ok, this one is fun, too!

Which Famous Revolutionary Are You? Martin Luther "Here I stand; I can do no otherwise. God help me. Amen!"

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.