Weekend Reads (Sep 24): “M*A*S*H,” Wokeness, MoMA, Evangelical Heretics, Floppy Disks
Recommended reading material for the weekend of September 24, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Earlier this month, M*A*S*H — the Korean War-based drama about an unorthodox Army hospital — celebrated its 50th anniversary. Back in 2015, I wrote about the beloved series’ depiction of faith, most notably in the character of Father John Patrick Francis Mulcahy.
When we first meet the good Father, he’s a rather milquetoast individual. Flustered and frustrated by the near-constant debauchery around him, he hardly seems like an effective priest for an outfit so lost. With his nasally voice and meek personality, Mulcahy is far from charismatic, and his services don’t draw many attendees — much to his superiors’ chagrin. However, Mulcahy displays an admirable faith that can only result from living out one’s convictions as best they can amidst many who hold little to no similar conviction.
There’s a lot to chew on in Adam Serwer’s recent piece critiquing the anti-woke backlash against series like The Rings of Power, but I found his final paragraphs particularly interesting.
Prominent genre brands like Star Wars, or Marvel, or Lord of the Rings also have the difficult task of creating content for children while still satisfying their middle-aged stalwarts, whose nostalgia is ultimately insatiable because they cannot look upon novel material with the same emotional intensity they felt as children. Many older fans are convinced they can’t recapture that intensity only because the producers themselves have failed to create stories of the same fundamental quality, when in reality they have simply outgrown the sentiment they are chasing. These campaigns seek to convince this audience that the feeling they are pursuing can be recaptured, if only those making popular art would reject modern progressive dogma — thus creating a well of cultural resentment they can manipulate for political purposes.
That is the deception of this campaign, which is not about protecting the integrity of art at all, but ensuring it serves a particular political purpose. In other words, these critics seek to turn art into propaganda for one cause rather than another. Maybe it’ll actually work. But even if it does, it will not make Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or any of the other stuff you liked as a kid Great Again, at least not in the way you want. People hoping otherwise will just have to grow up.
In other words, nostalgia’s a helluva drug, and it can lead to perfectly reasonable people saying some awful things about other people who don’t look like them — all because the latter have been cast in a movie or TV series.
Related: Earlier this month, I wrote an in-depth (that is, super-nerdy) analysis of the criticisms lobbed at The Rings of Power and other “woke” titles.
Also related: Numerous social media posts of Black kids responding joyfully to Disney’s The Little Mermaid — which stars a Black woman as the titular character — have gone viral. But of course, not everyone’s so happy about that.
Writing for Mere Orthodoxy, Paul Frank Spencer reviews one of my favorite movies of the year, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and its competing liberal and conservative tendencies.
In a sense, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a Rorshach test, shifting and expressing different aspects of itself according to the viewers’ prejudices. Conservatives can rightly applaud the call for personal limits and the practicalities of embodied, communal life. Liberals will likely find reassurance in the acceptance of persons regardless of lifestyle, something akin to “love is love.”
Both of these messages are presented in a positive light, with love and wisdom empowering the characters to more fully integrate their lives into a real and whole community. Practically every viewer will feel a sense of positive catharsis at the end of this movie, helped in large part due to how entertaining it is.
Related: My review of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Also related: Walter Chaw’s deeply personal review of Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Lindsey Romain reflects on Donnie Darko and the ways in which it helped her make sense of the world.
My self-aligning with Donnie Darko, the character, was nothing special. I would learn, once I left the confines of my own Midwestern wormhole, that it struck a great many of my peers: similarly anxious millennials who sensed the world ripping away from them and had no choice but to laugh. Donnie is the perfect vessel for our generational malaise — we whose youths were either circumvented by or blanketed wholly in terrorism and gun idolation and climate crisis. The inevitability of suffering is no longer ignorable, but a daily confrontation, our phones portals to horror and hilarity, demarcated only by finger swipes and clothing ads. Donnie, like us, goes through the motions of life while a great, ominous clock ticks in the background.
Related: My review of Donnie Darko from 2002.
Also related: Donnie Darko’s director, Richard Kelly, hasn’t made a movie since 2009’s The Box. But in 2021, he talked with Jack Giroux about his career and future plans.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is planning to sell $70 million worth of artwork — including works by Picasso, Renoir and Rodin — in order to expand the MoMA’s digital endeavors.
The move underscores the extraordinary lengths that museums and their biggest donors feel they must take to extend museums’ influence online as cultural institutions are struggling to recover from a pandemic-driven drop in attendance.
MoMA director Glenn Lowry said the museum typically gets three million visitors a year, but last fiscal year its attendance topped out at 1.65 million visitors. Mr. Lowry said he hopes foot traffic will return to prepandemic levels by 2024, but the outlook online is brighter.
Last year, he said the museum’s online content on its own website and YouTube channel as well as via its social-media followings on sites like Instagram and Weibo swept in 35 million people, up from 30 million before the pandemic.
In 2000, Adnan Syed was found guilty of murdering of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee and sentenced to life in prison. The case became the subject of the popular Serial podcast’s first season, which captivated millions of listeners. But earlier this month, Syed was released from prison.
The office of the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City said in a motion filed last week that there was new information about two potential alternative suspects. This detail makes a new trial necessary, prosecutors said.
Though prosecutors asked the judge to vacate the conviction in their recent motion, they are not saying Syed is innocent of the crime. They are saying they lack confidence in “the integrity of the conviction.”
Serial host Sarah Koenig recorded a new episode that covers this latest development in Syed’s case.
For the last few months, the ReAwaken America Tour has been traveling to megachurches around the country, arguing that Trump won the election, COVID is a sham, and other right-ring conspiracy theories. And Clay Clark is the man responsible for them.
Before last year, Clark was a provincial talk-show personality and business guru from Oklahoma; today he is a Vince McMahon frontman of a misinformation megashow. Here, the election was stolen from Trump; the pandemic is a horrific hoax; and a cabal of Luciferian cultists, including George Soros, seek world domination. There are End Times oracles, exorcists, multilevel marketers, New Agey health gurus, naturopathic bodybuilders, and QAnon crusaders all swaying together under one tent.
In Clark’s career, he has been a regional mogul and a self-help author; he oversaw a dog training company, a barbershop chain, and a photo business. He once ran for mayor. Now, he’s tapping into a mix of pandemic conspiracies, God-and-flag patriotism, Stop the Steal fervor, and spiritual supernaturalism — and reaping the benefits. He is not precisely a flame-breathing demagogue, but he is a capitalist who has found his product: culture-war spectacle.
A recent study reveals that a growing number of American evangelical Christians are, in fact, heretics. For example:
A surprising 73 percent agreed with the statement that “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.”
This is a form of Arianism, a popular heresy that arose in the early fourth century. Those believing it caused such a stir that it led to the gathering of the very first ecumenical council of church leaders. They discussed and denounced these and other unorthodox beliefs as heretical for being contrary to Scripture.
Out of the Council of Nicea came the Nicene Creed, which states in part that Jesus was “not made” but “eternally begotten” and “one in being with the Father,” as found in passages including John 3:16 and John 14:9.
On the other hand, American evangelicals are much more united and consistent concerning cultural and ethical issues, like extra-marital sex and abortion.
CNN recently interviewed one of my favorite Christian writers, Philip Yancey, concerning his racist upbringing, modern American evangelicalism, Donald Trump, and more.
There’s been a lot of debate in recent years about the rise of White Christian nationalism and White evangelicals’ steadfast support for former President Trump. But few people are better equipped than Yancey to explain how racism infiltrates White churches and how one can escape it.
Yancey went from being a self-described “born and bred racist” to becoming one of the most popular authors and speakers in contemporary America. His books have sold an estimated 17 million copies and been translated into 50 languages. Several, such as What's So Amazing About Grace? and Where Is God When It Hurts? have become contemporary Christian classics.
The anecdote about the White supremacist rally marks one of Yancey’s most candid admissions of his youthful embrace of racism. It comes from his recently released memoir, Where the Light Fell. In the book, Yancey recounts how racism corrupted his faith and eventually led to him feeling betrayed by the church. He rejected the racism of his youth, though, after encountering a series of remarkable people during his years as a journalist and an author.
Finally, Tom Persky occupies a truly unique niche in this day and age of cloud storage: he buys, sells, and recycles floppy disks.
20 years ago I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It’s shocking to me.
Via Daring Fireball.
I’m pretty sure I still have some 3.5” floppies somewhere in my office that contain some of Opus’ earliest designs and incarnations. They’re probably in the same box with all of my old Zip disks.
Related: Corridor Crew’s Wren Weichman uses visual effects to explore the scale of data storage across kilobytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and beyond.
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