Alan Jacobs

[gallery] Someone said to me the other day that MAD MAX is “his Star Wars.” His modern myth. A myth of the time of steel and petrol, that’s about collapsing back into dark history. Viewed as a continuum, the film cycle almost plays as a warning sent ahead to us from 1980. A time capsule that’s still telling itself stories from inside its box. FURY ROAD doesn’t feel like a modern film. It’s a throwback to classical filmmaking. A scream from the nightmares of the last century.

— Warren Ellis

“Blackwell explained that the bass drum, sock cymbal, and the snare are on the one and three. He told me to ignore the bass guitar because it was more of a lead instrument. It’s great music, but it’s kinda weird in that everything feels like it’s being played backwards. ‘Concrete Jungle’ was the very first thing that I was handed. That was the most out-of-character bass part I’d ever heard. But because the keyboards and the guitars stay locked together doing what they’re doing all through the song, that was sorta my saving grace. I thought I could follow the song, but I still didn’t know what I was going to do on guitar. So I started doodling on the front of it, and I told the sound engineer to start over about halfway through it. Then I started picking up a little something here and there. I nailed that guitar solo down on the second or third take, I think. It was a gift from God, because I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And then Marley came into the recording room. He was cartwheeling, man, he couldn’t get over what had just happened to his song, he was so excited. I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying. And he was cramming this huge joint down my throat and wouldn’t take ’no’ for an answer. He got me real, real high.”

- Wayne Perkins, massively gifted guitarist and my fellow Birminghamian, on how he ended up playing for Bob Marley and the Wailers. (I met Perkins once when I was about seventeen and sneaking illegally into a club called the Lowenbrau Haus.)

via tumblr ift.tt/1FjDIid

Blackwell explained that the bass drum, sock cymbal, and the snare are on the one and three. He told me to ignore the bass guitar because it was more of a lead instrument. It’s great music, but it’s kinda weird in that everything feels like it’s being played backwards. ‘Concrete Jungle’ was the very first thing that I was handed. That was the most out-of-character bass part I’d ever heard. But because the keyboards and the guitars stay locked together doing what they’re doing all through the song, that was sorta my saving grace. I thought I could follow the song, but I still didn’t know what I was going to do on guitar. So I started doodling on the front of it, and I told the sound engineer to start over about halfway through it. Then I started picking up a little something here and there. I nailed that guitar solo down on the second or third take, I think. It was a gift from God, because I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And then Marley came into the recording room. He was cartwheeling, man, he couldn’t get over what had just happened to his song, he was so excited. I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying. And he was cramming this huge joint down my throat and wouldn’t take 'no’ for an answer. He got me real, real high.

The inability of evangelicals to agree on how slavery should be construed according to Scripture, which all treated as their ultimate religious norm, was in fact connected to the economic individualism of American society.  The recourse to arms for civil war did reflect, at the very least, a glaring weakness in republican and democratic polity.  From the outside [i.e. in Europe] it was clear that American material interests exerted a strong influence on American theological conclusions. …

Foreign commentary makes clear how tightly American religious convictions were bound to general patterns of American life.  Only because religious belief and practice had grown so strong before the [Civil War and Slavery] conflict, only because they had done so much to create the nation that went to war, did that conflict result in such a great challenge to religious belief and practice after the war.  The theological crisis of the Civil War was that while voluntary reliance on the Bible had contributed greatly to the creation of American national culture, that same voluntary reliance on Scripture led only to deadlock over what should be done about slavery. …

The issue for American history was that only two courses of action seemed open when confronting such a deadlock.  The first was the course taken in the Civil war, which effectively handed the business of the theologians over to the generals to decide by ordeal what the Bible meant. … The second [course of action], though never self-consciously adopted by all Americans in all circumstances, has been followed since the Civil War.  That course is an implicit national agreement not to base public policy of any consequence on interpretations of scripture.   The result of following that second course since the Civil War has been ambiguous.  In helping to provoke the war and greatly increase its intensity, the serious commitment to Scripture rendered itself ineffective for shaping broad policy in the public arena.  In other words, even before there existed a secularization in the United States brought on by new immigrants, scientific acceptance of evolution, the higher criticism of scripture, and urban industrialization, Protestants during the Civil War had marginalized themselves as bearers of religious perspective in the body politic.

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One time I met a guy who had invented a heart valve that saved half a million people. He and I got to talking, and he had a habit of pausing to think before he answered a question, a cool habit, and I got into the habit of thinking about the people his heart valve had saved while he thought about his next answer. Moms and dads and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and grandparents and godparents and cousins and neighbors and fellow parishioners and old teammates and sorority sisters and work colleagues and every relation of ours in this lonely world. He had a seamed cheerful face with eyebrows that leapt in every direction like they had once been electrified and never fully recovered from the shock. Most every dad who had his life extended by that heart valve had a kid or kids who were probably thrilled beyond articulation that their dad didn’t die. How can you measure how happy you are that your dad didn’t die? My dad is cheerfully and wittily alive, and I try every day to articulate how glorious it is to have my dad, and I fail like hell. It’s really hard to measure love.  

The inventor then answers one question so gently and thoughtfully and honestly and nakedly that I jot down every word and read it back to him twice to make sure I have every word in the right order and to his credit he doesn’t edit or massage or manipulate or soften his remark but just nods and grins. I ask him another question, and he looks out the window for a while, and this time I think about all the little kids who didn’t die because of his valve. I bet that of a half a million people, thousands were little kids, right? And some of those thousands were four-year-olds, right? And is there anything cooler and funnier and holier in this world than a four-year-old? So if you save the lives of lots of four-year-olds, doesn’t that make you a totally great heroic person? I ask him this question, and he says no, he is not great and not heroic, he is just a guy who likes to fiddle with inventions and machines and tools and things, he is a tinkering kind of guy, he actually says this, a tinkering kind of guy, and I write it down…. You would think being the guy who saved half a million kids of every age would make you arrogant about how cool you were, but I tell you, shivering again now as I write this, that I never saw a hint or shred or splinter of arrogance in the late Donald Shiley. When I have dark days about arrogance and bluster and lies and pomposity, I think of him, and cheer right back up again.

One time I met a guy who had invented a heart valve that saved half a million people. He and I got to talking, and he had a habit of pausing to think before he answered a question, a cool habit, and I got into the habit of thinking about the people his heart valve had saved while he thought about his next answer. Moms and dads and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and grandparents and godparents and cousins and neighbors and fellow parishioners and old teammates and sorority sisters and work colleagues and every relation of ours in this lonely world. He had a seamed cheerful face with eyebrows that leapt in every direction like they had once been electrified and never fully recovered from the shock. Most every dad who had his life extended by that heart valve had a kid or kids who were probably thrilled beyond articulation that their dad didn’t die. How can you measure how happy you are that your dad didn’t die? My dad is cheerfully and wittily alive, and I try every day to articulate how glorious it is to have my dad, and I fail like hell. It’s really hard to measure love.  

The inventor then answers one question so gently and thoughtfully and honestly and nakedly that I jot down every word and read it back to him twice to make sure I have every word in the right order and to his credit he doesn’t edit or massage or manipulate or soften his remark but just nods and grins. I ask him another question, and he looks out the window for a while, and this time I think about all the little kids who didn’t die because of his valve. I bet that of a half a million people, thousands were little kids, right? And some of those thousands were four-year-olds, right? And is there anything cooler and funnier and holier in this world than a four-year-old? So if you save the lives of lots of four-year-olds, doesn’t that make you a totally great heroic person? I ask him this question, and he says no, he is not great and not heroic, he is just a guy who likes to fiddle with inventions and machines and tools and things, he is a tinkering kind of guy, he actually says this, a tinkering kind of guy, and I write it down…. You would think being the guy who saved half a million kids of every age would make you arrogant about how cool you were, but I tell you, shivering again now as I write this, that I never saw a hint or shred or splinter of arrogance in the late Donald Shiley. When I have dark days about arrogance and bluster and lies and pomposity, I think of him, and cheer right back up again.

from Wake in Progress

[gallery] from Wake in Progress

It seems obvious that Obama, Putnam, and the liberal elites they speak for want to believe that American Christians are narrow-minded and obsessed to the point of being uncaring. This is an utterly delusional way of discounting the tremendous, literally and figuratively livesaving work of American Christians. But to think about them any other way would be to actually wrestle with the fact that, while we’re all imperfect, any political disagreements Christians have be over hot button cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage might actually be motivated by genuine concern and compassion. Those are, not coincidentally, the same reasons that have made fighting poverty one the church’s most vital and important missions for millennia.

Mark Hemingway, speaking truth to power. I don’t think that Robert Putnam and President Obama are simply lying when they say the demonstrably false things they say about American Christians. It may be, depending on how you run your moral calculus, worse than that: they are speaking out of an absolute indifference to truth, because questions of truth and falsehood, being empirical, consistently trouble the purity of one’s chosen political narrative. This is political tribalism trumping facts — or rather, erasing facts, rendering them nugatory.

I can’t avoid the conclusion that traditionally-minded Christians are now simply The Enemy for the American left and center-left. As I’ve commented before, I haven’t voted for a major-party politician in about a quarter of a century, but on days like this I fear that the Democrats will make a Republican of me yet.

Finally, if you think that what Christians truly madly deeply care about can be discerned by how they spend their money, run the numbers. Robert Putnam and President Obama sure as hell won’t.

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The decision by corporate leaders to take a political stand over a controversial issue is therefore of great interest. Corporations and business leaders almost always avoid political statements and announcements, recognizing that such declarations have the effect of unnecessarily alienating potential customers. Corporations live in constant fear of bad pub­licity that can ruin a brand carefully erected through millions of dollars of advertising and publicity. Why step into a heated political debate and ­unnecessarily turn half of your customers away? Corporations exist to make money, not to advance political and social causes—except for those that help them make money, of course.  

And that’s just the point: The decision by Apple, Walmart, Eli Lilly, Angie’s List, and so on was a business decision—even more, a marketing decision. Coming out in opposition to the Indiana RFRA law was one of the shrewdest marketing coups since E.T. followed a trail of Reese’s Pieces. The decision to #BoycottIndiana was not made because it was the politically courageous thing to do; it was made because it was the profitable thing to do. The establishment could express support for a fashionable social norm while exerting very little effort, incurring no actual cost, and making no sacrifice to secure the goal. It had the further advantage of distracting most people from the fact that corporations like Apple have no compunction doing business in places with outright oppression of gays, women, and Christians. Those real forms of repression and discrimination didn’t matter; Indiana’s purported oppression of gays did.