Here come the bridesmaids
Getting married? Wondering what to give your bridesmaids who have spent good money on a dress they will never wear again? How about a Botox party? See this story in the New York Times. Oh, the perils of affluency!
Movie catch up
I don’t keep up with movies as they are released. I haven’t seen the inside of a theater in many months so I’m relegated to waiting for the DVD. Here are two recent movies that I think are worth seeing.
The Devil Came on Horseback, a documentary about the Darfur genocide. This was very good in helping me understand the politics of a problem that sadly seems to have played it self out only in the media.
The Nannie Diaries, I admit this is not great cinema, but it remains social commentary nevertheless. Light, but touching, entertainment that questions the social climbing values that Americans hold. Plenty of gender and class issues to feed a conversation.
Once, Excellent little sleeper film where contemporary people actually behave honorably. Good music too!
Happy New Year! More to come in 2008.
It’s the stuff
Recently Time magazine featured a story about China’s up and coming me generation. These are the young people who are profiting from China’s new market economy. Reading the article they sound like any educated and affluent person in the West. They like good food, travel, fashion, and consumer culture. They also demonstrate a complete disengagement from politics. As long as they are free to consume what they like, and have the money, they don’t really care about the nature of the government they live under. Even if that government is a source of oppression for millions less well situated than themselves.
This week there was another story on the web noting a survey that measured the willingness of NYU students to sell their votes in the next presidential election. According to the survey, “Only 20 percent said they’d exchange their vote for an iPod touch. But 66 percent said they’d forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU. And half said they’d give up the right to vote forever for $1 million.” What a relief, at least they weren’t willing to exchange their votes for a Prada bag.
I don’t know if we have ever seen this before. Somewhere the stuff became more important than intangible values like freedom, justice, and compassion. It reminds me of Esau who was willing to sell his birthright for bowl of lentils. It does seem the price for a person’s soul has dropped significantly and that the common denominator among the elites is not intangible values but the stuff. The difference between one person and another is no longer politics, values, or even race. It’s the stuff, who has it or who doesn’t.
Chip off the old block
Recently my husband came home telling me about a gated community he had just visited. This middle-class refuge caters to the active mature adult, people over 50 who were now ready to enjoy themselves after a lifetime of toil at the office. It belongs with other places with names like Quail Creek or Deer Ridge Ranch, where neither quail or deer can be seen . These are places where you can play golf and bridge, workout, swim, dance, attend the club house happy hour and sip a nice chardonnay, or join a ceramics class. The billboards promise a life of undisturbed dreams and no children are allowed to live there in order to maintain the heaven-on-earth like environment. My husband’s impression was that it seemed self-absorbed and rather sterile. Here you have people in the prime of their life with money and health enclosing themselves in a secular monastery. Oh, I forgot, they do have bible studies and yoga for the spiritually inclined. I guess it’s this or a nursing home.
Then I was having tea with a friend and she told me about a new survey of young people which showed that they are more narcissistic than ever. Then I heard it on the radio this morning – so I looked it up. Here is the story. Nothing new here. From the beginning of time the older generation has complained about the younger. Young people are lazy, aimless, don’t understand the value of hard work or a dollar. They are narcissistic ( we now have a test to prove it), selfish, and self-absorbed. They are now called the generation of praise. Too many parents were too enthusiastic with their toddlers. But are they much different from many of today’s aging boomers, with their demands for Viagra, cosmetic surgery, and uninterrupted frivolity? I guess that’s the point, in an affluent society we can afford to be as frivolous as we like regardless of our age.
The un-wedding
The wedding season will soon be upon us. I enjoy weddings. I really do, but with no consensus on its meaning, I am questioning exactly what we are doing and why. The “personalization” that is so much the fashion makes every wedding I attend a puzzle as I wonder what this particular couple means by it. Yet, whether in a church, a park, or at an exotic destination, weddings are bigger than ever. You can enter this lucrative industry by getting a degree in wedding consulting. No kidding! Here is an excerpt from a book by Rebecca Mead, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. In a radio interview, Ms. Mead noted that what we have come to regard as the traditional wedding with all the trimmings is a relative new invention. For most of western history weddings have been small, informal, family affairs without the intervention of church or state. Most took place in homes, modestly, without all the fanfare we have come to expect. The Puritans didn’t even allow church weddings. A wedding was witnessing a simple vow demonstrating the consent of both parties followed by sexual consummation. Those were the basic ingredients.
Today, there is no fundamental consensus on weddings or marriage. Rather, in The New York Times’ Wedding and Celebrations section we have a lesbian couple exchanging vows and a very pregnant bride in white. Bridal magazines overflow with opportunities to buy the dream wedding as seen on The Bachelor. You can even have a Disney wedding and wear a princess gown. In Japan, which has no Christian history to speak of, the western church wedding is all the rage. This all goes to show that the form and significance of a wedding is highly adaptable and changeable to social trends. What does this mean for those who take the nuptial ritual seriously as marking the beginning of a God ordained institution? Does the lack of social consensus demand we consider marking the event in a simple unadorned way? The counter-cultural wedding may now be the un-wedding – a small home-based exchange of vows. It’s obvious that a grand and expensive to-your-taste wedding does not assure marital happiness. I think it might actual set us up for failure. Maybe we should try a more modest approach that would allow room for the actual marriage to blossom over time and develop it’s own cadence. That might lead to marking anniversaries in grander style as the marriage matures. With simpler weddings we couldn’t hide our current ambivalence about marriage under all that tulle and too much champagne. Simple unadorned vows could shed light on our intentions in a startling way and remind the culture about the meaning of marriage.
Concerts, candles, and chants
Here is a concert for another hot cause and questioned by rocker Roger Daltry. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of all the tokenism we’ve taken to. Every cause, every tragic event, is marked with a candle light vigil, a celebrity concert, or a colored ribbon. Sometimes the symbol contradicts the cause, like this global warming celebrity concert. Raising consciousness has become another media event and a form of contemporary entertainment. Not to mention another corporate way to sell us more products. Please don’t ask me to place a meaningless bumper sticker on my car, or observe an empty moment of silence. Tell me something real I can do. Save the money, natural resources, and time by not having the big event. The problem is not that there are not any worthy causes, but rather that we have confused symbols with real action. Seldom have vigils, chants, and mass togetherness solved the world’s problems. Most social change has occurred because people slugged it out over decades in lonely work. I think of William Wilberforce, Susan B. Anthony, and Dorothy Day. Yes, it’s better to light a candle and than curse the darkness, but the candle better be made out of something other than wax because it will soon go out.
The May-June 2007 issue of Utne Reader has several articles that examine the meaning and effectiveness of slogans, placards, and marches. It’s asking some provocative questions worth pondering. Let’s not be deluded by tokenism that make us feel like we are doing something and be distracted from doing the small (or so they seem) concrete actions that are closer to our everyday lives.
Black men speak up
Here is a story about filmmaker Byron Hurt’s documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. In this film Hurt explores the depiction of masculinity in hip-hop and is speaking out against the rampant negative images of women that plague the genre. Taking his film on tour to college campuses, he hopes to encourage the discussion among young black men about violence against women. He stresses the need for broader definition of what it means to be a black man. One that is free from sexism and hyper-aggression.
In light of the Don Imus fiasco, there is a pressing need for open discussion both within, and outside the black community regarding how black women are viewed and treated. The specific history of black women in this country is a cruel mix of racism and sexism. Pop culture continues the degrading depiction of black women as over-sexed animal like creatures. We need more men to take up this cause because it’s a double win situation. Both black women and men will better off for it.
I’m jealous
Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News and crunchy-con fame got to interview Camille Paglia. Here is the link to his blog. Can’t wait to see the piece he is going to write.
Straight from the horse’s mouth
Working hard to look like your favorite star? Here’s a few lines from Kate Bechkinsale’s interview in Glamour magazine.
“What’s considered ideal in Hollywood is completely different than anywhere else in the world. I don’t think you can aspire to it, nor can I. Everybody is retouched, stretched, lengthened, slimmed and trimmed. I could look at a picture of myself from the past and think, why don’t I look like that now? It’s because I never have!”
Aren’t you relieved?
The secret, again
It seems that every few years the same banal, arrogant, and cheap spirituality gets recycled again. This time with no one other than Oprah championing The Secret. Read this excellent article in Salon. What is the secret? You create your own reality. Whatever you want you can have. Whatever you have, that you don’t want, is your fault. Money, power, romance, are all waiting for you. Tell that to millions of starving children, victims of human slavery, and the people of Darfur. It’s spitting in the face of millions, even us whose only problem, on any given day, is finding a parking spot.
The real secret, and it’s not even a secret, Jesus already told us. It’s difficult for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. Better to lose the world than lose your own soul. Take up your cross and follow me. Lose your life in order to gain it. Of course this all doesn’t sell well in consumer self-centered culture, but it’s the path to contentment. The alternative is to end up terrified and alone with all our stuff facing the Master of our lives. No one will be able to save us, not even Oprah.