Over at Alicublog, Roy bemoans the listlessly whipped froth that’s lately been hissing from the Redi-Whip cans of Wingnuttia. The second-generation sinecurists and welfare queens of the conservo-commentariat seem to be on auto-pilot this week; not even the usually reliable Jonah Goldberg can be bothered to lift his leg and emit a respectably crepitant insight.
But in the comments to Roy’s piece, Chad points out that some of those little mom ‘n’ pop pundits continue to provide the same hand-crafted, high quality, neo-fascist spleen you can no longer find at the soulless Big Box emporia:
I still advocate that Orson Scott Card is a tragically untapped resource of grade-A wingnuttery. In his most recent screeds, he called believing in climate change a a puritan religion and compared Al Gore to Islamic fundamentalists in one swoop and used an “Indiana Jones” review to make an implied insult against Hinduism *and* root for the Red Scare blacklistings.
To be fair, though, it could be argued that Orson just makes it far too easy…
The kid may be onto something! Let’s check it out…
Oops. Wrong Orson. Here we go…
I was prepared to be disappointed, going into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I’d been hearing from people that it just wasn’t as good as the other films. Oh well, thought I. I’ve already seen Prince Caspian and there’s nothing else remotely interesting in the theaters.
Only one movie this year depicting Jesus as an extra-dimensional carnivorous quadruped? This explains why Hollywood is going down the crapper: their fealty to the homo-liberal agenda prevents them from catering to a potentially huge market for huggable plush crucifixes.
The two best movies, Raiders and Last Crusade, both deal with Judeo-Christian elements. Remember when Sean Connery slaps Harrison Ford’s face for taking the name of Christ in vain? There was an element of faith, an affirmation of the Western religious tradition
…of beating your children. Spare the slap, spoil the middle-aged child.
It resonates in the minds and hearts of a lot of the public. At the end of Raiders and again at the end of Last Crusade, the wrath of God is striking down the enemies of righteousness. Made-up idolatrous gods just didn’t do it for us westerners in Temple of Doom. And it was not satisfying to see the second movie show that the idol was just a powerful as the God of Moses and Christ.
Hindus were especially irked, because realistically speaking, their gods would win any rumble with the Trinity by sheer force of numbers.
Now we have something even more outrageous than idolatry — we have science fiction. On one level, it’s perfectly all right…
…keep those royalties a’comin’, Tor Books!
But on another level, I was offended when, just in passing, we see the Ark of the Covenant from the first movie turn up in this one. It isn’t even important; it seems to have lost all its power during its years in storage. It’s nothing.
Well don’t get all bent out of shape. Maybe on the other side of the crate was a huge pile of bones and moth-eaten uniforms left behind by all the military geniuses who’d said to themselves, “Hey! This thing melts the flesh off anybody who even looks at it. Let’s check it out!”
Belief in the God of Abraham is part of what made western society what it is — and it’s one of the best parts. It’s the moral brake and the source of meaning for our civilization.
“Moral Braking void in Islam. No purchase necessary. Believers in the God of Abraham who reside in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, U.A.E, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Indonesia are not eligible for Source of Meaning.”
It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t, we wish it had.
I feel the same way about condoms and aspirin.
It’s disturbing to believers in that God to have extravagant sci-fi coexist with — indeed, trump — that religion.
That reminds me…Which god’s son do you think would win in a fight? Jesus or the Mighty Thor?
Naturally, having Commies as bad guys was really disturbing to the politically correct liberals making the movie. So they made a really big point of showing how the anti-Communists got Indiana Jones fired from his university job.
I’d like to know how many tenured professors were fired during that era? Remember that the blacklist of Communists in Hollywood targeted people who actually had been Communists; their defense was not that they hadn’t been Communists, but that the government had no right to question them about it.
“I’d like to know, but not enough to look it up or anything…”
The FBI helped out as well. In 1951, a group of governors, led by Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, asked J. Edgar Hoover to protect them against the threat of intervention from right-wing legislators by supplying them with the information they needed to purge their own payrolls. The FBI director agreed, inaugurating what the Bureau called its “Responsibilities Program.”…Though most of the program’s files are heavily blacked out, we can tell that…before Hoover discontinued it in 1955, the program had fingered about 800 people, many of them college teachers.
…
And, just as the firings at the University of Washington had precipitated the earlier ban on Communists, so, too, the late 1952 dismissal of two teachers at another public institution, Rutgers University, prompted the academic establishment to devise a rationale for firing people who took the Fifth.
…The most common formulation involved the academic profession’s so-called “obligation of candor.” In an official statement at the end of March 1953, the presidents of the nation’s thirty-seven leading universities explained that because of the academic profession’s strong commitment to free speech, professors had a special duty to speak out. “Invocation of the Fifth Amendment” the presidents declared, “places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society.” Or, in other words, name names or get out.
That’s my favorite part. “You must demonstrate your devotion to our Constitutional values of free speech by freely squealing on your colleagues. Anything less is Communist-style censorship.” Anyway, back the Big O…
And this was an era when our own spy service was hopelessly incompetent because the Communists had deeply penetrated British and American spy operations everywhere. Treason and espionage really happened — the anti-Communists didn’t make it up.
That’s why the FBI spent so much time wiretapping Martin Luther King.
So for this movie to simultaneously exploit Russian Communists as villains and slander the anti-Communist efforts of the U.S. government – however inept they often were — is hypocritical in the extreme.
Do we even have extreme hypocrisy anymore in this country? I know Irony died after 9/11, but I thought Extreme Hypocrisy choked on its own vomit right around the time Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Robert Livingston impeached Clinton for lying about an extramarital affair.
The Communists were around longer than the Nazis, and so they killed, tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, and oppressed many millions more than Hitler was ever able to get to. They were a movement that promised equality and delivered unspeakable oppression by a hypocritical oligarchy. They are excellent villains for the Indiana Jones movies.
But to paint the FBI as the moral equivalent of the Communists is a slander against the many law-abiding agents who devoted years of their lives to the service of our country, however corrupt their boss, J. Edgar Hoover, might have been.
Yeah. I’m sure Jean Seberg would be the first to agree.
