MonthJanuary 2008
The other day I watched eXistenZ. Afterword, I reached into the box of old Mondo 2000s that Bill Whitcomb recently gave me, and pulled out an issue at random. It just happened to have an interview with David Cronenberg (an excerpt from Cronenberg on Cronenberg, which I was also flipping through). Here’s an interesting bit where he talks about gender:
William Burroughs doesn’t just say that men and women are different species, he says they’re different species with different wills and purposes. That’s where you arrive at the struggle between the sexes. I think Burroughs really touches a nerve there. the attempt to make men and women not different – to pretend that little girls and boys are exactly the same and it’s only social pressure, influence, and environmental factors that make them go separate ways – just doesn’t work. Anyone who has kids knows that. There is a femaleness and a maleness. We each partake of both in different proportions. But Burroughs is talking about something else: will and purpose.
If we inhabited different planets, we would see the female planet go entirely one way and the male another. Maybe that’s why we’re on the same planet, because either extremes might be worse. I think Burroughs’s comments are illuminating. Maybe they’re a bit too cosmic to deal with in daily life, but hear it reflected in all the hideous cliches of songs: “You can’t live with ’em, and you’ve can’t live without ’em.”
Burroughs was fascinated when I told him about a species of butterfly. They couldn’t find the male of one species and the female of another. One was huge and brightly colored, and the other was tiny and black. It took forty years before lepidopterists realized were the same species. When Burroughs talks about men and women being different species, it does have some resonance in other forms of life. But there are also hermaphrodite version of this same butterfly. they are totally bizarre. One half is huge and bright and the other halve – split right down the middle of the body – is small and dark. I can’t imagine it being able to fly. there’s no balance whatsoever.
(See also my article on Breyer P-Orridge).
It sure takes some balls to put these on your truck…
“Dangling some furry dice from a rear view mirror in one thing – but in Virginia, one lawmaker has launched a crusade against decorating a truck’s trailer hitch with a large pair of rubber testicles. State lawmaker Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying rubber replicas of male genitalia on vehicles. He says it’s a safety issue, because the giant rubber testicles could distract other drivers. Under his measure, displaying the ornamentation on a motor vehicle would be a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $250.”
(via Metro)
In other words, “faith” is at its most toxic and dangerous point not when it is insincere and hypocritical and corrupt but when it is genuine. At that point, its energy of certainty and self-righteousness can be used, not only to reinforce the Church but also (as Mother Teresa’s continuing reputation demonstrates) to impress even the secular. The evidence now is that this is how she and her confessors squared the circle. Repress your misgivings, overcome your de?spair, re?double your efforts, and we will make you a saint and later claim that you cured the sick even after your death. It’s at this point that the cynical loops round to meet the na?ve and say in effect that anything is permissible as long as it keeps the illusion alive. Again, one has to stand amazed before a clergy who can use, as a recruiting sergeant, a wretched old lady whose own faith, as they well knew, had worn to a husk.
“They stare blankly into the lens, their lips tellingly pursed. All are the Norwegian subjects of a terrifying Nazi experiment. All were involved in one of the most shocking trials of eugenics the world has ever known. All are Lebensborn – the “spring of life”. And all are here to tell their stories for the first time.
The Lebensborn Society was born on 12 December 1935, the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s right-hand man and head of the SS. He had designed a project to promote an “Aryan future” for the Third Reich and turn around a declining birth rate in Germany. People were given incentives to have more children in the Fatherland as well as in occupied countries, most importantly in Scandinavia, where the Nordic gene – and its blond-haired, blue-eyed progeny – was considered classically Aryan.
But after the conflict had ended, many of the Norwegians born into the programme suffered. In an attempt to distance itself from the occupying forces, the Norwegian government publicly vilified the children born by Norwegian mothers and Nazi fathers. Many of those children subsequently experienced intense bullying, and in some cases, extreme mental and physical abuse. In recent years, a Lebensborn group in Norway has been fighting what it sees as the Norwegian government’s complicity in their horrific ordeal.”
(via The Independent)
“On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. “And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P.”
![[Shun]](https://i0.wp.com/s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WK-AK835_SHUN_i_20080117183044.jpg?resize=150%2C168)
Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10% of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff’s officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs. The charge was trespassing, but Mrs. Caskey’s real offense, in her pastor’s view, was spiritual. Several months earlier, when she had questioned his authority, he’d charged her with spreading “a spirit of cancer and discord” and expelled her from the congregation. “I’ve been shunned,” she says.”
(via WSJ)
While this is an interesting and short read, worth its perusal, I found this little snippet quite interesting about possible solutions to help the U.S. out of its sinking situation. I’m interested in the first point, but like I said, the whole thing is worth reading:
We might possibly be saved, he explains, if the nation engages in massive, radical reform in three areas: 1) Eliminating the current income tax system and moving to a national retail sales tax of 33 percent. 2) Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from Social Security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.
Full article via NewsTarget, by Mike Adams
Perhaps even worse than his known association with the Christian reconstruction movement:
Consider some of the items from the CoCC’s Statement of Principles:
‘We believe that the United States of America is a Christian country, that its people are a Christian people, and that its government and public leaders at all levels must reflect Christian beliefs and values.’
‘We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.’
‘We believe in the traditional family as the basic unit of human society and morality, and we oppose all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents.’
‘We believe the schools, public, private, and parochial, should teach students to be proud of being Americans and proud of their national and local identities, and that they should instill in them the values of Western, Christian, and American civilization.’
The Council of Conservative Citizens is descended from the White Citizens Councils in the South that worked to prevent African-American children from attending integrated schools. They’re hardly just a chummy group of ordinary conservatives.
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