I had a different post I wanted to write, but I decided that it was better for a private journal than for public consumption, so instead I wanted to jump in on the public zeitgeist while this incident is still in the public eye (I saw a video that discussed it and a new meme about it just today, I think i’m getting in JUST under the wire!) So this is everything I have to say on the issue:
Celebrities are terrible people. Like, all of them. I don’t know why we need to keep learning this. Two incredibly wealthy people acted like idiots in a self-pleasuring, over produced, culturally irrelevant, gaudy display of self-importance – who cares? Why is the entire country talking about this? You guys know there’s still a WAR going on in Ukraine, there are crimes against humanity happening in Ethiopia, THE US IS ACTIVELY INVOLVED IN THREE WARS. But no, let’s talk about a celebrity catfight.
Most of our involvement in these wars is in the use of unarmed predator drones, occasionally hitting valid targets, sometimes bombing innocent civilians. That and whatever crimes against humanity the CIA has been committing that’ll get declassified in a few decades to go alongside MK Ultra and Operation Paperclip.
The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh.
This is such a weird verse and it’s really speaking to me this morning, and i’m a little sleep deprived and in a weird mood so I want to talk about it because this particular neurochemical mix tends to lead to some… interesting thinking.
I’ve gone on record in various places, in person and in text, that reading the Bible always requires some level of interpretation. Some books more than others, the psalms are musical and music always requires a level of interpretation, even the most straightforward music. The proverbs as well, wisdom sayings are rarely straightforward. Much of the historical or biographical books are fairly straightforward, but even Chronicles or the Gospels require a certain understanding of the context and the setting to understand in their fullness. Genesis is a bit of an oddball when it comes to this because it straddles the line between history and allegory, and seems to switch back and forth between them in a way which isn’t easily understood for a modern reader.
So when I read about Jacob, a human man, successfully wrestling with God until he has to divinely cheat to get Jacob to stop makes me think that this may not be a literal retelling of a literal event that literally happened exactly as it was written in reality. It’s possible that an ancient man named Jacob literally physically grappled with the physical manifestation of God until God popped his hip joint, but I think a more allegorical reading might be more fruitful for this story.
Partially I believe this because who among us has not wrestled with God in some way? Life is hard and God is good, so struggling with that dichotomy can be a hard thing to reconcile. I think this passage can help illuminate what a healthy response to God and pain should be. Let me explain.
The context of the passage is very important. Jacob is about to reunite with his brother Esau. His brother, from whom Jacob had stolen his birthright, AND his blessing from his father. Esau, a powerful man of the wilderness, born and bred a hunter posed against Jacob, a gatherer who stole Esau’s blessing and birthright by deception, and ultimately fled for fear of Esau’s strength and vengeance. Jacob has come a long way, has a large family, herds, many followers, he has a lot to lose and his anxiety over losing all his family and his social power as well as possibly his life. Genesis 32:7-8 reads, “Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. He divided the people who were with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two camps,thinking, ‘If Esau comes to the one camp and attacks it, then the camp that is left will escape.'”
So Jacob split his camps, prepared a present, and went on ahead with just his wives, personal servants, and eleven children to speak with his estranged brother, grappling with the question of how to handle the reunion with his brother, like some ancient soap opera. He took his family to a stream called Jabbok, sent them on ahead and was left alone at the stream. That night Jacob wrestled with a man all night until the break of day. It’s stated in verses 28 and 30 that the man he wrestled with was God. Jacob wrestled with God all night until daybreak until God popped Jacob’s hip out of his joint. And yet even after Jacob’s hip was dislocated he refused to let go of God until he was blessed by him!
Bold. Bold I think is the word I would use to describe the act of wrestling with God at all, then to do so until daybreak, then to refuse to let go after he divinely cheated and popped his hip bone out until he was blessed.
Very bold.
I think it’s a common conception that it’s wrong to be angry with God, to be frustrated with God, to express anything except undying love and reverence towards God and his actions. That drives me nuts because I think it’s directly contrary to so much of scripture. I could dig through the psalms to find endless examples of people struggling to comprehend God’s love in the suffering of the world. There’s the story of Habakkuk, who pleaded with God for reasoning behind the suffering of his people, and when he was told by God, “I know things are bad, but if it helps, it gets a lot worse” was… unsatisfied with his answer,
“God, you’re from eternity, aren’t you?
Holy God, we aren’t going to die, are we?
God, you chose Babylonians for your judgment work?
Rock-Solid God, you gave them the job of discipline?
But you can’t be serious!
You can’t condone evil!
So why don’t you do something about this?
Why are you silent now?
This outrage! Evil men swallow up the righteous
and you stand around and watch!” (MSG)
And let’s not forget Jesus who wept tears like blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with God to not make him face the suffering of the cross, praying the iconic words, “if it be possible take this cup away from me.” Jesus spent hours in the garden praying, long enough that the disciples who went with him fell asleep. And I understand that it was late, and that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, but Jesus had been talking some doom and gloom leading up to this, if he was praying for so long that his very followers fell asleep he had to be praying for a while! One might say he was wrestling with God for hours in the garden before his death.
Which is the point, if I haven’t made that clear. Whether Jacob literally wrestled with God the night before he reunited with Esau, or if he dreamt his divine encounter, or if his encounter was entirely allegorical and he merely spent a restless night praying the point is still the same, Jacob wrestled with God over the fear of the pain of reuniting with his estranged brother.
But it’s not just that. It’s not just that he wrestled with God, it’s that he didn’t get go of God even when he was beyond the fight. I don’t know if any of my reader has been in a fight before, or if you’ve had something like a hip dislocated, but I remember when I had my stroke and couldn’t walk because my right leg couldn’t do what I told it to, and I would have had a real hard time fighting without the ability to move my leg.
And yet I can imagine, if I were physically wrestling with God to resolve a specific pain on my heart and my leg collapsed out from under my like it did in 2019, and my arm stopped responding like it did that morning I would grip the cloth of God’s clothes with my left hand and absolutely refuse to let go until he blessed me with with the peace which has so often evaded me. I can imagine why Jacob would refuse to let go of God until he received a blessing.
If you are literate enough to understand what I have written so far then I can assume with 100% accuracy that you have had to face the dark pain that is existence at some point in your life. Life is suffering, this is a fact which has been known by all of humanity for most of human history and which I think is no longer taken for granted the way it used to be. So when people must confront the darkness of reality it can be especially difficult, and often causes a crisis of faith. That crisis is worsened when you feel like you can’t really wrestle with God over this pain. That you either have to stuff it down or delude yourself into the belief that it’s not happening or it isn’t really that bad, and I don’t think either of those solutions are healthy or Biblical.
What God did cannot be understated. Jacob is more broadly known as Israel, father of the Israelites, and he was only given that name after he spent the night wrestling with God. I would also remember that this is not an easy thing to do. When Jacob realized what he had done, that he had come face to face with God he said, ” I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” To face God ad come out the other side intact is not a given assumption. To wrestle with God is not something which should be taken lightly, and neither should be the results. People like to break out the verse from Romans, “God works all things for good.” But that’s not the verse. The verse is, “God works together all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” God may not give you what you want, nowhere in the Bible is that promise made, but if your heart is humbled in service to God, and you are living your life called according to his purpose, then things will work out for you.
What I see in the Bible over and over are stories of men and women wrestling with God, either literally or metaphorically. I firmly believe that when you are faced with long nights of sorrow that the best thing you can do is turn to God in honest prayer and then to pull no punches. To wrestle with God, knowing that you will lose, in the desperate faith that God will bless you, as he did Jacob so many years ago.
OH and of course, possibly the most important thing to note: when Jacob did reunite with his brother, bowing before him and pleading for mercy Esau did not retaliate in vengeance. He picked him up in a loving embrace, as the long lost brother he was. He showed him nothing but love.
God blessed Jacob indeed.
I am writing this blog for the same reason I write so many others, because this is something I need to come to peace with myself. It’s alarming how many things I came across writing this that spoke to me directly, considering IM THE ONE WRITING IT.
“Putin said that in Ukraine the people will meet Russian soldiers with flowers. (we are) Preparing the Molotov cocktails; these are the flowers for Putin.” – Former Ukranian president Poroshenko.
For most of my life the United States has been at war. In fact from the cursory research i’ve done the US has been involved in some war or another for almost my entire life, with only a couple years here and there where the US military was not actively engaged in some war or intervention or another. War, for better or worse, has been a part of my reality, usually in the background. So a war existing isn’t shocking to me. But these wars are usually against a paramilitary organization, and in the 2000’s has only declared war against a nation once. So seeing a nuclear power declare war against a neighboring country and watching army march against army in a modern context is shocking and unsettling.
I want to start by giving a simplified overview of why this conflict has begun and what has happened since the declaration of war, since there seems to be a lot of sensationalist, inaccurate reporting on the situation (excuse me while I stifle my surprise.)
In 2014 the Ukrainian government refused to sign an agreement which which strengthen political and economic relations between Ukraine and the EU. Protests were held after this and ultimately the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was relieved of duty in a vote by Ukrainian parliament in a 328-0 vote. Yanukovych called for assistance from the Russian Federation, which ultimately led to rebellions in the Donbas region of Ukraine, starting a war which has not stopped and continued to rage to this day as a part of the greater Russo-Ukrainian war. A part of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine was to annex the peninsula of Crimea, land which belonged to Ukraine, on which Russia was leasing a military base (sort of like how the US has bases in Ramstein, Germany and Okinawa, Japan). When Russia annexed this peninsula they captured the entirety of the Ukrainian navy. In response to this the world did very little.
The division here was the question of whether Ukraine would join the EU and NATO or if they would strengthen their ties to Russia. The government attempted to enforce a relationship with Russia, and the people made their voice known that they wanted closer relations with the EU. In response Russia stoked a war in the Donbas region and that war is essentially what Putin has used to justify his war in Ukraine.
On February 23, 2022 Vladimir Putin announced a “special military action” to “liberate” Russian citizens living in the Donbas region of Ukraine. His stated goal was to “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine, and to stop the “genocide” as a result of the Donbas war. Now this is a complicated issue, as Russia has been stoking this rebellion, but both sides have been committing human rights violations, and have been indiscriminate in killing both military forces and civilians of the other side. Independent human rights groups have been critical of both the Ukrainian government and the rebel forces in Donbas.
The problem is that Putin’s invasion has not been limited to the Donbas region – which would have been unacceptable on the face of it – but he launched an army of 150,000 soldiers from the East via Russia, the North via Belarus, and the south via Crimea. The northern forces invading from Belarus have been pushing towards Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. these forces also seized the Chernobyl sarcophagus and the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Conflicting reports have been released about the radiation levels coming from Chernobyl, however the fighting from around the region seems to not have damaged the Sarcophagus radiation containment facility. See map below for a visualization of Russia’s invasion.
Crimea is the landmass to the south, Donbas is the red region to the East, and the city surrounded by blast markers is Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and former president Petro Poroshenko are leading the Ukrainian army on the ground.
Since 2014 the Ukrainian government has seen several office changes. After Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 Petro Poroshenko was elected, and under his leadership the war in Donbas was deepened. In 2019 Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected president. During the Russian military buildup over the last couple months President Zelenskyy spoke calmly, encouraging his people to stay calm and stay where they were, confident that the Russian’s would not actually begin the invasion. Quite frankly most of the world didn’t think Russia would actually begin this war.
Since the war began Zelenskyy has remained in the capital alongside his people. The United States has offered him evacuation support but Zelenskyy has refused saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Former president Petro Poroshenko, quoted at the beginning, has said the same. Even political opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko has expressed respect for president Zelenskyy. Ukraine has a standing, readied army of roughly 200,000 soldiers. In addition to this Ukraine has been recruiting and readying a volunteer army, giving them rudimentary training, armor, and weapons when possible. A military official in Ukraine was asked if they had enough weapons to give to all the volunteers. His response, “we will take them from the Russians.” The civilians in Kyiv have been preparing for the full battle in the capital by preparing homemade bombs and molotov cocktails. Battles in Ukraine began last night, but the real battle has yet to begin and may start tonight. Women and children have been evacuating, many men and some women have remained behind to fight.
It is difficult to tell how the narrative of the war is unfolding at this time, however it appears that there is some hope for Ukraine. Russia doesn’t seem to be making the progress they had hoped, and that the war is going much slower than Moscow had planned, at least according the the Pentagon. I am no war analyst, but I know enough to know that the longer Russia takes to complete it’s objective in Ukraine the worse things will be for them in the field and at home. If Russia has to pause the siege on Kyiv to resupply it will also afford time for more NATO weapons to find operators in Kyiv. There is one video in particular of what appears to be a Russian Armored Personnel Carrier, broken down in the middle of a Ukrainian road, and a Ukrainian offering to tow them back to Russia, then mocking them for getting lost because they don’t know where they’re going. There have also been unconfirmed reports of Russian soldiers deserting.
Which brings me to what might be the most insane thing which has come out in regards to all this: the various countries and organizations which have openly denounced Russia over this invasion. The US and other NATO/Western European powers denouncing Russia is no surprise. The Pope calling for peace? Makes perfect sense. Israel calling for peace, absolutely. Major African countries in the UN calling for peace, totally, makes sense. THE TALIBAN CALLING FOR PEACE feels like a fever dream. And what might be more striking, and is definitely more bold, are the demonstrations in 50+ Russian cities protesting the war, including St. Petersburg, Putin’s home city. Russia does not tolerate dissent and many of these protestors are being arrested and brought to the building that a lot of people go into but not a lot of people come out of.
These are the sorts of picture which end up in history books. But they really shouldn’t have to.
I’m being hyperbolic with that last sentence… hopefully. The point remains that the protests by Russian people against this war is an act of extreme bravery. It’s not brave for myself or frankly for anyone else in the US or around the world to condemn Russia’s invasion, but that this war is so unpopular IN RUSSIA is striking. It is a bravery possibly only matched by the Ukrainian people volunteering to fight and defend their country. There are a lot of stories of boldness if not bravery. The Ukrainian soldiers of Snake Island shouting explicatives at a Russian warship before the warship killed them. A Ukrainian woman walking up to Russian soldiers and offering them sunflower seeds, telling them, “take these seeds so that sunflowers will grow when you die.” An old man walking up to soldiers, cursing at them, telling them that no one wants them in Ukraine and to go home. A man seemingly trying to stop the advancement of Russian tanks by hand.
Finally, the West’s response. I’ll get into what we cannot do in the next section, but for now what the West’s response has been has largely been economic sanctions. Freezing transactions to Russian banks and oligarch accounts. One big question many people had been asking and which was just recently answered was the question of SWIFT. SWIFT is an internet banking system which makes international transactions easier. Russian companies were expecting to use this to facilitate oil sales to Europe. The EU and the US has recently expelled several Russian banks from the SWIFT system. In addition major western powers have been sending weapons to Ukraine, in particular the US has been sending fire and forget Javelin anti-tank rocket launchers, the UK has been sending similar NLAW launchers, and Germany (in a stark reversal of long-standing foreign policy) will send thousands of anti-tank and anti-air weapons to the Ukrainian army.
Ultimately there is no way to predict the future. The Ukrainians are holding the line in Kyiv but the war is less than a week old. I imagine there’s some fearmongering going on, I’ve seen some of it and I want to address that in two points. First, it is unlikely that Russia would dare attack any NATO member states. Article 5 of the NATO convention states that an attack on one is an attack on all. If Russia assaults Lithuania or Estonia or Latvia it would trigger a war with Germany, France, Poland, the UK, and the United States, among others. Russia is not willing to risk destroying the world over a land war with NATO because Russia is in the world.
Second, I would remind all my reader that the think pieces you’ll be reading as the war unfolds, that these news outlets do not make money by reporting the truth, they make money by making you angry or anxious. The awe response is stronger than the anxiety response, but it’s harder to reproduce. You can make someone fearful much easier than you can inspire them. Do not pay attention to the media outlets which are clearly attempting to bait you into anger or fear. If you must watch news coming from Ukraine there is a lot of grass roots, on the ground reporting being done that you can see, and always keep in mind that the story of the war is unfolding and that details are hard to sort out in war years after the last shot has been fire, much less while the shelling is still happening.
I believe that effectively concludes the retelling of the narrative to date. I want to spend the next time reflecting on what our response is and can be, responding to this invasion as a nation, as Christians, and as individuals. Some of these are more complicated than others, but none are pleasant. Probably the simplest and most regrettable response is our response as a country and as an alliance. Neither the United States, nor any members of NATO, nor NATO itself can directly involve itself in this Russo-Ukrainian war without potentially provoking the long feared thermonuclear war with Russia. Some people, some warhawks seem to be forgetting about the potential consequences of global nuclear warfare. For now applying economic sanctions against Russia, Russian banks and oligarchs, and Putin himself in the hopes that this will force further popular support against the war is the most direct action NATO can take against Russia. Indirectly we can and are supplying money, medicine, and weapons to the Ukrainian army. The fact that our inability to directly intervene in this war has made the Ukrainian government feel as though they have been abandoned breaks my heart, but we cannot risk nuclear war with Russia. I can only hope that the Ukrainian army will be able to push back the Russian invaders and that the US and NATO will flood the country with economic and infrastructure support to restore faith in the alliance.
So that’s the national level. Probably the least pleasant, but necessary to understand as our leaders sort through this invasion. What is much more difficult for me to process personally is what our response as Christians should be. And the reason why I wanted to write this is that I feel like there needs to be a Christian response. The obvious, simple response is prayer. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t pray, we certainly should, but simply sitting and praying feels… impotent.
There are other things to do. There will be an outpouring of refugees, not unlike the refugees fleeing Afghanistan, and if we want to help relieve the pain from both of these tragedies then taking in and caring for refugees is an important step. Many men and women are staying behind in Kyiv to fight the Russians, but most women and children are fleeing. And if Kyiv falls the humanitarian and refugee disaster will worsen very quickly.
No matter what happens the people of Ukraine will be in need. and as a Christian people we have an obligation to help relieve this pain If Ukraine feels too far away that’s fair. It’s possible (unlikely I would estimate, but possible) that the US will not see any refugees coming from Ukraine. If indeed the US doesn’t see a mass influx of refugees then let this tragedy move your heart to tend to the senseless tragedies being lived out in your own hometown. We should also understand that the sanctions levied against Russia will affect us. We may be in for some economic stress. We must weather that stress with dignity, because this economic pain pales in comparison to the war the Ukrainians are facing right now.
As for me personally, there have been a few personal reflections I’ve been having in the wake of this war, and the stories which have come out from it. First and foremost, seeing Volodymyr Zelenskyy address his people has been inspiring. I think after spending the last six or so years suffering through American politicians speeches, listening to them either ramble barely coherently or rant and rave about paranoid nonsense hearing a politician speak honestly about difficult things is inspiring. Among the standing army, the volunteer civilian army, and the various resistance groups in Kyiv the Ukranians have the privilege of having their president, their former president, and their opposition party leader all on the ground, guns in hand, ready to fight and die alongside their people. I cannot imagine American politicians doing this. Not when they’re fleeing their state from natural disasters. The American people deserve better than the cowards we’re bound to elect over and over again. I guess i’m just increasingly disappointed with American politics, economics, and culture.
Watching the civilians line up to train to use weapons, fire weapons they’d never used before to fight an army bigger and stronger than them is inspiring. It’s inspiring, but disheartening in the context of the last “defense of democracy” in the American capital. Here you have Ukrainian civilians defending their capital in the name of democracy and freedom, and only a year ago we saw American civilians assaulting their own capital in order to overturn the results of a democratic election. For better or worse for a lot of countries and cultures the United States is the symbol of democratic freedom on a global stage and seeing democracy degrade so dramatically like it did a year ago is thrown into stark comparison by people who are truly willing to lay their lives on the line for democracy and freedom.
I am also frustrated that for about a day and a half, while I was submerging my brain in news reports as fast and as deep as I could I found it hard to get away from MSM articles decrying Trump and various republicans. This frustrates me for the same reason I mentioned above that these news articles aren’t aiming for informing you or me about the war, they care about making you mad so you pay attention to them because being mad makes you feel good and it’s really easy to make you angry. I don’t care about what the disgraced former president has to say, I want to know about the land war in Eastern Europe with a nuclear superpower. It frustrates me how badly the media has degraded, to the point that almost all the outlets I use are cell phone recordings posted online or foreign media reporting. It’s disappointing.
I am disappointed by the small handful of dictatorial bootlickers, blaming NATO and Ukraine for Russia’s invasion. Russia is clearly uncomfortable with NATO’s eastern expansion but the fact of the matter is if the Ukrainian people wish to join NATO then it is unjust to allow a global bully to terrorize a people group into not joining an alliance. Fortunately this sentiment doesn’t seem to have much public traction, but if you see it I would remind you that Ukraine did not start this war, that Ukraine was not the aggressor, that even into 2014 and beyond (if you want to really track it back you can trace this to the USSR’s conquest of Ukraine before WWII) Russia was the aggressor. Russia, Putin, not the Russian people. I would remind all my reader again, this is an extremely unpopular war, even in Russia.
It seems to me that this war will not end well for anyone. Again, I’m no war analyst, but Russia is already facing fairly intense economic sanctions from the West, which could have long standing effects on the Russian economy. If Russia loses they will be humiliated on the world stage. If they win then they will either control a country which hates them and earn the ire of the entire world, OR be responsible for trashing another country and leaving it “DeMiLiTaRiZeD,” again, earing the ire of the world. In either case Ukraine will be much worse for wear for those who live through the war. And the economic sanctions will hurt Russia the most, but will hurt the global economy as well. This unpopular war will not help anyone. I really, really don’t understand who is benefiting from this.
For my final response I want to readdress something I believe I mentioned earlier. There is little or nothing you or I can do right now to help this disaster of warfare, and adding a Ukrainian flag to your facebook profile picture for a couple of weeks doesn’t really do anything. It’s not brave to oppose this war if even the TALIBAN is proposing peace. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t be doing these things, just remember what it is, and what it isn’t. What we can do is not allow the media to use the actual tragedy of actual people to bait us into becoming worse Americans, more malleable and manipulatable by those who would see you as naught but a cog in the machine of their political or economic machinations. These tragedies will happen, and they will create echoes which will scream across the world for an untold length of time. We do not need to amplify these echoes.
The “denazification” claim is especially maddeningly ironic considering President Zelenskyy is Jewish.
I am a capitalist, I strongly believe in the free market. Countless studies show that a free market is one of the strongest tools for uplifting people out of poverty.
I do not own $GME, I DO own $AAL, and when I went to check on my shares I found that I couldn’t buy any more $AAL, only sell. It fell under the same restrictions $GME, $AMC, and $BB did.
I am furious.
There need to be restrictions on the market. The Pareto Distribution is a statistical model which demonstrates that given free conditions the majority of any commodity will trend towards a single focus point. In laymans terms, the whole 1% of people hold 90% of the money is unavoidable unless artificial, unjust restrictions are put in place. Money attracts money, and if you waste money you’ll never be able to accrue wealth. Restrictions on the market – an absolute minimum number of restrictions – are necessary to prevent that 1% from literally running away with all the money in the world. It’s to protect the rights of citizens who would otherwise simply be steamrolled by the people who have all the money and therefore all the power. Let’s make something clear: there are only two privileges’ in the world: Wealth Privilege, and Attractiveness Privilege.
The US economy is not a free market. The events of this week demonstrate that. A bunch of random dudes on /r/wallstreetbets throw tons of money into $GME, the Gamestop stock, seemingly just because it would be funny to do so, I don’t know, maybe they’re all geniuses, that’s not the point. The POINT is that in response to this the prive of Gamestock surged, and all the hedge funds who shorted the stock, expecting to be basically worth nothing suddenly stand to lose billions of dollars.
Here’s the thing about that: that’s how the market works.
Buying stocks – ESPECIALLY buying securities – is always a gamble, and sometimes companies which are worth billions of dollars lose. The PROBLEM is when these billion dollar companies use their wealth to force retail trading organizations to shut down purchases of specific stocks. Market restrictions should be used to prevent the extremely wealthy from abusing their wealth to prevent economic movement. INSTEAD what is happening is that the wealthy are using their obscene wealth to force artificial restrictions on the market to prevent retail traders, like me, from using the market like it’s supposed to be used.
NOTHING that /r/wallstreetbets and their like has done has been illegal, retail traders are having their trades restricted because it stands to cost the wealthy a portion of their wealth. As soon as the wealthy are threatened the government moves swiftly to bail them out, and the companies which market themselves as providing economic mobility leap to defend their profits.
The free market is crucial for economic development, especially among the lower classes. We are very clearly not operating within a free market economy. This is blatant manipulation, it is anti-free trade, it is anti-capitalism.
You want to know how truly insane all this is? It’s got TED CRUZ and AOC AGREEING ON SOMETHING.
When big money tries to cheat you out of your cash, be it earned by hard work or luck, don’t ever give in. This sort of market manipulation is unacceptable.
I don’t even like AOC or Ted Cruz but that is wild man….
The mob which has stormed the US Capitol in response to the results of a democratic election are domestic terrorists. They are not interested in democracy, they are interested in maintaining their cult leader, their god in the throne of power they worship. They are godless, violent, dangerous psychopaths.
This is a coup. It should be treated like one, and the fact that the police response has been to limp wristed in the face of a literal coup compared to their response to the demonstrations this summer is sickening.
If you are among the people who are rioting against democracy today then I am sure you will only ever see yourself as a victim. But you are not. You are a child in an adult’s body and you need to leave society and think about your priorities for a very long time. This is not how civilized people act, this is how a child who did not get their way acts, and you know it.
If you support this coup you are in support of overturning democracy by means of terrorism.
I am sick and disgusted by ALL OF THIS.
It is undeniable that Trump’s tweets and public rhetoric sparked this. He should be arrested. It is undeniable that ALL the people involved with this are domestic terrorists leading a coup. They should be arrested.
This is one of the most dangerous things i’ve ever seen in my life, I can’t believe i’m watching this happen.
This video is wrong. I mean, it’s right, it’s very right actually, about a lot, all the details are right, and the whole study of the functions of the different parts of the brain is endlessly fascinating, but ultimately we are not two. We’re a whole lot more than two. The end of the video tags to another video talking about the cells which compose an organism but i’m more interested in the psychological and spiritual significance of the collection of personalities which compose our collective consciousness.
Now the term “Collective Consciousness” is a psychological one which refers to the fact that as a society we have a set of standards, norms, and accepted behaviors, beliefs, and values which are, broadly speaking, common to all who share in a specific culture. It is this collective consciousness which allows for communication to be clear, not only so that when you say word A your conversational partner understands your definition in a literal sense, but also understands certain implications and nuances implied in the speaking of word A. In this blog however, I will be taking this concept of the Collective Consciousness down from the sociological scale down to the individual.
Like the video says, we are two, referring to the two halves of the brain which typically work in synchronicity to create a single, collective consciousness. You have a collection of different personalities at work in your mind. A personality which is lazy, one which is hard working, one defined by anger, one defined by lust, one defined by hunger, one defined by exhaustion, and so on. These different parts of your mind serve different specific functions. For an obvious example, when you are hungry the personality within you defined by it’s hunger grows stronger and becomes harder to ignore until it is satisfied. If you are deprived of food for an extended period of time and haven’t eaten in, say, 4 days, then that leaves a permanent memory in your hunger personality which makes it harder to turn down food in the future, makes it so that you process food slower to prevent future starvation, and generally might make food more appetizing even if you’re not strictly speaking “hungry.”
It’s a defense mechanism, in the same way that your anger personality protects you from those who seek to wrong you, and your lust personality drives you to procreate and continue the species and bond with another human in an intimate way, and in the same way the hunger personality can be damaged or exaggerated so too can anger, lust, sleepiness, etc. When a person is sufficiently traumatized they can even split off one of these individual personalities to create it’s own consciousness, this is what we see in individuals suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, and its in part what is being forced by physics with split brains.
So we as an “individual” are a collection of personalities bounded by a collective consciousness – barring any unnatural interference – and if we feed or starve any of these personalities we can affect the way they interact and impose on the collective consciousness of the individual. We can overeat and overfeed the hunger personality and become a glutton, for example.
Ok, so I didn’t write all this out just to clumsily show off my vague understanding of Dissociative Identity Disorder, I wrote it to give context to my thoughts on the notion of what it means that the Holy Spirit dwells in the hearts of all believers.
See, now the Bible is interesting because throughout it’s pages it speaks a truth on many different levels. Literal truth, metaphorical truth, spiritual truth, and these all affect us in different ways. For example, if you read carefully the first few chapters of Genesis you will find the stories there are of a different genre than the ones coming after it, starting with the stories of Abraham. With Abraham you start to move away from a more mythological style and more into what we might consider historical record. That doesn’t mean that the preceding stories aren’t true, but rather that they’re telling a truth that works on a level other than the literal retelling of events.
Having said that, I think that the notion of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is another theological concept which works on various levels like that. I think it would be foolish and certainly heretical to say that the notion that the Holy Spirit literally lives in us is false, the account of the Pentecost in Acts very much reads like a historical retelling, however, it may also mean more than that.
If we consider in a metaphorical sense the notion that the Holy Spirit dwelling within all who believe translates in some form or fashion into us becoming more like God then I think we see a stark parallel to the ways personalities manifest themselves in the human psyche, perhaps even more fully understanding what John the Baptist meant in John 3:30 “He must become greater; I must become less.”
If on a psychological level the notion of the indwelling of the holy spirit amounts to the development of a personality within us which is akin to God then when it grows the parts of us which are antithetical to God must become lesser. Perhaps this is even what Paul meant when he wrote about becoming dead to sin.
Surely if you are reading this and are a believer then you must know someone who believes in God with all their heart yet still sins – if for no other reason than because that describes you – and me for that matter. It always bothered me that Paul said we become dead to sin but alive in Christ because if that’s the case then I must not be a true believer because I certainly still sin! But this statement makes more sense if you think of it in the forms of personalities.
We started by talking about the right brain and the left brain, and that video I linked up top describes them as having collective functions, and the video linked just below this paragraph elaborates on them further. If the traits represented in the left and right brain – if these personalities, create a gestalt personality presented in these parts of the brain then perhaps the same could be said of the Holy Spirit.
The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. If we look at the Holy Spirit like a gestalt personality like we would the left and right brain then I would say that these traits are representative of the personality of the Holy Spirit, and of course the traits which are displayed by those in whom the Holy Spirit is at work. Therefore, if accepting the Holy Spirit makes us “Alive in Christ and dead to sin” then the personalities of sin which die in our life with Christ would be antonyms of the fruits of the spirit. Perhaps something like, apathy, hatred, anxiety, impatience, wrathfulness, evil, deceitful, cruel, and perhaps impulsive.
Again, I believe that the Holy Spirit truly dwells within all who earnestly call on the name of God, but I believe that this psychological framework can help us understand the consequences of that indwelling. That we are not one, we are not two, but we are many coming together to form a collective consciousness, a gestalt personality, that that personality is fed by our actions and habits, and that to the degree that our gestalt personality reflects the fruits of the spirit the Holy Spirit is alive in us and working against the fatal nature of sin in our spirits.
OK, getting this post out before the year ends, and I feel somewhat obliged to acknowledge how… generally terrible this year has been for everyone. And it has been, it has been an unpleasant, terrible, calamitous, and generally inconvenient year for us all.
And not to be a contrarian, but for me personally, a lot of good has happened this year. I graduated from Seminary, I got a new job working in a field i’m passionate about, I moved back up North, I didn’t have a major medical incident happen and get saddled with another $300,000 worth of bills. COVID, the riots, the general weight of stress and anxiety which has been saddled on all of us this year has been hard to deal with to be sure, and despite the fact that a number of things went well for me personally I certainly understand that this was fairly exceptional and certainly join the world in consigning this awful year to the annals of history.
Things won’t change in an instant, in ~4 hours when the clock strikes 12 and the new year rings in we’ll still have the same problems we have now. But a new year brings a new hope, and my hope is that in looking to the horizon we can all become a little better than we were a year ago, and that when the light at the end of the tunnel finally becomes daybreak we’ll all have grown not in spite of our tumultuous journey, but because of it.
So it’s been a year and I still don’t like that movie. The Rise of Skywalker is like me in high school: a continual disappointment and waste of potential. I was playing the Star Wars MMO with my brother the other night and was struck by a certain realization. There are multiple scenes in that game which involve Revan’s mask, an object of such importance that it actually has it’s own wookiepedia page. Now the character of Revan is deeply familiar to most Star Wars fans who dive a little deeper than just the movies, but for all the uninitiated, Revan was a Jedi Knight serving the republic roughly 4000 years before the events of A New Hope. In this time the Republic was at war with a warrior culture known as the Mandalorians. For those unfamiliar with that Jango Fett was a Mandalorian, and his armor was iconic to the Mandalorian warrior culture. The Mandalorians were violent butchers who sought to provoke the Jedi specifically to war, seeing them as the greatest warriors in the galaxy. To that end they would burn planets to the ground, glass entire planets, ignoring military targets to eradicate civilian targets to try and force the Jedi to intervene. The Jedi however, felt that there was more behind the Mandalorian threat and were unwilling to intervene.
From here on this blog post contains spoilers for a game that came out 17 years ago, and another one that came out 10 years ago.
Revan, a knight of the order, was unwilling to simply wait and see the greater threat, and took a group of knights to one of the battlefields to see what exactly the Mandalorians were doing, and being granted a vision of the atrocities the Mandalorians had committed, specifically firing on surrendered civilians, Revan took up the mask of one of the fallen Mandalorian warriors who was killed by her fellow Mandalorians for refusing to kill the civilians and swore that he would not stop fighting until the Mandalorian threat had abated.
During this time Revan’s Mask became synonymous with the hope he and his Jedi warriors provided to the Republic and the civilians they were fighting to save. Eventually, after the end of the Mandalorian Wars, Revan returned to the Republic as a Sith, and a conqueror, and he and his mask became a symbol of fear and terror and betrayal. Eventually Revan was redeemed and through a long story i’m going to cut short, the mask eventually became symbols of hope again, fear for others, and eventually madness and split morality and personalities.
All of this symbolism, bound up in a single mask, the likes of which hundreds of thousands if not millions had been made.
Contrast this with the symbolism which runs throughout the Sequel Trilogy, specifically the Rise of Skywalker. Take Anakin’s Lightsaber for example, in The Last Jedi the lightsaber is destroyed, shortly after Rey’s heritage is revealed, that her parents were nobodies who sold her for drinking money. This was later, clumsily retconned in The Rise of Skywalker to make her the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine of all people, and then to adopt herself into the Skywalker lineage, and that drives me crazy!
What I loved about Rey’s position as a character at the end of The Last Jedi is how she was in a position where her identity was not handed to her. She wasn’t the daughter or granddaughter of some great force lineage, her greatness wasn’t predestined by genetics or heritage. Where some are born to greatness, and others choose it, she simply had it thrust upon her, and that made her compelling. More than that, it made it so that her accomplishments, her character development, and her choices were all her own. Nothing was handed to her, everything she did was build on her own actions.
The reason why I picked Anakin’s broken lightsaber as the symbolic contrast between TROS and Revan is because both are symbols of identity whose symbology came about from the actions of it’s user. Revan’s Mask symbolized so much because of all the different things Revan did during his career as a Jedi, then Sith, then Jedi again, then madman. Anakin’s lightsaber follows a similar path, being the blade of a powerful Jedi Knight, then blade of one of the greatest Sith lords, then family heirloom to humble neophyte farm boy, then to Kylo Ren a symbol of everything Vader was as a hero to him.
Rey, in looking for an identity, latched on to that lightsaber as much as Kylo did, knowing that Luke used that lightsaber to the point that both Rey and Kylo referred to it as “Luke’s Lightsaber.” The symbolism of that lightsaber is plenty interesting, but ultimately the symbolism of the weapon is infused by Anakin and Luke, not by Rey, and by continuing to use that lightsaber into TROS Rey clings on to an identity which isn’t hers. By the time Rey gets to TROS the lightsaber is full of symbolism, and on a broader scale it represents how Rey continually sought out and eventually found her identity in other people, not in her own actions.
When Revan picked up the mask of the unnamed Mandalorian Warrior who defied her people’s slaughter he began infusing the mask with meaning. His actions both defined his character and the meaning behind the mask which became his face for all it matters. When Rey picked up Luke’s lightsaber it infused her with purpose, set her on the path of the Jedi. But over time it began to weigh on her, especially when she comes face-to-face with Luke Skywalker himself, and has to face the reality of her lineage (again, before it was clumsily and stupidly retconned in the next movie), and neither Luke nor her family are willing or able to give her an identity or give her meaning – this is visualized so strongly in the destruction of Luke’s lightsaber. A lightsaber is always a symbol of identity, so Luke’s lightsaber being destroyed to me opened up the need for Rey to literally craft a new identity for herself. Yet that was given up so she could continue to use Luke’s lightsaber and his identity.
Revan’s mask is an icon made from an unassuming piece of common armor and through his actions was given great meaning. Luke’s lightsaber is a weapon of great meaning and symbolism which became a parasite onto Rey’s character.
Now, why did I write all this, when there are hundreds of other things I could talk about, and dozens of drafts I have sitting in my folder that are asking to be written? Well, I wrote this because I wanted to and I don’t want this blog to feel like an obligation and writing about something pointless that I sincerely enjoy helps me cleanse my mental palate.
Someday I have in mind to write a post titled something like, “On things I was told by people I respected which, on retrospect are absolute lunacy.” This post will be an elaboration on one of those topics.
Apollon et les Neuf Muses sur le mont Parnasse. Attributed to Pierre-Paul Prud’hon
I remember specifically one conversation a professor had with his students, including myself, in class one day. He took time to elaborate on the notion of the concept of “amusement.” He took an entirely unresearched, intellectually lazy approach to this etymological breakdown. He asked us about the word “Muse” leading us to remember the concept of the Greek Muses, the mythic sources of inspiration for artists. And of course the prefix “A-” negates or inverts the following word. Therefore to be “amused” by something is something which uninspires you, something which deadens your thoughts and perhaps even makes you dumber.
Photo Taken by ME!
Again, assuming my memory is not failing me, he spoke with great disdain of the concept of amusement parks as places to deaden your thoughts, places to become uninspired. There are two problems with this, the first being the actual etymological history of the word “amusement” the second being the role of amusement and leisure in life.
The English word for “Amuse” comes from the old French. From the 17th century and into the present the word essentially means to find something enjoyable, funny, or entertaining. Before then, past the 15th century the word essentially meant, “To entertain or deceive.” You may recognize the word “amuse” from the culinary term “Amuse Bouche” or, to please the mouth. It has nothing to do with deadening the thoughts, the mind, or the creativity; to distract or divert, most assuredly, but that’s entirely different from deadening one’s creative faculties.
But let’s say that to be amused is to deaden one’s thoughts and that amusement parks are places where you go do lose your inspiration. I would not see this as a bad thing. I can’t speak for other national cultures, but I think it’s safe to say that the US work ethic stands on the notion that you always have to be giving everything you have. Not just in the office but out as well. You have to have your phone on you to respond to emails and calls and you need to be reachable even on vacation. I think there’s a lot of good to the movement away from office work towards at-home work as a response to the COVID, but I don’t like the further blurring of work and leisure that’s inevitable from such a shift.
People not only have a right to, but an obligation to rest. For different people this comes in different forms. I recall a story told by my Marriage and Families professor at a class that I took at the Eastern Orthodox Holy Cross Seminary in Brookline outside of Boston a few years ago. She told us about how her husband would rest, after a long day of work he would sit in front of the TV, put on something mindless, and just zone out. She hated this, she didn’t understand it, why he would spend so much time doing nothing. She told us that after a while she understood that this was a sort of sacred moment, allowing himself to empty his mind, de-stress after a difficult or stressful day. It’s an implicit understanding that after a day of work and stress the brain needs rest. That perhaps for many of us, and for her husband, some days we just cannot take another problem without a little time for rest.
Rest may not look like zoning out in front of the TV for everyone. For some it’s a good book and tea, or a stupid video game on the couch, or just laying out in the grass on a cool fall day. Everyone needs time to relax and de-stress. The US has a culture of work which is extremely unhealthy. Just sitting here before I wrote this I felt bad, almost sick, not doing anything productive even though there was nothing I should be doing. Don’t get me wrong, I have work that needs to be done, but that would be work to be done at the office not at my home, for as much as that can be helped.
Jesus among the Wheat Fields, Johannes Raphael Wehle, C. 1900
And I shouldn’t feel that guilt! We all need to relax and take time to not do work, time to let our brains relax and enjoy life a little. Early in the book of Mark Jesus and his disciples were accused of working on the Sabbath and therefore violating the commandment about not working on the sabbath. Jesus responded, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for man.” You have a right, arguably to a point an obligation to rest, to take a sabbath once a week and let you brain cool off. Now Jesus was “working” in this case, but in this case he and his disciples were picking grains of wheat to feed themselves. Jesus was making a point about the nature of the Sabbath, that the strict legal perspective on the Sabbath wasn’t healthy, and that instead the Sabbath was a theological protection for the need for rest.
At Gordon-Conwell we talked in one of my practical ministries classes about the need for rest. There were multiple lessons in multiple classes about the danger of burnout, and that rest and relaxation was necessary to prevent burnout. The professor emphasized not only the need for weekly rest, for a weekly Sabbath, but also for monthly, quarterly, and yearly Sabbaths, even going so far as to commission a need for a substantial sabbatical every seven years or so.
Rest is an extremely important need for the psychology and physiology of a human being. Amusement can be an incredibly useful tool for rest. As happens, as i’m writing this last section of this post I started up the movie Knives Out by modern autour genius Rian Johnson. As the movie starts i’m reminded of the first time I saw this modern masterpiece.
It had been an extremely long day, I had spent most of it at the car dealership, getting expensive, specialized work done on my car. Specifically I was getting my driver’s side window reset on it’s track so it wouldn’t just sit in the door, and while I was at it I decided to get the broken door handles replaced. While the car was in the shop they identified an additional $3500.00 worth of fixes needed. This was after I waited three hours for them to inspect my car, not to do any actual fixes. I told them not to do any fixes other than those which were absolutely necessary to keep the car running, to reset the window, fix the door handle, and replace the brakes, that everything else, the other thousands of dollars of bills could and would wait. They issued me a rental car while they kept mine not just overnight but over the weekend to effect repairs.
THEN I had the pleasure of going to the DMV and getting my Massachusetts driver’s license replaced with a Florida license, which was annoying and frustrating- OH and it was raining, so I was cold and wet and mad and stressed and in the middle of all this I got a text from my brother asking if I wanted to see the movie Knives Out with him. I had been extremely excited to see this movie since seeing and loving Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi, so I agreed to meet him at the theatre.
Ana de Armas in Knives Out, Rian Johnson, 2019
After watching the movie I felt happy and relaxed, even reinvigorated. A long day of exhaustion and stress born out of dealership rip-offs and the DMV of all things were washed away, at least for the night, by the effect of good company and a good movie.
At the hands of amusement.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s wrong to get lost in entertainment, to allow escapism to rule your life, but entertainment, amusement has its place. And I don’t mean to compare something like Knives Out which has substantial artistic merit, to zoning out while you’re watching trash like… well anything on TLC quite frankly. But the effect of rest can be the same. And rest is necessary for human health.
So if you take your time off to visit Disney World or to watch 30 Day Green Card Marriage or whatever consider yourself fulfilling a sacred psychological mission. Shutting off your brain is not an evil, psychologically harmful thing, it’s a necessary beat in the rhythm of life that keeps your drum beating in proper time.
Maybe avoid TLC though, I mean those shows are just God-awful and weirdly exploitative, I mean talk about bottom of the barrel….
I recently saw a video showing a person’s favorite signs in ASL. In the description of the video this person said that they will not teach people ASL because that’s something only deaf people should do. A recent comment said that same for Spanish, or really any non-english language; that only someone who comes from a Spanish-dominant country should teach Spanish to non-Spanish speakers. This is a logical progression of “cultural appropriation” if you take such a philosophy seriously. These sorts of comments should highlight how insane the philosophy is. “Cultural appropriation” is an anti-pluralism, anti-multicultural, hyper conservative philosophy which by necessity inhibits creativity, cross-cultural communication, and frankly, is pretty racist and ethno-centric. And I don’t throw any of those words around lightly.
“Cultural appropriation” is the phenomena in which person A of culture A adopts elements of culture B which belongs to person B. This happens, it would be silly to say that this doesn’t happen. It’s been happening since the first cave person scratched a stick figure of himself hunting a deer somewhere in a cave in France and caveman B said, “wow, that looks pretty cool” and scratched a similar sketch of himself in his own cave. Recently, quite recently, a school of thought has come about stating that this is unacceptable.
Although that’s the general definition of that philosophy, in practice you only ever hear the criticism of cultural appropriation in the context of white people adopting cultural signatures from non-white cultures. I have no intention of playing the victim card on account of my race, but at the same time I am comfortable standing on the statement that the exclusive, singular application of this philosophy is racist. Really people will say that when a “dominant” culture adopts aspects of a “disadvantaged” culture that is when cultural appropriation occurs.
The worry is that when white people take non-white cultures they dilute them weaken them, or take their original meaning out of them. To this I say, “yeah, that’s what happens whenever a cultural artifact is used outside of its origin.” Critics who use the cultural appropriation card complain that white people use the artifacts of oppressed cultures without the social cost. That they take the clothes or hairstyles of an “othered” culture and wear them as a fashion without wearing the cost that the oppressed culture wears. To THIS I would say, “that’s how those cultural artifacts stop being otherized, that’s how those to whom that culture belongs stop being “otherized.”
This cross-cultural pollination is extremely important for cultural and personal growth.
I recently binged the handful of videos by the Youtube Content Creator Uncle Roger, you may know him, his rise to fame has been nothing short of meteoric. He uploaded his first video a year ago, and he’s already nearly got 2 Million subscribers. He did some stand up, and some vlog style bits, usually ranting about one topic or another, sometimes about white people ruining things – all seriously funny, his bit on the racist instagrammer, it was seriously hilarious! I feel like it sounds like im being sarcastic considering the context of how I started this post, but it’s seriously funny, love those videos!
Abundant adult language warning.
Anyway, his biggest videos came from him putting on an exaggerated Chinese affectation, an orange polo, and critiquing various attempts to make egg fried rice, which you wouldn’t think would be a topic you could milk for more than a video or two, and yet…. He roasted Jamie Oliver, and Hersha Patel of the BBC and eventually touched on Gordon Ramsay’s video on Egg Fried Rice.
Now, I LOVE Gordon Ramsay, I occasionally watch Hell’s Kitchen, I’ve seen all the episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, I hate Master Chef because the one bald dude is insufferable, but I do love Master Chef Kids, the kids are adorable and it’s lovely to see Chef Ramsay relaxing and able to be a human being around the kids when they start to panic. And I was not really excited to see this guy tear into my favorite celebrity chef over egg fried rice. But he didn’t! Gordon, true to form, out of an abundance of love and respect for the food and culture with which he’ll be engaging did a great deal of work and research before filming this bit. The bit is coming from a show called, “Ramsay Around the World” so one should hope he does an abundance of research before engaging with foreign cuisine.
And of course Uncle Roger is impressed with his use of proper equipment (using a wok and not a frying pain), technique (not straining the rice through a colander), and ingredients (Using Galanga and not Chili Jam). In his previous videos reacting to Jamie Oliver and Hersha Patel he made fun of their white culinary talents (despite the fat that Hersha Patel is Indian), playing on this ignorance of proper Chinese Cuisine. Yet despite the fact that Gordon Ramsay is about as white as rice his egg fried rice passed with flying colors.
Clearly it wasn’t Jamie Oliver’s whiteness or Hersha Patel’s cultural whiteness which was preventing them from crafting a proper Chinese egg fried rice dish. It was their culinary ignorance. Ignorance which was not enhanced by Gordon Ramsay’s whiteness. Chef Ramsay put the effort in to make an authentic dish. IF Cultural Appropriation is a thing, then the absence of this effort is why and how.
Let’s take a look at another example: music. My father is the Director of Worship Arts at his church, and in a conversation we recently had on this very topic he bemoaned a particular musician who spent time writing gospel music, and spent time doing so poorly. This musician is white, and the conversation trended toward the notion that the reason why he wrote bad gospel music was because he was white. Specifically, because Gospel music has origins in black communities and this writer, being disconnected from that culture didn’t have the cultural backstory to write good Gospel music.
My contention then and now is that it’s not his race which prohibited him from writing good music but only his cultural disconnect. Gospel music – the best gospel music, comes from pain, from need, from the sort of life which relies on God for survival on a transcendent level. If you have lived a life of shelter, of… privilege, regardless of race you’ll be incapable of writing music which comes from a life of struggle. This isn’t to say that privileged people don’t suffer, but there’s a difference between the suffering inherent to all people and living a life defined by struggle.
The contrast to this is in the beauty of well written crossover music. There are innumerable examples of this, and i’m gonna briefly touch on three. First one that comes to mind is the crossover between Aerosmith and RUN DMC to make the legendary Walk This Way. Aerosmith had already had a hit on their hands with the original Walk this Way off their second album, but when RUN DMC added a fun rap line over Joe Perry’s naturally funky guitar riff it breathed new life into the hit, making it one of the biggest crossover hit songs of all time.
A little while ago I was recommended to watch Cowboy Bebop, an anime from the 90’s, it’s a classic and I highly recommend anyone watch it if you haven’t. One of the strongest points that this show has going for it is the music. The show is overladen with Jazz. A traditionally Black genre of music, these particular soundtracks are written and performed by the Seatbelts, led by Yoko Kanno, the same composer who wrote the music for Ghost in the Shell. This particular Japanese Jazz is incredible, and could not happen without the benefit of cultural appropriation. I was tempted to put up the song Chicken Bone as an example of this music, a song which plays while a kid and a dog are wandering through the desert looking for a mushroom dealer, but I think this song is a better example of the kind of music this series carries with it.
As a bonus, I would also present the same song performed at the Liberty City Anime Convention in 2018 by a multi-racial group called the J-Music Ensemble. Im no ethnologist, but I think I see a white, asian, black, and hispanic guy all playing Japanese Jazz in this video. I defy you to try sorting out who’s appropriating what in this video or to say that anyone in this video should not be performing this music on account of their race. .
And finally, how can we talk about inexplicable crossover hits without touching on the song which held the #1 spot on the BillboardHot 100 for a record-breaking NINETEEN CONSECUTIVE WEEKS, the fastest song to hit Diamond certification, and whichwent Platinum TWELVE times in the US, Old Town Road. For the record, I was really not expecting to like this song, i’m not really big into country or hip hop, and i’ve really not enjoyed the way pop music has trended in the last few… decades. But come on, even with the amount of overplay this song got how can you not have at least a little place in your heart for this black kid in a cowboy outfit racing his horse and riding a Maserati with Billy Ray Cyrus of all people? And it was obviously a HUGE success, the likes of which which DEVASTATES records, and unites country and hip hop in a way that more conscious attempts couldn’t possibly do. I’m looking at you Florida Georgia Line, with as much contempt as I ever have.
I could talk about stuff like this for a while, this really got me thinking about crossover/”appropriative” music that I really like, but I want to wrap this up. I understand that the principle behind cultural appropriation is that a dominant culture absorbing a subordinate culture is a bad thing. But that’s a perspective that fails to take into account a whole lot of things. When Yoko Kanno is taking the genre of Jazz and filtering it into an anime soundtrack who is the dominant culture? The black music which is being represented? The Japanese culture that’s cribbing it? The American culture which connects it all? What about with Old Town Road? There were eons worth of discussion around the cultural interactions of that song, most of it unresolved. Was the black hip hop artist writing a country song appropriating a culture? If so which one? Same with Walk This Way, it’s Aerosmith’s song, but the remix is under RUN DMC, so whose song is it?
Frankly, as interesting as these questions may be legally and maybe broadly philosophically, I don’t think the answers really matter. What matters is that all this incredible art came about from cultural appropriation. There is a line of course, when the use of any culture becomes tasteless it should be critiqued to the bone, be it attempts at gospel music which are shallow or pretentious, or lilly white pop music which has as much cultural nutrition as a snorted pixie stick, or whatever slime oozes from Lil Wayne’s lizard pores this month.
Drawing segregational lines around culture on the basis of race is racist. I’ve heard of choirs debating whether or not they are allowed to sing gospel music; whether or not people are allowed to wear clothes from other cultures. It’s insane and unhealthy. If you are black consider yourself encouraged to write all the country songs, design all the art deco architecture, and build all the nuclear bombs you want. If you’re white you have a right to make all the homemade tortilla shells, hip hop music, and oriental dresses you want. This is how cultures grow, this is how people grow, if you require cultures or individuals to segregate within their “home” cultures then they necessarily stagnate and may even die. Allowing cultures to interact and learn from each other and grow is crucial for cultural health. It’s cultural appropriation which develops understanding and breaks down racial and cultural walls. IF Cultural Appropriation exists, then it is a good thing, something which grows cultures, develops people, and creates beautiful cultural artifacts, tentpoles of multiculturalism.
I used to watch a lot of Adam Ruin’s Everything, that show on… what channel was it on? OH TruTV, I legitimately forgot what channel aired that show and had to look it up. Nothing in particular made me stop watching, interest just sort of waned. I think you can only be shocked by the lies which constitute society so many times before you start to guess the patterns of the hows as they go. Spoiler alert: 9 times out of 10 the misconceptions we have are born of REALLY efficient marketing. See: the DeBeers Diamond Cartel and the traditions around giving diamond engagement rings.
There was one episode that had a few points that really bugged me. One point of which i’m going to talk about today. First, he talked about the traditions around Santa Claus, that Santa and the tradition of gift-giving was centered around the historical character of St. Nicholas, a third century bishop of Myra whose history you can read about in a prior blog post. To make a long story that you should read short, St. Nicholas was a bishop who, upon hearing the financial woes of a trio of sisters in his community, snuck bags of gold coins from the church treasury into their stockings as they hung over the fire to dry so that they could afford a dowry and would not have to be sold into destitution and prostitution. He did so discreetly and anonymously so that he would not receive credit for his actions. This is where we get the tradition of gift giving – at least traditionally. The actual practical origin of gift-giving probably originated in the early 20th century – again read the blog post.
So Adam referring to this act of pure generosity as “creepy” irritated me enough to write two blogs about it, but that’s not really what this one is about. This is about comments he made in his section about how gift-giving makes no economic sense. In his short sketch he explains that every item that is owned by someone has economic value, this being the maximum amount that that person is willing to pay for said item. So, for example, I collect hardcovers of Star Wars Legends books, in general i’d be willing to pay up to $10-$15 for each book depending on the book. So if I pay less than that i’ve generated value. If there’s a hardcover of Outbound Flight that I really want and someone is foolishly parting with it for $.99 (plus shipping and handling) then i’ve made $9.00 (minus shipping and handling). On the other hand, if I’m trying to buy Darksaber just to round out my collection, a book which is worth next to nothing to me but can only find a copy for sale for $20 then i’ve essentially burned $20 buying it.
This same thing happens with gift-giving, only you can’t see the entire equation. Say I want to buy a book for my friend and I essentially guess randomly and buy a random book off the shelf at Barnes & Noble. I may have paid $40 for the Atlas Shrugged, but to my Communist friend i’ve essentially burned $20 to provide as a gift a piece of trash- which it is. To Conover and Co. that’s where the equation ends. If you buy something for someone and pay less for it than they would be willing to pay then you’ve generated value, and if you pay more than they would be willing to pay then you’ve lost value.
This fails to take in the two most important parts of gift-giving, on which I will now elaborate. The first is the old adage, “it’s the thought that counts.” And, frankly, this is true. That’s not to say that there’s no such thing as a bad gift of course. But to elaborate: when I was fresh out of college I had a job and one of my co-workers whom I neither liked nor respected, gave to me a gift (unprompted by any occasion or season) of a Yoda sippy cup. I was 22 at the time. This gift had negative value to me, because not only did I not want it, but I now had to do something with it, and so it sat in my closet for a year before I threw it out in a move, because by then I was 23 and no more likely to have a kid in the near future than I was the year prior. So you can definitely give bad gifts, but even then I appreciated the thought. Kind of. I wasn’t crazy about the fact that he saw a sippy cup and thought, “you know I bet Christian would ignore the fact that this was essentially made for toddlers just because it has Yoda on it” but whatever. Incidentally, if you have an adult Star Wars fan in your life and you’re unsure what to get them for their birthday or for Christmas or for your anniversary or whatever sippy cups and books like the one shown below aren’t good gifts. There are Star Wars books written for adults, not to mention plenty of trinkets or games that would have more value that books with more pictures than words and libation mechanisms designed to deliver spill-proof milk.
I mean… come on. I know it was a re-gift! Same with the stickerbook I got at 26!
Right, the other factor missing from Conover’s attempt to ruin one of the fundamental exchanges of sentiment, is what I like to call The After-School Special Effect. See, I love gift-giving. I really love gift-giving. Throughout the year I build a shopping list on amazon with gift ideas for friends for Christmas and Birthdays as I can remember and afford them. Usually I can get away with a cheap gift with a great deal of sentimental value. See, that sentiment cannot be so easily quantified. I almost like giving gifts more than receiving them because of the After School Special Effect. Watching someone get excited because I nailed a gift, watching them smile or laugh or squeal or if I can really nail the jackpot: cry, fills me with happiness more than receiving most gifts.
I don’t want to brag about my own gift-giving talents, so i’ll brag on a few gifts i’ve received from friends and family who have absolutely nailed it. I started to collect a handful of select vinyls a few years ago (because i’m exactly that type of person) and while I had a selection of classic rock albums on my wishlist my brother chose to buy me a vinyl copy of Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, the first real album statement i’d ever really taken in, and one of the first bands (besides the Jonas Brothers) that I really loved when I was in middle school. A vinyl copy of that album is probably around $25, a fair price, though I might not be willing to pay as much, but when combined with the fact that my brother took the time to consider what I wanted then spent money he earned on the gift it’s value increases significantly for me. I can’t say what value he gained from watching me react to the gift, but I can only assume when you add the value he got from watching me love his gift, with the “it’s the thought that counts” value of being given a gift at all, as well as the base value of the gift to me personally and he probably spend $25 on a gift whose experience as a gift was worth over $50.
Another time it was Christmas, our family has a tradition where my mother, bless her heart, stays up Christmas Eve writing couplets and hiding them around the house, one directing to the next, leading up to the big gift of the year. One year that couplet collection led to a model of the Grand Floridian Resort and Spa for our monorail set. Happy just to receive a model of a hotel whose aesthetic and architecture I loved neither of us expected the actual gift, which was a week or so vacation at Disney World at the Grand Floridian. I would say my parents hit the jackpot this year because I cried my eyes out at the reveal out of sheer joy and excitement. The hotel room itself was actually fairly small and nothing to write home about, but the vacation as a whole was amazing, and the simple fact of the pageantry and effort and secrecy put into all this made the vacation so much more than the sum of it’s value. If I recall correct this was our first Christmas season spent in Disney World, and those are always trips I deeply treasure.
I was given a gift by a friend in college years ago. It was a small catholic charm. It has the serenity prayer engraved on the back and a pair of hands in a prayer position on the front. The summer after I was given that I took it to a jeweler with my first summer paycheck and got it put in a bevel and have worn it around my neck basically every day since then. That charm was a gift to her from her grandmother and was given to me at a very difficult time in my life and wearing a charm around my neck like that is something i’d wanted to do ever since I was a kid and read a book where the main character did the same thing. So if you take the value that item has for me, plus the probably $50 I spent getting it beveled and chained around my neck and it’s value is something around $∞ + $50, which kind of breaks the whole economic value proposition of gift-giving. But if I really had to put a hard economic value of being given this particular item by this particular friend under these exact circumstances I would realistically say that it’s probably worth $200,000.00. With no hyperbole. I seriously sat down and thought about what it would take to part with this item and it would honestly have to cover my student loans, get me a down-payment on a decent house, and help jump-start some worthwhile investments to get me to part with this item. I took a look at other charms of the same nature and they’re all going for under $10, so in essence by being given this gift it generated roughly $200,000 of value.
I understand Conover’s stupid, emotionally dead, poorly conceived point about the economic value of gift-giving, and to a point I even agree. Like I said, if you have an adult friend who is into Star Wars it is not an acceptable gift to get them a Yoda sippy cup, or a baby’s first words book just because it is Star Wars branded. You should put thought and effort into gifts remembering at the very least that adults will not be as receptive to books written for toddlers, and that toddlers probably shouldn’t receive particularly violent video games as a gift. At the end of the day it is the thought that counts, but that thought requires effort, but that thought is what elevates gift-giving above the mercenary transaction of dropping an amazon gift card in a 30 cent bag. That’s safe, sure, and if your alternative is giving a sippy cup to a grown adult maybe that’s preferable. But the best option is to think and put the effort in.
And that’s what the act of gift giving in and out of Christmas is all about Charlie Brown….
Fauxy Correspondence 