Eric Johnson: June 2005 Archives

Many misguided people, particularly those who have spent too much time in university classrooms, think that economic rights are for the rich and powerful. The opposite is true: in the absence of a legal system that safeguards private property, the rich can always protect their interests by hiring muscle and buying influence. (That's how organized crime was born.)

Jews and Christians agree that private property is divinely sanctioned, which is why God explicitly forbade theft in the Seventh Commandment. But the right to property is a natural right, and thus accessible to anyone with a functioning intellect. Ancient civilizations, East and West, prohibited thievery and often prescribed death as a punishment. Indeed, besides preserving the lives of its members, a mark of a functioning society is the ability to keep one man's hands off another man's goods.

The United States was founded on the ideal of private property. Our forefathers were so incensed with practice of housing British soldiers in private homes that they outlawed it in the Bill of Rights. They affirmed this fundamental right by only allowing a citizen's property to be taken under two circumstances: if he was convicted of a crime, or if the public good demanded it.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, without asking the people's permission, has authorized multi-billion-dollar corporations to steal people's houses, as long as the corporation can pay more taxes to the city government. You'd roll your eyes if a screenwriter came up with a plot that involved a major drug company commissioning a city council to destroy people's homes in order to build an office park, but that's pretty much what's going to happen in New London, Conn. Here are some of the little people whose homes are going to be demolished:

Petitioner Wilhelmina Dery, for example, lives in a house on Walbach Street that has been in her family for over 100 years. She was born in the house in 1918; her husband, petitioner Charles Dery, moved into the house when they married in 1946. Their son lives next door with his family in the house he received as a wedding gift, and joins his parents in this suit....

Big corporations are essential to modern life, as they are the best instruments for doing big things like creating new medicines, building airplanes, or running communications networks. But they're also made up of sinful human beings who can commit evils, and they should be restrained by the law appropriately.

This ruling represents a failure of justice at all levels of government. Theft is theft, whether it is performed by a burglar in the dead of night, or by a city council's decree, duly ratified by our unelected judicial tyrants.

Paige is still in the hospital with Molly, so I just watched a violent movie I knew she wouldn't see: "The Passion of the Christ." Though I wrote about it here several times last year — or more specifically, I wrote about the hysterical reaction to it — I hadn't seen it until tonight.

I was surprised at how much the movie didn't surprise me, probably because I had already read so much about it. It was so transparently grounded in the Faith that I experienced it more as a simple visual representation of Jesus' suffering and death than as an art object. There was no effort to convince, or even to teach. If you didn't know who Jesus was, or what he did prior to Holy Thursday, "The Passion" will not tell you because those things lie outside its scope. The images are so stark and the plot so barren of any narrative tricks that the subtitles were almost superfluous.

It's too much to hope, but perhaps other filmmakers will take up related projects. They needn't be believers; Robert Bolt wrote "A Man for All Seasons" and "The Mission" and he was not a praticing Christian, though he was sympathetic to those who are. Gibson did excellent work in fleshing out the characters of Pilate and his wife, and clever artists could take other biblical characters (Barabbas, Thomas, Paul) and turn them into protagonists of other movies.

It did surprise me that "The Passion" didn't make me pity Jesus' suffering as much as I thought I would, but perhaps that is a good thing. It seems to me that pity is a very dangerous emotion, capable of belittling its object. Pity puts the focus on the one who pities, not the one who has suffered misfortune. I felt the same way when I saw my fellow Marines injured. I helped them to my utmost, but I wouldn't have expected anyone to feel sorry for me if I had been wounded. We were Marines — we were supposed to suffer. It would have been ignoble to consider one's own suffering as more important than someone else's.

Similarly, I have never been disturbed by movies with scenes of battlefield violence, but I find it extremely difficult to watch the innocent and helpless suffer. I don't know how I made it through "Schindler's List," vowing never to watch it a second time. That is why, more than Jesus, it was Mary's pain that grieved me deeply. God is impassible and immutable; my personal sins cannot injure him in his divine nature. But seeing my sins contribute to a mother having to watch her son tortured to death is horrifying. I understand why God suffered for our salvation, but her? Why her? At least Joseph died a quiet death before the Crucifixion.

The answer, as "The Passion" explicitly shows, is that God wanted Our Lady to help guide and nurture the infant Church, just as she held baby Jesus to her breast after his birth. Yet we are all still culpable for piercing her sinless heart with the results of our sins, something I first contemplated when I wept in front of the "Pietá" in St. Peter's, long before I took the Faith seriously.

We try to ignore it, but the effects of our misdeeds careen around the world, affecting people who aren't directly involved. Happily, the converse is also true: our good deeds spill out and cascade through others' lives. I pray that for myself, and for all of us, the latter deeds outweigh the former.

This is the newest member of the Johnson family, Molly Colleen, who was 4 hours old when her picture was taken. She was born today at 10:32 a.m., and her mother is doing just fine. The kids can't wait to meet their new baby sister.

Molly weighs slightly under 8 pounds and she is 19 inches long. She is very good at crying already, and came into the world hungry, so I'm sure she'll be fine. Mother and child will probably be back home on Monday, barring any complications.

The newest member of the Johnson family is scheduled to be delivered on Friday, June 17. We're starting this novena tonight. Novenas are a big endeavor, but if you want to throw some random prayers our way for Paige's health and the baby's, feel free.

Amnesty International, like Greenpeace, is an organization I would join if it wasn't run by ideologues. Human rights should unite everyone of good will, but Amnesty has always been harder on Western or pro-Western governments than on the truly repressive regimes.

Now they have veered into Bush-hating territory. Two weeks ago, they caused a minor fracas by referring to the terrorist detainee camp in Guantanamo as a "gulag," then admitted they had no idea whether that was true. (Hint: unless it's a slave-labor camp, it's not a gulag.)

Dr. William F. Schulz (no relation to John or Steve), the director of Amnesty International USA (isn't that name an oxymoron?) said, "We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation."

At best, Dr. Schulz is misrepresenting and exaggerating Amnesty's findings. Even the few details they provide are questionable:

The Bush Administration cited Egypt for beating victims with fists, whips and metal rods. And yet US Major Michael Smith testified at an administrative review hearing last year that an autopsy of a captured Iraqi general revealed he had suffered five broken ribs that were "consistent with blunt force trauma, that is, either punching, kicking or striking with an object or being thrown into an object."

Five broken ribs might be painful, but that couldn't have been the cause of death. And who broke those ribs? Dr. Schulz implies that it was U.S. troops. Yet for all he knows, it was the general's fellow inmates.

Don't take my word for it — read the report yourself, or at least some of it. The country findings are long on summary, short on detail. The moral equivalence would be laughable if it weren't so sickening:

US-led forces in Iraq committed gross human rights violations, including unlawful killings and arbitrary detention, and evidence emerged of torture and ill-treatment. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during armed clashes between US-led forces and Iraqi security forces on the one side, and Iraqi armed groups on the other [emphasis added].

On the one side, you have thugs and murders who bomb mosques, churches, marketplaces, civilian vehicles; who kidnap and behead the innocent in the name of God; who desperately want to beat the rest of Iraqi society into submission so they can administer their "human rights violations" (and you can bet Amnesty won't be invited to observe.) On the other, you have thousands of Iraqis and Americans trying to stop these human beasts and build a more just society. But to Amnesty, it's just two sides fighting.

Dr. Schulz calls for "a truly independent investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers" and says not doing so "is tantamount to a whitewash, if not a cover-up, of these disgraceful crimes." Why isn't the Justice Department and the military judicial system equal to the task? Are they not independent? If not, who are the guilty men who are going free?

This irresponsible statement is an accusation against dozens of Bush Administration figures: "You're a criminal. Prove you aren't." Ironically, if a government presumed that a suspect was guilty and made him prove his innocence, they'd be violating the accused's human rights, and Amnesty would complain. Ye hypocrites!

HoDean, always good for a quote:

"You know, the Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people. They're a pretty monolithic party. Pretty much, they all behave the same, and they all look the same… It's pretty much a white Christian party,'' the former Vermont Governor [Howard Dean] told a San Francisco roundtable in reaction to a question about the lack of outreach to minority communities by political parties....

The comments are another example of why the former Vermont governor, who remains popular with the party's grassroots, has been a lightning rod for criticism since being elected to head the Democratic National Committee last February. His comments last week that Republicans "never made an honest living in their lives," which he later clarified to say Republican "leaders," were disavowed by leading Democrats including Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Pretty funny coming from a former governor of a 97% white state. One could say that, at least demographically, the Democrats are a "Christian" party, given that over 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, over twice the number that say they're Democrats.

Unless "Christian" is a code word for "Evangelical" or "fundamentalist," Dean probably means that the Republican party is the home for people who place their faith first in their lives. This nutty little man will drive off religiously serious voters, who tend to be morally conservative but are probably persuadable when it comes to, say, education or tax cuts.

And that's bad for the country. Both major political parties ought to be friendly toward religious voters — they used to be. 1984 was the first year that (to my knowledge) a pro-abortion Democrat ran for national office. Evangelicals used to split their votes between the parties, and Catholics used to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Now, one major political party forces believing, orthodox Christians to betray or ignore their faith, if they vote for its candidates. You cannot be in favor of medical experiments on tiny human beings, gay marriage, easy divorce, condoms for schoolkids, abortion, and pornography, and reconcile that with Christianity. In the long run, you either cast your lot with the ways of the world, or the ways of God. It isn't that the GOP is the party of God and the Democrats aren't; that is far too simplistic. Rather, the Democratic platform contains elements that go against the plain meaning of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian tradition. On top of that, a large number of Democrats hate — the word is not too strong — people of faith and disdain them with words normally reserved for people who commit mass murder or high treason.

Democrats will either abandon their quixotic quest to build their free-love, quasi-socialistic, pacifist utopia because the American people have rejected it, or they will convince Americans that the post-Christian society is the way to go. The only way they've been able to keep their party going is through racial demagoguery and promises to sustain middle-class welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare. Most Americans don't think that 13-year-old girls should have sex, much less get abortions without their parents' permission, and they don't think two men can make a marriage. If the party would drop its advocacy of those two issues alone, it would cause serious damage by stealing away weakly committed Republicans. But then a lot of hard-core Democrats would have to abandon deeply-held religious beliefs of their own, whether or not they label those beliefs as such.

If you knew a bunch of guys who collectively predicted the winning Super Bowl team before the season started, you'd think they were smart but lucky. However, if after 10 seasons they made seven correct Super Bowl predictions, you would think they really had a grasp of the sport.

But if you knew a group that kept insisting they knew everything about football, yet in 10 years they never managed to name one of the Super Bowl teams, much less the winner, you might question whether they understood the dynamics of the game.

The news media are a lot like the latter group of football fans. They've gotten Iraq wrong in so many respects, one wonders why they bother offering any analysis at all. You remember what the "experts" predicted: invading Iraq would provoke the "Arab steet"; unlike the Gulf War, the Iraqis would defend their country to the death; the United States military is unable to fight an insurgency effectively; turnout in the January election will be light; and so forth. (Curiously, they never predicted that we would find no weapons of mass destruction.)

They do continue, though, as in this account of a BBC reporter confidently predicting an imminent Iraqi civil war. There is a great deal of wishful thinking bound up in that remark, but is part of a much larger, much longer pattern: Stalin is our friend and would never do anything nasty. The North Vietnamese are patriots and would never harm their fellow countrymen. Ronald Reagan will start a nuclear war. Sanctions will dislodge Saddam's army from Kuwait....

Primarily, the press makes bad calls because they have a faulty view of how the universe works. Rather than fix their model so they can make more accurate predictions, they continue to insist on the validity of their assumptions.

This manifests itself in odd ways, most prominently in how they analyze President Bush. The reasoning seems to be this: because he is a slack-jawed Texan who lives his faith, and knows nothing about the outside world, the president is a fool. Therefore, everything he does is foolish. Ergo, any specific action or policy is likely to be disastrous.

This also explains why religous coverage is so abysmal, when it exists at all. Most mainstream press members think that religion is a secondary or tertiary characteristic about a person, like height or body weight, something that might or might not affect one's daily life. For most people in the world, it is what they build their lives around. Instead of making bad predictions, the press is simply baffled by the whole subject and resorts to comfortable terms. Thus, clergy are "liberal" or "conservative," not "traditional" or "hererodox."

In a quite different but still related example, you would have thought that a year ago, Moqtada "Mookie" al Sadr was routing the American military and leading a mass Shiite revolt. In reality, most Shiite leaders looked the other way as the gallant men of the Army's First Cavalry Division slayed 5,000 of Mookie's goons. There was no general Shia uprising, and now the would-be revolutionary is trying to get into normal electoral politics. Had the press considered Mookie's lack of status in the Shiite clerical pecking order, they might have realized that few imams would come to his aid.

This is a fixable problem, but it is an open question as to whether the oldline media can reform itself. They pay themselves in flattery, imagining themselves to be master analysts of the universe, and feeding one's own intellectual pride is as addictive as a narcotic. Admitting their errors and making ideological adjustments is possible, but it's not the way to wager.

One of Hank Williams Jr.'s songs is called "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down." Yet a few years later, he recorded "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight." What happened — did he get new rowdy friends? Or did his old friends get rowdy again?

Bonus random thought: Hank Jr. has recorded a lot of crappy music, but his best songs make up for that. These lines of his might be my favorite, from "Family Tradition":

Lordy, I have loved some ladies
and I have loved Jim Beam
and they both tried to kill me
in nineteen-seventy-three....

Was anyone else skeptical of computer-generated movies when they first started coming out? When I read about "Toy Story," I was more than skeptical. The name was dumb. The company that made it, Pixar, was created by Steve Jobs, the too-clever-by-half co-founder of Apple. How could they cut humans out of the creative process? And so on.

Somehow, my lovely girlfriend (now wife) convinced me to see "Toy Story" on videotape, and to my shock, I completely loved it. Before we started having kids, I saw it three times, and I've seen it twice with them.

There hasn't been a Pixar movie I disliked, yet every time a new one comes out, I still go through the same cycle: hearing about it and thinking it will be lame, reluctantly seeing it because of good reviews, and then thinking it's the most innovative and compelling film I've seen in a long time. Maybe I have difficulty believing that they can equal or top their previous works.

True to the pattern, when "The Incredibles" opened, I was unenthusiastic. Nothing about the plot sounded compelling — family of superheroes doing super stuff, yawn — and I never saw it in the theater.

Which is something I now regret. Paige bought the DVD the weekend it came out, and not only did I find it completely mesmerizing, by the time it was halfway over I thought, "When can I see this again?"

Like J.S. Bach, Pixar is content to work within existing genres. Dramatically speaking, "The Incredibles" breaks no new ground. Not only is the plot conventional, you've seen most of the visual tropes in at least a dozen other action-adventure movies, like the hero chained up after being caught by the bad guy, or the superhero protagonists striking a pose right before they fight their enemies. The score contains overt references to the early James Bond movies.

But like Bach, so much inventive genius is poured into this film that it seems completely new. At Pixar's birth, people assumed that if it was successful, it would be because it harnessed the nascent power of computer graphics. In reality, they are the most successful studio in Hollywood because they grasped something very old: that plot, character, theme, and spectacle (in that order) are the keys to making good drama, just like Aristotle taught twenty-four centuries ago.

Also, the studio makes family-oriented entertainment without descending into blandness or cloying preachiness. The original beginning of "The Incredibles," shown in rough form on the bonus DVD, showed Elastigirl as a new mother, getting insulted by a career woman who thought being a full-time mom was a dumb choice. Incensed, Elastigirl gives a speech about there would be much less evil in the world if more parents spent time raising their own kids, et cetera. Though I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, the revised beginning is far better — the pro-motherhood message is subtly woven through the movie, which makes it more effective, not less. And besides, even without delivering any lectures, Elastigirl is self-evidently a total badass.

Celebrating human excellence, and how insane it is to pretend that some people's special gifts aren't really special, is the other important thematic thread. "The Incredibles" could be seen as a satire in the same vein as "Harrison Bergeron," the only thing Kurt Vonnegut wrote that's worth reading twice. Not allowing the gifted to excel doesn't hurt the gifted folks, the movie says, as much as society in general. One might think of the way people insist that Jesus, Mary, and the saints were "just like us," which is true if you mean they shared our human nature. But they were better than us, qualitatively better, and if we want to be better ourselves, we should try to emulate them, not pull their memories down to our level to please our complacent, lazy souls.

I could go on, but I won't, because lots of you have already seen "The Incredibles." If you haven't, and the philosophical aspects don't entice you, rent it for the sheer joy. You will care more about those cartoon movie people than most live-action movie people. (There's an essay waiting to be written about how animated characters are looking more and more realistic, and "real" actors look less and less.)

In the "making of" documentary, Brad Bird, the director and writer, says that the movie's goal was to fuse "the mundane and the fantastic." Kind of like the immanent and the transcendant. Sounds like a formula for lasting success.