Author: Eric Johnson

Social justice in America (Dec. 20, 2002)
I was walking down 15th Street in Washington, having received spiritual direction at the Catholic Information Center and soup from the Cosi restaurant on the same block. As I crossed K Street, from which hordes of lawyers and lobbyists spread their darkness across the continent, I saw a gray-haired black man standing on the corner, shaking a cup.
“Change for the homeless,” he kept repeating as the coins jingled. “Change for the homeless.”
We looked at each other for a moment, then he saw that I wasn’t going to give him anything. I felt a mild stab of remorse. I have a personal rule that I will not give money to strangers, but if it’s at all possible I will help them in some other way. I got my food to tide me over until after a showing of “The Two Towers,” at which time I would eat a full meal. What better way to live the Advent season than to give up my food to a man in need. Here was a fellow human being, destitute, just trying to eke out a living on the mean streets of D.C. How could I refuse him? What if he starved because of my selfishness? I stopped about four paces past him, turned around, and said, “Hey, would you like my soup?”
“Oh, no thanks, man,” he said in a friendly way, patting his stomach. “I just ate.”

Postscript: Marriage outside the Church
Thanks for answering my question, Pete. Unfortunately, I left out a word when I sent you the request. I meant to ask about was the validity of two baptized Catholics getting married before a Justice of the Peace. You answered that question in the third paragraph. I should remember that my coherence drops precipitously after midnight before I send messages to anybody.

Why did they sing?
You’ve seen them do it on poorly drawn greeting cards and towering works of art, but have you ever thought about why the angels sang at the Nativity? I really hadn’t before a few weeks ago. It’s strange, though, that the angels would sing — why would they be so happy that God had entered the (to them, lower) material world? I have my own ideas, but I’m curious to see what you all think.

Empty Lott
The problem with Trent Lott isn’t that he made a stupid comment a couple of weeks ago, one he’d get away with if he had the correct opinions. The problem is that he’s had a history of making stupid comments, and he was a poor majority leader the last time around. Nothing in Lott’s history indicates that he will grow more prudent or intelligent by remaining in a leadership position.
The Senate needs to consider some bills that will loom large in the light of history, foremost among them the partial-birth abortion and cloning bans. It will consider at least one or two Supreme Court nominations. If this guy were Sen. Santorum, you bet he’d have plenty of people willing to defend him, but as he is neither effective in a Machiavellian sense nor principled, he’s as good as gone. Look, it isn’t a human right to hold a political office. Don’t cry for this guy, if you’re at all tempted to rail against the “injustice” of a politician being held responsible for his remarks.

May the farce be with you
There ought to be a name for the phenomenon I’m about to describe — let’s call it the “Buyer’s Endorse.” It’s when you have committed time and money to something that sucks, but since you’ve just devoted those resources, you convince yourself that it was worthwhile.
My brother lent me the DVD of “Attack of the Clones” on Thanksgiving, and my wife Paige and I finally got around to seeing it this weekend. I saw it last summer, and afterwards, the warm glow of the Buyer’s Endorse clung to my body like a moist, warm blanket. Or maybe that was sweat, because it was summertime in northern Virginia. Either way, I thought I liked it.
Now that I’ve seen it again, I realize how much the movie sucked. Part of this is because Paige kept making snide (and fair) comments about the movie; part of it was because I kept comparing it to “The Phantom Menace,” whose plot, you will recall, turned on some sort of intergalactic trade dispute. (Nothing like a trade dispute to get the blood running! When you’re having a boring day at the office, don’t you think of the NAFTA negotiations to put a spring back in your step?)
Were “Clones” not part of the Star Wars marketing phenomenon, it would have gone straight to video after a short, ignominious run at the box office. Once again, the plot is inscrutable: something about that trade dispute turning ugly again, and rebellious guilds, and a crucial vote to restore order to the galaxy. I defy anyone to explain it adequately in fewer than 50 words. Yet for all of its complexity, the dramatic tension of the plot is almost wholly about protecting Senator Amidala (Natalie Portman) from getting murdered. From the opening scene to the climactic battle, the Jedi and the other forces of light
Why is she so important? Well, her character is demographically important because she draws girls to the theater. And for the last quarter of the movie, the bottom half of her tight-fitting white outfit is torn off, producing images that will inhabit the imaginations of young teenage boys for years to come. But other than as a cynical marketing ploy, we never see why the fate of the universe hangs on her very existence. Every once in a while, the script has the characters spew outbursts of gibberish having to do with “democracy” and the importance of the “republic,” but in a real democracy no individual is supposed to be indispensable. And while we’re on the breathtakingly dumb politics of “Clones,” in the last movie Amidala was a queen, but now she’s been appointed a senator because her two monarchical terms have expired. A term-limited queen! On a planet that belongs to a republic! Don’t any of the offices at Lucasfilm have a dictionary? Did anyone think to look up the meanings of the words they’re using?
This is a manifestation of a reversion to pre-modern drama. Before the Shakespeare, audiences accepted the existence of evil and needed no explanation as to why it was evil. Shakespeare attempted to probe the psychological roots of evil, without disputing its existence. Today, in movies like “Clones,” they don’t even bother to explain why evil people do what they do. So the folks in league with the Dark Side don’t just feed the doe-eyed senator to one of the many hideous, man-eating creatures that populate the Star Wars universe. No, they throw Amidala and her two Jedi protectors into an arena so several man-eating creatures can attack and kill them with plenty of witnesses. Why? Well, it’s a convention in the movies that bad guys never kill good guys outright, they have to kill them slowly so the good guys can escape.
Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, loved to watch Westerns in his spare time. People would ask why a man of his powerful, probing intellect would enjoy such slight entertainment. It’s simple, Wittgenstein explained: “There are the good guys, and there are the bad guys.” The original “Star Wars” was successful because it tapped into that primordial desire for earthly justice — to see evil men frustrated by a band of intrepid warriors. From all appearances, George Lucas believes that people watched that shallow, flawed movie because it had great special effects and imaginative extraterrestrials. George, you’d do well to leave your ranch and meet non-movie-industry-related people if you want to start making good movies again.