I just bought the Criterion Collection DVD of Gillian Armstrong's 1979 film My Brilliant Career. It's one of my all-time favorite movies, and although I already own the 2005 Blue Underground DVD, I thought a Criterion edition with their supplementary material would be a good investment. The Criterion includes a couple of new interviews and Armstrong's student short film One Hundred a Day, which brought her to the attention of the producer Margaret Fink and soon led to the making of My Brilliant Career.
An interview with Fink on the Blue Underground DVD informed me that the first major financial backer of the project was very nervous about Sybylla the main character's refusal to marry a wealthy, eligible, and swoonworthy suitor. He changed his mind when he saw the final cut, but how interesting that a commercially-minded male industry type would agree with two radical gay male writers on that point, though their opinion was formed after they'd seen the film. Years later, Fink and Armstrong were still a bit nervous about it, protesting that it wasn't a feminist decision. I think it is, but then I don't think that counts against it. (As Rita Mae Brown wrote in a note in her second novel, To the non-feminist reader: What's wrong with you?)
Armstrong says that such an ending would be more acceptable today, but I'm not so sure of that. What would, I think, be acceptable would be for Sybylla to marry Harry, live comfortably in his mansion with a room of her own, numerous babies (tended by the help), as the camera pans over a row of her books visible and she writes in her workroom. For her to end up as she does in Armstrong's film, single, writing at night in her parents' rundown farmhouse in the outback, is less so. I think it's the difference between a woman's movie and a feminist movie. The former is okay, but there is a difference.
I am ambivalent about the Criterion Collection, which I think is somewhat overrated, partly as a result of all the "Criterion Closet" YouTube videos I've watched. In these, industry-connected people are turned loose with a bag in a big closet of Criterion videos. They gush over this cornucopia of great cinema, though the movies they choose tend to be pedestrian and predictable, and while I think it would be fun to have my pick of their products too, there are many great movies that aren't in the Collection and I want them too. While Criterion video transfers are excellent and the supplements are generally good, a Criterion edition means that older releases of the same movies often become unavailable, and Criterion editions cost more, often a lot more. (I know -- I can and often do buy used copies of the other versions.) Criterion editions are usually only in one language, unlike mainstream releases which may have several, and that can be valuable, as can subtitles in more than one language. But that's just me; I doubt many people notice or care about this.
Criterion editions also feature printed essays by prominent critics, though these tend to be of uneven quality. My Brilliant Career has one by Carrie Rickey, a critic I used to read in the Village Voice if memory serves. Rickey's essay is all right, but I quibble with one of her takes: "And while there is a fabulous kiss in My Brilliant Career, the first time Harry leans in to buss Sybylla, she hits him upside the head with a riding crop."
This is technically true, but I think it misreads the scene. Context: It takes place during a big party on Sybylla's maternal grandmother's estate. Sybylla has sneaked out of the upper-class ball in the big house to party with the workers in the barn. Class is an issue that I haven't seen addressed in discussions of My Brilliant Career. Sybylla's mother comes from bluebloods, her father is the salt of the earth. Thanks to childhood visits to her mother's mother, she knows her way around a formal dinner, but she also loves working people. (Miles Franklin, the author of the 1901 novel, eventually became a labor organizer in the United States.) Her suitor Harry Beecham drags her by the arm away from the barn and brusquely proposes marriage. She taunts him, which understandably makes him angry; he grabs her in a classic movie move and pulls her roughly to him. It's at that point that she hits him upside the head with a riding crop. I think Rickey plays down Harry's aggression in the scene. (I also don't agree that their eventual kiss is fabulous, but decide for yourself.)
But anyway, if you have never seen My Brilliant Career, you should. It holds up very well after forty years, and it looks great for a relatively low-budget movie, as lush as a Merchant-Ivory prestige production. Despite my reservations about Criterion, this edition shows off its visuals, and the English subtitles enabled me to understand some mumbled dialogue I'd missed before. For that matter, read the book.
Just a quickie about this lefty guy's words of wisdom. It's funny to see "eunuchs" used to mean "subservient toadies," when eunuchs historically have been regarded as ruthless, ambitious plotters who worked behind the scenes to undermine the power structure, not support it. If anything, it's macho men who love hierarchy and subordinate themselves for its perpetuation, and men on the left can't seem to shake off its appeal.
I found this video on Facebook the other day, and it's a concise account of the biblical scholar Dan McClellan's take on New Testament sexual ethics. Because it's short and captioned, I transcribed it.
This is just a brief reminder that the sexual ethic of the Apostle Paul has no relevance to today and Christians already reject the majority of it anyway. There are really only a couple of main points that are still preserved: abstinence before marriage and condemnation of same-sex intercourse. And those are preserved not because "this is god's will" or because the Bible says so. They're preserved because they have become convenient identity markers, and because they have become useful in the structuring of power and values in favor of the identity politics and the boundary maintenance of the relevant groups.
But everything else that Paul said is dismissed as just not for us anymore. Paul was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate, and you should only get married if you could not hack celibacy your sex should not be passionate because the passion of desire was for the dirty dirty gentiles who did not know God. Christian sex was to be holy and to be honorable, and the point was prophylaxis. Paul - because of Greek philosophical frameworks - thought of desire as a problematic product of our base material existence that we had to overcome, and so you had to keep a tight lid on sexual desire, and sex within marriage should only happen enough to screw down that lid tighter, so it was to be passionless and prophylactic and rare.
So it was not about procreation for Paul. He couldn't have cared less, he thought Jesus was coming back too soon for that to matter anyway. So Paul's motivations for these things are based on social historical ideological philosophical frameworks and circumstances that simply don't exist anymore. And so the majority of it has rightly been dismissed by Christians who recognize that it does not serve us anymore.
What we hold on to, we hold on to for rhetorical purposes because it serves our structuring of power and values, and there will also come a time when those things are rejected as not for us anymore. It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of when enough of us will decide that the utility to our boundary maintenance and our structuring of power and values is not worth the damage it does to the lives, to the mental health, to the well being of the people who are put in the crosshairs by the deployment of those things as identity markers.
This is wonderfully incoherent. I agree with some of what McClellan says, such as that most of today's Christians reject Paul's teachings on sexuality, though it's less deliberate dismissal than blithe ignorance of what they find inconvenient - a process that isn't limited to New Testament teachings on sexuality. Liberal Christians especially ignore the end-times teachings that permeate the New Testament, for example, displacing them onto the book of Revelation.
First, Paul's sexual ethic is also Jesus'. Jesus also regarded abstinence as preferable, while recognizing that not everyone could attain his standard. Matthew 19:12 is the most explicit example, though warnings that even feeling desire merited damnation appear elsewhere in the gospels. Displacing the anti-sexual teaching onto Paul is a popular apologetic move.
Second, their ethic didn't work for most people in their own day, not even for most Christians. But then Jesus taught that most people would be damned, so it didn't matter. Probably their teachings work, or are relevant, for the same proportion of people today. As McClellan says, a similar hostility to the passions was taught by some "Greek philosophical frameworks" of Paul's and Jesus' day; it seems to have been in the air. It can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism too, and some historians think that Buddhism may have influenced Greek philosophy. But those frameworks weren't embraced by most people then, any more than they are now.
McClellan says that Paul (and I would add Jesus) "was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate." Of course. We can see today that people tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences and hangups. But "dogmatically"? I don't think Paul would have been attracted by anti-sexual philosophy if he weren't already temperamentally in tune with it. The dogma followed from his own inclinations rather than vice versa, just as people today latch onto biblical or other teachings they agree with, ignoring their context.
Best of all, McClellan acknowledges that Paul condemned "same-sex
intercourse," which is not a biblical concept, but implies that Paul
(along with other biblical writers) would have condemned
"homosexuality," which is a subset of "same-sex intercourse," not a
discrete or separate thing. In other videos McClellan has claimed that the ancients (lumping together numerous cultures over a long period of time) didn't have "our concept of homosexuality" (lumping together numerous concepts within, presumably, the "modern West" or academic theorists).
Apologists almost always do this, I've found
(I've followed the debates for about 50 years): first they deny that
the Bible has anything to say about "homosexuality," then they flip and
say that it condemns "homosexuality." In the same way, orthodox Foucauldians will say that "homosexuality" didn't exist before the word was coined in the 1860s, then describe laws or attitudes that penalized homosexuality long before the 1860s, or use the word about cultures that have supposedly have no concept of homosexuality. Before McClellan mocks antigay dogmatists
for their incoherence and inaccuracy, he should consider the beam in his own
eye.
McClellan is misusing "identity politics" again. Has he read the Combahee River Collective Statement yet? The way he uses it is what he calls a "credence," a shibboleth to show that one belongs to a given group: biblical scholars, say, or hard-nosed anti-dogmatists. It seems to be bad when others use credences, but not when he uses them.
There's an old witticism that if you marry the spirit of the age you will soon be a widow/er. McClellan is aware of this, but he seems to think that he's exempt from it. He seems to believe in progress. The bad old dogmas will be abandoned, he says, because they don't serve us anymore. But who's "us" here? The values he rejects, he says reflect "our structuring of power and values," our "boundary maintenance." What will replace them? Won't their replacements also be about structuring power and values? I don't ask this, obviously, because I want to retain Jesus' and Paul's sexual ethics; it's because I've observed that power is served by the culture of therapy whose values are served by elite professionals with their own dogmas, credences, and desires to control others. All moral systems, including McClellan's whatever it is, including mine, are historically / culturally / ideologically influenced, no matter how sure their proponents are that they have risen above such constraints. And the more sure they are that they are uniquely qualified to protect and help those who've been wounded by the bad old dogmas, the more wrong they usually are.
Hemant Mehta, the self-styled Friendly Atheist, has never impressed me. He provides a useful service by tracking the Christian Right in his videos and blog posts, but it's hard to get a handle on his own politics.
In this video he reports on a youth minister-cum-junior high school basketball coach in Arkansas who told his church about the time he sowed the gospel to a student in the school library. Someone apparently leaked a video of his performance to Mehta.
We had a student in our middle school library this last week and I overheard this and so I just jumped in. I was like, I don't really care, you can fire me. I don't care. Right. Where's Todd? He's on the school board. Make sure it doesn't happen. Um, but this girl was asking Miss Cheney. She's like, 'Hey, I'm looking for like a book. Uh, it's got mystery and suspense." And so I was like, "I got you, sister." And I said, "Are you looking for something that's romantic, something that has suspense, thrilling? There is some murders in there. There's redemption, and there's a hero." And she said, "Where do I find it?" Sits right over there. It's the Bible. And then I just walked out. And I was like, I just teed off on that one, you know, and I was like, "Thanks, Miss Cheney, I'm so thankful." Um, but right, seriously, like like God just provided that opportunity and I know the girl, but I mean I was like, "Are you kidding me? Yeah. Like if you're looking for a book, I can show you one, right?" And so I just want to encourage you. And are they always that easy? Not necessarily, right? But I do want to encourage you. The opportunities are there all the time.
Mehta then goes on a rant:
Hey kids, if you want to read a book with genocide and incest, have I got the recommendations for you? What the hell is he doing? Let the librarian handle that one. That is not an opportunity that you need to tee off on. Like, no. No. And don't encourage other people to take that opportunity. No, that's not the proper time or place for that.
On the whole I agree with him - yes, the guy should keep his jobs separate - but one reason I included Mehta's video here was to let readers see his own tone and body language. I think he sounds just like the Christian-right censors he usually opposes: The Bible has genocide and incest! It's filth! Don't expose our innocent children to it! I suspect that the kind of books the girl was looking for include some objectionable material too - if they haven't already been purged from the school library by adults who just want to protect kids. I mean, I'm all for freedom of speech too, but next these Christians will have Our Children reading Shakespeare, the Iliad, Oedipus Rex and other Greek tragedies, Lord of the Flies, Maus, The Diary of Anne Frank, Twilight, and who knows what other obscenities? I'd like to think that Mehta was deliberately parodying the style, but I can't see that here. Even the sanitized retellings of Greek mythology I read as a kid in the Fifties included gory details such as Odysseus blinding the Cyclops with a burnt log and Procrustes torturing travelers to make them fit his guest bed. These were available in the elementary school library, yet I seem to have survived.
Mehta goes on to ask if Logan McCourtney, the youth pastor and coach, tries to impose his cult on his junior high school basketball players:
But I do wonder if this guy's doing this to a random girl in the library. He said he knows her. Whatever. If he's doing this in the library, what is he doing as the junior high basketball coach? Is he telling them to pray before games? Is he pushing his religion on those kids? Because we know what happened in the library cuz he bragged about it. We don't know what's happening when he's getting this team ready in a practice.
Fair questions, and someone connected to that school should ask them. But you know, I'm not sure we do know what happened in the library. We have only McCourtney's account, and braggarts shouldn't be taken too seriously whether they're secular or sacred. Since he's a preacher, it's even more reasonable to suspect he's exaggerating; he might have made the whole thing up so he could puff up his chest and boast of his devotion to the Lord. He dares the woke atheists to try to fire him (from the safety of a stage where they wouldn't hear him)! He has a buddy on the school board! Again, watch the clip: this is a stand-up comic at work, though there's not much daylight between a stand-up comic and a preacher. If Mehta had talked to the girl or the librarian involved, it would be different, but it's odd for him to take the guy at his word.
Even if McCourtney's account is accurate, we also don't know what happened next, what the girl thought, what the librarian said to her. As McCourtney tells it, he made a lightning intervention and got the hell out of Dodge. The girl might have rolled her eyes and said Geeyyyyy; the librarian might have rolled her eyes, told her not to be bothered, and made some helpful suggestions. It would be different if McCourtney were her teacher or, goddess forbid, her coach, but he isn't. Junior high students are already capable of independent thought, and we liberalswant them to be exposed to possibly discomforting literature and ideas, even in class. Don't we?
Mehta titled his video "A junior high basketball coach bragged at church about pushing the Bible on a kid." I didn't think so right away, but after watching the video and reading the comments on it, I think "pushing" is an exaggeration. Again, it's the kind of exaggeration I associate with Christian bigots (Woke teachers and librarians are pushing the trans agenda on our children!). I'd already noticed this in comments on other videos and elsewhere, but a significant number of liberals consider any public advocacy of religion, whether directed at them personally or not, as 'having religion forced on them.' (The same goes for booksellers offering recommendations online: that, to some people, constitutes refusing to sell any books they don't recommend.) Amusingly, they think that Jesus didn't go around pushing his beliefs on others, though that is exactly what he did according to the gospels, and he ordered his disciples to do the same. (I've seen similar claims made of the Buddha; sorry, children, but Buddhism is also a missionary, proselytizing religion.)
Some of these people had strict religious upbringings, which did involve forcing religion on them. I sympathize with them and understand why encountering missionaries makes them uncomfortable, but they are adults now, they often claim that they have left it behind and now think for themselves, and so on. Like it or not, and they don't, they live in a country with constitutionally protected freedom of speech and freedom of religion. That means that adults have a right to try to persuade other adults, even to convert them; it also means that they have the right to tell missionaries to take a hike, or to argue with them and try to persuade them to give up their religious beliefs. (Even more ostensibly open-minded Christians don't like that.) Schools are different in degree, which is exactly what the struggle over library censorship is about; where to draw the line is always up for negotiation, not only on religion but on history, sex education, "race," and other issues. Adults want to "protect" children, but they also want to control them. As students get older, the more discomfort they should be exposed to. As the educator Deborah Meier wrote:
There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity." First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories. But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later." *
It was funny at first to watch liberals and the Right switch sides on "discomfort." First Culture-of-Therapy liberals declared that no one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable; then they declared that if you're not feeling uncomfortable (mostly but not always about American history) then you're doing it wrong. Then the Right decided that no one should be made to feel uncomfortable about American history. But it's not really funny, because there are serious real-world consequences in these disagreements.
One especially telling comment under Mehta's video was this one (all punctuation sic):
"Free will is gods greatest gift" "Really then why do you all always want to take it away from people?"
A fair question, but in context the writer seems to think that simply declaring one's beliefs, or trying to persuade someone else to adopt them, is trying to take away their free will. It isn't. It's essential in a free society. I understand why many people want to take away that freedom, but they mustn't be allowed to do it. I think one problem is that they never learned to say "No, thank you" to such people. It's not surprising, because school is largely based on the assumption that saying "No" is intolerable disobedience; at some indefinite point adults are supposed to learn otherwise, but that point never arrives. Just this week I read another Miss Manners column where she explained that it is permissible simply to turn down unwanted or inconvenient invitations; "No thank you," amplified as "I'm so sorry, I can't," is all that needs to be said. (It's a mistake to invent excuses, which will encourage attempts to persuade you.) The other night a couple of Mormon elders knocked at my door; I said "No thank you," and they gave up gracefully. Not all missionaries are so agreeable, but they can be resisted and dismissed.)
It's good that Hemant Mehta objected to this pastor-coach's obnoxious conduct. But what does he want to protect children from? Does he want them to learn to think for themselves in a messy world? Or does he think it's enough if adults like him keep away any ideas that might make them uncomfortable?
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* The Power of Their Ideas, Beacon Press, 2002, page 81.
The speaker in this video is Brandan Robertson, a queer progressive Christian minister and theologian, author of Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025). Several of his TikTok videos have appeared in my Facebook feed, and I've watched them with growing irritation. TikTok videos seem to come and go, so I've transcribed this one:
And many of you will know the story because of the great work of the documentary crew 1946. If you've not seen that documentary, you should watch it. Amazing, amazing! But obviously, a fairly innocent translation mistake in 1946 led those English Bible translators to render the mysterious word arsenocoitai which is just a reference to Leviticus 18:22, which is a clear reference to exploitative sexual practice. They innocently chose the word "homosexual' because they thought that was making the Bible more modern, more relatable and now decades later almost every English translation has followed suit and most people assume that the Bible condemns homosexuality.
I haven't read Queer and Christian yet, nor have I seen 1946. In this post I'm going to address what Robertson says in this reel.
It's grotesque and morally tone-deaf to declare blandly that Leviticus condemns copulation between males as an "exploitative sexual practice." First, the Hebrew Bible has no objection to exploitative sexual practices, from selling young women into marriage (Genesis 29, for example) to concubinage to prostitution (Genesis 38) to the sexual enslavement of girls and women taken as booty in war (Numbers 31:15-20, Deuteronomy 21:10-14) to Yahweh himself grooming a girl child for his sexual use (Ezekiel 16).
Second, Leviticus demands the execution of both the "exploiter" and the "exploited"; it's as if I were to rob Brandan Robertson, and he was jailed as well as me. There's no ethical concern there, only an obsession with ritual purity. The same is true of Paul, even if he's right about 'arsenokoitai'; Robin Scroggs proposed that reading in his well-meaning but homophobic 1983 study, and he too overlooked that Paul also condemned the supposedly exploited 'malakoi.' So too did the RSV translators, by conflating the two categories under "homosexuals."
I haven't seen 1946 yet, so I don't know how the translators of the Revised Standard Version saw homosexuality. I do know that in that time and environment, the educated and compassionate view was that it was a disabling mental illness, but also that the homosexual was a predatory danger to the normal. I don't know, then, if their translation was "innocent" or accurately reflected their conception of the male bed. On Robertson's own reading, it still seems a reasonable translation, but like other apologists he wants to define homosexuality very narrowly, to defend styles he finds attractive and erase or demonize others. There's still a great deal of confusion over what "homosexual" refers to, even or especiallyamongacademics, and it has been thereall along.
Numerous gay Christian apologists have claimed that when Jesus healed a centurion's slave / boy / whatever, he affirmed a gay relationship. I'll have to read Queer and Christian to see if Robertson is one of these. But by gay Christian apologists' criteria that relationship could only have been exploitative.
It's very dishonest to blame antigay sentiment among English-speakers on this one passage alone, given Leviticus and Romans, or the endemic Christian antigay bigotry of centuries before 1946. As I recall, reactionary Christians in the US mostly attacked the Revised Standard Version anyway, hewing to the Authorized (or King James) Version. The waves of antigay repression that swept this country in the 20th century had little or nothing to do with the RSV or the translation of this verse. Does Robertson believe that psychiatry based its hostility to homosexuality on the 1946 RSV rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9?
It's certainly satisfying and encouraging that Mamdani defeated a well-funded, viciously defamatory campaign by a corrupt establishment, including Democratic Party leaders who developed a sudden amnesia about their own "Vote Blue No Matter Who" slogan. When he'd won they then exhibited similar amnesia about their refusal to endorse him. Bill Clinton, for example, endorsed sex-pest Andrew Cuomo, like his co-Epstein buddy Donald Trump, but flipped when it was all over. Hillary Clinton protested that she had no connection to New York, so why should she have an opinion? (Because she's a prominent Democratic politician who still feels free to comment on national politics the rest of the time, that's why.) The abrupt change of stance is classic doublethink. Even Barack Obama only praised Mamdani's campaign on November 3 (a day before the election); he stopped short of a formal endorsement, but offered to be a "sounding board" later on.
What I find more encouraging is that Mamdani's wasn't the only Democratic victory this month. It was an off-off-year election, and numerous Republican candidates went down in defeat. California voters passed Proposition 50 to redistrict in favor of Democrats. I'm ambivalent about that, but with MAGA Republicans in several states pushing redistricting to favor themselves, it shows that the move can backfire. Corporate media have tried to minimize the outcomes by declaring the Democratic winners "pragmatic" or "more pragmatic" than the "radical" Mamdani, but I call that damage control. Those media usually favor right-wing outcomes; remember their determined anticipation of a Red Wave in the 2022 midterms that didn't materialize? A lot can happen in the next year, but I doubt Trump will be able to buck the traditional midterm losses that Biden evaded.
At the same time, it's important to remember that Mamdani won his election with a 50.4 percent majority. That's not a mandate, though the media have assigned mandates to winners with smaller or no majorities. (Trump got only a plurality in 2024, and he lost the popular vote in 2016.) That doesn't diminish Mamdani's success, since he came out of almost nowhere to defeat a favored (if unpopular) party choice in the primary. Cuomo only got 41 percent of the vote in the election itself; even if Curtis Sliwa had withdrawn from the race, the votes he got weren't enough to defeat Mamdani, not even if all who voted for him had switched to Cuomo. Mamdani has his work cut out for him, and many observers have noticed that. He's already moderated his positions on some matters, such as the police, and his worthy "affordability" promises can't be fulfilled by edict. I want him to succeed, but winning the election was just the beginning. His enemies know this even if some of his fans don't: the smear campaign against him is still going on.
As I always say, the discourse on race/ethnicity stinks to high heaven. I'm not necessarily complaining, mind you: it's also hilarious.
The racist Right's freakout is entirely predictable, from promises to boycott the NFL to Kristi Noem's threat to send ICE to the 2026 Superbowl. Liberals on social media get to point out that Puerto Ricans are US citizens, though that won't slow ICE down much, though many of them are evidently unaware that racist panic over Spanish language is no new thing. I remember for example, during Dubya's second term, a similar freakout over Spanish translations of "The Star Spangled Banner." That was before I was even on Facebook, but it was covered by the corporate media. Then, a few years later, social media blew up when an eleven-year-old Mexican-American sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" (in English) at a pro basketball game in Texas. The kid was a US citizen, son of a US naval veteran, but that cuts no ice with racists. And such cases are just the most visible.
Just remember that Spanish is also a colonialist language. It's hilarious when
Spanish-speaking Americans claim that they've been colonized by the
gringos; it's like when the English colonial slaveowners said they were
being enslaved by the Crown. When Bad Bunny appeared on Saturday Night Live last weekend,
...the artist included some words in Spanish that he devoted to “all the Latinos and Latinas in the entire world and here in the United States”.
“More than being an accomplishment of mine, it’s an accomplishment for everybody, demonstrating that our mark and our contribution to this country will never be able to be removed or erased by anybody,” he said in Spanish. Afterwards, he said in English: “If you didn’t understand what I just said, you have four months to learn.”
It's certainly important to remember the accomplishments of Latinos and Latinas in the Americas, including the US, but it's just as important to remember that their heritage includes horrible oppression of the people who were living here when the Spanish invaded. If I, as an Anglo, need to be aware of the crimes of the English colonists (and I am), Bad Bunny needs to remember his heritage of invasion, colonization, and racism. That heritage continued almost unquestioned until the end of the 20th century. I've had numerous occasions in this blog to notice the way that the Spanish-speaking descendants of African slaves are considered "non-Western" by academics, and the American Indians simply folded into the supposedly non-Western "Hispanic" category. (One example I haven't written about, but should: US academics writing on Mexican homosexuality classified European-trained Mexican doctors in the early 20th century as resisting colonialist Freudian theory on sexuality. This jibes with South Asian antigay bigots who cite European antigay bigots as authority for resisting changes in Indian law and society.) Indigenous activists throughout Latin America have more and more to say about that.
I couldn't care much less about the half-time shows at the Superbowl, nor am I a fan of Bad Bunny. (I watched a few of his music videos on YouTube and realized that I'd heard some of his music before in Mexican restaurants. Boooooring, my dears - but my personal taste isn't the issue, I'm not a fan of Taylor Swift either, and it doesn't make me more sympathetic to MAGA.) It's worth noticing that white players are evidently a minority in the NFL now, and that Latins are a rapidly growing part of the fanbase. That's good for the capitalists who own the sport, not so good for most of us. Bad Bunny is immensely popular around the world, and this controversy isn't going to hurt him - probably the opposite. The frothing of racist malcontents in the US is going to contribute to our growing polarization, and I don't know what can constructively be done about that. The muddling of race/ethnicity on all sides is a side issue by comparison, but it still contributes nothing to clarity.
The notorious liberal pundit Matt Yglesias posted on Twitter that he could understand why Palestinians would care about Palestine, but not why American college students cared, or thought they should care, or pretended to care about Palestinians.
The
thing about Rashida Tlaib is she's Palestinian, it makes perfect sense
for her to be mad at Israel and fired-up about it ... what's sus is all
the people who aren't Palestinian and seem to care 1000x more about this
than any other humanitarian issue. I once met a Syriac Christian who
told me with passion and detail about how his people had been wronged
[by] American policy and I took it very seriously, but it would be weird
if some average college student was obsessed with this.
This was in November 2023, not quite a month after the October 7 attack. I should have written about it at the time, but I procrastinated - and then this month Yglesias repeated himself. As far as I can tell, that post has been deleted, but someone saved a screenshot.
I see where he's coming from, but doesn't that mean it's "sus" for American Gentiles like me to care about Israel? A commenter asked Yglesias about that. He replied that it's a "fair question" but didn't answer it.
One obvious riposte, made by most US critics of Israel I see, is that we are paying for Israel's crimes, with money, armament, and intelligence. This isn't some obscure little conflict in some unknown corner of the world; the US government is obsessed with Israel.
But I've always rationalized these matters in transactional terms: If I, as a gay man, want non-gay people to sympathize with and support my situation and movement, then I must do the same in return. But my concern for other groups began before I thought of homosexuality as something to be supported. I read an account of a Nazi massacre of Jews when I was in sixth grade, which marked me forever after, and I grew up with the ascendance of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. To me that's ordinary humanity, something that Yglesias seems to lack.
A feature of the Civil Rights Movement was the involvement of white people, including students and clergy, who traveled South and put their own lives on the line, hoping that their presence would deter white racists somewhat. As anyone who knows about the period knows, it didn't always succeed. Similar involvement occurred with targets of US violence such as Cuba, Central America, and Vietnam. I remember people like Yglesias in those days, who dismissed those activists as childlike, neurotic idealists. Whole books were written by sober clinicians, explaining that they were just working through father issues. I suppose that was kinder than frothing that they were Communists, a fifth column of useful idiots trying to undermine the American way, but both approaches represented a determination to ignore the issues at stake, a refusal to think.
I began losing sympathy with Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and my sympathy has been dwindling with each successive wave of their atrocities. Even now, when it has dwindled to zero, I don't call for the destruction of Israel, except in the metaphorical way that a one-state solution would mean its end as a ethnonationalist state. The only way to stop the cycle of violence is to stop it. I don't know how that can be done, but I know that bombing Israel into the stone age wouldn't work. The fantasy that you can terrorize your enemies into submission is a vain one; that approach never works for long. One obstacle to a constructive solution is people like Matthew Yglesias, who's not the only supporter of Israel who shares his indifference to the suffering of others. As Nathan Robinson's essay at Current Affairs shows in detail, his insular vision isn't even limited to Palestians: Yglesias casually dismisses the poor and weak of every variety, every class with the same smug callousness.
As you'll see if you click through to the threads that set me off on this post, he and his supporters and friends take the same bemused view of his critics that most of Israel's apologists take: Why, they ask, do you guys only criticize Israel and Matty? Why are you so obsessed? Why don't you attack someone else? The answer, which I've given many times, is that I attack other countries and pundits too. So do other left writers. Of course that just shows our immaturity and hypocrisy: we don't really careabout black Americans, Vietnamese, refugees, or Palestinians - any more than Karl Marx really cared about children working in factories. Yglesias and his ilk, they'd have us believe, really do care, which they show by opposing any ameliorative action at all.
I'm old enough that I should know better, but when my Facebook memories dredged up this gem today, I was amazed all over again at how aggressively stupid Richard Dawkins is. It seems to me that Karl Marx still has more than a "few followers" today, and I suspect that Dawkins believed that, however few he has, they are still too many. What's a follower, anyway? I suppose Yuval Noah Harari was his target here, but typically for the kind of thinker he is, Dawkins likes airy, sweeping dismissals of his real or imagined opponents. The Marxist writers I'm aware of have read his work and study it, but they're not uncritical, not what I think of as followers. I have read very little by Marx, so I don't have an overall sense of his ideas. Besides, like many heavy thinkers, he changed positions over time, so: which Marx? Dawkins makes it easy in this case: I suppose he means the Marx of Capital, the massive analysis of capitalism he didn't live to finish. I haven't read it, and I wonder if Dawkins has.
I also don't think I understand what he intends by devoting time "to the Internet & human genome." As I've noticed before, Dawkins has a tendency to write sloppily, especially on social media, and then to complain when he is, or thinks he is, misunderstood. Did he mean that potential Marxists should instead seek employment in the tech industry or biotech, and if so, why? Should they forget their reading of Capital and simply enjoy the rewards of working for Google, Meta, X, or the distinguished biblical scholar Peter Thiel?
This reminded me of the neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky, who once wrote (in The Trouble with Testosterone (pp. 107-8]:
We all do indeed have our dark sides. One evening, that great horned toad of an awkward intellectual, Karl Marx, came home from fulminating in the British Museum. "At any rate," he wrote to Engels that night, "I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives." As well they did. Few of us can ever hope for that level of retributive pissiness. We merely fantasize about returning someday to our childhood neighborhoods, encountering the ex-bullies or the catty girls who were in the in-group when we were not, and beating them into contused, bloodied contrition with our thick stack of diplomas.
Luckily, it wasn't Sapolsky but his DNA that wrote this weird, confused passage. After I first read this, I found the letter by Marx his DNA quoted, to find out what had upset him so much, and wrote about it here. Briefly, he was upset by the abuses of child labor in Britain in the mid-19th century, and by the efforts of manufacturers to block any legislation that might keep them from exploiting it. It's certainly fascinating, and symptomatic, that Sapolsky's DNA put that on the same level as being turned down for a date by "catty girls." My DNA doesn't quite see the connection, but then I'm not a neuroscientist. Sapolsky's DNA recently published a book called Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin, 2023), but I don't know if my DNA will be able to find the time to read it. I'm sure it's every bit as deep as his reflections on Marx.
My DNA did read An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (Verso, 2011), edited by Robin Blackburn, which includes among other things, Marx's journalism for a radical New York newspaper during the American Civil War and his correspondence with Abraham Lincoln. I was impressed by the clarity and intelligence of Marx's coverage of the conflict. What made it most interesting to me was Marx's perspective as an outsider and a contemporary of the war: he couldn't know how it would turn out. Dawkins might not care that Marx's followers today would pause their reading of Capital long enough to put together such a book, but he should at least be aware that they did. Marxism is definitely pertinent to the connections between chattel slavery and "free labor" as it developed under capitalism, and I'm sure Dawkins would at least pay lip service to the idea that slavery should have been abolished; even that child labor isn't a good thing. In the past it displeased him. At his age, there's probably little hope that he'll give up sharing his opinions on matters he's ill-informed about and hasn't given any serious thought, but the world would be a less entertaining place without his outbursts, and nowadays I need all the entertainment I can get.
I found myself grumbling crankily over liberal reactions to American Eagle's ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, so here's a little more.
Another brand put out a commercial featuring a pretty actor saying “This tan? Genetics. I just got my color analysis back and guess what? Golden summer.” While susceptibility to tanning rather than burning may have a genetic component, a tan is no more genetic than a haircut, or the clothes the actor is wearing. That's another reminder that most people don't know what "genetic" means, and shouldn't be taken seriously when they invoke it. (Still, from a white-supremacist viewpoint, the "best" genes are the northern European ones that burn in the sun without tanning.)
But that includes inclusivity-minded liberals who think that being gay or trans is in one's genes, or that one's cultural tradition is in one's DNA, or that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived. (That last one is particularly painful, since the claim comes from one of America's best liberal writers, who subscribes to a bonkers idea about what DNA does and clings to it, rather sadly, despite harsh pushback from his commenters.)
I think a similar confusion drives the liberal freakout over Sydney Sweeney. Why not say: okay, she has good genes – so do any number of other people. Sure, racists think that only whites and especially she has good genes. The problem is that liberals think so too: if she has good genes, no one else has them. Remember Chris Hayes's claim, in his book on meritocracy, that once you've found the absolute best soprano in the world, there's no reason to listen to any other. Then remember A. E. Housman's comment on another classical scholar's work: "Three minutes' thought would suffice to find [that] this [is complete wackery]; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time." But liberals are addicted to "Oh, how can you say such terrible things?" as the first move in public discourse; for thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
I've written before that people like Sweeney, far from being special, are the least common denominators of human attractiveness. They can therefore be marketed to the largest possible number of consumers. Marketing and consumption is what they are used for - and never forget that without mass communications and the institutions of publicity and marketing, she wouldn't exist as a star. So thousands, even millions of men, can fantasize that her smiles are for them alone, and if she was lucky enough to meet them, she'd immediately recognize their supreme value; likewise, thousands or millions of young women can fantasize about being that desirable. On some level they all know it's just a fantasy, but it's still a rush.
If Sydney's genes are so great, though, she should be having babies - lots of babies - to perpetuate them. She's only their temporary custodian; that's what eugenics is all about. American Eagle's copywriters know it too:"In the ad, the blonde hair, blue-eyed actress says, 'Genes are passed
down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair
color, personality, and even eye color.'" (You didn't think she wrote her own lines, did you?) The same is true of her appearance. Her genes may give her a head start, but without workouts, makeup artists, and hairstylists, she wouldn't glow as much, and time's winged chariot is already bearing down on her. Not to pick on her alone, this is a well-known problem faced by all people whose appearance is their fortune; the examples of Cher, Michael Jackson, and Madonna - not to mention Laura Loomer, Kristi Noem, and Lauren Sánchez - stand as a warning to us all.
And while she's apparently a registered Republican, if she utters any heterodox opinions, her MAGA fan base will turn on her without mercy. So far it doesn't seem that Sydney Sweeney is such a big star; no doubt she's hoping to parley her new notoriety into reaching a higher level. That will have to be seen.
There was a kerfluffle recently over a new ad campaign for American Eagle Jeans that featured Sydney Sweeney, a young model and actress who for some reason has become MAGA's sweetheart. Not long before, terminally online right-wing guys were drooling over pictures of her cleavage and crowing that the Woke Left doesn't like pretty white girls -- take that, libtards! Or this. Or something. These were the same guys who threw tantrums because M&Ms were no longer sexy enough to please them, and complaining because liberal co-eds didn't want to date them. (Why did they want liberal women to date them anyway? Social media are full of "conservative" males denouncing liberal women as fat lesbians with tattoos and piercings and blue or pink hair who will never get a man; or as stuck-up hot bitches who think they're too good for a regular guy. But this is all just the mirror image of doughy gay guys who complain that some hot guy wouldn't breed* them, and I digress.)
But then things changed. There were many complaints that the ads promoted eugenics and white privilege (Sweeney is blonde and blue-eyed), which you'd ordinarily expect would help sales. But then sales fell off and foot traffic in American Eagle stores declined - not drastically, but noticeably. The business press suggested that AE might want to dial it back. Certain MAGA celebrities and media denounced the Woke Mob for discrimination against white people and the sacred Free Enterprise system, though they were happy enough when they could claim that America had rejected Gender Ideology and forced businesses to stop using trans celebrities in their marketing. Boycotts for me but not for thee. All very predictable.
What had surprised me, though, was the objection to "eugenics." Everybody knows that eugenics is bad. But liberals and progressives generally love biological determinism, invoking genes and chromosomes and DNA and evolution. They love to claim that this or that cultural phenomenon is "in our DNA." In its day, before the Nazis ruined it for everybody, eugenics was as popular on the left as on the right. (See Andre Pichot's The Pure Society [Verso, 2000].) Sydney Sweeney probably does have good genes, though that's not as much of an achievement as people think. So do any number of non-white celebrities adored for their looks. Maybe the American Eagle ads were a handy opportunity to push back against resurgent racism in American Society, but I don't think the people who objected were thinking strategically.
The idea that the masses should be swayed by "influencers" seems to span the political spectrum. Toward the left end it has the form that we should be able to see images of People Who Look Like Us in the media. They generally don't look like us, but we should be able to dream that plastic, focus-grouped celebrities are us, or at least are our friends and will inclusively accept us and give us a sense of belonging. I agree that there should be variety in the types of people's bodies depicted in media, but it's not enough, and I don't think that mass media can be engineered to give everybody a sense of belonging. Sometimes it's good not to belong. Sometimes you have to stand alone against public condemnation and even feel like an outcast. There are no easy solutions to really important problems; or sometimes a easy solution is painful in some way. But American Eagle isn't standing on principle, it's just interested in making money, and will change its sales pitch as it finds necessary.
Last month a San Francisco bookstore announced that it would no longer carry Joanne Rowling's books because of her anti-transgender campaigning. This caused some concern, some of it disingenuous, as I argued at the time. I didn't mention this bit, but it's an excellent example of the way people distort things, deliberately or not:
On Monday, Booksmith provided a list on its website of fantasy books similar to the “Harry Potter” series for readers who are interested in alternatives, sparking some backlash and a debate about whether bookstores should make decisions about which books their customers can access.
“So you’re going to curate your selections to only sell books by authors that you agree with politically,” one commenter wrote on social media. “Good to know. I’ll be shopping elsewhere.”
Recommending some books rather than others doesn't deny "access", nor does suggesting alternatives; bookstores and libraries do both, and uninterested customers can ignore them in favor of what they do like. Ask a clerk or a librarian if you don't know where to look.
Which reminds me of a recent thread from Twitter/X, intended to explain why guys aren't reading books anymore. "Exhibit A", a display of current fantasy fiction:
You see, if there are any books in the store or library that don't interest them, men and boys just have to flee the place before they are swamped in girl cooties. When called out, the poster replied "I think we need more diversity in traditional publishing today."
There has been a lot of fussing over the alleged shortage of "literary fiction" by straight white males nowadays, and I've been meaning to write something about that. As numerous writers have pointed out, it's not even certain that there is such a shortage; the alarmists have not cited any actual data in support of their claim, and have been openly impressionistic about it, it's just how it seems / feels to them. But I'll try to return to that issue some other time.
I'm not very interested in the kind of fantasy fiction on display in the photo above, and I've read a fair sample. It's not because it's girly, but because I'm put off by the preachiness and New-Agey spirituality common to the subgenre, and the formulaic though professional storytelling. I'll keep on sampling, though, because some of it made a powerful impression on me: Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) for example, and Victoria A. Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor (2018). Both authors have published more work set in their respective universes, which I've enjoyed, but The Goblin Emperor keeps drawing me back; I've already read it three or four times. The trouble is that there is so much being published, and fantasy isn't the only area important to me.
I've given up any reservations I might have had about the ethics of boycotting Rowling's work, though, now that she has urged a boycott herself, of the British retailer Marks and Spencer for having a transgender employee in the lingerie department. I'm not going to try to disentangle the facts from Rowling's agenda in the case. The point is that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the ... goose.
And when I began writing this post I remembered something else about Rowling: she adopted the initials J. K. instead of her actual name when the first Harry Potter book was published, at her publisher's urging. The idea was that a girl's name as author might alienate potential boy readers. Not unreasonably for an unknown debut writer, she went along with the ploy. (Playboy magazine pressured Ursula K. Le Guin into using her initials when they published a story by her in 1968, thirty years before Harry Potter.) Her treacherous chromosomes were never really a secret, and the series became a worldwide phenomenon. It's significant, though, that when it came time to publish her first non-Potter novel, she chose not only another pseudonym but an unambiguously masculine one. The first Robert Galbraith book didn't sell well until she, uh, came out as its author. Not to make too big a thing of it, but Rowling seems to have a penchant for gender disguise to mislead potential readers. Shouldn't she stop pretending that she can be a man for paraliterary purposes? One could probably make a case that Harry Potter was the wedge that led to the invasion of commercial fantasy by women, and terrifying, emasculating book displays that cause men to give up on reading altogether.
Snopes is a valuable resource overall, especially since its writers lay out the evidence for the claims it examines and why it is or isn't credible.
Like any resource, however, Snopes isn't perfect. I've noticed before that the site seems to go easy on right-wingers in high places. That's okay, it's a reminder that you should be ready to be skeptical and critical of all media.
Today, while looking up some other topics, I found a recent post addressing a claim by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. After South Park's latest episode, which satirized Noem's history of cosmetic enhancement, Noem told right-wing podcaster Glenn Beck, "It's so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It's only the liberals and the extremists who do that. If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can't."
Snopes writer Joe Esposito declared the quotation a "Correct Attribution," which it evidently was -- she did utter those words -- and left it there. It would have been entirely proper, and I'd have thought an irresistible followup, to examine her claim itself. Is it only "the liberals and the extremists" who "constantly make fun of women for how they look"? (I think it's a safe bet that by "extremists" she meant only left-wing extremists, not right-wing extremists like her boss or herself. And I should add that the word "extremist," used as an epithet as she did there, is also lazy.) That claim is obviously false; the right has a long history of doing it. Just below the Noem post, Snopes provided a link to an earlier post about right-wing fantasies that Michelle Obama is too butch-looking to be a woman and must therefore be a man. Contrariwise, South Park's previous episode had mocked Donald Trump's appearance even more harshly. Noem was lying, and it wouldn't have been unfair for Esposito to mention that she was stretching the truth, or something comparably mild.
Noem was right, it's lazy to make fun of women's appearance, but South Park doesn't pretend to be sober, responsible discourse. It has always, for twenty-seven seasons, been juvenile satire. For awhile, a sect of right-wingers, known as "South Park Conservatives," managed to persuade themselves that Parker and Stone were their BFFs. Even then it took some disciplined memory management to ignore the show's mockery of the right, but of course they managed it. (I see from that article that the label "South Park Conservatives" was coined by Andrew Sullivan; it figures.) I have no such illusions myself. I figured out early on that I only agreed intermittently with their opinions. I still enjoyed a lot of their work, and tuned it out when I didn't. I haven't seen the Noem episode yet -- neither, she says, has Noem -- but from the summaries I've seen, it also attacked her for her policies and her actions - her job.
Trump's MAGA base, for all their religious posturing, has taken advantage of the breaking of taboos South Park spearheaded by becoming grosser than their predecessors could have been - openly, anyway. Hence the "Fuck Your Feelings" t-shirts, balanced by their indignation when someone stamps on their own feelings. Stone and Parker have had to become even more outrageous to keep ahead of them.
I don't judge Noem or the rest of the Trump gang by their appearance, I judge them by the content of their characters - just as I judged their predecessors of both parties. It's not out of line, I should think, to notice that Trump judges women by their appearance: his female appointees are nearly all from the same mold. That wouldn't matter if they were competent or honest, but of course they aren't. They're chosen for their looks and their loyalty, their willingness to do what he tells them to.
I thought I'd written an update on this before, but apparently I didn't.
In late 2021, a "non-LGBTQ+ affirming" church opened in a liberal, artsy neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. Predictably, it attracted a lot of negative attention, but there were some notably strange things about it, which I wrote about in the blog post I just linked. First, it occupied a space that had been held vacant for some time by a landlord who supported the venture; second, it was planned to include a cafe and crafts vendors because, the founding owner and pastor declared, "I get really cringy about church spaces that are open for like an hour
on Sunday for service and then take up massive real estate and sit empty." As I observed in that earlier post, I don't have the impression that most churches sit empty except for "like an hour on Sunday for service." They have services on other days - Wednesdays appear to be popular - plus Bible study, fellowship groups, charity work including food pantries, and so on. The pastor didn't seem to have any interest in such activities, or to know about them.
Every so often I would do a search for Pioneers, and nothing turned up until early last year. According to this article, the church closed down on February 25, 2024, with a clearance (labeled "Garage") sale to dispose of its stock. I had the impression that the founders hadn't done much to build a congregation, and showed little interest in doing so. They thought that they could run a church like a business, but didn't even do that very well: a business let alone a church would have tried harder to get along in its neighborhood and community, but the pastor did her best to dodge engagement with those who objected to Pioneers' agenda. According to the accounts I read of its beginnings, they thought they could simply "plant" a church without testing the soil. It's surprising they lasted two years; good riddance.
Apropos of Hell, a writer I like on Twitter/X wrote on July 23:
As ever, the downside to being an atheist is that I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell.
He was referring to the Gaza Humanitarian Organization, which certainly is a despicable organization, set up by the Trump administration to pretend to deliver aid to suffering people in Gaza - but really to draw them to delivery sites so that the IDF can massacre them.
I sympathize, I really do, and I realize that his post is an anguished cry of helplessness expressing what many people feel about the horrors in the world. That's nothing new. It probably is why people invented the notion of post-mortem punishment, as Dan McClellan argued in the video I discussed last time: people suffer terribly, those who torment them not only get away with it but thrive, so why not threaten the bad guys with punishment after they die? It seems to make those who invent the notion feel a little better. But it does nothing to help the sufferers. It doesn't stop their suffering now or undo their pain. Promising that they will sit at Abraham's right hand and view the torment of the damned doesn't help them either. There is no Hell, there is no Heaven, but even if there were, the threat doesn't slow the bad guys down. Someone, it seems to me, has not escaped his religious upbringing.
It's also unwise to make assumptions about divine justice. In the context of Christian tradition, it's just as likely (zero equals zero) that Hell will be full of Muslims who dared to resist or attack the Holy Land given by God to His Chosen People, while the Christian Zionists behind the GHO who blessed Israel will spend eternity in Heavenly bliss. Anguished helplessness tends to make people overlook such things.
I see many posts on social media from people who react to the horrors in Gaza by saying that they're praying for peace, that God will end the suffering and give the children comfort, that Allah will destroy the evil state of so-called Israel, and so on. These are as empty as the post I quoted above. If a powerful deity cares about these things, it can do something about it. In the Yahwist traditions, it has done so before. The logical conclusion is that it is content with the way things are going and has no interest in stopping it.
The same applies, I think, to atheists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, 'You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?' ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing." Those who lack the cosmic perspective include Tyson himself: "Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country." Like other religious teachers, Tyson contains multitudes and can be quoted on any side of any issue.
I was also set off on this topic by a song I heard on my community radio station on Friday: "The Day the Politicians Died," by The Magnetic Fields.
I was infuriated by it. Unfortunately I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person in this band will go to hell ... just kidding. If every politician died tomorrow, nothing would change. The world would face the same problems of organization and distribution that it faces now, without the limited expertise that our institutions do have. But I don't know, maybe The Magnetic Fields are MAGA? It doesn't matter, because I've heard numerous people from all over the political spectrum express fantasies along these lines, as if politicians were a distinct race that can be extirpated. They consider other politicians not to be politicians, so they don't really want all politicians to die, just the bad ones. Bernie Sanders, Obama, the Clintons, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar et al.; or Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron De Santis, Mike Lee, Lauren Boebert et al. -- they aren't really politicians, they're doing the Lord's work and will be spared. It takes a lot of determined stupidity to think like this.
I have no exact solutions, but as a general principle I believe the only way to stop suffering is to stop inflicting it; not in a wishful afterlife, but in this one. You can't wipe out the bad guys, because your own side has an ample supply of bad guys. Removing either Hamas or Israel from the face of the earth would not end the conflict. (Which reminds me of another post I saw recently, that confused "war" with "conflict." More on that soon, I hope.) It can only end through negotiation, and then making change happen. Killing and terror just create more angry, vengeful people, guaranteeing that the killing and terror will continue. And hoping for eternal punishment won't end it either.
I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily. But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok. I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact. But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video.
McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on. As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell." At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!" He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his reconstruction of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity. I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."
So that much is good. I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna. As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved. If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring. It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all. Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek? Maybe he won't, I don't know.
I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood. (Aren't human tyrants always marketed with touching stories of their occasional generosity and kindness? You don't want to see them when they're mad, though.) God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15). As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick. But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ. As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway. It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.
Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus. Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way. The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety. The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.
Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory. When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers. SCHOOLED them. And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.
As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way. McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field. I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it. The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him. Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have been found in the past century. Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented. But we know surprisingly little about him, almost no new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.) The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do not know'". But scholarship abhors a vacuum. So do believers and unbelievers.
I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking. It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority. Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah. If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them. As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have. It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.
