Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (2004)
I just watched the stoner-movie Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, and found it to be a fairly refreshing experience. It basically is a road-trip movie about two stoners, Harold, a Korean American investment banker, and Kumar, an Indian American medical student, trying to satisfy their munchies by undertaking a midnight adventure to the 24-hour slider burger joint White Castle.
It is a film that has to be watched from the beginning to the end, and viewed as a whole, for if one takes out any one scene from it and examines it up close and personal, the scene probably would't be funny or humorous at all. It is the gradual buildup of a chain of one after another surreal situation our heroes found themselves in that makes the movie humorous in a very sly way.
I don't know if any of you out there have this similar experience. You're watching this comedy, and instead of laughing your tears out (many of who to
get Harold and Kumar did in fact), you are being constantly provoked by outwardly grotesque yet inwardly very clever puns and jokes, that sorta' tickle your funny bone in a very subtle way.
It is a social commentary in a very subtle way. Ethnic profiling, racial discrimination, stereotyping, etc. are all poked fun at. The makers of this film clearly did not adopt a confrontational and angry stance against the injustice our heroes have to face, including being stopped by a racist cop three o'clock in the morning; harassed by a gang of hooligans for no reason, etc., etc. Instead, they let our heroes, conformist kids as they are, subvert "the system" that is so prejudicial against them in very light-hearted, surreal (who would use a glider to get to a burger joint?) and humerous ways.
The whole racism thing is depicted in a very tongue-in-cheek way that helped to easily earn the sympathy of white audiences for our heroes without them even realizing it. Instead of protesting their unfair treatment vehemently, our heroes gleefully overlooked these nonsense, and instead put up a really perseverent effort to get what they want (be it a White Castle burger, or the American dream), letting Lady Justice to take care of their adversaries. Instead of portraying racism as something evil and scary, the filmmakers portray it more or less as something "un-cool." Notice that such a treatment could have far greater impact on gen-Y Americans than any treatise written by Professors W.E.B. DuBois or Randall Kennedy. At the same time, codemies are always the best venues for stereotypes that are otherwise sinister to be perverted. How refreshing it is to have a Korean and an Indian American stoner in the first place!
Anyhow, I recommend anyone who wants to watch a wickedly intelligent movie to go watch this one. It's a hilarious experience.
Book reviews
Gosh, I've been such a speed-reader these days. Just finished reading the
Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, and Karl Korsch's
Marxism and Philosophy (1923).
I'll have to write some brief reviews on these books, and hopefully I'll start doing it once my policy fellowship program in Washington D.C. is over. By the time then I should also have finished reading Thorstein Veblen's
The Theory of the Leisure Class.
In the meantime, I bought a mammoth of a treatise, called
Mathematics: Its contents, methods and meaning. It was a collection of essays on literally every branch of math one could think of, and was written by a group of former Soviet mathematicians. The editors are Professors Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov (possibly the greatest mathematician in the 20th century), and Lev'rentev. A.N. Kolmogorov himself wrote the chapter on probability, a field he
literally helped established.
Topics include a general overview, analysis, algebra, ordinary and differential equations, computational mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry, theory of the function of a complex variable, theory of the function of a real variable, modern algebra, probability and statistics, topology and functional analysis. There are also some exposition on mathematical logic.
I think I will not read the whole thing, but instead read the topics not covered in my own mathematical education in school.
Disposition and character
I recently realized that I am a very serious person. My mind is always pre-occupied by different kinds of metaphysical discourses and I have always enjoyed reading what people like Mortimer Adler would regard as
the classics, contemplating their meaning and significance. Whenever I am neither reading nor meditating, I work out in the gym incessantly, for ideological reasons: how can a physically weak person be a true philosopher; how could an undisciplined person by the guardian of his society?
Or, to use good ole' George Fox's words,
in my very young years I had a gravity and stayedness of mind and spirit not usual in children; insomuch that when I saw old men behave lightly and wantonly towards each other, I had a dislike thereof raised in my heart, and said within myself, "If ever I come to be a man, surely I shall not do so, nor be so wanton."
Whenever my company tries to pursuade me into the pursuit of "vain sports" or "vices" unbecoming to people of learning,
they grieved me very much.
Such a stoic and elitist attitude has proven to be a burden to me. I could no longer have any decent discourse with people not interested in having their mind pre-occupied by philosophy 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Neither could I communicate with my friends who indeed enjoy the undertaking of sports that are vain in my eyes.
Is it my problem or is it their problem? I think it's the former.
I may indeed be obssessed with the pursuit of understanding. I should probably relax a little bit more.
I came to realize this thanks to a person I barely know. He is a neighbor of mine, from Texas. He never wore herself out by debating with others pathologically over questions like whether there exists natural law or not, and he is seldom perturbed by thoughts on things not directly related to our lives.
He is, to some degree, a good embodiment of the common person, American or not. Optimistic and realistic; friendly and helpful; well-bred yet not manneristic; clever yet unpretentious; moral and rationalistic. I feel comfortable chatting with him.
Maybe I should detatch myself from metaphysical contemplation for a little while as well.
3M
When Dirk Jan Struik, the much celebrated Dutch-American differential geometer and historian of mathematics and science, celebrated his 100th birthday in 1994 (he died in 2000), a student reporter at MIT asked him,
"
How did you manage to write peer-reviewed articles when you're in your nineties?"
To which Dr. Struik replied,
"I live with three M's: marriage, mathematics and Marxism."
A foremost Marxian theoretician as well, Professor Struik is one of the few pure mathematician who were prosecuted during the McCarthyite era. A full professor at MIT, he was also a part-time organizer in the Boston workman's club and its affiliated labor union evening school. His representative works include
Lectures on Classical Differential Geometry and
Birth of the Communist Manifesto.
I am looking very hard for his
A Concise History of Mathematics, and was not able to locate a copy of it (which is strange: for it is a bestseller).
Coffee
For some reason I have become more addicted to caffeine. I know this is very unhealthy.
The Hungarians historically have been a very mathematical people. Back in the old days, a whole third of Stanford's mathematical faculty were Hungarian refugees, George Polya being one of the most famous among them.
Some of these Hungarian fellas' also gave us great anecdotes about coffee. Dr. Alfred Renyi, today with a whole institute named after him in Budapest, once remarked:
"A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems."
This is the guy who proved that
every even integer is the sum of a prime and an "almost prime number" (one with only two prime factors.)
His compatriot and friend Paul Turan carried his theorem one step further:
"Weak coffee is fit only for lemmas."
Who knows? Maybe coffee can make me less mathematically-unsophisticated. Maybe it really works. Maybe I should drink more of it and get a little more insightful.
Lawyers' humor
Here's a short story, collected by Mr. Patrick Yu, M.A. (Oxon.), barrister in Hong Kong, in his memoir
A Seventh Child and the Law. Mr. Yu is a very eminent criminal lawyer and a co-founder of the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong.
There was a foreign litigant who was sued in Hong Kong. He was very anxious about the case. It was a bench trial and the trial has been lasting for many many days.
As Christmas was approaching, this fella' went to his lawyer's office, and asked, "Do you think I should send a Christmas present to His Honor to sweeten up his verdict a little bit?"
His lawyer was utterly horrified, and warned him sternly, "I don't know what the customs of your country are; but no, in our city, you can get yourself into serious trouble by trying to bribe the judge."
Several days passed and the trial judge handed down a verdict more or less in favor of the foreigner.
"See? I've told you before:justice is not something we people from Hong Kong take very lightly." The lawyer boasted. "Are you so sure about that?" the foreigner smiled slyly, "Actually I did send my present to the Judge."
"You did what?" the lawyer almost collapsed into hysteria.
"I send the present in the other guy's name."
Songs of Innocence
William Blake (1757-1827) was one of the foremost Romantic poet in England as well as an accomplished engraver and painter, and political radical (a "republican", with lower-case "r", in 19th century England). I have just purchased a collection of his poetry and prose, edited by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
The Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience were the only ones I have read before: as a high-school junior who knew little about literature. Yet I was, even then, shaken by the rich texture and the dazzling colors of his works.
After not reading poetry for five years, I have decided to pick this old reading habit up again. Went to Borders, and bought myself a copy of Blake's selected works.
It was not until now that I could genuinely appreciate William Blake, the man and his works. According to an English professor, reading Blake's poetry is like listening the Almighty One, speaking in a deep human voices, with all the gravity, antiquity, tenderness and love of a Creator, to his children. It was also now that I could understand the moral dimension of Blake's words.
It is noteworthy that Blake in fact created engravings as illustrations for his poems. One of my favorites is his engraving on
Death on the Pale Horse. Other than the Songs of Innocence and Experience, published in the 1790s, he has also written a large number of poetic sketches, prophetic books, poetic elaborations on moral philosophy, and a large number of essays. Here's one good example:
On Another's sorrow
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear -
And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
Jesus the Son of Man by Kahlil Gibran, poet laureate of Lebanon
Why is the life and morals of a Jewish carpenter who lived in a bygone epoch fascinates us so much? I do not know.
Jesus was a Man of great contradictions. He was a Man whose Words invoke imaginations. Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese poet and essayist captured perfectly the nuance of Jesus of Nazareth’s being in Jesus The Son of Man, published in 1928.
It is a collection of fragments of memories, told by characters whom in their lives bore witness to Jesus’ life and death. Among these were the rugged John the Baptist, the hot-tempered yet kind hearted Simon Peter, the otherworldly John the Evangelist, the dutiful scribe Matthew, the authoritarian Annas and Caiaphas, the opportunistic Pilate and his long mournful wife, the dazzling yet sorrowful Salome, the ever enchanting Mary Magdalene, a number of Jesus’ contemporaries from the cobbler on the street to owners of vineyards and keepers of inns, and of course Judas, called the Iscariot, who “also betrayed the Lord.”
The most intriguing fragments involve Mary Magdalene, who’s relationship with Christ was indeed complicated. She seems to have a genuine affection for Him, yet fully aware of His holiness, she dared not reveal her love for him. This is clearly shown in the fragment On Meeting Jesus for the First Time, where:
It was in the month of June I saw Him for the first time…The rhythm of His step was different from other men’s; and the movement of His body was like naught I had seen before…
It was in the month of August that I saw Him again, through my window. He was sitting in the shadow of the cpress tree across my garden, and He was as still as if He had been carved out of stone, like the statues in Antioch…
And I gazed at Him, and my soul quivered within me, for He was beautiful…Then I clothed myself with raiment of Damascus, and I left my house and walked towards Him. Was it my aloneness, or was it His fragrance, that drew me to Him? Was it a hunger in my eyes that desired comeliness, or was it His beauty that sought the light of my eyes? Even now I do not know.
… I said, “Will you not have wine and bread with me?”
And He said, “Yes, Miriam, but not now.”
Not now, not now, He said. And the voice of the sea was in those two words, and the voice of the wind and the trees. And when He said them unto me, life spoke to death.
For mind you, my friend, I was dead. I was a woman who had divorced her soul…
But when His dawn-eyes looked into my eyes all the stars of my night faded away, and I became Miriam, only Miriam, a woman lost to the earth she had known, and finding herself in new places.
…And I said, “I beg you to come into my house.”…Then He looked at me, and the noontide of His eyes was upon me, and He said, “You have many lovers, and I alone love you. Other men love themselves in your nearness, I love you in yourself. Other men see a beauty in you that shall fade away sooner than their own years. But I see in you a beauty that shall not fade away, and in the autumn of your days that beauty shall not be afraid to gave at itself in the mirror, and it shall not be offended. I alone love the unseen in you.”
Most other characters, especially ones like Matthew, whose lives form the bulk of Christian Scriptures, were given more orthodox treatment. For instance, in Matthew’s recollection of the Sermon on the Mount, Gibran basically re-present the entire Sermon without altering it, except it is now presented in verse, instead of prose.
A second character that I found interesting was that of Salome. In a letter to her friend, Salome wrote about how she was haunted by the memories of John the Baptist, that holy yet obstinate man who was slain by Herod, and how she had met the Spirit of Christ, that eternal logos, within her very own soul.
A last character that was re-created was Judas Iscariot. Here he was not the “thief” demonized in the Scriptures, but a patriotic Zealot, who sought to revive his nation Israel. In the opening chapter, On the Kingdom of the World, Judas told Jesus, “
Behold, the kingdoms of the world are vast, and behold the cities of David and Solomon shall prevail against the Romans. If you will be the king of the Jews we shall stand beside you with sword and shield and we shall overcome the alien.” To this Jesus replied
, “My throne is a throne beyond your vision. Shall He whose wings encircle the Earth seek shelter in a nest abandoned and forgotten? My kingdom is not of this earth, and my seat is not builded upon the skulls of your ancestors.”
After he had betrayed his Master, he confided to his friend, with his hands trembling “
like dry wigs in the wind,” and his
“clothes…as wet as if he had stepped out of a river.” that
“when first He called us to Him He promised us a kingdom mighty and vast, and in our faith…I followed His steps willingly…But I found it was not a kingdom that Jesus sought, nor was it from the Romans He would have us free. His Kingdom was but the kingdom of the heart. I heard Him talk of love and charity and forgiveness, and the wayside women listened gladly, but my heart grew bitter and I was hardened.”
And I was hardened…is this not the root of many ills in our world: that we have hardened ourselves and our hearts and souls and minds?
John Kenneth Galbraith
I have just written a short bio piece for Professor John Kenneth Galbraith on the internet movie database, since aside from being a maverick economist at Harvard, Mr. Galbraith was also a commentator on a number of very well-made documentaries.
I did that after reading his smallish book,
The Affluent Society (1958), a book that earned him perennial enmity from his professional colleagues. It was in this book that he coined the term "conventional wisdom."
Born in Ontario, Canada, Mr. Galbraith received his early and college education in that country, graduating with a B.S. degree from the Ontario Agricultural College in 1931. Being thrust into a society plagued with the Great Depression, he wasn't able to secure a job and consequently he went back to school, culminating with a Ph.D. in economics from Berkeley in 1934.
He quickly joined the staff of the Office of Price Control and the Social Security Administration under the FDR administration, and gained a sterling reputation as the staunchest supporter of Keynesian economics and a fearless crusader against poverty. He was offered an assistant professorship at Princeton in 1939, and within a mere decade he rose to become Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard.
In 1952, he published his first important post-war treatise, American Capitalism: The Concept of Counvervailing Power, in which he made a proposition that almost literally shook the profession. He claimed that the prosperity of America lays not in the fact that her free markets have helped people to get the price level "right" (in the classical economic sense) and hence satisfying the preferences of all; it really lays in the fact that oligopolies were able to mark-up prices (and hence ensuring a "wrong" price level) and accumulate vast amount of capital, which enables them to conduct scientific research that no single competitor in a perfectly competitive market could afford. Nevertheless, to prevent these oligopolies from turning into all-powerful tyrannical forces in the American society, countervailing powers are needed to keep them in check. These powers include an ever-suspicious populace at large; a very active government that has no qualm using fiscal policies to achieve short and long run goals; and trade and labor unions that have enough bargaining power.
In 1958, he published
The Affluent Society, which challenged many of the conventional wisdoms and assumptions used by professional economists, including the idea of diminishing marginal utility; of the use of production level as measure of human satisfaction; of various precepts about income equality and security; and of the nature of the human want for luxury goods.
Together with Dr. Robert L. Heilbroner (b.1919), professor at the New School for Social Research, Galbraith represented the last dissenting voice in economics from the American Institutionalists. American Institutionalism is an ecclectic school of thought, which could trace its roots in the English and German Historical Schools. It stresses the interaction between economic and noneconomic, for example, cultural, institution; and the role played by noneconomic factors in shaping economic systems. Leading respresentatives include Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) , John Maurice Clark (1884-1963) and Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). Leading works include
The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen, 1899), The Engineers and the Price System (Veblen, 1921),
The Affluent Society (Galbraith, 1958), American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Galbraith, 1952); The Making of Economic Society (Heilbroner, 1963); The Worldly Philosophers (Heilbroner, 1955); The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (Heilbroner, 1979); The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 1944).
An interesting aspect of Institutionalist economists is their liberal use of Marxian concepts. Make no mistake: these people are not Marxists for they believe that the "System" is able to survive. Nevertheless, they borrow freely insights provided by the Marxists. They also have some link to evolutionary economics, a school led by Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), who wrote
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
A detailed book review on
The Affluent Society will soon be posted.
Good quote
From Dr. Eulogius Schneider, Beethoven's mentor, professor at the University of Bonn, Attorney General of Lower Rhine under Napoleon:
To despise fanaticism, to break the sceptre of stupidity, to fight for the rights of humanity, ah! no valet of princes can do that! It needs free souls that prefer death to flattery, poverty to servitude...And know that of such souls mine will not be the last!"
Beethoven the Creator
Among all the men of letters of the twentieth century, Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was the most intriguing. Musicologist, historian of art, communist sympathizer, socialist, pacifist, essayist, 1915 Nobel Laureate in literature, novelist, hermit; M. Rolland was the perennial loner whose "lofty idealism" in his literary production has ultimately embodied the "sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings," to paraphrase the citation of the Nobel prize he received.
He was also a man of great contradiction. A socialist activist, he advocated vehemently against violent resolution to class conflict; a staunch supporter of the democratic form of government, he nonetheless wholeheartedly endorsed the regime of blood and iron Josef Stalin established in Russia.
Above all, he was a music lover, and hence a comrade of mine. Yea, his doctoral dissertation, completed in that ancient institution of Paris, the University of Sorbonne, was on "The History of Opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti."
A revolutionary and a man ahead of his time, Rolland was a great admirer of Beethoven. One could argue that the protagonist of his magnum opus, Jean Christophe, completed 1912, was based on the life and passions of none other than that great composer.
It was via Rolland's "Beethoven the Creator: from Eroica to the Appassionata" that I finally come into spiritual communion with my beloved Beethoven. I have always played his piece, yet (using Biblical language), I knew him not. It was through another titan that I have finally unveiled that giant of all times.
Beethoven, under Rolland's passionate pen, was first and foremost a revolutionary with lofty ideals, whose defiant disposition forged by the rapidly changing attitudes of his time. And yes we are talking about a time when the whole civilized world, the ancien regime, fell apart, where every person's understanding of their place in the world, their
weltanshaung, were challenged by the torrents of revolution.
"The Music of Beethoven is the daughter of the same forces of imperious Nature that had just sought an outlet in the man of Rousseau's confessions...Rousseau and the Sturn und Drang, these April showers, these equinoctial storms, are the signs of the break-up of an old society and the coming of a new. And before the new can take shape there must be an emancipation of man as individual...Beethoven belongs to the first generation of those...who launched in the night on the stormy sea of the Revolution, discovered their own Ego and eagerly subdued it...everything becomes for him a field on which to deploy the battalions of his thoughts, his desires, his regrest, his furies, his melancholies. His imposes them on the world." In our composers' case, he chose music as his battlefield.
In one word, Beethoven is the "Ego" of the "period of combat." Not only were he going to smash all the irrational and barbarous vestiges of the old days, he is the "masculine sculptor who dominates his matter and bend it to his hand; the master-builder, with Nature for his yard." In his victories of the
Eroica and the
Appassionata, the most striking thing is "not the vastness of the armies, the floods of tone...but the spirit in command, the imperial reason."
To be such a master builder, one must first discipline one's own mind and flesh. This our Hero did. "The mind of Beethoven has strength for its base. The masculature is powerful, the body athletic...Everyone of his acquaintance was astonished at his physical rigor." "He was strength personified" exclaimed the poet Castelli. "He is one of the hard, knotty, pitted fruits of the age that produced a Mirabeau, a Danton, a Napoleon" our friend Rolland said. He sustains this strength of his by "means of vigorous ablutions with cold water, a scrupulous regard for personal clealiness...then a sleep so sound and long that he thanklessly complained against it!" His way of way was substantial but simple.
"The soul is willing, yet the flesh is weak" Thus spake our good Jesus of Nazareth to good ole' St. Peter. This is not the case of our Hero. Not only does he maintain a vigorous body, he guarded his mind and soul jealously against any possible contamination above all. To many of us, he has gone probably too far. "His conception of love is too lofty for him to be able...to degrade it in these--to use his own word--bestial (
viehisch) unions. He ended up by banishing the sensual from his own passional life." When Giulietta Giucciardi, the first object of affection young Beethoven ever had, "still beautiful, comes to him in tears and offer herself to him, he repulses her with disdain. He guards the sanctity of his memories against her, and he guards his art, his deity, against contaminations."
Within his heart, there are two dominating spirits, one cynical, the other warm. He is "rich in scorn--scorn for the feeble, the ignorant, the common people, equally so for the aristocracy, even for the good souls who love and admire him...of which he never quite succeeded in purging himself." Nevertheless, "imputation of this kind are belied, at every period of his life, by the torrent of his warm humanity." These two currents, vast love, vast scorn, often came to a clash in him.
The vast love for truth and perfection no doubt lead to his scorn for the outdated, the conservative, and the hypocritical. Whereas Goethe, Gluck and Rousseau concealed their ego beneath their humble manners, Beethoven "blurts out straight to [the nobility's] faces...the contempt or the insult that he has on his tongue for this world." One example, when he was rebuked by the Prince Lichnowsky, he wrote, "Prince, what you are are are by the accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven." When the Countess von Thun fell on her knees before him and begs him to play, Beethoven refused without even rising from his sofa.
It must finally be mentioned that Beethoven was a tremendously spiritual man. Defiant outwardly ("after all, Jesus of Nazareth was no more than a crucified Jew."), God to him "is the first reality, the most real of realities...He can treat him as an equal, or behave as his master. He can regard him as a companion to be treated roughly, as a tyrant to be cursed...or as a rough friend, a severe father
qui bene castigat." "But whatever this Being may be that is at issue with Beethoven, he is at issue with him at every hour of the day: he is of his household, and dwells in him; never does he leave him." In all of Beethoven's work, we find dialogues of the soul.
A Cinderella Story
Alright, Let me first confess that I am not a big fan of Hilary Duff. Given my age and upbringing, that probably shoudn't come of as a surprise. Nevertheless, unlike most critics, I have very mixed feelings towards her latest film, A Cinderella Story.
Most people could easily recognize this as one of the latest no-brainer teeny movies. And I concede, that the storyline is fairly idiotic. You've got a modern day Cinderella who gets bitched by her step-mom and evil step-sisters all day long, who met her prince charming in an online chatroom, went to a masquerade ball, and left her prince a cell-phone instead of a glass slipper...according to one critic, the only highlight (by this she means "not entirely rubbish") is the performance of the step-mom.
But I do have a different take on this issue. When we say a movie is "good", against what standard are we judging its virtues? The all-time classics of the old days? Probably not. It probably should be the other teen movies these days. But what else do we have? American Wedding? Where audiences are supposed to chuckle watching a big-time loser shaving his crotch? Old school? Where we see a drunk man running naked on the street and where we're supposed to find this humorous?
It is very interesting. Why can't movies that are not as tasteless and as utterly depraved as recent teen movies be more interesting? Why do people who have their heads on their shoulders have to be boring? This doesn't make any sense at all.
Back to Cinderella. There is a better version of the story, made in Communist Czeckoslovakia in 1973. It's a very interesting feminist version of the story, in which Cinderella is no longer your brittle and willowy weeping beauty. She's not your typical princess who needs a prince to take care of. Nay, she's the decider of her own fate; a warrior within whose soul "destiny meets one of its own stature, who seized it by the throat" ; and above all, a girl of good cheer. She also displays great physical rigor, outperforming the prince in both archery and dancing. There is no such thing as the godmother in this movie, although our heroin did make use of three magical walnuts to get some very attractive outfits on her. And sorry for those Duff fans out there, the actress who plays Cinderella here is definitely prettier. This probably is the case for most Eastern European movies, since Hollywood actors in general have this very jaded and weary look on their face. But who could blame them?
There's a good fansite for the Cinderella I like:
http://www.threegiftsforcinderella.net
Every exchange is helpful
Sometimes I really want to throw food at those who disagree with me. Sometimes I really do.
But being a quick-tempered young man in his maturing process, I gradually come to realize that regardless of how wrong you think they are, exchange with people who disagree with you are almost invariably fruitful in one way or another.
Two days ago I ran into a bitter argument with a Bushite (my term for Bush-supporter; it's a term of endearment, I guess) who thought that the War in Iraq was both morally and legally justified. Neither of us gained anything from the debate itself. Nevertheless, after we had changed our topic, he mentioned to me a classicist named Mortimer Adler (from Chicago) whom I have heard of before but am not familiar with.
It turns out that this certain Dr. Adler is a very interesting person. Being a big advocate of keeping Western Civilization in our college curricula, he's also an ardent socialist who looked down upon the so-called New Left (i.e. the soft-bellied self-proclaimed liberals we have today who are more offended by terms like "Englishman" than the sight of starving children in Ethiopia.)
Adler in fact made a very good point during his tenure as editor in chief of the Great Book in Western Thought series. When asked, in 1990 (when he was eighty six), why he included no work by women or minority in his collection of great books, he replied, "Whereas it was indeed a human tragedy that women and minority has been so oppressed in the past that they were denied even the chance to express their thoughts effectively, it was also true that for this reason (i.e. sexist and racist) all the great books produced in the past were written by white men."
What he really was saying is, as progressives, our job is to ensure that women and minorities could contribute more in future, nevertheless, in the meantime, we cannot deny the fact that great books in the past were works by dead white men even when the cause for this pattern is utterly unsettling and repugnant to the progressive mind.
I love you Father
One interesting thing in modern fundamentalist Protestanism in America is its fixation on the propagation of a religion ABOUT Christ, rather than the Religion of Christ.
It seems to me that what these pious people care about is whether God Almighty created the world in seven consecutive 24-hour days and whether Jesus, the Christ, walked on the waters; rather than "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do","Love thy enemy" or better still, "Judge not, lest ye be judged."
This is indeed interesting, since an important aspect of the story of who Jesus is (or the religion about Christ)is the doctrine of substitional atonement, or, to put it in everyday terms, the doctrine which states that 'Christ died for us', and those who confess in their mouth and believe in their heart shall be saved from hellfire.
Well this leads to an interesting question. I am not saying that this doctrine is not important, well it is, since one could easily check it out from the plain text of Romans and Revelations.
The problem though is, for those pious folks who overstress the horrors of hellfire, it's very easy for them to realize the uncomfortable reality that their faith in God and Christ is really based on their fear of eternal suffering.
Louis XV's mistress once said, "His Majesty's Christian faith is not so much about his love for Christ as his fear for the Devil."
Interesting, isn't it? That's why Episcopalians back in the old days did the right thing when they started their service with the prayer,"Father we love you, not because we fear the eternal damnation, but because you have loved us." Better still, Christians should say, "Father we love you. Why? 'Coz you're our father."
Finally, it's worth mentioning of my encountering with a fire-and-brimstone pastor in a Chinese church. With plenty of foam in his mouth, he was hysterically preaching the horrors of hellfire when I met him. After he was done, I said, "Was Hell really that terrible? Look, only punishment we don't deserve ought to be dreaded of; but according to your doctrine, since all of us have fallen short of the glory of God, we all deserve hellfire: we can't complain about it. So why is hellfire a terrible thing? It's not like I don't deserve it."
Quaker Sermon
Yesterday I delivered a piece of vocal ministry in my Quaker Meeting for Worship, which was regarded by some of my fellow congregants as thought-provocative.
For those among you that are not familiar with the Quaker tradition, it is necessary for me to offer a brief remark on our peculiar way of worship. Quakers, to a certain degree, brings the Puritan movement in Commonwealth England to its logical conclusion. While their Puritan brethren were ridding (hence the name "Puritan") their religion of Catholic and Anglican influence, Quakers gave up all outward sacraments altogether, including the Lord's Supper and Water Baptism. The real sacrament, according to the Quaker, has to be worked by the quickening Spirit of God on our souls. Together with these "outward manifestation of inward faith", the concept of salaried clergy was also rejected, for the very idea of hiring men (and women) to preach the Word that Christ himself preached freely was repugnant to the Quaker conscience. Hence, according to this tradition, every Christian ought to be a minister, and the caste of laymen must be abolished.
It was under such tradition that I delivered a sermon yesterday in the Friends Meeting of Washington, D.C..
The Meeting itself was housed in a lovely garden enclaved in downtown D.C. The house was built in 1931 by a Rhode Island Quaker and was quickly donated as a Meetinghouse. President and Mrs. Hoover were frequent attendants to the services.
The sermon I delivered was a follow-up of what another Friend had said before me. He made a good point that progressive-thinking people today are no longer open-minded enough to tolerate people of diverse opinions, and more often than not we see people attributing to their ideological adversaries qualities beyond intellectual error. Instead of drug-addiction, alcoholic abuse, and sexual promiscuity, Quakers should really include "compulsive politics" in their Book of Inquiry. This fellow very vividly depicted our almost self-righteous contempt for every politician since Ike Eisenhower. Everyone from JFK to George W. Bush is a crook. Well perhaps they indeed were, yet who are we to call someone the "antichrist"? He ended his sermon with a mind-shattering statement, "He who cannot love Hitler cannot love mankind." (I'll follow up on this statement later.)
I was deeply moved by his sermon, so I rose immediately after he had finished and said:
Friends, when I pray, these words of our Lord often come up in my head, "[Father]... Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us." The first statement really is conditional on the second. It is a central message of the Gospel that being imperfect sinners ourselves, we could never expect communion with God unless we first forgive they that offended us. But what does it mean by "trespass"? Does it apply only to those who physically harm us? To those who rob us of our earthly treasures? No. It's much more than that. We must forgive they that reject our persons, our ideas, and all the beliefs we hold dear. Even if they did so with malicious intent. God made his sun shine over the good and the wicked, did He not? And who are we to pass absolute judgment on others? Even the most corrupted individual possess a measure of the Divine Light in him. Yes, President Nixon may be the most corrupt, paranoid and crooked politician in modern times. But God never hesitated to exercise His miracles through him. Was Nixon not the man who pulled our Nation out of Vietnam? Was it not he who pegged social security against inflation?
After the Meeting, many Friends came to me, expressing their approval of my sermon. A gentleman from Indiana, who is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, told me that when he mentioned how polarized our nation is in a workshop, a woman immediately raised her hand and say,"Yeah, you know, I couldn't even talk to the Republicans these days." We had some great discourses, and I remember he said, "You know, James, I really want to vote for someone, not against someone. Nowadays you hear a lot about how the Democrats are not really voting for Kerry, not so much as they're voting against Bush." Another Friend, who identified himself as a Republican lawyer, came to me and told me that it would be impossible for Friends 50 years to talk about politics at all in their meetings, let alone getting impatient of what others got to say. I totally agree. Christian congregations, left or right, for better or for worse, are overly politicized in this country. No one, none, remember these Words "the World will hate you,for you are not of this world." Now where has all this outworldliness been?
This probably has to do with the institutionalization of the Church, which is a huge topic. I'll address it some other day.
The all-time best selling economics textbook.
I recently found a used-book store a block away from where I work (in D.C.). It's a really great place, since one can buy all sorts of classics for a mere $2 per item.
One of the books that I've bought is Dr. Paul Samuelson's "Economics", first pubished in 1955. It's the all time best-seller among econ textbooks, and over 4 millions copies have been sold since its 1955 debut.
Paul was one of the titans who shaped what we now call "mainline (Keynesian?) economics". He was the among the first who came up with the idea that economics should be studied like physics, and it was he who started the mathematical revolution in econ, a discipline that was previously studied in purely philosophical terms (see F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Sismondi, Ricardo and Adam Smith).
As a representive of the left-wing of Keynesianism (as well as the second Nobel Laureate in economics and Institute Professor at MIT), Samuelson clearly exercise value judgment in his textbook, unlike most authors today who strive to
appear to be impartial. Here's a very interesting passage in which references to Dr. Milton Friedman, one of his critics from the libertaian side of the spectrum, were made:
People of all political pursuations should read Friedman's
Capitalism and Freedom. It is a vigorously logical, careful...elucidation of an important point of view. Before you read it, you may ask:
Can a man today seriously be against social security? Against food relief? Farm legislation? Pure food and drug regulation? Compulsory licensing and qualifying of doctors? and of auto drivers?...Public utility and SEC regulation?...Minimum wages?...price and wage controls?...Auto-safety standards? compulsory and free public schooling? Prohibition of heroine sales? ...
And the list of question marks went on. Finally, Dr. Samuelson ended his rather sarcastic mentioning of Friedman with a very interesting note: "Although one may, on reflection, agree with many or few of the positions advanced, it has been well said, "If Milton Friedman had never existed, it would have been necessary to invent him."
