A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `social`

¶ Unbiased journalism?

I understand that news companies are attempting to give an unbiased view of the news, even when they clearly aren’t (“We report, You decide” my ass, FNC).

But I agree very much with Jon Stewart’s view of the media as feckless and overly corporate—not everything, as he says, should be reported as a Pepsi v. Coke sort of news item. Sometimes it is the job of journalists to call stupid or crooked people to task.

As an illustration, let’s take this recent puff piece on MSNBC Arian Campo-Flores.

In the rapturous eyes of his flock, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is, in fact, the second coming of Christ. As the head of the Growing in Grace International Ministry, he presides over a sprawling organization that includes more than 300 congregations in two dozen countries, from Argentina to Australia. He counts more than 100,000 followers and claims to reach millions more through a 24-hour TV channel, a radio show and several Web sites. He is supported by the generosity of his devotees, who have launched some 450 businesses to pour cash into Growing in Grace’s coffers. Though de Jesus’ followers worship him, others denounce him as a charlatan. Everyone, however, agrees on one thing: his teachings are incendiary.

If it weren’t for the fact that de Jesus was claiming to be a reincarnated Christ, you might read most of this paragraph as a simple description of a charismatic preacher. But then comes that line, “others denounce him as a charlatan.” Why do they do this?

A native of Puerto Rico, de Jesus, 60, spent his youth drifting from the Roman Catholics to the Pentecostals to the Baptists. Then one night in 1973, he says, he awoke to a vision of two hulking men at his bedside who announced the arrival of the Lord, who, says de Jesus, “came to me and integrated with me.” In the early years after founding Growing in Grace in Miami in 1986, de Jesus didn’t claim to be Christ. Instead, he worked as a pastor spreading his doctrine: that under a new covenant with God, there is no sin and no Satan, and people are predestined to be saved. But as his following expanded, his claims did, too. In 1998, de Jesus avowed that he was the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. Two years ago at Growing in Grace’s world convention in Venezuela, he declared himself Christ. And just last week, he called himself the Antichrist and revealed a “666″ tattooed on his forearm. His explanation: that, as the second coming of Christ, he rejects the continued worship of Jesus of Nazareth.

Emphasis mine. So, an aimless Puerto Rican claims that the Lord (or perhaps just someone named Jesus) with two burly bodyguards “integrated” with him one night in 1973. Is it just me, or does it sound like this guy is repressing something?

In all seriousness, it’s clear that in fact de Jesus is a charlatan: he’s not even competent enough to make the same crazy claim consistently—he’s Paul one minute, Christ the next, and then apparently an Antichrist, for some wholly strange reason. He’s either a poor liar, or he’s a wackjob in the most severe sense. Remember the last time we had an “I’m Jesus!” cult leader with a large following? It ended in a large fire and a lot of death.

Clearly, de Jesus has nothing new or interesting to say, besides being charismatic and preying on the gullibility and general ignorance of over 100’000 people.

All members of Growing in Grace are expected to tithe—which, along with offerings, yielded $1.4 million for headquarters last year. One of the first orders of business at every service is the collection of money (credit cards accepted). Those who have pledged their businesses to de Jesus donate much more. Alvaro Albarracín, a savvy, successful businessman given the title Entrepreneur of Entrepreneurs by de Jesus, is an example. Over the course of Albarracín’s 14 years in the church, he estimates that he’s given roughly $2.5 million. Such funds help underwrite a lavish lifestyle for de Jesus, including diamond-encrusted gold rings and fancy cars.

It should come as no surprise, then, that de Jesus milks his stupid constituency for their money to fund an opulent lifestyle for himself. Like any evangelist selling his snake-oil as holy water, I would trust him about as far as I could through his pudgy, lying ass. But after telling us about his “doctrine” and his crooked finances with a straight face, what does the author of the article say? “Some observers call Growing in Grace a cult.”

Not “Growing in Grace is a cult,” or anything like that. “Some observers…” as in “It’s one side of the story, but it would be equally valid to say that de Jesus really is the incarnation of Christ.”

What kind of tripe is being fed to us? This sort of sugar-coated journalism is why I hate watching the morning news with its “human interest” stories. In my mind, there’s very little difference between “Look, the dog thinks it’s people!” and “Look, the Puerto Rican thinks he’s a god!”

§1701 · January 31, 2007 · 1 comment · Tags: media, religion, social, sociology

¶ The BEAST’s Most Loathsome People of 2006

The Buffalo Beast‘s annual “Most Loathsome” list is damn near the highlight of my year. I won’t give it much of an introduction: I’ll let a few choice excerpts speak for themselves.

38. Carlos Mencia

Charges: A German-Honduran who pretends to be Mexican so he can engage in jovial slurs about “beaners” and “wetbacks.” Repeatedly says “what?” and “no, I’m serious!” during his stand up routines, as if his audience is blown away by his tiresome retreading of age-old ethnic and gender clichés and his bellowing one-note delivery. Imagines himself to be some kind of envelope-pushing genius despite the fact that his entire body of work is a series of variations on the hackneyed “white guys do this, black guys do this” routine that has launched a thousand careers in stand-up mediocrity. What’s that you say, Carlos? Asians can’t drive? Gee, we’ve never heard that before. A well-known joke thief, Mencia can’t even write his own shitty, hackneyed material.

Exhibit A: Actual name is Ned Holness.

Sentence: Deported to Mexico.

31. Cindy Sheehan

Charges: A massive failure as a parent, it literally took the death of a family member to elevate Sheehan’s political awareness to that of a self-righteous college freshman with pungent dreadlocks and a Che Guevara T-shirt. Might have actually made a difference if she had played to the image of a regular soccer mom and exercised a little message control. Runs with ‘Nam Vets, blurring the important distinction between forced conscription and volunteer suckers like her son Casey. In ’06, Sheehan really jumped the shark by protesting the vulgar American occupation of Iraq with an equally vulgar All-American “hunger strike,” performing the most insincere and brand-conscious act of nonviolent resistance ever recorded: Two harrowing months deprived of all nutrition—except Jamba Juice smoothies, protein shakes and the odd ice cream latte, just like Gandhi. That’s not a hunger strike; that’s a diet.

Exhibit A: “I find traveling out of the country very challenging being on a fast. When I was on a layover in Madrid on my way to Venice, Italy yesterday, the closest thing I could find to a smoothie to get a little protein was a coffee with vanilla ice cream in it.”

Sentence: Starved to death.

22. James Frey

Charges: It only makes sense that an infantile, semiliterate, cliché-humping fabulist would become a best-selling author in a country that only reads books to keep Oprah off its back. But Frey’s “memoirs,” which would be pamphlets if they weren’t padded with grating faux-poetic repetition, are stuffed with poorly worded fabrications as obvious, artless and awkwardly self-aggrandizing as an adolescent geek’s tales of his “girlfriend from Canada.” Every hackneyed detail is transparently designed to engender sympathy and admiration, and above all to convince us he’s not gay. Frey’s success is just another sign that people will believe anything, so long as it makes them feel good and doesn’t challenge them intellectually.

Exhibit A: “I take responsibility for who I am. That’s what I’ve always done. That’s who I am. I would be a liar if I didn’t.”

Sentence: Chopped into a million little pieces. Feet first.

§1680 · January 21, 2007 · 2 comments · Tags: humor, politics, social, sociology

¶ World War Z

World War Z by Max Brooks: Publisher: Crown; Year: 2006; Pages: 352

By some means or other, I became under the impression that World War Z would be funny-ha-ha; by the end of the first chapter, it was deathly clear to me that the book wasn’t like that. There would be no Dave Barry humor here, or even McSweeney’s humor. Rather, the book is satire, and certainly not purposefully funny satire.

World War Z sprang as a sort of side project from Brooks’ earlier book about zombies—the topic is apparently near and dear to him…perhaps he played too much Resident Evil—and its primary occupation seems to be creating a backstory for a zombie uprising. The narrator (some post-apocalyptic version of Max Brooks) goes around interviewing survivors all over the world; the interviews are grouped chronologically, so that the reader learns first of the outbreak, then of the panic, then of methods of survival, and finally of the national response.

I must admit that Brooks’ choice of format—interview—was an excellent way to lend personality to the story. In a way, however, I find it self-defeating, as the ostensible purpose of the book was to show the “human side” of the conflict, but I felt as though the humans’ stories did little more than illustrate logistical concepts. The reader, being largely unaware of the specifics of Brooks’ fantasy, have to understand the facts before they can understand the supposed human side: Max qua Narrator introduces himself by way of saying that he coauthored the official UN report on the zombie war, but wrote this book from the excised interviews because he felt that the report was too dry and unfeeling. Readers do not have the benefit of reading said fictional report, and thus begins the quandary.

For its inconsistencies, however, World War Z is still a good book. It is satire in the sense that it attempts to look at how both governments and their constituents would react to such a horrible event. Brooks’ makes some bold assertions—Russia resorts to shooting 10% of her own troops in order to scare the remainder into fighting; China’s entrenched powerholders hide in a bunker and attempt to hold onto said power; Isolated Cuba, meanwhile, becomes a home base of sorts, and becomes essentially the richest nation in the world… but in the process turns into a free-market economy, and Castro resigns. You can see Brooks’ apparent bias—not that Communist or ex-Communist nations wouldn’t make a logistic butchery of things—though in fairness to him, he also notes that the US rather dropped the ball.

What really interests me—and this is one way in which I don’t mind that the book spent a lot of time talking logistics, despite its stated premise—is how Brooks, as opposed to every other work in the zombie canon, handles the epidemiology of the zombie virus, the zombies’ behavior and physical limits

Sure, he paints his points with broad strokes, but for all that, I still think World War Z is a good book, and a fun book. That is, as good as it can be while most of humanity perishes in a mass zombification. But if such a thing interests you at all, or if you enjoyed the author’s previous work, I would recommend World War Z

§1612 · January 15, 2007 · 3 comments · Tags: Book Reviews, books, politics, reviews, social, sociology

¶ Wicked

Wicked by Gregory Maguire: Publisher: Regan Books; Year: 1996; Pages: 406

Possible spoilers below!

When reviewing a book that has a Hollywood/Broadway equivalent, I always feel a tremendous pressure to abstain from such clunkers as “The book is a lot different from the movie.” I did essentially that when I reviewed Sideways last year, but largely because I felt I had some significant to say about their differences, and not just that I was disappointed that such and such a scene was left out or something banal like that. Having seen Wicked the musical twice in the last year, and having thoroughly enjoyed it, I was somewhat nervous going into Wicked the book.

Okay, I’ll get it out of the way: the book was a lot different from the musical. A lot different. Significantly more than I was expecting. About that only similarities that can be pointed out are some of the names and locales. In every other case, I fail to see even the most tenuous of connections between the two. I’m not slamming the musical: it’s supposed to be enjoyable and digestible, and it is: it takes Maguire’s characters, simplifies them, adds a Primetime love story, and throws in enough references to the original story of Oz that the audiences shrieks with glee when they make the connection between, say, Fiyero and the Scarecrow.

Let me very clear, for those of you who have seen the musical: Maguire’s book doesn’t end any different than Frank Baum’s original. Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is killed by a well-aimed bucket of water; the wizard takes off in a balloon; Dorothy uses enchanted slippers to get home. There are no surprises. What’s more, the many characters that the musical seeks to explain (lion cub as Cowardly Lion, Boq as Tin Man, Fiyero as Scarecrow) aren’t actually explained in such a way, with the exception of the lion.

But enough of that: this isn’t a comparison between the two media. Wicked the book doesn’t serve merely to give a bit of a backstory to a beloved piece of the literary canon. Maguire attempts to achieve several different goals with his writing, the first and most important of which is to look at the nature and formation of evil. The musical had sought to do that in the context of popular opinion (i.e. evil is what people perceive as evil), but Maguire sets up an entire world, replete with philosophically warring religions. Elphaba (the WWotW) is an atheist; her father Frex is a minister of the Unionist faith, which prays to an Unnamed God; many of the land of Oz are Lurlinists, who pray to a fairy god named Lurline; then there is the center of the “pleasure faith,” which is a giant mechanical dragon, run by a surly dwarf, that not only seems to predict the future, but also tends to inspire violence.

Elphaba’s journeys, her political rebellion, and her sympathy for intelligent animals (a facet which was brought out in the musical), not to mention her own green skin and dangerous allergy to water, leads to a lot of rather postmodern discussion of the nature and meaning of life—and wickedness. The story begins with Frex and Melena, Elphaba’s parents, and for a few years after he birth. It then jumps to an 18-year-old Elphaba at Shiz university; 5 years later, as an underground as a political rebel in the Emerald City; 7 years later, after a long stint in a Unionist nunnery (called a “mauntery); the 7 years later, living in large castle in the mountainous Vinkus region, where she is eventually killed.

There are a number of things to note about Maguire’s book. First, it’s filthy: there’s a lot of sex, even including Elphaba, and even an implied scene where someone is forcefully sodomized by a tiger (an event which causes him to go insane and eventually die). Don’t read this because you liked the original story, or the new musical. Second, the book is more sociopolitical intrigue and philosophical inquiry than downright action. If you’re looking for magicking and other excitement, you won’t find it: Elphaba is never really even a particularly good sorceress. Except for possessing a flying broom and killing a teenager with an icicle, she does very little magic at all: the label of “Witch” comes about in part because her magic-shoes-wearing sister, Nessarose, is known colloquially as the “Wicked Witch of the East” before she is crushed by a house.

Some of the book’s conventions felt rushed at the end, and may be due in part to Maguire having opened so many storylines and failing to close the majority of them, perhaps by design. This wasn’t meant to be a book that progressed arithmetically (and he’s already followed it up with one sequel, Son of a Witch). It’s an interesting read, if nothing else, but I submit that the detail alone of Maguire’s work is enough to merit a closer look at Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

§1522 · December 2, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, reviews, social, sociology