JULY 2011

    Obama’s reactions to events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria have been incoherent and hesitant. The anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize laureate hypocritically sustains costly conflicts in three foreign countries. These are accompanied with more indecision: We are providing a military presence in Libya, but we won’t put “boots on the ground.” We’ll send our military, but let someone else make decisions on how to use them. We want to take down Qaddafi, but we don’t want to strike hard enough to get rid of him! These feeble wishy-washy plans are like cutting the tops of weeds without pulling out the roots. It is the legacy of an unproven leader who lacks the experience to act definitively. His views on whether a president needs congressional approval to engage in significant military activity and his stance on Gitmo represent only a few of several recent flop-flops he has done relative to his bold-young-Senator days. His inability to even prioritize his efforts have led to an inconsistent scattershot approach to leadership on a variety of issues (see the parody, “Obama’s Top Priority” from RightChange.com). It’s no wonder that people in his administration are dropping out left and right to pursue their own courses in light of Obama’s own inability to forge one.  

    Yet, to be fair, there are some things that the President has been definitive on. He was insistent that his administration would no longer defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, even though this is a federal law created by a bi-partisan majority and approved by a Democratic president. He pushed very hard for congress to accept the 2,700-page health care legislation that many legislators did not read, but voted to pass anyway. This bill has been considered unconstitutional by legal scholars (see here, for example) and ruled unconstitutional by two federal district judges. A July 22-23 Rasmussen poll shows that 57% of Americans favor the repeal of Obama’s health care law (even a CNN poll finds that 50% of Americans wanted Obamacare repealed!). And yet, Obama resolutely defends his health care bill and rejects any alternatives. Well, at least he has found something to be decisive about.

    And while I give him credit on his handling of Osama, he may have definitively and decisively given himself too much credit for this operation in his May 2, 2011 remarks: “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. . . . Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. . . . I called President Zardari . . . ” He barely pulled up short of claiming to have personally pulled the trigger!

    The fallout from the president’s select decisiveness and general indecisiveness is that his approval by the American people continues to decline. A June 8, 2011 CNN/ Opinion Research Corporation poll reflects that, “Forty-eight percent of people questioned say they approve of how the president is handling his duties in the White House, down six points from late May. An equal 48 percent say they disapprove of how Obama’s performing, up three points from late last month.” A disconnect grows between the president’s political views and those of most Americans. A June 8, 2011 Rasmussen survey reveals that only “twenty-four percent (24%) say their political views are about the same as the president’s.” A July 7-10 Gallup Poll declares that registered voters favor a generic Republican candidate for the 2012 elections over Obama by a 47 to 39 percent margin. His strong stance on unpopular issues and his indecisiveness on others has caused his popularity to plummet.

    So what is the reason for his now characteristic indecision? Is it responding too late in significant situations? Is it his obvious dread of being wrong or unpopular or of responding without sufficient resolve? Is it an overriding terror of the prospect of not being re-elected? I think that it is a toxic combination of all these factors that is making Obama dangerously unreliable and definitively indecisive.  

    So what about you?  If you were filling out a report card for Obama, how would you grade him on foreign policy, or economic issues, or overall leadership?  Send us your thoughts at feedback@eclectickasper.com. 

SOUNDTRACK REVIEW: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, music by John Williams

    Whatever one may think about the prelude trilogy to the Star Wars franchise, or of this installment specifically, it is difficult to debate the exceptional contribution that John Williams has made to the soundtrack world and to the Star Wars universe. And, in the case of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Williams’ soundtrack may be its best and most redeeming feature. Williams’ work for Episode I bridges gaps between the original movies and the prequels in ways that the plot itself often fails to do or does so lamely. We could spend an entire article discussing the depth and scope of Williams’ work, and we may do that in a future article anyway, so for now, we’ll get right to the soundtrack.

    Track #1, “Star Wars Main Title and The Arrival at Naboo,” is everything one would expect in an opening to a Star Wars film, from dramatic heroism, to an other-worldly nebulous sound filled with tension as well as awe.    The dramatic “Duel of the Fates” (Track #2) is the most celebrated of the songs on this album, and one of my favorite epic-movie tracks. As the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia (yes, not Wikipedia!) reports, the lyrics are based on an archaic Welsh poem Cad Goddeu (Battle of the Trees), and sung in Sanskrit so that they sound less familiar than Latin would. One translation of these words reads: “Under the tongue root a fight most dread, and another raging behind, in the head.” What is fun about this track is that is has several faux endings: There is a dramatic climax, and you think the song is over, only to hear the music continue to pulsate faintly with an interplay of brass and voices. The “Duel of the Fates” theme is echoed in “Panaka And The Queen’s Protectors” (#12), and finds voice in the other prequel movies especially when Anakin vengefully speeds across Tatooine to rescue his mother in Episode II, and when Anakin, having succumbed to the dark side, duels with Obi Wan in Episode III (“Battle of the Heroes,” Track #3). The song is dark, intense and enigmatic, like Darth Maul, and later, like the newly knighted Darth Vader himself.

    “Anakin’s Theme” (#3) is beautiful, haunting, and not at all boyish as one might expect. Rather it is a deep, flowing, but unpredictable (with all of the accidentals) melody, which is reminiscent, ironically, of the theme for Luke and Leia from the original movies. There is a tender innocence about it as well as a mature contemplation. I would have wished for a young actor who could have portrayed these extremes of youth and profundity better, but, again, the music succeeds where the movie fails. This song ends with an portentous nod to the “Imperial March,” a haunting and chilling foreshadowing of Anakin’s fate.

    Williams’ ability to capture battle scene action, whether multiple ships, droids, people, or all of the above, has certainly matured since his earlier Star Wars days as seen in “Sith Spacecraft” (#5), “Panaka and the Queen’s Protectors” (#12), and “The Droid Invasion” (#14). These tracks reflect combat cacophony far better than similar kinds of action music from the original trilogy (some of which, I’m sorry to say, now sounds a bit hokey!). Other songs paint a rich tapestry of sounds that mirror the stunning visuals of Episode I, like the ominous “The Arrival at Tatooine” (#7) and the profound and pensive “The High Council Meeting” (#18). “Passage Through the Planet Core” (#10) is perfect for the harrowing underwater trek from one side of Naboo to the other.  

    The track, “He Is The Chosen One” (#8) is interesting in its own right. It is impressionistic and flowing, but occasionally includes some pomp and triumph that we look forward to in Star Wars music. An amazing amount of the six Star Wars movies takes place on the remote desert planet Tantooine. Williams bridges that gap between the original trilogy and the prequels in “Anakin Defeats Sebula” (#9) by incorporating other Tantooine tunes, like “Jabba’s Theme” from Episode VI as well as the beautiful “Binary Sunset” song from Episode IV.

    I love the way the imperial march theme keeps bubbling up in various forms throughout the CD, which is an ever present reminder that the peaceful Republic of the prequel series is driving inexorably toward the dark empire of the original trilogy. I thoroughly enjoy how vocals are used more on this CD than in most of William’s other works, especially in tracks #2 and #16. These vocal augmentations to the orchestra provide a rich spiritual and ethereal sense that is necessary for a story line like this. And, while I personally find “Augie’s Great Municipal Band” (#17) somewhat obnoxious as a song, I enjoy listening to it for the variety of sounds that William’s uses, which remind us that we are on an alien planet, and not listening to a terrestrial pep band.

    A frequent criticism of this album is that the tracks are out of order relative to the movie. This is somewhat exaggerated, in that the only track that is too far out of place is “Duel of the Fates,” which appears at the end of the movie, and thus, should have come between tracks 14 and 15. While I am a bit of a purist, and would have preferred the tracks in their movie order, I can understand putting this tremendous achievement second; “Duel of the Fates” is the song that really makes anyone want to go out and buy this soundtrack. Another criticism is that, while people agree that the music was great, they say that there simply wasn’t enough of it. However, there are only so many songs that can fit on a single CD, and doubtless, expanded renditions of this soundtrack will eventually be made available, if they haven’t already.

    A third criticism, and one that I will dismiss less lightly, is that this work, and indeed, the more recently trilogy in general, didn’t have the memorable character themes (or “leitmotifs,” for us musical snobs!) of the original trilogy, such as Yoda’s Theme, the Imperial March (usually associated with Darth Vader), or even Jabba’s Theme. Other than Anakin, few of the characters have really distinct or memorable themes, and I think that this is a legitimate weakness of the work.

    Say what you will about the movie itself, or the prequel trilogy in general, the music for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace itself is unsurpassed, and Williams’ effort is, as with most of his work, simply out of this world.  

EMERGENT CONCERNS: The Demise of Orthodoxy

    The last two installments of “Emergent Concerns” discussed postmodernism, first by illustrating it from popular TV shows, and then by describing postmodernism’s attitude toward truth, community and spirituality. 

    The Emergent Church is a movement in Christianity that started in the mid-1990’s as the self-proclaimed postmodern wing of evangelicalism. The emergent church assumes that as culture changes, church should change, adapt, or “emerge” in response. The most unifying principle seems to be a heightened desire to encounter culture even by integrating more culture into the church for the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of Christianity in society (1 Cor 9:19-23; 10:33). 

    However, this is not just about adopting culture’s methods as the megachurch movement is often accused of doing. Rather, many in the emergent movement perilously adopt culture’s way of thinking. They choose to understand and interpret Christianity through culture, not vice versa. Emergents would argue that previous generations of believers have also been culture bound, so changing church or re-imagining Christianity is actually just stripping modernist premises off of pure Christianity. The problem is that Christianity simply gets overlaid with a new cultural perspective after the old cultural perspective is taken away; modernist Christianity is traded in for postmodern Christianity.

    Since The Eclectic Kasper has spent so much time talking about orthodoxy (right Christian doctrine) and orthopraxy (proper Christian practice), we will begin by describing the emergent perspective toward Christian truth and practice using statements from emergent writers themselves.

    In terms of orthodoxy and doctrine, Emergents are less concerned about systematizing truth as much as they want to create a “conversation” about truth (Kevin Corcoran, Church in the Present Tense, p. xiv). Unfortunately, the conversation often takes precedent over the proclamation. Emergents assert that, “God is first and foremost a storyteller, not a dispenser of theological doctrine and factoids” (ibid.). This leads to an unnecessary and unsustainable minimization of orthodoxy. The contention “how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes” (Scot McKnight, “Five Streams of the Emerging Church,” Christianity Today, February 2007, p. 38) creates an unbiblical dichotomy between practice and doctrine (which we argued against in “Christianity is Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy”). The worst fringes of the movement “Embrace the idea that we cannot know absolute truth, or, at least, that we cannot know truth absolutely” (McKnight, 37). Emergents sometimes minimize completed aspects of the gospel: “They tend not to view themselves as finished products, as ‘saved’ or even as ‘Christian.’ Instead, they speak of themselves as ‘being saved’ and ‘becoming Christian” (Corcoran, p. xv, emphasis his).

    Doctrine and creeds are frequently marginalized by Emergents such that any doctrinal assertion about the attributes of God makes Him into an “idol” or causes Him to be merely the product of “theological fetish” (Corcoran, “Who’s Afraid of Philosophical Realism?”, p. 9). This a very disturbing way of understanding two millennia of exegetical study and theological discussion. Emergents claim that God is not an “object to be dissected,” but a “subjective event” (Corcoran, 9). I agree that God should not be treated like fungus in a specimen container. However, He does invite believers to know Him, learn of Him, and increase their understanding of Him (Jer 9:24; John 17:3; Eph 1:17; 4:13; Philippians 3:8, 10; 2 Pet 1:3). Scripture clearly illustrates the danger of not knowing God, or not properly responding to the knowledge of Him (Romans 1:21; 10:3). Biblical Christianity expressed in Nicene orthodoxy is a metanarrative that cannot be easily shunned nor abandoned (by “Nicene orthodoxy,” we mean agreement with and affirmation of the summary of Biblical truth in the Nicene Creed of 325 CE and some of the significant councils that followed, such as the Council of Constantinople in 381 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451).

    January 22, 2010 – My host and I arrived at the airport south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we went through several layers of security, and eventually boarded the 10:15 flight for the city of Yangon (Rangoon) in Myanmar (Burma). We were in an emergency row which afforded us about two feet’s worth of extra leg room. A frumpy-looking lady in her late-thirties plopped down in the window seat next to me, carrying a newspaper written in Malay. After my near-disastrous linguistic achievement of that morning, I was feeling confident (or cocky!).  So I turned to the lady and invoked one of the few Malay phrases that I knew well: Anda boleh berbahasa Inggeris? (“Do you speak English?”). “Eh?” she replied. I repeated my phrase a bit more deliberately and loudly. She giggled and declared in broken but comprehensible English, “I don’t know what you’re saying!” She was, of course, Burmese, but she had accidentally picked-up a Malaysian-language newspaper. She only realized later that seeing the Malay paper is why I asked her in Malay if she spoke English!

    We laughed, she gleefully, I, trying to mask my mistake, a bit less enthusiastically. She was shy at first, but then got chatty after take-off. I think that she was happy for someone with whom to converse, which we did for most of the 2.5 hour flight. 

    I caught on quickly that she had an infectiously girlish giggle, which means that I could only understand about 80% of what she said. When she was telling a funny story, or at least one that she thought was funny, she would get to the second line from the end of the story and start to giggle, decreasing the understanding factor to about 50%. The entire last sentence, usually a run-on sentence, was entirely in giggle-speak, plunging the understanding factor to near zero. I chuckled along, not because I had any grasp of the punch line of the story, but because her own childish self-delight in what she was saying was so charming.

    Despite her frumpy and unassuming look, she was an award winning scientist on the cutting edge of magnetic and electric metallurgical technology. She (I couldn’t understand her name, and didn’t want to keep asking) talked extensively about chemistry, physics and biology. She mentioned that no matter how small they can see with a microscope, the cells, molecules and atoms still reflect a remarkable level of organization. She had studied and worked in Japan for a year and in Malaysia for two years (not long enough, from her perspective, to have bothered to learn much Malay!), but hadn’t been back to see her family in all that time. I didn’t understand the entire story, but she was apparently not allowed back in Myanmar by the government; they denied her access until now for some reason. She didn’t say much about this except her otherwise buoyant body language expressed that she was not to happy with this situation. She clearly longed to be with her family and friends and had only had minimal contact with them these past few years. She quickly moved on to cheerier stories that ended in further giggle-fests.

    As the conversation passed beyond the formal background stage, I asked her about her religious upbringing and discovered that she was raised in a Buddhist family. I with my Bible on my lap, told her that I was a Christian. We discussed some basic similarities between the two, but then I steered the conversation toward the significant differences. Her particular strain of Buddhism was about keeping rules and codes more than anything else. I mentioned that nobody was capable of keeping all of any religion’s rules, which lead to a discussion of sin, salvation, and God's tremendous grace. It was hard to know what was crossing the cultural divide between us, but she seemed to be comprehending the basics of the Gospel message.

    A telling moment occurred later when I asked her about the governmental structure of her native country. I have found this to be a relatively neutral question in a few of the other places where I have been, and it is of genuine interest to me how the government of other countries is organized. However, as soon as I asked this, her face darkened dramatically. She broke my gaze, looked down into her lap, and just shook her head. That particular part of our conversation didn’t go much further than that. I was told later that the people in Myanmar just don’t like to talk about their oppressive government; maybe out of spite, maybe out of fear. After a few quiet and awkward moments she returned my gaze and ran her fingers along her cheeks as though trying to paint a reluctant smile over a great deal of sorrow. I sensed that this sorrow ran much deeper than just being denied entrance to her home country for the last three years. She became cheerier again as she recommended several places for us to visit in Myanmar and gave me a crash course on Burmese cuisine.

    After landing in Yangon, we were all herded off the plane. My host and I gathered our luggage and found ground transportation to the hotel. But before we pulled away in the taxi, I saw my airplane friend, giggling away joyously in the middle of a welcome party of family and friends. I yielded to a chuckle myself, just to see her so happy.

MOVIE/ TV IMPLAUSIBILITY: Case Study #2, Transforming Trilogy to Implausibility

    *** WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the live action Transformers movies. ***    

    I have been a big Transformers fan since childhood. So let me start off by saying that I generally liked the live action movie trilogy, and recently saw the final installment, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. These movies, far from instant classics, were at least fun and enjoyable. However, I walked away from each with somewhat of an empty feeling, the sense that something was just not right. I thus enter the Transformers trilogy into our The Eclectic Kasper Hall of Implausibility.

    Just to review from Movie/ TV Implausibility Case Study #1, many of the movies and TV shows that we watch don’t work, or at least, don’t work as well as they could, because of high levels of implausibility. The directors and producers hand us a premise that itself is hard to believe, such as a being with superhuman powers, or ships warping through space, and we graciously grant that premise. Beyond that basic premise, however, everything else must be plausible and believable. Too many hard-to-believe elements beyond the basic improbable premise makes it difficult to take a movie or TV series seriously, as with The Cape, which, as I predicted, met a grizzly end when booted off the NBC schedule after only 10 episodes.

    For Transformers, I grant the story’s foundation of the existence of highly advanced transforming alien robots. This is a great and expandable premise that has enchanted geeks like myself, as well as my own precious little geeklets, for years. However, the recent live action movies insert a variety of implausible plot turns, dialog, or characters, that make the entire trilogy fall far short of what it could have been. The action scenes were great, the basic plots were not bad, and the animation used to show the robots transforming was superb. But beyond that, the movies just asked me to throw too much reality out of the window. The implausibility factor prevents the trilogy from being what we wish it could have been.

    Implausible characters especially littered the latter two installments of the Transformers movies. Again, it is not the morphing alien robots that I had a hard time swallowing; I had a hard time believing that so many characters could transform into such nitwits. In Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter, T:RF), the list of both unrealistically silly human and robot characters included Mudflap and Skids, Leo Spitz, Ma and Pa Witwicky, Wheelie, Seymour Simmons (ridiculously overacted by John Turturro) and Jetfire. In an attempt to give these characters personalities the director and actors portrayed them as too foppish to be true to life, and made most of them more obnoxious than compelling, frequently dragging the film down into absurdity.

    Some of these characters reprised their ridiculous roles in Dark of the Moon (hereafter, T:DM), including the Witwicky pair, Wheelie and Seymour Simmons. However, to these already implausible characters were added Bruce Brazos (the wasted talent of John Malkovich), Brains, Charlotte Mearing, Dutch (again, a complete waste of Alan Tudyk’s abilities) and Jerry Wang. And, yes, for those of you counting, that’s about half of the cast that I could hardly take seriously enough, which erodes my ability to take the entire movie or the actions, dialog, and motives of these characters seriously. The only really credible human character in T:DM was Dylan Gould, the bad guy/ turncoat; while his motives were a bit unclear, he at least provided an appropriate and believable performance.

    Hollywood writers should keep two things in mind about comic relief characters. First of all, they should be comic, and actually funny, not painful and cringe-worthy. Secondly, if one third or one half of the cast of a movie are comic characters, then the movie will be hard to accept as anything other than a comedy. In fact it will make the serious characters seem stiff, unnatural, and horribly out of place.

    Throughout the trilogy, painful strides were taken to make some of the robots appear more human. Some spewed unnecessary amounts of profanity and others made irksomely unsuccessful attempts at humor. Some Autobots fought with each other like petulant children, while others urinated on things that they didn’t like (and these are the good robots!). All of this was both implausible as well as cheapening to otherwise beloved characters. These traits didn’t make the robots “more human,” but only made them more like humans that most other humans don’t really like.

    Moving on to implausible plot-lines, we’ll simply take each movie in turn. The first Transformers movie (2007) had a few significant elements of implausibility. The first revolves around Megatron: I have a difficult time believing that Megatron could be unearthed from his frozen catacomb, moved to Nevada, and had Hoover Dam built around him without being reactivated. The second significant point of implausibility is that having procured the AllSpark, the Autobot/ military alliance decide to hide it in downtown Mission City (which looks suspiciously like L.A.). What is monumentally dumb about this move is that an urban area would be hard to defend against Decepticon attack, it would blow the cover of the alien robots who are trying to keep a low profile, and the likelihood of many people getting killed in this location is extremely high. Wouldn’t trained soldiers (robot and human) consider moving the battle away from populated locations rather than drawing the conflict right in the middle of an urban area? And why is it that the AllSpark, which elsewhere in the trilogy gives life to robots, somehow killed, or at least incapacitated, Megatron? That simply doesn’t make sense.