Black Jesus

Black Jesus on tonight on Adult Swim.

You might expect McGruder, given his Boondocks history, to be out for pointed religious satire, but Black Jesus is really more of a stoner hangout comedy with a heart. In the pilot, Jesus chills with his well-meaning slacker friends, who bust his chops for smoking weed he never pays for and ask him to give them a ride to a business deal (also weed-related), plus “a miracle, just in case we need it–which we won’t!” 

But the joke here is not really on Jesus so much as people who don’t want to hear the modern version of his message. Johnson, despite his Sunday-School-pageant getup, plays Jesus as an expansive, wide-armed fountain of love, who exudes goodness even when he gets pissed off, because that’s who he is: “I still love your bitch ass! By default, too!” It’s the unbelievers who get laughed at, like cynical landlord Vic (Charlie Murphy), who believes Jesus is a hustler and a fake. (The series, by the way, is pretty clear that Jesus is the real deal–at least, we see him read minds and heal by touch, though he insists, “I ain’t in charge of miracles. That’s Pops!”) Black Jesus may be crude and irreverent, but it’s most interested in mocking a world in which Jesus’ message perpetually won’t fly.

Corporations as people

The Corporate Congress bad timeline moves closer.

A Bad Coincidence: The Hobby Lobby SCOTUS Decision And the 50th Anniversary Of The Civil Rights Act by Barkley Rosser

This one is so bad you might think somebody made it up. So, prior to the Civil Rights Act 50 years ago, many segregationists in the South defended their conduct on religious grounds, indeed this was used to justify slavery itself, that Africans were descended from Ham who was cursed in Genesis for having shamed his father Noah by not covering him up when he had too much to drink. Barry Goldwater opposed the Act precisely on libertarian grounds of business owners ought to be free to serve whom or whomever they choose on whatever grounds. The Civil Rights Act said no, you cannot refuse people service on the basis of their race. 

So, now with this latest SCOTUS decision we have "closely held corporations" being allowed to not provide insurance coverage for birth control if it violates the corporation's religious views, with the personhood of corporations being extended to new lengths. Heck, given the weirdly arbitrary definition of this, that not more than five people own more than 50% of the stock, why not just say all of them can do so? I mean, how do we know who the heck is making the decisions in these outfits? At least with a single proprietorship, we think we do know, but even they were not allowed religious exemptions to choose not to serve African Americans. 

Of course, as Justice Ginsburg warned in her dissent, who noticed the parallel with the Civil Rights Act, we now have a bunch of groups run by religiously oriented businesses demanding the right to fire gay people. This is getting even closer to what the Civil Rights Act was all about. I am sorry that Martin Luther King, Jr. and LBJ are probably rolling over in their graves on this one.

The Religious Right takes a Hit as the Supreme Court strikes down DOMA and California's ban

The Better Angels of Our Nature (Off-topic) by Krugman

Just an aside: I’m sitting in a coffee shop near the hospital, waiting for word, and they have news TV on in the corner, so I’m watching coverage of the Supremes on marriage out of the corner of my eye (along with “New Jersey woman unaware of pregnancy, gives birth on front lawn”). Not my department, of course; but also of course, I’m very much for equality, and gratified by the tone of the coverage, which clearly is that this is normal, natural, and inevitable. 

This is really amazing when you bear in mind that this very issue was used to mobilize the right-wing base in 2004. The change in attitudes in such a short period is awesome. 

I haven’t seen a good analysis of this transformation. But whatever caused it, it’s a testament to American tolerance and open-mindedness. We have our fanatical minorities — but they are minorities, and they’re getting smaller all the time.

Blowing the legs off of Boston marathon runners seems like something the Joker or Bane would do. A cruel, evil joke. (Think of the Joker's talk with Two-Face at the hospital in the Dark Knight.) It's also a bit like Locke cutting off Jaime's sword fighting hand to shut up him up and stop him from ever being patronizing ever again. "This will help you remember that your father isn't here." Of course people will say any analysis is providing an alibi or an excuse, but that's not true. It's just thinking out loud which is what a blog is for.

The terrorists were two young Chechen brothers living in Boston. 

Originally from Chechnya, but living in the United States since five years, Tamerlan says: "I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them."

If he wins enough fights ... Tamerlan says he could be selected for the US Olympic team and be naturalized American. Unless his native Chechnya becomes independent, Tamerlan says he would rather compete for the United States than for Russia.

Tamerlan says he doesn't drink or smoke anymore: "God said no alcohol." A muslim, he says: "There are no values anymore," and worries that "people can't control themselves."

I don't think many clueless, spoiled, solipsistic Americans (I vote Republican and train for marathons!) really understand how Russia flattened Chechnya in the 1990s. Or how Russian-backed Serbs slaughtered Muslims in Bosnia.* Or how Israel oppresses the Palestinians. But why blame America? "There are no values anymore"? Is that it? There is reporting that they were/are Muslim extremists.

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*Of course the Left treated Bosnian Serbs as victims of Imperialism. Even though Vietnam was ahead of my time, I was with the anti-war movement on that. But then they were silent on Chechnya and Bosnia or critical of America's Imperialism, that is, anti-American.

Thoughts on religion, "unhingement," and slavery

In the Hitchens article from yesterday, he discusses Nietzsche's episode in Turin where he had a nervous breakdown/psychotic break:

Eventually, and in miserable circumstances in the Italian city of Turin, Nietzsche was overwhelmed at the sight of a horse being cruelly beaten in the street. Rushing to throw his arms around the animal’s neck, he suffered some terrible seizure and seems for the rest of his pain-racked and haunted life to have been under the care of his mother and sister. The date of the Turin trauma is potentially interesting. It occurred in 1889, and we know that in 1887 Nietzsche had been powerfully influenced by his discovery of the works of Dostoyevsky. There appears to be an almost eerie correspondence between the episode in the street and the awful graphic dream experienced by Raskolnikov on the night before he commits the decisive murders in Crime and Punishment. The nightmare, which is quite impossible to forget once you have read it, involves the terribly prolonged beating to death of a horse. Its owner scourges it across the eyes, smashes its spine with a pole, calls on bystanders to help with the flogging … we are spared nothing. If the gruesome coincidence was enough to bring about Nietzsche’s final unhingement, then he must have been tremendously weakened, or made appallingly vulnerable, by his other, unrelated sufferings. These, then, by no means served to make him stronger. The most he could have meant, I now think, is that he made the most of his few intervals from pain and madness to set down his collections of penetrating aphorism and paradox. This may have given him the euphoric impression that he was triumphing, and making use of the Will to Power. Twilight of the Idols was actually published almost simultaneously with the horror in Turin, so the coincidence was pushed as far as it could reasonably go.

This reminded me of the opening scene in Amazing Grace, a film about William Wilberforce, the religious friend of William Pitt who ended the the British transatlantic slave-trade. In the movie, Wilberforce, played by the kindly and sympathetic Ioan Gruffudd, halts his carriage to stop the beating of a horse and soon after has a similar "unhingement" and becomes a religious fanatic or fundamentalist. He also endeavors to end the British slave trade against great odds.

To me the idea of a horse being beaten for some reason always brings to mind Orwell's Boxer, who represented the Russian working class in his book Animal Farm. Loyal and hardworking, worked to death in fact.

John Brown was a religious fanatic too. In AMC's "Hell on Wheels," the preacher in the railroad camp road with John Brown during "Bloody Kansas." It's very interesting that Obama chose to give a speech in Osawatomie.

As I understand it, Nietzsche and Mencken had a very negative of religion as a sort of a slave mentality. On the Internets someone wrote:

[Nietzsche] thought Christian morals and asceticism rejected life. The good for him is only that which asserts his aristocratic, elitist ideal. Christian morals defend the opposite - the meek, impoverished, and lower class. He was also skeptical of the Platonic rejection of the material world common in Christianity.

Hitchens writes Mencken believed in a sort of Social Darwinism. Christianity began as a slave religion under the Roman Empire. I share Hitchens's and Marx's view of it as an opiate. It's a less condescending, more sympathetic view, although maybe pity is ultimately condescending.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.