Movie Review: Charlie Wilson’s War

Occasionally I watch a movie that opens my eyes to well-known events and shows me an angle that I had not considered before.

Charlie Wilson’s War is presumably based on true events, and I have no evidence of  this being true or false, so let’s say it’s true. In the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was getting all the credit for ending the Cold War, the Russians were fighting a cruel and bloody war in Afghanistan. They had absolute superiority in terms of numbers and military equipment. The Afghan freedom fighters were resisting with rifles on the ground. The Soviets came in with helicopter gunships and blew away villages, men, women and children indiscriminately. They actually created mines that looked like toys, so the children would pick them up to play, and their hands and sometimes arms were blown away, if they survived. The Russians had figured out that it takes much more time and effort to take care of maimed children than healthy ones, and parents taking care of children had to time or resources to take up arms against the Russians. By 1990, half of the entire population of Afghanistan was under 14 years old, and many of the children were maimed.

In comes a U.S. Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks). He travels to Afghanistan and sees the refugee camps, observes the sorry state of the resistance, and is truly moved to do the right thing. That’s a stretch for a hard-drinking, cocaine-using and womanizing congressman from Texas, but he seems like just the right guy for the job. With the help of a Houston Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a cunning and courageous CIA veteran Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour), he raises money from the U.S. government for the Afghans. Five million dollars a year gradually turns into one billion dollars a year for Russian weapons that, through a complex set of maneuvers, comes from Israel through Pakistan into Afghanistan. Helicopters get shot down, tanks get blown up, and the Afghans start getting the upper hand and drive out the mightiest army in the world. The cold war ends, and Charlie Wilson does not get any credit. Really, did you know who Charlie Wilson even was before seeing this movie?

This is where the movie review ends and the social criticism starts: Fast forward a few years. The lost, abused and maimed children grow up. What will their worldview be? They need to survive, without much of a country, with no parents, no industry, no love and no hope. The very freedom fighters that we trained and supplied with arms in 1988 slowly morph into – yes – the Taliban. The poverty, despair, physical pain, hunger and lack of love and security drives them to Muslim fundamentalism. Soon they blow up schools, libraries, art, treasures of antiquity and anything foreign. They brutalize their own women, take away their rights to an education, and start turning against the West. Terrorist camps arise, and soon 9/11 happens. We don’t remember that we helped create this in Afghanistan. Do the research! Just like we armed Saddam Hussein in those days. Oh, how quickly nations forget.

All that and much more buzzed through my head as I was watching Charlie Wilson’s War.

Rating: ***

The Shack – by Wm. Paul Young

The book “The Shack” with the subtitle “where tragedy confronts eternity” was a challenging book to read and it’s going to be more challenging to review. According to the cover, there are more than three million copies in print and it’s a #1 New York Times bestseller.

I didn’t  pick up the book myself, since it advertises its religious content, and I am generally not much interested in the subject in fiction. A dear friend gave me the book, though, and said it was excellent and I’d really enjoy reading it.  So I did.

First, the author’s short bio on the back cover caught my attention:

Wm. Paul Young was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was New Guinea. He suffered great loss as a child and young adult and now enjoys the “wastefulness of grace” with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

Clearly, there is an indication of first a very different viewpoint, one that most of us cannot even fathom, and second, some deep struggle to explain severe adversity and possibly evil when there is presumably an all-loving God, particularly when your parents are missionaries and presumably deeply religious.

If you were a devout Christian and had something horrible happen to you, and you needed to come to terms with it, you’d write “The Shack.”

The story is quite simple: a family loses a small child to a deviant repeat abductor and murderer. We never get to meet the criminal, but from the evidence of his deeds we can conclude that he performed unspeakable atrocities before eventually killing the child. The rest of the family has to live with this and they all try to blame themselves for what happened. After years of grief, Mack, the protagonist, receives a note that he cannot explain other than that it came straight from God. His instructions are to come back to the shack, the location of the heinous crime years before.

He arrives alone, and indeed meets God. There are as many interpretations of God as there are religions and subreligions. For Mack, God shows himself as three people. Papa is God, the father, who is first a large black woman and later an aging hippie with a long grey pony tail and a goatee, in jeans and hiking boots. Jesus is God, the son, a stocky Middle-Eastern looking man in his early thirties, who is a handyman around the place and likes to build things with his hands. The Holy Ghost is Sarayu, a middle age Asian woman who likes gardening and is restless, flitting about and sprinkling wisdom around. The three spend the weekend with Mack, going on various walks, hikes and activities, talking and giving lessons. Mack is enlightened and eventually returns home.

I won’t tell you any more than this, lest I spoil the story and enjoyment. It’s an intricate plot, a well crafted and almost engineered story line. The author tries to make things come alive in front of you, but I don’t think he succeeds. I am constanly reminded of the fact that I am reading a book I was asked to read, and I make myself turn the pages. When Steven King tells of a group of good old boys sitting around in the lobby of a Texas gas station on plastic chairs, popping open cans of Bud Light, you can smell the beer, feel the Texas heat, smell the gasoline fumes and see the greasy fingers of the attendant. You are there. When Young elaborates on a point that is irrelevant to the plot but he makes it to paint the picture, you see just that, he’s painting the picture, and you wish he got on with it. There are several places in the book where Jesus or Papa tell Mack to “grab a bite” in the kitchen before they embark on something. The vision of “grabbing a bite” simply does not make things come alive for me.

The majority of the story is comprised of conversations between Mack and one or more of the personifications of God. They are talking about the original sin, Eve giving the apple to Adam, they are explaining good, evil and free will, they show why Christ died and how this somehow saved the world, and every other Christian theological topic you can think of. Young is obviously a preacher who wants to explain the whole of Christian doctrine in terms that people in 2009 can understand.

If you are a Christian, you will enjoy the new interpretations and answers to questions you may have harbored deep within you for a long time. You will probably interpret some of the dialog as theological discourse. You may find the story as creative and possibly spiritually profound and life changing. Every Christian will enjoy the book and the pages will keep turning automatically, regardless of the at times cumbersome prose and predictable plot.

If you are not a Christian, like me, you will simply be bored, when you realize about one third into the book that for the rest of the story, you will be presented with one interpretation of Christian doctrine after another, neatly packaged in conversations directly with God, speaking through characters manufactured to be likable.

The book is only 250 pages long, and it took me more than two weeks, on a business trip, to read, since I had to keep telling myself I was interested in this and keep turning the pages for that reason. After a few pages I’d fall asleep and I’d start over the next day. Without acceptance of a holy trinity the whole story does not make much sense. In my mind, the trinity was represented by a God father, an old bearded and long-haired man in a throne, Jesus, a guy in a robe with long black slightly wavy hair and a beard, and the Holy Ghost, a white dove. Ok. Now I have a big black woman, a Middle-Eastern man and an Asian woman. It does not help or expand my picture of Christianity.

People of other religions may have similar trouble reading this. The concept of the original sin does probably not filter through to a Hindu, but I am only guessing here. Having Jesus help Mack walk on water might elicit a good chuckle for a Christian, but it won’t invoke the same response in a Muslim.

This is a book written by a devout Christian struggling with the concepts and tenets of his religion, trying to make sense of it, for the audience of all other Christians with the same trouble. That’s why it’s a bestseller.

For everyone else, it’s just 250 boring pages by a mediocre writer.

Rating: *

The End of Faith – by Sam Harris

Excerpt from the Epilogue, page 224:

This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes – like blasphemy – and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.

When I was a teenager I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Antichrist, and I thought of him as a folk hero. Picture the Christian religion as a piñata, then Nietzsche’s Antichrist is a six foot five inch, 330 pound football linebacker with an aluminum baseball bat, going for the piñata. Can you hear the crushing blows of the bat against the cardboard side of the piñata?

If Nietzsche’s book was a baseball bat, then Sam Harris, with The End of Faith, hits the piñata with the cannon of a battleship. And he does not just go after religion in general, he hits every one of them with devastating blows, and Islam the worst of all.

This is not easy reading. I have owned this book for at least a year, and it’s accompanied me on many a trip. Five to ten pages was the most I could read in any sitting before I had to put it away in throw in a light novel for distraction. Harris is a first rate scholar, a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University. He has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of spiritual disciplines, for twenty years.

The soft cover book has 348 pages, 221 are copy, 8 are Epilogue, 8 are Afterword, 62 are Notes, 28 are Bibliography, and 14 are Index. I am telling you all this because when I picked up this book, I felt like I was working on reading assignments for an upper division philosophy class with all the trimmings. I realized how little I knew about organized religion, that I was a most undeserving atheist in all my ignorance. I resolved that I should buy a Bible and a Koran so I could refer to them and I’d know what I was talking about when I made an argument against organized religion. I realized that I could start over again, from the time at Glendale Community College in the spring of 1978, when I took Philosophy 101 from J.C. Volgo and Ethics from Bob Hubbard, my first academic tiptoeing into philosophy. There is a lifetime to study just on this subject.

On the other hand, I could just keep The End of Faith on hand as a reference work.

One of my favorite statements:

…Sanctimonious eruptions announcing the death of the pope (a man who actively opposed condom use in sub-Saharan Africa and shielded frocked child molesters from secular justice)….

And another one:

…Muslims in several countries are rioting over a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated a copy of the Koran. Seventeen people are dead and hundreds injured. The response of the U.S. government has been to offer up some lunacy of its own. No less a spokeswoman than the Secretary of State [Rice – this was in 2005] has assured the righteous hordes that “the United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran.” What form our government’s intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.

I have to curb my enthusiasm here, lest I quote the whole book. I cannot think of a stronger indictment of religion in recent literature than this work. It exposes the absurdities of organized religion fiercely. It makes you think about what’s going on in the Middle East, and has been going on for millennia. It gets you to think about Bush and his cronies, and the exploitation of an escalating level of ignorance in our general population when it comes to reason, objectivity and general scientific education. You come away scared for our safety when you realize that the likes of Palin are making progress in 20 or more states to try to stop teaching children the biological fact of evolution.

Harris points out the assault on reason and science by organized religion in a frightening light. Not only does the intellectual in me shiver in disbelief and bewilderment, I am actually threatened. More than 50 percent of Americans have a “negative” or “highly negative” view of people who do not believe in God (page 230). Here is what the Koran says to do with people like me:

Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage. If they attack you put them to the sword. (2:190)

For me, reading Harris was an assertion of my intellectual, spiritual and ethical fabric. I wonder what it would be like to a religious person, Christian, Jew, Buddhist or Muslim alike? A nuclear assault on the foundation of their belief structure?

We will hear more of Sam Harris in the years to come.

Rating: ****

Catholic Church Holding Up Progress

The Catholic Church holds up progress by denouncing Notre Dame University for inviting Obama to speak.

I really believe that if it hadn’t been for the Catholic Church and its relentless fight against progress, science, innovation, initiative, critical thinking for millennia, we would have had the Internet and man would have landed on the moon by the year 1200.

Today the bishops denounce Obama for opening up the opportunity for more stem cell research. Stem cell research is central to the advance of modern medicine, and critical for the development of cures for a number of ailments, as well as the natural growth of new organs and limbs for “spare parts” in an effort to expand our quality of life as well as our longevity. Is that a bad thing?

In the middle ages, midwives were accused of heresy and witchcraft for having knowledge of medicine and childbirth, and were frequently burned at the stake, after horrific tortures, just for helping other women give birth.  After all, they undermined the authority and power of the priests and monks, among whose ranks where the physicians, who in their own intellectual arrogance held a monopoly on the practice of medicine.

Today they can’t burn women at the stake. But they can do their best to keep trying to limit women’s rights to make their own choices about their own bodies, and all of our rights to make decisions about how to live our lives and what to study and research.

The church is threatened, so it blocks research, trying to keep us uneducated and misguided by medieval mythology and outdated moral and ethical principles.

Remember this is also the same church that almost went bankrupt defending against legal cases against dozens of clerics for sexual abuse of children.

Will the church please stay out of the way of science and government?