Taking Off and Landing
As If You’ve Never Wanted to Bust Kurt Russell
3 Comments
I currently live in a house, until the first of year, with a couple who love television. I mean, LOVE: when they moved in, they brought with them their complete package of digital cable-expanded package-premium channels, and continue to pay an extra share for it to continue to be a reality in the house. I’ve never been much of a TV-watcher, but with literally 500 channels to choose from, it’s hard not to find myself sitting on the couch with Die Hard going in the background while I mindlessly grade papers.
Die Hard post forthcoming. Don’t think I won’t post on that Christmas-time gem.
***
Tonight, as I sit down to crank out some notes from the evening pastor search committee, I see Kurt Russell driving a car like hell through a deserted backroad, with Rosario Dawson in close pursuit. Obviously, I am intrigued. It’s a meeting of Overboard and Rent: what’s not to hate about this trainwreck already?
A quick look at the information on the cable reveals that this is indeed Quentin Tarrantino’s Grindhouse. For the next 30 minutes, I watch Russell drive with a bullet in his shoulder, pursued by three violent–yet mildly attractive–women until they run Russell off the road. And stomp on Russell’s face with a stilleto.
There might have been a time when I liked the Tarrantino films. I still admire portions of Pulp Fiction, mostly because it’s a highlight for both Samuel L and John Travolta, gems in an otherwise lackluster decade of films for both actors. I love the pontifications of Pulp Fiction; I enjoy the snazz of watching Uma Thurman kick ass; I really get tired of the gratuitous violence. A stilleto? To the face? Really?
One and a half Dodge Chargers out of five. Quentin, I am losing my patience.
On Voting or Not
6 Comments
The national fervor over voting (which I participated in) has become a national diet supplement for actual political involvement. In being so excited about voting about those who will vote and deciding about those who will decide, America has said two things: 1) the epitome of being political is to abandon one’s ability to be political, and 2) “America” is a legislative idea, not an actual one. Let me explain:
1) By being so excited about voting for the voters and deciding for the deciders, what we have effectively said is that being political is an agency which not only has to be channelled through certain filters (bureaucracies, legislative houses, etc.), but that these legislative bodies are the eptiome of being political. In other words, what you or I might do on a local level is less-than-political. In being so excited about electing electors, we have forgotten that people are meant to be political, i.e. self-organizing. There are better or worse ways of doing this, but the point is that by being so excited about having someone who will decide things for us, we have said that to be TRULY political, one has to give up one’s own ability and hand it to another. In other words, we should wait on the government to fix schools, or on the government to help people get jobs, or on the government to do X.
Seriously? Tutoring a kid or taking someone to a job interview is a political act! It’s acknowledging that the federal level is ultimately unable to live up to its claim to take care of things on a broad level, and doing the work anyway. To look to the act of electing as the height of political involvement is to abandon any sense of change that doesn’t happen outside the bounds of legislative act.
2) By being so excited about voting and electing, “America” has become a legislative ideal, not an actual one. “America” now means a body of laws and lawmakers, not the people themselves. Forgetting that the laws are ultimately things we’ve put on over against ourselves, we treat the law as the thing we cannot live up to, and the thing which ultimately defines what Americans are. People are more than their laws, and more than their legislators (hopefully). They are pluriform and multitude, uncontainable by legislation. Legislation helps provide some bounds, but if these are so necessary, why do they keep shifting in response to the people? Because the people are the ones running the show.
All this is to say that when we vote today, let us realize that what we’re doing is ONE MORE WAY of being political, not the ultimate way. Voting is us speaking our minds on a national level, but does NOT take the place of BEING political. Don’t wait on elected officials to do the work that people are always meant to do: feed one another, teach one another, and take care of each other. Tutor a child, cook a meal for your neighbor, help a teenage mom beat the tax system.
Yes, I voted; you can if you want, but I’ll say that it’s ONE way among others of living out the political life.
