I am almost positive that Roland is a telepath. Reading through The European Declaration of Independence, my thoughts exactly.
“Has anyone else noticed a curious confluence of Breivik’s proposals regarding the church and those espoused by the current conservative holder of the see of Rome and certain proponents of radical orthodoxy?
read the rest, and comment: Breivik, The Pope, and Radical Orthodoxy by Roland Boer.
Finishing this text was an accomplishment, and I am so happy I took my time with this book. So much to absorb. I have high hopes of reading it again
I tried avoiding simplistic summaries and preconceived notions of what this book is about. To the average reader, Orientalism is a work by an angry Arab expressing his anti-Western sentiment in the form of “cultural Marxism.” This is hardly the case. What Said contests is the history of portrayals of the Orient as “eternally” and “immutably” the Orient, without change, without specific place. Aside from this, one could read Orientalism as a protest against Western scholars who examine (and some continue to examine) Islam as an essential, unchanging cultural and natural Oriental phenomena. If my reading of this is correct, perhaps Christians should join Said, re-investigating the history of the West as a Christian cultural/nation-form.
Perhaps just as importantly, to the disciplines of theology, religious studies, and biblical studies, Edward Said proposes a narrative view of history (innovative for 1978!), one that counters the essentialist visions of cultural imperialism (240). Story “asserts [...] the tendency of institutions and actualities to change [.]”
Representation is not the problem; the problem is that for all images, there is a purpose. What is the purpose of the backward, wild, sensual, pious Oriental that we know in our media and our mythologies? Perhaps for the subjugation of their dark bodies, through our rationality, our money and our weapons?
In February, Chad & I had a couple of blog posts on postmodernity, sexism, and the Wonder Woman t.v. series re-boot.
On Sunday night, Amanda informed the rest of the Joss-pel Coalition on twitter that the David E. Kelley’s failed pilot was up on youtube.com. A-Mac warned us it was bad, and she was not kidding. For anyone that follows me on Twitter, that following hour, I probably tweeted some of most random (but truest zingers) about such a bad show. For one thing, rather than Diana Prince, David E. Kelley made the decision to turn our heroine into Jack Bauer of 24, thus further proving my theory of the Bauerization of our imaginations. The dialogue sounded like it was written by a third grader (no offense to our third graders out in the audience). Worst of all, the storyline, very first episode, you make it about a White-Savior complex? Really? That was just too much for me.
In one of the cheesiest promotions of feminism, Diana Prince kinda, sorta, half-heartedly protests the latest business plan for her company– dolls of Wonder Woman, and Prince decries this move, albeit for only three minutes, that she is a human being and not a doll to be objectified. #EpicFail!
Kelley should have stuck to lawyer shows, which he is good at, perhaps even making Prince an attorney of some sort; Wonder Woman as a business person was just not believeable.
Unfortunately, this travesty for DC Comics (basically any t.v. series wishing to base itself off a comic book) made Amanda remind us of Joss Whedon’s run-in with Warner Brothers studios. Imagine the impact of a successful lasso-wielding Wonder Woman in theatres, on the level of a Batman Begins, only Whedony. Wouldn’t it be nice to have had a Justice League movie (sans Brandon Routh as Superman) and an Avengers film, both written by Joss Whedon? Sigh. Only in a perfect world.
We can only dream though. Only dream.
