Quagmire
So I know that there's at least one avowed fan of Quarterican-blogging out there, so in his name, I'll make a half-hearted attempt to keep The Virginian from totally overrunning this territory.
First, I'd like to register a complaint. I just installed Mac OS 10.3.2 on my (aging) laptop, and discovered the following information: (1) my computer is just old enough that it can't quite run Garage Band, which, OK, fine, I can deal with that; (2) I successfully sent exactly one email from Apple's new Mail program before it decided it didn't want to send anymore. This is a recurring problem I have and may not be related to any of the actual programs on my computer, but I currently can't communicate via Apple Mail, or Webmail in any of an assortment of browsers; (3) Safari and IE both fuck up the format I like for blogging, and IE outright crashes Blogger w/some consistency; Mozilla is browser that doesn't fuck up my preferred blogging format, but it fucks up downloading files (although I'm told I should make sure I had the absolute most recent version of Mozilla); Mozilla and Safari have tabs, which IE doesn't. Why can't I find one damn browser? (4) Reasons why I should walk away and breathe before making hasty decisions: in anger at not being able to discern exactly where my hard-drive space went, I started deleting items left and right as I deemed them unnecessary. In retrospect, I don't know that I could recall everything I deleted, and don't know that I knew exactly what everything did before I tossed it in the Trash. Grr.
But there's other things to talk about, right? Right. Because the fundamental question before us today, ladies and gents, the fundamental question this country has to answer, is: What Would Jesus Do? WWJD about Jews, gays, people wanting to get married, people wanting to crucify Him, people wanting to make movies about crucifying Him, people wanting to use Him and His message for their own political ends, His involvement in the everyday workings of an ostensibly secular government...
Bleh. As regards The Passion of the Christ, I'm (of course, like any reasonable person) reserving judgment until when/if (probably when) I see it, but from everything I've read written by people who actually saw it, you'd have to (a) be a pretty ridiculous person to walk away without a sense that certain people behind making the movie aren't 100% behind the ongoing project of Judaism, (b) be a pretty ridiculous person to walk away thinking the movie was blatantly or even subversively anti-Jewish, (c) have a pretty strong stomach to see what Roger Ebert calls the most violent movie he's ever seen. The Virginian's post downstream about this is interesting - less relevant to Catholics like him and (theoretically) myself than to Protestants, since I feel that there's been less cleansing of the violence in the Gospels from the Church of Rome than from the various Scions of Martin Luther, but the Gospels also aren't that violent. I can't recall where I read this, so I apologize for not providing a link, but someone who had seen the movie wrote that one problem they had was its apparent desire to make the crucifixion of Jesus the most violent and horrific thing ever done by one person to another, which, frankly, isn't the message of the Gospels. I've always been of the opinion that the important thing isn't how He died, but that He did, and that He rose again three days later. He suffered, but so did the men on either side of him. There is no glory in crucifixion; it was the punishment for common thieves. Mr. Gibson seems to have an affinity for extensive pain, though. Remember the end of Braveheart?
I don't think I quite have the energy to deal with gay marriage right now. But I will return to school all your asses later.
