The characters Joe and Seligmann from “Nymphomaniac” by Lars von Trier.

By Ethan Poe

Despite its titillating reputation Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is, essentially, a religious film. Its aggressive theologizing, in fact, runs through the film’s discussions of nature, sadomasochism, Christian iconography, and rugelach, leading the audience into an examination of psychological religion.

The film is structured as a confession: a woman, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is found, beaten, in an alley by an older man named Seligman (Stellen Skarsgard). After taking her back to his tiny apartment, later called a “monk’s cell,” Joe regales Seligman with tales of his life as a nymphomaniac and the  “old, charming bachelor” (in the words of the film’s official synopsis) shares fragments of his isolated world in return. As the film progresses, we unravel an increasingly bleak character in Seligman — he is bookish, asexual, and at times predatory.

As Joe tells her story to Seligman, she emphasizes her “sinful nature.”  Joe’s story, however, is not one of sin, but, ostensibly, of love. A young man named Jerome (Shia Labeouf), is the center of her narrative. Initially, an adolescent Joe falls in love with Jerome’s strong hands. From there, their relationship grows, culminating in marriage, a child, and Joe’s eventual turn to BDSM with disciplinarian  K (Jamie Bell). Ultimately, this leads to a disintegration that paves the way for the film’s finale.

It is significant that Joe articulates her own self-understanding in terms of sin, a religious category, and other religious themes work their way into her story.  Though these elements are found throughout Nymphomaniac, they are most prominent in the film’s sixth chapter: “The Eastern and Western Church (The Silent Duck).”

Joe’s tale up to this point has been one of pleasurable sexual adventure.. In “The Eastern and Western Church,” however, she inexplicably loses all ability to orgasm.  Two sets of flashbacks follow. In the first, Joe struggles to regain her orgasm, which results only in an act of vaginal flagellation. The second is another of Joe’s many childhood treks into nature, which Von Trier made a recurring element of previous chapters. Laying in a bed of grass, the young Joe suddenly finds herself hovering, fearful, in mid-air.  Surrounded by dew and fog, she is visited by two mysterious women. Seligman identifies them as Valeria Messalina (“the most notorious Nymphomaniac in history”), and the Whore of Babylon.  He describes this event as a “blasphemous transfiguration.” His analysis reflects the importance of religious imagery for him, and imposes some further significance onto the event for Joe and the viewer.

In an orgasmic state, Joe continues rising above the earth into a space of the perverted divine. This, she thinks, raises her sexuality to the level of God, what Joe calls “the most powerful force in the universe.” Her orgasm is a full infusion of this power. While she cannot control it, this transcendence heightens the tragedy of her later fall into numbness.

Following these visions of the past, we jump further ahead in Joe’s story. Raising a child strains her relationship with Jerome so intensely that he decides for Joe’s sake to open the relationship. Von Trier frames Seligman and Joe’s conversation about her marriage’s decline around an icon of the Virgin Mary in Seligman’s chamber.  Seligman uses the work to reflect upon acts of iconoclasm by the Catholic Church as violent discipline, in contrast to the pleasurable indulgence of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Indeed, most of his discussion of these two churches, rests upon a conception of the violent nature of Catholic imagery. In dwelling on how such icons exemplify violence done to images of pleasure, this chapter characterizes the East as a place where one seeks pleasure and the West as a site of struggle between desire and discipline. Von Trier represents Joe’s path from pleasure to discipline in terms of ecclesiastical geography; the East is the church of sensual pleasure, the West, that of punishment. When pleasure eludes her in “the East,” she travels “west,” into the disciplinarian therapy of K.

Joe’s relationship with K is a conflict between his therapeutic distance and her embodied need for fulfillment.  K attempts to create pleasure from physical structures, their scenes focusing on long shots of applying duct tape and fixing Joe into mechanical harnesses.  Joe seems to experience genuine feelings for K, but her attempts to initiate sex with him are met with rejection.

It’s only when her visits to K threaten the life of Joe and Jerome’s child that this relationship escalates.  Forced by Jerome to part with their child, Joe frantically moves further into K’s world of order.  In this moment she attempts to exert sexual control over her master, attempting to arouse a natural response from his sterile facade.  Her overture is met, appropriately for a force of the Western Church, with a Roman punishment.  Joe is lashed forty times for her transgression against K’s order.

Von Trier frames this struggle between desiring both control and loss of control with the competing forces of the two churches, both of which are rendered, ultimately, impotent.  In particular, the eroticized East is incapable of either full submission or full control; Joe can’t give in fully to K, nor can she control him sexually the way she has all other powers in her life.  While her orgasmic revelation might seem like access to some kind of “Eastern” power, she never gains control over it either. The Western church fails also. Though Western Catholic power is a power of transformation, it cannot transform Joe.

Ultimately, Joe is left ruled by the embodied power she finds in orgasmic revelation: her personal, transcendent, sexual theology.

Still from “Chapter 6: The Eastern and the Western Church” from “Nymphomaniac” by Lars von Trier
(via www.nymphomaniacthemovie.com/)

In many ways, both Joe and Seligman represent important parts of Von Trier’s religious thought. Seligman, an asexual hermit, represents a compelling voice in Von Trier’s theological debate.  Particularly, Seligman is used to highlight a certain impotency of the modern intellectual, and the sort of vestigial interest in religion they hold.  His many religious objects are of such vestigial interest.  Of his “childhood nature bible” Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler all he seems to have gotten from it is a series of petty fly-fishing anecdotes.  Furthermore, he denies any religious outlook. His Judaism is an inheritance, and, institutional religion, like sex, is something he claims he “won’t go down on my knees for.”

Like von Trier himself, Seligman sees great power in the aesthetic appeal of religion.  He cites from religious literature in order to forge a connection to Joe’s story.   As a recluse using these images to relate to others is a survival mechanism.  Throughout the film, we see Joe and Seligman’s experiences shaped by religion, from their childhoods through their present encounter. Though both deny being religious, both use Christian language and images to tell their stories. Religion as a structuring force doesn’t help Seligman become more empathetic to Joe, but it allows him to feel as though he is.  In that way, religion for Seligman is a therapeutic category, allowing him to deny his detachment.

Von Trier’s playing with Joe and Seligman’s notions of the therapeutic and structuring value of religious institutions is also an autobiographical discussion.  Having once flirted with Judaism, von Trier has for years expressed some form of Catholic faith.  That said, his expressions of faith are often complicated. For example, in 2009 he said, “I’m a very bad Catholic. In fact, I’m not religious in any way. I’m becoming more and more of an atheist.”  Here, like in the film, issues of religion are expressed two-fold.  In one way, religion remains a fixation for even irreligious individuals, but beyond that, religions represent forms of over-arching psychological landscapes.  This again is reflected in von Trier’s own biography considering his conversion to Catholicism rested in his seeing it as a “much more healthy religion than Protestantism.”  Reflecting the power that von Trier places in the structural dimensions of religion as it relates to psychology.

Joe eventually seeks out the formal rigor of psychotherapy to replace K’s Catholic discipline. Von Trier seems to have made a similar move.  Recent interviews have seen von Trier more interested in discussing his interactions with psychotherapists than his Catholic faith.  Still, Nymphomaniac’s therapeutic understanding of religion and investment in Catholicism as effective treatment is quite provocative.

In the language of Nymphomaniac’s guiding allegory, this conversion from religion to therapy represents a move westward and eastward for von Trier.  While he spoke of Catholicism in terms of therapy and lightness, it still was a move to contain his own struggles with depression.  Likewise, while unlike Joe in that he appears to no longer be fully consumed by depression, he still places himself in a seemingly contradictory religious space.  He converted to a religion in part for its perceived structure, but also for the transcendent romanticism that he found within it.  In that way, his conversion can be seen either as an attempt to enter both the eastern and the western spaces. Or, in other words, this dyad represents a cleaving of von Trier’s own experience into the two rigidly defined spaces of the Eastern and Western Churches.

This construction of two rigid spaces between which one can be lost speaks to von Trier’s own self-isolating form of religion.  His faith appears intensely private, with him not mentioning participation in Denmark’s Catholic community.  In this way, like Seligman, von Trier’s religion is that of a cloister.  In isolation von Trier constructs, and deconstructs a form of Christianity which based on interviews, is not what he expected.

To what extent Nymphomaniac represents a clear autobiographical statement from von Trier remains an open point of discussion.  Still the way he relates imagery of Sadomasochism, religion, sexuality, and psychology is the film’s more significant movement.  These elements all play into Joe’s and von Trier’s own needs for discipline and structure. Religion and sadomasochism are the means by which psychological forces are contained.

This at times brutal discussion of sexuality and religion represents von Trier’s most forward presentation of his worldview to date.  Fans of von Trier’s work will find this discussion a welcome continuation of the issues of anxiety, nature, and powerlessness that have been a constant theme of his filmography.  They will also see von Trier at his most open about his faith on screen.  For those new, indifferent, or hostile to his work, Nymphomaniac still offers many points of interest.  The film finds a way to blend sexuality and religion in an original way that offers thoughtful observations on both.  Lars von Trier is aggressive in his construction of this film’s psychological theology, but he builds it delicately.  This construction being the film’s highest tittilation.

***

Ethan Poe is a graduate student in religious studies at NYU. He is mostly focused on issues of contemporary Mormon media. Though, is he is also interested in religion in modern Scandinavian film.

The post Churches of Pain and Pleasure: Nymphomaniac’s Theology appeared first on The Revealer.

A garage in Duhok is painted with the Kurdish flag. Image by Jenna Krajeski, Iraq 2014

By Jenna Krajeski

Late last year, in response to what appeared to be an increasing number of young Iraqi Kurdish men leaving northern Iraq to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) announced that, should those Kurds die, they should not be given a funeral at home. Their participation was being described as jihad – a term in Islam meaning “struggle” which has been appropriated by extremist groups – and reports circulated that, at the behest of some local clerics, the Kurds were joining Al-Qaeda linked rebels in Syria. Numbers were low (officially around 150) but the KRG’s anxiety was understandable— while sectarian violence tears apart much of Iraq, the northernmost region’s reputation as safe, secure, and religiously moderate is at stake.

“Kurdish Islam is not the Islam of Saudi Arabia or Iran,” Mariwan Naqshbandi the KRG’s minister of religious affairs has been quoted as saying. “We have often been made to suffer by those who were our Islamic brothers. It has made us more tolerant.” Whether or not these forward-thinking declarations manifest in the day-to-day lives of Kurds in Iraq (statistics about the role of women in society hint at its limitations) they are vital to the image that Iraqi Kurdistan wants to promote to the rest of the world. So is its relative security.

In addition to banning funerals, Kurdish security arrested young men who tried to cross the border with Syria into Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdish media erupted with worried stories about the missing youth, and the threat to Kurdish stability that came with links to terror groups and the weakening borders between Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria, already blurred by an influx of refugees. In late September, a suicide bomber in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, had left six dead and dozens injured. That explosion, the region’s first in six years, was attributed to extremist groups, but many wondered whether those extremists had also been Kurds.

While Syria to the West and portions of Iraq to the south buckle under the weight of war, Iraqi Kurdistan seems to shine. The region, once oppressed by Saddam Hussein, benefited from a no-fly zone established in 1991, and was almost entirely untouched by violence after the 2003 US-led invasion. Untapped oil reserves, foreign investors, and strategic importance to old allies like the United States and newer friends like Turkey, all depend on maintaining that security and stability.

“The [KRG] security forces are good at dealing with people that pose a threat,” Fazel Hawramy, a journalist in Sulaymaniyah, told me. “But in the long term if there is no solution, then of course this [trend] is going to be a threat. You can only check and contain these people to an extent…. It damages the Kurdish region. One of the things Kurds are proud of and always promote is that we have security.”

The KRG formed an investigative committee, headed by the minister of interior, and by early April, just seven months after the bombing in Erbil, Wasta Hassan, the security chief in Sulaymaniyah province sounded victorious. “It has decreased,” Hassan said in an interview with the Kurdish news service Rudaw. “The youth have discovered the misleading reality over there.” The young Kurds who did make it back home, Hassan assured the public, were “regretful.”

But the KRG appeared to have underestimated the religiosity of portions of the Kurdish population and the draw of charismatic and highly visible clerics who reach out to alienated populations. This set of religious leaders, whose emphatic sermons are routinely posted on YouTube, are particularly appealing to young Kurdish men set adrift by the contradiction they embody: Their actual, stagnant lives clash with the ardent declarations of Iraqi Kurdistan’s progress. “When candidates put an emphasis on Islam, they get more votes [in Kurdish elections],” Hawramy told me. “Religion plays an important role.”

In April, Salim Shushkay, a popular cleric who recently came under fire for alleged links to a handful of young jihadists, was running for parliament. Shushkay preaches in a mosque in the suburbs of Erbil, where the gates of two-story concrete homes are backboards for neighborhood soccer games, and hair salons draw attention to their storefronts with garlands of blinding florescent lights. The mosque is a light yellow-green, surrounded by a tall fence and a tranquil courtyard. Shushkay’s large office is lined with glass bookshelves and couches. When I arrived with a Kurdish friend who had agreed to translate, Shushkay retrieved cans of fruit-flavored soda from a mini fridge humming in the corner, before sitting in a rolling leather desk chair. He slouched in his chair and spoke softly, giving only clipped answers.

Shushkay’s sermons are fiery and delivered at full-volume; many are posted on You Tube. Favorite topics include female chastity and the war in Syria. But, as with many interviews in Iraq, my conversation with Shushkay began with his personal experience living through war, in this case the 1991 Kurdish uprising against Saddam. He was fourteen at the time. “I remember they killed a lot of people in front of my eyes,” he told me, folding his hands over his thick waist. “I wrote a poem about it.”

Memories of war are strong among Kurds in Iraq, and some officials have used this to explain their jihadist presence in Syria. A young generation is living in relative peace, but they grew up on their parents’ stories of struggle. To these young men the fight against the Assad regime, long made murky by a fractured and radicalized opposition, might nevertheless appear clearly righteous. Hawramy thinks that clerics like Shushkay build upon this naive impression of the Syrian war. “There is a lot of talk about Islam, jihad,” he told me. “People are constantly reminded of that. They take it a bit further, as a battle between good and evil.”

Scene from a diorama at the Halabja memorial museum.
Image by Sebastian Meyer, Iraq 2014.

Shushkay was still a young politician, but you wouldn’t know it by his steady and confident denial of a connection between his sermons and the jihadists. “I never encouraged people to go to jihad in Syria,” he told me. He maintains the position that jihad is an important tenet of Islam that is deformed, not fulfilled, by terrorism. “I knew [jihad in Syria] would only make trouble,” he said. Like Hawramy, he blamed the media—“They broadcast the tragedies in Syria”—and he was quick to point out the futility of joining a dangerous conflict that is also ambiguous. “It’s a war without any outcome or result,” Shushkay said.

The accusations, he insisted, were a ploy to take votes away from the Islamic parties which, as dissatisfaction with the government grows, have become more popular. “My sermons are fair,” he said. “Most of the people who attend my sermons are youngsters and I defend their rights. I am very frank, that’s why people like me.” He poked his toe through a small hole in his sock, and sighed. “I am an independent person,” he said.

When Shushkay preaches he sounds furious, and when he talks about Syria it is reasonable to think that his fury is directed at inaction. He does not shy away from controversial topics, and was direct with me about both his support of Shariah law and his belief in the reach of extremist groups into Iraqi Kurdistan; when I asked him why he didn’t actively discourage youth from going to Syria his face lit with paranoia. “They would kill me,” he said.

But the cleric insists that he was only doing his job, and that his words have been misinterpreted by Kurdish officials and media. “It’s the style in the mosques,” he told me, about his sermons. “You have to be strong and give strong messages.” It’s hard to imagine that his defense is entirely genuine, but his style is effective. By May, according to preliminary election results, Shushkay had won 50,000 votes, enough for a parliamentary seat in Baghdad.

One-hundred and sixty miles east of Erbil and Shushkay’s mosque is the city of Halabja. In 1988, in an incident at the height of the Saddam regime’s al-Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds, the city and parts of the surrounding province of the same name were  battered with chemical weapons. Over the course of one day, thousands of people died and thousands more were injured, and the attack looms in the Kurdish collective memory; nowhere more so than in the memories of the people who still live in Halabja. A memorial to the attack dominates the road into town, and includes a museum of gory images, dioramas modeled off those images, and a black wall listing the names of the dead. On the lawn outside the museum a wrecked truck is parked atop a concrete plinth; it had been discovered filled with bodies. Spent bombs are plunged into the ground around it.

In 2006, protesters, angry that the government continued to use the massacre for political gain while ignoring the city, which remained in poverty with its main road unpaved, burned down the monument. It was a moment of defiance in a town that had become known for opposing the mainstream. All three major Islamic parties were founded in Halabja (at one time, the only viable opposition parties to the two dominant Kurdish ones), and it was reportedly also the hometown of many of the Kurdish jihadists.

“People here really sympathize with oppressed people,” Peshawa Ahmad, a Halabja native said. “Most of the people in the city think they have been oppressed for most of the time.” Ahmad, who had just completed his masters degree in public administration in the US, struggled to make a connection between the jihadists, some of whom he had known, and local religious fervor. The neighborhood where the boys came from wasn’t particularly religious, he said, and they were too young to be deeply influenced by the Islamic parties. One imam had been arrested but soon released. Ahmad was careful to remind me that rumors were rife.

In Halabja, the scars of the past are more visible than the promises of a Kurdish future. Like many smaller cities and villages in Kurdistan, it has not yet benefited from the development projects and investments that have inspired comparisons between Erbil and Dubai. New construction is mostly limited to sturdy, practical concrete homes. In Halabja, a city that remains both the center of Kurdish consciousness and a town isolated by an inattentive government, the dissatisfaction is obvious. So are the potential consequences.  “[The KRG] hasn’t created a state that functions properly,” Hawramy told me. “When there is unaccountability you lean on what you trust more.”

Ahmed was equally direct in his assessment. “About a month ago I was talking with the head of the security forces in Halabja and the topic came up,” he wrote to me in an email. “He was telling me, Those young people can’t do anything here. They look at Syria and think they are going to change the war.”

Jenna Krajeski is a writer living in Istanbul. Reporting for this story was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Sebastian Meyer is an American photographer and filmmaker working internationally, with a particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa. From 2009 to 2013, he lived in northern Iraq where he helped set up Metrography, the first Iraqi photo agency. See his work at sebmeyer.com.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Erbil to Aleppo: Kurdistan, Islam and the Syrian War appeared first on The Revealer.

Still image from “Noah” directed by Darren Aronofsky

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Much of the early hubbub over Darren Aronofsky’s recent Biblical blockbuster NOAH centered on whether the film was an “accurate” (read: evangelical Christian) rendition of the story of the Flood.  The director and his co-writer battled powerful religious-right consumer blocks, and their own studio, to insist that the Bible was open for wider possibilities of interpretation—and successfully so, if box-office numbers carry the day.

In such an atmosphere, it is understandable that Aronofsky was reluctant to discuss the “message” of his movie. But NOAH did have one; all good movies do. When pressed, Aronofsky said he believed that Noah was “the first environmentalist.” This might sound like a way to avoid taking sides in a Christian-or-not debate. But in fact, it places the movie in the center of a long-running battle involving religion, politics, and science.

If the first book of Genesis, with the 7-day creation and Garden of Eden, was the litmus test for the fundamentalist fight against evolution (Exhibit A: Scopes Trial), the second book, with its Flood story, has become the “vessel,” if you will, for the next chapter: environmentalism vs. climate-science-denialism. Climate-science deniers even use the same language as creationists: “the science isn’t settled,” “teach the controversy,” etc. This kind of lock-step rhetoric has prompted Daily Kos to refer to climate deniers as “climate zombies.”

Climate zombies are not always Christian fundamentalists; but when they are, they prefer to reference an interpretation of the Bible known as “dominionism.” God gave humans “dominion,” that is, power, over the earth, they argue, so we should be able to do with it whatever we want. But dominionism is not the only Biblical environmental school of thought. God also commands us to be stewards of the earth, to “tend it and keep it.” Advocates of “stewardship” tend to believe that taking care of the earth is a moral concern.

If you want to know where a given religious organization comes down on climate-change regulation, keep an ear out for those two “dog-whistle” words. Dominionism jives nicely with a free-market approach to natural resources and distaste for regulation. A front-page New York Times story before the 2010 elections quoted several Tea Party supporters who claimed religious motivations for their climate skepticism: “Being a strong Christian,” said one, “I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”

Stewardship, the more environmentalist angle of Bible interpretation, on the other hand, can be harder to find in the public dialogue on climate change. But it is out there: sometimes in surprising places.

In the spring of 2007, shortly before a major G8 conference debate, Greenpeace Germany came up with a dramatic plan to draw attention to this mother of all environmental issues. They would rebuild Noah’s Ark, on top of Mount Ararat, where, according to legend, the Ark landed after the Flood, to show that this kind of disaster could happen again soon.

Wolfgang Sadik, the Action Coordinator of the project, told me he ran into some opposition at first, from colleagues at Greenpeace International, who found the idea too sentimental, too American, not serious enough. But to Sadik the “climate symbol” made perfect sense: “The Greenpeace logo is the rainbow, they call us the ‘rainbow warriors,’ and if you go into the Bible, after the flood there is a “new contract” between man and nature, and the symbol for this new contract is the rainbow….We are working on a new contract between…[man and nature].” The Ark was an available and widely-known symbol, so why not use it?

There were also major logistical concerns, because of the tricky politics of the Turkish-Kurdish mixed region of Armenia where Mount Ararat sits, which was then controlled by paramilitary groups. (Armenian environmental activist Jason Sohigian told me he had vaguely heard of the Ark project. But he pointed out, somewhat ironically, that the biggest threat from climate change in that area is not from flood, but from deforestation and drought.) Building the ship on top of a mountain didn’t make matters easier: “It had to look like a big ship even if it was not really big, use the topography, landscape, curves, angles.”

But like Noah, Greenpeace persevered. They built a scale model to explain the project to the press; reporters followed the volunteers as they carried wood up the mountain and built their Ark; they got a whole month of international press attention. At the opening ceremony, on May 31, 2007, they released 208 doves, one for each country in the world, and read the Ararat Declaration: “Climate change will cause… flooding on a scale unheard of since the story of Noah was first told.”

Greenpeace’s Ark on Mount Ararat (via greenpeace.org)

Sadik said that the stunt had had the biggest impact of any campaign Greenpeace had ever created in that part of the world. The Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty which requires member nations to reduce greenhouse emissions, and which was then in the last phase of signing nations before going into effect, had not even been on the Turkish government’s agenda, and suddenly they were being invited to parliamentary sessions debating the legislation, because, as Hilal Atici, Greenpeace’s woman on the ground in Turkey, put it, “the story was so big that they could no more ignore our request.” Neither activist, however, had any illusions about their Ark’s wider effectiveness. That new contract between man and nature would have to be worldwide, and there was at least one major holdout: us.

Climate-science denialism had reached American halls of power via the Tea Party. And Noah’s Ark was a central plank in their platform. During a Congressional hearing in 2009, Illinois Congressman John Shimkus famously cited God’s promise to Noah that “nor will I ever again destroy all living creatures as I have done.” Shimkus took that to mean that God would not destroy the world again by flood. (Which of course leaves open the possibility of other forms of apocalypse.) Because that’s “the infallible word of God,” climate change could not be real.

It may sound silly, but the existence of deniers like Shimkus prevented national legislation from being passed; which in turn became an obstacle to U.S. entry into international climate legislation. Brad Johnson, climate correspondent for the Center for American Progress, had a front-row seat to the fallout of free-market fundamentalism at the 2010 Climate Conference in Cancun: “Practically speaking,” he wrote me, “the seeming ascendance of climate denial makes progress on a climate treaty seem almost impossible.” Johnson has also correlated the amount of donations politicians receive from big oil and other polluting industries with legislators’ votes on environmental legislation. “Many [international representatives to the Cancun talks] simply don’t understand—it seems to them as if people in the United States must be insane.” It sure does look that way from Kentucky.

***

Ken Ham and his organization Answers in Genesis run the Creation Museum, which presents a guided tour of the 6,000-year-old earth, and often serves as a poster-child for American young-earth creationism. Its planned sequel, the Ark Encounter, does not actually exist–yet. But you’d never know that by how the religious theme park has stayed in the news cycle for at least four years. (First came the novelty stories: can you believe these crazies think the Ark was real and want to build one you can actually visit? Then it was the tax-scandal stories: how dare the state of Kentucky pay for this?)

Ham’s organization does the climate-zombie routine fairly gracefully. One of the many highly circulated press releases for the Ark Encounter was an announcement that they will employ an architecture firm known for its LEED-certified, “green” building design. Environmentalism has its (tax) benefits. But then, they also sell a “biblically based and thoroughly balanced” book on the topic that asks: “Global warming is real, but is it primarily man-made?”

Even Ham’s much-publicized debate with “Science Guy” Bill Nye got pulled into the Ark-building narrative. Before the debate, reports were coming out that the Ark Encounter was behind in fundraising; afterwards, they apparently suddenly had enough money to start the groundbreaking. And just in time to compete for headlines with Aronofsky’s film opening. Aronofsky was Ham’s big-budget Ark-building competition.

Like Ham, Aronofsky had been enthralled by the Ark story since his youth. Like Ham, Aronofsky signed on to the “long-cubit” school of Biblical interpretation. (The “cubit” is a unit of measure somewhere between a foot and a yard, defined in ancient sources as the length of the forearm. But that, like everything else Biblical, leaves room for interpretation.) Unlike Ham, however, Aronofsky did actually construct a full-scale model of the Ark—in a clearing near Oyster Bay, Long Island. He hired the artists who created the installation “Big Bambu” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010 to create a scaffolding around it. And the heretical Hollywood Ark did, in fact, survive Hurricane Sandy unscathed. Ham had to show him up.

Ham thinks the meaning of this Genesis story is perfectly clear: it’s about Jesus. Specifically, the Rapture. “The Flood is a reminder that one day there will be another global judgment, but next time by fire (2 Peter 3:10).” And since it’s fire, the Ark needs to be symbolic. “God has provided an Ark of salvation for each of us to be saved from the judgment to come, which places people in Hell. Our ‘Ark’ today is the Lord Jesus Christ…” In a brief, breezy blog post responding to news of NOAH, he once again located the “real message” of the Old Testament story in the New Testament, and brushed off Aronofsky’s environmentalism angle: “I smiled at the statement that ‘Noah was the first environmentalist.’ Can you imagine what today’s environmentalists would say about that? Imagine all the trees Noah had to cut down to get all the gopher wood—and he had no replanting program!” Nothing environmental to see here, move along.

And then he throws in a little shout-out to dominionism: “We must understand that we live in a sin-cursed universe and that man was given dominion to use the environment for man’s good and God’s glory. Modern environmentalism for the most part is built on an evolutionary view of history with the creation having dominion over man!”

Ham notwithstanding, the role of religion itself in American attitudes toward climate change is hardly black-and-white. First of all, the separation of religion and environmentalism is a very new development. Geologist David Montgomery, author of The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, calls creationists “the most recently evolved species of Christian.” People like Ham, he says, “are walking away from a long tradition of the natural world as a valid source of revelation. There were two sources of divine knowledge: what God made, and what God wrote.” What changed was not so much theological as political and economic.

Global-warming denialism builds on a half-century of what the authors of Merchants of Doubt call “free-market fundamentalism.” In an effort to avoid costly government regulation, big business funds scientists to sow uncertainty about what is scientifically true: tobacco causes cancer; acid rain is bad; there’s a hole in the ozone layer. Climate change is the largest-scale problem the denialist machine has tried to push under the rug, but in a way it’s also the easiest: who would really want to believe that we have caused the earth to end in rising sea levels and drought, if they could possibly avoid it? Which makes the evangelical environmental movement all the more improbable and impressive.

***

Major evangelical leaders, including Rick Warren, Jim Wallace, and Richard Cizik, have long advocated for stewardship, in a movement they call “creation care.” They argue that Christians are actually called to combat environmental devastation, and to care for those already affected by it around the world. Their influence in the evangelical world has always fluctuated. In 2006, a call to action, the Evangelical Climate Initiative, was signed by numerous evangelical leaders. But the misleadingly-named climate-deniers Interfaith Stewardship Alliance shot back, pressuring the National Association of Evangelicals to postpone an expected statement on climate change that same year.

People are always declaring creation care dead in the water. But the movement is still kicking. The Evangelical Climate Initiative has since become part of the Evangelical Environmental Network, run by Rev. Jim Ball, Executive Vice President for Policy and Climate Change. In the face of climate denial, Ball wrote me, the EEN will “continue to do what we have been doing: telling the truth to our community and others that anthropogenic global warming is one of the most serious threats to humanity in this century and therefore a profound challenge and opportunity for Christians and others of good will.” He recently started a project with the Department of Energy to make houses of worship more energy efficient, called GIVER (Green Initiative for eVangelical Renewal). Still, it can be a lonely world out there for public figures who declare both their allegiance to evangelical Christianity and climate science. Just ask Katherine Hayhoe, author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, who was publicly skewered by the religious right. Creation care has the catchy name, it’s got big personalities behind it, it makes a lot of common sense. What it doesn’t have: big oil money. 

That’s where Hollywood comes in. Hayhoe is becoming a celebrity, thanks to Showtime’s big new climate change documentary series, The Years of Living Dangerously. In NOAH, the environmentalist overtones are not subtle: they are not meant to be. Like Wolfgang Sadik of Greenpeace, Ari Handel, Aronofsky’s longtime co-writer, is willing to grab onto a symbol usually ceded to the religious right. He articulated to me at least three points where the Biblical text pointed in the direction of stewardship. First, God asks Noah to get two of every animal onto the Ark; every animal has value to God. “That’s a conservationist idea.” Noah’s vegetarianism: In the Garden of Eden God tells man that they may eat only of plants; then after the flood, He announces humans are allowed to eat meat. And the reasons God gives for having to flood humanity and start over again include “corrupting the earth.” The filmmakers don’t perceive the environmentalist angle as controversial. “To not have those ideas in there…it’s like a weird editing job. We believe those things and we are oriented that way, but it’s not like it’s artificially grafted onto the story.” Of course, you’d never know that by the responses the movie gets. “It’s funny, the same people who say, ‘Hey, how come you’re not biblically accurate?’ are also the ones who say ‘Hey, why are you such an eco-wacko?’”

“I think the really sad thing is that somewhere along the line… good stewardship of the earth got politicized as anti-religious somehow.” In the film, the villain Tubal-Cain is frequently given dialogue that comes straight out of a dominionist playbook. We were given this earth, these animals, to do with what we like. It’s fighting and killing and eating animals that makes you a man, et cetera.  But even he is not without sympathetic characteristics. Before taking off on an attack of Noah’s encampment, Tubal-Cain is shown in his tent with a candle, asking why God doesn’t speak to him like he clearly does to Noah.

Handel, coming from outside the evangelical debate, sees things a little differently. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that dominion vs. stewardship idea, and how to reconcile them, and I think I came up with the reconciliation. It’s so simple. God gave humans dominion over the earth, and we have it. Look around. Who runs the earth? Who’s going to decide if the coral will go extinct? We will. We have dominion. And the other thing we have been given is the responsibility to take care of it. And are we? So one is a gift and the other is a responsibility.”

Geologist David Montgomery would agree. Part of his goal is to take the interpretation of the Noah story out of the hands of the fundamentalists. After thoughtfully debunking the history of “flood geology,” he offered his own personal interpretation of the story. “To me it says: we are Noah on the planet, we are the stewards. Noah’s Flood tells the story of the way that nature made it into the future. And that’s a challenge for us today. In our meeting with the forces that could destroy us… who’s going to be around to survive, to share the story? There’s a very concrete lesson there.” Which version of the Ark and its story will survive is still an open question.

***

 After the dedication ceremony for the Greenpeace Ark built on Mount Ararat in 2007, the replica’s political utility was considered to be over. Greenpeace Turkey transferred ownership of the Ark to the local government, who reportedly moved it to a safer spot in the town where it could attract tourists. Sadik, who spoke to me in 2011, thought he remembered a visiting colleague report that the Ark was still there, being photographed by Japanese tourists. He hopes the Ark still exists, because it may still come in handy one day. “Even now it’s a good symbol, to bring religions together, especially in these times, with the background of 9/11 and increasing fundamentalism, [it would be nice to be able to bring religions together] not to talk about religion, not to talk about war, but to talk about that ‘new contract between human and nature.’”  Maybe in a year or two.

Meanwhile, the Creation Museum already includes an extensive exhibit about the Ark. It comes after the long, dark tunnel of sin after the Garden of Eden exhibit, and it’s notable for its contrast. You enter a bright, active room, with Biblical-looking animatronic people everywhere. One of whom, looking uncannily like Aronofsky’s previous star, Natalie Portman, is forever weaving a mat. Another might be cutting “gopher wood” as building material. And still others, with impressive industriousness and optimism, hammer nails into the Ark-in-progress, over and over again.

 ***

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is the author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, and editor-in-chief of Killing the Buddha.

The post All Aboard the Ark: Rainbow Warriors vs. Climate Zombies appeared first on The Revealer.

Dr. Steven Laureys with a patient at the University Hospital in Liege, Belgium, Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009.
Photo: AP Images / Yves Logghe via http://www.christianpost.com/

By Ann Neumann

If thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous. Job 8:6 KJV

“I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me,” Rom Houben, who had been in a coma for 23 years, typed. “It was my second birth. I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.” Houben was finally able to communicate these words–via facilitated communication, a method by which a speech therapist helps a minimally conscious person convert thoughts to written language–because Dr. Steven Laureys and a team of Belgian doctors had discovered that some patients with severe brain injury could still be conscious.

“Just imagine,” Houben typed, “You hear, see, feel and think, but no one can see that.” Researchers and the families of those in an array of mentally disabled states rejoiced with the hope that new technology could release their loved ones from the prisons that their bodies had become. “Pro-life” groups across the globe, including the US-based Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network and the Canadian Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, were particularly enthusiastic about Laurey’s research because they saw it as a chance to sway public perception of the severely brain injured and to prevent those individuals from being removed from “life support,” as Terri Schiavo had been. These groups consider removal of respirators, feeding tubes and defibrillators to be a form of euthanasia. Wrote Alex Schadenberg at the time:

As executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition I have received many phone calls from friends or family members of people who are in coma. My experience is that medical professionals are too quick to give-up on the person in [a] coma or cognitively disabled. Family members are often pressured into withdrawing medical treatment or pressured into removing food and fluids from the person in a coma, even before they were given a reasonable opportunity for recovery.

But the news of Houben’s “discovery” was not universally accepted; many were skeptical not only of Laurey’s research but of the method Houben’s caretakers  were reportedly using to communicate with him. Bioethicist Art Caplan likened facilitated communication to using a Ouiji board. Facilitated communication–and Houben’s ability to “speak” using it–was soundly debunked in February 2010, forcing Laureys, who has been studying “minimally conscious” patients for more than a decade, to recant his support of the communication method.

Said Laureys in 2010, “From the start, I did not prescribe this technique. But it is important not to make judgments. His family and care­givers acted out of love and compassion.” The researcher stood by his own work, which uses PET and fMRI brain scanning machines to detect consciousness in patients previously considered unconscious.

Laureys caused another stir last month with a report in the British medical journal The Lancet on a new study of 126 patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, locked-in syndrome, or in a minimally conscious state. The study, wrote Denise Grady at The New York Times on April 15th, “found that a significant number of people labeled vegetative had received an incorrect diagnosis and actually had some degree of consciousness and the potential to improve.”

Laureys told Grady, “I think these patients are kind of neglected by both medicine and society. Many of them don’t even see a medical doctor or a specialist for years. So I think it’s very important to ask the question, are they unconscious?”

The significance of this finding is great. Reports of those in minimally conscious or vegetative states vary, but Grady notes that in the US “there are 100,000 to 300,000 people thought to be minimally conscious, and an additional 25,000 are vegetative.”

Rom Houben
(Photo: Reuters via http://www.bt.dk)

And yet, while I am excited by the kind of research Laureys is conducting–and I’ve been watching him since the case of Rom Houben emerged in 2009–I find a host of reasons to question, if not his conclusions, the potential uses of such research.

The brain is still a vast mystery, a final frontier of uncharted territory in the human body. Diagnoses for minimal consciousness, coma and other such extreme brain injuries are still fairly ill defined, if not in medical literature, at least in diagnosis. And, with the exception of brain death (absolutely no function in the brain) and persistent vegetative state (some function in the brain stem), patients’ mental states can change or be hard to pin down. Too often, various conditions are lumped together despite their vast differences. Laureys’ sample size for the study is also incredibly small. As well, the machines used to conduct the tests of patients’ brains are exorbitantly expensive, putting them out of the reach of many; their use often increases when a hospital purchases them because, well, the cost has to be recouped somehow.

There’s also the question of what exactly “the potential to improve” means in this setting, both medically and to an ever-hopeful family. What level of recovery is possible? What kinds of lives can such patients and their families anticipate. And, what everyone asks under his or her breath: could the expense of these machines and this year-after-year extensive care be better used for patients who can return to fuller lives? The Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network lists 20 patients who have, since 1997, emerged from “PVS/Locked-In State/Coma,” including Rom Houben. One can’t help but wonder if some of these emergences are attributable to misdiagnosis or varying definitions of what emerge means. Or what quality of life changes these patients can ever expect to experience.

Of course, the Life and Hope Network has a clear–and dare I say, persistent–objective, and that is to prevent patients from being removed from “life support” of any form. Bobby Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s brother and executive director of the Network, considers himself a disability rights activist and claims that his sister was “severely mentally disabled” but healthy and capable of living a long life. The Network recently advocated for a brain dead child to be transferred from a hospital that wanted to remove her respirator. Schindler and countless other advocates do not consider brain death (absolutely no brain function) to be death, as the medical community has long agreed that it is. Such groups believe that a person is alive so long as their heart continues to beat, even if made to do so by machines.

The efforts of these groups may be well intentioned, but they tend to confuse the general public about the irreversible nature of such diagnoses. Where there is confusion, there can be great emotional turmoil–and political upheaval. The brain death at the end of last year of a pregnant woman, Marlise Munoz, exposed a Texas law that prevents families from removing “life support” from pregnant patients. Although Marlise Munoz was brain dead, a status that experts say is not covered by the Texas law because brain death is death, the hospital chose to keep Munoz on machines, against her and her husband’s wishes.

The larger politics of Laureys’ work can’t be ignored either. Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network are both anti-aid in dying organizations located in countries where aid in dying (or assisted suicide, or euthanasia) is gaining a foothold. Laureys himself is based in Belgium where euthanasia (the accepted term in Europe) has been legal since 2006. In February, and to great global outcry, Belgium legalized euthanasia for minors. Laureys’ work is seen by some as a necessary stay to such legalization; indeed, opponents have worked double-time to hail Laureys’ new study as proof that persons in varying states of brain injury should be kept on machines.

But there’s yet another issue we must consider when reading (and writing) about Laurey’s research, one that is lost on Grady when she writes in the New York Times, “Terri Schiavo, in a vegetative state for 15 years, died in 2005 in Florida after courts allowed the removal of her feeding tube.” The courts determined, according to long-standing jurisprudence, that Schiavo’s feeding tube could be removed not because she was thought to be in an irreversible state or because the courts thought she had no consciousness, but because her husband proved that his wife’s wish would be to have the feeding tube removed. It’s a point that deserves clarity. Regardless of one’s definitions, the foundation of medical ethics is the principle of autonomy: that patients have the right to be fully informed of all available medical options and to select or refuse treatments they do or do not want, even if doing so means certain death.

What then do the results of Laureys’ recent research mean? For the future of brain research, they’re exciting. Perhaps some day this mapping of the brain’s functions will provide us with more accurate diagnoses of such injuries–and in the distant future, some methods for not only communicating with patients, but also providing meaningful treatments for recovery. Those possibilities are still a very long way off, though.

Until then, what does Laureys‘ study mean for patients like Terri Schiavo? Nothing. Her husband satisfied the court that Schiavo would not have wanted to remain on a feeding tube. My fear is that Laureys’ research will be used by activist groups to cause confusion among the public regarding the realities and possibilities for patients like her. Hope, however unrealistic, is powerful. It changes laws, public opinion and hospital practice, as the cases of Terri Schiavo and Marlise Munoz and others have shown. Could Laureys’ hopeful research lead to laws that end informed consent and autonomy for similar families and patients? Could it inhibit doctors’ and hospitals’ decision-making process? In some sense, it already has by providing the unrealistic hope that unconscious patients are still “there”–thus justifying periodic overrides of general medical practice by unnaturally preserving… a far-fetched hope.

When you consider the thousands of patients in the US who are being kept “alive” on machines, the chance that some may be conscious or minimally conscious–with little chance of any meaningful recovery–sustaining their bodies with machines seems barbaric and inhumane. Particularly when we don’t know their explicit wishes. Perhaps some day Laurey’s research will provide us with a way to ask them if they are aware–and if they wish to be.

 ***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

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Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann‘s book about a good death, SITTING VIGIL, will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.

The post Wakeful Unawareness appeared first on The Revealer.

© Max McDermott

By Don Jolly

I was born in 1986, four years after the death of science-fiction author Phillip K. Dick. When I think of the years of my childhood in the 1990s, I think of his author’s note to the 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly. Dick’s focus on the future, I think, allowed him to write the epitaph of that decade he did not live to see. “If there was any ‘sin,’” he wrote, “it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever.” In the end, they were punished for it, and “the punishment was far too great.”

Originally, these words were meant to sum-up the failing of the drug culture in the 1960s and ‘70s, a subject Dick considered neither moral nor bourgeois. My reading is the opposite. I see the American middle-class in those words. For Dick, Scanner’s junkies were “children playing in the street.” That’s how I think of my parents, and myself, and our whole slow party through the last decade of the twentieth century. It wasn’t a great time, just a good one — and it hit us too hard when it ended. These days, looking back, I feel like I’m sifting through the party favors.

Case in point:

Monster in my Pocket was a toy line by Matchbox, the venerable company best known for pocket-sized replicas of cars. It launched in 1990 with a set of 48 monster figurines, each made of brightly colored plastic. They were flexible, almost rubbery — you could fold one in half between your thumb and forefinger and then watch it, miraculously, uncurl into its original form. “Now you can collect the greatest REAL monsters of all time,” boasted the text on the back of their boxes. “Since the beginning of time, man has battled Monsters and great Monster Legends have existed in every culture. Now you can learn the facts about the greatest REAL MONSTERS of all time.”

The toys were, as their box assured us, “carefully researched.” The monsters depicted came from film, literature, mythology and, significantly, religion. By the release of its fourth series, Monster in my Pocket featured figured based on the biblical Behemoth, the Hindu gods Kali, Ganesha and Yama, and even the “great beast” described in Revelation 13, “with ten horns and seven heads.”

The toys were distributed like Baseball cards, randomly n opaque packaging. This forced  parents to buy set after set until all 48 could be cobbled together. What’s more, they came with all the usual multimedia affectations of a successful 90s toy line. A Nintendo cartridge was offered in 1991, with a four issue comic book series released concurrently. A half-hour cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbara aired the following year. There were trading cards and figures exclusive to cereal boxes. All of it, taken together, was meant to turn the appetite of a young consumer from simple interest to devotion – not just to bits of plastic, but to the moneyed child’s equivalent of a lifestyle: complete with games, collectibles and relevant narratives. Monster in my Pocket wasn’t even one of the more successful examples of the form. A similar endeavor ten years earlier, the Transformers, turned a line of shape-changing Japanese robot toys into a multi-million dollar franchise whose latest Hollywood film will arrive later this summer. Still, it did decent business for Matchbox — and lasted most of the decade.

The inclusion of Hindu gods as “monsters” in the line sparked a mild controversy. In 1993, complaints by the British branch of the Vishwa Hindu Pariṣad, a Hindu advocacy organization, caused Matchbox to issue an apology and, according to a contemporary issue of Hinduism Today,  “[pull] all the Monster units from store shelves and [stop] production” of the offending figures. While the blurb doesn’t specify, speculation on collector’s forums is that such disruptions were restricted to the U.K., whose colonial history made the issue an especially thorny one. The whole episode, in fact, serves as a repetition-in-miniature of European reactions to Indian divinity. The only altered variable is the size of the monstrosity.

© Max McDermott

The sixteenth century traveler in India Lodovico de Varthema, an early and popular voice in the history of such encounters, was unequivocal in his condemnation the Indian divine. “The God of Calicut,” an image he recounted in his Itinerario of 1510, is described as “a devil made of metal… a crown made like that of the papal kingdom, with three crowns; and it also has four horns and four teeth, with a very large mouth … and the most terrible eyes.” The similarity between this account and John’s vision of the apocalyptic beasts in Revelation is striking. Both authors linger on the clear enumeration of crowns and horns. Both also focus on hybridity. For John, the second beast of Revelation 13:11 has “two horns like a lamb,” but “speaks like a dragon.” Varthema’s God has the hands of a “flesh-hook” and the feet of a “cock.” The language of one explains the other.

The scholar Timothy K. Beal, in his 2002 volume Religion and its Monsters, speculates that Varthema may have based his “God of Calicut” on an image of Kali. Whatever the material facts of the incident, Beal is careful to note that, “what [Varthema] describes is far less Indian than it is biblical.” Confronted with an alien system of icons and a different conception of the body from his own, the explorer’s vocabulary turned monstrous. It had to.

Monsters, Beal observes, are “in the world but not of the world.” They exist in our rhetoric as representatives of a vast “outside” — a chaos beyond epistemology. The threat of the monster, then, can only be neutralized by its incorporation into extant systems of understanding. For Varthema, bringing the language of Revelation to the description of “The God of Calicut” served to render its dangerous otherness inert. In Varthema’s account, the “God” does not challenge the cosmography of Christian readers. Instead, it conforms to the aesthetics of the “demonic.” It remains frightening, but comprehensible.

Monster in my Pocket performed this same operation, centuries later, in converting its monstrous subject matter into fodder for a children’s collectible line of toys. In this context, John’s beast and Varthema’s misconstrued Kali achieved parity — both were sculptedand sold. To consumers, a collection is composed of two halves: that which is possessed, and that which is needed for completion of a set. Kali, Behemoth, Ganesha and the seven-headed terror of Revelation were shrunk, by Matchbox, to fit this paradigm. Their only “threat” was in their potential absence — a condition cured by hassling one’s parents for a sufficient number of boxes. The monsters became pure commodities. Toys, cartoon characters and flashing, 8-bit sprites — ideas whose comprehension was inextricable from their consumption.

“Now you can collect the greatest REAL monsters of all time,” bragged the packaging of Monster in my Pocket’s first series. “REAL,” it may be assumed, meant that the monsters were drawn from elsewhere in culture. The figures retained, however faintly, their origin as upsetting, liminal ideas — beings in the world, but not of it. This light residue of relevance resulted in Matchbox’s minor controversy of 1993. The company learned its lesson. Afterward, the Monster in my Pocket turned to less troublesome subject matter. There was a line of dinosaurs, followed by a series of space aliens and, finally, in 1995, what many collectors consider the property’s nadir: Monster Wrestlers in my Pocket. In the course of my research for this column, I came across an elegiac forum post on the matter. In it, two images were presented side-by-side: one of a neon green first-series Monster, the Aztec divinity Coatlicue — the other a grotesquely bulging wrestler in flesh-tone plastic, its one-piece muscleman costume sloppily painted blue. “How did this turn into this?” the collector asked. A chorus of agreement followed. Everyone felt his disappointment. Monster in my Pocket had been smart, artful — and, then, it was just a stupid toy. 

© Max McDermott

To me, the aim of the early franchise was very much of its time and place. The cold war was over. Computer technology was advancing in great strides, opening new avenues of media and communication year by year. It seemed, for one dreaming decade, that the systems of understanding at play in modern, Western capitalism really worked. We had Netscape and microwaves and the atom bomb — nobody could tell us what to do. What other culture could produce something as stupid and self-satisfied as mass-produced figurines of Kali, Dracula and the Anti-Christ? We were struggling through the fumes of some imagined victory.

Those days are over now. Political certainties have collapsed, technology has become uncanny — monstrous in the worst sense of the term. Ten years of junk food has given us diabetes. Monster in my Pocket seems like a misguided product of a misguided age — a childish hope that the demonic, the chaotic and the other could be pacified by means of a little strategic finance.

“The enemy will never be forgiven,” Dick wrote, in A Scanner Darkly. I’m sure the collector who wondered how Monster in my Pocket turned into a wrestling line shares his sentiment. The world was fun, it made sense — and then it didn’t. Dick, at least, can pin his regrets on the limited chemical dignity of junk. The forum poster, who’s probably around my age, directs his elegy at toys. Still, they share a foe.

“The ‘enemy,’” Dick said, “was their mistake in playing.”

***

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The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger

By Drew Thomases

Earlier this year, Penguin Books India agreed to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History from publication. The petition by Dina Nath Batra and his Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (“Committee for the Struggle to Save Education”) argues that the book is a “shallow, distorted and non serious presentation of Hinduism” written with the intent “to ridicule, humiliate & defame the Hindus.” Doniger’s effort to present a different narrative about Hinduism—with emphases on women, sexuality, animals, and untouchables—is admittedly selective, though Batra finds her approach both offensive, and more shockingly, suggestive of “a woman hungry of sex.” Ad hominems notwithstanding, offense is enough to stir things up. Section 295 A of the Indian Penal Code holds culpable those who might insult or attempt to insult any religion or religious belief with the intention of hurting someone’s “religious feelings.” Under threats of a criminal case brought against the author and publisher, Penguin buckled.

Much digital ink has been spilt on the subject, some attacking Batra’s position and Penguin’s milquetoast decision, others defending the petition, and a few taking on the Penal Code itself. Wendy Doniger penned her own reply, and by now most have drawn their lines in the sand. For me, the Doniger debate has brought to mind a very different book, one which has seen incredible popularity in India, and which unlike The Hindus, faces little danger of being pulled and pulped: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. This situation—Doniger nowhere, Hitler everywhere—provides an unusual vision of India’s current political landscape.*

Waiting for my train in New Delhi Railway Station, I glance over some of the titles at the bookstall near platform #16. Next to Fifty Shades of Grey and resting gently on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a book with a blood-red cover, and the world’s most infamous mustache. “What’s this about?” I ask, pointing to Mein Kampf. “Oh this,” the vendor says, “this is a really good book, a bestseller.”

For those who have spent time in India, this should come as no surprise. Mein Kampf is remarkably visible, not only because its availability spans from tiny bookstall to mega-vendor across the subcontinent, but also because it is often piled so high—like pancakes stacked and going fast. Even at the book tent of Jaipur’s now-famous Literature Festival, no less than twenty copies of Hitler’s tome burdened the shelves. According to an article from 2009, Jaico Publishing House—one of several purveyors of Mein Kampf in India—sold upwards of 15,000 copies each year in Delhi alone. Moreover, the reading audience extends beyond the English language; translations of Mein Kampf are now available in Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Why the popularity? One of the more prominent answers seems to be a perception of Hitler’s leadership skills and undying patriotism. The Times of India conducted a poll in 2002, finding that among students in elite institutions across the country, 17% favored Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have. Just this April, All India Radio News posted a story on Facebook about the recent developments surrounding the Führer’s wife, Eva Braun, and her possibly Jewish ancestry. Civilization would perhaps crumble if we were to read too much into Facebook comments, but some of these are illuminating: “People may hate him but remember one thing[:] whatever he did was for his motherland”; “except his genocide he was a grt patriot”; “Hitler had a great love for his country n he sacrificed his life for his motherland…whatever he did [was] only in the rage of patriotism.”

With India’s general elections taking place right now, the “rage of patriotism” is far from irrelevant. This rings especially true because of the resurgence of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with Narendra Modi and his muscular Hindu nationalism at the helm. Without Nazi-baiting or succumbing to Godwin’s law, it is nevertheless pertinent to consider how Modi’s popularity—like Hitler’s in India—has also required an erasure of past violence. In 2002, Modi was put under the media microscope for being accused of complicity in the communal riots in Gujarat, which transpired while he was Chief Minister and led to over 1,000 deaths—most of them Muslim. Regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, there is no doubt that Modi’s future successes could only be possible with a massive campaign of disremembrance. Time and again, the BJP tells the Indian electorate to look forward, to worry more about what India can become than what it has been, and finally, to put aside the divisiveness of left-wing, minority-based politics. Modi, they say, can deliver progress.

Fear of a nation divided seems very much the province of the majority; the assertion of sameness does not hurt them because they command it. The past is the past, and a united future requires only strength of resolve and love of country. As for those on the margins, their struggles are erased and their unique experiences rendered incompatible with an undivided India. Whose voices should be heard? Whose concerns—or “religious feelings,” as it were—should shape the future? Dina Nath Batra, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, and the people he claims to represent: that’s who. In the end, it is precisely this political logic that allows for Hitler’s Mein Kampf to be so popular, and Doniger’s The Hindus to be pulled from the shelves. This is the politics of looking forward: a shrug to past violence, and a wink to the majority.

*A longer piece would also take consideration of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses—its being banned in India and the aftermath—which some would see as a counterpoint to my main argument. My point, though, is that the political backdrop of the banning of The Satanic Verses served as one of many factors leading to a growing distrust of minority-based politics. That, in turn, helped to shape today’s landscape.

***

Drew Thomases is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Religion, studying the anthropology of Hindu traditions. He holds a B.A. from Hamilton College in religion and Asian studies, as well as an M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University, both in religion. His dissertation research is based in Pushkar, India, where he explores the intersections of pilgrimage, tourism, and globalization.

The post The Hindus, Hitler, and the Politics of Looking Forward appeared first on The Revealer.