Faith in Fantasy

I saw the most recent Narnia film today with my daughter. (She's a big fan.) On the whole, I'd have to rate it a failure, certainly inferior to the first and best, and even a hair below the second. Though it had plenty of promising material--a high seas adventure in search of enchanted swords and missing lords, a boy who turns into a dragon, a pool that transforms all it touches to gold--for me, all of these elements fell flat. And the reason is simple: the film had no faith in its own fantasy.

That's the problem with allegory, and the Narnia films, though they've been softened somewhat from the overtly allegorical books, are nonetheless allegories. (At one point in the film Aslan tells Lucy, "I am known by a different name in your world, and you must come to know me there." Yawn.) Allegory, by its very nature, empties fantasy of its mystery and appeal and turns it into a mere facade or excuse for something else, something supposedly deeper and presumably more important. Allegory won't let fantasy simply be; it insists that fantasy has to mean, and what it means cancels out the very vessel that holds the meaning. So instead of a thrilling adventure, you get a dull lesson in temptation and sin. Instead of true imagination, you get a sermon. Instead of a talking lion, you get talking points about the Son of God.

I say all this, remember, having nothing against the Son of God. As Martin Luther King Jr. Day approaches, I think we would all do well to remember what the Son of God said, and try to live our lives, as King did, a bit more in his example.

But King was no allegory. Neither was Christ. They were living models of the spiritual life, and when they told us to follow them, they didn't need a talking lion to make their case.

So let's have both faith and fantasy, and keep the two separate. Let's allow life to be mysterious and unknowable for its own sake (that's fantasy) as well as mysterious and unknowable for some higher purpose (that's faith). Let's not demean faith by calling it a fantasy. But let's not demean fantasy either by insisting it has to be the handmaiden of faith.

Yeah, That Should Work

Having apparently exhausted all the human, technological, and governmental resources at our disposal--this includes Kevin Costner's really big centrifuges, which didn't work at all--Alabama Governor Bob Riley has turned to another resource: God.

That is to say, he named yesterday a state day of prayer and urged Alabamians to pray for those affected by the oil spill.

Now, there's a long history in this country of declaring days of prayer. The Puritans did it (usually when the crop was bad, witches were causing trouble, or Native Americans were peskily taking up arms to remain on their lands). Presidents have called such days during times of social unrest, economic downturn, and war. It seems that a group called "Catholics against Obamacare" called a day of prayer for September 11, 2009 in hopes of "Barack Obama's conversion and for the truth about his health care bill to come out." So there's ample precedent for Riley's call.

And I guess, in the big scheme of things, such a call is fairly harmless. That is, while it's unlikely to produce any tangible benefits--it certainly won't plug the leak, purge the waters and beaches, save the pelicans, or contribute one iota toward the clean-up effort--it won't actually make matters worse (as most of the technological shenanigans of the past months have).

But there is a way of thinking that suggests that days of prayer are ultimately counter-productive. If we content ourselves with praying, are we not avoiding the actions (both short-term and long-term) that might truly resolve the problem? Even worse, are we not giving ourselves license to continue performing the actions that are producing the problem? Hey, I PRAYED! So what if I bought an SUV and voted for a "drill, baby, drill" candidate?

This is why civil rights leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King always linked prayer to action and reform. For these leaders, prayer was not an end in itself; it was preparation--mental, spiritual, social--for the real work that had yet to be performed. It was a means of purification, yes--but purification in the interest of selfless action, not purification in order to proclaim, self-servingly, one's own moral rectitude. Prayer to address the problem, not to wash one's hands of it.

That's the kind of prayer we need now. Because frankly, that water's pretty oily for hand-washing.

I Want to Par-TAY

After reading my op-ed, a few people have asked me why, if I'm so thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party, I end the piece by predicting or hoping for some new party to emerge. Maybe, these friends have suggested, it's futile to look to political parties at all to heal our society's ills.

Part of me is very responsive to this argument: the part of me that agrees with Thoreau, Gandhi, and King that civil disobedience, protest, and other forms of direct citizen action are the best (or only) way for citizens in a stiflingly complex sociopolitical system to "break through" and effect real change. Such an argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would dispense with political parties (or government itself) entirely: for what possible use could it be to align oneself with a preconstituted party (or even one of one's own devising) if the point is to liberate oneself from the very structures that exclude, or at least distance, citizens from direct participation in the political process?

So in that respect, I sort of wish I'd ended not with a plea for a new party, but with a plea for a new social consciousness, conscience, and conviction among ordinary citizens. That might have made the article stronger.

But at the same time, there's a large part of me--call it Socialist if you want, or if you must--that believes in the fundamental power of social collectives to multiply the clout, and soften the selfishness, of individuals. Political parties, of course, aren't the only such collectives; the organized, grassroots movements of Gandhi, King, and others are too, and may be even more powerful examples of the form. And yet I continue to find the promise of political affiliation, if not its practice, appealing; I continue to find myself believing that there must be a place, however small, for politically constituted collectives to guide and shape the political process.

Maybe this makes me wishy-washy, an independent not worth his name. Maybe it shows I'm still very much a child of my parents' New Deal legacy; maybe it says I've been drinking our political system's Kool Aid so long I can't imagine a true alternative to the junk it's been selling me. I'm not sure. I'd like to hear what others have to say about this, though. Maybe, together, we can figure out a way to party without parties.

King's True Dream

In the week following Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I've made it a habit to introduce my students to a speech of his that practically no one knows about, a speech that's been almost entirely eclipsed by "I Have a Dream." Not that I have a problem with the latter speech, of course. But I feel that the obsessive focus on this speech does a disservice to King's legacy, a legacy that was far more radical than his words at the Lincoln Memorial suggest. "I Have a Dream" is a speech that, these days at least, it's hard to disagree with; who but hardcore racists could object to King's vision of interracial harmony? In that respect, the endless replaying of the "Dream" speech serves a stultifying rather than a galvanizing function in our current historical context; the speech allows us, especially with a black man in the White House, to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, rather than to ask ourselves how far we still have to go.

And of course, we still do have a ways to go. From New Orleans to Haiti, we still live in a world of radical inequality grounded to a great extent in skin color; we still have color-coded systems of education, justice, economics, employment, residence, health, environment, and all the rest. We have a black president, yes, but also a black record that has yet to be addressed.

And we also, as I've noted in many an earlier post, have a black president who is waging (indeed, escalating) two wars. To bring this up might seem irrelevant to a discussion of King--but that's only because we've forgotten his other speech, his more radical speech, the speech in which he made clear that dismantling racism is neither sufficient nor possible without dismantling the systems of economic injustice and military imperialism on which racism is founded.

I refer to King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," which he delivered on April 4, 1967, a year before his death. In this speech, King argued that domestic racism was only one symptom of a larger social malaise of international reach, a malaise reflected both by the criminal war in Vietnam and by economic inequality at home and abroad. This speech, not surprisingly, turned many of King's former supporters against him; he was upbraided for dabbling in matters about which he knew nothing, vilified as anti-American, decried as a Communist. He was treated, in short, the way antiwar protestors are always treated: as traitors to their nation.

But his words remain as resonant today as they were over 40 years ago. Just listen to them:

"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. . . . One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

That's the message I take from King's dream: the radical message of revolution not only in the arena of race relations but in the way our entire global social, political, economic, military, and environmental system is structured. We are far from realizing that dream; indeed, we are arguably farther from it now than we were in King's day. But if we truly wish to honor King's legacy, we must see that legacy in its full and true dimensions and do as he says: "rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world."