I went out with one of the students from our church the other day to see Iron Man. I’d heard some great reviews and the buzz surrounding Iron Man was huge. Even with all the hype, Iron Man surpassed my expectations. I was pretty unfamiliar with the story line and had only recently overheard the “origin story” where Tony Stark, über-wealthy arms dealer, is captured by the enemies of America and is able to escape by building himself a robotic suit of armor. Fast-forward to 2008, update the enemies (Viet-cong to Afghani Terrorists) and we have today’s Iron Man.

[spoilers ahead] I really enjoyed Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the self-centered billionaire, Tony Stark. He brought the kind of “rough around the edges” persona needed for this character. It also makes Stark’s conversion seem believable. And speaking of conversion, I was really surprised at some of the territory this film covered. There was a healthy dose of critique for the arms industry and Iron Man wasn’t afraid to portray the United States for what we are, the largest and most indiscriminate arms dealer in the world. Stark learns this when he finds that his Afghani terrorist captors are using weapons that came from his own company. While it may be public knowledge that the United States armed both al Queda and Iraq… oh, and Iran, we don’t often see that in the plot line of a blockbuster summer action flick. So to the writers with the gravitas to pull that one off… bravo.

Stark comes back from his captivity and has an incredible change of heart. As the president of the largest Arms Manufacturer in the world (Stark Industries), he holds a press conference and announces that Stark Industries will no longer be making weapons. The stock takes a 50 point nose dive and people begin to speculate if he is insane. Could you imagine if Lockheed Martin did something similar? Wow. Tony tries to steer the company towards more humanitarian pursuits while he begins to build the REAL version of his robotic suit of armor that got him out of Afghanistan. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a preachy Amnesty International film disguised as a superhero movie. It is still an action packed two-hours of eye candy… with a heart.

A few days ago I finished Jesus for President and I’ve already lent it out to the first person on the growing waiting list. What a magnificent book! If you went to seminary and constantly had your nose stuck in a Hauerwas or Yoder book but wished you could lend a more accessible version to someone… this is that book. It isn’t dumbed down, let me be clear about that, it’s just that this book was really written for the church. This isn’t the kind of conversation that takes place in the ethereal upper layers of academia, this is the best Kingdom-of-God theology taken to the streets. And what would we expect? Shane & Co aren’t professors, they’re subversive prophets living in the abandoned places of the empire. Making their own clothes, living with the poor, dumpster diving for food… always pointing to Jesus. They are living at the margins pointing us to Jesus. They are shouting with their lives (and this book) that the America we live in is a pitiful and fallen Kingdom not worth our allegiance.

The Eagle is fake, the Eagle is dead.

Follow the Lamb!

Iraq for Sale is a documentary about the corporations that have been given contracts to do work formerly done by the military, and how a corporation’s first priority to make as much profit as possible is in direct conflict with what is good for the American military and the American taxpayer.

I first heard about this phenomenon (specifically Blackwater’s role in Iraq) on NPR sometime last year, so I was very interested when I found this documentary. Blackwater is a corporation that offers specialized military forces. They are not part of the US military, they are a private firm that can be hired to perform military-like duties. The US military out-sources a lot of work to firms like Blackwater, CACI and KBR (a division of Halliburton). These firms do a number of jobs such as providing security to top level officials, washing soldiers laundry and even interrogating prisoners at places like Abu Ghraib.

Some of these corporations are getting attention because information has come out showing that they’ve been ripping off the government, for example KBR was charging $95 to do a load of laundry for soldiers in Iraq. Stuff like that. These corporations are getting contracts to do things the military used to do itself and then they, like all corporations, proceed to maximize profit. You can imagine that a lot of patriotic folks are unjustifiably upset about how these corporations are putting profit over serving the military and about the cost to the American taxpayer for the incredible waste. My own anger over the issue has less to do with how this affects my taxes. What upsets me is the incredible profit war provides some corporations. This is only exponentially so in an administration so committed to the “free market” that they out-source intelligence gathering and interrogation to a private corporation. Of course this shields most of what happens in such operations from any kind of criminal prosecution. If a soldier harms an Iraqi civilian they can be court martialed. If a Blackwater employee kills an Iraqi civilian they cannot be brought to trial.

This marriage between military-corporations and the US government is a particularly horrible one. When war breaks out these corporations stand to make HUGE profits, and when the government uses these corporations there is an added “safety layer” from investigation and prosecution. These corporations are staffed by surprise… former government and military officials. This marriage only serves to make war an incredibly lucrative business to be in and consequently much more frequent.

Have mercy on us Jesus. Your ways are love and peace, but our ways are greed and violence. You are THE truth, but we are a people of deception and lies.

A while back I was riding in the car listening to NPR when they re-aired a peabody award winning broadcast of “This American Life” a favorite show of mine produced by Chicago Public Radio. The broadcast was titled Habeas Schmabeas. Here is a description of the topic “Habeas Schmabeas” tackles…

The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they’re the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

What followed was one of those gripping stories that makes you sit in your car outside your apartment for 45 minutes because you don’t want to miss anything by running inside. You can download the entire episode for free here. What I learned offended the American side of me, to hear about how the constitution is simply ignored or put on hold when it is deemed inconvenient to those in power. Don’t we write these rules specifically for hard times when we’d be tempted to abuse power?

From a Christian standpoint what distressed me even more was the de-humanizing abuse many of these prisoners are forced to undergo. Far from buying into the excuses that “this is a different kind of war calling for different kinds of tactics,” I am compelled to reflect on Jesus’ parable of the indebted prisoner who is freed only to turn around and put those who owed him money into prison. What does forgiveness look like in the midst of a world racked by terrorism? Would Jesus put a “temporary hold” on forgiveness in the face of terrorism declaring that new more modern tactics were needed to fight “extremism?” Or is forgiveness a form of religious extremism in itself? I certainly think so. If prisoners do indeed need to be held captive can it be done while still honoring their God-given dignity? Can their captors be committed to truthfulness and honesty instead of secrecy and deception?

We are often told that the world changed on Sept. 11th, that we now must operate in a “post-9/11″ mentality. Does that apply to being a disciple of Jesus Christ? Did being a Christian change on 9/11? Do we get to temporarily set aside things like forgiveness and loving our enemies in the midst of a world filled with terrorism?

OR are forgiveness and love the very ways Jesus taught us to fight such evils?

Having heard some high praise for the recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, I trekked off to the theatre a few weekends ago to catch it myself. What followed was an interesting mix of emotions for me. I am usually easily able to suspend disbelief and enter into the world of a film, and it is indeed almost always my goal to do so when watching a film. But some films make that really really hard to do. Or maybe to put it more accurately; sometimes John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas make that really hard to do.

300 lacks nothing in stylistic cinematography or art direction. Every single frame lives in a creative land somewhere between Miller’s original comic book and modern day Photoshop art. The texture and style of the film exude a larger-than-life mythical quality that enhance the tale of 300 Spartans fighting off Xerxes’ vast armies. It is a story that can only be told in paintings and campfire tales, and in that regard 300 does exceedingly well.

Some have called 300 one-part Art Film one-part Action-Adventure war movie. I would agree, and the first part is done masterfully. But it’s that nagging issue of content that kept irking me about the second part of 300. While I was continually drawn into this Spartan world by the artistic beauty I was constantly ejected from it as I heard Yoder, Hauerwas and especially Jesus ringing in my ears.

The overtones of what Walter Wink calls “redemptive violence” are nowhere more pronounced than in 300. The Spartan culture while shown as a somewhat barbaric solider society is nonetheless glorified in perhaps every barbaric trait other than their systematic killing of “less than ideal” babies. While this is shown in a horrific light, the rest of their violent ways are glorified as essential parts of a “rational” and “democratic” society. The overtones connecting American culture and military (especially American Marines) to the Spartan warriors are obvious. King Leonidas’ wife, Gorgo lectures the politicians about the necessity for violence using today’s popular phrase “freedom isn’t free.” All these themes kept me from truly entering the movie. Instead I held it at arms length, thinking to myself, this is exactly what Jesus subverts in the Roman empire. This society built on violence, the culture that disciples its people in warfare no matter the personal cost to children and wives. The Roman empire Jesus lived under and was crucified by was heavily influenced by the Spartan legends and ethos. This is the same warrior-culture that the Gospel has a harsh judgment for, and while we have tended to privatize our war-making, we Americans buy into many of the same illusions that the Spartans did.

I kept trying to see where Christians would fit into this whole story (had they been around back then). I think that the Jesus people wouldn’t be caught dead on the side of Xerxes, the Persian emperor who called himself a God. The followers of Jesus wouldn’t march with the Persian army in it’s goal to conquer the world. But neither would the Jesus people devote their lives to being discipled as killing machines in the city of Sparta. The Spartan story of redemptive violence would be in direct conflict with the followers of Jesus who practiced redemptive suffering.

From Catholic Anarchy

Last weekend I convinced some friends to join me watching Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Letters from Iwo Jima. Letters is a companion film to Eastwood’s earlier film from this year, Flags of Our Fathers, which I’ve yet to see. Each film takes a look at the same battle over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima from a different side, Flags from the American perspective and Letters from the Japanese.

Letters may indeed be a compelling war movie, a Japanese tear-jerker in the genre of Saving Private Ryan but I think most would agree that this film has a much more profound message. What Letters does such an excellent job of doing is showing just how much we Americans have in common with the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. Their fears and dreams are the same as ours, their pride is as honorable and as blinding as our own. Letters gives almost no real face time to any Americans in the film with the exception of one kid from Oklahoma who is captured by the Japanese. We completely empathize with the Japanese. We root for them, even against our “own” army. In Letters the Americans are a scary invading force and its the Japanese who’s story we’ve entered into. A few characters in the film are also able to enter into the stories of their enemies and it gives them profound compassion in the midst of blind hatred and violence. The three Japanese soldiers and one American soldier who step out of their own national story which narrates the enemy as nothing more than a savage, subhuman creature to be destroyed are able to see that their enemies are indeed their brothers. It is this connection that paints the entire film and its violence as foolish, ignorant and unnecessary.

Having seen all the other best picture noms (with the exception of The Queen) I don’t see any way this film doesn’t grab picture of the year… unless Scorsese gets the nod as a recognition of his life’s work. But put Departed up against Letters and I think Letters is hands down a better film.

Last night I went to a movie alone, as has become my habit of late, and one that I don’t really mind. Going alone often allows for much more reflection and immersion in a film. Needless to say though, I will be glad to go to movies with Kara again! The movie I went to see was The Last King of Scotland in which Forrest Whitaker plays the terrifying and somewhat charming Idi Amin, the brutal president of Uganda during most of the 1970’s. While Amin is the gravity of the film, all plots and figures being drawn into his world, we observe him mainly through the life of a young Scottish doctor named Nicholas Garrigan. The young Scotsman is as charming as Amin himself and they quickly become friends.

When Garrigan is drawn into Amin’s world however, he looses sight of the real Uganda. It isn’t until its almost too late that Garrigan realizes what and who Amin really is. What ensues is a terrifying and claustrophobic tale of Garrigan trying to stay alive by appeasing Amin and simultaneously trying to get the heck out of Uganda. Scary. And more scary than your average horror movie because of the reality of it all. This horror tale doesn’t have radio-active desert zombies bent on killing, it’s about the insane insecurity of a man with a lot of power.

I recently saw the 2nd 5 hour episode of the new season of 24 which plays 9 times a day back to back to back on the new 24 network formerly known as FOX or some such thing. Part of me expected to actually like the show despite all my nay-saying over the years about how nothing in 24 would appeal to me. Part of me thought that, as it was the case with LOST, I would become an addict.

BUT NO! 24 was everything I thought it would be: a “we’re constantly being threatened by terrorists and need to be ’saved’ by people like Jack Bauer, poorly acted, cliché laden, obsessed with America, ‘we’ll get them‘ voyeurism” show. Sure its tense but that alone does not explain the amount of hysteria over this show.

Example from this past week’s episode 2 of 193 straight hours of heart-pounding 24 action…

Jack Bauer

I’m not afraid of dying.
In China I wasn’t afraid of dying, I was afraid of dying for nothing.
Now I know I’m dying for something.

That “something” was intelligence about where a terrorist was hiding out. I laughed out loud when I heard those lines.

So, my question to all of you 24 fans is this… WHY do you love this show so much? It is usually better than this? WHAT is the reason you are so in love with it?

It wasn’t until college that I met the forgotten Martin Luther King Jr. Like everyone else I had met the civil rights leader in grade school, learning about him in history texts and on MLK Jr. day. This man was so monumentally popular in US history, held up as a saint who helped make racial equality part of what it means to be an American. But I didn’t meet the other MLK until years later and I’ve come to find out that most people never meet this other MLK. It was in his last years here on earth that Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention towards the growing poverty in the United States and towards the systems that help cause and maintain such poverty. He turned his attention towards the growing militarism of the United States and towards the wars being fought. Indeed MLK had the courage to say that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” It was this MLK that our country has forgotten. This MLK was assassinated. The words of this MLK still have a prophetic word for us today.

Thanks to Mark Bilby for this article about the forgotten MLK.