Christ, they’re doing it again

It’s a sequel, God’s Not Dead 2 (but Professor Jeffery Radisson is).

Like the first one, the heart of this already terribad movie is a ginned-up controversy. Philosophy professors do not force students to sign pledges of belief, and there is no prohibition against citing the Bible as a literary and sociologically-relevant text. Even us noisy militant atheists don’t argue that you have no right to believe as you want.

The movie is going to be more invented oppression to fit the persecution complex of Christians. It’ll probably make a bucket of money, while getting abysmal reviews and making the rational, honest part of society puke into buckets.

Those are mighty modest goals

Luxander, one of our awesome bloggers at FtB, is trying to raise a few dollars to start a video gaming channel (in case you don’t recall where Lux is blogging, they are a co-blogger with Zinnia Jones.) They’re requesting a pittance for what should be a unique startup.

I chipped in a bit, although to be honest, I’m just hoping Lux will remember me when they’re rolling in all that PewDiePie money.

I thought science fiction was supposed to be a creative, imaginative genre

Star-trek-logo

All day long, my social media have been pinging with jubilant people repeating the message that a new Star Trek series is coming out in 2017. Now don’t get me wrong — I was once a 9 year old boy who begged his parents to let him stay up late to watch Star Trek — but I felt a despairing groan deep inside me.

Let it die.

The series came out 51 years ago. We don’t need another rehash, reboot, repeat, whatever of the same stories. It’s not as if this is the only science fiction future we can imagine, it’s not even as if this was the best framework for telling stories ever. Inspire me with something new. Do something brash and wild and surprising.

I know, this is commercial television, which lives for the predictable and bland, the lowest common denominator that will draw in the largest audience. I will point out two things: 1) in its time, Star Trek was that weird wild card that network executives didn’t understand, and 2) now its virtue to television producers is that it is an entirely known quantity with a built in audience, and is therefore the precise opposite of what good science fiction ought to be.

I’m not from here. Really.

mnnice

Paul Kix explains the essence of the Midwest — he starts with the inevitable discussion of the movie Fargo, which is how most outsiders are exposed to our exotic inscrutable ways.

What Fargo nails, in other words, is Midwestern Nice, the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace that appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world.

Read the whole thing. I’ve been living here for 15 years now, and I’m only sufficiently familiar with the culture to be simultaneously entranced and horrified. It’s even: I sometimes seem to shock the natives with my blunt and awkward ways, too.

To be fair, though, at least I had a transition. My mother was born in Minnesota, and her family were all tried and true Scandinavian Minnesotans, so I moved here as a sort of mongrel Midwestern/Western hybrid. I also see a lot of my mother in that essay: she’d never say an unkind word about anybody, and tends to be quiet rather than snarky. Not that she’s unaware, though — she always knows exactly what’s going on.