Of all things for a lapsed Catholic to ponder upon this Saturday...

I've been thinking about a lone Jewish man.

Blame it on the buzz of Gibson's movie; you can't flip the cover of any popular periodical or surf across news sites without seeing something about his movie.  There are reviews all over the place, making me wonder about the genius of the marketing mechanisms at work.  Heck, this is the second time I've posted something related to it and I'm not even going to see the movie.  It's stuck in my craw; there's something more to all this than appears on the face of it.

Perhaps this is why I haven't been able to jettison this stuff and brush it off.  Perhaps all those years of catechism and my Catholic upbringing are still at work deep in the recesses of my mind.

To whit: the Passion of Christ wasn't just a religious or spiritual experience, let alone an opportunity for a filmmakers in personal crisis to continue their line of work without having to generate new content of their own.

The Passion documents a culmination of a particular man's political struggle, the result of private and public forces that sought to suppress speech, sought to suppress teachings that weren't in accordance with the ruling religious and government parties.

It is a fundamental flaw of Gibson's movie that he concentrates so narrowly on the violence of Christ's Passion, rather than the challenges that led to the Passion itself.  Nor did Gibson explore the the parallels between our contemporary culture and that of Christ's time.  Christianity is not just about Christ's ultimate sacrifice depicted in the Passion or even about Christ's teachings; it is about the process of breaking away from that which is institutionalized injustice and creating something new and just, about the practice of egalitarianism in contradiction to hierarchical tradition.  It is about taking action, speaking out against the unjust, the ineffective, against evil.

Which brings me to the lone Jew.

Who could imagine any similarities between Christ and of all people, Howard Stern?  I'll guess there wouldn't be many if one were eager enough to dig through the many gospels.  They're both Jewish men and that's about the end of it.  But both had issues with authority and both have been attacked because of speech that did not sit well with social, religious or government leaders.  Howard has been attacked a number of times for his vulgarity and has been purged by Clear Channel only this week from their programming lineup.

I'm not a fan of Stern's work; I used to enjoy a limited amount of his programming years ago, and I even enjoyed his movie.  He's too vulgar and coarse for my tastes, too prurient.  But there's a market for that, just as there is for Family Life Radio that I also find not to my tastes.  As long as I have an out -- changing the dial or powering off -- then I don't much mind Stern.

But the wholesale censorship of Stern, particularly after his recent conversion from pro- to anti-Bush sentiment, goes against everything I believe in.  That's everything I believe in, both as a woman raised in Catholicism, and as an American citizen who takes seriously the Constitution and its protections of speech.  The Jews of the temple were concerned about threats to their hierarchy, their powers -- they quashed any threat to the status quo, including Jesus Christ.  Today's secular world has its own hierarchy that is threatened whenever its powers are questioned or usurped.  Government is as toxically ineffectual today as the Romans were, leaving it to these corporate masters to punish with impunity.

Is Stern a Christ-figure? Not in the sense that he has much redeeming merit in spiritual terms.  Far from it, in my personal opinion.   But as a lone man speaking out against the temple of corporate and government powers?

Yeah.  He's got something in common with that other Jewish man born a couple thousand years ago.

9:56:19 PM    comment []

Didn’t happen last night.  I didn’t log on after dinner and post as promised, very sorry.

I’d only had fifteen hours of sleep inside the last three days; I’d enjoyed a Sapporo, against my better judgment.  Both sleep deprivation and the soporific Sapporo worked to diminish my drive to blog. 

Not much really to write about, either; I had my favorite meal so no major new food discoveries fueled my Muse.  My favorite is Chirashi, Korean style, in case you’d forgotten.  A bed of iceberg lettuce with a mound of sushi rice and the featured fish on top made for a filling meal.  Salmon, tuna, crab meat, flying fish roe, dressed with a sweet-spicy sauce – in other words, heavenly stuff.  Hubby had an over-full bento box, sending a panko-coated crispy fried shrimp and a bite of spider roll my way.  I was stuffed, just too much good food to eat.

I could learn to like Lenten “Fish Fridays” again, if I could eat this way every Friday night.

The kids aren’t big sushi eaters, but they’re happy with yakitori and rice.  (If you have kids who aren’t adventurous, yakitori might be a solution for you.  It’s marinated chicken, pan-fried or grilled; it could be a bit different from restaurant to restaurant, but at our restaurant it’s grilled on wood skewers, dressed with a teriyaki sauce and sesame seeds.  Perfect finger food for kids.)  They enjoy the fussing they receive from the staff at our favorite restaurant, makes up for the lack of a kid-friendly menu (their perspective, not mine). 

We dined with close friends and their son, making for a lot of laughs.  The other hubby is a gifted jokester with a special talent for magic tricks; he kept the kids in stitches with his “pulling a Gameboy out of the ear” trick.  A neighboring table seated with another family that we know from our kids’ school were equally amused by the tricks.  My face was exhausted after all the laughing.

Once home, the kids were put to bed, the lights turned down, and the call of the blog monkey jumping on my back was ignored.  Well, not ignored as much as put on snooze. 

A big blog snooze.

12:55:50 PM    comment []