More Passion

[This is a draft post from sometime in early March 2004 - I didn't post it because it was unfinished, as you can see from the Roman Numerals at the end of the post... I don't have time to finish it now, either, but I gotta make this blog less drafty!]

Hopefully, the end of this topic

Some last points about the "Passion."

First of all, I want to rationalize why we are spending so much time on it. I happen to believe that it is a significant point in early 21st Century. Yeah, this is just a film; yeah, its a pet project of a lowbrow religious punk - a punk who has been able to manipulate the entire Western World into paying attention to his personal demonology.

The 20th century saw the transformation of Western Culture from Industrial to post-Industrial to Information. We are in the "information age" (for those who're keeping track) and when you recognize that information is all in the mind, you will recognize that anything which directly impacts the mind is both powerful and significant.

In a land that holds free speech as an inalienable right, we have understood even back in the 18th Century that ideas are powerful and significant. However, over those hundreds of years, we've learned that speech can liberate as well as obliterate.

"Hate speech" is a difficult and nebulous substance that has only been seriously thought out in the late 20th Century. We have the Supreme Court cases that relate to dangerous speech (shouting fire in a crowded room) to hate speech. A watershed moment, I believe, was the Clarence Thomas - Anita Hill case which alerted America that sexual harassment is harmful and is accomplished in the intangible realm of verbal and non-verbal language. The fact that the culprit of the harassment is one of the most powerful people on earth is ironic but understandable when you see him as an antediluvian vestige and an accident of history.

Speech is a weapon; images are weapons. The cultural-conservatives who demand prayer in schools (speech), Ten Commandments in stone in the courthouse (images), no smut on television and radio (both), understand this.

In fact, were you to ask a cultural-conservative and a cultural-liberal what the greatest threat to American society is in 2004, the liberal would say "the near-fascist thuggery of our rapacious and illegally elected government." A conservative would say "Hollywood."

The reason why "The Passion" is so important is because it wages a war of images and ideas using the enormous power of Hollywood and Big Business. It's message - about religion and violence - has been the public discourse for the past 20 years and ever-so-much-more-so in the past 3 years.

That's why I think we need to still discuss it.

II. Why you do not need to see it
III. Christianity is anti-Semitic by definition