Crayola Store. (Taken with Instagram at Crayola Store)
Efficient, but *allegedly* unstylish. (Taken with instagram)
My wife and I decided to visit the midnight showing of The Hunger Games, both knowing basically nothing of the books or story. Those who have read the books and bought the lunchboxes, give this pedestrian grace as I will analyze this piece of film.
For those who are in the dark as much as we were, Hunger Games is a story of post-apocolyptic world where a nation celebrates an important war victory generations ago with a unique holiday. Each year, a male and female ages 12-18 are randomly selected from 12 districts to compete in a nationally televised reality show. Set in a secluded forest and televised in a Truman Show-esque wooded arena, the children compete in a multi-day challenge where the winner is the last person alive. Use of weaponry such as swords, arrows, and mines are encouraged. The story follows a girl named Katniss as she trains to represent her lowly impoverished district and family, then competes along with her partner-turned-combatant, Peeta.
The book’s author, Suzanne Collins, found inspiration from watching a reality show and footage from the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces. What emerges is a cautionary tale designed to leave the viewer feeling uneasy from ten minutes into the movie until the end. Every step and turn features adults reveling in arenas and pageants of bright lights, wine glasses, and enthusiasm, while the viewer wants to stand up and scream that something is wrong. The contest is overseen by an Orwellian organization with advanced technological systems to summon animals and elements to skyrocket television ratings. Seventy-four years into the Hunger Games, this holiday tradition seems to be Collins mash-up many elements that leave humanity with bruises and sinking optimism.
One needs not look further than the infamous Roman gladiator games to tee off. We tend to look down on these, though somehow, Russell Crowe’s epic years ago didn’t pull these same heartstrings. Our culture sees children as the last bastion of innocence, making this an invasion on sacred turf. Having dancing adults in costume celebrating this diabolical holiday seems offensive.
Perhaps more subtle is that H.G. Wells’ Time Machine book should be cited as a source material during the opening credits. Wells’ features a protagonist travels through time until arriving in the extremely distant future where he finds humanity now in two races, the Eloi and the ape-like Morlocks. Wells’ envisions the Eloi as the sympathetic tribe that is being subdued by the Morlocks who have become cannibalistic. Having seen two films dedicated to this book, skip the 2002 version and watch the 1960 edition by George Pal.
Finally, this is the sort of journey that is at least winking at doomsday author George Orwell. In 1984, Orwell paints a future where the bourgeoisie oppressed the proletariat using ultra-evasive technology and other methods. Collins’ world features a hopeless mass of humanity surrendered to an organization of few.
As Collins’ blockbuster completes, the audience is given a would-be satisfying ending. The problem is, the inherent moral code in people is intentionally never left acknowledged to the point that my wife was angry as she left the cinema. The audience’s 142 minute rumble with emotion feels ignored. Collins’ knows very well that inherent in adults is an optimism in her world and ours reserved for children. Seeing a twelve-year-old girl (not graphically) sacrificed at the altar of brainwashed adults for little more than a holiday celebration is horrendously unsettling. For Lionsgate and its $78 million budget, the hope is that the audience will be so unsettled, they will gladly shell out money at the theater to give an inevitable sequel a chance to see the government dismantled out of revenge. As a work of cinema, the movie is well-composed. The plot, however, may easily anger or turn-off its audience if they aren’t given a clue that this isn’t the end.
This week’s monstrous Kony 12 video (which at the time of this writing has 38 million views on YouTube and 12 million on Vimeo) has rocked social media and the concept of non-profits. I’m not here to present a commentary on the video or its cause. I think there’s something perhaps more important going on, here.
For going on two days, the video and its organization have been in the top 10 most tweeted concepts worldwide on Twitter. Facebook groups are all the rage and its unpopular to have any sort of dissenting voice in the conflict.
This engine appears to be the most powerful movement of groupthink ever assembled. Here we have a very well constructed video that pulls on all the right emotional heartstrings, has a grassroots movement ready to unleash, and makes celebrities who know nothing of global politics become its spokespeople.
What concerns me about this is that these elements work. Imagine that this was a completely faulty cause, but it was so well constructed that it also caught fire. This is the dawn of a new age of propaganda, where given the right conditions, the masses can protest and move mountains of politicians, while actually being hypnotized into thinking they are doing what is right.
I worry about the humanness of my generation and those that follow us. I worry about myself, as well.
While I was driving two days ago, I reached for my cell phone which had notified me of a message that had the potential to be important. As I checked it while sitting at a stoplight, I had an epiphany: my world is plastic. For two days, I have been deliberately observing how much of the interactions with my culture are plastic.
Our gadgets. The toys we give to children. The music we “touch.” How we purchase items. How we store food. The vehicles we drive. The glasses we wear. Our televisions. Our shelves. Our doorways.
I suppose it could seem normal and part of 21st century life, but I don’t know that its good.
A few months ago, I acquired a vinyl record player. It plays music when I place a large black primitive CD on a spinning platform, then put a lever with a needle on the CD. I can’t skip tracks magically. I have to move the rod and guess. The experience is foreign. I listen to whole albums, investigating the full narrative of the artist. The sound feels alive. There’s something different about touching music in a format that costs money and is fragile. These massive vinyl records cost more money than CDs and much more than a Spotify account. But when I delicately place this disc on a turntable, the experience feels real. As I type this, I am listening to Mozart on this device.
I accompanied my wife to a playground in Kansas City recently, though this was an indoor playground. Children’s guardians pay money for their under-five-offspring to play in an indoor facility that is extremely safe. Everything they touch is plastic. The slides. The platforms. The tables. The chairs. I wondered: Is a chain on a swing that dangerous? Wasn’t there something somewhat good about a child having grass stains and scars on their elbows? Is an open field with a backstop now a waste of space that could be a parking lot?
My cupboard has two shelves for drinking containers. The lower shelf has glassware, while the higher shelf has glassware. For my entire life, I always chose the plastic cups. They are safer and softer. But for the last few months, I have chosen glassware whenever possible. Beverages taste better. They go down smoother. I can see through them.
I just had to get up to flip the Mozart album on the record player over because it was done playing. I was annoyed, but it feels healthy.
I am a technology enthusiast. Like many of my ilk, a tablet PC was an obvious evolution. So when I chose to read a book on a tablet computer, I forsaw life being better. But reading on a screen is not as involving as turning pages. I finished the book without knowing I was near the end. My sense of accomplishment was zilch. I felt cheated.
I’m not convinced that the Internet has improved my life. No one ever talked of “not having enough time” until the Internet. When people wonder where the time went, it went to a global system of information, commerce, organization, and demands. It is part of our life, though imagine this: suppose you explained how many things you would need the Internet to do and how much of your time it would require to maintain to a person living in the 1970s. I wonder how much it would seem like a good idea.
My world is plastic. And so am I.
Years ago as a teen, I found myself mowing yards and making money only to sink it quickly in CD purchases. That was the 90s when CDs were the only way to go and $14 would seem like a bargain. Then the Internet happened.
In 1999, I arrived in high school and heard a few peers talking about a bountiful forrest lush with free music called Napster. I had dabbled in a bit of online file sharing, but when I obtained Napster, the world changed.
Everything
was
free.
As Napster, Aimster, Morpheus, Kazaa, etc rolled on, my CD purchases slowly faded to where by late college, I was buying just a couple albums a year. It was all free. The music industry made it hard to justify buying anything, so I didn’t. Yahoo Music, Napster Free, file sharing, and later YouTube made legitimate file streaming possible. I quit pirating music, but rarely bought an album.
After college, save for a few bands a year, I stopped listening to much music at all. My taste became soundtracks and sitting in silence more than hearing anthems. It was cheaper, relaxing, and I had YouTube. I bought stuff on occasion through iTunes and Amazonmp3, bought on a very rare occasion.
Then came a month ago. A friend of mine demanded that I test-drive Spotify, a European imported music subscription service. I immediately thought it’d be another lame DRM nightmare.
It wasn’t.
For $10 per month, it’s an all you can download buffet of insanity. Rare tracks and a hot community. Over the last month, I have begin to rediscover the joy of music. The prophets. The eery melodies. The worship. The hooks that make you scream in your car, knowing the car at the stoplight next to you has someone watching.
It’s good to have fun again.
Repenting is a tough thing to do. A lot of times, its easier to hold dearly to the things that we know we should rethink and change. I suppose the things that are hardest to repent might be the most important.
When I repent of my screw-ups, anger, jealousy, etc, I will find ways to examine it. Journaling. Sitting in silence to meditate about it. Exploring how it came to be. I pray for God to forgive me of the problem and to help me to see an alternate way of thinking or living. Sometimes, I’ll even attempt to imagine life without the issue.
“Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence - religious meaning, God meaning - apart from God as revealed in the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds…a crowd destroys the spirit as thoroughly as excessive drink and depersonalized sex. It takes us out of ourselves, but not to God, only away from him. The religious hunger is rooted in the unsatisfactory nature of the self. We hunger to escape the dullness, the boredom, the tiresomeness of me…a crowd is an exercise in false transcendence upward, which is why all crowds are spiritually pretty much the same, whether at football games, political parties, or church.”
— 
The Pastor, A Memoir
Eugene H. Peterson
Years ago on an old blog, I received a comment that was the harshest rebuke I’ve ever received. The blog itself has questionable content, but looking back, this rebuke is still awesome.
What life-long profound and comprehensive discipline have you engaged in to enable you to presume to lecture others on how they should live?
Who were/are your LIVING Spiritual Teachers? Such Teachers being necessary to guide you and more importantly to challenge you to examine ALL of your ideas and opinions about quite literally everything.
Have you been humbled by your own sweat and suffering?
If you read the biographies of the great Saints and Realizers from all of the traditions you will find that most of them went through a profound ordeal of struggle and testing until they came to their Spiritual maturity—it often took decades.
You are mortal and entirely subject to the Mercy of The Divine. You own nothing and know nothing. There is not anything to be believed that is the Truth.
You must be touched in your feeling by the unspeakable suffering of this world, and thus become broken hearted. It is only on that basis that you can truly serve others.
Everything else is just an extension of your own unexamined obnoxiousness, and your drive to achieve power and control over others.
I’m a fan of the Bible. I’ve read it more than any other book and am moderately familiar with portions of its origins, (take the Deutero-Isaiah controversy or the “Q Source Hypothesis,” for example). All that being said, over the last few years, I’ve heard voices muttering concepts about the Scriptures that have helped me to re-place the Bible in a healthier context.
I work in a relatively large church with a student ministries department. Over time, I’ve become quite aware that students don’t read books. No - I mean they really don’t read books. This is probably rooted not just in our YouTube culture, but the way in which schools present the concept of learning. I digress and hope to live to write about that another day. Its something of a new illiteracy, only this one is self-inflicted.
In 2004 as an experiment for a class I had taught to teens in a program called Remnant, I had students all turn their Bibles in and held them captive for a week, leaving just one Bible for the lot of 30 of them to rip pages out and pass it around like some kind of persecuted church. The experiment proved interesting: all but 4 of them lived their lives no differently. I suppose its odd that it took me 4 years to begin to ask more about it.
By 2008, I began to be nagged with a question: how do we teach students Christian thinking when they don’t read the Bible? Now mind you, I grew up in a non-denominational, Baptist-ish context, so this was a lethal question to me.
I entered a thought experiment: if the global church seemed to get by prior to Gutenberg’s printing press (and the birth of Western mass-literacy), clearly there are principles we can apply to our context today. The answer is in their liturgy, authority, and stories. Theology prior to the 15th century was passed on like a torch to the next generation, and even among the Hebrew people, through stories and songs. Those who composed these mediums were very cautious with vocabulary selection to be clear, succinct, and to describe God as God is (through good hermeneutics and a Christ-centered focus).
All this being said, I still study Scripture, but I have come to value the global church much, much more than I once did. I trust the church, who gave us the Bible. The notion that one can be a Christian without the church is intriguing given the source of its canon.
Moving forward, I won’t ever tell students not to read the text (I actually do encourage it). As someone who would like to see them “get it,” my dream is to see the stories, emotions, themes, and melodies of the text come alive in their lives so much that they want to live lives that are fully alive.
Update: Below, you’ll find links to three past blogs on the subject from an old blog of mine.
1) Facing Illiteracy
2) Facing Illiteracy Revisited
3) Facing Illiteracy (Part 3): Christianese