Sunday Reading
Sunday, July 22, 2007
‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ - A Pakistani-American novelist gives a pretty damn fair lecture on American influence, foreign policy, etc.
Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others. It will come his way no matter how kind, generous or humble he may be.
But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
Religion Beat Becomes Test of Faith - LA Times reporter and former budding Catholic William Lobdell writes about his years covering ugly stories on the religion beat and how it soured him on the whole thing.
Father Vincent Gilmore — the young, intellectually sharp priest teaching the class — spoke about the sex scandal and warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. Otherwise, we’d be committing “spiritual suicide.”
As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the victims — people usually in their 30s, 40s and up — should have just gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of them were needlessly stuck in the past.
But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.
A Fine Romance - New Yorker film critic tries to sort out what the hell is going on with all these new romantic comedies featuring sloppy, boorish, charismatic men and professional, responsible, dull women.
There they are, the young man and young woman of the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years—the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow. The movies form a genre of sorts: the slacker-striver romance. Stephen Frears’s “High Fidelity” (2000), which transferred Nick Hornby’s novel from London to Chicago, may not have been the first, but it set the tone and established the self-dramatizing underachiever as hero. Hornby’s guy-centered material also inspired “About a Boy” and “Fever Pitch.” Others in this group include “Old School,” “Big Daddy,” “50 First Dates,” “Shallow Hal,” “School of Rock,” “Failure to Launch,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Break-Up,” and—this summer’s hit—“Knocked Up.” In these movies, the men are played by Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Adam Sandler, John Cusack, Jimmy Fallon, Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black, Hugh Grant, and Seth Rogen; the women by Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Katherine Heigl. For almost a decade, Hollywood has pulled jokes and romance out of the struggle between male infantilism and female ambition.