Charles Martin's Blog, page 23
January 8, 2015
When is a Muslim not a Muslim, or Atheists Can be Dicks, Too.
For those who prefer a particular narrative about what constitutes Islam, any reasonable words about the attack on Charlie Hebdo will be met with adamantine cynicism. For them, Islam is and has been a religion of violence. In spite of the widespread condemnation of the attack from Muslim leaders around the world, including the imam of the Great Mosque of Paris, they will aver that only a fool believes the claims of so-called peace-loving Muslims.
This group includes men and women who ought to know better, who have in fact spent much of their time fighting exactly the kind of irrationality generated by religious movements. Just one example among thousands ought to suffice. David Silverman, the president of American Atheists and (ironically) the chair of the Reason Rally, tweeted this amazing non sequitur today:
@MrAtheistPants: If you call yourself a Muslim, you legitimize all parts of Islam, including the terrorists.
Thinking like this would garner an F in nearly any logic class in the world, but in the superheated matrix of anger and confusion in the wake of the massacre, critical thinking is not considered a virtue. Simple counterexamples abound: If you call yourself a proud German, you legitimize all parts of German history, including the Holocaust. The form of the argument is so stupid, it is difficult to believe that an otherwise intelligent human adopted it, and that he did so with a hashtag #TrueStatement only compounds his unwillingness to think through what is actually being said.
The campaign against Islam from high profile celebrities like Bill Maher and Sam Harris has been all over the news recently, and even the brilliant and compelling Reza Aslan failed to crack Maher’s ignorance of the basic tenets of Islam. [1] Maher, usually a champion of critical thinking, fails his own test of who should be able to speak about a subject: only the informed. He knows nothing of Islam beyond what is presented by violent factions of Islamists, and he seems not to know the difference between Islam and Islamism.
Isms are helpful when talking about religion because the suffix separates the actual religion from ideologies that use the religion to legitimize their agendas, as is the case with groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Ku Klux Klan, Church of the Creator, Boko Haram, and other racist, reactionary, nationalist, or political extremists. When teaching classes on religion, I insist students know the difference between what Islam teaches and what Islamism teaches, just as they should know the difference between a Christian and an abortion clinic bomber (Christianist).
This is not to say that there are no legitimate concerns with Islam’s global growth, particularly in the areas of free speech, treatment and education of women, separation of church and state, and several other issues, but Islam has a long tradition of talking about these things with frank openness. It was Islamic scholars, after all, who preserved the manuscripts of Greek philosophy while the Catholic Church was destroying them, most notably when Crusaders burned the library at Constantinople in 1204 c.e.[2] The number of cultural treasures lost in that orgy of violence is incalculable. There would have been no Plato for Ficino to translate were it not for Muslim scholars. In fact, the contributions of Averroes and Avicenna to Aristotelian and Neoplatonic studies helped shape Western philosophy.
Discussing the development of Islam as if Al Qaeda is the inevitable evolution of Islamic political theory and without a proper understanding of the history of Islamic thought shows a still-extant colonialist mentality among white Westerners. Bill Maher knows less about Islam than he does about Christianity (not much), but it does not stop him from discussing it from a position of “expertise.” If this isn’t intellectual colonialism, I don’t know what it is.
One of the issues that journalists are concerned about is the support for free speech in Islam, but here, too, there is a lack of understanding. Shi’a Islam has no history of iconoclasm. Images of the Prophet abound in the Shi’a tradition. Sunni Islam has not always been hostile to depictions of the Prophet and his Companions either. The traditions have changed, and they will likely change again. There is more than one Hadith tradition in modern Islam.[3]
Islam is more than 500 years younger than Christianity. Year one on the Islamic calendar is 622 c.e. on our calendar, the year of Muhammad’s flight to Medina, the Hijra (flight). Five hundred years ago, Catholics and Protestants were busy killing each other all over Europe, and the Inquisition was already hundreds of years old.
Additionally, Muslims are painfully aware of how some of the constraints imposed upon them by the Ulama (a group of scholars who interpret the Hadith and Sharia) have kept them in a premodern phase of development. This, too, is likely to change. Islam in America holds great promise for the modernization of Islam. Alan Wolfe, the brilliant professor of religion at Boston College, noted in his wonderful book “The Transformation of American Religion,” that no religion comes to our country without being fundamentally changed. The forces of individualism, materialism, and consumerism create a tremendous pressure to conform to what the market demands. Christianity has clearly gone down that road. Islam will follow. The tradition of free speech in this country and the idea that “everyone has a right to her own opinion” will ultimately transform any faith that seeks to impose in absolutist fashion demands contrary to what Americans truly want.
In the meantime, Muslims who truly practice what their founding Prophet envisioned will have to work hard to fight the tendency of outsiders to define the parameters of what constitutes Islam, and they will have to identify those in their midst who seek to create an -ism of their faith, especially those who would use violence. Allowing lunatics to self-identify[4] as Muslim or Christian or Buddhist, etc., will only allow extremists and murderers to borrow their justification for violence from ancient faiths that were founded by people who envisioned a better world. I don’t practice any faith, but I am averse to allowing ignorant people, be they theist or atheist, to define the world’s great religions in self-serving or politically motivated ways. I have friends in those faiths, and they do not look like the murderers who attacked the great tradition of freedom of the press yesterday.
[1] The first thing Americans ought to do is read Reza Aslan’s excellent, readable history of the development of Islam, “No God but God.”
[2] c.e. = Common Era and b.c.e. = Before Common Era. These are the new designations preferred by scholars of various and no faiths who wish to designate a date without reference to “the year of our Lord” or making claims about whether or not Jesus was the Christ.
[3] The Hadith was originally to be a collection of the deeds and sayings of Prophet Muhammad, but as Aslan has effectively shown, the various Hadiths morphed into complex layers of justification for teachings contrary to the Qur’an, including the prohibition against images of the Prophet. There is no sura (chapter) in the Qur’an that prescribes iconoclasm beyond the reiteration of no images of Allah, similar to the Hebrew prohibition in the First (Catholic) or Second (Protestant) Commandment.
[4] The tendency as Americans to let people self-identify is a terrible idea. That is for another column, though.
January 7, 2015
January 6, 2015
The Bible Is True Cause It Says So, or Sacred Texts For A Secular World
Kurt Eichenwald, Pulitzer Prize nominee and Vanity Fair writer, created a bit of a shitstorm in fundamentalist and evangelical Christian circles last week with his Newsweek cover story “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” For anyone who has had more than one Bible class at a legitimate private or public university, what Eichenwald says is not new, even for those who disagree with Eichenwald’s conclusions. I read the whole piece and recognized material I learned as an undergrad. For grad school, our professors would have simply assumed we were familiar with the material. It is that underwhelming and not newsworthy. Except that it is.
The majority of the criticism was for Eichenwald’s portrayal of fundamentalists and some evangelicals as biblical illiterates (He is correct about that, except that it’s most Christians, period.) who treat the Bible like a cafeteria serving line where certain verses can be cherry-picked to support specific ideological positions, especially LGBT issues. Reading through his piece, it is difficult to find where what he writes misses the mark. He opens with this:
“They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation.”
Bearing in mind that he never describes all Christians thus, where is the false note? Most of us have met the people he describes, especially those of us in Oklahoma. Until Satan inspired a motorist to smash into our Ten Commandments monument, we too had an idol on the capitol grounds. Ever driven by the “preachers” near Windsor Hills Baptist Church? Young men on street corners screaming condemnation for a “perverse and adulterous generation” were likely not what St. Francis of Assisi had in mind when he said to preach with words only when necessary. How long ago was it that Governor Perry of the great state of Texas spoke at a prayer rally in front of thousands? These people exist, numbering in the millions, and one need not tune into Fox News or Trinity Broadcasting to find them. They are in our stores, schools, little league teams, social clubs, and neighborhood associations.
Given that he fairly describes a subset of modern American Christendom—and that is without contradiction—what about his take on the Bible? His critique is very simple and widely accepted in most non-conservative Christian universities. The text that we see today is nothing like what the Bible, if it existed in an ideal form, would actually read like. There have been omissions, emendations, intentional additions, politicized interpretations, and all manner of shenanigans that ensure that the biblical text is anything but what it is believed to be by evangelicals and conservatives who fetishize it even as they don’t read it. It is a totem more than a sacred text for that demographic.
Albert Mohler is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ken., and he regularly comments on social and political issues; the Eichenwald piece was no exception. Mohler’s primary complaint about the piece—other than it being a “hit piece”—is that Eichenwald does not interview Christians with a “traditional understanding of the Bible.” I assume that Mohler means Protestants in his own conservative Baptist tradition rather than Catholics, whose Bible is considerably longer with the addition of the Apocrypha, or even Jews—you know, the people from which the Old Testament (Tanakh) actually emerged. (Mohler seems to have no trouble treating the Jewish text as if it’s a Christian document, so apparently his critique of Eichenwald is a bit self-serving and possessed of a massive blind spot.)
The issue here is that Mohler sincerely believes that his tribe ought to be able to rightly interpret the Bible over against all other claimants, especially those he deems to be from the “far, far left” of biblical studies, which is to say, men and women who don’t typically hold to a supernatural understanding of the text. In other words, the great lengths that Eichenwald goes to in order to demonstrate that it is clearly not a supernatural text are lost on Mohler and other evangelicals and fundamentalists of his tribe because they have already decided that the text is supernatural, and so no amount of evidence can be mustered to undermine that position because all evidence must support, not refute, the position else it is false. This is the grandest case of theological confirmation bias and cherry-picking imaginable.
This is the same sort of thinking that led to the famous Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. A bunch of really smart people got together to declare the Bible inerrant and infallible in the “original autographs,” a fancy phrase for the original documents. The problem with that? There is no such thing as an original Tanakh. Much of it was oral tradition. When it was finally written down, the manuscripts were copied when they became worn, and the old copies were destroyed so as to avoid corruption of the text.
As for the New Testament, the original letters of Paul probably are real things, but we don’t have them, and the Gospels were cobbled together decades after the death of Jesus from oral tradition and alleged eyewitness accounts. So, because the group in Chicago believed the Bible was inerrant, they agreed that it was, but they can clearly see it is not in its present form, and so they created a document—original autographs—that none of them had seen because it doesn’t exist. This is called theological conservatism, I suppose. Professors would call it dishonest at best, but it passes for critical thinking in certain evangelical and fundamentalist circles. Again, what did Eichenwald get wrong?
Finally, the obsession with some liberals over redeeming the biblical text leads to a quixotic task. They are attempting to demonstrate to true believers that the warrant for their true belief is not something upon which the biblical “literalists” should base their belief, at least not in an absolutist sense. (Incidentally, they are correct. In theology, the proper object of faith is God, not the Bible, but bibliolatry is fashionable among the tribe Eichenwald targets.) The liberals expect people who believe that the text is supernaturally given to apply the lessons of literary criticism and anthropology and other utterly useful tools to a task—Bible interpretation—that is far easier when practiced as repeating what they have been told rather than doing the hard work of reading critically. They believe the Bible to be the “Word of God,” because they have been taught that it is and, quite frankly, they prefer to believe it, but they believe without bothering to parse what “Word of God” means.
This comes down to an issue of authority in the sense of “does the Bible possess any authority in my life, and more importantly, should it?” Can I or should I trust that the Bible explains or commands authoritatively, which is to say, is it worth listening to (Is it accurate?), and does it contain commands from God? I understand the desire among liberals to shore up their theology with reference to the Bible, but do we really expect to find solid sexual ethics, political ideologies, or social conventions in a text that dates to the Bronze and Iron Ages? Better to stop looking for signs of God’s blessing on gay marriage in a book not written by God. Better to stop arguing with people who fetishize the Bible without reading or understanding it about what percentage of an ancient text is trustworthy or authoritative. It serves to buttress their faith and their politics, not shape their practices; that much is clear. Old books are awesome when treated like old books. After all, nobody is killing anybody over Marcus Aurelius or Herodotus. Take what is good; reject what is bad. There is wisdom in that.
January 5, 2015
January 2, 2015
Ten Ways I Will Try To Save The World In 2015
1. Though I view my cautiousness as a mark of maturity, there comes a time to leap if I am ever to capture something beautiful.
2. I am no closer to truth than any other human on this planet, so I must be more patient while listening and more considerate while responding.
3. The story must become more important than the storyteller.
4. My dogs will die soon. I need to remember that ever day that I have left with them.
5. My children no longer need me as much as I need them. This means that I am doing a good job and I should do more of whatever I have been doing to get us to this point.
6. My heart is bigger than I expected and I should fit more into it.
7. I am not who I hoped to be, but I should be proud of what I have become.
8. I have a little over half my life left, which is more than enough time if I start now.
9. I will be proud of Oklahoma City and it will become proud of me.
10.Perhaps I should stop pulling people into my light and try stepping into theirs. It might actually be better.
January 1, 2015
Literati Library Push
I firmly believe that libraries are among the most critical public institutions because funding a library is a symbolic act by a community to affirm literacy as a uniform ideal. All our citizens are freely given the tools to read in the belief that an informed populace with access to information and entertainment will then be more ambitious, productive, and humane. Public libraries are in direct defiance of suppressive policies of our ancestors that chose to keep the Bible in Latin so parishioners could not discern for themselves the word of God, that punished anyone who taught an African slave to read, or that strangled the public voice to silence free speech.
In short, I am big on libraries and find myself within the walls of my local branch at least once a week to awe at the bastion of civility and empowerment. Also, I am poor and a good 80% of books I read are checked out for free at the library.
I was recently asked why none of Literati’s titles were available in the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Library System. I shrugged. This is my hometown and I regularly frequent its shelves. I simply had not thought about hassling them to carry our stuff. I figured they would come to me should the need arise.
Well, it’s 2015 and it is time to kickstart that process. All we need is a little time from you to create the demand.
Requesting our titles is simple and will only take a few minutes of your time. Simply go online to www.metrolibrary.org/services, scroll down to the bottom to click on “Suggest A Title”. Input your library card info so they know you aren’t a bot, then input the novel title and author you are requesting.
Some suggestions:
Mer Whinery – The Little Dixie Horror Show,
Charles Martin & Will Weinke – Pets,
Dorshak Bloch – The Story of Ivan A. Alexander.
If there is a book you have not yet read, you can check it our for FREE and feel wonderful by supporting one of our nation’s most important and worthwhile institutions while also spreading the brand of our modest publishing company. Wins all around. Now bring it in for a group hug.
December 29, 2014
Girls Read Comics
I’ve always known about comic books. I was aware of their heroes and villains, the alternate worlds they inhabited with problems similar to our own. The crime. The corruption. The objectification of women.
In high school, I watched the guys pass comics back and forth, talk in code about the stories, or huddle over their own artwork as they tried, through immersion, to disappear into a world they loved far better than the one they currently occupied. I watched my male friends duck into the dark doorways of comic book stores and was intrigued by the near-religious mystery. There never seemed to be a place for female acolytes. I comforted myself with the thought that if comics were so much for them, they couldn’t have anything important to say to me.
Flash forward to the present, where females account for 46% of self-identified comic fans on Facebook, according to The Beat, a daily news blog of comic news, reviews and information. I wonder how many of these women were pulled in by the wildly popular comic book series, Saga, an epic space opera fantasy about two political criminals in love and on the run as they try to protect their infant daughter. A common theme among almost every female Saga fan I’ve met is that they were first drawn in by the cover art which prominently features a breastfeeding mother.
Vanessa Castoe, co-owner of Quentin & Scout Screenprinting in Guthrie, said, “How did I start reading comics? One word: Saga. My husband and a good friend bugged me to read Volume One for months before I finally gave in. And then I read all of it I could get my hands on in a matter of hours. I immediately connected to Alana’s character and her fierce need to protect her daughter since I have three kids of my own.”
Vanessa and her husband Cory recently put together a Comic Book Meet-Up for people of all ages. She plans to start a comic book club for young girls, and a vlog directed at girls and women who read comics. “I think we’re going to gear our website, readbrave.com, more towards comic and graphic-novel related things.”
Natasha Alterici, local artist of the powerful and beautiful comic, Illustrated Girl, says that she also didn’t read comics growing up mainly due to a rural upbringing and lack of availability. “The first comic/graphic novel I read was Maus by Art Spiegelman because an excerpt was assigned in college. It immediately struck a chord. It was my first exposure to a true combination of art and literature. I found the full story at the library and fell completely in love with the medium.”
In addition to Illustrated Girl, Alterici has become an in-demand artist, picking up freelance projects and even working on a few of her own stories. “I’m most excited about the story of a young Viking woman who doesn’t like the status quo and decides the Norse gods are to blame. Along with her horse, Saga (a little nod), she sets out to find the legendary scorned Valkyrie Brynhild. Along the way she has to battle, befriend or outwit the various gods, monsters, and fellow Vikings who cross her path.”
Among Alterici’s current favorites is Lumberjanes, a comic series about teenage girls spending the summer at scout camp and killing monsters that lie in the forest around them. “If Lumberjanes had come out when I was eight, my comic book love would have started so much earlier! To girls everywhere I say be brave, be bold, be yourself! We need girls to draw more, and to tell more stories. You can do it right now! Draw and write about whatever interests you. Show people your art and stories! Who knows, maybe they have cool ideas for stories, too.”
The influx of women readers and creators means that more and more, the industry will be trying to find stories like Saga, that are engaging to both men and women. Little girls today won’t grow up thinking that a comic book store is not a place where she is welcome. Instead, she’ll know that through that door, inside that mystical shop, waits stories for her full of wonder and meaning.
December 28, 2014
Who Would Jesus Shoot, or How to Kill Christianly
Pastor Tom Vineyard killed a 14-year-old intruder in his home in Oklahoma City on December 22. Vineyard is the senior pastor of Windsor Hills Baptist Church, probably the largest Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church in Oklahoma. The description is capitalized because it’s actually a loose affiliation of fundamentalist churches nationwide. Using the term “Baptist” to describe them is unfair, as any Southern Baptist or Freewill Baptist or any other Baptist will attest. IFBs are the Amish of Baptist life, which is to say, whereas the Amish stopped adapting to new technology in 1850, the IFBs stopped evolving with the larger world in 1950.
The church and a school that was added later were founded by Tom Vineyard’s father, Jim Vineyard, who is now listed as Pastor Emeritus on the church’s website. Tom Vineyard took over as senior pastor in 2007. It is more than fair to say that both have an unhealthy attachment to firearms and violence. Tom Vineyard has a concealed carry permit, and the church once famously offered a gun as a raffle at a youth camp.
Before getting to the details of the shooting and the ramifications of a pastor who has a concealed carry permit and who chooses to enter his house after a motion detector activated rather than call police, a brief explanation of what IFB actually means. Independent Baptist congregations separated from larger Baptist denominations over fear of creeping modernity, mainly in the early to middle 20th century. Yes, there are Baptists who thought that Southern Baptists–a group that did not apologize for their support of slavery until 1995–were too liberal to hang out with. The churches are known for political conservatism (obviously), hyper-masculinity, traditional gender roles, a “literal” reading of the King James Bible, and regressive social and sexual ethics.
Increasingly since the late 1960s, these churches have pushed for a patriotism that borders on idolatry, if one is to take seriously claims in the Jewish and Christian tradition that the role of the community of faith is to “speak truth to power.” These congregations are comfortable homes for military veterans and law enforcement, as they push a version of Christianity that makes of Jesus a “man’s man.” It’s far easier to discuss the cleansing of the temple or the Jesus of the Revelation than the Jesus who goes peacefully to his death or commands love of enemy. And there is the crux of the issue.
Tom Vineyard went armed into his own home–yes, it’s his right, obviously–after receiving notification that a motion detector had activated, and after allegedly being attacked by the 14-year old, he shot the child to death…in self-defense. It should be noted that Vineyard had apparently been burglarized previously, and so had posted signs around his property and on his home stating: “Nothing on this property is worth your life.” Clearly, though, they were worth taking the life of a teenager, an irony that should not be lost on anyone. Christians follow a Savior who commands love of enemy, turning the cheek, and giving away all that we own to the poor. Shooting someone, especially a child, over stealing stuff seems the most callous disregard of those ethical admonitions.
The narrative of Jesus that Rev. Vineyard believes makes Jesus a liar or a fool, which is to say, in the parlance of modern conservatism, a liberal. Silly Jesus expects people to be robbed without resistance, and the Bible in all of its foolishness commands believers not to love their lives unto death. In other words, you should be willing to die before resorting to violence. That is clearly a narrative that is lost on modern evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, both in America and abroad.
In the present case, it was not even necessary that Vineyard be a pacifist, a position that Jesus clearly favors, even if it’s difficult to explain some of his behavior in the biblical text. It is reasonable to say that Vineyard could simply have waited for police to arrive. He might have lost some stuff, but what kind of Christian ethic values property above human life? Windsor Hills Baptist is relentlessly pro-life according to the modern definition that actually means anti-abortion, but how can a pastor be pro-life and simultaneously place protection of property above sanctity of life?
Pro-gun non-theists will sympathize with Vineyard because he is defending the right to private property while exercising his Second Amendment right. He’s an American wet dream, complete with pistol, Bible, cross, crewcut, and bald eagle, but the narrative of the Bible is contra empire, and Vineyard is clearly a citizen of the wrong City, to borrow a phrase from St. Augustine’s “City of God.”
The Bible is also greatly concerned with the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law, and while Vineyard may have survived the litmus test for adhering to the letter of the law–he was within his rights–he clearly failed the spirit of the law: a 14-year old is dead. Just dead. Yes, he was a burglar, but the Jesus who was crucified between thieves would surely have preferred to die before he took the life of a young man whose life was so tragically, and yes, criminally, off kilter. Only an American civil religion that borrows the vocabulary of Christianity to facilitate the propagation of a political and cultural conservatism could possibly use the Jesus who died at the hands of “the state” to justify the killing of a child at the hands (gun) of a “pastor.”
December 25, 2014
How A Stoner Comedy Became Important To The American Brand.
North Korea cost Sony a lot of money and respect with one of the most impressive and devastating hacks of the digital era, assuming that North Korea was really behind the attack. Conversely, North Korea may have made Seth Rogen and James Franco legends by tying a silly stoner comedy with the American vision of patriotism and Freedom of Speech.
The Interview opened at midnight on Christmas in select, independent theaters across the country and through online streaming sites like Google Play. I paid $5.99 to rent it for a couple days and it was what I anticipated. In the vein of Pineapple Express, lots of base humor, lots of homoerotic chicken where Rogen and Franco push the boundaries of their friendship. It’s fun, sometimes clever, well worth the cost of admission, but not at all on par with The Great Dictator, where Charlie Chaplin eviscerated Adolf Hitler long before the world realized that the German dictator was the most dangerous man alive.
Kim Jong Un is not Adolf Hitler. He is a small, petty man following in the footsteps of his small, petty father who views the lives of his nation as disposable commodities. He uses fear to keep his place secure as the Supreme Leader of a failing state. If you want a better view of North Korea, read The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson.
The Interview is a stoner comedy with a great premise, but it isn’t even Rogen’s best movie, falling behind Knocked Up, Zac and Miri Make A Porno, and This Is The End. But it’s still fun. I’ll probably watch it again before the rental expires on Google Play.
But watching The Interview isn’t the same as giving Un the finger.
Max Fisher made a fair point when he stated, in a recent post for Vox, that watching The Interview is playing into Un’s hand by buying into the propaganda machine both North Korea and Sony Entertainment desperately need to make this picture a success for both of their ends. North Korea’s ability to get Sony to pull their film from theaters was a massive victory for Un’s image as a protector of his people. Sony’s ability to herald an adequate dick-and-fart joke movie as a patriotic duty was a massive victory for them to salvage what they can from a crippled promotional campaign. The only way Sony can come out of this with any kind of win is to look like the victim of international espionage, thereby inspiring the American people to hold the film aloft with our dollars.
Hell, maybe even a handful of Golden Globes. Lord knows that those damn things have been given out for less.
As I mentioned before, the movie is worth your time and money if you like Seth Rogen. It’s not as funny, daring, and insightful as Team America, by South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but it is a fun ride. Randall Park’s performance as Un was exceptional. He developed the reclusive dictator into a bipolar, charming, but brutal man, injecting layers subtly and making the most of the license comedy affords actors. Rogen was Rogen. Franco was Franco. The explosions were big, the drugs were abundant, the shoving-the-object-up-the-anus scene was exactly as funny as I hoped it would be.
What more can I say? If you like all of those things, watch the movie.
What will be interesting is to track the movie sales as time goes on, to see if the publicity storm will drive enough online rentals and purchases to make back the movie’s budget. If Sony hadn’t gotten hacked and the movie did go to theaters, it would have been an easy win for the studio, but now it is drifting into the unknown. A big, budget movie hoping to clear a profit off of online sales. Can it happen? Perhaps. Will North Korea really care from here on out what happens to The Interview? Probably not. Un got what he needed, fuel for more propaganda against the outside world which will hold his starving people in place. Rogan got what he needed, a movie that will elevate his credibility and separate him from the other stoner comedians in his wake. Sony is the only question mark.
