Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 331

Faith That Makes Mountains

David Berry describes a visit to Salvation Mountain in southern California, a “folk art project made by Leonard Knight, a Korean War vet who had a religious epiphany, which led him to park a truck in the desert and make a hill out of adobe clay and old house paint”:

[T]he mountain itself, a handmade version of Calvary, complete with cross, looks like a child’s furious scribblings blown into life. … The technicolour mountain is maybe 40 feet from its blue base (“the sea of Galilee”) to its peak, leftover clay piled on top of pushed-out dirt. Most of the paint has gotten another layer of religious sloganeering, from the GOD IS LOVE, each letter five or six feet on its own, to scaling down tributes to JESUS and THE HOLY BIBLE and FIRE and a frequently repeated screed to let Jesus into your heart. Near the base of the mountain is a half-completed hay-bale-and-telephone-pole “museum,” slathered with more paint, littered with twisted limbs, repurposed religious refuse and more slogans. The climate and grit and taupe clay surfaces make it feel something like a Holy Land cave, or anyway what I imagine they feel like from repeated viewings of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Inside, one tattooed twentysomething lay on an outcropping of plastered-over hay bales staring into a knotted mess of branches. Outside, a breathing H&M advertisement of a foursome, wafting hints of pot, took a group selfie in front of the mountain. A woman who claimed to be from Ohio, with a drawl I thought only came out of the South, explained that she was on the upkeep crew, Knight having passed away about a year ago.

(Photo of Salvation Mountain by Flickr user bdearth)

Holy Crimea

Mara Kozelsky reminds us of Crimea’s significance in the history of the Russian Orthodox church:

Crimea sits at the heart of both the Third Rome idea and Nicholas I’s nationality platform, because it was on the peninsula that Byzantium passed the mantle of Orthodoxy to Russia. In the ancient Greek colonial city of Chersonesos, the Byzantine emperor baptized the Kyivan Rus Prince Vladimir. Prince Vladimir’s conversion has been described by an early Russian nationalist as “the most important event in the history of all Russian lands,” because the conversion “began a new period of our existence in every respect: our enlightenment, customs, judiciary and building of our nation, our religious faith  and our morality.”

Beyond Prince Vladimir’s conversion, Crimea gave Russia a first century Christian pedigree.  Roman Emperor Trajan exiled the first century pope Clement to Crimea, where he founded an early Christian community that hid among neolithic caves. Some biblical scholars also believe St. Andrew the Apostle passed through Crimea en route to his mission field in Scythia.  Until the communists imposed an official policy of atheism, Russian archaeologists, historians and biblical scholars combed over the peninsula looking for the exact location of Prince Vladimir’s conversion and evidence supporting the first century legends. The Russian Orthodox Church, meanwhile, established a network of monasteries on the peninsula and promoted pilgrimages to “Russian or Crimean Athos.” Crimea became Russia’s very own holy place.

Boris Barkanov stresses the symbolic value of Ukraine writ large:

Ukraine (Kiev especially) is at the very heart of the origin myth of the Russian nation and civilization.  An analogous case is the significance of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock (al-Aqsa Mosque) in Jerusalem to Jews and Muslims respectively.  This means that for Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, Ukraine is what UC Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner has called a “sacred space.”  It appears indivisible, but has to be shared to avoid conflict and violence.  The same is true for Tatar, Ukrainian, and Russian nationalists regarding Crimea.  Defusing such conflicts requires thoughtful, innovative solutions that empower moderate, rather than radical, political forces on all sides.

Alexander Motyl, responding to an op-ed by Henry Kissinger from last week, pushes back on parts of this narrative:

Pace Kissinger, the Russian religion did not spread from “what was called Kievan-Rus.” What spread was Orthodox Christianity and it spread from Constantinople, thanks in no small measure due to the proselyting efforts of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, both Greeks. True, Ukraine “has been part of Russia for centuries,” but it’s been no less a part of the Mongol empire, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.

(Illustration of Vladimir I of Kiev via Wikimedia Commons)

“Better Sung Than Said” Ctd

A reader writes:

Choral music is a rich source of deeply expressed faith, as Giles Fraser notes, and music based on Lent offers particularly striking examples. The most famous such piece may be the Allegri Miserere [seen above]. Backstory here. The score of the piece was a closely guarded Vatican secret for more than a century, until the church made the mistake of inviting a 12-year-old boy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to hear it. He listened twice and transcribed it from memory, and the score was published shortly thereafter.

The Rise Of The “Reverse-Missionaries”

Adedamola Osinulu argues that dramatic growth of African Pentecostal churches in the US “demands a change in how we, in both secular and religious America, understand our relationship to African Christians and Christianity as a whole”:

Africans’ interest in Pentecostalism was fueled by literature emanating from North America in the 1970s and ’80s. But, as one example of how they re-shaped Pentecostal theology to be more responsive to local practitioners’ material conditions, they presented a God who is deeply invested in believers’ fiscal and physical well-being in the present, not just the fate of their souls in the after-life. Amidst the swirling political and economic crises of the postcolonial state, this was an immensely attractive proposition.

Conceiving themselves as part of a global religious community, they began to export their brand of Christianity around the globe. As a result, we find that the largest single congregation in Europe, the 25,000-member Embassy of God, is a Pentecostal church founded by a Nigerian man. Today the largest African Pentecostal organizations are sending so-called “reverse-missionaries” to North America and Europe. One of those groups, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), founded in Nigeria, has 15,000 parishes around the globe including at least one in every major North American city.

Last month, Jason Margolis reported on the RCCG’s efforts in America. Keating’s take-away from the piece:

American missionaries played an important part of spreading the faith around the world, but one question posed by researchers is whether the transmission would reverse: Would any of the hundreds of new denominations sprouting up in Africa cross the Atlantic and gain adherents in the United States? The decentralized structure of Pentecostalism leads to new branches and churches being created more quickly than in other forms of Christianity.

Margolis’ reporting on the Redeemed Christian Church of God seems to indicate we haven’t hit that point yet. The church’s members are nearly all Nigerian or African immigrants, and it has had a hard time expanding beyond those communities. But the Catholic Church certainly isn’t the only Christian denomination whose geographical center of gravity is shifting.

Previous Dish on the rise of African Pentecostalism here.

The Tail Becomes The Dog

Jack Shafer reviews Cynthia B. Meyers’ new book, A Word From Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio, which examines the longstanding entanglement of the media and advertising industries:

In Meyers’ view, advertising is not something appended to radio and TV broadcasts or shimmied into the pages of newspapers and magazines. Advertising has been both the dog wagging the tail and the tail wagging the dog, sometimes occupying points in between, its symbiotic relationship with popular media forever ebbing and cresting. And while the past never predicts the future, this book gives readers a peak around the media future’s corner. …

I’m no media purist. Like Meyers, I appreciate that advertising has never stood outside news creation. Without advertising, the daily newspaper, the news broadcast, the news magazine and news on the Web would scarcely exist. One of the things that has prevented advertisers and their clients from controlling the whole ball of wax in the past has been the sheer capital costs of building out a newspaper — its presses, circulation, ad sales, news collection, etc. But the affordability of Web, which has benefited such new entrants as Gawker, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Vox and the rest, will also benefit advertisers and their clients. If the advertising industrial complex masters editorial creation in a future media season — becoming such a big dog that it needs no tail to wag — old news hands might come to regard the era in which gobs of sponsored content propped up ailing news properties as “the good old days.”

When even the lefty Guardian is now merged with Unilever, I think it’s already here. Check out this breathless piece of enthusiasm about the merging of journalism and advertizing. And, yes, it was a sponsored post.

Watching Hamlet In Pyongyang

Human rights groups have criticized the Globe Theater for planning to take a touring production to North Korea:

The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright’s birth. “We do not believe that anyone should be excluded from the chance to experience this play,” the theatre said in a statement.

But Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said exclusion would be the order of the day if the performance went ahead in Pyongyang. “It’s going to be an extremely limited, elite audience that would see a production in any case,” Robertson told AFP on Tuesday. “It would have to be in Pyongyang, which is a showcase city whose residents are selected to live there because they have shown their loyalty,” Robertson said. “So there’s a strict pre-selection process involved right from the off.”… Amnesty International urged the theatre to “read up” on the reality of North Korea before going there. “No tragic play could come close to the misery that the 100,000 people trapped in the country’s prison camps endure – where torture, rape, starvation and execution are everyday occurrences,” Amnesty said in a statement.

Mark Lawson thinks the Globe should go ahead with the tour, arguing that North Korea is not apartheid-era South Africa:

The obvious reference point in any discussion about which stamps actors should have on their passports is the boycott of South Africa by the theatrical union Equity and other representatives of the entertainment industry, which ran from 1965 until the Mandela presidency. … [T]here was a solid logic to the embargo on exporting drama to South Africa. The plays would be performed in venues operating a policy of segregation, with the result that touring productions participated in and legitimized apartheid. The governments during the discriminatory years also strictly censored the sort of material that was admitted.

Hateful as the North Korean regime is, the situation is significantly different. The Globe will presumably have no control over the makeup of the audience, but the choice of play is its own, and the use of Shakespeare’s plays as a weapon against repression has an honorable history.

Zeljka Marosevic looks back at that “honorable history”:

When Prague was under the rule of Russia, the Czech author and philosopher Pavel Kohout ran a politically charged production of Macbeth, and the staging of this was later used as the basis for Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth. Not only this, but PEN actively encouraged Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller to go to Turkey in 1985; “when the dramatists challenged the prevailing political climate so fiercely that they were ejected from a dinner at the US embassy.” And it’s not just Shakespeare that has been used as a kind of theatrical intervention. Susan Sontag’s staging of a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo made its mark in a city that was undergoing the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.

Meanwhile, Tierney Sneed marvels at how dramatically attitudes toward cultural diplomacy have changed in less than 10 years:

In 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang upon invitation from the North Korean government amid US efforts to engage North Korea in nuclear weapons talks. When the Philharmonic agreed to play in 2007, a George W. Bush administration official defended the trip – which the State Department helped to coordinate – calling it a sign that “North Korea is beginning to come out of its shell,” and that it represented “a shift in how they view us, and it’s the sort of shift that can be helpful as we go forward in nuclear weapons negotiations.” PBS even broadcast the concert.

However attitudes toward North Korea have changed since Kim Jong Un took over upon his father Kim Jong Il’s 2011 death, says Sheila Smith, a senior fellow in Asia studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. “There’s now an increasing hesitancy to allow informal arts diplomacy between [North Korea] and other countries” she says, as the regime under Kim Jong Un has engaged in increasingly provocative behavior. … “It can actually run the risk of enhancing a regime that is guilty of oppression,” Smith says.

A Short Story For Saturday

The avant-garde writer Yi Sang’s dreamlike 1937 short story Child’s Bone (pdf) – one of 20 modern Korean classics now available free online – opens dramatically:

This is the scene that my feelers detect.

After a long period of time I open my eyes to find myself on my own, lying in a neat, empty room on the city’s outskirts. When I look around me, the room settles like a memory. The window is dark.

Soon after, I’m shocked to discover a suitcase that I must guard. I also discover a young woman placed like a potted plant beside the suitcase.

When I continue to look at this strange sight, would you believe it, she gives me a smile! Ha ha, this I remember. I think hard. Who is it that loves this woman? While I’m still thinking, I start by asking, “Is it dawn? Or is it dusk?”

She nods and then smiles again. Her skirt and jacket, which are suitable for May, swish as she opens the suitcase. She takes out a gleaming knife.

Keep reading here (pdf). Check out previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Conned

Walter Kirn’s new book Blood Will Out is an account of his friendship with the conman and murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who charmed many in high society under the alias Clark Rockefeller. In an excerpt from the book, Kirn considers the place of the impostor in the American imagination – and his own complicity in “Rockefeller’s” deception:

The kidnapping, which made international news and later inspired a TV movie, exposed Clark Rockefeller as a fraud, the most prodigious serial impostor in recent history. It also connected him to a lineage older, and in a certain fashion richer, than that of the founding family of Standard Oil: the shape-shifting trickster of American myth and literature. In Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, this figure takes the form of a mutating devil aboard a riverboat who feeds on his fellow passengers’ moral defects. In Huckleberry Finn, he again stalks the Mississippi River as the Duke and the Dauphin, flamboyant mock aristocrats whose swindles are cloaked in Elizabethan claptrap. In The Great Gatsby he’s a preening gangster sprouted from a North Dakota farm boy. In Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels he’s a murderous social-climbing dilettante. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 he’s Milo Minderbinder, the blithe wheeler-dealer who’d blow up the world if he saw a profit in it. He’s the villain with a thousand faces, a kind of charming, dark-side cowboy, perennially slipping off into the sunset and reappearing at dawn in a new outfit.

But if Clark was all that (I’d learn after the trial that he understood his literary provenance and took great pride in it), then what was I?

A fool. A stubborn fool. When his story began to unravel during the manhunt, and the Rockefellers claimed not to know him, I told a fellow reporter that they were lying, a family of cowards running from a scandal. I only backed down when his German name was published and the word Lebensraum echoed through my head. The disclosure unsettled me but it also softened me, especially when more facts about his background trickled out in the days after his capture. I too had a German name and German blood, and I’d spent a summer during college living in Bavaria, his home province. I was 18 then, about the same age he was when, in 1979, two years before my stay in Munich, he left the small town of his youth for the United States. I’d left my own small town that year, for Princeton. I knew the yearning. No wonder we’d been friends.

Laura Miller calls the work “an absorbing spectacle of self-surgery,” detailing the psychology of the mark as well as that of the con man. Meanwhile, Meg Wolitzer shivers:

[T]he way Kirn tells it all makes me feel it’s entirely possible that I too might’ve allowed Clark Rockefeller to stay in my life because of a kind of lazy vanity and the pleasurable, ongoing thought that a really rich and powerful person likes me – despite the fact that I don’t like him at all. Even as the absurdities mount up, I could still imagine passively allowing a joyless friendship to continue. Life can feel so ordinary. You get up in the morning, you go to work, you pay taxes like all the other poor schlubs. The idea that someone in your midst doesn’t have to do any of that opens up a little fantasy door in the brain, a door unlocked by a pathetic magic key.

Translation As Performance

Lucas Klein thinks that’s the best way to understand his work:

A performer needs to know the lines or the score or the dance she or he is performing, which covers the accuracy, and also do so in a way that the audience can appreciate, which means acceptability. There’s no limit to how many performances of a certain piece there can be, nor is there any confusion between concrete performance and the abstract “artwork” it is performing – even reading the script of a play creates a certain kind of performance in the mind of the reader. This also highlights the fallacy behind the statement, common amongst readers of more than one language who do not themselves translate, that they prefer the original to the translation (or the other way around). That’s like saying, “I like Hamlet written by Shakespeare better than Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh.” Performances can only really be compared to other performances.

Previous Dish on translation here, here, and here. More on Holly Maniatty, the ASL translator/performer above, here.