Month: April 2007

Response: part 1 of 2

A Good War Is Hard to FindShame. To shame someone. To put them to shame. Shame on you. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Say a word often enough and it starts to lose its coherency. It becomes pure noise: a “shhh” sound, followed by an “ay” sound, followed by an “mmm” sound. I like what Mike Ciul says about shame as it corresponds to my book because it gets me back to thinking about its definition in a serious way.

Mike writes:

If shame is the gateway to redemption, then it has a purpose, but it’s not an end in itself. By the end of this book I felt like Griffith had replaced his quest for cool by a quest for shame. He says he used to think it made him more tough or cosmopolitan to be able to watch shocking scenes. Now he says you have to put yourself in the picture and be shamed into repentance. So I’m asking myself, what’s the difference? Am I not cool enough to look at pictures of torture? Or am I not compassionate enough?

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Cirignano arraigned today

Larry Cirignano is being arraigned in Worcester court today. You’ll recall he allegedly pushed a woman to the ground at an anti-gay-marriage rally.

I was outside the courthouse a little this morning to try and snap a picture of the elusive fellow, but no luck.

Update: I’ve heard conflicting reports of the hearing. How can there be conflicting reports of an arraignment? Anyway, I think if there was real news, Ethan Jacobs would have posted something on the “Bay Windows” website by now.

Update 2: “Cirignano pleads not guilty”

Items

Gambling and Worcester
Mayor Konnie Lukes:

“I’ve never been impressed by the expectations of loads of money being made by casinos,” Ms. Lukes said. “It’s my understanding from previous research that the more casinos there are in a geographic area, the less profits and less revenue generated.

“Gambling is one of those industries that doesn’t produce a product, doesn’t produce any skilled labor positions and just redistributes income,” she said. “It’s sort of an admission that everything else is hopeless.”

You know, I’d say the same thing about Wal-Mart.

A stinkier durian
DurianSeth Godin:

Will stinkless durian revolutionize the marketplace? Possibly. I’ve been wrong before. But if I were a durian farmer, I’d work hard to make durian stinkier.

Bye, Larry
Larry Gottlieb, who I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with a time or two, is leaving his job at Worcester’s Community Healthlink and taking a similar position in Lexington, MA. This T&G article about the move is notable because:

  1. The first sentence gets across the most-notable point: he’s leaving.
  2. The last sentence has the second-most-notable point: he played pro basketball in Israel!

The T&G needs to get its priorities straight.
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Coffee of Worcester: Dunkin Donuts

This week we focus on the Dunkin Donuts at the corner of Pleasant and Main, the heart of Downtown Worcester. This store used to be across the intersection. A Honeydew Donuts will be moving into the old Dunkin location. For businesses like this to have some smooth operations within the state, records like that file boi report in indiana can help them by ensuring compliance with state regulations and maintaining active status.

Dunkin Donuts, Worcester

Bruce: I think when we went down to Dunkin Donuts, that was very nice in there.

Pie and Coffee: You think so?

B: I think it’s a little more organized than it was when it was across the street. Across the street it was a little crowded, there’s not a lot of room to walk around.

P: See, I got a very different impression from you. My feeling was, the only good thing about this Dunkin Donuts was that it was full of dirtbags, so I felt right at home. But it was dirty, it was crowded, the registers are not set up good. I feel like I should write a diagram and show them how to lay out the cash registers. Because we were both standing at one of the registers, and people could hardly get to the other register because of the way it’s set up.

B: Yeah.
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Good Friday, Worcester

Way of the CrossSeveral groups walked the “Way of the Cross” in Worcester today. Among them was a group of eighteen Catholics who observed the annual “Contemporary Way of the Cross.” (T&G report of another group.)

Photo essay.

In Roman-occupied Palestine, executions were not merely public events, but often times were preceded by a public scourging and parade, in which the condemned person was forced to carry the instrument of their own death. Jesus did not suffer in some far away place, but in the streets of the city of Jerusalem, where He was seen by many.

For Christians, the suffering of Jesus represents the greatest testimony to His love. For centuries, Roman Catholics have reenacted Christ’s agony on the last Friday of Lent by carrying a replica of His cross through the streets of their own communities. This “Way of the Cross” has been seen both an aid to understanding Jesus’ experience and as a public proclaimation of His love.

In recent years, socially concerned Worcester Catholics have tried to carry on this tradition with a special emphasis on how His suffering still continues in our city and world. Jesus preached that He would remain with us in a special way incarnated in the poor and oppressed. The reflections we are making today in Worcester are a small attempt to seek out the still-suffering Christ and to pray for the grace to respond as God wills.

“True Romance” and true compassion

A Good War Is Hard to FindWhen I was in college I watched the movie True Romance with some friends. I’d never seen anything so painfully violent, and I told them how it bothered me. Their response was dismissive and they seemed to think I was some kind of prudish weirdo for complaining about violence. The incident really affected me, and within a year I’d become a Tarantino fan and spent a lot of time trying to justify his use of violence in film.

There is, in fact, something special about the violence in Tarantino’s brand of film. You really feel the characters’ pain when they are assaulted and mutilated. That’s something I never saw in an action movie. I watched a lot of Schwarzenegger films with my dad and though the body count was much higher, I never felt the loss as much as in Reservoir Dogs or even Pulp Fiction.

In A Good War Is Hard to Find, David Griffith talks about how the violence is disconnected, even funny in Pulp Fiction. That’s true in some ways, but in a way Tarantino’s violence is more connected than in a lot of other films. When the guy’s head is accidentally blown off in the car, it is kind of funny, but his death is also very real. He’s not some enemy who won’t be bothering you anymore, and he’s not some mystic warrior who becomes one with the Force. He’s really gone, and it’s tragic. When you laugh, you feel ashamed.
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A comment on “Good War”

A Good War Is Hard to FindI’ve been e-mailing with my little brother Mark about David Griffith’s A Good War Is Hard to Find, and about Christopher Sorrentino’s review of the book in the New York Times.

The New York Times review bugged me, because it didn’t mention Christianity at all, while the last third was on “postmodernity.” I thought that the search for God’s grace in moments of violence was at least as important a theme in this book as Griffith’s critique of our culture. I wondered if those reading the review would think the book was some odd, secular salvo in the culture wars.

Mark straightened me out:

I read the Times review and I’m not entirely sure the Sorrentino guy paints it as a culture wars thing—I see what you mean about his desire to (maybe) justify postmodern cultural artifacts, but I think the key part is the notion that these artifacts come out of postmodernity—there’s a larger social/cultural/economic/political realm there that one might want to take on before one worries about Pulp Fiction. Or so I thought his point was.

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Items

Drew Wilson on SoapboxWPI ditches battery cage eggs: Interview with Drew Wilson about how the WPI cafeterias were persuaded to stop buying eggs from hens raised in battery cages. More details may accrue at the Worcester Activist No Battery Eggs page. The Humane Society is coordinating this campaign nationwide. For footage from one of New York state’s largest egg farms, which uses battery cages, see this movie.
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Nation of Lost Souls

A Good War Is Hard to FindIn An Ethic for Christians, William Stringfellow wrote: “The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens, transfiguring the common existence of persons and principalities in this world into the only history of salvation which there is for humanity and all other creatures.”

It strikes me that this idea of redemption lies at the heart of David Griffith’s essays in A Good War Is Hard to Find. As he describes our “common existence” he seems to desire for Christians to act rather than react, to act justly, tenderly, humbly, rather than react violently either through ouright violence or through complicity with violence born of apathy, boredom, or believing in the euphemistic language used to describe it.
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