Jeff Ellis: It's Impossible To Start A Fire If You Have No Desire To Burn

Barack Obama: The God That Failed

It would appear that Barack Obama's health care plan might finally be passed by the U.S. House tomorrow.

No worries though.

As destructive as Obamacare has the potential to be, the ultimate victims will be Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

Obama, as is his style, has been running around the country giving angry speeches and making a lot of histrionic comments about thousands of citizens dying slow and painful deaths.  Listening to Obama is a bit like listening to the speeches at a middle school speech tournament.  As opposed to actually saying anything, he simply states that its bad when people die and who is going to disagree with that?

How do we prevent people from dying?

We just do whatever Barack Obama says.

One can only look forward to the future when countless Obama partisans will either find themselves disillusioned with their God or spending all of their time trying to explain away the actual results of the Obama presidency.

After only a year in the White House, Barack Obama has perfectly positioned himself to replace Marxism as the God that failed.

Oral Roberts, R.I.P.

Retired televangelist Oral Roberts died on December 15th.  He was 91 years old.

When I was a child, I knew Oral Roberts as simply the old guy who came on after the cartoons.  Later, in 1987, Roberts contributed to one of the defining moments of my cynical adolescence when he announced that if he didn't raise 8 million dollars by a set date, God would kill him (or "call him home.")

Roberts ended up raising 9.1 million dollars but, in the end, his statement did far more harm than good to the American evangelical community.  His claim that God was blackmailing him managed to discredit every other televangelist in the country, regardless of whether they practiced Roberts' style of ministry or not.  Certainly, it added fuel to a fire that would, later that year, turn into an inferno as both Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker saw their ministries collapse.

It's not for me to say whether or not Roberts sincerely believed he would be killed for failing to raise enough money to please God.  All I can say for sure is that the death threat doesn't sound like something that the God I was raised to worship would have anything to do with. 

Roberts was semi-retired when he died.  To be honest, I was initially surprised to discover that he hadn't died years earlier.  Oddly enough, his death was not greeted with any jokes about being called home.  Then again, Americans always have been a forgetful group of people.

Oral Roberts, R.I.P.

God Laughed

President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today.

Meanwhile, thousands of American soldiers prepare to go to Afghanistan.

Somewhere, God is laughing.

Greetings From The Streets of New York City

To see the entire image, click on it.

What I Am Doing Right Now

I'm recovering from a two-day migraine.

I'm also watching 1956's The Ten Commandments on ABC.  This, of course, is the epic film that featured Edward G. Robinson screaming, "Where's your God now!?," Anne Baxter as a nymphomaniac, Vincent Price as an Egyptian, Yul Brynner as Ramses, and, most famously, Charlton Heston as the most gentile (and virile) Moses imaginable.

There's a tendency to be dismissive of this film and indeed, it is just as over-the-top and (by modern standards) campy as is often claimed.  That said, the film's excesses are really no different than the excesses of most modern studio productions.  Indeed, when compared to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor or any of the films that Mimi Leder has directed over the last decade, The Ten Commandments is a portrait of restraint and good taste.  And the film's oft-ridiculed dialog and stiff, one-note characterizations are no worse than anything to be found in James Cameron's Titanic or Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

The thing is that, strangely enough, The Ten Commandments still works.  It still hold the viewer's interest and, if you're willing to accept the film for what it is, the film can still be oddly moving in its way.  Add to that, in these days when movies are being made to improve special effects (as opposed to special effects being used to improve movies), there's something rather charming about The Ten Commandments' attempts to visualize such concepts as the burning bush and the parting of the Red Sea.

And, say what you will,Edward G. Robinson really does shout "Where is your God now!?" as if his life depended upon it.

That said, the best film version of Exodus remains Mario Bava's rather low-key (and criminally underrated) Moses, the Lawgiver, in which Moses was played by Burt Lancaster, another easily miscast actor with a comically strong jawline.

However, there remains something very comforting about the knowledge that. over fifty years since it first premiered on the nation's movie screen, The Ten Commandments continues to appear on television.  It's a lasting tradition in a country that, as of late, has been far too quick to dismiss its traditions.

Indeed, I will only truly worry about the future of this nation when an Easter passes without the sight of Charlton Heston turning his staff into a snake on national television.

Marjoe

( 

I just finished watching Marjoe, a documentary from 1972.  The film follows former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner as he goes on a self-described "farewell to faith" tour.  The audience watches as Gortner both flamboyantly praises Jesus at various revivals across the country and as he cynically counts the money has raised afterward.  Over the course of the film, Gortner tells us about his bizarre childhood, his total and complete lack of religious faith, and the various techniques that he uses to swindle people out of their money.  Strangely enough, Marjoe remains strangely likable throughout this film even though, in the end, he comes across more like a pathetic little creep than anything else.

 

Of course, the film's expose of how a con man like Marjoe Gortner operated was probably pretty heady stuff when this film first came out.  Now, after years of scandal and ridicule, it's no longer as shocking to see someone like Marjoe Gortner revealed as a fraud and, when viewed today, the film actually seems to be a bit mean-spirited.  It's hard not to feel as if the filmmakers themselves were more interested in ridiculing the faithful than in providing any real insight into what made Marjoe Gortner tick.

Still, it remains a fascinating and rather creepy film.  While the tent revivialism of Marjoe Gortner may no longer be fashionable, it's hard not to see a bit of Gortner in Barack Obama.  Indeed, when so many Americans seem to be putting such blind faith in Obama's empty promises, it is perhaps important to be reminded just how many Americans once put their blind faith in the empty words of men like Marjoe Gortner.

 

(As a sidenote, towards the end of the film, Marjoe tells the documentary crew that he's going to abandon preaching so that he can pursue a career as either a "rock singer" or an actor.  And, if nothing else, he proved to be a man of his word because this is exactly what he did.  While his cover album of Bob Dylan songs didn't amount to much, Marjoe Gortner did have a fairly active film career in the 70s.  While he was never embraced by mainstream audiences -- and I doubt that this documentary did much to broaden his appeal -- Marjoe Gortner was a passable enough actor.  His most succesful film was probably Earthquake, in which he attempts to rape Victoria Principal and ends up getting shot by George Kennedy.  However, Gortner also played the lead in the so-bad-it's-good Food of the Gods.  His best film remains Luigi Cozzi's rip-off of Star Wars, StarCrash.  As Caroline Munro's rather smug co-pilot, Gortner smirks his way through one of the most entertaining Italian exploitation films of the 1970s.  The film also co-stars Joe Spinell, Christopher Plummer, and David Hasselhoff, which -- if nothing else -- should make it relatively easy to link Marjoe Gortner to Kevin Bacon.)

TGI Middle East

I saw this story out of Israel on the Reuters Wire earlier today:

Rabbi rules joking teens legally married.

It's nice to know that, as unstable and scary as that part of the world remains, life in the Middle East can still occasionally resemble a rerun of an old ABC T.G.I.F. sitcom.

What?  Don't you remember that episode of Boy Meets World?

9-11 Flashback

The news today has been dominated by the story of a commerical airline flight that, after hitting a flock of birds, was forced to land in the Hudson River.

Remarkably, all 155 passengers survived and only one serious injury has been reported (a passenger who broke both legs).

Both the plane's pilot and the rescue workers who responded to the splashdown are being praised and rightfully so.

I first found out about this when I got home from work at 3:30 pm, turned on the television, and was confronted with images of the plane half-submerged.  As soon as I heard a reporter say the words "Hudson River," my first thought was "Oh no, not again."

I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately started to think about 9-11.

However, within a minute of my initial reaction, that same reporter added that the plane was brought down by birds. 

(No word yet on whether or not the birds in question were of the Islamic faith.  If they were, I'm sure they're currently in Paradise, deflowering vestal virgins and committing honor killings.)

Quite frankly, I don't know what has left people more relieved: that everyone lived or that Osama Bin Laden apparently wasn't involved.

Everything Goes Topsy Turvy

Bizarrely enough, most of the current criticism of Barack Obama nowadays seems to be coming from people and groups who, traditionally, are considered to be on the Left.

For instance, gay activists are apparently very upset by the fact that Obama has asked the Rev. Rick Warren -- an evangelical who is an economic liberal but who is also both pro-life and a supporter of California's gay marriage ban -- to deliver the invocation at his inagural.

What?  Were they expecting Richard Dawkins or something?

The People Panic Once Again

I'm watching a news story right now about the American people's reaction to the current economic situation.

According to this story, everyone appears to be having a nervous breakdown.

Stress levels are supposedly at their highest since the days immediately after 9-11.  I have to say that I'm actually not stressed out about the economy at all.  I'm not happy with the situation and I think that it's probably going to lead a lot of people to vote for Barack Obama despite their better instincts but none of this really concerns me.  Life will go on regardless.  Strangely enough, 9-11 didn't stress me out either.

At times, it's as if people still can't bring themselves to believe that we actually made it to the 21st Century.  In those years leading up to 2000, all we heard about was how all the computer would fail because of the Y2K bug or that nuclear apocalypse was inevitable or that the universe would suddenly stop expanding or that the Earth would get hit by a comet or whatever the popular scare theory was at that time.  The prophet Nostradamus was famous for never predicting any events taking place after the year 2000.  We heard about that a lot, didn't we?

And yet somehow, it is now 2008.  The world has not ended and it's as if the American people are feeling guilty that it didn't.  Every year has brought us a new apocalypse.  What do 9-11, Katrina, An Inconvenient Truth, campaign finance reform, Gustav, and the war in Iraq have in common?  They've all inspired people to run out into the streets and scream "We're doomed!  We're doomed!"

Whether these people want to admit it or not, life will go on and the world will survive.

You may find yourself broke in the new economy.  That might be the end of your world but it's not the end of the world.

It's certainly not the end of my world.

Seriously, people, get a grip.