Category Archives: Nihilism

Noah Udoffia writes that we cannot rise as a nation until we bring God back into our society

For the majority of long-suffering citizens, God seems to be absent in Nigeria. Three concurrent signs imply the loss of divine presence in the nation: One, false prophets (those who predicted Buharis messianic reign) and false prophecies (unfulfilled predictions that Buharis policies will solve the nations problems) proliferate; two, false prophecies beget a false messiah (yes, Buhari) who reigns supreme in the land; three, the false messiahs policies inflict horrendous suffering on the masses. The void of divine absence has brought out the worst in human nature across the nation. Carnage and death abound. We cannot rise as a nation until we bring God back into our society. I am not implying a religious state; simply that individuals and communities must return to God in an authentic way before they can return to a stable state.

The fallen state of our nation is blatantly apparent. Everyday children are abused, and in the midst of plenty, millions go to bed hungry; young boys and girls are smuggled and sold for sexual exploitation and organ harvesting; school children are kidnaped for ransom with impunity; drug addiction and substance abuse among the youth is an epidemic; women and men are sexually assaulted and raped indiscriminately by politicians, professors, pastors, policemen and other people in power; and mass killings, criminal cults, organized banditry, general insecurity, disorder, distrust, corruption, poverty and inequality are pervasive. Right now, our natural environment has been degraded. Toxic pollutants in the air we breathe are killing us. Marine life in our rivers and streams have been destroyed and farmlands polluted by big oil.

In this depraved land, the wages of sin are wealth for a few and death for the suffering masses. Sodom and Gomorrah pale in comparison to the debauchery and injustices experienced by ordinary Nigerians under Buharis false messianic reign. It is no surprise, therefore, that the country is morally, economically, politically and socially bankrupt (for evidence read my previous essays published in THISDAY

Nigeria After Buhari: Healing a Divided and Traumatised Nation (2)

Noah Udoffia President Buharis Record of Underperformance As Nigeria sinks deeper into the abyss and politician

). None of these should be taken to imply that President Buhari is the root of all evil afflicting the nation. These problems have been endemic for years. Notwithstanding, President Buhari was recruited by the people to solve them. But his policies made them worse.

Nigeria has become a society in which ordinary citizens, roiled by bottomless sadness and nihilism, question their idea of God. This doubtfulness prompted many Nigerians who were interviewed for this essay to ask: one, How could God, in all His goodness, give us President Buhari in all his depravity? Two, If God is omnipotent, why does He allow the profound sinfulness rooted in the criminal and immoral acts of some religious leaders, politicians, professors, the police, traditional rulers, judges, businesspeople, soldiers, government officials, etc., to go unpunished here and now? Three, like the biblical Job they lament: Why is it when we, the poor, ask so little of life in Nigeria and live morally to the best of our ability, we are punished so severely by a morally perfect God while those who loot the nation wallow in their ill-gotten wealth and abuse power everywhere you look?

To the suffering masses, these salient questions define the paradox of God in Nigeria. It must be stated at the outset that this essay is not an argument about the existence of God. God exists. Nor is it about the love or care of God. God loves. God cares. Broadly conceived, ordinary citizens are struggling with these relevant questions of theodicy to better understand God in contrast to their lived experiences juxtaposed to their faith in God as all-knowing, all-powerful, and morally perfect and just. When a society separates itself from God, when divine absence seems apparent, when false prophets beget a false messiah and the nation fails, and citizens suffer, these questions demand broad and thoughtful inquiry.

Accordingly, this essay explores why false prophets and their false prophecies deceived us and why a false messiah reigns, inflicting horrendous suffering on ordinary Nigerians of all tribes, regions and religions. The essay takes on signicance and urgency in the light of the on-going political process to replace President Buhari in 2023. Without doubt, the current situation in Nigeria is an existential crisis the nation can no longer ignore. As such, understanding how we got here will inform who we elect as our president to avoid reoccurrence of the Buhari reign. Our people have suffered long enough.

With this morose and horrific description as background, and based on analysis of published reports and interviews with clerics and citizens, lets attempt to address some of the questions raised by ordinary Nigerians.

Lets address the foremost question of why God, in all His goodness, gave us President Buhari in all his depravity. As previously stated, one of the significant predictors of divine absence is the proliferation of false messengers who claim to speak for God. As you might remember, several self-professed messengers of God prophesied that God Himself appeared to them and revealed that Buhari was Nigerias chosen messiah, the new redeemer, and the only anointed leader to save the nation, stabilize and unite the tribes, secure its citizens, bring peace among the tribes, and let prosperity flow to all the tribes of the nation. They quoted scripture and boldly proclaimed Buharis election as ordained by God. They promised that Buhari would restore Gods ideal world, here and now, to alleviate the suffering of poor Nigerians. Prominent among them are Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka, Pastor Tunde Bakare, Prophet Christopher Owolabi, Prophet Ekong Ituen, Prophet Emmanuel Omale, Bishop Kayode Williams, Prophet Joshua Arogun, Pastor Sunday Adelaja to name a few variously reported by media outlets.

They wove incredible tales of Gods direct revelations to them into a mythology that made them demigods. As such, they attracted followers including politicians, business executives, and the poor. These charlatans influenced politicians and business elites who championed and nominated Buhari for the presidency, despite his well-known personality flaws, leadership liabilities and divisive political-religious ideology. Further, they commanded millions of followers to vote for candidate Buhari if they were to avoid Gods wrath. And so it came to pass that Buhari was elected president. Triumphant, these false prophets claim their prophecy was fulfilled to the glory of God. It is reported that the administration rewarded them richly. False prophecy became profitable, and the land was rife with charlatans and frauds who traffic in lies.

However, one validation of true prophets is that the word of God, spoken through them, is fulfilled. Six years into President Buharis tenure, the prophecy of a rebirthed nation, peaceful, prosperous, united, and blessed by divine providence is blatantly falsified. President Buhari has presided over one of the darkest chapters in Nigerian history. He has been widely criticized for dividing the nation and being responsible for some of the most horrendous sufferings perpetrated on ordinary Nigerians since the war.

It is no small irony that as the Buhari government began to fail, these counterfeit prophets continuously adjusted their prophecies to perpetuate their claims of divine favour. Some have now claimed, after-the-fact, that Satan deceived them by muddling the message from God. Notice what this nonsensical rationalization suggests. What they are implying is that their Buhari prophecy was either from the devil, or that God allowed His message to be corrupted, which He cannot permit. But this admission then concludes that their prophesied messiah was not of God, but of Satan.

As further evidence of their hypocrisy, instead of giving to the poor to alleviate poverty as preached by Christ, these wolves in sheeps clothing are interested only in their own wealth accumulation while preaching a debunked prosperity gospel and promising the poor masses a reward in heaven. These false prophets gain social recognition and become popular among followers by offering an optimistic, if not opportunistic, preaching of get-rich-quick gospel. They base their pretended insights on a selective and literal interpretation of the word of God, pleasing followers with their sweet talk and performative dark arts engineering fake miracles and sham healings.

Rather than serve as the religious and moral conscience of the nation and its people, these flamboyant, egotistical falsifiers of Gods message deceive their followers, worship money, status, power and popularity. They turn the church into a political-commercial institution. They build large religious-industrial complexes to make more money, not to save souls. They are among the wealthiest in the nation, live in opulent mansions, own high-priced private jets, drive the most expensive cars and have no sympathy whatsoever for the poor. For evidence, six Nigerian multi-millionaire pastors (in USD) made the top 20 ranking of the richest pastors in the world in 2021 according to Forbes.

In sum, it doesnt take much to see that, with the void of divine absence, authentic religious tradition became infected by politics and corrupted by money and power. Pastors became great promoters of politicians and guardians of the status quo. As we now know, false prophecy undermines the electoral process, and as such, a serious threat to our democracy. While we cant undo the consequences of heeding the false prophecies of the Buhari election, the 2023 election gives us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

I am an ordained elder of the Presbyterian Church and have been an adult Sunday school teacher for over 30 years. At the core of Christs teachings is a plea for us to know God, build a relationship with Him, and change not only into a better person but also help to build a better society. Despite our apparent departure from God, I hold steadfast to the strong conviction that God has not forsaken us, and that He is still what He has always been, even if we feel His absence today. What has been absent in our nation is not God, but Godliness and morality. A nation devoid of morality may feel divine absence when in reality they feel the influence of evil perpetrated by those in power. We have, it seems, a problem of depravity rather than a problem of God in Nigeria. This is not to suggest that those Nigerians who cried, Lord, where are you when we need you, are mistaken. This lament indicates that, despite the pernicious evil suffocating this people, some still have the faith to seek God. As Peter Berger and Amlie Rorty have noted, the presence of evil is not the absence of God.

We have a way out of our problem of depravity. God is merciful as well as just. He was willing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there were only 10 righteous persons. We must take collective action to realign with God on a personal as well as societal level. But we must also deal with those who have led us away from God and allowed evil to proliferate all around us, in our culture, schools, and public spaces.

For the false messiah, his reign will be over when we elect a new (and hopefully) moral and effective president in 2023. But Buhari seems to have set the standard for many of his devotees. For example, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo (guess what, hes a pastor!) is already being prophesied as Redeemer 2.0. We must not forget that he embodies everything we know (and much we dont yet know) to be wrong with the Buhari administration. Osinbajo will likely be the second coming of Buhari. Similarly, Pastor Tunde Bakare who was Buharis VP candidate in 2011 and had the audacity to self-prophesy his own election as the 16th president in 2023 (he is quoted to say God revealed: I will succeed Buhari as President of Nigeria; nothing can change it.) must be rebuffed. The latest prophecy is by the General Overseer and Primate of Christ Revelation Church of God, Bishop Ayodele Ipinmoroti, saying that God revealed Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be the next president in 2023. For context, we must not forget Tinubus devils bargain which enabled the ascendency of the false messiah Buhari. Prophet Joshua Arogun is at it again. His recent prophecy vaguely revealed Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, an ex-convict, as President Buharis replacement in 2023. We must reject every Buhari 2.0 candidate claiming divine right.

What should we do with the false prophets who prophesied Buharis failed messianic presidency? Every one of them should be prosecuted for bearing false witness and crime against Nigerians for aiding and abetting a false messiah whose policies have had horrendous consequences on the lives of millions of Nigerians. There is nothing in the Nigerian penal code that grants immunity of prosecution to conmen and counterfeiters. False prophecy is not protected by ecclesiastical privilege. We must bring them to justice or else others will follow, seeing there is no downside to promising salvation and delivering only evil.

However, it will require moral and creative wisdom to discover what it means to rebuild a nation in which awareness of divine presence is the foundation of being. Both Islam and Christianity, the dominant religions, have teachings that disapprove of false prophets and false messiahs, immorality and illegality. God stands waiting at the door. We must develop and internalize the moral qualities we expect of our leaders and fellow citizens. Only by doing so will we have the power to break the vicious cycle of false prophets, false messiahs, and mass suffering. God only feels absent in Nigeria because evil pervades. If we remove the evil, we can feel God again. Only then can we expect to welcome God back into our society.

nudoffia@gmail.com

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A FALSE MESSIAH AND THE PROBLEM OF GOD IN NIGERIA - THISDAY Newspapers

As I get older, holidays, especially with the emergence of a new year, become both a time of remembrance and joy. They offer memories steeped in joyfulness and loss, the value of loved ones, close friends, the beauty of solidarity forged in giving and sharing, and a hope that merges struggle, passion and justice. The dawn of the new year rests not merely on long-cherished narratives but also offers a time for renewed visions; it is about birth, the emergence of new possibilities, the weighing of mistakes, a renewed sense of struggle against the haters, liars, and the dreadful conditions that produce and support them. It is about a gentle kiss and touch that comes early in the morning with the ones you love. Such moments speak to falling into the comforting abyss of desire, becoming more conscious of what it means to make yourself vulnerable so you can step outside of the privatized prisons that a savage economic system puts us in. The new year offers a space to ponder what it means to reclaim history as a site of struggle, resistance, and civic courage. It infuses the present with the fire of wakefulness, longing for and hopefully producing a new language for reclaiming our sense of agency, consciousness, and the courage to never look away. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present. The new year suggests giving new meaning to the promise of a world without suffering, inequality, and the anti-democratic forces sprouting up like dangerous weeds. The new year should offer the opportunity to rethink life, dignity, and a humane equality as they unfold in their fullest and always with others.

I realize that these words of hope come at a difficult time in Canada and across the globe. Civic courage and the social contract are under siege. Struggling for a better world seems almost incomprehensible in a society where the pathology of privatization and greed have turned the self-inward to the point where any notion of social commitment and struggle for social justice appears either as a weakness or is treated with disdain. Freedom has partially collapsed into a moral nihilism that creates a straight line from politics to catastrophe to apocalypse. Chaos, uncertainty, loneliness, and fear define the current historical moment. In too many cases, learned helplessness leads to learned hopelessness. A culture of consumerism, sensationalism, immediacy, and manufactured ignorance blinds us to how political and moral passions substitute sheer rage, anger, and emotion for a thoughtful defence of truth, the social contract, civic culture, a culture of questioning, and democracy itself.

Of course, there are counter instances of civic courage among young people, educators, health care workers and others fighting social injustices, caring for the sick, dispossessed, and those bearing the weight of poverty, bigotry, and hatred. These agents of democracy offer a history and sense of the present that allows us to greet the new year with a vision of what a different future would look like, one born out of moral witnessing, the social imagination, civic courage and care for others. While it is true that we face the new year at a time when social fractures and economic divides fuel a tsunami of fear, anger, falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and in some cases a politics wedded to violence, we need to summon the courage to reject normalizing such events. As such, we can never let hope turn into the pathology of cynicism or worse. Hopefully, the new year will offer us the time to construct a visionary language as a condition for rethinking the possibilities that might come in the future, one that offers the promise of a sustainable democracy. Values such as freedom, solidarity, and equality need to breathe again, develop deeper roots, and renew an individual and collective sense of social responsibility and joint action. We need to throw out the crippling assumptions that turn freedom into a toxic notion of selfishness, hope into a crippling cynicism, and politics into a site of indifference, cruelty and corruption. The new year should give us a chance to reclaim the virtues of dignity, compassion, and justice. It should provide us with the opportunity to dream again, imagine the unimaginable, and think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

Henry A. Giroux is the chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University. His latest book is Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021).

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Hope in a time of disorder | TheSpec.com - TheSpec.com

DONT LOOK UP tells the story of two low-level astronomers, who must go on a giant media tour to ... [+] warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet earth. In select theaters December 10, on Netflix December 24.

Dr. Randall Mindy: Why arent people terrified? What do we have to say? What do we have to do?! Dont Look Up, Netflix, 2021.

While the latest climate movie isnt technically about climate change (spoiler warning: its an asteroid) it is ugly-laugh funny, surprisingly moving in places and an excruciatingly precise satire on the everyday experience of climate scientists, activists and change makers.

Its also a blockbuster. Dont Look Up has been viewed for over one hundred million hours in the week after its release and comfortably tops Netflixs most watched chart. Arguably, its the most successful climate-inspired movie since The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.

On the surface, Dennis Quaid heroically battling through a new ice age and Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling through disastrous TV interviews are very different stories. But I think its interesting, and worrying, that these two stories take on environmental risk is essentially the same that people are dumb about climate change. No one listens to the scientists in either movie, with the resulting Armageddons then depicted in vivid CGI. With 17 years between them, the two most successful climate movies are based on the premise that we wont solve humanitys greatest challenge.

Of course, those arent the only climate stories out there (although it seems to be a good blockbuster formula). Ive identified seven typologies of climate story or parable with similar arcs. As you read down youll probably notice one story that is very obvious by its absence;

1.Were So Dumb Stories pioneered by Dr Strangelove back when nuclear annihilation was the existential threat de jour, these Were So Dumb stories revel in the schadenfreude of humans profound stupidity when faced with magnitude threats. In Day After Tomorrow the politicians are dumb, and in Dont Look Up everyone is dumb. Cautionary tales or painful prophesies?

2.Post-Climapocalyptics - since 1973 with Soylent Green, the greenhouse effect has been useful fodder for movie dystopias. My personal favourite is the utterly lacking in nuance Waterworld in which (to hammer home the eco point) the baddies literally live in a dirty old oil tanker. Interstellar, uses biosphere collapse to drive the search for another world and the terrific German horror Hell makes global warming less creepy than its survivors. Im tempted to put Wall-E in this category alongside Mad Max Fury Road.

3.Super-Fuel Utopias almost every space opera assumes humanity will truly advance once we dump oil as fuel. The starship Enterprise doesnt run on petrol. In Tomorrowland this potential is given a rather dull outing, but Back To The Future nails it by powering the DeLorean with organic waste in a mass produced Mr Fusion machine.

4.Man-Made Monsters as climate parables go, Frankenstein is the story that most resembles much of our climate discourse man makes monster, then monster destroys man. From the The Matrix to the The Terminator these man-made monster stories are easy analogies for climate change, and I expect as our climate anxiety grows well see more of them.

5.Evil Humans V Good Nature Avatar, Fern Gully, Princess Mononoke and even Frozen II all lean into the truism of people being bad for everything else on the planet. Whilst the moral of these stories is laudable, seeking to ignite a more biophilic mindset, I do wonder if theres also a touch of misandry in them.

6.Oops, Wrong Solution! Ive written before about Thanos from the Avengers and his terrible Malthusian mistake, similarly, Downsizing takes a bad solution to resource crunch (make people smaller so they consume less) but turns it into a reasonable comedy. Snowpiercer is an excellent thriller set aboard a single train that survived a failed geo-engineering attempt. But its First Reformed that explores a very tangible and terrifying climate response nihilism and violence in an exquisite film.

7.Deus Ex Machina are films where tech, magic, aliens or superheroes fix the planet. In the 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, alien Keanu Reeves is sent to protect Earths fragile biosphere from humanity. Even the alien Predators are worried that global warming will change human DNA. In Geostorm a satellite network conveniently manages the climate (until it doesnt) and in 2067 a future ravaged by climate change invents time travel to a far future that might not be. Ive always been a little surprised there arent more of these. Perhaps the Avengers will eventually take on climate change?

Yes, I do watch too many movies. But the experts at Yale have watched even more and I recommend their brilliant list of cli-fi movies here if youd like to explore the genre.

But, theres one typology of climate movie that is notably missing even though audiences yearn for answers

8.How We Fixed It stories - not the Deus Ex Machina quick fixes but the story of real, messy, challenging and unexpected ways to solve and recover from climate change. Ive written before about how amazing that story could be.

I adore the ending of the penguiney childrens movie Happy Feet after people discover the plight of the starving penguins, an emotionally soaring montage shows in just a few frames exactly how we could go about solving over-fishing. Theres a media frenzy of coverage, protest marches, government pronouncements, consumer action and then a global fishing treaty. Its like a mini masterclass for kids on how we change things for the better. I wish we had even one montage like that for climate action!

Of course, we do have a familiar movie blueprint for heroes overcoming terrible odds from the brutalised Dumbledores Army gathering in Harry Potter, all the free peoples of the west preparing to battle Saurons army in Lord of the Rings and perhaps even the superheroes stepping through those swirly portals to back up Captain America in Endgame. Thats what we need for climate change, story after story of courage and compassion in the face of our climate monster.

The story exists, just not yet on film. I hope Netflix is planning to follow Dont Look Up with a big-budget adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinsons astonishing The Ministry For The Future novel. Its the most compelling, unputdownable story of facing into the solutions that Ive ever come across.

For once, Id like to cheer the solutions of climate change, rather than darkly laugh at our response to it.

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The Seven Climate Movies (And The One We Need Next). - Forbes

To be a writer is a lot like that Isaac Newton phrase, "standing on the shoulders of giants." Any progress one makes is largely due to everyone who preceded them. Joan Didion, like Hunter S. Thompson, taught herself to write by retyping the stories of Ernest Hemingway. The movements and shifting placement of the already perfectly chosen word in a sentence were better learned by this level of ingestion. However, she did not make his words her own. Like a surgeon who after years of reading, watching, and even assisting - the process would never be the same again for her again after picking up her own scalpel.

Didion was a fifth-generation Californian. Her family was on the same wagon train as the infamous Donner Party. Her ancestors split from the group and went their own way down the safest path. The rivers of northern California were in her bloodstream. Her own family life as a child defined the range of dynamics within her own. Some say she was perhaps overshadowed as a youth; however, it is far more likely Didion was busy sharpening her skills as the unbiased observer.

One of the famed writers practicing The New Journalism in the tumultuous Sixties, she managed to reveal more about herself and the others around her than all the other writers. Thompson whirled into phantasmagorical worlds that rivaled how false reality had become. Tom Wolfe placed himself in alternate universes to build the dandy mythic character he would become. Norman Mailer bloviated, exaggerated, and found the truth only when fighting tooth-and-nail for it.

Didion gracefully waltzed in and assumed a place to simply inquire, observe and record. In her landmark work "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" she describes herself "I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests." Like an apostate welcomed to the inner circle of social and societal upheaval, her disbelief in the changing mores of those around her made her observational eye uncanny.

Perhaps it was her family life. Her father did his level best to keep his family in the best neighborhood in Sacramento. Young Joan saw a man struggling at times to rise out of the depths of his own depression. Or perhaps it was the precision of her writing. As a young woman, she wrote in the Bridal and Society (like Eudora Welty) sections of newspapers before winning a position via scholarship at Vogue Magazine where a witty undercurrent was demanded through subtle implication.

For all her streams of beautifully rhythmic prose featuring sentences carefully aligned to run along like those rivers of her childhood, she could be amazingly succinct. Didion once wrote about Georgia O'Keeffe - "Style is character." In hindsight, those three words thread a lifetime of O'Keeffe works together.

When Vogue already designed the cover of its 1961 issue to contain a piece entitled "On Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power," the writer assigned to the task backed out. Didion stepped in and composed one of the defining essays of the late 20th Century. Like Machiavelli's "The Prince" or Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations," Didion carefully interweaves the oversights and overreaching of her own life with the lessons to be learned from actually from living. Her message was no "carpe diem" - style inspirational rah-rah self-recovery and worship. It was coded and complex, like perhaps she just knew the slow release of this philosophy and information would be the best way to undermine all the social constructs that were keeping people in their place.

To write without caring is an oversimplification and a drastic reduction of Didion's overarching message. Didion cared tremendously for the lost youth leaving their homes in the Sixties for an advertised Utopia that was far more sinister. It is easy to get lost in the tales of wreckless abandon and free love surrounding the mythology of Haight-Ashbury in its so-called heyday. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" covered the season of discontent before the fabled "Summer of Love." Like Mailer, Didion was there but she was not extending her reportage to people bleeding on the streets of Miami and Chicago in '68 or even trying to levitate the Pentagon. Didion found pockets of diffidence and nihilism, those whose disbelief would defuse the power of the movement. Didion cared very much for her protagonists. In the middle of this paisley haze, Didion chose to reveal the truth.

She examined the truth within herself in her novel "Play It As It Lays." she traveled far and wide to find the truth in other political movements in foreign lands. She even faced the truth of mortality in the loss of her only daughter ("Blue Nights") and her husband ("The Year of Magical Thinking.") Didion chose to write about her life with the same selfless dedication to truth, as she did all the others. In the end, Didion rose above "The New Journalism" tag to become one of our most cherished writers.

When she finally got the chance to interview (and Didion always maintained that she was - in her words - "a bad interviewer,") her childhood idol John Wayne, she carefully places the real John Wayne in her dreamworld while showing you that he is truly a normal man with the same issues we all contend with. Here, even though The Duke is fighting off a cold and on his ninth week of filming in Durango, Didion still envisions him as the mythic warrior who promised to build her a place of comfort and certainty. Didion is finally there.

In the end, I tried to find the right pull quote. Actually, I struggled to send her off. As one who writes, Didion has always been there to help smash through the writer's block and replumb the fountain of ideas. Watching her, listening to her, listening to others talk about her - one actually feels how much she cares without having to say it. In grief, she pointed out that it truly had no direction - it was only deep and wide and there to envelope you. However, I consciously chose not to write this out of grief. After all, she has long written about knowing the end was near. Instead, maybe she would prefer to be remembered as the one who through every travail of life - never lost herself.

Mik Davis is the record storemanager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.

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NOTEWORTHY: THE HOUSE AT THE BEND IN THE RIVER WHERE THE COTTONWOODS GROW - HubcitySPOKES.com

For a ten year period from the late 80s to somewhere in the 90s, Geena Davis followed a peculiar arc. Incredible in David Cronenbergs The Fly, not the least for the chemistry of a real-life romance with Jeff Goldblum that flamed out after a passionate conflagration, she found herself a curious kind of star. Too pretty to be the nerd, too nerdy to be an idol, she was a kind of dreamgirl for the very smart and the kind of lonesome. She anchored pop-cultural touchstones like Thelma & Louise where she introduced the world to the particular pleasures of objectifying an on-the-cusp Brad Pitt; and A League of Their Own which has in the decades since accumulated almost as many laurels as a feminist rallying point. My fondest impressions of her, though, are from The Fly (of course), but also her turn as suburban ghost Barbara in Beetlejuice and odd, unconventional Muriel in Lawrence Kasdans underseen The Accidental Tourist where Davis matched up perfectly with the similarly unconventional William Hurt. Its those seemingly disparate qualities of capable athlete and lovable dork that people like Zooey Deschanel would later parlay into careers. In details of her personal life that found currency during this same period, I find evidence of both of those things in Davis foray into Olympic archery, and simultaneous-in-my-memory revelation that the Boston University grad was a member of Mensa. Though there are obvious explanations for Davis elevation as a feminist icon (and lets not forget Earth Girls are Easy), I think often of her, some would call it bizarre, two-film run with then-husband Renny Harlin where she made a play for action hero before settling in to play mom roles in animated mouse movies.

Cutthroat Island landed first, earning immediate scorn as arguably the worst film of 1995 and a financial boondoggle to boot. In it, she plays the dread pirate Morgan who, in the first ten minutes of the film, makes two dick jokes and skins her fathers head for the treasure map tattooed there. It has its pleasures, in other words. Theres a lovely stunt where Davis herself seems to time a fall from a window into the shotgun seat of a racing carriage, but the picture is vile and loud, obnoxiously over-written, has numerous monkey reaction shots, and fails I think to capture the thing about Davis that is the most arresting: that is, her ability to play characters that are in the process of discovering something about themselves. Davis is like Matt Damon in that way: they are too smart to be likable unless what were watching is a process of them figuring out just how special they actually are. I dont think its a mistake that career highlights for both involve characters who are special agents with amnesia, fishes literally pulled from the water and into normal, domestic situations before circumstance calls them to action. Harlin, I dont think, entirely understood what it is about Davis that made her a star, not entirely, but he got a lot closer the second time out with the exuberantly bonkers The Long Kiss Goodnight. Perhaps unfortunately for The Long Kiss Goodnight, it landed just one year after Cutthroat Island.

Working from a script by Shane Black, The Long Kiss Goodnight was dismissed at the time as just another loud, obnoxious, ultra-violent piffle that further degraded Davis momentum and was popularly speculated to have been at least part of the reason Davis and Harlin ended their marriage soon after. Stripped of its tabloid interest, The Long Kiss Goodnight is exactly the kind of movie that filmmakers have been chasing recently, in this newly diverse-aspiring climate: the unapologetic action movie heroine grounding a potential franchise. This is the movie I think of when I watch things now like Atomic Blonde, movies that know the notes but, without the particular, difficult-to-replicate complexities that Davis brings to the party, dont quite hear the music. In this, Davis plays Charly Baltimore, a government-bred assassin whos lost her memory and so begun a new life as a housewife. Her past catches up with her, of course, and as pieces of her old skills start returning, she partners with good samaritan Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) to protect her new family and, why not, save the world from evil in the process. I love this movie I love in particular the scenes where Charly plays the wife because there is something always fascinating about someone like Geena Davis in a role that is so completely familiar. She makes a comfortable thing uncomfortable with the volume of combustible potential energy she brings to it. A sequence where, while cooking dinner, she discovers she has unearthly knife skills (Maybe I was a chef!) is absolutely a delight for how Davis plays it as not a superhero origin story, but a woman coming into power.

Geena Davis is like Matt Damon: they are both too smart to be likable unless what were watching is a process of them figuring out just how special they actually are.

Beyond Blacks typically-snappy and world weary banter, thats what sings about The Long Kiss Goodnight 25 years after its initial release seeing Davis joy as not just the best wife and schoolteacher there ever has been, but eventually, the best killer the world has ever seen. I recall vividly the Siskel & Ebert pan where they talked derisively about the physics of outrunning a fireball, missing entirely that Davis when shes on fire with the right material to suit her many facets. The film is trenchant in its pessimism about government agencies with the baddies actually being the CIA in the process of planting a false-flag operation in order to better persecute Muslims at home and abroad. I dont think I understood exactly how opportunistic our government was, nor how easily our racism is weaponized against the minority bogey-du-jour, when I first saw this film. Its nihilism struck me back then as unsettling and The Long Kiss Goodnight was easier to dismiss as a particularly bleak fantasy. Watching it now, after everything weve been through the last quarter century, its maybe not nihilistic enough?

Whats constant, though, is how effortlessly Davis moves back and forth from warmth and nurturing, to calculating and deadly. Theres something archetypal about Davis towering over most of her co-stars, gangly in one moment and lissome in the next, as at home in a leather trench coat as she is in a gingham dress. She is the very image of unpinnable and as a being of complete liminal possibility, she becomes like Hitchcocks Roger Thornhill; Cary Grant in a light blue suit who is everything to everyone but truly knowable only by the person he chooses.

The action in The Long Kiss Goodnight remains memorable. Harlin, of all the things he is and is not, is a master of muscular motion. During this his period of greatest production, he began the decade crashing an passenger deck full of people in Die Hard 2 and ended it with a super-smart shark interrupting Samuel Jackson mid-diatribe. In between, the better-than-it-should-be Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger (and Stallone was floated as one possible star of The Long Kiss Goodnight should Davis not work out) and a game adaptation of Daniel Waters The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. But for me, hes the director of these two attempts to find a franchise for Geena Davis who has been good in everything shes been in, but has never had her unique skill set entirely honored by any single project. The Long Kiss Goodnight came the closest and its influence on filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Doug Liman, even Chad Stahelskis John Wick epic, continue to cast long shadows. If you havent seen it, you owe it to yourself. Its brutally violent and surprisingly tender; hilarious and somber; absurd and all too familiar. Its all the contradictions inherent in Davis, too, this complicated star for a complicated decade whose greatest gift of polar ambiguity might be coming into focus only now, when were similarly fractured and looking for a way all those pieces fit into one possible whole.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Long Kiss Goodnight

Originally posted here:

'The Long Kiss Goodnight' At 25: Geena Davis Was The Matt Damon Of Her Time - Decider

formal

1 : the belief that traditional morals, ideas, beliefs, etc., have no worth or value

2 : the belief that a society's political and social institutions are so bad that they should be destroyed

1a : a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless Nihilism is a condition in which all ultimate values lose their value. Ronald H. Nash

b : a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths

2a : a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility

b capitalized : the program of a 19th century Russian party advocating revolutionary reform and using terrorism and assassination

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Nihilism Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

bell hooks, the feminist author, poet, theorist and cultural critic, has died at the age of 69 at her home in Berea, Kentucky. Her works, including Aint I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, All About Love, Bone Black, Feminist Theory and Communion: The Female Search for Love, were beacons for a generation of writers and thinkers in academia and beyond.

Heres a handful of her most memorable quotes:

The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin. Communion: The Search for Female Love, 2002

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. All About Love: New Visions, 1999

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 1994

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term feminism, to focus on the fact that to be feminist in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression. Aint I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981

If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000

No Black woman writer in this culture can write too much. Indeed, no woman writer can write too much No woman has ever written enough. Remembered Rapture: The Writer At Work, 1999

We continue to put in place the anti-sexist thinking and practice which affirms the reality that females can achieve self-actualization and success without dominating one another. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000

Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation. In fact I was saying just the opposite: that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. Marginality As a Site of Resistance, 1990

Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sign, marking the condition of our pain and deprivation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that ones creativity, ones imagination is at risk, there that ones mind is fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for is lost. Marginality as a Site of Resistance, 1990

All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity. Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995

We cant combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice. - interview with Jet Magazine, 2013

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004

I still think its important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not. Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? in conversation with Maya Angelou, 1998

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is its to imagine what is possible. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012

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A life in quotes: bell hooks - The Guardian

Wolf Alices third album could easily have been a disaster. They made it with Markus Dravs, the go-to producer for going big (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Florence + the Machine). Its a move that can fit uncomfortably for anyone not born in Bonos image, as the low-key London four-piece clearly arent. Then the pandemic hit. Stuck in Dravs studio in Brussels, they meticulously refined the album, risking sucking the life from it. Somehow they skirted both pitfalls: Blue Weekend is Wolf Alices biggest and most immediately satisfying album cresting shoegaze, woozy classic rock, inventive acoustic songwriting cohered by melodies that arent just sticky, but frequently moving. Its also one thats seldom as straightforward as it seems, deriving its greatest potency from Ellie Rowsells subtly layered songwriting.

She has said that Blue Weekend is her least autobiographical album: whatever the inspiration, it tells a convincingly lived-in story of searching in dark places for answers to some indefinable question; of self-sabotage becoming a logical response to having your worst suspicions confirmed. Rowsells lyrics have never been stronger, telling of a breakup with friends (brooding opener The Beach), a litany of creeps, misogynists and a cheating lover: I take you back / Yeah, I know it seems surprising, she thunders on Lipstick on the Glass with a measure of ecstatic control, as if mirroring her prideful composure.

Untethered, her narrator swerves knowingly into nihilism. Its here that Wolf Alice come into their own as adept musical shapeshifters, using their broad influences to explore the extremes a person might reach for in the throes of alienation: the self-destruction and desolation; the flare-ups of defiance and self-doubt. Safe from heartbreak if you never fall in love, Rowsell sings conclusively over a song of the same name, her drawbridge-up stance contrasting sweetly pastoral guitar and innocent in-the-round harmonies.

Similarly, at first pass, the woozy Delicious Things comes off as a classic fantasy of a wide-eyed newcomer seduced by life in Los Angeles. But Rowsell is well aware that the vibes are kinda wrong and that the man whose bed shes in is here for one thing. Nevertheless, she sings, paradoxically, of feeling alive, like Marilyn Monroe, and the dreamy song billows skywards like the ill-fated bombshells skirts, a blissed-out wall of guitar steadily charring. Maybe certain annihilation is the fantasy, though some self-preservationist instinct kicks in: Hey, is mum there? Rowsell sings in a small voice at the end. Its just me / I felt like calling.

There are more headstrong forays into the abyss. The squalling, stadium-ready Smile is a personal rebuke to Rowsells critics. Through a jutted jaw, she reclaims attributes that some might perceive as weaknesses caution, sensitivity, rage but the songs crowning moment finds her at the bar amid her fellow lost souls, drinking to fake that superhuman feeling. The confidence is conditional; as is the relief on Play the Greatest Hits, a deliriously fun, campy rager about the groundhog day of narcotic nights out, repeated to keep real life at bay. It isnt loud enough, she screams, furiously trying to sate some primal need.

Blue Weekend was released with Rowsell, Joff Oddie, Theo Ellis and Joel Amey all on the cusp of 30 a time when youths reckless momentum slows and youre forced to puzzle over whats next, or at least to start being more honest with yourself. The albums turning point, How Can I Make It OK?, plays out like an attempt at consolation, laced with their own doubts at being able to offer it: How do we sell you the world? Rowsell sings expansively. But they clearly understood the assignment: the song swells to a euphoric, girl-group-indebted sandstorm of a chorus thats stirring to the point of confrontation. Similarly tender, but more barbed, is the gorgeous The Last Man on Earth, which wields opiate psychedelia a la Bowie or Floyd to slyly mock a blinkered character awaiting divine intervention instead of sorting their own life out. The music carries you off like a dream, but Rowsells lyrics are resolutely grounded.

There is a powerful magnetism between the scale of these songs and the detailed empathy and frustrations they contain. But Wolf Alice also trust when to pull back. Penultimate song No Hard Feelings is the inevitable, hard breakup moment, the defenceless conclusion to the earlier heartache. Its not hard to remember when it was tough to hear your name, Rowsell sings gracefully, to just softly thrummed guitar and twinkling ambience: Crying in the bathtub to Love Is a Losing Game. This ending is a beginning, she knows, an idea threaded into closer The Beach II, a sweet dirge that marks the reconciliation of that broken friendship: The tide comes in as it must go out.

These are grand gestures wielded elegantly, and they make Blue Weekend a complete, moving piece of work. In a sense, its a record that feels very familiar a big, confident pop-rock album but then you remember what an anomaly those are these days, when the form is so diminished as to have been almost abandoned. Few are bemoaning its demise, but theres an undeniable pleasure in finding one adventurous, ambitious and human enough to remind you why they used to be so essential.

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The 50 best albums of 2021, No 2: Wolf Alice Blue Weekend - The Guardian

China's writers and artists should avoid producing "vulgar" work that paints the Chinese people in an "ugly" light, ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping told a recent literary and artistic conference.

Writers and artists should ensure that they behave in a "moral and upright" manner, while producing work that "extols goodness, truth and beauty," Xi told the 11th National Congress of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the 10th National Congress of China Writers Association in Beijing on Dec. 14.

"Our artists and writers must practice morality and decency, have good taste and be responsible," Xi said.

"I hope that the majority of literary and artistic workers will hold onto their original aspirations, keep their mission in mind, live up to the times, live up to the people, and make new and greater contributions to the comprehensive construction of a modern socialist country and the realization of the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," he added.

He called for literary and artistic works that live up to Chinese aesthetic standards and spread "Chinese values."

"You shouldn't ridicule the people, still less demonize them with ugly brushstrokes," Xi told the conference. "Literature and art should be popular, but not vulgar or kitsch."

"The makers, followers, and advocates [of art and literary] must innovate, but they must not engage in anything weird or ridiculous," he said. "[They] shouldn't be contaminated with filthy lucre, nor enslaved to the market."

"We must emphasize taste, style, and responsibility, be upright, act innocently, and extol truth, goodness, and beauty, and pinpoint falseness, evil and ugliness," Xi said.

Liao Tianqi, vice chair of the PEN International Peace Committee, said Xi's comments are in effect a set of demands on writers and artists to produce propaganda for the CCP, similar to his requirement that the media belong to the ruling party.

"Literature should be about expressing human nature, not marching to the tune of those in power," Liao told RFA. "Some literature does tap into weaknesses in society and in human nature."

"Expressing such things doesn't mean you are exaggerating human evil, or social ugliness ... it's better than that; it's calling society's attention to the way society treats disadvantaged groups."

Xi's comments were far more prescriptive than during his 2016 appearance at the same conferences, during which he merely asked writers to avoid "historical nihilism" when writing about modern and contemporary Chinese history.

Freedom, privacy of thought

In a separate interview two days earlier, U.S.-based writer Han Xiu accused the CCP of "ruining 5,000 years of Chinese civilization."

She also warned that it is hard to write without the freedom and privacy of one's own thoughts.

"Writers don't just need to have freedom in the environment where they live; it also matters whether their thoughts are free or not, or whether there is some kind of yardstick telling them what is the right way to write and what is not," Han said in an interview with RFA's "Viewpoint" program.

"In such a complicated environment, you must have your own standpoint," she said. "If you stick to that, and write what you want to write, then you have creative freedom."

"There are no artists who are subject to no restrictions at all, and many sacrifice their personal happiness and their independence of personality," Han said. "But they won't sacrifice their independence of thought or their creative freedom."

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Continue reading here:

China's leader warns artists, writers to be 'upright' and avoid 'vulgar' work - Radio Free Asia

(solarseven/iStock/Getty Images)

These days, anti-humanism is as thick as molasses among the intelligentsia. That includes an ongoing conversation in bioethics whether all things considered human extinction would be a fine thing because of the suffering that never coming into existence would avoid.

Example: A few months ago, Oxford professor Roger Crisp opined that we might not want to stop a huge asteroid from hitting the Earth. From Would extinction be so bad?:

Consider the huge amount of suffering that continuing existence will bring with it, not only for humans, and perhaps even for post-humans, but also for sentient non-humans, who vastly outnumber us and almost certainly would continue to do so. As far as humans alone are concerned, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill at the University of Oxfords Global Priorities Institute estimate that there could beone quadrillion(1015) people to come an estimate they describe as conservative.

These numbers, and the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements in individuals lives, are difficult to fathom and so large that its not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid. In fact, there seem to be some reasons to think you shouldnt.

Perhaps one reason we think extinction would be so bad is that we have failed to recognise just how awful extreme agony is. Nevertheless, we have enough evidence, and imaginative capacity, to say that it is not unreasonable to see the pain of an hour of torture as something that can never be counterbalanced by any amount of positive value. And if this view is correct, then it suggests that the best outcome would be the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our planet.

Crisp equivocates a bit at the end, writing, I am not claiming that extinction wouldbe good;only that, since itmight be, we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date. Good grief. Is the issue really debatable?

Not to be outdone, writing in response to Crisp in the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog, University of Calgary professor Walter Glannon shrugs his big brain at the prospect of us being gone. From A world without us:

We cannot predict the sort of lives future people would have because we do not know the sort of world they would inhabit. But the circumstances described above make it difficult to be optimistic. Regardless of the hypothetical value or disvalue of these lives, possible people are not deprived of anything if they do not come into existence.

We have an obligation to collectively act to prevent or reduce the suffering that present and future humans will actually experience. This depends on controlling natural habitats, deforestation, carbon emissions and other processes. Future actual people have the same rights and interests in avoiding suffering as present actual people. The extent of suffering may provide a pro tanto reason to prevent them from existing. Even if there is no such reason, merely possible people do not have these rights and interests because they do not and will not exist. If we become extinct, then the world will go on without us and will be good or bad for no one.

Why do ivory-tower discussions like this matter? Because these nihilists are teaching the society leaders of tomorrow, those who will exert tremendous influence over future public policies and cultural attitudes. With our supposedly best minds suggesting that human extinction could be desirable, is it any wonder why so many of our young people seem to be despairing?

Moreover, the utter terror of suffering is pathological and leads directly to evil and/or terribly wrongheaded utilitarian policies such as eugenics and social Darwinism. It is also the moving force behind the euthanasia movement, which seeks to eliminate suffering by eliminating the sufferer. Avoiding suffering is also the central philosophical core of the transhumanism quasi-religion, which seeks to create a corporeal immortality by instilling a new eugenics with very sharp teeth.

So, what should be our attitude toward suffering? It should not be utopian scheming. Nor, to be sure, should it be indifference. Rather, we have a human duty to mitigate each others suffering, to love and suffer with each other which is the root meaning of compassion. And we can harness our own suffering to grow and become better individuals.

In this regard, for my Humanize podcast, I recently interviewed the quadriplegic Christian evangelist and disability rights activists Joni Eareckson Tada, who unexpectedly took a deep dive into this very issue, and in a very intimate and personal way. Regardless of faith issues, her attitude toward and personal response to her own deep suffering is much healthier than the nihilism that has grown so dark within utilitarian bioethics that some dont reject the prospect of human extinction out of hand.

Read the rest here:

Bioethicists Okay Human Extinction to Eliminate Suffering - National Review