Book Review: Attack of the Theocrats

“Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity.  It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven…it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”  -John Adams

    I’ve felt a change in the air as the years have passed.  As a boy, there was a great deal of hope and longing for a future of technological advancement, world peace, and a reign of compassion and reason.  Science and evidence based reasoning were the tools we would use to build a brighter future.  It was in the literature, on the big and small screen.  We were going to space, we were curing illness, we were learning about our past (and learning from it), and we were going to clean up our planet and make things right.  But, as I entered high school in the early 90s, I got my first taste of something.  Something that had been building in the shadows of American politics for a long time.  A conscious, directed effort on the part of a faction of American Christianity had been using their considerable wealth and grass roots energy to erode basic tenants of American law, democracy, and our nation’s very spirit.  Why were we abandoning science?  Why did we start denying the facts of evolution, of climate change, of our founding fathers, and so much more?  Why were established and understood maters of science being cast aside left and right?  Why was innovation and intellectual curiosity held up as a thing of ridicule?  When did trying to get an education become ‘elitist?’  When did fair taxes, chipping in, taking care of your fellow man, coming to a consensus, etc. become ‘socialist?’

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law representing establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” -Thomas Jefferson

“I believe that God wants me to be president.” -George Bush

    Sean Faircloth’s book goes into details on how this shift happened, who was behind it, what their goals were and are, and what can be done to stop them, and to wrestle the future of America back from religious extremists who want to create a theocracy in direct contradiction to the principles of the Founding Fathers and the desire of the ‘man on the streets.’  It’s a frightening, clarion call to action against the very real, and very dangerous element within our government and our civilization, who are putting our lives, the lives of our children, and the very future of our species and our planet in jeopardy.

“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” -Thomas Jefferson

    Using plenty of examples, and directly calling out egregious offences against the Constitution and Bill of Rights on the part of those who so vocally claim their sanction, Faircloth does a fine job of highlighting individuals and organizations that all Americans should fight against in the name of freedom and law.  Law.  That thing that has made our country strong in the past.  Law.  The tool of justice.  Law.  The thing that keeps safe the poor and the rich, the old and the young, the minority and the majority.

And this from a very religious man.

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of.  My own mind is my own church.” -Thomas Paine

    If you’re worried about the direction a small number of backward looking extremists are trying to drag our country, you should take a look at this book.  If you want to see America take the lead in science and innovation again, you should read this book.  If you are tired of people claiming to be for ‘small government’ while they simultaneously try to legislate every aspect of your personal life, you should read this book.  If you’re tired of sending your tax money to support religious organizations you don’t belong to or support in any way, you should read this book.  If you're sick of hearing how our founding fathers wanted America to be a Christian nation, in spite of all the mountains of written works by those same founders to the contrary, you should read this book.  Tired of government sanctioned religion that flies in the face of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, changing our money and even our Pledge of Allegiance, in the name of their particular beliefs, you should read this book.  Are you angry to see Jefferson and Madison’s ‘separation of Church and State’ attacked time and again, except when used as an excuse for not paying taxes on massive megachurch incomes and financial double-dealings?  Are you sick to your stomach at the idea that our children are tortured and allowed to die in the name of ancient superstitions?  You should read this book.  Faircloth looks at specific examples and general trends, and shows how wrong the attempted Theocrats are, and how anti-American they really are.  Men and women who wrap themselves in the flag, while they soil everything it stands for.  Read this book.

“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature.  Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” -George Washington


Attack of the Theocrats
Author: Sean Faircloth
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
ISBN: 9780984493241

(I read this as an ebook, which you can get for the Nook or Kindle)

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (5/5/13-5/11/13)

    Day after day, week after week, rain and threat of rain.  It’s starting to get to me.  I’ve only done maybe five or six bike trips so far this year, which is unacceptable by this point.  Otherwise, just stress broken up with movies and books.  Woot.

    I got in a few more episodes of Fraggle Rock.  I’m in season 3 now, and the quality has not dropped.  I continue to be impressed by the show’s solid foundation in basic morality without being too preachy or condescending.  Truly one of the greatest youth oriented shows I’ve experienced.

Star Trek: First Contact:  “This far.  No farther!”  Picard faces his Khan, the Borg, in this darned exciting and action packed film.  This should have been the first movie for the Next Gen crew, instead of the wishy-washy, gutless and stupid Generations.  After the Hugh episode of Next Gen pretty much eviscerated the Borg, making them little more than a bumbling bunch of communist thugs, First Contact made them scary and menacing again.  And oddly, by putting a ‘human face’ on them, helped to make them less human.  The so called Borg Queen is, I think, a manifestation of the species’ intellect as opposed to its leader.  As she says, you see disparity where there is none.  She is the Borg.  And she drips with sexual menace and Vaseline, becoming an all consuming fertility goddess, a bottomless hunger that consumes all.  The Borg are obviously the dark side of the potentials of cybernetics.  But they are not evil, simply alien.  Along the way, we also see the story of the fist warp vessel launched by a backyard astronaut-entrepreneur.  The movie looks great, it moves fast, has some really good moments, and a solid story.  I know everyone is about Star Trek II, but First Contact remains my favorite of the franchise’s films.

House on the Edge of the Park:  Well, that was unpleasant.  A film that makes beautiful women taking their clothes off difficult for me to watch.  I guess that’s something.  David Hess is hard to look at.  Don’t.

    As I’ve said before, I grew up in the late 70s and 80s, in the shadow of the Cold War, but also during a fairly tectonic shift in technology and its democratization.  The personal computer, the early days of what would become the internet, the explosion of prosthesis, transplants, and implants.  It was pretty wild.  Every year felt more and more like I was living in a new age, a science fictional world.  Part of that shift was captured in a somewhat short lived, but key movement in science fiction literature that I felt attuned to then, and still hold a special place in my heart for now.  Cyberpunk.  It was a movement born of and reflective of its time, a specifically 80s thing, though ripples of its influences continue to wash through books and movies and culture.  All that is just to bring up that I randomly picked the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades off the shelf this week and read the story Snake-Eyes by Tom Maddox.  Darned fine and cool tale.  Reading about the protagonist and his desire to experience the strange reminded me of myself.  I think my friends think I’m kidding when I say I want to get 360 degree vision, or the ability to shift my perception through various spectra, or just that I want mechanical legs.  But I’m not.  Not at all.  And here is a character after my own heart, as he struggles with what it means to have these implants within him, unleashing his primitive impulses.  I also like that the story isn’t about ‘tech bad/bio good’ or ‘instinct bad/logic good.’  It’s about the dangers of technology and the benefits, and its about balancing the deepest and most base lusts with the rational control of civilized Man.  I’m all about that.  Good stuff.

The Last Dragon:  “Shonuff!”  Oh, man.  What the heck is up with this movie?  It’s funny (sometimes intentionally) and weird as all get-out.  Bruce Leroy.  Vanity.  Young William H. Macy.  It’s some kind of alternative 1985, fueled by coke, neon, and awful post-funk Motown.  The acting is truly inspired.  And something about Bruce Leroy running around in that rice farmer’s hat seems racist.  I’m not sure how, but it feels racist.  Vanity really was cute, though.  Talentless, but cute.  So, when the Shogun of Harlem is giving you some guff, you just call Bruce Leroy with his Power of the Glow.  This movie is what the Double Dragon film should have been like.

Shonuff!!!

Cat-women of the Moon:  “You‘re too smart for me, baby.  I like ‘em stupid.”  I’m not sure if I’d seen this before, or if it’s so typical of the genre that it just felt that way.  Chicks in unitards hide out in the ruins of an ancient civilization.  The usual battle of the sexes crap.  A bunch of near-immortal sex kittens need to learn what wholesome and slightly dim American men can do for them.  It’s fine, but pretty by the numbers.  But hey, it’s short.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid:  “I got my shotgun full of 16 thin dimes.  Enough to spread you out like a crazy woman’s quilt.”  Everybody who was alive when this film was made shows up to look ugly as heck and do evil things to each other Peckinpah style.  I’m not a Dylan fan, but his music on this movie isn’t bad, and his extremely affected acting performance is fun.  Otherwise, it’s just nasty, nasty, nasty.  Oh, and depressing.  But it’s also a pretty good flick.  Not going on my list of best Westerns, but it’s a good one.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:  “I been here before and you don’t know the way.”  Wow.  Ever think you’re just in too good a mood, and want to bring it down a notch?  This is the movie for you.  A relentlessly grim and angry film, it rages at you with whiskey stinking breath and grime covered hands.  You are the white whale, Peckinpah is Ahab, and he’s shooting his heart upon you with his chest cannon.  It isn’t the Western I was expecting, though it often feels like one.  It’s modern, but dingy and aged, beaten by the sun and spit on by life.  I keep thinking of Mister Eddy in Lost Highway with his throat all slashed, gurgling, ‘you and me buddy, we can sure out-ugly them som’bitches.’

Prey:  A dumb young woman and her obsessive lady friend are living the life in a secluded English estate, when a bird hating alien shows up looking for lunch.  One long, awkward dinner party later, who can tell hunter from prey.  This movie has a lot of screeching.  The dumb woman screeches a lot.  A LOT.  Her lady love also screeches…but not as much.  Even the alien screeches a bit.  Maybe they should have called the film Screech.  It’s not a good movie.  But it has a dubious charm.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad:  “We may be thieves and murderers…but we are not fools.”  One of literature’s great adventure heroes, Sinbad, gets a definitive presentation with this Ray Harryhausen creature packed fantasy film.  Like the tales of the Arabian Nights, it is a hodgepodge of traditional stories from various cultures and whole cloth.  Kerwin Mathews is an adequate Sinbad (though I prefer John Phillip Law), and Kathryn Grant is adorable as his chosen bride.  I notice watching this film, the evil wizard was hardly out of line in his requests for aid.  Granted, his reaction is perhaps a touch extreme, but I really do think he was used rather poorly by Sinbad and his sultan.

    Friday night and Saturday morning, I read new book The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan.  It’s a solid exploration of the need in American politics for the moderate, centrist elements to stand up and be counted.  The first rational call for a serious and useful third party I’ve seen in my lifetime.

    I also read the prequel graphic novel Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness that leads into next week’s Star Trek: Into Darkness theatrical release.  Can’t say I’m surprised to report it’s not very good.  The art is blah, the script is more blah, and the story isn’t interesting.  The portrayal of Robert April is straight-up silly.  It also does nothing to alive my fears for where they’re taking this new movie.  Conspiracy this, war that; fistfight, fistfight, fistfight!

Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island:  Fleeing a Confederate prison, some Civil War soldiers end up in a balloon, trapped in a powerful seemingly endless gale that takes them away from any known land.  Crash landing on a …mysterious island, they find some danged peculiar things going on.  The film works as a kind of sequel to Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a nice stylistic companion to Journey to the Center of the Earth (though, that makes its lack of James Mason conspicuous).  Ray Harryhausen once again creates some very cool creatures to menace our heroes.  I love these adventure films.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad:  “My friend, you can not pick up two melons with one hand, and I cannot work miracles.”  John Phillip Law is definitely the best Sinbad of the Harryhausen era, and my Caroline Munro fetish can not be denied.  Plus, fourth Doctor, Tom Baker as the evil wizard is enjoyably hammy in that stage actor sort of way.  Even the supporting characters are more interesting than usual.  Lavish production and exotic locations give it a grand fantasy feel.  The story is pretty wild and the action solid.  Fantasy movies of this much imagination are not unheard of today, but they are rare.  I’d like to see more.

One Million Years B.C.:  “Errr!”  Hammer Studios takes on history in this caveman epic featuring the awe-inspiring body of Raquel Welch and the stop-motion wizardry of Ray Harryhausen.  Truth be told, this isn’t a particularly good movie.  Its grasp of history is…well, absent.  The acting, even without sensible dialog, is not good.  It’s pretty much made watchable by Welch (who is infinitely watchable) and the cool creatures.  Martine Beswick isn’t too hard on the eyes either, I guess.  The music is interesting.  Where do you find a village of beautiful blonde spear-fishing cavegirls, anyway?  Sweden?  Was this filmed on location?  I do kind of get Tumak.  All Welch’s emotions are weird and she’s kind of clingy.  I wonder if the scriptwriter began with ‘two fur bikini-clad women in sweaty cat-fight’ and worked backward from there.  That seems about right.

Where is this film's Oscar?

    And lastly, I started watching the PBS series Secret Files of the Inquisition, a look into the Vatican’s records.  The narration and dramatization are well done, though the pacing and editing is a bit weird.  It frequently feels like it’s going to commercial, but as it’s from PBS, I assume there wasn’t one.  And there’s a lot of unnecessary foreshadowing, often of events about to be described.

-Matt

History was AWESOME!