Brought to you by the letter “L”.
Today's Lesson – Stay off the political blogs during staff meetings (really, stay off them altogether during work hours) less I give co-worker “L” the mistaken impression that I am pregnant and considering an abortion. Thus driving L, a deeply religious and conservative man to ask me in private if I was considering having an abortion and wanting to let me know that there are other alternatives.
He was relieved to learn that I was neither pregnant nor considering an abortion and that I was not offended by the question. On the contrary, I thought it was very nice of him to express concern and thought he did so in a sensitive and non-judgmental manner.
The irony – I normally do stay off those sites during staff meetings. But it was my third such meeting of the day and I was completely burned out.
In other news...
James Cameron produced a documentary called the Lost Tomb of Christ, scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel on Sunday night. Naturally since it suggests that Jesus actually died, remained deceased and (oh the horror!) was married, it has ruffled more than a few feathers, including those of a letter writer to the Post Gazette.
I'm not sure what amused me most about the letter. It was short and to the point. It was strangely logical. It managed to get an insult in at the “Hollywood elite”. It made me wonder if the writer was using “elite” as a code word for “Jewish”.
Or maybe it was that the writer was giving any credibility to James Cameron. Since I am of the minority that believe that Titanic is a truly terrible movie*, I find it difficult to take the documentary seriously anyway.
*Right behind Gone With the Wind, a movie that sends me into hysterical laughter every time I watch it.
Titanic was four hours of movie about infatuation -- Rose's and Jack's with each other; Cameron's with special effects. Other than Kate Winslet's pose-on-the-couch scene and the indelible sense I got of the ship as a real artifact, the movie made little impression on me.
ReplyDeleteAs for Gone With The Wind, a movie-worshipping co-worker back home put that one beautifully in perspective with "It's a classic example of the MGM style." But some moments in it stick with me: As the gentlemen meet for cigars before the party at Twelve Oaks, with Rhett Butler consternates them with his jeremiad: "There isn't a single cannon factory in the entire South!" A brief bit of comedy when Mrs. Meade asks about Belle Watling's décor and Dr. Meade has to tell her, "Good heavens, Mrs. Meade! Remember yourself!" with a double-clutched glare. And finally, the scenes outside the telegraph office when the Gettysburg casualty lists start coming in, and later at the rail depot when camera pulls back to show the yard full of wounded men at the fall of Atlanta.
It's true that there are some moments in it that are campy, silly and gales-of-laughter-inducing to postmodern, hip-ironic sensibilities, but it's also worth noting that this movie was wildly popular especially in the South, where people were alive in 1939 whose childhood memories or parents' and grandparents' stories of Sherman's March to the Sea -- the first modern instance of warfare waged deliberately on a civilian population -- informed their viewing and turned the film into catharsis of a sort; and the movie came out in the Christmas of the same year von Rundstedt's Panzers rolled and Germany annexed western Poland, while my father apprenticed at Picatinny Arsenal as a tool-and-die maker manufacturing howitzers.
I don't think that by "elite" the person meant "Jew." I think they meant those in Hollywood whose success and fame has swelled in their own head to the point that they consider themselves above the masses who believe in a higher power - and especially above those would believe in the notion of a higher power taking on human form.
ReplyDeleteAnon (2)
ReplyDeleteFunny, I'm so used to reading in code, that the meaning of "elite" you suggest never occurred to me.
It is an interesting notion to assign the descriptor "elitest" to those who do not believe in a higher power and would place themselves above those who do.
I must ponder that. Thanks for giving me something to think about.