Author: VD

I’ve been working on improving my Italian, so I decided to tackle translating some the columns that Umberto Eco, one of my favorite writers, writes regularly for L’Espresso. Please note that this translation is without doubt riddled with errors and that the views expressed do not reflect my own. I’m not finished with this one yet, as there’s a few references that are presently beyond me, but as the subject seems timely, I thought I’d post part of it now:

The Passion is a film that wants to rake in lots of money by offering lots of blood and enough violence to make Pulp Fiction look like an animated cartoon. Well, yes, since I was fearing a series of questions, I decided to resolve the affair once and for all and went to see Mel Gibson’s Passion….I must quickly say that this film, which was done very well in technical terms, is not an expression of antisemitism or of Christian fundamentalism, but instead of an obsession with the mysticism of a gory sacrifice. It is splatterpunk, a film intended to rake in lots of money by offering oceans of blood and enough violence to make Pulp Fiction look like an animated cartoon for a children’s school. Except a cartoon like Tom and Jerry never places the whole object of the lesson in the incidents where the characters are flattened like CDs being crushed by a steamroller, where they are falling from skyscrapers and broken into a million pieces or crushed behind a door. There is so much blood, gallons of it, that it appears to have been harvested by the work of every vampire in Transylvania, and brought to the set by ten tanker-trucks….

Gibson’s hatred for the Nazarene must be inexpressable, who can say what ancient repressions he harbors as he pours more and more torture onto the Nazarene’s body, and thank God the story does not permit him, otherwise he would have applied electrodes to Christ’s testicles and poured gasoline into his wounds. This would give a healthy jolt to the mystery of Salvation…. Gibson leaps at the idea that Jesus had to suffer; like Poe, he thinks that the most moving and romantic thing is the death of a beautiful girl, and he senses that the more profitable ‘splatter’ will be that in which he puts the Son of God in a meatgrinder. There, he succeeds extremely well and I must say that, when Jesus is finally dead and has finished his suffering, (or enjoyment), when the hurricane is unleashed, the earth shakes and the Temple veil is torn, we find a certain emotion in that moment, we discern a hint of that transcendence that the film does such a disastrous disservice.

Yes, at that point the Father makes his voice heard. But the enlightened viewer, (and, I hope, the believer), perceives that at that point, it is with him and Mel Gibson that the Father is pissed off.

Dread Pirate writes of a friend: …he basically told me that he could not believe in anything that he himself could not understand. He does not believe that anyone should go to hell, or (for that matter) that hell even exist. However, he believes that everyone should go to heaven. It simply not fair that some should go to hell, especially if one is really seeking truth, but rejects God; or any other kind of diety.

That’s an interesting approach to life. Does he understand how x-rays work? Does he believe in them? Whatever the example, modern life is so complex that there is not a single person, however intelligent and educated, who understands everything. And yet, we have no problem believing whatever a sufficiently large number of people around us happen to believe.

If your friend doesn’t believe in Hell, why does he believe in Heaven? And what does fairness have to do with anything, much less reality? Attempting to ascertain reality through fairness is bizarre – had the situation not been so sad, I would have laughed out loud in the days after a schoolmate died in a car accident and everyone was lamenting the unfairness of it all and wondering why, oh why, did this happen? Well, the girl didn’t wear a seatbelt, drove like a maniac, took a corner too fast and rolled the car. Try it 100 times and you’ll get pretty much the same result almost every time, cause and effect. No great mystery there. Was it fair that she died? Yes, the laws of physics and biology demanded it.

Now, the Bible and the story of Christianity are either true or they are not. Your friend wants to hang onto the parts he likes, and ignore the parts he doesn’t. That’s absurd. If he wants to reject the whole thing, that’s fine, he should reject it all and indulge himself in wine, women and song for he only has a few short decades before his consciousness is obliterated into nothing. Encourage him to be honest with himself and follow his bliss, so to speak.

Not once does the Christian God claim to be fair. He claims to be just – everyone has sinned and is therefore damned. But He is also merciful – He offers a Way out to all. You don’t have to take it, but if you don’t, then be prepared to suffer the consequences. The unbeliever accepts this cheerfully because he rejects the totality. It is only the wishy-washy half-believer who suffers mental turmoil, because he cannot commit either way. But what he wants or what he thinks should be is as utterly irrelevant to the question of the existence of Hell as it is to the existence of Toledo.

It always amazes me that people don’t understand the parable of the wheat and the chaff. If you can’t believe or refuse to bow down before God’s Son, then you are essentially worthless in God’s eyes, you have failed in the purpose for which you were created and you will be tossed aside as useless trash. Don’t think that’s fair? So what. Fairness never entered into the equation.

That’s the headline – angry with the result from Oporto. And, here come the conspiracies. Never mind the fact that the Danes and the Swedes were the best two teams in the group and deserved to progress. Italy almost lost to Bulgaria – they would have if Bulgaria’s striker had been capable of putting away an excellent one-on-one chance with Buffon. But instead of accepting their own responsibility, they’d rather complain that the other teams were too clever, as the Corriere della Sera writes of the tomatoes they will throw at Denmark for allowing the late tying goal: Chissà come si dice «imbarazzati» in danese, e magari in svedese. “Who knows how you say embarrassed in Danish, and maybe in Swedish.”

What’s silly is that Italy was losing at the time the Swedes scored and the Azzurri have no one to blame but themselves for not putting away either Denmark or Sweden in the first two games. Italy was dominating Sweden in the first half, they went into their trademark defensive shell in the second and gave the two points away. The Italian press was screaming that Trappatoni was too conservative after the World Cup; it so happens that they were right and he should have been replaced. The Swedes destroyed Bulgaria, the Danes beat them soundly and Italy had to score in the 94th minute to steal the win.

Italy and Spain have conclusively proven that you can have all the talent in the world, but if your manager is going to saddle you with a defensive approach that simply hopes individual talent will create something out of nothing, you’re going to lose. I’d much rather see the wide-open styles of the Scandinavians going forward anyhow.

PS – the Pan-Gargler blogged that he’s getting tired of all the soccer and baseball blogging on the net. To him, I quote the greatest one-line put-down of all time. “You can’t spell Citrus without UT.”

I’m looking to make a list of ten or fifteen historical lies, things that conventional wisdom holds to be obviously true, but upon research and analysis can be conclusively shown to be false. Four obvious ones are:

1. The Spanish Inquisition was an evil institution comparable to the Final Solution or the Black Death.

2. Abraham Lincoln was dedicated to human liberty and fought the Civil War to free the slaves.

3. Religion is the primary cause of most of the wars in human history.

4. Islam is a religion of peace.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter. No cows are sacred; if there’s any examples beloved of the Left, I’d like to hear them too.

ENCOURAGING preliminary ratings for all-liberal Air America in New York have collapsed along with the fledgling radio network’s finances. An unofficial “extrapolation” of Arbitron data released last Friday — which Air America’s hosts crowed about last month but virtually ignored yesterday — showed WLIB’s ratings dropping back to their lowly levels before the net’s April launch.

Arbitron cautions stations and advertisers not to read too much into this interim monthly data — but that didn’t stop Air America star Al Franken from boasting last month that he’d beaten WABC’s Rush Limbaugh among the 25- to 54-year-old listeners chased by radio advertisers.

Being liberal means never remembering what you said yesterday.

Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York Times is more liberal than Tom Daschle or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an ADA score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News’ Special Report, and all three networks’ nightly news shows.

Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABC’s World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News’ Special Report is the most centrist. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample….

11.2 Republican average

26.4 Fox News’ Special Report

40.0 Senate average

44.1 Drudge Report

44.5 House average

54.8 ABC World News

58.4 LA Times

62.5 NBC Nightly News

62.6 USA Today

64.5 CBS Evening News

64.6 New York Times

74.1 Democratic average

Of course, the fact that these are all big corporations trumps everything they are reporting, printing and broadcasting. If you’re Eric Alterman, or dumb enough to be mistaken for him, that is.

From Slashdot: Today the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that anybody can be compelled at any time to identify themselves, if a police officer asks. People who refuse to identify themselves, even if they are not suspected of a crime, will be arrested. Sound Orwellian? The Supreme Court also said people who are suspected of another crime might not be subject to arrest for not revealing their name. On this latter point, someone will have to bring a separate case. And the SCOTUS is at liberty not to hear any case it doesn’t like. The case is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada.

What did Europe say after 9/11? We are all Americans? I think they had it backwards. Now, thanks to these black-robed defenders of our Constitutional rights, we are all to be good Chermans. It is now a crime to remain silent – so much for that right.

How long will it be before it becomes a crime to give a false name as well? Then, you will obviously be required to provide identification proving you are who you say you are. Thank goodness we can elect a Republican Congress and President to stop these egregious abuses of liberty! Wait a minute….

Jennifer Saba writes in Editor and Publisher: It’s been an embarrassing week for newspapers, especially for those in circulation departments at Newsday in Melville, N.Y. and at the Chicago Sun-Times. Both papers admitted, after markets closed for the day, to puffing circulation figures….

The ABC audit revealed the problems at Newsday and Hoy back in February, John Payne, senior vice president of communications for Audit Bureau of Circulations, told E&P. ABC plans to release its findings in July, though the Tribune Co., which owns Newsday and Hoy, essentially pre-empted ABC by announcing the overstated figures yesterday. “It’s very unusual to talk about an audit that has not been released,” Payne commented. Newsday had inflated its circulation figures for the period ending September 2003 by approximately 40,000 daily copies and 60,000 Sunday copies, while Hoy jacked up its numbers by 15,000 and 4,000 respectively….

Troubled by last week’s circulation scandals at Hollinger International’s Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune Co.’s Newsday and Hoy, Merrill Lynch’s Lauren Rich Fine released a report today calling into question the reliability of circulation figures for the entire industry. “Our biggest fear,” the report said, “is that these two announcements may not be isolated incidents.”

As ever, I fail to be surprised by the reality that you cannot believe in the accuracy of anything printed in a newspaper. I spoke to an executive in the gold producing business a few days ago; he lamented that every single time he speaks to a reporter, they get something wrong in the subsequent story. I reminded him that the same is no doubt true of every other story in the paper – whatever you’re reading almost surely contains something false, the challenge is to determine precisely which part.

SI’s Excuse of the Week: “I had blisters on my heels at the end of the game. The thread that these socks were made with is too rough.” –Christian Panucci, Italian National Soccer Team defender, explaining his poor performance in their Euro 2004 opening game tie against Denmark.

You have to love the Azzurri. What other team would dare to put gold lame numbers on their jerseys? If they win Euro 2004, I’m hoping they show up for the World Cup with Armani-designed gold uniforms.

Many of Air America’s investors and executives say they thought the network had raised more than $30 million, based on assurances from its owners, Guam-based entrepreneurs Evan M. Cohen and Rex Sorensen. In fact, Air America had raised only $6 million, Mr. Cohen concedes. Within six weeks of the launch, those funds had been spent and the company owed creditors more than $2 million.

When the problems came to light, “we realized that we had all been duped,” says David Goodfriend, the company’s acting chief operating officer. Messrs. Cohen and Sorensen say they didn’t mislead anyone about the company’s finances. They say they planned to invest more over time but didn’t because of cultural differences with other managers. Both resigned in early May.

Five months before a presidential election, Air America should be on a roll. Instead, it’s grappling with a financial crisis. Creditors are lined up at the door, and it is off the air in two big markets, Los Angeles and Chicago.

How unfortunate….