Saturday, December 22, 2012

Legend of the Wise (Poetry by Bob Racine)



Wise Men, reputed to be kings, what made you so? 
Were you astute in the ways of the world?  Hardly that, 
since you failed to see beneath Herod’s
artifice and disguise.

Soon enough you met him, ate flattery from his plate,
kissed his ring, watched him flash his puffy eyes
at mysteries beyond his ken, you all the while 
beguiled by his offer of safe passage.
Half-crazed you were, believing a tyrant would
accord the office of a king to a child not of his seed. 
Such “wisdom” does not become your legend.

Scholars perhaps,
nestled all snug in your parchments!
But why would scholars abandon their dusty scrolls
for the glossy stars?  Wise and foolish alike
marvel at the stately array of those heavens.

Better we deem you wise in matters of the spirit and soul,
devout in your posturing before symbol and rite,
craven in your quest of the sacred truth embedded in holy writ.
And yet, if the soul be your domain, why your costly gifts –
gold, frankincense and myrrh – to honor this babe?
Think you that this carpenter’s son cares for such things? 
It was he who was destined to offend the lust and greed
of the lofty.  Such glitter for him would be but a vain pretense,
your wealth perhaps nothing more than
a cracked lantern lost in the nimbus of its own smoke. 
Or did you cast these your pearls before him
to denounce their alleged worth, to disavow
the spoils of an old and moldering estate?

In time the belly of Herod would retch,
choking on the blood of infants.
And you left your wealth to the fate of
hovels to make your way back to
parchments and scrolls or omens and rites.
Time did not entreat you to witness the onslaught
of this child upon the rearguard of sage and princely men. 
You would not live to see the love of sacred truth
come of age by way of him.  You would sleep in the
anonymous silence of antiquity, unnamed vassals
of the spirit to this one whose infancy
your curious presence once inflamed.

Alas, old ancient wayfarers, it befits some of us
to place you among such wise as know the
insufficiency of your own minds before a glory
not of your making and the warm incubus of new life –
out of your hollow and void hounded,
in your eloquent but small knowing. . .                   
confounded.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net


Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Lawrence of Arabia (Movie Review)



                             3 hrs & 42 min, color, 1962

Many of you reading I am sure have already heard during recent weeks that 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of this colossally great motion picture.  You’ve possibly picked up on it from magazines, and the quiz show Jeopardy featured an entire category devoted to it not too many days ago.  It seems 1962 was a significant year.  It also saw the premiere of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which I featured in an earlier entry to this blog, as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis, about which I wrote all of two months ago. 

The brilliant architect of this screen epic is David Lean, one of Britain’s most distinguished and celebrated movie directors, who practiced his craft from the 1940s until the 1980s.  Others of his achievements are “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Brief Encounter,” “Great Expectations,” “Doctor Zhivago,” and “A Passage to India” (his last).  But it is almost universally agreed that “Lawrence of Arabia” is his finest. 

It concerns the British military officer T.E. Lawrence, who was largely responsible for the Arabs (allied with Britain) defeating the Turks during World War I.  Though the character on screen bears the same name as the real Lawrence, he is essentially a fictional creation, an amazing man of mystery whom Lean takes great pains to dissect over the fabulous space of almost four hours.  That he is so fictionalized is understandable, since the real Lawrence was and is a very elusive figure.  If he had been alive when the film was shot, it is doubtful that he would have cooperated in any way in mounting the production.  His own diary of events in which he participated and on which this screenplay is based does not disclose much about him as a person or about the things that were driving him.  He remains an obscure figure out of early twentieth century history and folklore.  Lean took great liberties, but he brought that period and that subtext of the Great War to fascinating light, whether or not the leading character bore any resemblance to the factual man. 

The odyssey of the Lawrence we see on the screen is so compelling and so complex and filled with so much paradox that I feel I could spend another four hours with him without being weary.  He embodies the struggle between passionate commitment to a vision (bringing all the Arab tribes together into one nation) and an obsessive megalomania.  The conflict sometimes reduces him to a near infancy of spirit, at other times to a dangerous exhibitionism, at others to prolonged despondencies, at still others to the frolics of a court jester.  But set over against all that is a shrewdness of mind that can arouse the warrior spirit in the most obscure of men.  Now what actor could heft such a characterization and not lose his balance – who but the incomparable Peter O’Toole!  This was the movie that made him an international star overnight, along with Omar Sharif as his Arab friend and confidant Ali. 

Aside from the paradoxes in the story, there is an off screen paradox that bears citing.  The very region in which Lawrence’s odyssey occurred is the one in which the United States is so horribly embroiled at present, and the Turks, who were the considered enemy in that earlier conflict, are today our allies against some of the very peoples whom Lawrence loved so dearly and went to such lengths to bring together in unity – Britain’s allies on the field of battle.  The tricks time can play on homo sapiens!     

O’Toole and Sharif are not the only figures who fascinate in this carefully and meticulously crafted blockbuster.  A huge cast of well-sculpted personages is at hand, representing almost every known human variable.  I could write pages about each one, played by such solid talents as Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness, Arthur Kennedy, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle and veteran Claude Rains.   No one we meet is a lily white hero.  In his films Lean never treated his fellow countrymen or anyone else for the matter with patronage.  Everyone, even with the best of intentions and avowed ideals, seems to be running some kind of racket or driven by some opportunistic agenda.  There are a few combat sequences in “Lawrence of Arabia,” but characterization and substance prevail over the action at every turn.  The scenery is never splashy  

The story is spiritually infectious, even if the time and circumstance are remote, the kind that leaves you feeling as if your own heart and soul have been explored.   Despite Lawrence’s indiscretions and lapses of sanity, I always experience, as I watch the film (and I have numerous times) some identification with him when the wheeling and dealing of those in power manage to thwart his idealistic intentions.  I sense that his labor has not been a complete waste, that something of value has been lost. 

There are times, when it seems that the real star of the show is the desert.  Never on screen has the desert’s mystery and mystique been so wonderfully captured  – its beauties, its glories, its breadth, its pitfalls, the anvil pound of its sun, its awesome power over the human mind.  And the camera does full justice to it all and then some; the cinematography is staggering.  I had heard the word “wilderness” all my life and read of it in the Bible, but after “Lawrence of Arabia” came into my consciousness, the word ceased to be an abstraction.  And let us bear in mind that computer generation did not exist those five decades ago.  That means that every rock, sand dune, mountain slope, crevice and canyon you see is for real; all the outdoor scenes were shot on location.  The picture required two solid years for its completion.

A monumental motion picture that has appeared close to the top of every 100 best list!  It won seven Academy Awards including Picture and Director, and numerous others.  There is something in it, I believe, for just about everybody, all of it unforgettable.  They just do not make them any better. Be sure to see the restored version.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Ayn Rand: An Intellect, But What Else (Essay)



Paul Ryan seems to have started something with a comment he made early in his recent campaign for Vice President.  He indicated that Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” had meant a lot to him when once he was formulating his personal politics and core values.  Some of my church friends have shown an interest in reading it through and have invited others to read with them.  I encountered the book early in my life – about fifty-two years ago, to be exact.  I had what you might call a love affair with it and with her ultra conservative ideas about humanity’s place in the universe and the values of self-hood and independence. 

Published in 1957, it is a futuristic epic about America and the plight Rand perceived the country was undergoing.  It portrays a not too far off time when just about everything pertaining to the nation’s institutions and structures is in decay and heading furiously toward collapse.  Only a handful of industrialists and a brave woman manager of a transcontinental railroad are able to save it from itself.  Rand poses an imaginary situation in which a nationwide strike takes place, only the people going on strike are not unionized laborers but “the men of the mind,” the prime movers, those impelled by “rational” as opposed to “altruistic” or “mystical” imperatives.  Their withdrawal from society catalyzes the nation into change.

The book is gargantuan in length.  The paperback I once read (twice through, as a matter of fact) was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 pages.  After a half century, a three-part movie treatment is finally in the process of coming forth.  I have seen Part I, which follows the novel rather well and for pure curiosity’s sake I will most likely view Parts II and III, when they arrive in DVD.  But I can wait!

I discovered the book at a time in my life, in my mid-twenties, when because of various disillusionments and because of a thirst for ultimate meaning that my theological education had not fully satisfied up to that point in time and because of a new streak of maverick independence and, yes, self-importance, I latched onto the book.  It sounded alluring, tasted good and it was the kind of challenge that I believed my searching mind was craving.   

What I am writing here is not a review of the book per se, except to point out that I long ago got off her bandwagon, as I gradually came to understand that the story is extremely far-fetched and weighted down by too many speeches at implausible points in the action, and further examination of her world view and further maturity on my part laid bare for me the fallacies in her philosophy.  It is this world view that I now want to look at.  If the comments I make whet anyone’s appetite, I recommend reading two of her non-fiction works, “The Virtue of Selfishness” and “Capitalism: The Hidden Ideal.”

Her basic tenet of belief is that a human’s consciousness is, unlike that of all other species of animal, volitional.  We have to discover how to survive and what the values for survival are.  Unlike the animals, we cannot rely on instinct.  And reason is the “faculty that integrates the material all about” us.  This capacity for reason must be exercised by choice, through focused consciousness.  Otherwise one “drifts in a self-conscious daze. . .Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival – not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”  The three values that are the means of reaching the ultimate are Reason, Purpose, and Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues, Rationality, Productiveness, and Pride.  The capital letters are hers. 

Of course, it seems that in her vocabulary Self-Esteem and Selfishness are the same thing.  No one exists to serve anyone else.  In her ideal world people would just make contracts.  They would trade, nothing more!  “The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material.  It is the principle of justice.”   As a staunch atheist she believed that humanity is the measure of all things.  And a human’s very existence requires the pursuit of these values.  

As a corollary to that prescription, she says that the only purpose of a government is to protect the individual’s rights, protect us from physical violence, and safeguard one’s right to one’s own life and property.  “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”  The welfare state and government programs related to economics are anathema to her.  “Only [the individual has]the right to decide when or whether [that individual wishes] to help others; society—as an organized political system—has no rights in the matter at all.”  Taxation is legalized looting. 

I must admit that Rand was a shrewd intellect.  Her abstract thinking is about as systematic as anything theological or philosophical ever gets.  She is not easy to read; her concepts and her terminologies are quite intricate, and she really covers a lot of human territory.  And she has a very special gift for a turn of phrase.  But for all her verbiage she has not really covered the waterfront as thoroughly as it at first appears.  Just for starters, she says that the sole purpose of government is to protect the individual.  But how can a government do this without revenue?  Who is going to pay the salaries of those police and firefighters and other protectors?  We would still need judges and trial lawyers as well – the justice system.

Her most outrageous claim is that a conspiracy exists, dating way back to the beginning of recorded history, between what she calls the “mystics,” the “altruists,” the “hedonists” and political “thugs” and that this conspiracy has dragged western civilization down to the mud pits.  Under “mystics” would fall all religious observers, of any faith, anyone who believes in any sense in a higher power and, by implication for her, in a pie-in-the-sky recompense for human suffering and poverty.  Under “altruists” would be the welfare state and all who proclaim the doctrine of the brotherhood of man.  We are not our brother’s or sister’s keepers.  No individual exists to serve another.  To put others first is a form of living death.  Self-denial, as she understood it, is self-immolation.  The self, above all else, must not be denied or sacrificed.  The Sermon on the Mount is poison. 

Actually her definition of “altruism” is to a great extent accurate.  It does have to do with caring for others, at least as much if not more than the feathering of your own nest.  But for her it also includes the notion that “the happiness of one [person] necessitates the injury of another.  Today, most people hold this premise as an absolute not to be questioned.”  Most people!  How many of us consider ourselves one of the most?

Of course under ”thugs” would be any totalitarian power, most notably Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  And hedonists – well, we know who they are.   

A kind of “moral cannibalism” is at work in the world order, and as a result of all these evils (and this is an exact quote) “most people today [there’s that most again] are engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts.”  She said this in 1964.  I have no reason to think she would not say the same thing in 2012.  (She died in1983.)  There are very few “men of the mind.”  In fact, she thought that the most persecuted minority in the world are (get this!) the capitalists.  If the capitalists were only left free to pursue their business without regulation or taxation or restriction, all would work for the betterment of all.   The notion of checks and balances she shuns.  What would she say about the recent failure of the banks and the business segment of our society that brought on this current recession due to deregulation and too little transparency?  Capitalists left alone and unregulated can be a menace.  They are not saints.  They have led us down the garden path many a time. 

She ascribes evil strictly to the absence of rationality, and here is where I believe the basic fallacy in her philosophy lies.  She talks as if reason were a switch one can either flip on or turn off.  But evil is more than wrongheadedness; evil is a creeping cancer that we have barely begun to understand, let alone cure.  She seems to have no grasp of psychosomatic phenomena, of flesh and spirit struggling with each other.  I daresay she would reject the science of genetics.  She speaks as if everyone is born into the world with equal attributes and equal capacities.  Someone has called attention to the fact that no one ever gets sick in her novels.  Nobody wrestles with a chronic, life threatening illness.  No one ever endures anything more than a gunshot wound or a torture rack administered by the irrational bad guys.  In her fictional world there are no birth defects, no prenatal accidents, no retarded children, no cripples.  

Yes, Rand is a powerful, even formidable intellect.  But as far as I am concerned, that is all she is – an intellect.  Her novels ( I’ve read three others besides “Atlas Shrugged”), though intricate in construction and coherent in narrative, are devoid of humor or bona fide expressions of warmth or tenderness or grace or mystery or a sense of wonder.  They are cold as icebergs.  Nothing and no one in them are in the least complex.  Black is black and white is white.  Her so-called characters are not really characters; they are talking heads, mouthing her ideas or the exact opposite of her ideas.  But the last time I looked at the human scene, there was a lot more than talking heads out there.     

Altruistic people are not enemies to reason and equality and productivity.  They are motivated by the fact that in other people they see themselves.  We exist in the same bundle of life.  But that aside, speaking purely in economic and survival terms, humanity cannot survive if the poor and the diseased (through no fault of their own) are ignored.  They become a burden and a drain on us.  Altruism at the very least is self-interest at work.  It is not a school of abstract or conspiratorial thought; it is a practical, sensible form of investment. 

The big paradox lies in the contrast between Rand’s form and her substance.  As I have already pointed out, she has constructed a vast and intricate belief system, backed up by endless floodtides of rhetorical dissertation.  Quantum physics could not be more elaborate or dense.  She appears at first glance to be unfathomable.  But sift it all down and what she offers is really quite simplistic and even sophomoric.   She had a messianic complex.  Never until the coming of Ayn Rand did anyone know what morality was.  “The world is collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell,” and she has The Answer.  You look in vain for even a hint of the dialectical in her writings.  All the world has to do is follow her formula, throw out the Bible and adopt “Atlas Shrugged” as our new sacred writ. 

So read the book if you must.  It is very crisp, suspenseful and exciting for the most part, but do so keeping in mind her philosophical premises upon which the story is predicated, much of them made explicit in the articulations of her so-called characters.  As far as I can tell, her few followers today are themselves largely intellectual.  I do not believe that even today’s conservative politicians would pay her all that much heed, whatever to the contrary Ryan’s remark may have suggested.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

A Separation (Foreign Movie Review)



                              (Iranian, 2 hrs & 3 min, color, 2011)

There are many who maintain, and I am one of them, that the best way for most people to learn about history is through stories – stories that have authentic historical settings, with either fictional characters or factual ones who have been fictionalized.  They will retain much more about a place and time that way than from reading history books and commentaries about the period under consideration.  A good story teller is worth more to the average person than a scholar.  That is also true, I believe, of current conditions that are making history.  And that is especially true of stories dramatized on the screen.  A motion picture can put us under the skin of people subject to a society or an element of a society – more so than a dozen or more documentaries.    

In that regard, I highly recommend “A Separation,” an Iranian production released in 2011, to anyone who wishes to get some insight into that nation’s current culture and mores.  When we think of that part of the globe, our western minds envision suicide bombers, civil wars, oppressive dictatorships, war lords, militias, tribal tensions and violent revolutions.  More specifically, mention of Iran triggers thoughts and concerns about nuclear development and that government’s adamant determination to keep on defying world opinion in the further enrichment of uranium. Well, none of these kinds of things are portrayed or even referred to in the film.  There is not even a reference to government or figures of state.  No military or political activity is portrayed anywhere in the footage.  We simply visit with two families in Tehran who become interlocked in a very complicated and fractious dilemma.  But the current state of affairs in that nation is made quite palpable during those gripping two hours.  These peoples’ struggle speaks volumes about the soul and mindset of its citizens, the fabric of life as they live it, and the values that are inculcated into the mainstream of thought and behavior. 

The movie opens with a husband and wife seated side by side and facing the camera.  They are contesting in front of an unseen magistrate.  She wants a divorce.  Why?  Because of his cruelty?  No, she claims he is a very decent and loving man.  Because he has failed to provide for her?  No, nothing like that!  He is gainfully employed in a bank.  Because of drug addiction or the like?  No!  She is protesting because he refuses to leave the country with her, after they have allegedly been planning the move for a long time and have already secured a visa that is due to expire in forty days.  Why does he refuse to leave?  Because he has a father with Alzheimer’s and he thinks he has to take care of the old man!  She accuses him of indifference to the welfare of their eleven-year-old girl, preferring the welfare of his father to the care of his wife and child.  What the wife finally has to accept is that no Iranian divorce or separation can be sanctioned by the court without the husband’s approval, nor can the child be taken from the country without it.  The unseen judge finally declares that theirs is a small problem, not one justifying divorce action or the court’s further time.

That on the surface sounds clear enough, and maybe fair enough.  But in the hailstorm of words that are exchanged between the couple, overlapping each other at many points, she blurts out that she cannot leave her daughter “in these circumstances.”  When the judge asks her “what circumstances,” she does not reply.  She appears embarrassed by having said it.  But her evasion of the probing question is understandable enough to any audience in any society in the global village.  She wants to escape the tyranny of the Islamic state in which she feels trapped.  That unspoken, implied longing remains unspoken throughout the movie, but that is what drives everything that transpires in the following two hours.  

The girl elects for no apparent reason (at first) to stay with her father, and the mother, unwilling to emigrate without her daughter, remains in the city  but moves out of the home and in with her parents.  This necessitates the husband hiring a caregiver for his helpless father while he is at work, a function the wife has previously served.  The lower class woman he hires (he an upper middle class citizen) turns out to be immense trouble from day one, and it is she, a devout and well-meaning Muslim, around whom the plight of Middle East women is most vividly demonstrated in the scenario.  I will not relate any more of the plot, except to say that a circuitous chain of cause and effect is set in motion that sweeps two families up into a firestorm of accusation, intimidation, litigation, lies, half-truths, dishonor, and personal injury, both to body and individual dignity. 

Before the drama plays out, we westerners get fresh insight into how religious stricture and the domination of male hubris in a society holds peoples’ consciences captive and pays out enormous forfeitures far beyond the bounds of compassion or even rationality.  What it finally comes down to is the impact of all this clamor and deadly dealing upon the children involved.   

This is the sort of movie in which we are inundated with mixed feelings about the many characters.  All the adults are shifty and irrational one moment, and the next moment they evidence humanity and affection for each other.  There is a virtuous strain in each and every one striving to be seen and heard but doing battle with fear, pride, anger and intimidation.   And yet we identify with them to whatever extent our living conditions bear any likeness at all to theirs. At least one out of four Americans has encountered the crisis of separation and divorce in some manner, and we have all been affected by somebody’s injustice, if not our own, as well as the sometimes blurry line between truth and falsehood.

The film has won wide acclaim, including this past spring an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, in addition to a slew of international awards at film festivals and inclusions on a sizeable number of ten-best lists.  Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi, who play the contending parents, won the lead acting awards at the Berlin Film Festival, and Writer/Director Asghar Farhadi received the Directing award, along with other recognitions by various critics’ societies here and abroad.  Whatever impression any of us may have of the nation of Iran, the presence of top grade cinematic artistry inside those borders is now beyond dispute.  It should not be surprising that Farhadi got no government support in the production of the film.  He had to call on private sources for financing.   
The language spoken is Farsi.  But the subtitling, like the production overall, is top grade. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net