Over at Alicublog, Roy bemoans the listlessly whipped froth that’s lately been hissing from the Redi-Whip cans of Wingnuttia. The second-generation sinecurists and welfare queens of the conservo-commentariat seem to be on auto-pilot this week; not even the usually reliable Jonah Goldberg can be bothered to lift his leg and emit a respectably crepitant insight.
But in the comments to Roy’s piece, Chad points out that some of those little mom ‘n’ pop pundits continue to provide the same hand-crafted, high quality, neo-fascist spleen you can no longer find at the soulless Big Box emporia:
I still advocate that Orson Scott Card is a tragically untapped resource of grade-A wingnuttery. In his most recent screeds, he called believing in climate change a a puritan religion and compared Al Gore to Islamic fundamentalists in one swoop and used an “Indiana Jones” review to make an implied insult against Hinduism *and* root for the Red Scare blacklistings.To be fair, though, it could be argued that Orson just makes it far too easy…
The kid may be onto something! Let’s check it out…
Oops. Wrong Orson. Here we go…
I was prepared to be disappointed, going into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I’d been hearing from people that it just wasn’t as good as the other films. Oh well, thought I. I’ve already seen Prince Caspian and there’snothing else remotely interesting in the theaters.
Only one movie this year depicting Jesus as an extra-dimensional carnivorous quadruped? This explains why Hollywood is going down the crapper: their fealty to the homo-liberal agenda prevents them from catering to a potentially huge market for huggable plush crucifixes.
The two best movies, Raiders and Last Crusade, both deal with Judeo-Christian elements. Remember when Sean Connery slaps Harrison Ford’s face for taking the name of Christ in vain? There was an element of faith, an affirmation of the Western religious tradition
…of beating your children. Spare the slap, spoil the middle-aged child.
It resonates in the minds and hearts of a lot of the public. At the end of Raiders and again at the end of Last Crusade, the wrath of God is striking down the enemies of righteousness. Made-up idolatrous gods just didn’t do it for us westerners inTemple of Doom. And it was not satisfying to see the second movie show that the idol was just a powerful as the God of Moses and Christ.
Hindus were especially irked, because realistically speaking, their gods would win any rumble with the Trinity by sheer force of numbers.
Now we have something even more outrageous than idolatry — we have science fiction. On one level, it’s perfectly all right…
…keep those royalties a’comin’, Tor Books!
But on another level, I was offended when, just in passing, we see the Ark of the Covenant from the first movie turn up in this one. It isn’t even important; it seems to have lost all its power during its years in storage. It’s nothing.
Well don’t get all bent out of shape. Maybe on the other side of the crate was a huge pile of bones and moth-eaten uniforms left behind by all the military geniuses who’d said to themselves, “Hey! This thing melts the flesh off anybody who even looks at it. Let’s check it out!”
Belief in the God of Abraham is part of what made western society what it is — and it’s one of the best parts. It’s the moral brake and the source of meaning for our civilization.
“Moral Braking void in Islam. No purchase necessary. Believers in the God of Abraham who reside in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, U.A.E, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Indonesia are not eligible for Source of Meaning.”
It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t, we wish it had.
I feel the same way about condoms and aspirin.
It’s disturbing to believers in that God to have extravagant sci-fi coexist with — indeed, trump — that religion.
That reminds me…Which god’s son do you think would win in a fight? Jesus or the Mighty Thor?
Naturally, having Commies as bad guys was really disturbing to the politically correct liberals making the movie. So they made a really big point of showing how the anti-Communists got Indiana Jones fired from his university job.I’d like to know how many tenured professors were fired during that era? Remember that the blacklist of Communists in Hollywood targeted people who actually had been Communists; their defense was not that they hadn’t been Communists, but that the government had no right to question them about it.
“I’d like to know, but not enough to look it up or anything…”
The FBI helped out as well. In 1951, a group of governors, led by Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, asked J. Edgar Hoover to protect them against the threat of intervention from right-wing legislators by supplying them with the information they needed to purge their own payrolls. The FBI director agreed, inaugurating what the Bureau called its “Responsibilities Program.”…Though most of the program’s files are heavily blacked out, we can tell that…before Hoover discontinued it in 1955, the program had fingered about 800 people, many of them college teachers.…
And, just as the firings at the University of Washington had precipitated the earlier ban on Communists, so, too, the late 1952 dismissal of two teachers at another public institution, Rutgers University, prompted the academic establishment to devise a rationale for firing people who took the Fifth.
…The most common formulation involved the academic profession’s so-called “obligation of candor.” In an official statement at the end of March 1953, the presidents of the nation’s thirty-seven leading universities explained that because of the academic profession’s strong commitment to free speech, professors had a special duty to speak out. “Invocation of the Fifth Amendment” the presidents declared, “places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society.” Or, in other words, name names or get out.
That’s my favorite part. “You must demonstrate your devotion to our Constitutional values of free speech by freely squealing on your colleagues. Anything less is Communist-style censorship.” Anyway, back the Big O…
And this was an era when our own spy service was hopelessly incompetent because the Communists had deeply penetrated British and American spy operations everywhere. Treason and espionage really happened — the anti-Communists didn’t make it up.
That’s why the FBI spent so much time wiretapping Martin Luther King.
So for this movie to simultaneously exploit Russian Communists as villains and slander the anti-Communist efforts of the U.S. government – however inept they often were — is hypocritical in the extreme.
Do we even have extreme hypocrisy anymore in this country? I know Irony died after 9/11, but I thought Extreme Hypocrisy choked on its own vomit right around the time Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Robert Livingston impeached Clinton for lying about an extramarital affair.
The Communists were around longer than the Nazis, and so they killed, tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, and oppressed many millions more than Hitler was ever able to get to. They were a movement that promised equality and delivered unspeakable oppression by a hypocritical oligarchy. They are excellent villains for the Indiana Jones movies.But to paint the FBI as the moral equivalent of the Communists is a slander against the many law-abiding agents who devoted years of their lives to the service of our country, however corrupt their boss, J. Edgar Hoover, might have been.
Yeah. I’m sure Jean Seberg would be the first to agree.
Posted by scott on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 3:30 pm.
29 Responses to “Orson Scott Cardboard Reviews: Indiana Jones and The Commie Coddlers”
Well, that just goes to show that you just don’t understand – extremists can only ever exist on one side, and that’s the bad guys’side! The good guys can never be extremists, because the good guys can never, ever do anything bad. Ever!
That’s why people I kind of agree with are way awesomely super better than anyone I kind of disagree with. You see, you’re either with us or you eat babies and rape livestock and sell organic vegetables (though I may have the order confused, there…) and are therefore super-duper evil.
I hope this helps you understand Card’s world, even if you are a vegisexual.
That’s why people I kind of agree with are way awesomely super better than anyone I kind of disagree with. You see, you’re either with us or you eat babies and rape livestock and sell organic vegetables (though I may have the order confused, there…) and are therefore super-duper evil.
I hope this helps you understand Card’s world, even if you are a vegisexual.
It’s disturbing to believers in that God to have extravagant sci-fi coexist with — indeed, trump — that religion.
What a hypocritical turd. In his book Treason, the protagonist uses some quantum Gaian-Vulcan planetary soul-melding nonsense to gain super powers and triumph. Seems that most of his books have similar god-like powers that trump The Godster’s.
I swear this Orson Scott Card is an Evil Twin who killed the original one and buried him in the Utah desert.
What a hypocritical turd. In his book Treason, the protagonist uses some quantum Gaian-Vulcan planetary soul-melding nonsense to gain super powers and triumph. Seems that most of his books have similar god-like powers that trump The Godster’s.
I swear this Orson Scott Card is an Evil Twin who killed the original one and buried him in the Utah desert.
It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t, we wish it had.
Sorry, had to comment on this line, too.
I think this is one of the greatest wingnut apologist lines ever written. Really.
“Sorry about that genocide and all. We really wish it all had gone better.”
Sorry, had to comment on this line, too.
I think this is one of the greatest wingnut apologist lines ever written. Really.
“Sorry about that genocide and all. We really wish it all had gone better.”
greatest wingnut apologist lines
“Mistakes were made” is my favorite.
“Mistakes were made” is my favorite.
“When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
“It’s disturbing to believers in that God to have extravagant sci-fi coexist with — indeed, trump — that religion.”
Irony. In case Orson hadn’t noticed, that’s what all the other Abrahamic religionists say about his faith.
Irony. In case Orson hadn’t noticed, that’s what all the other Abrahamic religionists say about his faith.
I would pay to watch “Indiana Jones and the Golden Discs brought by the Angel Moroni”.
Made-up idolatrous gods just didn’t do it for us westerners in Temple of Doom. And it was not satisfying to see the second movie show that the idol was just a powerful as the God of Moses and Christ.
See, all this time I thought the second movie sucked because a) it wasn’t really a about Indiana Jones (you could replace Indy with any generic pulp hero without changing the script at all), b) there wasn’t any hint of archaeology in it anywhere, c) Indy was completely passive throughout (i.e., the whole plot “happened” to him, and all he did was react), d) it was series of disconnected adventures, not a story, and e) Kate Capshaw was in it.
Good thing Card came along to set me straight.
See, all this time I thought the second movie sucked because a) it wasn’t really a about Indiana Jones (you could replace Indy with any generic pulp hero without changing the script at all), b) there wasn’t any hint of archaeology in it anywhere, c) Indy was completely passive throughout (i.e., the whole plot “happened” to him, and all he did was react), d) it was series of disconnected adventures, not a story, and e) Kate Capshaw was in it.
Good thing Card came along to set me straight.
You know, I keep hearing this about how it’s just wrong for religion and science fiction to co-exist in that movie, and not just from the religious nutjobs. My partner the atheist came home from it going “ALIENS? Really?” I said, “The first movie had the living spirit of the Judeo-Christian God melting faces off of people. You were happier with that?” Apparently so. I fail to understand why people have such a freaky break between science fiction and what is, let’s face it, fantasy. It’s like expecting someone from the Middle Ages to *not* view a space shuttle as magic, it’s all about perspective. And, frankly, if you went to see a movie with the words “crystal skull” in the title and you did not expect aliens, the problem is with you, not the movie. It would be borderline cinematic malpractice to leave the aliens out, for pity’s sake.
Also: I am typing on a tiny pathetic laptop from a motel room in Atlanta, where we flew today so we can go see the Georgia Aquarium tomorrow. My partner got me a membership, even, so I can spend the best part of the next two days there and go on the behind-the-scenes tour and everything. I’m very excited, but I hate this computer and please forgive the typos. It looks like you need a mallet to actually make any of these keys work.
Also: I am typing on a tiny pathetic laptop from a motel room in Atlanta, where we flew today so we can go see the Georgia Aquarium tomorrow. My partner got me a membership, even, so I can spend the best part of the next two days there and go on the behind-the-scenes tour and everything. I’m very excited, but I hate this computer and please forgive the typos. It looks like you need a mallet to actually make any of these keys work.
And, frankly, if you went to see a movie with the words “crystal skull” in the title and you did not expect aliens, the problem is with you, not the movie.
damn, and here i thought it was the ‘oughts update of “Reefer Madness” with meth as the drug of choice
damn, and here i thought it was the ‘oughts update of “Reefer Madness” with meth as the drug of choice
Which god’s son do you think would win in a fight? Jesus or the Mighty Thor?
well, they both had hammers, but i think Thor’s was more powerful
well, they both had hammers, but i think Thor’s was more powerful
well, they both had hammers
It was OK for Joshua ibn Yehovah to moonlight as a carpenter, but somehow I can’t see Thor Odinsson in the same role. The demolition trade might have a suitable vocational niche for him.
It was OK for Joshua ibn Yehovah to moonlight as a carpenter, but somehow I can’t see Thor Odinsson in the same role. The demolition trade might have a suitable vocational niche for him.
I didn’t spot any typos, D. Sidhe.
When I hear “Orson Scott Card”, it doesn’t remind me of Orson Welles, it reminds me of “Mork calling Orson. Come in, Orson!”
Not sure what that says about me.
When I hear “Orson Scott Card”, it doesn’t remind me of Orson Welles, it reminds me of “Mork calling Orson. Come in, Orson!”
Not sure what that says about me.
I guess he missed the part in The Last Crusade where the millionaire capitalist joins forces with the Nazis to steal the Holy Grail and attain eternal life. Doesn’t he think Spielberg was unfair to millionaire Nazi-collaborating capitalists who, after all, gave us Bush I and Bush II?
[...] Orson Welles seems not to be at his best here Found this on World o crap: [...]
Oh well, thought I. I’ve already seen Prince Caspian and there’s nothing else remotely interesting in the theaters.
Th’ fuck? The man’s sixty years old. Does he not have air conditioning or something?
I mean, I can’t remember saying that any time after my 21st birthday, and that was before videocassettes and cable television.
Th’ fuck? The man’s sixty years old. Does he not have air conditioning or something?
I mean, I can’t remember saying that any time after my 21st birthday, and that was before videocassettes and cable television.
It must be tiring to see all cultural products in this way, judging whether they make the chip on your shoulder wobble or not. I just saw that dumb Indiana Jones movie last weekend; IMO, it was very expensive and somewhat entertaining crap—I liked the first part, but then it turned into nothing but endless fights and chase scenes. The alien stuff didn’t make much sense, especially at the end.
But it didn’t even occur to me to register the movie’s POV regarding the question, “Commies: Good or Bad?” To me, they were just villains. Every Indiana Jones movie needs a bad guy, and historically the Russkies fit the bill. I wasn’t compelled by inner demons to read anything more than that into it. And the subject of the Lucas/Spielbergian attitude toward “religion” didn’t occur to me at all. What a chore it must be to be a paranoid wingnut and always be looking for more evidence that filmmakers either are with you or against you.
But it didn’t even occur to me to register the movie’s POV regarding the question, “Commies: Good or Bad?” To me, they were just villains. Every Indiana Jones movie needs a bad guy, and historically the Russkies fit the bill. I wasn’t compelled by inner demons to read anything more than that into it. And the subject of the Lucas/Spielbergian attitude toward “religion” didn’t occur to me at all. What a chore it must be to be a paranoid wingnut and always be looking for more evidence that filmmakers either are with you or against you.
Dorothy, I think you’re missing the main reason Temple of Doom sucked, which is that the whole thing is a crazed, Orientalist fever dream. All that other stuff is true but sort of beside the point when pitted against the elephant in the room.
(appalling as it was, however, I still liked it in an only semi-ironic way. Short Round rules.)
(appalling as it was, however, I still liked it in an only semi-ironic way. Short Round rules.)
What a fucking twat.
Sounds like the Indiana franchise is like the Star Trek movies- every other one stinks. The 2nd one gave me a massive headache. “Just dump the ninny in the lava so I can go home!” I said to myself. The coal-car train ride made me queasy, and 20 years later I’m still queasy.
which is that the whole thing is a crazed, Orientalist fever dream.
Geo, yes! That’s the perfect phrasing, which I wasn’t able to capture with that “disconnected adventures” bit.
But seriously, don’t underestimate the influence of Kate Capshaw as an Angel of Suckitude. Not even Short Round could withstand her power.
Geo, yes! That’s the perfect phrasing, which I wasn’t able to capture with that “disconnected adventures” bit.
But seriously, don’t underestimate the influence of Kate Capshaw as an Angel of Suckitude. Not even Short Round could withstand her power.
Down through the years, lots of people, even ones whose opinion I value, have told me I should read Ender’s Game, but when everything else I’ve ever read from or about Card is like this, I just can’t bring myself to do so.
This almost makes me want to go out and see Indiana Jones just to spite the fucker (I thought the first was okay, but the second two, particularly Temple of Doom, were about as much fun as spending two hours with a set of electrodes wired to my testicles).
This almost makes me want to go out and see Indiana Jones just to spite the fucker (I thought the first was okay, but the second two, particularly Temple of Doom, were about as much fun as spending two hours with a set of electrodes wired to my testicles).
“Ender’s Game” is one of those stories that if you hit it at the right time in your life (12-15), it has an Effect On You (see also: 50% of Heinlein, 90% of Spider Robinson) in that it exposes you to ideas that you may not have thought of yourself. Some people get past it, some have a hard time re-evaluating something that moved them at the time (see also: religion).
Otherwise, it’s *shrug* okay.
Otherwise, it’s *shrug* okay.
Ah. Sort of like Ayn Rand, then?
I know the politics are crazy, but I can’t pay attention to that with this staring me in the face:
It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t, we wish it had.
This isn’t so much a quality of Christianity as it is a quality of all things that exist everywhere.
Well, at least all things that can be said to work.
I mean, really now, this guy used to be a famous writer?
It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t, we wish it had.
This isn’t so much a quality of Christianity as it is a quality of all things that exist everywhere.
Well, at least all things that can be said to work.
I mean, really now, this guy used to be a famous writer?
In New Zealand courts at least, “wishing it had worked” is notaccepted as an adequate defense for acts that society considers objectionable.
See, all this time I thought the second movie sucked because a) it wasn’t really a about Indiana Jones (you could replace Indy with any generic pulp hero without changing the script at all), b) there wasn’t any hint of archaeology in it anywhere, c) Indy was completely passive throughout (i.e., the whole plot “happened” to him, and all he did was react), d) it was series of disconnected adventures, not a story, and e) Kate Capshaw was in it.
f) Chilled monkey brains in Aspic.
f) Chilled monkey brains in Aspic.
Effect On You (see also: 50% of Heinlein, 90% of Spider Robinson)
Thought that said 50% Heineken.
about as much fun as spending two hours with a set of electrodes wired to my testicles).
Dood, what movie theater do you go to?
Thought that said 50% Heineken.
about as much fun as spending two hours with a set of electrodes wired to my testicles).
Dood, what movie theater do you go to?
about as much fun as spending two hours with a set of electrodes wired to my testicles).
Dood, what movie theater do you go to?
Did you never hear of “Testaculo”, one of William Castle’s horror-movie gimmicks? It was the obvious next step from ‘Emergo’ and ‘Percepto’.
Dood, what movie theater do you go to?
Did you never hear of “Testaculo”, one of William Castle’s horror-movie gimmicks? It was the obvious next step from ‘Emergo’ and ‘Percepto’.
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