Mourning and learning, Bernie memes, Bartleby and more - Beer Christianity Newsletter 5
Seven points to remember on Holocaust Memorial Day, plus news, reviews and amuse.
Hi there!
Thanks for checking out Beer Christianity issue 5 – I think you’re going to like it! There’s a movie review (I keep getting the urge to write them), praise for the Democratic Party (WUT?! I know, right?!) and my fave Bernie meme. Plus a link to another podcast you might dig.
First, though, there is a piece about Holocaust Memorial Day, which was yesterday.
I hope you are staying safe and that you find something to enjoy or relate to in this newsletter.
Jonty
How to remember the Holocaust
Yesterday we remembered and mourned the six million people, mostly Jewish people, murdered by a government that enjoyed popular support in Germany. Holocaust Memorial Day is not a day for equivocation and scoring petty political points (no day is, when it comes to genocide). But neither is it a time to miss the lessons of history.
So, today we must remember:
· The millions of Jewish people who were killed because of their race and religion, each one made in the image of the living God, each one precious in His sight. We must remember and not allow denial or diminishing of what happened to gain a foothold.
· That the cancer of anti-Semitism was allowed to metastasize and grow in Germany after the First World War, but that Germany was not alone in tolerating this particular breed of racism. That all over the world, anti-Semitism was accepted, tolerated and propagated, in the form of conspiracy-theories, racist stereotypes, fearmongering over unassimilated communities and supposedly ‘harmless’ prejudices. We must remember that anti-Semitism still exists and is growing in some places. And we must not tolerate it.
· The people with disabilities who were murdered because they were deemed ‘imperfect’ and less useful than those not made in the same way as them. We must remember that the disdain for perceived ‘weakness’ has no place among followers of Christ, and that there are many ways to be fully and beautifully human.
· The LGBTQ people who were also persecuted, humiliated and murdered by the Nazis. We must remember that God loves every gay and trans person, and that we who have not faced the prejudice they face cannot imagine what their journey must have been like. We must remember that Jesus stands in opposition, always, to the mob picking up stones.
· The Black, Roma and other people murdered because their ethnicity or national origin. We must remember that this prejudice persists and so the struggle for justice and equality must also persist. We must remember that the temptation to see those not like ourselves as less deserving of safety, prosperity and dignity is endemic in humanity – and that it is a sin.
· The communists, socialists, left-wing organisers and intellectuals who were murdered for believing that the poor should not be subservient to the rich, that workers should reap the benefit of their labour and that an economic system that resists equality needs to be resisted itself. We must remember that it is necessary to take a side in issues of injustice, even when that injustice seems inescapable.
· The Jehovah’s Witnesses and ‘asocials’, who were also murdered and are often forgotten: repeat offenders, alcoholics, beggars, sex-workers and pacifists. To these, add a huge number of people from nations deemed inconvenient to the national strategic ambition. We must remember that those who scapegoat these people today bear an uncanny resemblance in spirit to those who supported Hitler on his road to power. We must never allow them to dignify their disdain for human beings who choose to live differently (or have no choice but to), with a shiny glaze of Christianity. We must remember that we are not the measure of human worth.
In this time, we must remember that ideology and belief matter. That ideas, particularly ideas that deny the humanity of others, are powerful. That it is possible for a sophisticated and diverse nation to be seduced almost entirely by an ideology of hate – unless that ideology is opposed.
There is no innocent racism. There is no benign form of a prejudice that denies the full and equal humanity of another human being. And the ideologies and politics of those who, however subtly, believe and preach these things, do not deserve our respect.
Now, as before, violent homophobia, anti-Semitism and racism still exist. And new forms of prejudice against those who do not or cannot conform, assimilate or ‘fit in’ are continually justified by Islamophobic politicians, press who denounce ‘shirkers’ and ‘swarms of migrants’ and our friends and family who ‘just don’t trust them’. This kind of hatred is easy to stoke because it is the laziest and most selfish fallback of the angry, the desperate and the duped.
Because of this, we must reckon with the fact that we are always just a few short steps from genocide – and that, often, the only thing preventing it is people of good will who recognise the evil before it builds the ovens and starts packing people onto death trains.
Too often right now, Christianity is being invoked by those with more than a little sympathy for the ideology of the Nazis. We must rebuke these people in the name of Jesus Christ the Jew, the ‘asocial’, the religious subversive and the proclaimer of justice for the poor. That is how we should remember.
News
Sips and pieces of interest from the last week
Private prisons: perhaps I underestimated the Democrats
It pains me when I’m wrong, and even more so when I’m publicly wrong. But I feel like my suggestion that Joe Biden and his administration would enact no significant change was shown up this week. Biden and (surprisingly considering her awful record on crime and punishment) Harris this week announced that their administration would discontinue Department of Justice contracts with private prisons.
The concept of for-profit prisons is so horrifyingly problematic I can’t get into the detail of it here, but this is good news and impressive from an administration I have low hopes for. It’s worth noting, however, that this does not apply to the ICE prisons (you know, the ones housing undocumented immigrants and caging children). Those can stay.
So let’s say I wasn’t totally wrong.
Do actually check out the links. They are informative, not to mention horrifying.
Britain reaches 100,000 Covid-19 deaths
I hear South Africans occasionally decry their Government’s Covid response. All I can say to them is that here, in one of the wealthiest (and far from biggest) countries in the world, our Government has mismanaged its response so badly that 100,000 people have now died. A mixture of incompetence, political gamesmanship, arrogant refusal to listen to experts and a worship of GDP over human life brought us here. And deaths are deaths regardless of the reasons. But don’t think this is an ANC problem.
Here’s a sobering updating map of UK Covid stats.
Yet another reason to love Bernie
Bernie Sanders is like an American Jeremy Corbyn – except he’s never had the opportunities Corbyn had to be as thoroughly stabbed in the back by centrists in his own party that Corbyn enjoyed. Like Corbyn, he is loved and supported because his ideology and policy platform (not to mention personal lifelong commitment to justice and being on the right side of history). Unlike Corbyn, his personality plays a part too. Corbyn is quiet and mild-mannered. Bernie is gruff, grumpy and gritty.
This came out in the photos of him at the Inauguration: sat alone, arms folded, inexpensive mittens seeming to express a grudging acceptance of the pageantry, rather than excitement at it. He barely looked like he dressed up at all. I love that man. And so does the internet. The memes that were created from that image were inescapably wonderful. They are still being made. Here are some of the best (click this link to take a look).
This, however, is my favourite, from when the memes became ubiquitous:
Amuse
Beer Christianity recommends...
No sex and the single girl
You’d be forgiven for thinking I’d probably not enjoy a podcast about being a 20-30-something single woman – particularly one that comes from a chaste and solidly evangelical perspective. But you’d be wrong. I love A Tale of Two Singles SO MUCH. It’s hilarious and smart without sacrificing the chumminess. A friend of mine puts it together (and I had the privilege of helping them come up with the name of one of their segments – can you guess which one?) and it is utterly charming. I find the discussion about being single and female in the Church fascinating, I love the interviews with single guys, dating app founders and academics, and I laugh out loud at their stories of dating disasters. The vibe is fun and the thinking reasonable and completely non-judgemental, regardless of your approach. Humble, funny and well worth a listen — and their social game is strong!
Here’s episode 18 to whet your appetite:
You can find A Tale of Two Singles on Soundcloud, Spotify and Apple podcasts.
Follow A Tale of Two Singles on Instagram and Facebook.
Reviews
New Old Movies: old films that may be new to you – from the ‘30s to the ‘00s
Bartleby (2001)
Directed by Jonathan Parker
What if you just stopped working?
Or rather: what if you just started saying that you would prefer not to? That’s the premise of this uncomfortable comedy-drama starring the intensely creepy Crispin Glover. Bartleby is based on a Herman Melville short story you may have covered in school, Bartleby the Scrivener. It covers the same themes as that story: the tension between compassion and duty to an employer, the terrifying nature of free will at its most basic level, the power of polite refusal. But to them, Parker’s film adds a Kafkaesque vision of capitalism through a 1950s Technicolour lens, neurodivergent experiences of office life on a 1970s set.
The individual performances are masterful from Glover and his boss (played by David Paymer) as well as his uncomfortably funny and almost likeable colleague Vivian (played by Glenne Headly) though they lean towards theatrical farce where the short story was less broad. This is where the discomfort sets in. You want to feel the emotions of screwball comedy or campy satire, because those are the visual cues you’re being fed, even by the acting style. But moments of intensity (Glover and boss stopping in existential agony on a crosswalk over a 50s futurist motorway, a close-up of Glover’s face in a rare moment of non-passive internal violence) make it impossible.
Bartleby isn’t fun to watch, and yet it’s goofy AF. As with most Crispin Glover vehicles, it is disconcerting in a way that is hard to put your finger on. But it is funny in places, claustrophobic in others, both sensations eventually giving way to a feeling that something profound and beyond one’s usual frameworks of analysis is being said.
Is Bartleby exposing a system where work is meaningless and alienating (for in the film, as for many employed in repetitive or bureaucratic tasks, it is) and pretends not to be coercive?
Is it demonstrating the power of passive resistance (Bartleby never refuses, he merely expresses his preference not to) to expose the inconsistency between the velvet glove of formal politeness and the iron fist of homogenising work culture?
Is the film a kind of management textbook, highlighting the problem most managers of good will have encountered: how far can your grace and compassion towards your reports go when they are at odds with company interests?
Is Bartleby about depression and our refusal to see it as serious, real and legitimate — and how even today the ‘asocials’ among us are tortured into submission or death?
Is it asking the philosophical-political-economic question whether a good society, in contrast to the Protestant, Socialist and Capitalist ethics, should expect people to work if they don’t want to?
Is it about the dark side of communalism that cannot help but punish those who will not define themselves by what they do and can add through activity?
Or, is Bartleby about something more profound: the question of whether human freedom can be expressed and experienced without conflict, separation and profound loneliness?
Yes. Yes, I think it is. But you could just enjoy it for the weirdness.
Bartleby is available on Prime Video. (Yeah, yeah, I know, but until the Revolution we may need to use their products. Last capitalists, the rope they sold us and all that.)
On the podcast
This is a good week to think about nationalism in all its forms, as Christians. So here’s an episode from the Beer Christianity back catalogue that asks whether patriotism is that different from nationalism for the Christian. Episode 36 of Beer Christianity, with Stephen Backhouse (aka Eleanor Roosevelt).
Find more from Stephen Backhouse at Tent Theology.
Follow, engage with and support Beer Christianity
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Anyway
Thanks for reading, for listening and for being interested!
Jonty