Musings on the White Evangelical Ubermensch and Making America Christian Again.

 

In cultural anthropology you are taught—and rightly so—that cultures vary across space. Contemporary cultural anthropology and history rightly teaches us that culture also varies across time. 

Despite the simple descriptive fact that culture varies across space and time there are many who have thought and who continue to think, despite the more than ample evidence to the contrary, that many people create their own “realities”, that a mixture of reality and rationality can cure anyone of this false reality syndrome and that, as a consequence, the human race can live happily ever after as they progress ever further toward paradise along the yellow brick road to utopia, a secular version of the Christian Eden.

The problem with this notion—that humans can progress thanks to science and rationality—is that it does not grasp the obvious fact that those who live in manufactured “realities” don’t simply go away or fade into the dark night of superstition anymore than does religion, ignorance, stupidity, or moronicity. There are, for example, many White Protestant Christian evangelicals, who believe that Donald Trump is god’s weak yet strong vessel who has been called by the White Protestant Christian evangelical god to make America great and godly again. As a consequence, they do not and cannot believe that Trump resoundingly lost the 2020 election, though he, of course, did, something that should be a red flag for those who believe that god makes the world go around for if he does and if she made Biden win in 2020, well you get the picture. God’s will, they believe, can only be subverted by devious and demonic subterfuge making the Trump lost the election of 2020 ideology akin to the idiotic and moronic claims that Jews were secretly poisoning wells and murdering Christian children in the Mediaeval era of European history and the various variations on this anti-Semitic theme in Europe and European settler societies seemingly ever after.

The fact that created “realities” and those who believe them and have faith in them don’t go away also explains why you cannot compromise with those who believe they have a monopoly on the truth and who, as a consequence, believe they are called by god to a holy crusade to make god’s will be done, the point at which Christianity paradoxically given Nietzche’s criticism of Christianity as the religion of the weak, meets up and merges with the will to power of the Christian Nietzschean macho superman on a crusade for Christ. These “Christian” ubermensch will take the inch of compromise, say a religious oriented charter school, but they want the mile, they want to make the charter school a house of intense socialisation, what some might call indoctrination or brainwashing. Even the mile, however, isn’t good enough for them. They want the proverbial whole nine yards. They want to make the United States into their own image, something that should not be surprising given that they are self-satisfied, holier than thou, we are always in the right because god is on our side saintly sinner theocrats. And they will not stop until they make America into their own image by “convincement” or coercion, the carrot or the stick. 

Welcome to TrumpWorld, a world that never goes away, and OrangeTrumpifornication. So, be afraid, be very afraid.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Prophets and Profits in the Mormon Social Media Universe

 

Social media sites like YouTube are, in a way, microcosmic examples of what theoretical quantum physics in general tells us what the universe we all live in is like. To wit, there are a host of parallel universes on YouTube and within these parallel universes one can find a number of parallel worlds.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, of these parallel universes or cultures with parallel worlds or countercultures and subcultures within them on YouTube is that related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism. But then I have been studying Mormonism for some thirty years now.

There are a number of parallel worlds within the parallel universe that is Mormonism on YouTube. There is the parallel world of Mormon news. There is the official LDS content world which includes an ask a missionary page and the Meet the Mormons film. There is the what Mormon polygamy was and is like world, a world that ranges from the polemical, the apologetic, and the academic. There is the why I am a Mormon world. There is the why I am no longer a Mormon world. There are insider explorations of Mormon doctrine. There are critical exposes of Mormon finances and the Church’s use of their monies. There is the what are Mormon temple rituals like world. And there is the intellectual polemical and apologetic worlds related to Mormonism in general, both of which have long histories in the history of religion, particularly monotheistic our way or the highway religions, and a long pedigree in the history of Christianity. 

The Mormon polemical and apologetic world is one of the largest LDS worlds on YouTube. One can, for instance, find worlds on YouTube where some categorise Mormonism as a “fake" religion and a “fake" brand of Christianity. The bases for such a claim is grounded in the poster's perception that Mormonism is different than the religion of the poster, which these posters regard, of course, as the one true religion (ethnocentric apologetics) despite the fact that all monotheistic religions are grounded in belief and not empirical fact. See, for instance, the self proclaimed I am not a “progressive" Bible Thinker Mike Winger who, following in a long tradition in Christian polemics, condemns not only Mormonism as a “fake” variety of Christianity but also condemns Roman Catholicism as “fake” brand of Christianity, a theme that has a long history in Protestant and particularly evangelical polemics. See Capturing Christianity’s Cameron Bertuzzi, a photographer and self proclaimed Christian apologist, who, following again in a long line of Christian insider or emic polemics, condemns Mormonism and Islam as “false” religions created by “false” prophets.

Another of the parallel worlds within discussions of Mormonism on YouTube is the world populated by ex-Mormons who have converted to another sect or brand of Christianity. See, for example, the posts of Sandra Tanner, who converted to “true” Christianity thanks to her husband Jerald, the barber James Wardle, and Pauline Hancock, the founder of the more “orthodox” or mainline Mormon sect the Church of Christ (Hancock). In the wake of her de-conversion and conversion experience Sandra, along with her now deceased husband, has been arguing against (polemics) Mormonism, if in a somewhat academic way since 1964 through their Utah Lighthouse Ministry and its bookstore. See the ex-Mormon convert Ed Decker who converted to “true” Christianity—Decker was an early member of Saints Alive in Jesus, a group of ex-Mormon converts to “orthodox” Christianity—who, unlike the Tanner’s, often engages in defamations against Mormonism. See Heidi Luv, a self proclaimed “born again” Christian, demonologist, and “conspiracy theorist" who hosts the Unfiltered Rise Podcast and who has appeared as guest star on several YouTube “programmes”. Luv says that she broke away from the “Mormon cult”(a loaded ethnocentric term that in less ethnocentric scientific parlance refers to a new religious movement or a sect in tense relationships with its broader religious geography)  because of its “occult" origins. For Tanner, Decker, and Luv problems related to aspects of Mormon history eventually foregrounded for them the falsity of Mormonism. One of the curious aspects of these now “true” believing “orthodox” Christians—well not, I suppose curious from an emic point of view—is that they never apply the same empirical and historical standards to their own faiths that they do to Mormonism, their other, a religion which they remain obsessed with even after departing from it.

There are other once Mormons who remain as obsessed with their now Mormon other as they were with their Mormon us (a trait one also finds in former I believe us's who become evangelical anti-them’s or “anti-cult” crusaders) . Karl Lyman and Clarity of the Clarity Podcast, for instance, left Mormonism for other cultural, ideological, and religious reasons than did the Tanner’s Decker, and Luv. In their discussion on the Clarity Podcast Karli and Clarity note that they left the LDS because the leaders of the Church gave into governmental “tyranny" during the covid pandemic—something they compare to another federal governmental “tyranny”, prohibition—when they counselled members of the Church to get the covid vaccine shot, to wear masks, and when they shut down wards (Mormon congregations) meetings during the pandemic. Interestingly Kari and Clarity do not discuss the giving in of Mormon authorities to another possible federal government “tyranny”, the feds forcing of the Mormon elite to end polygamy. Karli and Clarity maintain that when the Mormon bureaucratic elite urged members to use masks and get the vaccine poke during the recent pandemic they capitulated to a governmental conspiracy to limit human freedom and liberty. In response, they say, they left the Church. Problematically, they miss certain historical facts. They fail to grasp that prohibition and temperance were mass movements that effectively lobbied local, state, and federal governments to end alcohol sales in the United States—prohibition, in other words, was a mass movement of citizens—and they fail to grasp that, like the birth control pill, masks, particularly the N95 mask, are, 95% effective in blocking airborne particles when worn correctly and that the covid vaccines, in all their iterations have proved to be quite effective in at least softening the effects of covid should one get it.

And then there are the ex-Mormons like John Dehlin, the excommunicated Mormon psychologist who runs the Mormon Stories podcast where a variety of historical and cultural issues related to the LDS are discussed by Mormon and cultural Mormon intellectuals, the ex-Mormon HailHeidi, many of whose posts explore the standup comedy of George Carlin and the criticism of religion of atheists Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, and the ex-MormonAlyssa Grenfell. The prolific Grenfell, like HailHeidi, seems to have jettisoned her Mormon beliefs largely because of historical problems related to Mormonism (a common theme in ex-Mormon posts), and exchanged it for another meaning system or cultural system, atheism. Grenfell ranges broadly over a variety of Mormon historical, cultural, and ideological topics from dancing in Mormonism, to Mormon garments, to what is was like to go to BYU, to what it was like to go on a mission, to Mormon purity ideologies, to Mormon polygamy, and to why I left the Church. Her posts, which condemn a prophetic religion and its prophets for empirical reasons, have garnered thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even a million views on some occasion, something that, no doubt, has brought Grenfell profits.

Grenfell is one of those rare birds on YouTube. She actually does empirical historical research for her sometimes over an hour posts, good solid empirical research. Her research, however, has its limits. For example, in her discussion of Mormon purity culture she doesn’t dig deep enough and discuss how the cult of domesticity, which is not a monopoly of Mormonism (see patriarchal macho White evangelicalism, for example), has Victorian and perhaps even further back historical and prehistorical roots. In her discussion of Mormon ballroom dance culture and the prevalence of Mormon dancers on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars she fails to explore the important role dancing has played in broader aristocratic culture and in cultures in general before the advent of radio and television.

Beyond the critics of Mormonism (polemicists) there are, of course, a number of defenders of the one “true" faith of Mormonism (apologists) on YouTube. Thoughtful Faith discusses, sometimes with others, the Mormon Faith and often turns anyone who is critical of Mormonism for valid empirical reasons into an anti-Mormon enemy of the one true faith. The youthful and MTVish and TV commercial hip Saints Unscripted, for example, is on a mission to "present information about the gospel of Jesus Christ in genuine, compelling, and loving ways". The various hosts of Saints Unscripted do not duck and cover when it comes to addressing criticism of Mormonism. FAIR, one of today’s leading Mormon apologetic and polemical organisations, particularly after the demise of FARMS, provides self proclaimed faithful answers and informed responses, FAIR, to issues associated with Mormonism. Like Saints Unscripted FAIR does not sweep critical takes on Mormonism under the rug though they often, like Thoughtful Faith, confuse and conflate empirical criticism of the LDS with polemical criticism, a common phenomenon that one can also see in those groups and individuals who wrongly and sometimes cynically and manipulatively conflate academic analysis of Zionism and Israel with anti-Semitism and academic analysis of America with anti-Americanism. There are professional historians like Ben Spackman, who has appeared on several faithful Mormon programmes like Saints Unscripted, Keystone, and The Interpreter Foundation, who argues that Mormonism is not a form of Protestantism (which I think is accurate) and that it is more like Judaism rather than Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism and thus is not a sola scriptura, Bible as sole authority, brand of Christianity (which I think is accurate and which also makes it more like the liturgical brands of Christianity). Like many Christians, including evangelical Christians, before him Sparkman, in hermeneutic and homiletic mode, argues that the creation/evolution binary does not have to be an either or binary (which is accurate if not my cuppa tea in terms of intellectual engagement). One can argue, for example, for god directed evolution. Spackman also (rightly in my opinion) argues that in the 1950s, for a variety of social and cultural reasons, Mormonism was fundamentalised.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Index of Banned Facebook Art

 

We live in an age of utter stupidity, utter idiocy, and utter moronicity. How else do you explain the election of a fascist with self-esteem issues, many related to the size of his dick, but who does not even have the mental reflexivity or capabilities to realise that he has self-esteem issues, as president of the United States? 

I was reminded of this fact once again recently when I received this rather banal message in bureaucratic American English from Facebook, another organisation headed by yet another fascist der Führer with possible self esteem and probable narcissist issues:

"It looks like you shared or sent something that shows nudity or sexual activity.

Ronald Helfrich

14 Nov 2024

https://www.prestomusic.com/.../8033275--gesualdo-the…

You shared this on your profile. This goes against our Community Standards on nudity or sexual activity”. 

What I shared or sent was a link to the Naxos Classics Gesualdo Madrigals box pictured above which I am presently listening to.

Now I realise that the age we live in is no more stupid, idiotic, or moronic than ages past. Humans have long lived in kingdoms of stupidity, idiocy, and moronicity. What is different, however, is that like term limits for politicians, limits that would simply spread the shit that is American politics around as George Carlin notes, social media sites like YouTube and Facebook spread the stupid, idiotic, and moronic shite around to a greater number of people. How else can you explain the confusion of a work of art on the Naxos Gesualdo box with pornography—painted breasts and painted arses—the morons at Facebook don’t even know because in all their wisdom they leave judgements about what is pornographic and what constitutes the violation of “community standards" to bots that are as stupid, idiotic, and moronic as they are? Nor should we forget that the scribes, Pharisees, parasites, and hypocrites at Facebook allow photographs of scantily clad women, and sometimes partially naked women, to appear hourly on their Reels feed, a feed aimed, no doubt, at the leering male “adolescent” demographic numbering in the thousands upon thousands on Facebook. But then, of course, one suspects that the high priests of Facebook adore such beefcake photos because they make monies by peddling such page three like photos on its site. And in Mammon Land money trumps everything including so-called community standards.

Like Dick van Dyke I am glad that I won’t be around to see much more of this stupid and moronic idiocy that Facebook encapsulates in its very digital bones. I may have long loved the fact that human life in absurd but even I recognise that absurdity has its limits. And Facebook's censorship of a work of art and its confusion and conflation of it as pornography is something that reaches those limits for me.

Life as Crisis Management: The Buying a Car Kiada

 

Around 2009 I bought myself a car at Rensselaer Honda in Troy, New York. It was a used Honda Fit with 11.000 miles on it. It was a car I had done extensive research on. I paid cash for it as I had done with the previous four cars I had owned. I loved it. 

Unfortunately, one day in 2013 while driving from work in Oneonta to home in Albany I came up over a hill and ran into a snowstorm and an unploughed freeway, one of the far too occasional “joys" of living in upstate New York at the time. I tried to slow down. However, the car hit an ice patch hidden under the snow, skidded, hit the railing, and died. RIP.

I should have purchased another Honda Fit and would have if I had known that several years later Honda would cease selling the fit in North America. The issue at the time, however, was that I wanted a heavier car than the Fit because the drive over hill and dale and through ice, rain, sleet and snow from Albany to Oneonta sometimes proved to be too much of an adventure. I initially thought about getting another Honda but I, not very deep of me I know, really didn’t like the look of either the Civic or the Accord. Idiotic me. 

My neighbour had a Ford Focus which I liked the look of and the compact met my criteria of a bigger car than the subcompact Fit. So, I started looking at Focus’s. I was able to get what my neighbour said was a good deal on Focus from Crossroads Ford in Ravenna. So I bought it and paid more than half down on the car and took out a car loan for the rest with SEFCU, my credit union, for the rest. It was my first car loan ever.

The Focus wasn’t a Fit. Not even close. Two years after I bought it the brakes had to be replaced. A year after that the motor in the door for the driver window had to be fixed because the chain had gone all wibbly wimey. A year after that the air conditional died. This was partly my fault since I didn’t run the a/c periodically even during the winter. And while I should not have assumed that you treat a car a/c the same way you treat one in your window, I would prefer not to have an air conditioner in the car if the technology requires that it be run periodically including in the dead of winter.

In the winter of 2019 I got a have we got a deal for you mailer from DePaula Ford in Albany. It offered me, or so they claimed in the missive, a great deal on my long in the tooth Focus, which was sitting on 90,000 miles plus at the time, and a deal on a new car of my choice. Given my age and health I had been thinking that I needed a car that was easier for arthritic me to get into and out of and a car with four wheel or all wheel drive given historic upstate New York weather even before the “invitation” arrived. So I got the Escape. Part of the deal was an interest free payment plan so I arranged to pay the Escape off over a five year period.

Just like the Focus the Escape needed new brakes within two years later. A year of two after that it required extensive transmission work. Later in the same year an axle and a bearing had to be replaced. This summer—it always happens in summer doesn’t it?—the air conditioner went bust. 

I almost sold the car to DePaula when the axle and bearing were replaced in November of 2023. I thought I could get a decent amount for it since it had only 8500 hundred miles on it. I tried to find a Fit with less that 50,000 miles on it, one of the neo-labours of Herakles at the establishment I bought my old Fit from. Though Ren Honda said they would contact me if a Fit came in they didn’t when a Fit came in so I sent them packing. I also looked at a Kia Soul. In the end, however, I decided to wait until the car was paid off in full, which just happened this month, before exchanging the Escape for a Soul.

At this point I must say that I have really had it with Ford motor cars and not only for the reason that they periodically break down and have to be fixed even when they have few miles on the odometre. Late last month, to note yet another example of why I am fed up with Ford, I got a letter from Ford Credit. informing me that my title was about to revert to me. A week or so later I received another letter from Ford Credit telling me that my title had been lost or destroyed. 

Now I have, as I said, only bought two cars on credit my entire life and I was naive about how titles and liens worked. When I did not receive my title in 2019 I assumed Ford Credit had it. When I went to DePaula for my annual inspection TODAY, however, I learned that this was not true. DePaula assured me that they did the title and registration work when I bought the car. And admittedly I did receive my registration renewal by email and mail after that so they clearly did get the address on the registration right or they just simply merged it into my already existing Focus registration at the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. As for the title, DePaula blamed the DMV for me not getting the title to the Escape I now own. The DMV, of course—don’t you just love the bureaucratic blame game merry-go-round?—blamed DePaula.

Now it is certainly possible that the DMV is to blame. Did the DMV mess up the address on my title? Did it post the title at all? Did they post it to the wrong address?  I do know that I had problems with my New York State EZ Pass after I had DePaula upgrade my licence plates to the new Excelsior ones on the Escape. I could not link my EZ Pass to my new licence plate number when I tried to do this. On the other hand, it is possible that DePaula somehow messed up the address on my title since I never received it at the flat that I have been living at since 2007. Whatever the reason I had to pay the DMV $20.00 dollars for a car title I never received. Can you say Ron you have been screwed over again?

To make a long sad story short I think I will be looking to trade in my Escape, which now has around 9500 miles on it, for a Soul once I get my errant title. My experience with Ford has not been a good one. I no longer trust Ford vehicles and I am not sure I trust DePaula any more though they have admittedly done a good job inspecting—this took an hour and a half today— and repairing the Escape over the years. 

Such is the absurdity of life.

The Books of My Life: Jacques Tourneur (Fujiwara)

As someone who has devotedly watched films since the mid-1960s—many of them in the company of my sister and my friends—I early on gained a familiarity with the French and Hollywood director Jacques Tourneur, the son of another famous French and Hollywood director Maurice Tourneur. Sometime in the 1960s and 1970s I saw several of his films on television including the famous Cat People (1942), the famous I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the famous The Leopard Man (1943), all of which he made with the noted B movie producer Val Lewton at RKO, the famous Out of the Past (1947), and the famous Night of the Demon (1957). 

When I went to university I broadened not only my cinema going, the number of films I saw, including what were called at the time “foreign films”, and took a few Film Studies classes while an undergraduate. The auteur approach to film studies was still popular at the time, particularly with film critics who wrote critical reviews for the major newspapers. major magazines, many major film journals, and with me though it was being challenged, particularly in the ivy halls of universities, by structural, semiological, semiotic, Marxist, sociological, historical, psychoanalytic, feminist, and approaches to film that mixed and matched all of the above. They to, particularly the structural, semiological, Marxist, sociological, and historical approaches, also impacted my approach to auteurism at the time. 

The auteurist approach, along with critiques of auteurist approaches to directors and others, has impacted scholarly work on Jacques Tourneur over the years. The major question relating to Tourneur in auteurist or authorship approaches to film has long been whether Tourneur or Val Lewton, were the author of the films they made together and which made the name of both with the film going public and with auteurists. For some auteurist critics Tourneur was ultimately the author of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, the three films the pair made together. For others Lewton was the author of these and others of his films, a hypothesis given flesh by those who point out the fact that there are many Lewton biographical elements in, for example, Curse of the Cat People and the fact that Tourneur disagreed with some of the decisions made concerning The Leopard Man. For a few, myself included, both were the authors of these films. For Chris Fujiwara, the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998) Tourneur is the primary author of the films he directed between 1931 and 1966.

In his exhaustive study of the work of Tournier, one that includes not only the short and long films he directed, the television shows he directed, the films he was a bit player in, the films he was a script clerk for, and the films he was an assistant director on, several of these foci a rarity in film studies, Fujiwara argues that one can find consistencies across Tourneur’s films and some of the television shows he directed. These consistencies, according to Fujiwara include consistent themes, consistent character traits, and a consistent mise-en-scene such as his consistent use of decor, his consistent use of sound, his consistent camera movements, his consistent acting strategies, his consistent melding of the real and the supernatural, and his consistent editing strategies, this despite the fact that Tourneur once said that he never turned down a film opportunity offered to him and the fact that Tourneur made films produced by others and written by others.

Fujiwara argues that in Tourner’s work, particularly in the best of it and in the films with which Tourneur was deeply involved intellectually and emotionally whether mystery films, horror films, western films, or noir films, one finds a tight relationship between his themes, his characters, his mise-en-sene, his camera movements, his use of sound, and his use of actors. Tourneur’s cinematic universe, Fujiwara argues, is one in which characters act naturally, in which the mise-en-scene is expressionistic, atmospheric, full of light and shadow, filled with the prominent use of natural light sources, in which camera angles are sometimes odd, in which the editing gives viewers a sense of dislocation, and in which things often happen offscreen. In this they parallel, Fujiwara argues, Tourneur's narrative emphases with their fluctuations, fluctuations between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, and oppositions between human and animal, the living and the dead, the healthy and sane and sickness and insanity, town and country, law and crime, male and female, and the powers of darkness and the power of the mind. Tourneur’s cinema is generally, Fujiwara argues, a cinema of mystery, a cinema of the supernatural, and a cinema dominated by outsiders.

Fujiwara’s analysis of Tourneur’s work will not please everyone. Those sceptical of the auteurist approach to American cinema will not likely find it compelling even though Fujiwara is attentive to historical and sociological contexts and makes use of semiological and psychological theory in his author centred analysis of Tourneur’s films. Those who find an approach grounded in a unitary ideal reader (akin to Chomsky’s ideal speaker) will find much that concerns them in the book given Fujiwara’s unitary interpretations. Those who find the mix of the descriptive with the normative problematic will find much to critique in the book given that Fujiwara not only describes the narratives, mise-en-scene, use of sound in the film, and the editing of the films but also whether he likes them or not. Some may wonder why the book wasn’t an article instead in a book given that it could have been if his extensive analysis of each film had been dropped in favour of a more linked and threaded auteurist approach as in the introduction to the book. Despite all this Fujiwara’s book on Tourneur is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton.