A Sound of Sheer Silence

Lots of people have said lots of better and smarter things about #metoo, particularly in light of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings ( most recent update here , though this story is evolving at warp speed), than I can.  I have never been assaulted, so I cannot speak to the experience.  I have, however, noticed a couple of things out there in the discussion that I think are worth commenting on. 1. "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" and "Innocent Until Proven Guilty."   Lawyers, and people who like to sound like lawyers, often try to gaslight people who are concerned about an accusation against someone by saying things like "people are innocent until proven guilty!" and "where is your proof beyond a reasonable doubt?"  The idea here, of course, is that you are a bad person for "immediately assuming" that a person is guilty of whatever they are accused of, whereas the speaker is a reasoned and broad-minded and fair person.  This is nonse...

1. When this winter started, there were two things I thought we going to happen before it was over.  First, I was going to get out of the snow before it was over, to go scuba diving and to get some sun and to recharge from the grey and the shoveling and all of that.  Second, I was going to take concrete steps to leave the Catholic Church. Well, it is clear now that only one of those is going to happen.  And I am sitting in Key West, Florida, watching the sunrise. . . . ********************* 2. Bruce Springsteen's sixth album, Nebraska , is a dark work.  It is just Springsteen, his guitar, and a harmonica.  The themes are violence and hopelessness, with crime as the link between those two.  It's a haunting album. But the genius of the album, for me, is the last song, Reason to Believe .  After the despair and alienation of the previous nine songs, Reason to Believe changes the conversation.  It is not in any way upbeat--it involves a dead...

Over the weekend, I saw a film entitled A Pervert's Guide to Ideology .  Ostensibly it was a documentary, but really it was a 2 1/4 hour lecture by Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and provocateur Slavoj Zizek on his theories of ideology and how it works.  To make his points, he uses movies, ranging from Triumph of the Will  to Jaws  to The Dark Knight , as illustrations.  Even if you don't agree with everything he says, he is very engaging and thought-provoking, not to mention very weird and funny. In addition to talking about ideology generally, he also goes into specific ideologies--Nazism, Stalinism, Capitalism, Consumerism, etc.  He also has a fascinating discussion of Christianity generally, which I will come back to at some point.  But at the beginning of the film, he talks about the "ideology" of Catholicism. To explain his view of Catholicism, he uses the movie The Sound of Music .  In the beginning of the film, we have the nov...