Alfred Hitchcock, Future Christian Homemakers and Galaxy Quest

The Paradigm of the Compassionate Conservative

The cable Television channel, AMC, is currently running an Alfred Hitchcock series that picks up with his films for Universal from Vertigo on through his last, Family Plot. Some women friends have watched some of the movies and come away appalled at the Barbie Doll-like quality of Hitchcock's female leads from this period. They were bothered by the helplessness and passivity of Kim Novak in Vertigo and Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Indeed, those women aren't exactly the perfect examples of women from the period. They are the suspense movie versions of Doris Day in those gawdawful Rock Hudson romatic comedies like Pillow Talk. They are also why, when I was a boy, I instinctively preferred Judy Holiday to Doris Day. But I was also probably reacting to the fact that I never saw any women who were, paradoxically (oxymoronically?) as coldly sensual. Not that I didn't look. They just didn't exist in real life. Not only that but they were a recent male fantasy invention. In fact, none of the women who played those roles were actually like that in real life. Nor had they been like that before World War II ended.

The role of the cold woman, repressed sexually, passive, subservient was a specific image born, I think, innocently enough in the fantasies of men away at war and transmitted into the movie scripts that those men directed and wrote. Consider the most famous female icon of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe. She was sexy, anything but cold and repressed and not taken seriously at all by anyone but Arthur Miller. Not until her last major movie, that incredible confluence of Miller, John Houston, Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift in The Misfits (revealing title, no?), did she get a serious role. But compare Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint who always had serious roles as the unattainable ideal woman.

This Stepford Wife paradigm was entirely a fiction superbly illustrated by comparing the private and public lives of that television icon of the glamorous homemaker, Loretta Young. Most people who lived it knew that the fictional image and the reality were greatly at odds. In fairly short order the blond ice queen we see in Tippi Hedren became a parody of itself that was supplanted by far more earthy women like Sophia Loren and Melina Mercouri. They were totally eclipsed by even more earthy women like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Jane Fonda and Sally Kellerman.

It seems to me that the middle aged and older women behind the idiocy of Future Christian Homemakers is that, much as Dan Quayle couldn't distinguish between real women and the fictional Murphy Brown, they can't distinguish between the fictional image of a non-existent woman and the reality. Those women, as I did, grew up with those television and movie images and seem incapable of understanding that the Doris Days and Tippi Hedrens on screen were never real. In similar fashion Ronald Reagan famously couldn't distinguish between the movies he was in and actual events of World War II thinking that he'd actually been in combat when he'd never been even close.

The most superb satire of Star Trek is a delightful movie with a magnificent cast called Galaxy Quest. In the movie the cast of a long-cancelled sci-fi television series, Galaxy Quest, is grudgingly earning a living by doing fan conventions and the occasional big box store opening. Their leader, Tim Allen doing a parody of William Shatner that is only exceeded by the parodies that Shatner does of himself, is approached by a group of weird people who call themselves Thermians for help as the great commander of the Galaxy Quest starship. Since these weirdos fit right in with the run-of-the-mill fans Allen agrees to help them and find himself in command of an actual starship. You see the Thermians have been recieving the old Galaxy Quest television shows and, being excessively, nay, terminally literal, they view them as "historic documents" of the exploits of the great starship commander. I recommend the movie as a very good time and would suggest that the women behind Future Christian Homemakers are Thermians.

On September 10, 2007 the Los Angeles Times reported on a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. New York University and UCLA jointly carried out the study. The researchers identified students who had a range of political views ranging from "very liberal" to "very conservative". They were then put to a test which required the students to distinguish between the letter "M" and "W" when they appeared on a computer monitor. The researchers measured activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, the area that analyzes conflicts between that which we expect to see and that actually seen. The data revealed that those who described their views a liberal were 4.9 times as likely to show brain activity (that's 490%) than those who described themselves a conservative. Liberals were 2.2 times (that's 220%) more likely to score higher in accuracy.

The researchers concluded that, in general, liberals would be more accepting of new ideas in areas such as social values, science and religion. Perhaps they would also be better equipped to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Still it's rather horrible that girls or anyone will have to suffer for the mental failings of their right-wing lunatic elders.

Praise the Lord! I

So homosexuality is "against god's law." Evolution contradicts the "inerrant word of god." Science, we are told must take a back seat to revelation. It's claptrap and is actually acknowledged to be claptrap. Fundamentalists don't dispute the cosmology that science gave us: a solar centric universe. They don't dispute the speed of light or the existence of electricity or of the atom. But Fundamentalists do dispute the things they wish to dispute.

A lot of air time and forests of paper and rivers of ink have been devoted to noting this idiocy, but there's very little discussion of why revelation needs to reign over empiricism. Perhaps one way of getting at that problem is in asking why it is so important to publicly support such nonsense for people who don't actually believe it themselves?

I think that the attack on science is identical in origin and purpose to the attack on "the media." For 40 years at least the right-wing has been attacking the amorphous, indistinct strawman "the media." Of course what goes unsaid most of the time is the modifier "the Liberal media." The right-wing fanatics found it expedient to convince a large segment of the public that the information they receive through newspapers, radio and television is biased and, therefore, untrustworthy. It's rather like the old joke about the wife whose husband catches her in bed with another man. The punch line is, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your eyes?" The first step in getting people to believe something other than their actual experience is to convince them that what they are seeing is a lie.

We should note that the media outlets most ideologically skewed, Rupert Murdock's newspapers and Fox News, and Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, present themselves as "fair and balanced" though they are anything but. Meanwhile probably the most fair and balanced media outlet, Public Broadcasting, is vilified and under constant attack. The term "the media" may be shorthand for any reporting that displeases the right-wing fanatics but, in the minds of those fanatics, it never includes the media outlets spouting their bias and outright lies.

Yet there's a weakness in the narrow focus on "the media." The weakness is that sometimes something happens that is so outrageous that claiming that it's a construction of "media bias" just won't wash. In those cases, even some of the fanatics themselves are forced to accept the truth of what they see or hear. The senses are a powerful contradictor of ideology.

So how does a fanatic convince people that even their senses can't be trusted? Well there is a way...Praise the Lord!

God is the ultimate paradigm for contradicting one's senses. If you can get people to believe in god, you can get them to believe in any absurdity. The "big imaginary friend in the sky" not only doesn't require sensory confirmation, god continues to be a delusion for millions world-wide specifically because there is no sensory confirmation for its existence. Further, since almost no one actually reads the Bible as a book very few have any sense of what it actually says. The majority of those who do read the Bible do so in a controlled environment of belief. They read passages seeing the book only as a fragmentary work. The basic assumption is that it is the word of that mythical Judeo-Christian god and the reading consists only of interpretation within the context of belief. In fact, the discussion tends to be about which of several interpretations that differ from one another very little is actually the "correct" interpretation and those discussions are usually guided by someone with a particular viewpoint. Thus, even the secondary, indirect experience of god is limited and perverted.

Enter religion. Fundamentalist religion's entire existence is based on the false premise that the Bible is the "revealed truth and inerrant word of god." Even more absurdly, most of the Christian fundamentalists overcome by their shallow religiosity insist that the "inerrant" text is the King James Bible. That gives rise to the satire that holds that if god hadn't wanted Moses and Jesus to speak Jacobean English he wouldn't have revealed himself in those words. So a lovely but a corrupt translation made somewhere between 1,600 and 5,000 years after the alleged events described is the sole source of "truth" and "inerrant."

Still the alleged inerrance of the Bible is only the starting point. You see, if the Bible is "inerrant" then Darwinian evolution and all subsequent modifications of that hypothesis must be errors. If the prevailing view of how life evolved, the age of the earth and the development of species over time are in error, then all science and all knowledge derived from scientific examination must also be wrong. If that is true then all empirical observations of anything from social behavior to nuclear physics must be wrong.

True enough that the right-wing fanatics won't go quite that far. After all, they are funded by corporations and individuals whose very lucrative livelihood would be threatened if we were to question nuclear physics, the solar centric planetary system, and even the chemistry that goes into the increasing number of drugs that we take. They won't even go whole hog on evolution. Where evolution can be directly observed, as in laboratory mice, insects and other animals, they claim that all of nature may evolve along Darwinian lines but human beings, alone in all the universe, are the exception. By stomping on empirical science via evolution the right-wing fanatics achieve the goal of establishing that not only can we not believe our media, we can't even believe our senses. Confusion and doubt result and into that state of disorientation comes a "preacher" - he or she may be a purveyor of religiose or political ideology - who offers soothing, simple reassurances, bumper-sticker length ideas and the promise that this person who's been disoriented, confused and frustrated can know the ultimate truth if only he or she will surrender all thought to the direction of the "preacher".

And we accept all this madness simply because in America the right-wing fanatics have changed "Sieg Heil!" to "Praise the Lord!"