Davison's Doodle

Unlearned Lessons

I’m not a historian. World history and US history was taught in high school and college. There has been other reading since. Increasingly, our context is repeating the early 20th and 19th centuries. As I lay me down to sleep this morning after the 2024 election, I don’t understand my neighbors. If they thought the Nation was on the wrong track. Buckle up. Beyond our political and theological commitments, we apparently don’t share a path to dreams or aspirations for people, for families, this Nation of immigrants, or the ideals enshrined on Lady Liberty or the Bill of Rights. There are many things I’m not and maybe that’s the point. We are living through a time of “you’re not like us” that is turning more systemically parliamentary. In a recent article, a BBC reporter described our Nation as two countries sharing a land mass uncomfortably. If the new President achieves fifty percent of what he wants to do aided by the nationalists and loyalists to him that fancy themselves as anointed by a deity, the profound change will affect two generations. Is our Constitutional Republic in danger? No and yes. It depends on the character of my neighbors and their humility. Reading, Go Set a Watchman a few years ago helped me glean how two terms of a Trump presidency have come to pass.

I wasn’t a fan of either Bush Presidency, but I thought I understood my neighbors. The concerns about Clinton’s moral failures and questionable character was understandable. I could empathize. Integrity mattered. I got it. With the 47th President moral character doesn’t matter anymore. Integrity doesn’t matter anymore. My neighbors can’t argue morality or integrity with me anymore. The 47th President has no moral compass or integrity that doesn’t point to him or benefit him or those that flatter and bow to him. Mr. Potter, the character in It’s a Wonderful Life, won the Presidency of these United States Nov 6, 2024.

Many times my parents just shook their heads at my decisions. I’m sure they still do today. For the second time in my life I understand what they felt and experienced as I grew up and lived into adulthood. They had to let me learn the hard way. I guess that’s what our Nation will have to live through, again, as a former President, who inspired an assault on the Capitol during the ritual accounting to prepare for the transfer of power when he lost an election, will again return to the Presidency and lead this country for the last half of this second decade of the 21st century. Every Nation older than ours has lived through their version of extremism, authoritarianism, and graft politics. They’ve dealt with oligarchs and religious extremists attacking secular and civic institutions to bend them to their will and vision for the Nation. It’s our turn. As a Nation, we haven’t learned history’s lessons. SCOTUS has provided the path backward. The Nation is more entertained and aggrieved than ever before in my lifetime. We are about to get what my neighbors asked for. I weep for them. I weep for all of us and the world as the American experiment turns more toward the Sci-fi western Star Wars with each passing day.

Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t understand my neighbors. But, I’m listening. I trust that goes both ways.

At the Movies: 1999

 Manners are a way of showing other people we care about them.

Adam, “Blast from the Past.” 1999.

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.

Tyler Durden, “Fight Club.” 1999

 I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.

Ann Scott, “Notting HIll.” 1999

There was a time before Covid, way back when, that my companion and I would probably be in a movie theater on a Friday afternoon. A recent New York Times article, “The Movies of 1999,” has me thinking about the films that year before Y2K and how many we saw. Looking over the entire list of American films released in 1999, I realize just how much time we spent in theaters in Lexington, KY. This was a time when the local video store membership was still the way to see movies at home and when Netflix sent DVD’s to your home through the US Postal service. Yes, the mail was quicker and mostly reliable pre- 2000.

I’m a Star Wars fan. While I understand prequels are designed to answer lingering questions of a fan base and build a new fan base, I think those that no longer need to speculate and discuss how Anakin Skywalker became, transformed into, Darth Vader, are missing something important about what films can do. Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace began the backstory of the franchise. I’m one of those people that is comfortable with ambiguity and unanswered, quality questions.

Mention something out of a Charleston Heston movie and suddenly everybody’s a theological scholar.

Metatron, “Dogma.” 1999.

You can find edited versions of Dogma if the “F word” offends you. There are a lot of “F words” and other language that you could, may, find offensive. Jay and Silent Bob, Jay because Bob never speaks, and the cast use language to shock, but this little comedic fantasy’s deep impact is its exercising a theological idea and religion traditions to a possible logical conclusion. Plus, it has a great cast. To borrow from Monty Python, it was something completely different.

Our context is awash, shaped, and conflicted by social media and “influencer” accounts. Three years before Jason Bourne there was Tom Ripley who posits,

“I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”

Tom Ripley, “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” 1999,

The only explosions are interpersonal. Moral relativism is abundant. This wasn’t the only

Buzz and Woody returned in “Toy Story 2.”

James Bond returned in “The World is Not Enough.”

“The Green Mile” offered a different image of an angel or Christ character’s last days waiting execution.
Hilary Swank cosplayed Brandon Teena, a trans man that was murdered which brought LGBTQ+ conversations to mainstream big screens in “Boys Don’t Cry.”

“Three Kings” tells the fictional story of American solders stealing gold, stolen from Kuwait, at the end of the First Gulf War.

The animated, “The Iron Giant” told the story of a boy, an alien robot, and how friendship can change us for the better in the midst of the Cold War. And, baseball fans got to hear Vin Scully call a game and for a moment Billy Chapel put “professional” back in baseball in “For the Love of the Game” even though he was an ego centric, aging player and boyfriend.

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, Wild Wild West, Big Daddy, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (O Behave!), Life, The Mummy, Election, The Sixth Sense, and others offered laughs, frights, cultural commentary through laughs and scares, romcom hope, drama, philosophical and religious inquiry, and Disney-ride level adventure.

The choice Morpheus offers Neo applies to all kinds of truth (Truth).

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Morpheus, “The Matrix.” 1999.