Catholics Vs. The Mentally Handicapped

Perhaps no single religious organization has played such an important role in censoring art and prosecuting new and interesting ideas as the Catholic Church. The examples are numerous and well-documented. The Church, in particular, has always been inextricably linked with the censorship of Hollywood movies, going back to the days of the Hays Code (so afraid, people were back then, of Cecil B. DeMille's period dramas). In fact, a lot of people don't know that the original text of the Code was authored by the priest and writer Daniel A. Lord. When that was replaced by the MPAA rating system in the late 1960s, Jack Valenti devised a system by which a lot of those strictures would stay in place, and you can still tell today from the obvious problem the MPAA has with grownup depictions of sex, as opposed to finding wanton displays of violence generally less offensive.

This is all common knowledge. Did you also know that the Catholic Church actually has people in their employ whose sole job is to evaluate movies based on how appropriate they would be to the average Catholic audience? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has an "Office For Film and Broadcasting" that classifies movies according to these ratings:

A-I: General Patronage
A-II: Adults and Adolescents
A-III: Adults
L: Limited Adult Audience
O: Morally Offensive

It's sometimes fun to read their capsule reviews. I mean, they're readable, which is something you can't say about Peter Travers. At least half of their movies end up being rated "O," I've noticed. Their considerations don't always match up with the MPAA, as you will see from their review of The Invention Of Lying, which (most people don't know this) contains a pretty devastating takedown of organized religion:

Venomous supposed comedy, set in a world where lying is unknown and every word spoken is accepted as truth, and where God does not exist until a failed documentary screenwriter (Ricky Gervais) discovers the ability to deceive and, to comfort his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), invents the fable of an afterlife, going on to fabricate the story of a "man in the sky" who rewards good deeds and punishes evil, all of which is eagerly accepted by the credulous masses who flock to hear his message. Along with his co-writer and co-director Matthew Robinson, Gervais launches an all-out, sneering assault on the foundations of religious faith such as has seldom if ever been seen in a mainstream film, despicably belittling core Judeo-Christian beliefs and mocking both the person and the teaching of Jesus Christ. Pervasive blasphemy, some sexual humor and references, and a few rough and crude terms. O -- morally offensive. (PG-13)

Most of the reviews are in a similar, hilarious vein. But check out this writeup of Kevin Smith's Mallrats, and see if you find anything odd (my boldness):

Sophomoric sleaze about two college-age retards (Jeremy London and Jason Lee) running amok in a suburban mall after being rejected by their girlfriends (Claire Forlani and Shannen Doherty). Writer-director Kevin Smith plumbs the gutter for laughs but finds only mindless tedium. Sexual situations, nudity, drug abuse, toilet humor and constant gross language. (O) (R) ( 1995 )

The USCCB, which is the official voice of the American Catholic Church, is calling people retards? Any normal standards and practices committee would have nixed that pejorative in a heartbeat, and would probably have had words to say with the writer in question. Such is the intellectual state of American Catholics today.

NOTE: I wonder if this review was colored by the controversy surrounding Smith's Dogma in 1999? Still, that's just harsh, USCCB, to make fun of Jason Lee like that.

NOTE II: Although I saw Mallrats again recently and they're probably right...

Thanks For the Unintended Shoutout, Pat Robertson

(P.S. I'm in the process of developing a lot of content here in the next few days so if an errant viewer stumbles upon here, there is plenty to occupy his or her time.)

Pat Robertson has alienated a lot of reasonable people in the last few days, due to comments he made during an episode of his still strangely watchable Christian news show The 700 Club. Here's a video showcasing the most relevant comments:

Good for the people calling him out. Surely, this is not only crazy talk but exactly the wrong type of observation to impart at a time of unimaginable crisis. But you may be confused as to what Robertson is referring to. He's actually questioning the motives behind the Haitian slave rebellion of the late 18th century, which is considered by many historians to be the first large-scale slave revolt of its kind. One of the principal characters in this drama was a vodoun priest named Dutty Boukman, who we will get to later.

Soon-to-be Dr. Robert Taber, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, wrote a special guest post for FiveThirtyEight called (somewhat misleadingly) "A Qualified Defense Of Pat Robertson." In it, he writes:

For religious conservatives in Haiti and abroad, the idea that the leaders of the slave revolt led and participated in a Voudou ceremony provides a troubling contrast to presentations of the United States’ founding fathers as devout Christians, one that explains their vastly different fortunes. Many view the U.S. invasions and the rule of the Duvaliers being as indications of the devil’s two hundred year lease on the country.

(The Duvaliers he is referring to are a family team of autocratic, murderous dictators--François "Papa Doc" Duvalier was president of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, and his son Jean-Claude ruled until being ousted in 1986.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a response to this piece, taking umbrage mainly with its title, arguing that the defense of Pat Robertson's comments is an offense in itself. Taber stood by his comments, claiming only that the story of Boukman and Co. making a pact with Satan is still an extremely resonant one among evangelical Christians and superstitious Haitians alike. Which is true, and I have no problem with the American public learning more about the devil pacts that have shaped the courses of so many nations. If I could have them teach it to my future kids in school, I would.

Anyway, Pat Robertson may have inadvertently bolstered my career as an English scholar. How is this? In September 2008, I took a Senior Seminar class for my English major focusing on postcolonial representations in restoration literature. One of my projects was to develop a Wikipedia page for a book I was writing a paper for, an insanely polemical leftist potboiler written by Guy Endore, titled Babouk. I could explain what the book is about, but I'd rather direct you to the Wikipedia page, which as I just said, was written by me (it has since been amended by others, of course). The important detail is that the main character Babouk, an African trickster and storyteller who is shipped to Haiti as a slave and becomes the voice of (explicitly liberal and anti-capitalist) resistance, is in fact a fictionalized version of Boukman. American public interest in Boukman, now, is as high as its ever been, and according to these online statistics, the number of page views for my little article has increased dramatically.

All of this is a long way of saying: Thank you, Pat Robertson. Your insensitive, yet oddly accurate religious ravings have inadvertently benefited exactly one (1) person. Now I know what Kurt Vonnegut meant when he said that he was the only person in the world to have ever benefited from the bombing in Dresden. Something like $3 for every dead body, I think he said.

BONUS/PLUG: Interested in reading my article on Babouk, which was accepted for publication this past summer? Are you curious about the Haitian slave rebellion, Edward Said's Orientalism, or developing alternative canons of literature? You can find it here (PDF; my own contribution starts on pg. 55). If you chance upon this blog and decide to read this thing in its entirety, you will be the first person to ever do so. I don't think even I've even read the whole thing; the whole thing is one benzedrine-fueled blur of madness...