Review of THEM: ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS by Jon Ronson (New York: Simon & Schuster 2002)

Amazon listing - http://www.amazon.com/Them-Adventures-Extremists-Jon-Ronson/dp/0743233212

When I was in my 20s, a friend and I used wonder if Klan meetings ended with the "Wizard" thanking "[Sam and his wife] for bringing the donuts today.” Ronson’s book comes about as closest I’ve ever found to answering this question ;-).

Ronson does us all an enormous service in “THEM - Adventures with Extremists” by humanizing the quacks, and yes, the terrorist extremists that we fear. It’s as if his whole book is a testament to the truth of the line of Max in the 2008 movie “Get Smart” where Max declares to the assembled agents that he is briefing: “Ladies and gentlemen, let us never forget that though the opponents we face are bad guys -- and they _are_ bad guys – they are first human and we will never be able to defeat them until we understand them as such.”

Ronson gives us an array of stories about Islamic fundamentalists, survivalists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists proving the point.

One learns, for instance, that even in Islamic fundamentalist circles, one can fear being pigeon-holed as a nerd. When English Islamic fundamentalist Omar Bakri showed up with Ronson at a “fishing retreat” with other “English fundamentalist Islamic bigwigs,” Omar had to endure being belittled by one of the other retreatants who said to him: “I brought a spare suitcase. Dr. Al-Masari brought a spare pair of shoes. You Omar Bakri, have bought a spare journalist.”

I learned that the Weavers actually had a point out there in Ruby Ridge, when federal agents shot and killed both Randy Weaver’s son and wife in an attempt to arrest Weaver on an arguably trumped-up weapons charge: A federal agent asked Weaver to sell him two shotguns whose barrels the agent himself had to asked be sawed off to 1/4 inch below the federal legal limit. When the dust and the blood settled after a week-long standoff that eventually included tanks, Weaver served only 16 months on the weapons charge (and nothing else) and his surviving children received over a million dollars each in an out-of-court settlement in compensation for the federal agents’ having shot and killed their mother.

Ronson also introduces us to avid self-improvement book reading Thom Robb, Grand-Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who had been trying to move the Klan into a “positive direction.” Ronson caught-up with him in the Ozarks where Grand-Wizard Robb and his daughters were giving seminars to Klansmen on “personality types.” Robb was trying to get Klansmen to stop using the n-word, because it just got people angry, and noted to Ronson that the Klan "doesn’t burn crosses,” rather it seeks to “light” them, and that the Klan fundamentally _wasn’t_ about _hating people_ of other races or religion but about “_loving_ white, Christian people...” All this, of course, was causing Robb dissension in the Klansmen ranks. Said Jeff “Moron” Berry, Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (a dissident splinter group): “Thom Robb is chickenshit. He’s a sissy. He kisses black babies. He had it all once but now he’s politically correct. Did you know that Thom Robb’s going around telling people not to say n... _and_ he’s _banned_ robe usage?”Apparently glasnost isn’t going to come easily to the Klan ;-).

Ronson introduces the reader to David Icke, who on a conspiracy speaking tour throughout western Canada had to spend weeks explaining to the Anti-Defamation League (who kept protesting and closing his events) that when he would say that the leaders of the industrialist Bilderberg Group (who met each summer in Bohemian Grove, California somewhere in the woods outside of Santa Rosa for a bizarre owl burning ritual), turned into 12 foot lizards that he was _not_ using code to mean Jews (most of the Bilderbergers were_not_ Jewish) but rather that he was saying that the leaders of the Bilderberg group _really turned into 12 foot lizards_. Icke really believed that these 12 foot shape-shifting lizard-people existed and were descendants of extraterrestrial crossbreading.

In the last chapter of his book, Ronson takes readers to the yearly Bohemian Grove conclave – owl burning and all -- which over the years has _really attracted_ a lot of the world’s industrialists and up-and-coming political leaders (including in the 1990s, Dick Cheney and both Bushes).

All in all, if one likes good stories, if one suspects that the truth is often more interesting (and more human) than the wildest conspiracies and if one believes that even the craziest people have probably more in common with us than we’d want to admit, then this book is for you. Jon Ronson's THEM is certainly a fun and provocative read!

On the Marian Imagery in the Terminator

by Fr. Dennis Kriz, OSM

© 1997 Dennis Kriz, OSM

Now with a movie review blog: Fr. Dennis at the Movies

Note: This paper may not be reprinted for profit without my permission -- Fr. Dennis Kriz, OSM

INTRODUCTION

This Thursday night (Sept 17) CINEMAX will be broadcasting once again the Terminator. Since the film has been around for over twelve years now, that it is being broadcast again is, in itself, unimportant (One can also rent it at any given time). At the same time, I would like to call attention to this film in a manner that I think would be fascinating to many, but which, I think most (including most critics) up until this time have missed.

For the movie THE TERMINATOR turns out to be an interesting and remarkably faithful adaptation of the Bible's Apocalypse/Revelation 12 expressed in the contemporary idiom.

So get out your Bibles, read Chpt 12 from Revelation (or in Catholic lingo, the Apocalypse) and let me explain...

THE "DRAGON"

The Terminator monster played by Arnold Schwarzenegger serves a terrifying updated expression of Apoc/Rev 12's "dragon." Indeed, the Terminator is portrayed as having been born of human arrogance (that is, Sin) with a single-minded task -- to simply destroy everything it its path until its programmed objective, whatever it may be, is obliterated. In otherwords, the Terminator's mission is simply to kill, kill, kill. The Terminator thus serves as a horrific "image of man", a product indeed, of humanity's thrust to mold and dominate all the world in its image.

Indeed, in the Terminator's time, humanity has succeeded all too well. The machines they have created (the great computers), gain a "consciousness." Then no doubt still operating out of their human _programming_ the computers decide in their Machiavellian / Nitzschean "beyond good and evil" and monstrously efficient / "single-minded" / machine-like sort of way - after a nanosecond's deliberation (more that enough time in the cyber-realm...) they decide that it is :in their interest" to simply destroy humanity (their maker) before humanity knows what hit it.

Most of humanity is destroyed in the nuclear war set-off by the machines themselves, and the movie is then set, in part, during the machines' subsequent "mopping-up operations" - The Terminator monster/machine is sent back into the past by the machines, to kill the mother of the humanity's resistance leader so that he would never be born (Cf. Apoc/Rev 12:4-5).

The Terminator, played by eminently Aryan, Arnold Schwarzennegger, is thus both the Nietzschean Superman and "Dragon" of his time.

THE "SAVIOR"

The future "warrior savior" (Cf. Apoc/Rev 12:5) in the movie has even a name, John Conner, whose initials are "J.C." Despite his future messianic stature, his name is also a _common one_ to a contemporary American audience. He is thus portrayed as being both "super" and as having come out of "one of us."

THE "ANGEL"

Kevin Reese is the messanger/protector sent back in time by the adult John Conner to his mother, announcing to her both her importance/mission and protecting her from the Terminator, who was sent back in time by "the machines" in order to kill her. Reese serves thus a conflated Gabriel (Cf. Lk 1:26-38) and Michael (Cf. Apoc/Rev 12) character in the story.

THE "VIRGIN"

Sarah Conner was John Conner's mother in the movie. Sarah is a Biblical name. Further the Biblical Sarah shared something in common with the Biblical Mary: both had the birth of their sons announced to them in advance by God (cf. Genesis 18:1-15) or by a messenger from God (cf. Luke 1:26-38).

Sarah Conner's physical virginity at the beginning of the film is ambiguous. Indeed, one gets the impression that she probably was not still a virgin at the beginning of the film, and is definitely not a virgin at the film's end as John Conner is conceived as a result of Sarah inviting Reese (who himself was, in fact, up until that time a virgin) to have sex with her at a point in the film.

Perhaps it would be too much to expect of a Hollywood film flirting with so much more-or-less obvious Christ-referring imagery to portray Sarah as being explicitly a Virgin in a traditional physical sense. However, Sarah retains many very interesting "Virgin-like" characteristics: She's a nobody. In fact, she's a waitress -- a modern-day "servant/handmaid." She's somewhat awkward. A little wise-guy kid plays a joke on her in the "Denny's-like" restaurant in which she works causing her to spill something on herself (water?) in the opening scene of the movie. She is definitely not part of the "social elite." Indeed, her "one-of-us" "innocence" is further reinforced by her being "stood- up" by her boy-friend the night she meets Reese and the Terminator out to kill her.

Sarah's "Virgin-likeness" is thus expressed in this movie through her awkwardness/innocence. In this "nothing-special" innocence, Sarah Conner, like the Biblical Mary reflects _us_.

In fact, the Sarah Conner character finds countless re-expression in the readily identifiable "Virgin" character in 1970s-early 1980s "Mad slasher" films -- "Halloween," "Friday the 13th," "Prom Night," etc, even, if more distantly, in Steven King's "Carrie." In each case, while the monster, who systematically liquidates "the elite", often to the cheers of the audience, is finally overcome by who one critic calls "The Final Girl" but who we as uncoothed teenagers used to simply call "The Virgin." (In the case of "Carrie", Steven King has noted, Carrie herself, in "Solomon like fashion" liquidates the elite who oppressed her). What has interested some feminist critics has been that IN ALL THESE MOVIES, the audience has been predominantly or even OVERWHELMINGLY male, and yet, the audience at the end of the picture _identified with_ "the Final Girl" cheering her on, until she defeated the monster who tormented her.

THE CLIMAX

This brings us to the climax of THE TERMINATOR. Events bring Reese, Sarah and the Terminator monster to a robotics plant (where the still mindless precursors of the Terminator work). Reese, in a dying gasp of traditional but INSUFFICIENT male chivalry/bravado is able to damage but not destroy the Terminator monster, whose humanlike skin had by now been seared-off and was now exposed to all for the mechanical horror that it always was. The Terminator monster, now simply a metallic, but still functioning skeleton, no longer with legs (which were blown-off of it by Reese in his parting suicidal attack) is reduced to dragging itself along the floor (like the ancient serpent of the Garden of Eden [Cf. Genesis 3:14]). But, programmed as it was to destroy Sarah Conner, it continues to do so, dragging itself along the floor with one arm and GRABBING AT SARAH'S FEET with the other. Sarah destroys the Terminator monster once-and-for-all BY CRUSHING ITS HEAD IN A _GIANT_ MECHANICAL PRESS: "I will put enmity between you (the serpent) and the woman, and between your offspring and hers: He/She (*) will strike at your head while you strike at his/her heel" (Gen 3:15).

(*) Pronoun unclear: He, referring generically (he/she) to the woman's offspring, she if referring to the woman herself.

To any traditional Catholic, the Mariological imagery should be clear: The iconography of Mary as the Immaculate Conception has been of Mary standing over the Serpent having crushed his head against the Earth with her heel.

THE FINAL SCENE

If however, one were to still miss Mariological imagery of the Terminator, the movie ends, with the now obviously pregnant Sarah Conner driving off "into the desert" to safety until the proper time (Cf. Apoc/Rev 12:14), indeed, to the neighboring country of Mexico (as Mary/Joseph did by fleeing with the infant Jesus to Egypt, [Matthew 2:13-15]). 


SOME POINTS FOR CONSIDERATION: ON THE VALUE (?) OF A MOVIE LIKE THE TERMINATOR

In this presentation I have shown the by-now more-or-less obvious parallels between the film THE TERMINATOR and the imagery portrayed in the 12th Chapter of the Apocalypse/Revelation along with the traditional Catholic interpretation of this text (which has linked this text with the passage in Gen. 3:15 giving a lively and glorious image of Mary as the "Woman Clothed in the Sun" and the "New Eve" who helped crush the head of the serpent with her "yes" to the will of God).

There are questions to be asked as to the value to such "updated" adaptations of the Scriptures.

On the positive side, there is little doubt that the detailing of the parallels between this movie and these highly esoteric Biblical texts can give today's generation of Americans/Westerners a PROFOUNDLY MORE COMPREHENSIBLE PERSPECTIVE on the meaning of the symbols used in these texts, as well as the theology behind them. I found the employment of the Terminator cyborg/android monster as a contemporary expression of the "dragon" of Apoc/Rev 12 particularly compelling, this in particular because the _humanly_ created Terminator mechanical monster explicitly points to the source of the Evil expressed in this monstrosity in human arrogance, that is, sin.

Further, while in part amusing (that Hollywood can't seem to bring itself to put on the screen a true, even physical Virgin), I found the film's exploration of what characteristics in Virginity are indeed the most important in making symbol of "the Virgin" a symbol of "one of us" to be _very interesting_. And I do think that this movie can help give the contemporary person a greater appreciation of what exactly Mary symbolized in the Annunciation scene of Luke's Gospel (Lk 1:26-38): She symbolized "the Daughter of Zion", a member of the People of God and indeed a member the whole of Creation. Her "Yes", prefigured in fact, or made possible the whole of Creation's eventual saying of "Yes" to God (Cf. Lk 1:38, Rom 8:18-25).

There are those who would question the violence of the movie (as if Apoc/Rev. 12 or indeed the just about all of Apoc/Rev was not violent). There are also those who would find the unmarried sex scene between Sarah and Reese (which in the movie was heavily implied to have been the cause of the conception of John Conner, who would become the future savior of the world - in the universe of this particular movie) as bordering on blasphemous. On the flip-side some could perhaps see this particular scene as somehow a "proof" that Jesus whom we Christians hold as the Christ would "have to have been" conceived in a similar (non-virginal) way. A "proof" it clearly is not... and it certainly would not take the production of a Hollywood movie to say the obvious: that true virginal conception would be something truly outside the natural order of things. And that is of course exactly what the Gospels Matthew/Luke claim. To take away Jesus' divinity, to reduce him to one of many other "great human leaders," would in fact reduce him to irrelevenc.  As it goes without saying that many "human leaders" would probably be more "relevant" today that a purely human Jesus would be (One thinks of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, even Mother Teresa - on her own). But none of these purely human leaders can save...

One can perhaps question the employment of violence in the Terminator in another way: that it seems to propose violence (against machines) as the way to go, while at least many would argue that Christianity is or should be inherently non-violent. Again, we would fall back to the reality that the book of the Apocalypse/Revelation is graphically violent. Yet here many Christians, and correctly I believe, would argue that the book of the Apocalypse/Revelation is really to be understood as a "spiritual conflict" not to be taken _literally_ but whose drama simply requires the wide-open glorious canvas _portraying_ the whole of creation "blowing up" -- after all, we are talking about the great "fireworks" consummation of all Creation.

Yet, this could, and I would argue _should_ be said of the Terminator as well. And I say this because I think most people immediately recognize these graphically violent movies like the Terminator as _fictional_ (not real and yet very emotional ... requiring once more a very large canvas and fireworks).  And people watch movies like The Terminator in a very different way from the way they would watch a movie like Schindler's List which is also graphically violent and yet obviously more real. Indeed, I have _met_ people who have had little or no trouble watching, popcorn in hand, the standard Schwarzennegger/Van Damme/Segal movies in bliss, and yet become very disturbed by the violence of the far more closer to home, far more real accounting presented in Schindler's List.

Perhaps an even better comparison would be between the all-but unmatchable realism of "The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre" and the subsequent "teenie-bopper" mad-slasher films which imported from the "Texas Chain-Saw Massacre" its principle icon -- the hockey- masked madman with a buzzing-chain saw -- but placed him in such a stylized (and safe) environment of the high school crowd from the American suburb of the 1970s-80s, that there was no question that the subsequent slew of spin-offs - Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc - were basically "morality tales" (the arrogant and the oppressors all get killed, and the virgin representing all the "humble folks" triumphs in the end).

As such, a very interesting, and in our contemporary American/Western culture, a very important study could be made of how the cuing of audiences as to what is meant to document a literal/physical reality (i.e. the horror of War (as, in for example, the movie "Memphis Belle" a 'new generation' WW II movie), the horror of the Holocaust (as in "Schindler's List"), or the result of the progressive desensitization resulting from ongoing dehumanizing work (which I believe was the primary or certainly most viable motivation behind the making of the "Texas Chain Saw Massacre") and what is meant to be above all a flamboyant stylized, symbolic expression of emotion or reality (think of Kafka or "The Far Side") _beyond_ the literal, physical plane. (If one were to for instance consider the sheer number of potentially debilitating 'horrors' awaiting the average high school kid who approaches 'Prom Night' -- where one is going to be mercilessly scrutinized by his/her peers on basis of one's appearance, wealth, wit, one's date and often enough even one's sexual performance -- it should surprise no one that a great many teenagers would really wish that _someone_ would just come out and "cut down" the elite of one's class who would be oppressing him/her).

So in this light, even the violence of the Terminator needs to be discussed in the future in more thoughtful light.

CONCLUSION

All in all, I hope that you will have found this exposition on the Terminator as interesting as I have. In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest, both among Protestant and Catholic thinkers to better seek to understand the emerging post-modern culture, which is proving to be a "new world" for secularist and believer alike. And I do hope that even the avowed secularist will be able through this reflection on the Terminator and its borrowed motifs and themes from Apoc/Rev 12 to see the Christian concepts as Sin and even the role of the Virgin Mary in Catholic thought in a new and more comprehensible light. For the Scriptures became the Scriptures precisely because they were meaningful. If time and changing location and circumstances causes us lose our comprehension of the manners of expression used by the Scriptural writers, then it is the challenge of the believers of today to re- express this same message in imagery and language understandable today. The screen-writer of the Terminator may or may not have this intention at all in creating the Terminator, but this screen-writer has given us a vivid example of what in fact is possible.

Introduction

The purpose of this blog is simply to give me a place to put online various things that I've written over the years (or may write in the future) which don't fall under easily identifiable categories.  So this is going to be something of a "random blog" and I don't expect it to be updated all that regularly. 

Still it will allow me a place to put/keep online items like an article that I wrote back in 1997 on "The Marian Imagery in the First Terminator Movie" which remains available on the internet because someone out there liked the article, but could disappear tommorrow if the service that has it up goes out of business or the person who keeps it up decides to take it down, etc.  Here I'll have more control over these sorts of things.