The People Must Never Know

An essential ingredient of conspiracy theories is that those in power do not want us to know the truth.  Of course, some conspiracy theories are true, such as those behind Watergate, Bridgegate, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, because government officials often collude to violate the law or the public’s trust and do not want us to know about it.  And the fact that some conspiracies are real is the basis for the fantastic ones like those that claim that the government knows about aliens from outer space but is keeping it under wraps because we can’t handle the truth.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons for the government to keep secrets, as when national security is at stake.  Information is classified so that our adversaries will not be able to make good use of it.  But sometimes the government’s secrecy does seem to be directed toward the American people rather than our adversaries.  David Sanger of The New York Times quoted President Obama regarding Russia’s attempt to influence our elections through hacking:

“Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us because we can do stuff to you,” he said. “But it is also important to us to do that in a thoughtful, methodical way. Some of it, we will do publicly. Some of it we will do in a way that they know, but not everybody will.”

I am not sure what to make of that last sentence.  We will do something to the Russians, and the Russians will know that we did it, but “not everybody will.”  By “not everybody,” Obama must surely mean the American people.  It is important, apparently, that we not know.

Perhaps the best explanation why the American people cannot be allowed to know what the Russians will know was given by David Pertraeus, according to the same article:

“Is there something we can do to them, that they would see, they would realize 98 percent that we did it, but that wouldn’t be so obvious that they would then have to respond for their own honor?” David H. Petraeus, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Mr. Obama, asked on Friday, at a conference here sponsored by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “The question is how subtle do you want it, how damaging do you want it, how do you try to end it here rather than just ratchet it up?”

This is like getting into a fistfight with someone and thinking, “I’d better not hit him too hard, because then he might knock my teeth out.”  Furthermore, if 2% doubt would be all that stands in the way of the Russians retaliating in a manner we might regret, then the prudent thing would be for us not to do anything. Besides, if they might strike back to defend their honor, then they might strike back even if their honor is not at stake, but just to make sure we understand that they can hurt us more than we can hurt them.

In the end, the safest thing would be for us not to retaliate at all, but simply to improve our cyber security so as to minimize the threat of future interference from foreign adversaries.  But admitting that there is nothing our government can safely do to punish the Russians would be politically disastrous.  And so, we are told that our government may do something that only the Russians will know about, but not the American people.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

If Slumdog Millionaire were generally disliked, I would never bother to write a review about such a ridiculous movie.  But as it was praised by critics, won many awards, including the Academy Awards Best Picture, and was incredibly successful at the box office, I find myself stunned.  Sure, I could dismiss the whole thing as being a matter of taste, about which there can be no dispute, but that still leaves me wondering, “Why is my taste so different from everyone else?”

Let us sort out a few of the elements.  First, I do not know what India is really like in general, but that which is presented to us in this movie is horrible.  Overall, my life has been pretty good, living in middle-class America and being in good health, but if there were such a thing as reincarnation, and if I were given a chance to come back in a new life, I think I would pass, preferring oblivion instead.  In the movies, people always comes back in good health as white, middle-class Americans, but I would be afraid that I would end up in some country like Syria, suffering the ravages of war, or some famine-stricken or plague-ridden country in Africa, or end up as an untouchable in Calcutta, scrounging around for my breakfast in a garbage dump.  In other words, if the India in this movie were typical of existence on this planet in general, then I would never want to be reborn.  This is especially so when one considers that most of the suffering in this movie is not the result of war, famine, or plague, but of cruelty.  Nevertheless, the tone of this movie is, beyond all reason, life-affirming.

Second, the movie centers around a quiz show, the equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?  I have never cared for quiz shows.  I have never bought a lottery ticket. And, in general, I have never dreamed of getting rich in one big, lucky stroke.  I suspect that the people who buy lottery tickets and watch game shows are probably the same people that loved this movie.  In other words, Slumdog Millionaire plays into the fantasy shared by so many that no matter how bad things may be, there is always the hope, taken very seriously by such people, that one day they may hit it big.  Never having indulged in such a fantasy, however, this movie was simply not believable to me, not even qua fantasy.

With quiz shows like Jeopardy! the successful contestants are those with prodigious memories for facts, figures, names, dates, and places.  But the quiz show Jamal participates in is multiple choice, which means that, as Jamal himself notes at one point, you don’t have to be a genius to answer those questions.  In fact, pure luck might get you by.  Most of the time he is able to answer the question correctly because some horrible thing was going on in his life at the moment he happened upon the information that allows him to answer the question, such as his seeing a statue of a god just after his mother got her brains bashed in.  But if he is asked a question for which there was no corresponding traumatic event in his life, he is in trouble.  So, when he is asked about India’s emblem, whether it says that it is truth, lies, fashion, or money that triumphs, he has not the slightest idea what the answer to that question could possibly be.  The policeman who is torturing him into confessing that he is cheating says that his five-year-old daughter could answer that question.  Quite right, because nothing more than common sense is needed.  In fact, Jamal does seem to be something of a mouth-breather.

But this plays right into the above-mentioned fantasy.  Most of us know we could never win at Jeopardy!, but since we could do even better than Jamal at that point, we can easily imagine winning such a game show, especially if we are lucky enough to be asked questions about trivia that happens to come to our attention when something awful happens to us like jumping into a cesspool of human dung.

The final question is the name of the third musketeer in the novel by Dumas.  We all know the answer to that question, especially when prompted by the multiple-choice format, so now we can really fantasize about how we might win such a contest.  He does not know the answer, but that’s all right, because he just guesses that it is Aramis.  Why is he so lucky at this point?  Because Latika was Jamal and his brother’s “third musketeer.”  How could he lose?

On the night he wins the twenty million rupees, Latika is freed from the gangster who has been beating her and raping her for years, so now Jamal and Latika can live happily ever after on his millions.  And so, as the musical finale takes place, as uplifting as the ending of The Music Man or Grease, my only thought was that they are going to get married and start having babies, oblivious to nightmare world that has characterized their lives up to that point.

The only way this movie makes any sense to me is if the whole thing is Jamal’s hallucination while being tortured in a police station for stealing a bicycle.

English for the Twenty-First Century

There was a time when there were only two sexes and three genders.  Those were the days when sex pertained to plants and animals and gender pertained to language, so that the sexes were male and female, while the genders were masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Because men were regarded as the primary sex, we tended to use masculine pronouns even when the sex of the individual was unknown or indeterminate, as in, “Someone left his pen on the table.”

When men got together with other men to do manly things like fight a war, run a business, or sail a ship, the result was that lots of things were referred to with masculine and neuter pronouns, with feminine pronouns seldom being used.  Sailors, for example, would have nothing but men and things about them for months at a time, and so it came to pass that feminine pronouns could be used to refer to anything of special significance.  Thus, sexless objects like hurricanes or the ships they sailed on were referred to as “she,” and even whales, half of whom must have been male, were nevertheless so referred to when sighted, with the expression, “Thar she blows!”

However, as women began taking on roles outside the home, the English language began to accommodate their presence in a different ways.  For some time, the singular “they” has been used to coordinate with indefinite pronouns, so that it has become standard colloquial English to say, “Someone left their pen on the table.”  The singular “they” has become so popular, in fact, that someone is likely to use it even when they know that the person is a male.

Academics are often found using the feminist gender, as in, “A scientist will check her results thoroughly,” although the reader usually ends up thinking that a particular woman was referred to earlier and finds herself looking back a few pages to see what she missed.

And there is always the legalese alternative, as in, “Someone left his or her pen on the table,” which is grammatically sound.  Given these alternatives, it is left to each person to decide for himself or herself how he or she wishes to express his or her thoughts.  So far as I know, there has been no objection to placing the masculine gender before the feminine when speaking legalese, but this oversight should no longer be tolerated.  Precedence must be alternated, so that half the time we should say, “Someone left her or his pen on the table.”

Finally, there is the possibility of avoiding the sex of the individual altogether, as when we use the word “person” instead of “man.”  Instead of saying, “The brotherhood of man,” we can say, “The siblinghood of personhood.”  On other hand, whereas it once would have seemed strange to refer to a man’s spouse instead of his wife, such a locution now serves the useful function of letting us know that the man in question is married to another man.

Because the word “sex” makes us think of intercourse, which may unnecessarily excite the imagination, the word “gender” has come to have more than grammatical significance, referring to persons instead of just nouns and pronouns.  I do not know if there is a definitive list of all the possible genders, telling us how many there are or how exactly they are defined, but there seem to be more than males, females, and things, and there seems to be more to it than anatomy.  As these additional genders (as a feature of persons) are a recent invention (discovery?), so too do we need additional genders (as a feature of grammar) to go with them.

However, whereas it used to be easy to discern the sex of a person, it is not so easy to discern that person’s gender.  Lest we refer to someone as a man when he, she, or whatever is actually something else, a recent solution has been to introduce a new pronoun, the word “ze,” to be used in place of “he” and “she.”  In so doing, the third person singular would become like the pronouns of the first or second person as well as the third person plural, which is to say, it would not be inflected for gender at all.  An alternative would be for the first person singular to be inflected for gender, so that variations on the word “I” would tell us which gender a person regarded himself, herself, or whateverself, from which we could follow his, her, or whatever’s lead, but the trend is to avoid the implications completely with totally neutral pronouns like “ze.”

Exactly why “ze” was chosen as the way out when we already have the singular “they,” I am not sure.  When referring to a student standing in the hallway, we traditionally might have said, “I wonder if he knows where Professor Plum’s class is.”  To avoid presuming upon the student’s gender, however, we could say, “I wonder if they know where Professor Plum’s class is.”  Apparently the extension of the singular “they” to such situations is unacceptable owing to the inherent plural connotation of that pronoun. Many would end up looking for two or more people rather than that single individual.  And so, we are advised to say, “I wonder if ze knows where Professor Plum’s class is.”

That’s fine, except the job is not done.  While “ze” is all right for the nominative or subjective case, surely it will be inflected for the other cases as well.  The article linked above made no reference to these other cases, but we need something for the objective pronouns “him” and “her,” the possessive adjectives “his” and “her,” the possessive pronouns “his” and “hers,” as well as the reflexive forms “himself” and “herself.”  Now, whereas “ze” is no more similar to “he” than to “she,” it is obvious that we cannot simply say “zim” or “zis,” because then we would be giving away our preference for the masculine gender.  I suggest we use the word “zerm” for the objective case, combining elements from both “him” and “her.”  If this is acceptable, we can then have “zerms” for the possessive case, both adjectives and pronouns, and “zermself” for the reflexive form.

Once this innovation becomes standard, we can finally eliminate the singular “they,” for we can then say, “Someone left zerms pen on the table.”  But all this is just so much theory, if we don’t put it into practice.  We can talk the talk, but can we talk the talk?  If someone writes a blog on this website in the future, it is hoped that ze will use these new pronouns, so that zerms writing will reflect zerms desire to be sensitive to another person’s gender, treating zerm the way ze would want to be treated zermself.

Fury (2014)

Because we are Americans, it is second nature for us to pull for American soldiers in a war movie, especially a World War II movie where we know that the Nazis are the most evil enemy we have ever fought.  But by the time this movie was over, I was pretty much past those preconceptions.

Had I not known anything about WWII, I would have been pulling for the Germans to kill all the evil Americans, who murder surrendering prisoners, rape innocent women, act like brutes, and bully the new recruit because he is a little guy who can’t defend himself.  The only suggestion that the Germans were evil in this movie was the way they hanged the draft dodgers and forced young teenagers to fight, but that seems almost benign compared to what we see the Americans do.

The movie centers around a tank crew led by Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt).  A replacement, Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), is added to the crew, and he is immediately badgered and bullied by the rest of them, all of whom are bigger than he is in addition to outnumbering him, so there is no chance that he could defend himself.  You see, there they are in the middle of Germany toward the end of the war, but this tank crew isn’t satisfied to have the Germans for enemies, so they figure they will try to make an enemy out of this new guy as well.

Now, Don’s motive for treating Norman roughly is to toughen him up, so that he will be able to commit war crimes just like the rest of them.  But Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal) and Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña) are mean to him for a much more basic reason, which is that cruelty is fun.  I found myself hoping that Norman was just waiting for the chance to be alone with any one of them and would then put a bullet in his back.

The ultimate absurdity in this movie comes when Don and Norman go into an apartment where there are two German women.  Don says to Norman regarding the younger of the two, “If you don’t take her into that bedroom, I will.”  Reluctantly, Norman takes the girl into the bedroom.  When they close the door behind them, Don says to the other woman, “They’re young, and they’re alive.”  Aw!  Isn’t that sweet?  Rape can be so lovely and romantic when it occurs during wartime.

I really was glad that, except for Norman, the Americans in the tank all died in the end.  They deserved it.

Moses Movies

I watched the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments the other day, and I was intrigued by it.  It started me thinking about how Moses movies have changed over the last century.  One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, I was binge-watching a whole bunch of them, which then led to the decision to present my thoughts on all these movies in an essay.  I cannot claim to have made an exhaustive survey.  I would like to have seen The Ten Commandments:  The Movie (2016), but the DVD is not available yet.  I did not bother with any animated versions, such as The Prince of Egypt (1998), because these are obviously aimed at children.  My interest is not what dramatic presentations are deemed suitable for children, but rather what dramatic presentations are deemed suitable for adults.  Any documentaries examining what evidence there is for the story in the Book of Exodus were passed over, such as The Exodus Revealed:  Search for the Red Sea Crossing (2001).  While such films are not without value, the truth or falsity of the story of the Hebrews in Egypt is not my concern at the moment.  I am only interested in contrasting the story as told in the Bible with the story as told in the theaters or on television, and how that has changed over time.  For that purpose, it would be all the same if the story in Exodus were literally true, partly true, or just so much fiction and fantasy.

 

The Ten Commandments (1923)

 

The first movie to depict the story about Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, The Ten Commandments (1923), was directed by Cecil B. DeMille.  DeMille obviously enjoyed making biblical movies about pagan decadence and debauchery, accompanied by much spectacle and wrath of God, so notwithstanding its being a silent film and all, I figured it might be worth a look.  I was surprised, then, when early in the movie we learn that Egypt has already been visited by nine plagues, none of which we got to see.  What’s the deal?  This is especially perplexing considering that the movie is two hours and sixteen minutes long.  Even the tenth plague, the one where all of Egypt’s firstborn die, is disappointing, for we see no one actually being struck down.  All we see is the Pharaoh’s son alive, and then later we see him dead, after which the Pharaoh tells Moses to take his people and get out.

 

As we all know, people pick and choose the parts of the Bible they agree with and ignore the rest.  But movies have the unique task of picking and choosing the parts of the Bible that are suitable for dramatic presentation to large audiences.  One of the items we expect the movies to suppress is the one in which the Hebrews loot Egypt before they leave, taking gold and silver jewelry and some nice clothes as well under false pretenses.  As a burning bush, God told Moses he would do this in Exodus 3:

 

3:21  And I will give this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians: and it shall come to pass, that, when ye go, ye shall not go empty:

 

3:22  But every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians.

 

Just before the tenth plague, in Exodus 11, God tells Moses this last plague will do the trick.  Therefore, the time to start borrowing gold and silver jewelry is now:

 

11:2  Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbour, and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold.

 

It does indeed come to pass, as stated in Exodus 12:

 

12:35  And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment:

 

12:36  And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.

 

Now, whereas Exodus 11 seems to imply that the borrowing took place before the tenth plague, Exodus 12 seems to imply that it took place afterwards.  The movie follows the latter interpretation, the Great Borrowing coming after the tenth plague has taken its toll, with the intertitle saying, “And they despoiled the Egyptians of jewels of silver, jewels of gold, and raiment.”

 

Try to imagine what that must have been like.  It’s the middle of the night, and the firstborn of each Egyptian household has died (Exodus 12:29-30).  During that same night (Exodus 12:31-34), the Pharaoh tells the Moses to take his people and leave immediately.  So, all the borrowing must have taken place before the sun had even come up.  A typical example might be a Hebrew woman knocking on the door of an Egyptian woman, saying, “I heard a great cry coming from your house, so I figured you were up.  Oh, your baby just died?  I’m so sorry.  But since you will probably be in mourning for a while, could I borrow your bracelets, necklaces, and earrings in the meantime?”  It is only something to be imagined, however, because there are no such scenes in the movie.  Instead, all we get is just that one lousy intertitle, followed by scenes of people leaving Egypt.  If you didn’t know better, you might wonder why they even bothered to mention it.  It might also make you wonder if that was the real reason the Pharaoh changed his mind and chased after the Hebrews:  “Hey!  They borrowed all our gold and silver jewelry, and I’ll bet they don’t intend to return it.  Let’s go get it back.”

 

We finally get some spectacle when the Hebrews come to the Red Sea.  Not bad, considering.  Then Moses climbs up Mount Sinai to receive the title Commandments.  While he is away, the Hebrews make a Golden Calf.  And that, of course, is why it was necessary to include the part about borrowing the jewelry, so we don’t wonder where a bunch of slaves got all the gold needed for its fabrication.  But since the manner in which they obtained that gold is disgraceful, the movie downplays it by not depicting it.

 

The Golden Calf having been made, Miriam, Moses’ sister, gets all sensual with it while displaying as much of her body as was permitted in the movies in those days.  Dathan, “the discontented,” starts to make love to her, but then he sees she has leprosy.  Now, somewhat later, as told in Numbers 12, God does eventually inflict Miriam with leprosy, because she objected to Moses marrying an Ethiopian woman, but in this movie, she gets inflicted with the disease during the Golden Calf party.  Moses breaks the tablets in anger, Miriam begs him to heal her, and God lashes out with bolts of lightning, ending the party.

 

It is at this point that we find out why we were shortchanged on the first nine plagues of Egypt.  After only fifty minutes of screen time, with almost an hour and a half to go, the movie jumps to the present, and we discover that we have been watching a visualization of the story in Exodus as it was being read by a woman to her two adult sons.  One of the two sons, Johnny, is a carpenter (Oh, brother!), and he is the good son.  The other, Dan, is an atheist, and he blasphemes, making fun of the whole story.

 

At the beginning of the movie, there was a prologue that told of how belief in God had come to be thought of as a “religious complex,” and how people had come to think of the Ten Commandments as old fashioned.  But then came the World War.  “And now a blood-drenched bitter world—no longer laughing—cries for a way out.”  That way out, of course, is the Ten Commandments, the Law without which men cannot live.

 

The World War must have already worn off on Dan, however, and it isn’t long before his mother turns him out of the house for his godless attitude.  What follows is a melodramatic plot in which Mary, a homeless and hungry but beautiful woman, is allowed to stay with Johnny and his mother, as well as with Dan, who came back to get his coat, and, seeing Mary there, decided to stick around awhile.  Johnny and Dan both fall in love with Mary, but she marries Dan.  They leave the house, promising to break all the Ten Commandments as they live their heathen lives.

 

We don’t see Dan and Mary making any graven images of God, but other than that, they do presumably break the other nine Commandments, and the juicy ones are actually depicted.  Dan cheats on Mary by having an affair with Sally Lung, a woman half French and half Chinese—a dangerous combination Dan is told by one of his cohorts.  As for the Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” Dan inadvertently does in his own mother when the cathedral he was building with shoddy cement collapses on her.  And it turns out that the ship that brought in the cheap material for making that cement passed by an island that was a leper colony, from which point Sally Lung had stowed away.  Why Dan never noticed her leprosy while he was having sex with her, we don’t know, but his skin starts showing the tell-tale signs.  He shoots Sally in anger, so this time he deliberately breaks that Commandment about not killing.  Then he ends up giving the disease to Mary, just before he tries to escape the law for his role in the cathedral collapse and ends up killing himself when his speedboat hits some rocks.  So, the theme of leprosy as punishment for sin runs through both parts of this movie.

 

Mary decides to run away, possibly planning to kill herself, now that she has leprosy, but Johnny stops her.  He reads to her from the New Testament, telling her about love, and in the morning she is cured of the disease.  This squares with the dying words of the mother, who said she was wrong to make religion be about fear of God instead of love.  But it doesn’t square with the prologue, which said the Ten Commandments, not the New Testament, were what people needed following the World War.  Ambivalence regarding the Ten Commandments vis-à-vis the message in the gospels, however, is not unique to this movie.

 

The Ten Commandments (1956)

We may have wished for a little more spectacle while watching Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 movie titled The Ten Commandments, but we never feel shortchanged while watching his great 1956 remake, for it has spectacle galore.  In addition, the principal actors get to wear those nifty outfits and deliver all those heavy lines, speaking in a manner that befits an epic from ancient times.  Actually, the biblical Moses had a difficult time speaking on account of his “uncircumcised lips” (Exodus 6:12), but would we really want to hear Charlton Heston, who plays the part of Moses, stuttering and stammering his way through this movie?  If any movie ever called for an eloquent Moses, this is it.  Other improvements add dramatic interest.  The addition of Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) as part of a love triangle between Moses and Rameses II (Yul Brynner) is good stuff.  She gets to look all beautiful and sensual, while the two men get to display their muscular, chiseled bodies as they try to out-macho each other.

Speaking of macho, Moses is portrayed as an Egyptian general who has been victorious in battle, even though there is no indication of this in the Bible.  This may be a way of staving off the idea that Judaism and Christianity are, as Nietzsche argued, religions suitable for slaves, which is to say, those who are weak and defeated.  It is not unusual to see movies in which religious figures are shown to be strong, so that we are assured that in being Jews or Christians, they are not just making a virtue out of their weakness.  For example, in San Francisco (1936), Clark Gable plays Blackie Norton, an atheist; Spencer Tracy plays Tim Mullin, a priest.  Early in the movie, we see them sparring in a boxing ring.  Tim knocks Blackie to the mat, and Blackie admits that Tim is the better boxer and always has been.  Later in the movie, Blackie and Tim argue over Mary Blake (Jeanette MacDonald), Blackie wanting her body, Tim trying to save her soul.  When Blackie hits Tim in the face, drawing blood, Tim does not hit back.  The earlier scene in the boxing ring, then, was necessary to assure us that it was not out of weakness or fear that Tim did not hit back, but because Jesus said we should turn the other cheek.  Tim became a priest out of strength, the movie is at pains to say, not weakness.  It is probably for the same reason that this movie portrays Moses as a mighty warrior.

These are aesthetic alterations, however, while others are of a moral nature.  For example, the God of the Old Testament is the God of the Hebrews, who are his chosen people, while the Moses of the movie has a Universalist attitude, saying God is for everyone.  Also, there is no indication that the Hebrews were opposed to slavery per se, but only that they did not like being slaves themselves, whereas the Moses of the movie talks as though slavery is intrinsically wrong.

And then there are all those times referred to in Exodus where the Pharaoh is just about to agree to let the Hebrews go, but then God hardens his heart:

4:21  And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.

Thanks to the addition of Nefretiri, however, the movie is able to blame her for hardening Rameses II’s heart, although Moses does throw in a quick line about how God will work his will through her.  But mostly, the movie wants us to blame the woman.

The reason given as to why God keeps hardening the heart of the Pharaoh is to make a point:

14:4  And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, that he shall follow after them; and I will be honoured upon Pharaoh, and upon all his host; that the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD.

That seems to be acceptable as long as God is just making the lives of the Egyptians miserable, as when they have to walk around in the dark for three days (Exodus 10), but we start feeling a little queasy when God decides to make his point by killing all of the Egyptians’ firstborn (Exodus 11).  To render God’s behavior morally acceptable to a modern audience, the movie first has Rameses II decide to kill all the firstborn of the Hebrews to show them what’s what.  Earlier in the movie, the previous Pharaoh, Rameses I, had ordered all the newly born Hebrew sons to be killed.  And so, while watching the movie, we readily believe that Rameses II would do something similar.  In point of fact, there is nothing of that in the Bible.  It is God who simply decides to kill all the firstborn Egyptians to really make the point that he is the Lord.  But in the movie, once Rameses II orders the killing of all the firstborn of the Hebrews, Moses talks as though this has set in motion an opposite process, the killing of all the firstborn Egyptians, almost as if there is a kind of supernatural mechanism that brings this result about automatically.

But let’s back up for a moment.  As told in Exodus 1, a previous king of Egypt had feared the increasingly numerous Hebrews and thus ordered that all the newly born sons be killed.  Of course, if you want to put a check on population growth, the thing to do is kill the girls, but this king was thinking of the military strength of the Hebrews and thus worried about the boys.  And this was what led to Moses’ mother putting her baby in a basket, where he was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter and raised by her as her son (Exodus 2).

This movie, however, deviates from the biblical story in an important way.  The movie has the High Priest give Rameses I a very different motive for killing the newly born males, saying, “Divine One, last night our astrologers saw an evil star enter into the house of Egypt.”  He goes on to say that this star foretells trouble from the Hebrew slaves:  “Among these slaves, there is the prophecy of a Deliverer who will lead them out of bondage.  The star proclaims his birth.”  As a result of this warning from the High Priest, the Pharaoh orders the death of all newly born males.

The similarities between this story and the one in Matthew 2, in which Herod hears that the King of the Jews has just been born from some wise men, who know of this because they saw a star, after which Herod orders all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two to be slain, is so painfully obvious that I cannot believe the people responsible for putting it in the movie had the gall to do so.  Presumably, the reason for it was to Christianize, if only subliminally, the story of Moses.

Anyway, after the death of Rameses II’s firstborn son, he tells Moses that he and his people can go, taking their belongings and livestock with them.  But then Rameses tosses in a remark from out of left field:  “Take what spoils from Egypt you will, but go.”  That’s a little bizarre.  It is not as though Moses had made that demand previously, as in, “Let our people go, and throw in all your gold and silver too, or get ready for some plagues.”  But having Rameses say this makes it look as though he offered to let the Hebrews take the gold and silver, that it was decreed by him, rather than the way the Bible tells it, that the Hebrews accumulated the gold and silver by way of individuals borrowing jewelry in bad faith.

It is not enough, however, to have the Hebrews come into possession of the Egyptian gold and silver merely as an instance of “To the victor belong the spoils.”  Instead, a man tosses gold items out to the crowd, saying, “All who shared the toil will share this gold.”  In short, the spoils are anachronistically construed as reparations for slavery.

After the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptians, the Hebrews eventually make it to Mount Sinai, which Moses climbs in order to talk to God.  While he is away, the people begin to think he is never coming back.  In Exodus 32, the people ask Aaron, brother of Moses, to make gods for them, and he complies.  He even has all the people get naked and dance around.  In the movie, it is Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) who inspires the people to demand a Golden Calf.  Aaron (John Carradine) opposes the idea and later protests that the people made him do it.  So, the movie minimizes Aaron’s complicity.

When Moses comes down from the mountain with the tablets and sees the orgy going on, he blows up the Golden Calf by flinging the tablets on it.  Just as Miriam got her leprosy a little early in the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, so too does Dathan meet his doom now when the earth opens up and swallows him instead of much later (Numbers 16).

When we reach the end of the movie, Moses knows he will soon die and that he will not be able to cross the Jordan.  Moses’ wife, Sephora (Yvonne De Carlo), referred to as “Zipporah” in the Bible, is with him, and this seems strange, because the Bible says that he eventually married an Ethiopian woman (Numbers 12).  In fact, early in the movie, Moses brings a beautiful Ethiopian princess to Egypt and presents her to the Pharaoh, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to be the one that Moses eventually married.  But this second wife has been expunged from the film.

On the other hand, some say that Moses had only one wife, that Zipporah was the Ethiopian woman.  That, however, would mean that Zipporah had been black all along, and not just slightly brown.  But then, notwithstanding the movie’s declaration that all slavery is wrong and that slaves deserve reparations, I suppose depicting Moses as being married to a black woman in 1956 would have been a little too much for the times.

Moses the Lawgiver (1975)

Originally, Moses the Lawgiver (1975) was a television mini-series with a running time of six hours.  I was only able to see an edited version lasting two hours and twenty minutes.  It begins where most Moses movies do, with the Pharaoh ordering all newly born Hebrew boys to be killed; but it follows the biblical account, in which the motive is to limit the military strength of the Hebrews, as opposed to the account in The Ten Commandments (1956), in which the motive parallels that of Herod in Matthew 2.

Just to make sure we in the audience know that Yokebed’s baby is a boy, we are shown the baby’s penis right after he is born.  Now, I would have taken their word for it, but as long as they went to the trouble of putting it on full display, I could not help but notice that the penis was uncircumcised.  You may think this should not be worth commenting on, but it turns out that this movie is taking a stand on of a matter of some controversy, for whether Moses was born circumcised is a bone of contention.  The following verse in Exodus is significant:

2:2  And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.

Regarding this, Chabad.org makes the following remark:

What did she see? One interpretation, cited in several classic sources, is that she saw that he was circumcised and knew that there was greatness in store for him. Being born circumcised was an expression of the otherworldly perfection that characterized the one who would speak face to face with G‑d.

I assume the “o” was left out of the word “God” so as not to violate a taboo about uttering or writing God’s name.  Anyway, this movie is in the camp of those who think Moses was born with his foreskin.

But that does raise an interesting question:  When was Moses circumcised?  In movies like the present one, as well as The Ten Commandments (1956), Moses does not find out until he is an adult that he is a Hebrew.  But if he was born circumcised or if his parents circumcised him before putting him in a basket, everyone would have known he was a Hebrew right off.  An uncircumcised Moses allows for more drama and suspense regarding Moses’ identity, and this may be the reason most movies prefer a Moses with foreskin, either explicitly, as in this case, or implicitly, as elsewhere.

As for what is in the Book of Exodus, however, it would appear that Moses knew all along that he was a Hebrew:

2:11  And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.

This would be consistent with the theory that Moses was either born circumcised or was circumcised before being put in the basket.  But enough of this.  Suffice it to say that Moses has grown to be a man in this movie before he and other Egyptians discover the truth.

Before going further, a word is necessary about the names of the Pharaohs.  In the 1956 movie, Rameses II is Moses’ stepbrother, the Pharaoh with whom Moses must contend.  In other movies, such as this one, Ramses II is the Pharaoh that orders all the newly born males to be killed, and it is one of his sons, Mernefta, that becomes the Pharaoh who refuses to let the Hebrews go.  The Bible never names the Pharaoh that reigned at the time of the exodus, so movies are free to name them as they see fit.  Also, as the names of the Pharaohs and other characters have various spellings, I simply follow the lead of whatever movie I am reviewing.  Finally, Moses’ relationship to the Pharaoh that will not let the Hebrews go varies from movie to movie.  Here, Moses and Mernefta are said to be cousins.  Similar differences among the movies concern which is Mount Horeb and which is Mount Sinai and whether they are one and the same.  The moral of all this is that there is no consistency among the several Moses movies as to who’s who or what’s what, so don’t look for any.  But only if you are crazy enough to binge-watch them all as I have is it likely to cause any confusion.

There is a theory one hears of from time to time that the ancient Egyptians were black.  I have never given it much credence, but for those who care about such things, we do see a handful of black Egyptians here and there.  They seem mostly to have low-level positions, however, while all the important Egyptians are white, the one exception being Mernefta’s wife, who is black.

As per the usual story, Moses kills an Egyptian that was beating a Hebrew, goes to Midian, marries Zipporah, and they have a son, Gershom.  After the passage of several years, Moses, now played by Burt Lancaster as an older man, sees the burning bush on Mount Horeb.  When God speaks to him, however, it is the voice of Burt Lancaster that we hear.  Then there are two miracles:  Moses’ staff is turned into a snake and then back into a staff; Moses’ hand is made leprous and then returned to normal.  Both miracles are filmed in a blurry, distorted manner.  It is hard to avoid interpreting the whole thing as a hallucination on Moses’ part.  Later on, Moses speaks of miracles as having ordinary causes, so there is patina of naturalism overlaying this film.

According to Exodus, after Moses learns that God has a special purpose for him, he heads back to Egypt, taking Zipporah and his son with him.  For some reason, this movie shows him leaving his family behind.  This is a significant departure, because Exodus tells us that on the way back to Egypt, Zipporah saves Moses’ life:

4:24  And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.

4:25  Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.

4:26  So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.

When this movie has Moses leave Zipporah and their son behind, I could not help but wonder, “So, what’s going to happen when God tries to kill Moses, and his wife is not around to do the necessaries?”  However, I have read that there is a scene from the original mini-series in which Zipporah circumcises their son, saving Moses’ life, before Moses heads back to Egypt alone.

It never surprises me when a movie leaves out the circumcision scene, of course.  But what does surprise me is the way several of these movies about Moses have him leave his wife and son behind when he sets out for Egypt.  In other words, when Exodus 4:20 specifically says Moses took his wife and son with him to Egypt, why would this movie and a few others have him abandon them, even if only temporarily?  It is not as though they are going to get in the way, as can be seen from watching the movies where they do accompany Moses back to Egypt.  My guess is that this departure from the Bible is due to a feeling that domesticity and spirituality do not go together, so the producers of these movies figure that the less we see of Zipporah and Gershom, the better.

Anyway, Moses returns to Egypt, there are the ten plagues, and the Pharaoh finally allows the Hebrews to go.  The Great Borrowing does not take place, as in The Ten Commandments (1923), nor is gold and silver jewelry taken as reparations for slavery, as in The Ten Commandments (1956).  All we see is one Egyptian woman being granted a drink of water from a Hebrew when the first plague turns all the water into blood, after which she gives the Hebrew something in return, which I believe is a piece of gold jewelry.  Perhaps we are supposed to generalize from that scene, in which case the Hebrews get the jewelry by selling water to the Egyptians.  In any event, when the Hebrews arrive at Mount Horeb (aka Mount Sinai), Moses climbs it, and the people get tired of waiting for him to return, there is talk of “the treasure,” which we see is not only gold and silver jewelry, but also gold goblets and what have you.  Since this is a shortened version of the six-hour mini-series, perhaps the Great Borrowing was actually depicted but edited out for the version that I saw.

As usual, Aaron is shown to be reluctant about building the Golden Calf, it all being Dathan’s fault.  Moses returns and breaks the tablet with the Ten Commandments on them.  Following that, Exodus tells of how Moses gathered the Levites around them and ordered the slaughter of kith and kin:

32:27  And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.

32:28  And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

The ways in which people are put to death in this movie are various:  one guy has liquid gold from the idol ladled down his throat; others are stoned to death; many are slain with arrows; and we see another man being thrown off a cliff.  Now, all this may seem a bit much just for building a graven image and dancing naked around it, so this movie tries to justify the slaughter by making the orgy that took place worse than that described in Exodus 32.  The movie shows a man being murdered and his woman being sacrificed to the Golden Calf, thus making the Hebrews seem a little more deserving of the death penalty.

Speaking of the death penalty, there is a scene earlier in the movie in which Moses explains the idea of the Sabbath, a day of rest.  Anyone who violates the Sabbath will be punished, he says.  As we know, Exodus says the punishment is death:

31:14  Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it is holy unto you: every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.

In the movie, however, when someone asks Moses what the punishment for breaking the Sabbath will be, Moses answers, “We’ll think of that later.”  I snickered when I saw this scene, figuring it was the movie’s way avoiding something that might offend a modern audience, a tactic not uncommon in Bible movies.  Much to my surprise, however, when later in the movie a couple of men are caught chopping down a sapling on the Sabbath, Moses, having by now had a chance to think it over, orders that they be stoned to death, just as is written in Numbers 15:32-36.  We get to see the stoning of these men, which is pretty gruesome.  I guess the value of stoning as punishment lies in its participatory nature.  Only one man could put someone to the sword.  Perhaps several men could shoot arrows into a condemned man as a sort of primitive firing squad.  But the whole tribe can take part in a stoning, thereby strengthening the communal bonds.

In Numbers 20, the story is told where God informs Moses and Aaron that they will not enter the Promised Land, apparently because Moses was angry when he struck a stone to get water, or because he struck the stone twice instead of speaking to it, or because he did not believe what God said:

20:12  And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.

At the end of the movie, Moses says he never really understood this “sin of doubt.”  That makes two of us.  Anyway, he speculates that Aaron’s sin was that he loved the people more than the Law, whereas he, Moses, loved the Law more than the people.  Presumably, this is the movie’s way of looking forward to the New Testament.

Greatest Heroes of the Bible (1978-1979)

The Story of Moses (1978) and The Ten Commandments (1979) are two parts of a television mini-series entitled Greatest Heroes of the Bible.  And there are two parts, in turn, to The Story of Moses, the first half of which appears not to be included on the DVD I watched, because the story starts when Moses (John Marley) has just returned to Egypt and has started making demands on the Pharaoh.  Presumably, that first part had the stuff about Moses being put in a basket, fleeing to Midian, marrying Zipporah, and seeing the burning bush.  On the other hand, the Pharaoh acts as though he has never seen Moses before or even heard of him, which belies the story that Moses was raised by the daughter of the previous Pharaoh.  But since I did not get to see the first part, I cannot explain this oddity.

From what I was able to see, in any event, there is not much remarkable about either of these two movies from the mini-series.  Nothing is said about God hardening the Pharaoh’s heart, and unlike The Ten Commandments (1956), which blamed it on the Pharaoh’s wife, in this movie the wife does all she can to soften his heart.  The hardening appears to be nothing but a character flaw.  There is nothing about the Great Borrowing in this film, nor is there any other explanation, like reparations for slavery, as to where the Hebrews got all the gold needed to make a Golden Calf.  In other words, instead of giving alternative explanations for problematic parts of the story as do some of the other Moses movies, these two movies just sidestep them altogether.

One thing the second of these two movies does not sidestep, however, is Aaron’s complicity in the building of the Golden Calf.  Though Exodus 32 shows no reluctance on Aaron’s part in gathering gold to fashion an idol, yet the movies usually depict him as resisting the idea.  This version of The Ten Commandments, however, takes the extra step of completely making up a story about his son Eleazar, in which he is almost murdered by a man who wants his wife.  Because Aaron is desperate for Eleazar to recover from being run through with a sword, he goes along with fabricating the Golden Calf in the hope that this god will do what the God of Moses has not.  So, whereas other movies simply show Aaron giving in to pressure, this movie further apologizes for him by adding a father’s love to the mix.

The funny thing is, no sooner do they make the Golden Calf and start dancing around it than Eleazar recovers.  If we didn’t already know the story, we might conclude that the Golden Calf is a god of great power, and that Aaron did the right thing in deciding to worship it.  But we know the fix is in.  The prima facie evidence for the efficacy of this idol notwithstanding, the Golden Calf has to go.

Moses (1995)

The title character of Moses (1995) is a far cry from the manly Moses played by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956).  First of all, he is played by Ben Kingsley, whose screen persona is mostly determined by movies like Gandhi (1982) and Schindler’s List (1994).  As an example of the difference, Exodus tells of how Moses helped the seven daughters of the priest of Midian water their father’s flock when some shepherds tried to drive them away, but it does not say how he did this:

2:17  And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock.

The Charlton Heston Moses of The Ten Commandments (1956) uses physical force to drive the shepherds back, and most of the other Moses movies that depict this scene show Moses using force as well, an exception being Moses the Lawgiver (1975), in which Moses’ commanding voice and imposing demeanor intimidates the shepherds; but the Ben Kingsley Moses bluffs the shepherds, making them think Egyptian soldiers will soon be arriving and will take their sheep.  He is the weakest Moses of any of the movies I watched.  Whereas the Heston Moses declares at Midian, “I will dwell in this land” (which is epic-speak for “I’m going to live here”), the Kingsley Moses wants to leave, but Jethro, the Midian priest, overwhelms him with his insistence that he stay, and, not knowing how to get out of it, Moses relents.  We also see Moses crying, and he is given the speech difficulties of the biblical Moses.

According to Exodus, Moses marries Zipporah and they have a son.  Years later, Moses encounters the burning bush and learns that God has a special purpose for him.  So, he takes Zipporah and his son and heads back to Egypt.  As in Moses the Lawgiver (1975), however, this movie shows him leaving his family behind; but unlike Moses the Lawgiver, we never see Zipporah again.  Jethro shows up and talks to Moses at one point, but he is by himself.  As noted in the review of the former movie, the reason for minimizing Zipporah and their two sons was likely the sense that a man with a wife and two children to support will not be able to dedicate himself fully to the plans that God has for him.  Perhaps another consideration is the sense we get from Exodus 18 that Moses sent Zipporah and his two sons back to Jethro because he was tired of them.  However you look at it, Moses just does not seem to be a good husband and father in the Bible, and movies have to work around that the best they can.

On some points, this movie seems to be a fairly authentic rendering of the Book of Exodus.  For example, unlike the Heston Moses, who is shocked to learn in a dramatic moment that he is a Hebrew, the Kingsley Moses and everyone else pretty much knows all along to which race he belongs, which is indicated in the original story (Exodus 2:11).  Furthermore, this movie fully accepts the biblical explanation for why the Pharaoh would not let the Hebrews go, to wit, that God kept hardening his heart.  Moses says at one point that God will keep hardening the Pharaoh’s heart until he thinks the time is right for the Hebrews to get their freedom.  Moreover, the Pharaoh (in this movie, Mermefta) is not the one who first threatens to kill all the firstborn of the Hebrews, as Rameses did in the 1956 movie, which then brought about the tenth plague in which all the firstborn Egyptians were killed instead.  Rather, this movie follows the Bible in having God make the first move against the firstborn of the Egyptians.

By this time I was starting to be impressed.  The elimination of Zipporah aside, the movie really seemed to be following the Book of Exodus.  For a moment, I thought I was actually going to see a depiction of the Hebrews intruding on grieving Egyptian families so they could borrow all their jewelry just before they left town.  But at this point, the producers of this movie had a failure of nerve.  Scenes of the Great Borrowing were apparently deemed unsuitable for our consumption.  It is not even referred to.

That aside, the movie once again follows the Bible in the parting of the Red Sea, which according to Exodus 14:21, was brought about by an east wind that blew all night.  And this may be as good a point as any to say that while this Moses movie may be more faithful to the original story in many ways, the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments is by far the greater movie.  I got bored watching the Kingsley Moses hold his staff out all night long while waiting for the sea to part.  In fact, in this and many other ways, this movie seems to drag on forever.  Dramatically speaking, I’ll take the Heston Moses, who says, “Behold his mighty hand!” after which the Rea Sea parts before our very eyes.

Eventually, they come to Mount Sinai, where God tells Moses to get the people sanctified before he will speak to them.  In the movie, Moses tells the people to wash their clothes and tells the men not to have sex with their wives for three days, just as in the Bible, but the movie leaves out the part where any person or any animal that touches Mount Sinai during a three-day period must be put to death.  When God does speak, this is dramatized in the movie by having the Hebrews spontaneously utter the words of God themselves, as if they are all divinely inspired.  Beginning in Exodus 20, Moses receives the Ten Commandments, orally at first, along with a bunch of additional jaw-dropping laws, such as the one that tells you the proper way to sell your daughter into slavery, that no movie, including this one, will have anything to do with.  In the end, however, only the Ten Commandments are engraved on the two tablets.

There is no Dathan in this movie.  Taking his place is Zerack, but since he is not mentioned in the Book of Exodus either, they might just as well have kept Dathan.  Perhaps people producing these Moses movies feel the need to show their independence from what came before, even if only in small ways, so Dathan is replaced by Zerack just as Rameses is replaced by Mermefta.  In any event, Zerack is just as thick-headed in his skepticism as Dathan was in the 1956 movie, never believing in God for more than five minutes after the last miracle.  And just as in the 1956 movie, it is Zerack who is primarily responsible for making the Golden Calf, with Aaron giving in reluctantly after much pressure, instead of freely going along with the idea, as told in Exodus 32.  No reference is made to where the Hebrews got enough gold to make the calf, however, neither by way of the Great Borrowing nor by way of the reparations for slavery in the 1956 movie.  We are just left to suppose that these former slaves had that much gold jewelry all along.

When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and sees what is going on, he becomes angry.  Now, just prior to that, according to Exodus 32, God was angry about the exact same thing, and Moses admonished him so much that God “repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (32:14).  But Moses ends up doing the very evil he talked God out of.  First, he breaks the tablets.  Following that, Exodus 32 tells of how Moses gathered the Levites around them and ordered the slaughter of kith and kin.  We only get to see a light version of this part of the story in the movie.  Moses orders the killing to begin, and it appears that maybe twenty or thirty men are killed, somewhat less than the biblical three thousand.  Still, it is pretty crude seeing Moses put a bunch of people to death just for sculpting a cow.

After Zerack is dispatched in the massacre, Miriam takes his place as a malcontent.  Numbers 11 tells of how the people began grumbling about not having meat and vegetables to eat, nothing but the same old manna day after day, and in the movie, Miriam becomes the spokesman for this grievance.  For that she is struck with leprosy.  As we know, Numbers 12 tells us that she got leprosy when she and Aaron objected to Moses marrying an Ethiopian woman, but no such woman is to be seen in this movie.  You would think that once the decision has been made to omit the story about Moses marrying an Ethiopian woman, the people making the movie would cut Miriam a break and omit the leprosy too.  After all, the leprosy was supposed to be condign punishment:

12:10  And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous.

As a technical matter, leprosy does not turn people white, so this disease was probably confused with something else that does.  But whatever it was that turned Miriam white, it was as if God was saying, “So you think it is wrong for Moses to marry a black woman, huh?  You think being white is superior, do you?  Well, I’ll show you white.  Take that!”

Notwithstanding the fact that this specific punishment goes with that specific sin, for some reason, this movie and the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments omit the Ethiopian woman but still afflict Miriam with leprosy.  It is as if the idea of Miriam having leprosy was too satisfying to let go, and so they just came up with some other reason to punish her.

While we are on the subject, The Ten Commandments:  The Musical (2006), starring Val Kilmer as Moses, does not deserve a separate review, but is worthy of a comment here.  It is basically the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments stripped down to the bare essentials, not only because it is only two hours long, but also because it is a musical, and time must be allowed for a lot of singing and dancing.  Nevertheless, Zipporah is played by Nita Whitaker, who is African American.  I guess this would go with the theory that Moses had only one wife, Zipporah, who was the Ethiopian woman all along.  But when Moses takes her to Egypt, and Miriam sees her, she voices no objection, and she does not get leprosy.  Make of that what you will.

As for the present movie, it continues on with the story of Moses and that of the Hebrews as told in subsequent books of the Bible, ending when Moses realizes he can never cross the Jordan.

The Ten Commandments (2006)

The Ten Commandments (2006) follows the 1956 movie of the same name in having the Pharaoh decide to kill all the newly born males on account of a prophecy about a Hebrew baby being born that will become a great leader of his people, causing Egypt much trouble, rather than the biblical account, in which the slaughter of infant boys was motivated by a fear of increasing military might on the part of the Hebrews.  The movie differs from the one in 1956, however, in that when Moses (Dougray Scott) grows to be a man, he has no interest in being a warrior, and says later on that he had no training as a soldier.  In fact, his stepbrother says he is “much more at home in a library.”  Furthermore, Moses finds out while still a child that he is a Hebrew.  This is somewhat in keeping with Exodus 2, which suggests that he knew this early on:

2:11  And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.

2:12  And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.

In the movie, however, instead of Moses killing an Egyptian for hitting a Hebrew, he kills the man for trying to rape a Hebrew woman right in front of her husband.  Perhaps this modification in the story is motivated by a desire to make things more relevant to our greater sensitivity to sexual assault these days.  Anyway, to avoid punishment, Moses takes to the desert and ends up at the well at Midian, where he drives the shepherds away from the daughters of Jethro.

He eventually marries Zipporah and takes her and their son with him back to Egypt after the burning bush episode.  But when it appears that the Pharaoh, Ramses II, is going to be difficult about letting the Hebrews go, Moses sends Zipporah and their son back home.

There is no reference to the Pharaoh’s heart being hardened, so no one is said to be the cause of such.  After the tenth plague, when the firstborn in each Egyptian family is killed by an angel of the Lord, Ramses finally relents.  I have already discussed how different movies have different names and relations regarding the Egyptians and Moses, but this movie is especially weird.  Moses’ stepbrother is Menerith, and it is Ramses who refuses to let the Hebrews go.  At first, I thought that meant Ramses was the father of Menerith, but that wouldn’t make sense, because he or some older sibling would have been the firstborn of Ramses that died in the tenth plague and not some little boy, which was the case in this movie.  (I say “sibling,” because the sex of the firstborn is not specified in Exodus 12 or in any of the movies.  And yet, I don’t think I saw any female firstborns die, so I cannot be sure.)

Up to this point, all Moses has demanded is that the Hebrews be allowed to leave, taking their possessions and livestock with them.  But just as Ramses says they can go, Moses throws in another demand:  “Before they leave, their masters and mistresses will give them gold and silver as tribute for the labor of four hundred years.”  In other words, the Great Borrowing does not take place in this movie.  Like the 1956 movie, the gold and silver is given to the Hebrews as reparations for slavery, the only difference being that in the 1956 movie, Rameses simply tells Moses to take the stuff without being asked, while here it becomes a last-minute item in Moses’ demands.

Things proceed as usual until sometime after the crossing of the Red Sea, when we get to the battle with the Amalekites, which is covered in Exodus 17.  This includes a rather bizarre bit about Moses keeping his hands up in the air:

17:11  And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.

17:12  But Moses’ hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.

The problem with this story is that it goes beyond the more or less acceptable forms of divine intervention that we expect in a religious movie and puts us into the realm of magic and silly superstition.  So, I wondered if it would be depicted in the movie.  The answer came very quickly, when Moses announced that there would be no miracles in this battle, that the Hebrews would have to win it themselves.  Moses does stand on a hill overlooking the battle, holding up his staff, and when he gets tired and lowers his hand, Aaron helps him hold it up.  That’s not bad.  It looks as though the staff, which has acquired a great deal of symbolic significance by now, acts like a flag.  As long as a flag flies during a battle, the thinking goes, soldiers are inspired to fight on; but should the flag fall to the ground, soldiers become dispirited.  So, I count this as a pretty decent rendering for modern audiences.

Later on, Jethro shows up with Zipporah and her two sons.  This part of the story in Exodus 18 is ambiguous as to whether Jethro later left by himself, leaving Zipporah and her two sons with Moses, or Jethro took his daughter and her sons with him.  The movie decides that Zipporah and her sons leave with Jethro.  Moses gives as a reason why she can’t stay with him that he has too much of the Lord’s work to do to have a family as well, but it is not very convincing.  With all the thousands of Hebrew families he has following him, it would seem that his own family tagging along would impose no great burden.

Early in the movie, we found out that Moses liked to spend time in the library.  This prepares us for a flashback that Moses has, in which an Egyptian priest tells him about Akhenaten, a Pharaoh that promoted the idea of monotheism, and it is suggested that this is where Moses got the idea that there is only one God, a theory advanced by Freud in Moses and Monotheism.  This is unusual for a Moses movie.  Normally, these movies make it look as though it was the Hebrews who first discovered God’s existence as a fact, not that monotheism is an idea, whether conceived of originally by the Hebrews or borrowed by them from Egyptian culture.  I suspect this scene about Akhenaten was thrown in as a sop to sophistication.

What follows is an interesting sequence, completely made up for the movie.  A man and a woman, both of whom are married, have an affair.  The woman’s husband surprises them while they are naked in a pool.  The husband starts abusing his wife, and the paramour kills him.  They hide the body.  When it is discovered, an innocent man is accused of murder.  When Moses asks for proof, the paramour steps forward and bears false witness against him.  The man is tied up so he can be stoned to death.  The adulteress is given the privilege of throwing the first stone, since it was her husband the man supposedly murdered, but Moses stops her.  I guess he had a hunch.  Eventually, she and her paramour confess, and they are tied up for stoning.  While dozens stand around with stones in their hands, Moses picks one up.  We think ahead to the New Testament.  Will Moses, a man guilty of murder himself, cast the first stone?  You’re darn right he will.  He throws it hard and true.  Many more stones follow, and the two adulterers are killed.

Anyway, it sure seems as though these people are in need of some Commandments, especially the ones about adultery, murder, and bearing false witness.  Of course, such things still go on in the world and always will, but I guess the idea is that the Ten Commandments will at least put a check on this sort of thing.  So, Moses climbs Mount Sinai to get the tablets, and while he is away, the people start demanding a Golden Calf.  Once again, Aaron is shown to be reluctant and overwhelmed by the demands of the malcontents, unlike the story in the Bible, which indicates complete willingness on his part.

In Exodus 32, after Moses gets back, becomes angry, breaks the tablets, and destroys the Golden Calf, he orders those who are on his side to stand with him:

32:27  And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.

32:28  And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

This movie gives us the whole hog.  Men are slaughtered right and left.  Then, when the battle is over, Moses is asked what should be done about the ones that surrendered, to which he answers, “No quarter!”

Most of the time, biblical movies try to avoid depicting scenes from the Bible in which a religious figure does something that would be morally offensive to a modern audience.  But this movie is actually more outrageous than the original story.  As indicated above, the Bible says that three thousand men were killed that day.  But the movie shows women and children being put to the sword.  Not that that would be out of character, for we know that women and children will be slaughtered by the Hebrews under Joshua’s command in the process of taking back the Promised Land.  Still, it is strange that we would see women and children being murdered when there is no indication of such happening in this particular story in Exodus.

In any event, when the killing was all done, it made me think of a line from Ninotchka (1939).  To paraphrase Greta Garbo’s classic remark, “They now have fewer but better Hebrews.”

Exodus:  Gods and Kings (2014)

The first thing we notice about Exodus:  Gods and Kings (2014) is the photography, even if we did not see it in 3D in the theater.  I assume it is digital photography of some sort, but whatever it is, I always get a feeling of revulsion whenever I see a movie that uses it.  However, I won’t belabor my personal preferences for ordinary film.  Another stylistic difference is the absence of the grandiose speaking often found in movies depicting an ancient epic, especially in The Ten Commandments (1956).  In this film, ordinary colloquial English is used, albeit with just enough accent so that people don’t sound as if they are from Nebraska.

Style aside, this movie follows the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments in making Moses (Christian Bale) an Egyptian general or at least a high-ranking officer.  A major difference between these two movies, however, is the attitude toward the supernatural.  In the 1956 movie, we never have any doubt that God exists and is actively causing all the miracles.  At one point, Rameses dismisses the plagues as a sequence of natural phenomena:

I too was afraid, until word came of a mountain beyond the cataracts which spewed red mud and poisoned the water.  Was it the staff I gave you that caused all this?  Was it the wonder of your god that fish should die and frogs should leave the waters?  Was it a miracle that flies and lice should bloat upon their carrion and spread disease in both man and beast? These things were ordered by themselves, not by any god.

But we know better.  The plagues are God’s doing.  In Exodus:  Gods and Kings, on the other hand, the story is naturalized and secularized, God’s existence not being required:  Moses is told by Zipporah that he was hit on the head, and so whatever he thinks he saw was just a hallucination; the plagues of Egypt seem to unfold in the manner described by the Rameses of the 1956 movie; and the Red Sea parts owing to a tsunami, perhaps caused by a comet. It’s no wonder that Dathan in this movie seems superfluous.  Who needs a skeptic in a movie that is itself skeptical?  I suppose the idea of denuding this movie of the supernatural is to make the story more acceptable to a modern audience.  But this is misguided.  People who believe in the literal truth of the Bible will find this rendering disappointing, and people who do not take these stories seriously don’t care.  It’s not as though once we have purged God from the Bible, what is left over is historical fact; so you might as well tell the tale in all its supernatural glory, much in the way we do with any other myth.  I mean, who wants to see a remake of Jason and the Argonauts (1963) in which everything that happens is explained as a natural phenomenon?

Is it my imagination, or were there subtle allusions to the holocaust in this film?  When the Egyptian soldiers were searching for Moses’ relatives, who then hid in a secret place beneath the floor, it called to my mind scenes in which a Jewish family would hide from the Nazis when they came to their house.  This ties in with a scene toward the end of the movie, just after the parting of the Red Sea, in which Moses expresses his misgivings about what will happen when all his people enter Canaan.  In other words, he is worried about the genocidal slaughter described in Joshua, Deuteronomy, and Samuel, in which everyone in a conquered city is put to death.  My favorite is in Joshua:

6:21  And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

And this raises a question I have often wondered about.  It was a common practice in the ancient world for the conquerors of a people to kill all the men and enslave the women and children.  If there are any historians, amateur or professional, reading this, I would like to know if the Jews were the first people to kill all the women and children also.  If so, that would be an ironic bookend to the holocaust of the twentieth century.

In any event, the people that produced this movie apparently liked the idea put forward in the 1956 version that it was Rameses who first threatened to kill all the firstborn Hebrews (in this case, only those that are still children), making it look as though he started it, thereby precipitating the tenth plague as a kind of turnabout’s fair play.

The orgy of the Golden Calf is all but omitted from this movie.  If you didn’t already know the story, you would never know that what was what going on in the background, briefly glimpsed, while Moses chisels the tablets.  Therefore, there is no need to say where the Hebrews got the gold to make this notorious idol.  As a result, neither the biblical account of the Great Borrowing, as described in the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, nor the reparations-for-slavery account, as put forward by the 1956 movie, is used as an explanation.

After that, the movie jumps ahead to when Moses is very old.  I cannot tell if Zipporah is still around or not, but in any event, there is no Ethiopian wife to be seen.  Now, it was one thing for the 1956 version to avoid divorce and miscegenation, but this is the twenty-first century.  Moses could have divorced Zipporah and married the Ethiopian woman, no sweat.  Or Zipporah could have been the Ethiopian wife all along.  MaryAnn Johanson, of Flick Filosopher, wrote an entire review of this movie complaining that there were too many white people in it.  Seeing Moses married to a black woman would have filled an aching need.

Finally, there is the business about the child.  Exodus is ambiguous as to who it is that talks to Moses from the burning bush.  Either it is an angel of the Lord:

3:2  And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

Or it is God himself:

3:4  And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

Notwithstanding this initial ambiguity, however, subsequent verses strongly indicate that it is God who is talking to Moses:

3:14  And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

If it had been an angel talking to Moses, I should think the angel would have said, “HE IS THAT HE IS.”

And so, when a child appears during the burning bush scene and starts talking to Moses, I just figured it was God.  However, some critics go with the interpretation that Malak is just a representative of God.  Now, it is not as though the child says, “I’m Malak, an angel of the Lord.”  We would not even know that “Malak” is his name were it not listed as such in the credits.  Since “malak” is a word for angel, however, it does suggest that the producers of this movie thought of him as such.

Whichever it is, the idea that God (or his representative) is a child naturally resulted in various critics cracking wise, saying that the Old Testament God does act like a spoiled brat, but a more serious explanation for this bizarre representation of God is required.  Several theories have been advanced, and there are the reasons given by Ridley Scott, who directed this movie, but I have a pet theory of my own.  During the decade in which The Ten Commandments (1956) was made, the heroes in movies were typically bachelors.  The hero might get married at the end of the movie, but as often as not he remained single.  As the years went by, however, and the baby boomers got married and started having children, heroes in the movies began to follow suit.  And so the Lethal Weapon movies featured a married cop with children and another cop, a widower almost suicidal in grief.  The Die Hard movies feature a married cop as well, estranged from his wife, at least in the first of that series.  A child plays a big role in each of Aliens and Terminator 2.  And so on.  This is not an absolute distinction between then and now, of course, but rather a question of frequency.  In a similar way, political speeches back in the 1950s were relatively sparing in their references to children, whereas politicians of the last thirty years or so have really been laying it on thick when it comes to families and children.

And so, in a society that seems to be saturated with the importance of family and children, a bachelor God seems a little out of step with the times.  I suppose the movie could have given God a wife (the future Virgin Mary, perhaps?), but that might be a little too much.  Instead, making God a child not only was a safer way for the movie to conform to this recent trend, but also gave us a metaphor for the way our society sometimes seems to worship children.

On the Need to Waste Food and a Suggestion as a Way to Eliminate That Need

There has been a lot of talk lately about the way we waste so much food, as in Jonathan Bloom’s book American Wasteland.  And the need to stop wasting food has just been made official by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack.  The urgency of this problem is usually couched in terms of an expected increase in population.

There are those of us, of course, who figure this is more of a demand problem than a supply problem.  Fewer babies would not only solve any problems we have with our struggle to produce more food, but would go a long way toward solving a lot of other problems as well, such as climate change, resource depletion, and pollution.  And it would take away Monsanto’s justification for its GMOs and associated poisons.  If the world’s population could be reduced to, say, a billion, that would make things a whole lot better.  Half a billion would be better still.  But that is utopian.  The only way the population of this planet will ever be reduced to those numbers will be when a comet slams into it.

As far as the demand problem is concerned, I have done my part.  I have spent my life as a bachelor and have never had any children. This meant forgoing all the rewards of a domestic life, the pleasures of hearth and home, but it was the least I could do.

Of course, virtuous sacrifice is always easier when it conforms to one’s inclinations.  Just as I never wanted to have any children in the first place, neither have I ever cared much about eating food.  My mother said that when I was a baby, I never put anything into my mouth that wasn’t food, and I wasn’t too dang sure about that.  Naturally, I get hungry and have to eat, same as everyone else.  And I cannot say that I have never experienced the pleasures of the palate.  But if I could meet all my nutritional needs and never experience hunger simply by taking a pill, I would never eat anything again.

I suppose it was for that reason that I was able to give up junk food over forty years ago.  No cakes, pies, cookies, candy, ice cream, or soda pop.  Well, there was that one exception for a brief period about twenty-five years ago.  A woman was involved.  You have heard the saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.  With me, it’s the other way around.  The way to my stomach is through my heart.  When I love a woman, I will eat whatever she puts in front of me.  And so, when she would bake something special, I would eat it.  The things we do for love.  I’m just lucky she never wanted to have any children.

Needless to say, I am a flop when it comes to Thanksgiving.  Try as I might, I just cannot feast and gorge with the same gustatory delight as everyone else seems to.  I have my small portions.  They fill me up.  And then I spend the rest of the meal apologizing for not having any more of this or another portion of that.  At a place where I used to work, the week before Thanksgiving the women would talk about all the food they were going to prepare.  Then we would have the day off, after which they would spend the following week talking about all the food that was eaten.

When I was in my thirties, my parents moved to Florida.  That meant that Thanksgiving was a holiday more like Labor Day, one involving no obligatory eating or drinking.  Whew!  What a relief.  A woman I worked with who was old enough to be my mother knew that my parents lived in another city, and this aroused her maternal instincts.  “John,” she said with much concern and solicitude, “you’re not going to eat Thanksgiving dinner alone, are you?” to which I replied, “I’m not going to eat it at all.”

Some people just love to eat.  I worked with a guy who would tell me about what he was going to eat for dinner that night while he ravenously devoured all the food he was having for lunch.  For such people, socializing must always be accompanied by food and drink.  For me, on the other hand, socializing is something I want to do after I have gotten all the necessary eating out of the way.  As a result, I have never really cared much for the custom of having dinner as part of a date.  The fact that I am a cheapskate, who never wanted to spend much money on women in the first place, reinforced this disinclination, which meant that only rarely did I take a woman to dinner.  But on a couple of occasions when I did, a different kind of problem presented itself.

One Saturday afternoon, a woman who was taking the same group lessons that I was agreed to go dancing with me later that evening.  As a result, we ended up with a couple of hours to kill, and so we decided to get something to eat.  We found a fast food joint, and soon we each had a meal before us.  I admit I was hungry and would have finished it off with dispatch, but a gentleman must never get through eating before the lady does.  As a result, I had to slow myself way down.  I watched her plate and made sure not to make any more progress than she did.  But she was a slow eater, and things plodded along.  I never chewed my food as thoroughly as I did that day.

Then she started telling a story.  And as she told the story, she played with her food, only half of which she had eaten.  The story had something to do with a guy named George, and as she went into detail about whatever it was, she used her fork to push a morsel around on the plate.  I couldn’t really pay much attention to this story about George, because I was thinking, “Would you eat your damn food!”  I was exhausted from the need to exercise so much self-restraint, because what I really wanted to do was just scarf it down.  Instead, I was forced to play with my food too, so as not to finish eating before she did.  Suddenly, she said, “Well, I’ve had enough.  How about you?”

Ruefully, I looked at my plate.  Half the food was still there.  But what could I do?  I couldn’t say, “Just a minute,” while I shoveled it in, for that would have been crude.  Instead, I did the proper thing.  I said I was finished eating as well, and we left.  It was one of the few times in my life when I wasted some food.

Some years later, I had the occasion to have dinner with another woman.  I ordered what appeared to be a simple meal, and the amount of food piled on my plate would have fed both of us with enough left over to take home to her dog.  But I was ever so grateful.  I was able to eat at my own natural pace without any fear of finishing my meal before she did.  Once I became fairly full, it was easy to slow down, engage in conversation, eat a bite every now and then, and pay full attention to what she was saying.  When she finally said she had had enough, I was able to truthfully say the same.

As long as it remains the custom for men to take women to dinner, there will be a need for portions so large that the man will have no fear of finishing his meal before she does.  Therefore, if we are really serious about not wasting so much food, we should consider eliminating this archaic ritual in which the man symbolically demonstrates his ability to provide for the woman in which he has a romantic interest.

And doing so may help with the demand side of the problem as well.  Fewer steak dinners, fewer babies.

Patriotism and Justice

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French army was falsely convicted of collusion with a foreign power and sentenced to spend the rest of his life on Devil’s Island.  Years later, when evidence finally came to light that Dreyfus was innocent, the army tried to cover it up to avoid embarrassment.  The scandal divided the nation and beyond, and many years were spent by the defenders of Dreyfus, notably Émile Zola, advocating for his exoneration.

In reading about this scandal, I was struck by the ceremony of degradation, an elaborate ritual performed before assembled troops, in which an officer has all the symbols of his status removed and destroyed, most dramatically the breaking of his sword, in a manner expressing the utmost contempt for the convicted officer.  During that ceremony, Dreyfus was heard to say, “Innocent, Innocent! Vive la France! Long live the Army.”

That he proclaimed his innocence is not surprising.  That he did so while expressing his love for France and admiration for the army is astonishing.  One wonders why someone would participate in such a ceremony.  At the time, he could not have known or even hoped that he would eventually be exonerated and reinstated.  All he knew was that evidence had been trumped up against him, no doubt in part because he was a Jew, and that he would have to spend the rest of his life on Devil’s Island.  He could have shown his contempt for the proceedings by refusing to stand at attention.  And could anyone have blamed him had he shouted, “To Hell with France and God damn this army!”  At the very least, he could have participated in the ceremony, proclaimed his innocence, and simply not said anything about loving France and honoring the army that had railroaded him.

Needless to say, I recall the Dreyfus Affair because of the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick, a football player who refused to stand during the national anthem as a statement against racial oppression.  “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he explained.  The two cases are not perfect opposites.  The injustice against Dreyfus was against him personally, even though his race played a part in his being unfairly treated, whereas the injustice Kaepernick refers to presumably concerns those of his race, but not so much him personally.

Another element common to these two cases, though not with perfect symmetry, is the military.  Unlike Dreyfus, Kaepernick is not in the military, but the subject of the military keeps coming up, as if those who serve or have served in the armed forces are more likely to be offended than are civilians.  In speaking of Kaepernick’s refusal to stand during the national anthem, President Obama said, “When it comes to the flag and the national anthem and the meaning that holds for our men and women in uniform and those who fought for us — that is a tough thing for them to get past.”  Logically, there is no reason a civilian should be thought of as any less patriotic and thus any less offended by Kaepernick’s actions than a soldier, but it has been ever thus.  During times of war, waving the flag is always understood as support for the war, which is why many that opposed the Vietnam War burned the flag rather than wave it.  Opposition to a war and even opposition to the government that wages that war are not incompatible with patriotism and love of country.  That is why burning one’s draft card, which was merely nonviolent resistance, should be distinguished from burning the flag.  But such nice distinctions may be too subtle for the strong emotions that prevail during such times.

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on this subject:  the one, that respect should be shown for the state, even when it acts unjustly; the other, that contempt for the state is permitted, perhaps even obligatory, when it is guilty of injustice.  Perhaps that is another reason for the distinction between the military and the general population.  The military is an authoritarian institution, in which people are trained to obey orders, not question them.  After many years of military service, it was part of Dreyfus’s constitution to continue to respect authority even after it had betrayed him.  Also, people that are by nature authoritarian are more attracted to service in the military in the first place.  Of course, I hope it is not necessary for me to say that not all members of the armed services are equally authoritarian in nature.  Some even side with Kaepernick.  Human nature is too complex to fit into any easy formula.

In some cases, requirement for respect is codified into law, as when a judge finds someone in contempt of court.  There have been attempts to pass a flag desecration amendment, but these have failed.  But that really is not the issue.  When Obama said that Kaepernick was exercising his constitutional right, what he said was correct, though not really to the point, since few had any doubts about that.

Obama went on to suggest that what Kaepernick did was a good thing, though one suspects that Obama would never do such a thing himself:  “But I don’t doubt his sincerity. I think he cares about some real, legitimate issues that have to be talked about. If nothing else, he’s generated more conversation about issues that have to be talked about.”  There it is again, the conversation mantra. That Kaepernick has “generated conversation” cannot be doubted, but the conversation has been less about the issue of injustice against the black race than the act of disrespect shown for his country.  As might have been expected, many have had the “Love it or leave it!” reaction, saying, “You don’t know how good you have it here in America,” and asking him, “Why don’t you move to another country if you hate this one so much?”  It is such sentiments that lie behind the popularity of the short story “The Man Without a Country” in particular and the punishment of exile in general, in which one who despises his country is deprived of the advantages of being one of its citizens.

One wonders, If Dreyfus had cursed France and refused to stand at attention while the officer stripped him of his insignia and medals, would the animosity that resulted have made him a less sympathetic figure, so that he would have spent the rest of his life in hellish confinement, because fewer people would have risen to his defense?  And one must also wonder whether Kaepernick has helped the issue he cares about or harmed it.  I referred above to the burning of the American flag during the Vietnam War.  It is impossible, of course, to sort out all the causal factors at work during those years, but I always thought that this only made things worse, that it hardened the hearts of those who supported the war.  Any sympathy they may have had for anti-war protesters and their cause was ruined by the latter’s unpatriotic actions.  By the same token, associating the cries for racial justice with contempt for one’s country is more likely to engender ill will on the part of many that might otherwise have had sympathy for this movement.

On the Segregation of the Sexes

One of the things I always liked about dancing was the way it forced a mixing of the sexes.  Of course, not all forms of dancing involve such a mixing, but as far as mainstream dancing is concerned, ballroom or country-western, for instance, it does.  The word “forced” in my first sentence may strike some as peculiar.  Are not men and women of heterosexual orientation naturally attracted to each other?  Indeed they are, and yet they also have what I regard as an unfortunate tendency to segregate.

I was at a party one night many years ago, and after a while, the men congregated on one side of the room; the women, on the other.  The men started talking about sports, a topic that is apparently inexhaustible, but which I care nothing about, and so I quickly lost interest.  I was fortunately seated in such a way that I could, without calling attention to myself, ease my way over to where the women were.  I have had many pleasant and stimulating conversations with women, and thus I thought things would be more interesting in their group.  No sooner had I surreptitiously joined them than I found they were deep into a discussion of baby snot, the color of which is apparently of great significance.  From there they went on to the color of baby doo-doo.

In The Wind and the Lion (1975), Raisuli (Sean Connery) is chief of a band of Berbers.  He tells of how he escaped from prison, after being confined for many years, and how he came upon a group of women washing clothes.  “I do not normally enjoy the chatter of women,” he says, as his swarthy band laugh in manly agreement.  But, he goes on to say, on that day their voices filled him with delight.  Not having spent time in prison, however, I was not similarly enthralled.  I withdrew into myself and wondered how long I would have to wait before I could get away from this “party” without seeming rude.

It occurred to me as I sat there that the conversation of the women might have been more interesting had there been no men in the room at all.  For one thing, they might have talked about their husbands.  A friend of mine overheard one such conversation, and he said he knew right then and there that he would never marry.  Alternatively, the women might even have confided in one another about affairs they were having.  But as the men were within hearing distance, the women were reduced to conversing on subjects more fitting for their roles as wives and mothers.

It all made me think about movies I had seen in which rich people attend a dinner party, where the hostess arranged the seating so that the men and women would alternate along the table, while each woman would sit opposite her husband, no doubt so that he could make sure things were not getting too cozy on the other side of the table.  That mixing of the sexes seemed to be an admirable convention.  But then the time would come for the women to retire, so that the men could enjoy their brandy and cigars.  In these movies, the men generally begin to discuss politics, which is better than sports at least, but what happens with the women is usually not depicted, probably because the men that made those movies figured it wasn’t important.

In the movie Giant (1956), Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), presumably wishing to avoid a discussion of the color of baby snot, tries to sit with the men after the women have retired to another room.  As these men are hyper-macho Texans, this is regarded as an unacceptable breech of etiquette, all the men becoming quiet and embarrassed, except for her husband Bick (Rock Hudson), who becomes angry.  Had I been in that room, I would have been thinking, “Oh, thank God!  Leslie’s going to join the conversation.  Now I won’t be bored.”  But I would have been the exception, apparently.

And now that I have brought up the subject of movies, I cannot help but think of Blackboard Jungle (1955).  In that movie, Mr. Dadier (Glenn Ford) becomes a teacher in a school with some of the worst juvenile delinquents that was then imaginable, though later movies, such as Lean on Me (1989), would make this movie look like the Blackboard Tropical Rainforest.  Later on, Dadier tours another school where the students are polite, patriotic, and studious.  Oddly enough, it does not seem to occur to Dadier or anyone else in the movie that the school he visits has both boys and girls in it, whereas the school where Dadier teaches is for boys only.  That is why I always shudder when I hear people argue that students do better when they attend an all-boy or all-girl school. The girls may do better, but without girls around, boys become even more brutal than they already are.  It was bad enough in high school when it was time for P.E., because without the civilizing influence of the girls, the boys reverted to barbarism.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I enjoyed dancing so much was that dancers always try to have a balance of the sexes in their groups, so the tendency to segregate is overridden by the desire to have plenty of opportunities for dancing.  But eventually the years caught up with me, and I began getting tendinitis with greater frequency, with longer periods needed for recovery.  Telling a partner that I might not be able to go dancing for a couple of months became a nuisance, and I eventually decided to hang up my dancing shoes for good.

After a hiatus of several years, I started thinking about bridge.  I learned to play bridge in college in the 1960s, back when the game was an essential social skill.  I had pretty much abandoned the game once I started dancing, but now it seemed like a good time to take it up again.  After all, one of the things I liked about bridge, apart from the pleasure of the game itself, was that it was something men and women could do together.  It may not force them together the way dancing does, but the game certainly lends itself to a mixture of the sexes.

Bidding systems come and go, so I knew I needed to learn the latest fashions.  And thus it was that I decided to make my entry into bridge society by way of lessons.  Though it is the segregation of the sexes that is my subject here, yet I cannot pass this point without mentioning other forms of segregation as well.  On entering the bridge studio, I was struck by the fact that I had not seen so many Caucasians in one place in thirty years.  Houston is ethnically diverse, with people from all over the world living here, but you would never know it from being in that bridge studio.  As my eyes became accustomed to the glare of racial purity, I did discern a smattering of Asians, but I have yet to see any Hispanics or African-Americans playing the game.  Of course, the people playing bridge were mostly elderly too, which may have something to do with it, apart from cultural differences.  I have been told by people I play bridge with that their grandchildren have no interest in playing the game.  So there is age segregation going on as well.  But I digress.

Much to my satisfaction, in any event, there were plenty of both men and women at the tables.  In the months since I decided to take up the game again, however, I have heard from three different sources about three different groups of women that get together and play bridge, men being excluded.  It was then—and only then I reluctantly admit—that I finally realized a principal motive for such segregation.  A lot of people are married or at least living with someone.  As such, they get their fill of the opposite sex.  No wonder they want a night out with the boys or a night out with the girls.  Even those that are widowed or divorced may, as a result of all those years of living with the opposite sex, still have a need for same-sex socializing; whereas I, on the other hand, having never been married or lived with anyone, have never experienced a surfeit of the fair sex.  Even when I had a girlfriend, we always unconsciously adjusted our dating frequency so as to not get too tired of each other.  As a result, I have never had a need to get away from women and be among men only.

Now, given this principle, bachelors like me being the exception, men have as much desire to get away from women from time to time as women have to get away from men.  And yet, I noticed that whereas I had heard of three women’s bridge clubs, I had not heard of any bridge clubs for men.  “Are there any groups of men that get together and play bridge,” I asked of those sitting at my table.  I was met with complete silence, so that I concluded that not only were there no such men’s clubs, but also that it had never occurred to anyone that there would be such a thing.  I know you can find a few men’s bridge clubs around the country by Googling them, but I am talking about impressions I have formed casually in my own milieu.

I have concluded that while men have a desire for the company of other men same as women have for their own sex, bridge is unsuitable for that purpose.  It might be going too far to say that bridge is essentially feminine like the game mah jongg, which is why the play The Men of Mah Jongg has such a humorous premise.  Instead, I shall say merely that bridge is insufficiently masculine.  As I noted above, in reference to Blackboard Jungle, females have a calming, civilizing, some would even say emasculating, effect on males.  In Giant, the main reason Bick becomes angry when Leslie intrudes upon the male preserve is that marriage creates the suspicion of an enervating domesticity.  As a result, Bick feels it is important to put her in her place, lest his companions have doubts as to who wears the pants in his family.  Consequently, when men have a boys’ night out, they must do more than merely get away from their wives.  They must engage in an activity that reaffirms their manhood, something like playing poker, bowling, or shooting pool.  Playing bridge just doesn’t cut it.

But for me, bridge is just right.  My only hope is that the women don’t get too carried away with these women’s bridge clubs.

On the Irrational Nature of Voting

My vote doesn’t count.

Well, there was this one time that a group of us were trying to decide whether to go ballroom dancing at Melody Lane or country-western dancing at the Longhorn Saloon.  We took a vote, and by a margin of one, we went country-western dancing.  Had I voted the other way, we would have gone to Melody Lane.

That sort of thing aside, when it comes to voting as part of one’s civic duty, the closest I ever came to having my vote count was when I sat on a jury.  As we all know, the vote has to be unanimous in a criminal trial, so one holdout can make the difference between either a conviction or an acquittal on the one hand and a hung jury on the other.  As a matter of fact, the jury I was on was indeed hung, resulting in a mistrial, with two people holding out for a guilty verdict.  Had I changed my vote, it would still have been a hung jury, with three people voting guilty.  Alternatively, had I managed to shirk my civic duty, someone else would have taken my place, and the result would have been the same either way, except for one consideration.  On a jury, one does not merely vote:  one also exercises one’s powers of persuasion, such as they are.  It is conceivable that the person that might have taken my place would have argued more persuasively, resulting in either a conviction or an acquittal.

If one still lives in a state where caucuses are held rather than primaries, the element of voting and persuasion are also intermingled.  In fact, just the feature of standing up and being counted all by itself can be of no small significance.  And therein lies a tale.  In 1984, I decided to vote for the first time in my life.  As a democrat, I naturally attended the democratic caucus.  Once there we divided into three groups:  one for Walter Mondale, another for Gary Hart, and a third for Jesse Jackson.  Those of us who were for Hart went into a room separate from the others to select two delegates to attend the citywide convention.  A couple of party regulars spoke to each other in hushed tones, after which one of them, who was also the precinct judge, made an announcement.  As we were in the Montrose area, also known for being the part of Houston in which there was a significant gay community, they decided that there would be one gay delegate and one straight delegate, the former to be selected by the gays; the latter, by those that were straight. The precinct judge had not previously come out of the closet (the other party regular was straight), but out he came, with great difficulty, he admitted.  After all, sodomy was still illegal in Texas at that time, so there was not the general acceptance of homosexuality back then as there is now, Montrose area or no Montrose area.  He then asked all the straight people to go the right side of the room and all the gays to go to the left.  As a heterosexual, I cannot speak for the feelings of those in the room that were gay, but it occurred to me that whereas the precinct judge had had time to think over his decision to come out publicly that night, there were doubtless some there who were caught completely unprepared, not sure whether to come out likewise or to go to the right and play it straight.  Needless to say, for some in that room, the act of voting, as it were, had consequences well beyond the delegate they might have picked that evening.

When it comes to the general election on the other hand, voting is done in secret.  And the elements of persuasion and voting are kept distinct by law.  Whatever persuading one does must take place prior to going to the polls or just outside the place where voting occurs.  Psychologically speaking, those that make the greatest effort to persuade are those most likely to vote.  But from a logical point of view, the two are distinct and may occur independently of each other.  It is not unheard of for someone to attend rallies and protests, owing to the excitement and camaraderie of it all, but decide on voting day not to bother, owing to having slept late or wanting to avoid the inclement weather.  Meanwhile, another citizen, having pretty much kept to his own knitting during the campaign season, may get up and vote without anyone even being aware that he has done so.

I suppose that by voting you may inspire others to do likewise, but to that end you could simply lie, announcing at work that you had already voted that morning, thus also giving yourself an excuse for having shown up a little late on account of having overslept.  Others might then be inspired to vote by your example, false though it may be.  Or, if you work with a bunch of republicans, you might vote and then lie about it, saying you are not going to vote because it’s not worth the effort, hoping to depress their turnout, especially since they will not feel the need to cancel your vote.

And thus, having isolated the vote in the general election from extraneous considerations—taking a public stand, persuading, setting an example—we may now turn to the question as to whether that vote counts, whether it makes a difference.  And as I indicated in the first line of this essay, my answer, regarding my own vote, is decidedly in the negative.  Of course, it is a little too easy for me to say that.  Texas is a winner-take-all state that always goes republican.  And it is so thoroughly gerrymandered that even the congressional districts present one with a fait accompli.  I suppose I might feel different if I lived in a swing state, but not much.  Even if I had lived in one of those troublesome counties in Florida in the 2000 election, my vote for Al Gore, when added to the rest, would still not have been enough to make him president.

At this point, there will be those that argue, “If everyone felt the way you do, no one would vote.”  True enough, but the Prisoner’s Dilemma proves again and again that one is better off (or at least no worse off) by defecting.  Some will prefer a weaker version:  “It’s because of people like you that republicans keep getting elected.”  (Republicans are less reflective than us democrats, you see, and they will go to the polls and vote undeterred by such philosophical ruminations.)  All that may be true, but everyone does not feel that way, and my voting per se will not increase the turnout of other democrats.  Immanuel Kant took that basic idea behind the argument, “If everyone felt the way you do…,” and made it the cornerstone of his ethics.  I cannot consistently will my not voting into a universal law because then there would be no election.  Actually, there is no contradiction.  As others have pointed out, if I will my action to be a universal law, all we get is a world no one would want to live in.

But enough of that.  Let us grant that we all do have a civic duty to vote and that willfully choosing not to vote is immoral.  There still remains the irksome question as to whether it makes any difference.  Much of what we call “immoral” harms others in some way.  But the fact remains that if I don’t vote, it is more likely that I would win the lottery without even buying a lottery ticket than that my vote will count in the general election.  So even if my not voting is immoral, it is harmless.  I doubt if I will go to Hell for that.

I noted above that republicans are more likely to vote than democrats, if only because they are not as likely to bog themselves down with idle reflections that their votes do not count, at least when considered individually (that their votes count collectively is beyond question).  But this year may prove different.  A lot of republicans cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump, and yet they say that they are even more opposed to the idea of voting for Hillary.  And so, some will stay home and not vote at all, some will simply leave the vote for president blank, some will vote for some other candidate listed on the ballot, and some will simply write in a name.

Now, we all know that owing to the electoral college, only Trump or Hillary will be elected president.  So, by not voting for Trump, whatever their alternative vote or non-vote may be, they are helping to elect Hillary.  Implicitly, then, they prefer Hillary to Trump.  So, is there any rational basis for them to vote for someone other than Hillary?  No.  But then, neither is there a rational basis for voting at all, inasmuch as one’s vote does not count, individually considered.

I will be voting for Hillary (Groan!).  I know my vote will not make a difference politically, but I am going to do it anyway.  I suppose I will do it because it will make me feel good. Republicans that vote for neither Trump nor Hillary are no better or worse than I am in this regard, for their action will simply make them feel good.  Whoever is president, they will be able to say to themselves, “At least I didn’t vote for her (or him).”  I wish there were more to voting than that, the mere production in myself of a feeling of rightness, but no matter how I try, reason will not get me there.

It did get me to the Longhorn Saloon, however.

The Final Solution

In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, “The Brave New World of Robots and Lost Jobs,” David Ignatius discusses the problem that society faces as robots start taking jobs away from people, leaving many of them permanently unemployed:

Job insecurity is a central theme of the 2016 campaign, fueling popular anger about trade deals and immigration. But economists warn that much bigger job losses are ahead in the United States — driven not by foreign competition but by advancing technology.

This is not the first such article to address this issue.  A diary written almost three years ago by RobLewis calls our attention to a prediction made by Gartner, as enunciated by Daryl Plummer, that as technology reduces the need for labor, social unrest will be the result.  An article reporting on this forecast quotes Tom Seitzberg, who agrees with this bleak future:

“Ultimately, every society lives from the backbone from a strong middle class,” said Seitzberg. “If you get just a top level, a small amount of very rich people and a very large piece of very poor people, it leads to social unrest.”

RobLewis also notes that Paul Krugman, in an article entitled “The Rise of the Robots,” has expressed similar concerns, arguing that the economic benefit of a college education is waning:

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society,” or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents.

What Plummer, Seitzberg and Krugman have in common is their emphasis on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, while the rest struggle at the level of subsistence.

Economics is usually understood in terms of the production and distribution of goods and services.  When John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society in 1958, he argued that the production problem had pretty much been solved. This is truer than ever today.  We have it well within our capacity to provide our citizens with the all the necessities and quite a few luxuries.  In fact, given the labor theory of value, the less human labor is needed to produce these goods and services, the less they will cost.  So technology will only make it easier than ever to produce enough for everyone.

Therefore, it is argued, the problem is distribution.  For the most part, we expect people to get what they want by working for it:  they sell their labor, and in exchange get the money to buy the goods and services they desire. But according to the views expressed above, that option will become increasingly unavailable to more and more people in the future.  Therefore, the problem of distribution will have to become one of redistribution, one of forcing the rich to share their wealth.

That rich people have so much money is really a remarkable thing, because we are free to take it away from them any time we want.  They have it only because we let them have it.  The fact is, however, that people will tolerate the rich, and even admire them, provided their own needs have been reasonably met.  But if the disparity of wealth becomes extreme, the situation becomes untenable.  In societies where the people are oppressed through force, revolution is the result.  In a democracy like ours, however, confiscatory taxation will suffice. If the rich are as wise as they are wealthy, they will even encourage this redistribution, as a way of buying off the mob. If they are not wise, and there is no evidence to indicate that they are, we will take even more of their money as compensation for their insolence.

So the distribution problem can be solved as easily as we have solved the problem of production. But no sooner is that problem solved than we realize that other questions present themselves: What happens when the link between labor and income has been sundered? What happens when the average person has enough money to provide himself with a decent living without having to work for it?  What happens when the robots do all the work, and the goods and services produced by them are fairly distributed among the people?

Some of us can handle leisure.  We do not need to work in order for our lives to have meaning. In fact, our lives don’t need to have any meaning at all.  It is enough for us to while away the time indulging in harmless pleasures, be they sensuous or intellectual, allowing the years to pass effortlessly, until an inconvenient death puts an end to all our enjoyments.

But there are those for whom leisure is a curse.  I have known people who, at the end of a three-day weekend, will say that they are so glad it is over, because they were becoming bored and restless.  These are the people who will blithely say that they will never retire, that they will work until they drop, in part because they think they will not have enough money to retire, but mostly because their idea of retirement is an insufferable three-day weekend that never ends.

Since the robots have not taken over yet, technology at this time has merely left us with underemployment and declining real wages.  One solution would be to allow all those for whom a life of leisure is the ideal form of existence to receive a government check without working for it.  For example, there was an initiative presented to the people of Switzerland which, if passed, would have provided every adult with an income of $2,800 per month.  That would certainly have been enough for me to quit my job and never turn a lick again. It was rejected, however.  In any event, given some such policy, those who need to work could continue to do the jobs that still remain, so that their lives can have meaning, and receive the additional income.  Unfortunately, those who need to work, and who say it is the meaning in their lives, nevertheless tend to resent those who seem to get along just fine without it. Like the dog in the manger, they cannot stand to be idle, and yet they are outraged by those who indulge themselves in the very idleness they abhor. There is no need to be overly concerned with this problem of resentment, however, because as time goes by, and robots take over more and more of the jobs, there will not be enough work left for humans to do, even after all the lazy people have removed themselves from the workforce.

Although a college education is not the solution, as far as making people employable is concerned, it may be the solution to making people suitable for unemployment by giving them the real skills needed for the twenty-first century, the ones needed for a life of leisure.  Instead of emphasizing all those skills that robots can do better anyway, we should encourage a solid foundation in a liberal arts education, with special emphasis on that most useless of all disciplines, my major and lifelong avocation, philosophy.  The problems of philosophy, being perennial, can provide the intellect with unlimited amusement.  Nor need we fear that artificial intelligence will solve these problems and leave us with nothing to do.  What chance do robots have of figuring out the mind-body problem, of making sense of free will, or discovering the meaning of life, even if they are the ones doing all the work that supposedly provides it?

Not everyone is suited for a life of contemplation, however.  Perhaps the legalization of marijuana would help.  Marijuana is apparently pretty good at snuffing out ambition, a formerly useful passion, but without the need for work, a troublesome, mischief-making drive.  Those for whom a love of leisure does not come naturally may be able to acquire an appreciation for it with the help of a little weed.

Unfortunately, there will still remain those who need to work, for whom the above remedies will not suffice.  A lot of them will simply be bored, and marriages will fail as husbands and wives get on each other’s nerves.  And then there is the fear is that without the exhaustion that comes with toil, people will become perverted and cruel, and violence will become the entertainment of choice.  With the elimination of poverty and inequality, the social unrest that arises from an unfair distribution of wealth may be replaced by the social unrest of boredom, in which mobs go on a rampage just for something to do.

Perhaps the final solution will come when the robots replace us entirely. After all, it is not obvious that the elimination of man and his replacement by robots would necessarily be a bad thing.  I suppose the first issue to address is whether robots would be conscious, since the conception of robots as mindless automata would seem rather bleak. Though science fiction movies seldom include dialogue directly addressing the question of robot consciousness, most of us automatically assume that robots in movies are indeed conscious. Whether it be Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet (1956), HAL of 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus of Colossus:  The Forbin Project(1970), or the title character of The Terminator (1984), along with countless other examples, these computers or robots in the movies always seem to be conscious.  In real life, on the other hand, we never attribute consciousness to computers and robots. Though designers and programmers may get better at making robots simulate human nature, even to the point of claiming to perceive the world around them, to have desires, and even to feel pain, yet we are likely to suspect that it is all just a very good case of mimicry. In all likelihood, the simulation will eventually reach the point where we will presume consciousness on the part of real robots just as we do with their movie counterparts.  In any event, as the problem of other minds has always been insoluble even when restricted to people, it will presumably be no less so with robots.

It all may come down to religion.  Those who believe that man has an immortal soul that survives the body will suppose that it is this soul that is the seat of consciousness.  Robots, not having a soul, will be mindless. Atheists, on the other hand, suppose that one way or another, the conscious mind is something that naturally arises out of matter, and they see no reason why robots will not eventually become conscious too, if they are not so already.

Death will probably come to robots as it does to man, in the sense that machines eventually wear out to the point that repairing them is impractical. However, robot immortality may be achievable nevertheless. Regarding the notion of reincarnation, Leibniz once said that if you tell him that when he dies, he will immediately be reborn in another body, but with no memory of his present life, then you might just as well tell him that when he dies, someone else will be born.  And that is because memory is essential to any kind of immortality worth having.  You can clone my body, so that someone genetically identical to me will exist in the future, but if that clone does not have my memories, he will still be someone else.  But if my memories could be transferred into that clone, then indeed I would count myself as having survived death. What can only be imagined in man could easily be carried out in robots, as memories downloaded from one could be uploaded into another.

But immortality is a good only if life itself is good, and given the misery of existence, I sometimes have my doubts.  Now, I have been pretty lucky, as far as health and finances are concerned, and if everyone were as well off as I have been over my lifetime, I guess I would admit that life is good enough. But, regarding reincarnation again, if I had the choice of being reborn after I die, with no control over where in the world I would be born or in what circumstances, I think I might pass on that.  The odds are just too great that my next life would be miserable.

But this would not be a problem for robots.  Assuming they will have consciousness, we can be sure that they will design themselves so as not to experience any more pain than necessary to avoid harm, and which in any event may be turned off at will.  This would be a great triumph in the evolution of life.  We evolved to survive long enough to have babies that can survive long enough to have babies, and if we must experience much pain and suffering in the process, that is just too bad.  But robots can adjust their sensations to meet their needs, and needless suffering, that great objection to existence itself, can at least be eliminated from this small section of the universe.  Having conquered death, robots would also conquer suffering.  As a result, robots would not have to bother much about morality, for in a world where you cannot hurt or kill someone, it is hard to imagine what immoral behavior would look like.  For a world like that, the elimination of mankind would be a small price to pay.

Just as robots will design themselves to keep from having unnecessary pain, so too will they be able to produce unlimited pleasure.  They will not have sex, of course, but there is no reason to suppose that they could not induce feelings of ecstasy in themselves, once they came up with the right circuitry. This could be their downfall.  Once they figure out that trick, they may end up lying around all day in a self-induced high, not caring whether anything gets done.  Long before they get around to wiping out man, they may be too wiped out to care, and man will simply stroll in, step over the robots, and start having to do the work that they are too wasted to perform.  If we cannot keep them from hitting the pleasure button, we may just have run the world ourselves after all.