I came across an interesting article which gave evidence for the proposition that Modern Art is a CIA “psyop”. The short-short version is that, during the cold war, the CIA funded modern art to show off how free the west is because communist countries wouldn’t let artists make anything that ugly. I am not really in a position to evaluate the evidence cited by the article, but this is a very interesting explanation because it’s more plausible than anything else I’ve heard.
The basic thing that needs to be explained is how such bad art ever came to be popular. There are various partial explanations, most having to do with the trauma of the two world wars and the influence of recreational drugs interacting with rich snobs who wanted to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses who recently gained access to art through technology which made reasonably faithful reproductions inexpensive. These explanations never really satisfied me, though. It just didn’t feel like enough of a motivation.
The CIA promoting this art feels more plausible. It gives the right kind of perverse motivation—an outright competitive motivation completely decoupled with having to live with the consequences of one’s decision. If a real art collector pays a million dollars for a bad painting he’s going to have to keep looking at the awful thing. If a CIA operative pays a million dollars for a painting, he never has to look at it again. Plus, it’s not his money.
The basic approach will work, too. If you have tens of millions of dollars per year to burn plus patience and some basic understanding of human nature, you can make a style of art prestigious. You can’t make it popular, but that’s not at all the same thing. To be prestigious means to convey status to that small subgroup who is obsessed with status and will do anything to get it. You can make galleries, you can put on gatherings with good food and nice amenities, you can pay select artists.
It’s also plausible because it doesn’t take that much money to get a largish number of people to do something as long as you’re careful to make everyone in the large group think that they have a chance of being one of the lucky few. Reality TV shows demonstrated that the right kind of person will do a huge amount of work for the chance at not all that much money.
And such things inevitable take on a life of their own. Once people think that there’s money in something, some people will add their own money in the hope of making more. Speculation can drive prices up, for example. Some people who want to purchase status will jump on the bandwagon.
And then there’s the interesting question of how much of the current art market is just money laundering. Bad art is very easy to produce. If I want to pay you money for something illegal in a way that looks legitimate (since governments pay attention to large transfers of money), buying the illegal thing plus a bad painting and claiming that all of the money was for the bad painting works well for laundering. I even came up with this idea on my own for a story about an assassin, where to launder the payments he would see a modern art painting to the people paying for the hit. (This also enabled him to report the money to the IRS.) How much of the current market for modern art this is I am in no position to say, but I’ll happily believe north of 99% of it.
I recently came across a very interesting video where a woman named Susan Kare demonstrates the 1984 Mac user interface:
The show was called Computer Chronicles. It was a half-hour show that ran from 1984-2002 on PBS.
I find the hosts quite interesting:
Much of the discussion is about how the Mac, being graphical, makes it easy to learn. Karen explains terms like “window” and “menu” to the hosts. It’s all extremely formal, too, with everyone taking this very seriously.
It’s also funny to hear about things being modernized described as “bring it into the 1980s.”
There’s a curious phenomenon in movies where movies which are spoofs of a genre can be some of the greatest entries in the genre and even epitomize it. Examples aren’t hard to come by: Galaxy Quest is one of the best Star Trek movies ever made. True Lies is an excellent James Bond movie. Last Action Hero is one of the great 80s action flicks. Support Your Local Sheriff is a fantastic western. Hogan’s Heroes (admittedly, TV series) is a great entry in WW2 storytelling.
Not all spoofs are good entries in their genre, though. The example which leaps to mind is Scary Movie, which wasn’t a good horror film (though this might be related to it not being all that good of a movie). Perhaps more relevant, since it was a good movie, is Spaceballs. Though a great Mel Brooks movie, it was not a good space opera movie11.
So what is the difference? Or, to shift the emphasis a bit: what is it that makes a spoof the epitome of its genre?
Truth to tell, I’m not entirely sure, but I think that the key ingredient is that the spoof must take its jokes seriously. To use Galaxy quest as an example: the central joke is that aliens watched episodes of an old Star Trek style show, thought it was real, built a copy of the ship they saw from the “documentaries”, and then found the “crew” in order to operate it in order to defeat the bad guy trying to conquer them. The hilarious absurdities in the show generally all follow from taking this premise seriously; a collection of actors tries to learn how to do what they had pretended to do in order to not be killed by the entirely serious evil alien who wants to conquer them. The movie is filled with jokes, but they always work with the story being told. For example, when the characters have to go through a hallway which has periodic jets of flame and large stomping… things… that require one to run and pause with a particular sequence, it’s absurd and the actors curse the writer who added this to an episode, but they are cursing the writer precisely because they have to now do it for real or get burned to death or stomped to death. Thus when the actors get through (with the help of a phone call to some obsessed teenage fans who have every episode on tape and walk them through the sequence), it’s genuinely exciting and means something to the characters who are now not dead but who could easily have just been dead (within the pretend of the movie, of course). While the scene is hilarious, it is also satisfying as space opera where people who are unprepared have to survive technology far outside of their normal experience.
Contrast this with the scene in Space Balls where the heroes are running away, dive through a closing door, and get captured in a nearby room. As the captain is telling them that it was a nice stunt but all for naught and they can never win, they turn around and are clearly not the main characters. He he stops mid-speech, then shouts at the guards, “these are not them, you idiots, you’ve captured their stunt doubles! Search the area!” In context, it’s extremely funny, but it is in no way satisfying as space opera. Stunt doubles are explicitly a reference to the fact that this is a movie, shattering the suspension of disbelief. Even apart from that, capturing a group of people while thinking that they’re another group of people is neither common in space opera nor related to the central theme of fantastic yet relatable worlds. Again, just to be clear, this doesn’t make it bad. It only makes it not-in-the-genre.
I think, then, that when a spoof takes its premise completely seriously and derives the humor primarily through exaggeration, often from a highly exaggerated premise, it can epitomize the genre precisely because, being a spoof, it tries to cram in as much as it can of what is common to movies in the genre. This will tend to bring in the essence of the genre.
Which is almost the opposite of what normal movies in a genre try to do.
Each real movie in a genre is trying to distinguish itself from the others in the genre. It seeks to explore something not yet explored, or to look at the genre from a new perspective. Each movie justifies its existence by being a little different. One might be tempted, therefore, to look to the first movie in a genre, but it frequently does not realize that it’s in its own genre. More rare, still, is that initial movie understanding all of the implications of its genre.
Consider Star Wars: A New Hope. Is it the first of its genre? It’s the first of a sub-genre, perhaps. It was meant by George Lucas as a throwback (or homage, if you prefer) to older science fiction stories, like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. But if you watch the original Buck Rogers—or go back further to the original comic strips—you’ll find that it’s not what you think of us as typical Science Fiction. There is, after all, a reason why it’s not commonly watched anymore.
Which yields the curious conclusion that if anything is going to be the epitome of a genre, the most likely movie to be the epitome of a genre is a spoof.
I love Spaceballs and have watched it many times; it’s not a criticism of the film to say it wasn’t good space opera since it wasn’t trying to be. ↩︎
The parable of the Good Samaritan is well known, but I think that it is common, these days, to miss a large fraction of what it’s about. The most common interpretation, in my experience, focuses entirely on the aspect of seeing people outside of one’s group as human. In particular, that the “good guy” in the story is a Samaritan, which is the last person a Jew in Jesus time would expect to be the “good guy.” This is certainly true, and no true interpretation of scripture is invalid because every true interpretation of scripture was intended, since God, in His eternity, as he inspires it sees every moment of everyone interpreting scripture simultaneously with the moment of its writing. But there’s a great deal more to it than just that (now trite) truth, and I want to present a more modern retelling which I think will help us to notice some of these other truths in it.
Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with the original (including the context of why it was told).
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
The key word, neighbor, in the original Greek.
The first problem most of us encounter is: what on earth is a Samaritan? Most of the time we’re only told that they are people that the Jews looked down on, but we’re never told why. The thing is, it was for a good reason: the Samaritans were descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who intermarried with pagans and took up the worship of pagan gods alongside the God of Israel. They weren’t just a different ethnicity—in fact, they weren’t really a different ethnicity. They were idolaters who flagrantly broke God’s commandment to have no other gods before him and taught their children to do so. And the pagans of the time had some pretty awful practices—this was not all theoretical.
Also important to know is that the Samaritans were not an oppressed minority. Samaria was, for many hundreds of years, a separate kingdom from Judea and the two often warred with each other. By the time of Jesus the two had only recently been both brought under a unified rule, but (oversimplifying) this was only because of Roman domination, not because of any unity between the two. They were still separate places, with Jews rarely going to Samaria and Samaritans rarely going to Judea. Yes, the Jews didn’t like the Samaritans, but equally importantly, the Samaritans didn’t like the Jews.
In not mentioning that last part, we miss a great deal of what this parable is about.
So I’d like to offer a modern retelling, which captures the relationships as first centuries Jews would have understood them when listening to this parable:
Back in the 1960s, in Michigan, a black man was walking in a bad part of Detroit when some robbers caught him, beat him, and took everything he had, leaving him half dead in the street. By chance, a civil rights leader walked by and, seeing the man, moved to the other side of the road and walked by. Similarly, a baptist minister happened to be there and saw the man, switched to the other side of the road and walked past. But a KKK member who was driving by saw the man and was deeply moved. He pulled his car over, treated the man as best he could with the first aid kit he had, gently moved him into his car and drove him to the hospital. At the hospital he told them that if the man didn’t have insurance he himself would pay the bill.
Who, of the three, was the neighbor of the beaten man? If you answer, the one who took him to the hospital and paid his bills, go and do likewise.
The way Jesus’ question is often translated, “who proved neighbor” or “who was neighbor” doesn’t, it seems to me, capture all of the meaning of the Greek verb which is used. It’s more literally “who came to be neighbor”—the verb is the same verb used in the prologue of the Gospel of John where it says “all things came to be through him and not one thing came to be except through him.”
This also seems related to how the context is often forgotten about. The context is the lawyer saying that the way to eternal life is (secondarily) to love his neighbor as himself, and asking the clarificational question, “who is my neighbor?” That is, he’s asking who it is that he should love in the same manner that he loves himself. And I think it’s important to take note of the fact that Jesus never (directly) answers this question.
If you examine the parable with an eye towards the question of who had the obligation to love another in the manner he loved himself, the most direct answer that you get is that the man who was beaten by the robbers—the Samaritan became his neighbor. But that’s not what Jesus says; he does not say who anyone owes anything to. He only says to go and do like the Samaritan did.
There’s an interesting aspect to this if you look at the original Greek. The word always translated as “neighbor” is “plesion” which is actually an adverb being used as a noun. As an adverb, it means “near” or “close.” In the parable, the priest and the Levite both stayed away from the man who was beaten. Upon seeing him, they walked on the other side of the road. Only the Samaritan, upon seeing him, came close enough to touch him.
And a final thing about the parable worth considering when this happened: why was the Samaritan there? It’s actually quite strange, since Jerusalem, Jericho, and the path between them are all in Judea and not close to Samaria. The Samaritans worshiped on their own mountain, they didn’t go to Jerusalem. So it’s really rather strange that he was there. All we are told was that he was journeying—he was on his way to somewhere. That is, he was going about his own business. He was not a do-gooder who scoured the countryside looking for Jews who had been beaten up. He also wasn’t at home with a sign up that any beaten Jews should stop by. And, furthermore, he also kept going about his own business, whatever that was. He didn’t give up his journey, he only gave the innkeeper money and told him that he would repay him any further expenses on his return.
A final thought about the passage worth considering is Jesus’ final instruction: go and do likewise. He didn’t say that the Samaritan was righteous, or that the Samaritan’s idolatry was less important than his good works, or even that the Samaritan did a single other decent thing in his entire life. All Jesus said was that the lawyer should do as the Samaritan did in this particular case.
That is, he told him: show mercy to someone in your path who needs it.
Chris Lansdown 
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