Pop Culture

, , , , , , ,

Norm Macdonald's 'Nothing Special' -- final thoughts on mortality while the clock was ticking

, , , , , , ,
Norm Macdonald's 'Nothing Special' -- final thoughts on mortality while the clock was ticking

Comedians frequently take shots at taboo targets, but that wasn't what Norm Macdonald was doing when he addressed Down's Syndrome while solo recording what became the new "Nothing Special" on Netflix.

"I love people with Down Syndrome," said Macdonald, in a no-audience performance packed with his familiar pauses and bemused expressions. "I wish I had Down Syndrome, and I'll tell you why. They're happy. You know what I mean? …

"What's wrong with that? … People get mad at them … and they pity them. Now, who's the bad person in that scenario?"

The former Saturday Night Life star -- who died September 14 after a secret nine-year fight with cancer -- recorded nearly an hour of material during the coronavirus pandemic, before yet another operation in the summer of 2020. He said he "didn't want to leave anything on the table in case things went south."

This Netflix finale offers fresh musings on mortality and morality that, with Macdonald's blunt language and haunting images, evolve into meditations on how modern people deceive themselves. The X-factors in his art were religious faith and his love of literature ranging from Mark Twain to Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

"Macdonald showed respect for basically everyone, with the exception of himself and people like O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton," said Rich Cromwell, a television professional and essayist for The Federalist. "He was not a Christian comedian -- that's clear. But that was part of who he was, and he treated faith with respect. …

"This Down's Syndrome material is a perfect example. He didn't turn that into an overt argument about abortion, but it's clear that he is saying all life is worthy of respect, even if some people don't judge that life to be worthy. He's saying people with Down's Syndrome are God's children, no matter what."

"Nothing Special" ends with an A-list reaction panel -- David Letterman, Adam Sandler, Conan O'Brien, Dave Chappelle, David Spade and Molly Shannon -- who knew Macdonald as a friend and colleague. This special was full of "third-rail stuff," noted O'Brien.

Macdonald riffed on his own "degenerate" gambling sins, his fear of airplane crashes ("Ashes to ashes, stuff to stuff, as the scriptures say"), cannibalism, slut-shaming, racism, transgenderism and his fear of dying and discovering that he picked the wrong religion. He also discusses living wills and giving doctors explicit instructions not to yank "that plug in the wall" in the event of a coma.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

Concerning 'good' faith and the Christian/pagan priest who believes Google AI is sentient

, , , , , , , ,
Concerning 'good' faith and the Christian/pagan priest who believes Google AI is sentient

Let’s start with some basics as we look at a recent New York Post story that ran with this headline: “Google engineer says Christianity helped him understand AI is ‘sentient’.”

For decades, I have been arguing with people, mostly cultural conservatives, who say things like: “Journalists hate religion.”

This is simplistic. In my experience — first, while working in newsrooms, and second, while reading and writing about media-bias issues — many journalists don’t care enough about religion to work up a good batch of hate. They tend to be indifferent or apathetic, unless certain types of religious folks start interfering in politics, which is the true religion of many or most news professionals.

No, it’s crucial to understand that many reporters love certain types of religion and oppose others. Always remember the following passage in that Jay Rosen PressThink essay, "Journalism Is Itself a Religion.” Yes, this involves interaction with one of my “On Religion” columns, but I can’t help that, nor can I help that this is quite long. So, what is the religion of the press?

A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy,” wrote David Samuels.

This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist of religion: “This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist’s convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the ‘world that most of us inhabit’ cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.”

Yet here is the part that intrigued me: “But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward ‘fundamentalists.’ Thus, when listing the ‘deadly sins’ that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns ‘the sin of religious certainty.’ “


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Podcast: So many questions after that symbolic Tampa Bay Rays conflict over 'Pride' logos

, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Podcast: So many questions after that symbolic Tampa Bay Rays conflict over 'Pride' logos

Symbolism often plays a major role in tense clashes between people with competing religious beliefs (or secular beliefs, for that matter).

You could see evidence of this fact during and after the recent kerfuffle about a small group of Tampa Bay Rays players who declined to wear special rainbow-logo uniforms during the team’s recent celebration of Pride Month. The media coverage of this clash was the subject of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), in part because the stories raised more questions than they answered.

I’ll get to some of those questions, but first let’s look at the Washington Post coverage. Note that this means the Rays conflict was a national story, since the Post doesn’t cover mere regional stories and disputes (see this classic M.Z. Hemingway post about the newspaper’s MIA stance on covering the trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell).

The headline on this sports-desk story: “Rays players make ‘faith-based decision’ to shun Pride Night logos.” Yes, it’s important to note that there are doubts about the nature of this “faith-based” angle. Let’s look at some important passages in this:

A member of the Tampa Bay Rays said he and several teammates made a “faith-based decision” to not wear rainbow-colored logos on their uniforms during a “Pride Night” home game Saturday that recognized the LGBTQ community.

Most Rays players, per accounts from the game, wore the special uniform designs that had a rainbow pattern over the “TB” on their caps and over a sunburst logo on their right sleeves. The team, which has staged Pride Night for several seasons but had not previously included uniform changes, reportedly gave players the option to display the logos or go with the usual look.

The crucial fact there is that team management decided to allow players some degree of free-will in this case. Hold that thought.

Apparently, team management asked pitcher Jason Adam to make a statement on why he, and four others, elected to wear their usual jerseys for this symbolic event. Thus, he said:

“A lot of it comes down to faith, to like a faith-based decision,” said Adam, a 30-year-old in his fifth major league season.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , ,

Naomi Judd: 'It's scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so together side'

, , , , , , , , , ,
Naomi Judd: 'It's scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so together side'

Naomi Judd thought she understood the ties that bind country-music stars and their audience -- then one aggressive fan went and joined the Pentecostal church the Judd family called home.

"It really burdened me," said Judd, after signing hundreds of her "Love Can Build a Bridge" memoir back in 1993. "I just don't sign autographs at church. The best way I can explain it to children … is to say, 'Honey, Jesus is the star.' "

After a year of this tense standoff, Judd became concerned and wrote the fan. "I said, 'I want you to really get away by yourself and read this letter and answer this question honestly: Do you come to church to see The Judds or do you come to church to see God?' She never came back to church. But she was in the autograph line today."

Through it all, Judd and her brash daughter Wynonna have talked openly about their triumphs and their struggles. Many fans identified with their failures just as much as the messages about faith and family.

At the time of that 1993 interview, Naomi Judd had battled through waves of anxiety attacks to address some dark realities -- such as rape, crisis pregnancy and her deadly battle with hepatitis C that retired the The Judds.

What she hadn't discussed at that time was the sexual abuse in her childhood that led to treatment-resistant depression. Judd's April 30th death, at age 76, focused new attention on blunt passages in her 2016 book "River of Time," in which she said had been tempted by suicide. "I wanted to be completely honest that if someone took out a gun and killed me on stage, they would be doing me a favor," she wrote.

The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame the day after Naomi's death and her shaken daughter Ashley Judd told the crowd, "I'm sorry that she couldn't hang on until today." Writing in USA Today, the actress expressed gratitude for her mother's legacy, but added: "Perhaps it's indecorous to say, but my heart is filled with something else, too. Incandescent rage. Because my mother was stolen from me by the disease of mental illness, by the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl."


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Naomi Judd: Press reports covered the dark nights of her life, but not the Sunday mornings

, , , , , , , , , , ,
Naomi Judd: Press reports covered the dark nights of her life, but not the Sunday mornings

Journalists tend to remember symbolic details from many of interesting interviews — whether they are with superstars of various kinds or ordinary people who have seen remarkable things.

Exhausted after signing hundreds of copies of her “Love Can Build a Bridge” memoir back in 1993, Naomi Judd retreated to her tour bus parked behind the bookstore. She apologized for heading to the back room to get out of one of her famous stage dresses and into something from her farm outside of Nashville. The ground rules: no photos, but all questions were fair game.

At point in her life, she had already talked about some dark days and nights — from rape to a crisis pregnancy and beyond. But she hadn’t dug deeper into her childhood and the abuse that created the deep pools of depression that would eventually take her life.

But this was a woman who was driven to talk about her angels, as well as her demons. My favorite quote from that interview didn’t make it into the “On Religion” column that I wrote pre-Internet, but stashed deep in my file cabinets with pages of notes and transcripts.

Naomi Judd stressed that if people — journalists included — want to understand country music, and the relationship between the musicians and their fans, they need to remember that it’s normal, in a country music show, “to sing about Sunday morning, as well as Friday and Saturday nights.”

That’s what I went looking for in the coverage of her death and then the ceremony in which The Judds — Wynonna and Naomi — entered the Country Music Hall of Fame. Here’s the top of the Nashville Tennessean report on that event, as it ran in USA Today:

As Grammy-winning duo The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame Sunday evening, Wynonna Judd addressed the passing of her mother Naomi just one day earlier.

Following brief remarks from her younger sister Ashley, Wynonna spoke for roughly four minutes.

"It's a strange dynamic to be this broken and this blessed. … But though my heart is broken, I will continue to sing," she said.

Wynonna said Naomi Judd, 76, passed away at 2:20 PM, and that she kissed her mother "on the forehead and walked away." She also stated that the last act she, Ashley and unnamed other family members did together was praying the Bible's 23rd Psalm. The crowd in attendance all recited the Psalm in unison with Judd to complete her speech.

That’s solid and hints at the atmosphere during the ceremony.

Truth is, Hall of Fame member Ricky Skaggs — who knew the Judds from the days before their rise to fame — took the audience to church, as he struggled to control his emotions through the entire speech-sermon.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , ,

What is religion's role if powerful social media trends are endangering America?

, , , , , ,
What is religion's role if powerful social media trends are endangering America?

Whew! Within a matter of days Elon Musk bids $44 billion to get full control of Twitter, Netflix's market value plummets $54 billion, Florida's conservative version of "cancel culture" penalizes the Disney empire, and CNN kills off its streaming service in a month after investing $300 million -- perhaps the worst industry flop since Time Warner's 2001 merger with AOL.

Anchor Kasie Hunt, who left MSNBC for CNN+, embraced a life-goes-on attitude: "The news is the news is the news is the news." (She was quickly named CNN's Chief National Affairs Analyst.)

By the way, a certain influential newspaper in New York City also named a new team of top editors. Did you see those photos of incoming editor Joseph Kahn?

Maybe all that media turbulence is far less important than the inexorable accumulation of 21st Century cultural power by Twitter and other "social media: giants.

Thus, readers will want to consider this warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University's business school, in the May issue of The Atlantic: “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.

Religion writers: Despite Haidt's imagery of failed communication taken from the biblical Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), his article sidesteps whether faith groups could help restore societal calm and how they're being reshaped by ubiquitous media. Perhaps he'll get into that in his book "Life After Babel Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share," due from Penguin next year.

Though critics often say conflicting religions erode social cohesion, is it only coincidence that organized religion's slump to near-Depression status since A.D. 2000 occurred simultaneously with the disintegration Haidt decries?


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Plug-In: Déjà Vu all over again, as religion plays big role in fight over Disney and sex ed

, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Plug-In: Déjà Vu all over again, as religion plays big role in fight over Disney and sex ed

I’ve never visited Walt Disney World, but I did make it to Disney church one Sunday.

Mickey, Minnie and friends are, as you might have noticed, key actors in the nation’s latest culture war skirmish.

Over the last week, the fight over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill — or, as critics call it, the “Don’t Say Gay” law — has made front-page headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

Call it Disney déjà vu.

The Los Angeles Times’ Ryan Faughnder asserts:

It’s a battle that, to people who have followed Disney’s history, has a familiar ring. The current conflict is just the latest clash to reveal underlying tensions that have existed between Disney and religious conservatives for decades as the company has increasingly embraced the LGBTQ community.

It has strong echoes of the anti-Disney protests of the late 1990s, when religious leaders criticized the extension of health benefits to the partners of LGBTQ Disney employees, the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres on her sitcom on Disney-owned ABC and unofficial “Gay Day” celebrations at the theme parks.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, host of “The 700 Club,” warned the city of Orlando that it risked hurricanes by tolerating Gay Days. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 called for a Disney boycott after the nondenominational American Family Assn. campaigned against the Burbank entertainment giant by sending thousands of protest packets to pastors. The difference now is that, instead of brochures, there’s Fox News and Twitter.

A major development in the current brawl came Thursday, as the Wall Street Journal’s Arian Campo-Flores and Robbie Whelan report:

Florida lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that would end a special tax district that allows Walt Disney Co. DIS 0.07% ▲ to govern the land housing its theme parks, escalating a weekslong dispute with Disney over its public opposition to a Florida bill that limits classroom instruction on gender and sexuality.

The measure now goes to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made clear he would sign it.

In a twist, Southern Baptists have been “offering discounted Disneyland tickets for families traveling to Anaheim this June for the denomination's big annual meeting,” as the Tennessean’s Liam Adams reported earlier this month.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

White evangelicals, again: New York Times urgently probes praise music on political right

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
White evangelicals, again: New York Times urgently probes praise music on political right

At this point, it’s safe to say that some New York Times editors are still engaged in a passionate quest to find a large group of Americans to blame for the 2016 general-election victory of Donald Trump of Queens.

There’s an obvious answer: White evangelicals. And it’s certainly true that independent and, especially, Pentecostal Protestants played a strategic role in the shocking rise of Orange Man Bad. It’s also true that independent evangelicals, fundamentalists, charismatics and Pentecostal believers have played high-profile roles in video-friendly pro-Trump events, including the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol to hunt down Vice President Mike Pence — a mainstream White evangelical if there ever was one.

However, White evangelical voters were not the crucial Rust Belt voters that put Trump in the White House, although Latino evangelicals and charismatics were a major force in Florida

Therefore, what are discerning religion-beat readers supposed to make of that long, vague Times sermon that ran the other day with this dramatic double-decker headline? (Sorry for the delay getting to this piece, but surgery slowed me down last week.)

The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’

Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election.

Here is one strong opinion that is drawn — with his permission — from an email I received from Kenneth Woodward, for decades the religion-beat pro at Newsweek and the author of “Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump.”

This is the most naive religion story I’ve read in decades and illustrates precisely why the Times still does not get religion. … Only the Times could publish a piece as misinformed as this one.

Why does Woodward think that? To some degree, he is blaming a newspaper story for lacking the kind of depth seen in interpretive magazine pieces produced during the glory years of religion-beat work at Newsweek and at Time by GetReligion patriarch Richard Ostling. For a short period of time, Emma Green was allowed to do similar work at the Atlantic.

Depth is an issue here. But this Times feature is quite long and has lots of room for anecdotes, when what is missing is a hard skeleton of facts that link (if this is possible) these vague trends and illustrations to actual denominations, publishing houses, parachurch groups, think tanks and academic institutions at the heart of American evangelicalism.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

I was never nuts for Disney. I’ve never been to one of their a theme park, either as a child or now as a parent of two children, and never indulged in their movies much over my lifetime. I’ll freely admit that puts me in the minority, both in the United States and around the world, when it comes to Disney consumption.

I was, however, once a Disney employee. No, I didn’t work in one of their stores. Instead, I was employed at ABC News in New York, where I worked for their digital unit running the website and other internet assets such as social media. It was a great place to work — although not “The Happiest Place On Earth” as the official tagline for Disneyland states. It was, after all, a newsroom — but one of the perks was free tickets each year to their amusement parks.

I say all this in the context of the ongoing feud regarding the Florida “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which is now law after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it. This is the much-discussed bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

The law continues to get media coverage for two reasons. First, because of Disney’s involvement and second due to the larger notion that DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, is — everyone chant the media mantra — “engaging in a culture war.” This remains a political story, a business story and a pop culture story.

Is this also an important religion story? It certainly is (tmatt takes on this very topic in GetReligion’s most recent podcast).

My most recent GetReligion post focused on the news media’s largely ignoring the Republican DeSantis’ Catholic faith in regard to the widespread news coverage around the bill, which opponents effectively labeled “Don’t Say Gay” even though the bill never used those words.

At the same time, the news coverage for conservative press around the legislation has centered much more on Disney’s late-in-the-game activism in opposing it. The coverage among mainstream and progressive news sites continues to center on that activist “Don’t Say Gay” mantra.


Please respect our Commenting Policy