Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

RISK TO LIFE AND LIMB: 140 WORDS ON 127 HOURS.

When I was 12, flying to visit relatives in Brazil, I listened on the plane's radio to Olivia Newton-John sing the theme to Xanadu. Thirty years later, the movie and the trip are permanently intertwined in my mind.

The same will be true of 127 Hours and my recent Moor Tour to Portugal, Spain and Morocco, not only because I watched the riveting film on the flight home but because the questions posed by the movie weighed on my mind even before I arrived in Morocco -- is exploring the world worth risking one's life and what happens if something goes wrong?

With revolution sweeping the Arab world, my friends and I wondered whether to visit Morocco at all. In the end we took a risk, mostly minimal -- there were protests the day after we left -- and (luckily for me) that second question remains unanswered.

THE POWER OF AMERICAN CULTURE.

 

It’s not much of a revelation, but still fascinating to fly out of Toronto listening to Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas and land in Lisbon only to hear Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas in the 10-minute taxi ride from the airport to the train station. Not to mention the posters for The Fighter, a Staples store and two of the earliest scouts of American cultural omnipresence and global pre-eminence: McDonalds and Coke.

My initial reaction to all these familiar cues was to marvel at how global we’ve truly become. But who am I kidding? We’re not global. Like it or not, we’re all American now.

Of course, as the US’s closest neighbors Canadians have struggled with this double-edged ginzu knife for decades now. America, the culture drug. We want to just say no, but we just can’t. Like the husband who stimulates our intellect but fails to arouse our other bits, we try to take pride in Anne Murray and The Beachcombers and even the Blackberry but it’s nearly always an exercise in flaccidity. Like telling the runner-up it’s really not about winning. Does anyone actually believe that shit?

The truth is our cultures live and die the way creatures do and always have. This has always been the business of survival of the fittest. Plenty of beautifully majestic animals and their long lines of descendants lived perfectly honorable lives till something came along and wiped them out. It’s not a moral issue. Mother Nature isn’t sentimental. The fitter animal is simply bigger, faster, stronger, more efficient or better suited in some way for its present-day environment.

And bam. You are out, auf wiedersehen.

Or to put it another way, you can comb over that cultural bald spot for a little while but sooner or later you run out of hair. Baldness wins. You’re fired.

And so it is with the culture of products and ideas. Governments can mandate music content on the radio or the predominance of a threatened language on commercial signs. Schools can ban books. Networks can ban words. Dictators can ban dissent. These may plug the leak. They may make us think we can, for a time, overcome the forces of nature and time.

But in the end, sooner or later, no one can overcome a product or idea whose time has come nor the consumers who want it more than anything.

Just ask Hosni Mubarak.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN STUPIDITY? 140 WORDS ON THE RITE.

If you ever needed proof Hollywood is utterly bereft of new ideas just watch The Rite, the latest in a long line of silly movies about crazy people, ostensibly possessed by the devil but more likely raped by a loved one. (This, by the way, only months after Hollywood promised The Last Exorcism. They lied.) In fact, the only thing fascinating about this schlock is how anyone is still able to sell another exorcism movie starring Anthony Hopkins in another creepy role to the guys who finance these things.

Even more absurd is the movie’s premise: a skeptical priest who learns the most important lesson of all – that you can do anything and con anyone if only you believe. Then again, that may be the secret to how The Rite was green-lighted in the first place.

 

FUNDAMENTALLY UNREASONABLE.

A good friend of mine came out to his mother the other day. And it wasn't pretty.

Telling your mom and dad you're gay can be painful in the best of circumstances -- all parents construct fantastical notions about who and what their little boys and girls will be when they grow up. And then in a few seconds the words "I'm gay" change all that forever. Parents are wrenched into a period of mourning and shame, imagining their child will die of AIDS or that their son or daughter will never have kids and families of their own or -- more selfishly -- grandchildren for them to dote on, or that they'll be ostracized by their friends and community. None of this is necessarily true, but coming out to one's family is above all an emotional, not rational, experience -- and in these circumstances, it's often our primitive, fear-based cores that take over (at least for a few days, months or years) until hopefully we reason that the son we loved before is still fundamentally the same son that stands before us now, except for who sleeps in his bed and who he ultimately chooses to love.

Now layer on top of this emotional coming out experience, as my friend did earlier this week, religion -- in his case, Islam. He is devout, as are his parents, and he has wrestled for some time with how to reconcile his innate attraction to men with what his religion (and most religions) literally tells him: homosexuality is sinful, lewd, shameful, illegal, haraam, even punishable by death. It doesn't matter how pure your heart is toward your fellow man. It doesn't matter how much good you've done in the world. All that is cast aside by an act that doesn't hurt anyone except, fundamentalists would say, God.

Speaking with my friend before he came out to his mother, I thought I'd found a loophole in this logic -- as if there is any logic in religious belief to start with. But I put aside my cynicism about faith because I understand that religion is important to many people, including my friend. I told him: "ask them, if God is all-powerful and created you, then surely he created you this way and if that's the case, how can being gay be a sin? Surely God is not such a sadist that he would create us a certain way then condemn us for it?" (I forgot, of course, that the god of Jews, Christians and Muslims has done this sort of thing before. After all he put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden then punished his creation for eating its fruit. But I digress.)

Alas, I always seem to underestimate the lengths to which religion and fundamentalists will go to justify their literal belief in texts that would clearly be deemed illogical in any other context. His mother's response was that, no, God didn't create him this way. He is possessed by the Devil.

Well, how can you argue with that?

No, really. How?

You can't of course because religion, like any unreasoned and unreasonable ideology, is not about arguing or thinking or questioning. It's about accepting. It's about submitting to someone's interpretation of texts that were written when people believed spirits were ejected out of your mouth when you sneezed and lightning and thunder were signs of a deity's dissatisfaction with the mundane acts of his creation.

Most of us understand when we go in for surgery that the single most important thing to be concerned about is the competence of the doctors operating on us. It is not whether you gave sadaka or confessed to your priest or read your horoscope that week.

It simply is not.

In the 21st century, we understand how disease works, how medicine works, how evolution works, how the tides work, how the earth revolved around the sun. We even have a pretty good handle on the workings of the mind. We understand these things because we have used reason to develop theories, we have tested hypotheses and confirmed the results.

Most of us, any way. Unfortunately for some, gods still tell them, mostly innocuously, to wear this hat or that veil or that dagger, or less so, that devils make us gay. And that, in the end, may be the worst part in all this. That instead of allowing a parent to do what might come naturally after the pain subsides, instead of being supportive and understanding when a child they love exposes a little bit more of his humanity to them, they cling to superstition and primitive notions of gods and devils and sin that are reckless, damaging, hurtful and utterly wrong.

That's not just fundamentally unreasonable. It's tragic.

 

EGYPTIANS FINALLY PLAYING THE RIGHT BLAME GAME.

When courageous Egyptians took to the street last week to tell a 30-year dictator that his time was up, I was wondering how long it would be before someone blamed Israel. After all, there's a virtual cottage industry in the Arab world when it comes to blaming the Jews for their problems.

First I saw stars of David sprayed on an Egyptian tank, then I saw this:

In other words, the hated Mubarak is as low as -- or in bed with -- the Jews. Sweet sentiment. Let the blame game begin!

But happily, this sort of thing seems to be the exception. Time Magazine's Andrew Lee Butters reports:

"Of the legion of signs and slogans arrayed and shouted in Tahrir Square, I encountered just one that even referred to Israel: a small Star of David on the necktie of a Mubarak dummy hung in effigy from a lamppost. For a political demonstration in the Arab world, this is next to nothing. One protester ran up to me and said, 'I want the American people to know this is not about Israel. We are at peace with Israel. We are not at peace with Mubarak.'"

Finally.

While I have no starry-eyed illusions that Arabs and Muslims suddenly love Jews or Israelis, maybe, just maybe, it's finally sunk in to Arabs on the street that there are bigger belehat to fry. And that while the Palestinian-Israeli issue is still one that needs to be resolved post-haste, for average Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Jordanians, Syrians and Saudi Arabians, they've finally figured out who to blame and what to do about it.

Click here for another interesting view on the place of Israel, if any, in this historic pan-Arab revolution.