And thus begins The Cultural Prism experiment. Some people have been encouraging me to start a blog for awhile and now that the alleged Judgment Day has passed without incident, it seemed a safe time to start. I just wasn't sure what to write about. The obvious avenue was to write about Star Wars - and there will be time for that, believe me - but there are so many blogs about Star Wars and, truthfully, I wanted to try something different.
Reading or watching the news every day, I am struck by how often I distill what's going on in the world through the prism of the arts: movies, music, books, even sports. I guess it's my way of processing things that I either don't know enough about or simply don't understand. The arts have been ingrained in me from a young age.
Saturday night was movie night in our family. Mom and dad would pile all us kids in the station wagon and traipse off to the twin theatre (no movieplexes then!). It was family night and we all went together. Great fun! It also meant that I saw alot of movies and, as the youngest, plenty that I probably shouldn't have seen at my age. But I got my love of movies from those Saturday nights.
Elsewhere, my brother fed me a steady diet of The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and many other great acts at an early age as well. Even now, there is always music playing for me, at home, at work. Just not in the car - that stereo has been broken far too long.
Sports was a given - three brothers. You kidding me? And as a writer, books have always been important. So using the arts to interpret life is like breathing for me. So here goes. Hope you'll stay along for the ride, wherever it may lead!
First up: the aforementioned Apocalypse/Rapture. I am not one to poo-poo anyone's beliefs. One man's faith is another man's folly, or vice-versa. To each his own. So I can't say I was surprised by some of the wilder stories regarding last weekend's non-event/end of the world. I don't begrudge anyone their right to calculate the End of Days, or worship a goat, or to believe in nothing at all. But I worry when children are subjected to adults' beliefs.
Now don't get me wrong. Faith is an idea passed on from generation to generation. And the roots of that faith are usually sewn at an early age, regardless of the faith. Eventually, at some point, most of us grow up and begin asking tough questions and end up deciding if what we were exposed to as a child really makes it for us, faith-wise. 'Tis always been so, and always will be.
But when I read about the man who drove his family from Maryland to California - some 3,000 miles - to experience the Rapture in Oakland with a group of like-minded followers, my mind immediately raced to the film, "The Mosquito Coast".
Starring Harrison Ford, in one of his few non-heroic roles, "The Mosquito Coast" relates the story of Allie Fox, an idealistic inventor who moves his entire family to a remote village in South America in an attempt to create a Utopian society, with predictably bad results. Ford's performance is as powerful as his character is unsympathetic. But I especially remember the look on the face of his son - the late, great River Phoenix - excited by his father's brilliance, but eventually shocked by his father's descent into trying to play God. That really stuck with me.
"I was hoping for [the apocalypse] because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth," said the man who traveled across country for the Rapture last week. I wonder what his kids thought? Did they believe what he said, or did they just believe in him? And when Saturday passed without so much as a ripple in the pond of time, did his children look at him the way River Phoenix looked at Harrison Ford?
Too often in an impatient search for paradise, people end up creating their own personal hell. I guess I wouldn't mind so much, if they didn't subject their children to it.
