Challenging Scientism

The most disturbing and bravest book I’ve seen in a long, long time is this one:

I can’t believe the candor, or the excess, and the lack of pride or self-aggrandizement in the telling. It’s the American Dream, the California Dream, the dream of “liberation,” but it’s no fantasy. It’s a plain horror, lived in tacky Kodachrome, in the sugar-drunk decades of our little failing experimental country. It is just horribly honest about the brutal pagan realities of life. She deserves an award, and I’m sure will be paid in an endless sea of cold shoulders, or perhaps, of syphilitic libertines who are titillated by the topic. Poor girl. Glad she wrote it. I hope she is too.

A review of a program on the television, (the lowly lying despicable beast that it is). But, I’m spurred on, because it’s a pretty shocking and often dramatically and thematically interesting/fascinating program: Battlestar Galactica. (also known as Battlestar Ga-dork-tica, Ga-nerd-ica, etc.)
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A summation by way of Hollywood analogy:

- Jimmy Stewart versus Moe Howard.
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You can’t beat Gov. Sarah Palin for believing in a party line. She’s terrific, beyond all expectations, as an effective, energized, humanized version of the McCain party line.

Overheard at the podium – “I love you” – “Don’t touch me.”
On the other hand, she ” will not answer questions the way you [Senator Biden] or the moderator want me to. ” In other words, she won’t answer questions that show her frailties, or her Candidate’s hypocrisies – she’ll change the subject, and bite your heels while she’s at it.
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“Out of my way, old timer.” “Who you callin’ old, youngster?”

The first debate – a solid, mostly issue-based tussle between two near-adults. Something we have not seen in presidential politics since I-don’t-know-when.
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Charlie Gibson takes his network neckerchief off and asks (and asks and asks) relatively to truly good, hard questions of Mrs. America:

[Here] and [Search]

“ Can you look the country in the eye and say “I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?…Am I ready? Do I know enough about international affairs? Do I — will I feel comfortable enough on the national stage to do this?”
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McCain offers his service – and seems 1,000 times less insane than our current president.

(All quotes are paraphrases from memory of having just listened).

John McCain gives a very strong, but un-florid speech to a crowd that has not always loved him. An earthy speech, with blessedly few “Amen” choruses and “Can I get a witness!” lines, of the kind that mark the rhetoric since Reagan (Clinton, Bush).

He even threw cold water in the audience’s face at one point, declaring the “Latina daughter of migrant workers,” to be a “US Citizen.”

Uh-huh. Pulling that in St. Paul, in Rush Limbaugh’s den? That is a maverick.
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It’s in the writing (acting, directing, and production):

The meta-machines that destroyed humanity (and its 12 zodiacal planets), drive us to discover our inner piece of Holy Spirit (while forcing us to reject our happy pantheon)…

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