How do you write a review for a beloved classic? A novel many consider one of the best ever written? I’ve now read Anna Karenina once, and I feel I need to read it at least two more times before I do it justice. Classics, after all, are not books you get to judge, not until your own tastes have matured to a certain point, after marinating in wisdom, life, and other great literature.

Classics are works that judge you. If you don’t like a classic, that means your tastes are wrong. Period. Most people will die before they prove an exception to that maxim, before they could ever offer a proper critique, though many try as if they were lobbing invectives at the sun.

So this isn’t a review of Anna Karenina, but a stumbling, drunken appreciation of it. My goal is to get you to read it. That’s it. Joshua Gibbs once said that the goal of teaching a classic in high school is to infuse enough love and curiosity into the student so they would willingly choose to read that classic again later in life, and profit from it. And so that is my humble aim. To get you to read it.

Except for Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina is the easiest classic I’ve ever read, despite being the longest classic I’ve ever read. Halfway through reading it, in anticipation of reading it again, I purchased another copy with a different translation. That’s not something I did for Crime and Punishment.

From the first page, I was hooked and ready for the journey. I think you’ll experience something similar. In many ways, it felt impossibly modern, as if it had been written just a decade ago and someone had successfully pulled off an elaborate prank.

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The Friends You Made Along the Way

We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art. We are to take it as a piece of life.

Matthew Arnold

And you’ll find many pieces of life in this book, pieces you recognize as if Tolstoy had been peeping in your window. You’ll see yourself. You’ll see your friends. You’ll see your enemies. The first time you read, everything is new, yet so many things are familiar.

One moment, Tolstoy will describe a posture or attitude you’ve always known and recognized but never quite been able to sculpt into something coherent, but as soon as you read it, the swirl in your mind solidifies and you say, “Yes!” Sometimes audibly. Or sometimes you just chuckle.

From Levin working up the courage and bumbling out a proposal, to the description of “happy terror” two people in love feel as they embark into the unknown, to a mother who, one moment, is so proud of her children she could burst, and then later think they are some of the most wicked children in the world, it’s all familiar and real.

When Anna’s husband greets her at the train station, he says, “Yes, as you can see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you.” But he says it, and I quote:

…in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at any one who should say in earnest what he said.

Is this not the modern Millennial posture? Earnestness is not allowed, because to be earnest is to open yourself up to disappointment or ridicule. It is this sarcasm that will prevent Anna’s husband from being sincere and earnest when it is most critical, when she is being seduced by another man.

Every single character is flesh and blood, with veins and muscles and tears and laughter and hopes and heartache, and the ink on the page might as well be the breath of life that animates them inside your head. It drips with life. And you can’t help getting swept up in the drama.

Tolstoy loves these characters. Even his villains. You can sense that he wishes they made different choices. Nearly every character has something admirable about them, and you know that, as far as human judges go, Tolstoy would give you a fair hearing even while stripping away all of your pretensions.

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Wisdom for Life

And because you know you are in good hands, hands that have proven themselves time and again, hands that know the contours of the world and the people that walk around in it, you trust the occasional asides and wisdom it tosses out. Both obvious and direct, but also painted on a particular character. There is much to learn and reflect on.

For example, describing Vronksy:

He did not know that this mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men such as he was. It seems to him that he was the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his discovery.

Vronsky has some of the same faults as Austen’s Wickham from Pride and Prejudice, but while Austen, ever coy and in her own brilliant way, only shows the crater caused by Wickham, Tolstoy gives us the full portrait and exactly why Vronsky is terrible. Not only that, we immediately recognize the tendency in others or ourselves. Any one of us men could be a Vronsky.

Then Tolstoy will throw us an insight into childhood, which makes us take stock of our own hearts.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

And this quick homage to marriage spouted off quickly by a loyal friend.

“But I’m married, and believe me, in getting to know thoroughly one’s wife, if one loves her, as some one has said, one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands of them.”

You’ll also learn that adultery doesn’t “just happen.” The great sin that kicks off the drama was first coaxed and coddled into being with discontentment, unwise imaginations, improper yet “innocent” conversations, and other small steps that fanned the ember into a dangerous flame. Let the reader take heed, lest he also fall.

The act itself never gets a wide-angled, lingering shot from the camera. We only bear witness to the direct aftermath, described in such haunting, depressing language that would make any reasonable person recoil at the thought of mimicking such a deed.

As Anna lies sobbing on the floor, begging forgiveness, Vronksy is described as follows:

He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

There is no wink at evil, no enticement to the forbidden.

Blue Collar Prose

The prose refuses to point to itself and instead dances out of the way. No blinking lights to call attention to its own brilliance. It is content to be a perfectly clean window into its world. Simple and effective. You don’t read this book for the prose. Like muscles, the prose is meant to perform a job, not preen about in tight shirts, glistening in the sun. And it performs the job admirably. Certainly, the translation (by Constance Garnett) has something to do with this, but she required something to translate, and the final product must have fidelity to the original.

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Beware Modern Study Guides

Anna Karenina is a book you can get a lot out of, even as a casual reader. A good teacher could lead you to greater insight and appreciation, but for the layperson, it’s not needed. You certainly don’t need a modern study guide. It’s more likely to lead you into the woods to get lost and devoured by an evil witch than give you any help.

My used copy of the book included Spark Notes as a bonus. I expected them to be lame. I expected them to try to pick my pocket. Instead, they tried burn my house down. I am dumber for having read parts of this guide.

Predictably, its analysis of Anna attempts to frame her as a proto-feminist hero, one who is simply trying to be true to herself. She might not have committed suicide if the shackles of society’s expectations hadn’t strangled her. It also tries to soften her abandonment of her son by insisting she still cared for him because she snuck in to see him on his birthday. That’s like seeing a wolf vomit up the hind leg of a rabbit and conclude that it’s apologizing for its bout of carnivorism.

No.

The wolf only had some indigestion, just like Anna had a sudden bout of motherly feelings. The wolf will continue to devour rabbits, and Anna will continue to ignore her son.

The real kicker, the part that proves whoever wrote this guide should be forced to do manual labor on a chain gang instead of subjecting readers to such nonsense, is the attempt to describe the "forgiveness" motif.

During this explanation, it cites the novel's epigraph: "Vengeance is mine. I will repay."

According to the Spark Notes, this is meant to haunt the novel and convey that forgiveness is, perhaps, not the ultimate virtue after all. Not once does it mention where the quote is from, nor its greater meaning.

Does someone engaged in literary analysis really not recognize a relatively well-known quote from the Bible? And then ignore that context?

God Himself is saying, "Vengeance is mine. I will repay." You are not to engage in vengeance, because it belongs to him.

For the Spark Notes to suggest that "Vengeance is mine. I will repay" is somehow oppositional to the idea of forgiveness is, itself, unforgivable. All of the ink used to print it is wasted, and would have been better off used for drawing mustaches on the people gracing the covers of old dentist office magazines.

It fills me with horror that someone can buy a Spark Notes guide and think they're getting accurate information about a work of art. Don’t do it. Just read the book at your own pace and enjoy the journey.

Read This Book

I’m telling you to read this book because I think you will enjoy it. I think you will be surprised by it. I think you will be delighted by it. There might be certain points where you will be tempted to quit, but I think the momentum you build up will carry you through.

While reading a classic can sometimes feel like eating your vegetables, as if you’re a child starting at broccoli that’s been boiled to a bland, pale, tasteless torture, contemplating the future of a sad night without dessert, this novel is like discovering butter, salt, and cheese and the magic those ingredients can perform on almost any food that’s “good for you.”

Who received the spoils of WW2? Who was the main victor? Sean McMeekin argues persuasively that Stalin was objectively the person most enriched, and his empire enlarged. He even got Poland, ostensibly the reason WW2 started in the first place.

Yet, Hitler is always the main villain when describing the global eruption of conflict, the main instigator. While he is certainly a villain, he had nothing to do with the wars in Asia, and he had only invaded Poland after agreeing with Stalin to split up the country like a group of kids claiming their rooms for the week at a vacation cabin. And Russia’s share was actually supposed to be larger than Germany’s.

German military speed and competence secured a larger portion of territory than initially planned. In fact, German military speed and competence in Poland and then in France frustrated Stalin’s long-term foreign policy goals.

He wanted Europe embroiled in a long war of attrition, with the capitalist powers beating each other to pulp, exhausted to the brink as in the First World War, so the Soviets could march in unopposed and bathe Europe in the glories of Communism.

“Let them fight,” sums up Stalin’s goal. It was a war Stalin wanted. Hitler certainly didn’t want to fight France or Britain and expected them to back down again. Yet it’s also clear that, given British and French early responses, they didn’t really want to fight the war either. It didn’t serve their interests.

As Germany gobbled up France, Stalin cursed French and British incompetence. Despite being Hitler’s ally, and literally fueling the conquest with 4,000 tons of Soviet oil per day delivered to German Panzers, Stalin hated that Hitler smashed the allies so quickly. He wanted everyone to bleed.

And so the book is aptly titled Stalin’s War. While it was not exactly what he wanted, the outcome was close enough, with Soviet influence smothering half of Europe. Stalin was able to claim territory in the slipstream of German victories and in the rubble of German defeats. He played both sides, and the only reason he wasn’t burned was because of American naivety.

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Pantheon is a show about uploaded intelligence, and it poses all the right questions while intersecting related themes in interesting ways.

Are people uploaded to a computer really the same person?

What about a 100% genetic clone? Is he the same person or does he have a distinct identity?

What is the end game if the technology for uploaded intelligence were viable?

Can uploaded intelligences have children?

Is the uploaded intelligence the intellectual property of the company that invented the technology?

And many more. The show’s answers are surprising and entertaining, even if half of them are unsatisfactory. It plays it smart by focusing on well-rounded characters, so viewers forgive some of the handwaviness. As entertainment, it’s top-notch.

However, the show isn’t just entertainment. It posits a world that modern technologists and oligarchs desire. An artificial world made in our image, bowing to our every whim. Eternal digital life.

The very name of the show speaks to this conceit. Pantheon.

“And ye shall be as gods.”

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The “Mind Virus” of the Biological World

In a recent Vox podcast and article discussing the metaphysical assertions of AI, Jaron Lanier discusses the unusual, faith-based goals of technologists and their reverence for what they are creating.

I talk to the people who believe that stuff all the time, and increasingly, a lot of them believe that it would be good to wipe out people and that the AI future would be a better one and that we should wear a disposable temporary container for the birth of AI.

Just the other day I was at a lunch in Palo Alto and there were some young AI scientists there who were saying that they would never have a “bio baby” because as soon as you have a “bio baby,” you get the “mind virus” of the [biological] world. And when you have the mind virus, you become committed to your human baby. But it’s much more important to be committed to the AI of the future. And so to have human babies is fundamentally unethical.

Elon Musk has said that humans might be the bootloader for the intelligence that matters. The idea of something artificial replacing humanity is something serious and powerful people believe.

The desire to slough off the limitations of the flesh is nothing new. Gnosticism and its denigration of human bodies has been around forever. Even its union with modern science into a form of techno-gnosticsm was something predicted by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength, published in 1945.

Here is a conversation from the novel among some of the scientists at N.I.C.E.

“If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”

“Go on,” said Winter.

“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life expect your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”

“That’s true.”

“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”

“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”

“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life…We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”

The mind. The mind is what matters. For the mind to live without the body is the ultimate wish for many.

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Hell Becomes Heaven

The first season of Pantheon treats uploaded intelligence as unnatural and ugly. The second episode has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever watched. A man unwillingly has his brain burned away and scanned, layer by layer, as you watch the life dim in his eyes.

A nightmare. Who would want this? No one sane. Only the terminally ill would ever volunteer for such a procedure.

Yet, it is soon discovered that these UIs (uploaded intelligences) become superhumanly powerful as they are unleashed on the internet, free from all physical limitations.

Then the show does something clever. It introduces the flaw. The mind was not meant to live without the body, and a mind processing more data at lightspeed than any human brain could fathom begins to decay. To lose itself. If left unchecked, the flaw makes a UI even less than human and certainly less than a god. Shadows that eventually fade.

A large part of the second season is about trying to fix the flaw. Once the flaw is fixed, the nightmare is over. People can now live forever. Hell becomes heaven, even though nothing is real.

Remember The Matrix? The movie where humanity is enslaved by plugging them into a simulation, a prison they must fight to be free from?

For Pantheon and many modern technologists, the Matrix wouldn’t be a prison. A voluntary Matrix is the end goal of the human race.

So the Matrix is good, actually. Cipher, the traitor from the first movie, was correct in his desire to be plugged back in. This view isn’t new, of course, but its grown beyond the contrarians and online edgelords to the founders of real-life companies who have political influence.

No Grace in a Secular Heaven

One character, Julius Pope, complains in the penultimate episode that he helped build heaven, but he was kept out of it because of a criminal record. If he uploaded himself via the black market, the authorities would figure it out quickly and delete him.

Only the deserving get to be uploaded in this brave new world. Julius has a case of sour grapes and becomes a terrorist. It backfires with beautiful, dramatic irony.

But it’s funny when people who no doubt would complain about the capriciousness of god who dares deny entry to heaven when it’s something we would obviously do ourselves. And we would be vindictive about it. Even if we could somehow create our own paradise, we would find a way to make it exclusive.

The God of the Bible, on the other hand, offers free grace. Everyone is offered eternal life. A real life, not a digital facsimile. All they have to do is bow down and take it, no matter what else they have done. The price has already been paid.

Of course, we will never create our own paradise. We long for the Garden. In our fallen state, we also hate the Garden. We are in love with our own flesh while also despising it and desiring to make it obsolete. Everything becomes sterile and/or tyrannical.

Our would-be paradises always end up requiring the shedding of blood, and Pantheon’s paradise is no different.

A Rushed Infinite Regression

Pantheon was canceled while season 2 was in production. It’s obvious they were counting on at least one more season to tell their story, because the final two episodes are a madcap rush to a conclusion that devolves into an infinite loop.

Simulation theory is explored quickly. What if it’s all digital, all the way down?

The main protagonist becomes a god. Or does she?

The show collapses on itself, which is understandable. Those final two episodes could not bear the weight. The creators at least did something wild and interesting.

It’s a mess. But it’s a beautiful mess.

Pantheon is worth watching because real people, probably people you know, long for the digital over the physical. These ideas have captured their imagination. People want digital life without becoming the blobs from Wall-E.

The show will help you ponder the right questions, even if it can’t help you find the right answers.

8/10

The movie has already aged better than 2012’s The Avengers despite being eight years older. It was a breakthrough for a 3D animation studio that had struggled to animate humans, especially human hair. The voice cast is perfect. The callbacks to James Bond films are glorious. Brad Bird was the first outside director of a Pixar film, brought in partly based on the strength of The Iron Giant (another masterpiece.)

And its central theme is even more relevant today. What is that theme?

We are told at the very beginning.

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Secret Identities

The movie opens with three heroes talking about secret identities. Who wants the pressure of being “super” all the time? Who would want to go shopping dressed like Elastigirl? “Superladies” think sharing a secret identity strengthens the relationship.

Mr. Incredible thinks about the simple life and raising a family. Elastigirl scoffs at the idea of settling down. A clash of identities is naturally wrapped up in the superhero life.

As the story goes on, we are invited to ask and debate the following questions:

Which identity is the real identity, and how is it determined?

Soon, disaster strikes. Mr. Incredible causes too much collateral damage and is sued again and again, and the government can't afford to keep paying. Heroes are outlawed. One official says: "It's time for their secret identity to be their only identity."

Mr. Incredible gets his wish to “settle down” good and hard.

But first, we are introduced to Buddy.

A Mismatch of Self-Identity and Reality

Buddy has created the identity of "Incrediboy." He is the sidekick of Mr. Incredible.

The problem, of course, is that Mr. Incredible disagrees with that identification. Buddy doesn't get to decide unilaterally what his identity is. It's not as simple as a mask you can put on and off.

Soon after, the heroes are found in a similar predicament. They thought they had a hero identity, but society now disagrees. Our heroes don't get to unilaterally decide to be superheroes. The relationship between superheroes and the people they save has been an unwritten but mutual agreement.

Identities are not atomistic things.

And so Mr. Incredible's identity becomes regular Bob Parr, who works in insurance. He hates it. But he feels stuck.

Bob knows he can do so much more. His son Dash knows he can do so much more and is acting out at school. His daughter Violet has no idea who she is and goes invisible to avoid other people.

Embracing or Refusing a New Identity

The only one adjusting fine is Helen Parr, the wife and mother. She has embraced her new identity despite the feminist undertone of her introduction. She is the housewife trying to keep it all together. She cooks. She cleans. She seems to have settled into her new life. Her secret identity has become her only identity, and she is comfortable in this new skin.

But Bob goes into full mid-life crisis mode, and suddenly, Helen's new identity is in jeopardy. She finds a stray hair. She starts to suspect. Even her new identity as a housewife is not 100% controlled by her. Without a loyal husband, she is no longer a settled, loyal wife.

Bob goes through his mid-life crisis because he has found someone who agrees with him that his identity should be that of a superhero. Mirage, the stunning, mysterious woman who appears out of nowhere, confirms Mr. Incredible’s self-image. Without that confirmation from someone else, Mr. Incredible is buried beneath the identity of Bob Parr. Despite his super-strength, Mr. Incredible’s identity depends upon other people.

Which brings us back to Buddy, now called Syndrome.

And wow, does Syndrome still have identity issues.

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An Identity is More Than a Mask Or a Costume

Syndrome is a supervillian, but wants to be seen as a superhero. But again, he is foiled, because you can't just decide your own identity unilaterally. He tries an elaborate deception to overcome this, but it fails. The real heroes have to step in.

The resolution of the theme happens when Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible, correctly orients his conflicting identities. He is a husband and a father first. After that, everything begins to fall into place, including his superhero identity.

Violet, his daughter, understands the true stakes more than anyone else. During the scene at the fire with her brother, she says, "Mom and Dad's lives could be in jeopardy. Or worse, their marriage." This statement is played for laughs, the dramatic pronouncement of an anxiety-ridden teenage girl is extraordianary circumstances.

But Bob and Helen's marriage is the bonding agent that keeps all of their core identities intact. Violet is correct to be worried.

Only as a family can they be superheroes. The acceptance of each other within those bonds and boundaries allows each one to flourish in their own way. As a result, by the end of the film, more and more people begin to agree with them.

We Don’t Get to Choose

We do not get to choose our own identity. Our identities come from our bonds with other people. From the moment we are born, we are enmeshed in a series of relationships.

You don't choose your father and mother. You don't choose your name. You don't choose your sex. You are not an autonomous, sovereign individual. You do not get to unilaterally decide what your identity is. You can't just walk onto the court claiming to be an NBA basketball player. You can't just decide to be someone's boyfriend or girlfriend.

You can’t just decide to be someone’s sidekick; no more than a man can decide to become a woman.

It is our relationships that give shape to our identities, that provide borders where we can run wild and free. Having unlimited, unfettered choice in your identity is the same thing as dissolving away into nothing.

This truth is something the trans movement understands.

Trans and The Power of Other People

Why do trans people insist on people using the “correct” pronouns? Why do they see deadnaming as an unforgivable sin? Because deep down, they know they cannot unilaterally decide who they are. They must have people agree with their choice.

First, they're like Buddy. Then, they become like Syndrome.

The trans movement will never be content to play a private game of dress up and let everyone else go about their business. All of society must conform to their choice because they know their identity only matters in the context of other people. Without external affirmation and assent, their fancies are shown to be pure fiction, and that is a truth they cannot abide.

So don’t be gaslit by their pleas. Tell the truth. You can do it in a way that’s a bit more sensitive than ejecting them from the car like Mr. Incredible did to Buddy, but you should hold your ground.

The Incredibles is a great testimony to the power of other people, especially our families, to shape our identities. It's a lesson we should take to heart.

“Slow productivity” sounds like a phrase one uses to be intentionally provocative but not too provocative. You are meant to stop and think and chew. It does its job of generating curiosity.

I found Newport’s book Deep Work to be helpful, and Slow Productivity feels like a natural evolution. The book applies most to knowledge workers. Writers, developers, academics, researchers, and more.

What is knowledge work, according to Newport?

The economic activity in which knowledge is transformed into an artifact with market value thorugh application of cognitive effort.

That’s a pretty good definition. In fact, Newport excels at defining his terms. He’s not trying to pull a bait and switch, nor trying to overpromise with bombastic claims.

I’ll share exactly what he recommends under his banner of “slow productivity,” but first, let’s talk about productivity and its poisonous expectations.

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The greatest evil is to betray one’s country . . . the second greatest evil is to make a sequel where none was required.

- Dante Alighieri, probably

I don’t go to the theatre often. It’s loud, underdressed (at least the people are), and expensive. Recently, after already paying $13 for a small envelope of popcorn, I was asked if I wanted to pay another $2 for real butter. “How is butter not included?” I asked the popcorn clerk. “There’s butter flavoring in the dispensers if you’d like,” she said. I looked over and noticed two steel vats that looked like those used for transporting liquid strychnine.

I paid the $2.

All of this to say that when I DO go to the theatre, I at least want to enjoy the movie. By the end of Gladiator II, however, even the faint hopes I’d been nursing had been flung from the Tarpeian Rock like a bunch of common criminals. And I had a popcorn kernel lodged next to my third molar.

There are many ways in which Gladiator the Twoth is an inferior movie in itself — I could go on about the uninspired speeches, the uninspired casting, and the demotivational storyline — the fact that it follows the towering spectacle of its predecessor makes it something almost twice dead. Gladiator II is a microcosm of the blight that has come to define nearly the entire film industry — not just in terms of its moral bankruptcy (which is evident) but also in terms of its existential bankruptcy (which isn’t as evident). Most modern films not only fail to answer man’s deepest questions; they are positively phobic of even asking them.

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Fifty years ago, jazz critic and art historian Hans Rookmaaker could say the following:

Many of the films people see today are good entertainment and often have somewhat of a moral point. Yet they are bad. For they depict as true a world which is limited and superficial, one without God, without the deeper questions in man’s heart, without real matters of life and death, for life and death are reduced to sentiment, or adventures, or crime or violence or cruelty, without any sort of judgement expressed.

This is a good place to start. Most modern films are “bad” not because they aren’t entertaining but because they stop at the level of entertainment. The Marvel franchise is the peak illustration of this, with Dr. Strange’s Multiverse of Madness arguably occupying the peak of peaks.

In it, viewers are assaulted with a shameless barrage of acid-induced CGI: Colors! Explosions! Action! At no point is there any attempt at a cohesive storyline. At no point is there any attempt at genuine human experience. Despite the screenwriter's attempts to convince us of an endlessly complex multiverse, everything ends up feeling “limited and superficial.” We feel as if we’ve just endured a two-hour conversation of nothing but small talk. We watch the end credits roll and find ourselves asking, “So . . . Is that it?”

Romantic comedies and hallmark specials often do the same thing, except they swap out CGI with sentimentality. Take The Santa Clause. The film ends with a heartwarming scene in which Scott Calvin, now accepted in his role as Santa Clause, gives everyone the gifts they always wanted. See? Charlie is vindicated, a peaceful snow is falling, and Neil gets his weenie whistle.

Everyone’s happy darn it. But we’re not actually happy, are we? Scott still loses his kid and Charlie still has a broken home. It doesn’t matter how many tears, snowflakes, and diffusion filters are used. We are painfully aware of the discord.

Just close your eyes and imagine it’s good

It’s clear that Ridley Scott wants us to take his Gladiator sequel seriously.

But can we?

In short — it’s not easy. And it’s not easy because everything just feels so damn contrived. And by contrived, I mean what happens when a movie tries to make you feel something you wouldn’t feel if the movie wasn’t trying to make you feel it.

When Lucilla dies, we know we’re supposed to feel sad. We’re not sad — mostly due to a shoddy script and lackluster motives — but we know we should be. We hear the sad music, we see the slow motion, we see her son wailing. When Lucius tries to rally his fellow gladiators, we know we’re supposed to feel stirred. We’re not stirred — at this point we really just want Lucius to be eaten by lions — but we know we should be.

Perhaps Scott could have gotten away with one or two contrivances, but what we’re dealing with here is contrivance within contrivance. It’s contrivance inception. Just like the film of the same name, you can only play with people so much before they start to wake up. At some point, the spell breaks, and the ride just isn’t fun anymore. For Gladiator 2, this point was somewhere around the 13-minute mark.

And then there’s the contradictions.

We’re to believe that Maximus — who in the first film, even after his wife had been murdered, was unerringly faithful to her tiny wooden figure — also had an affair with his best friend’s daughter. We’re to believe that Lucilla is a serial adulteress, a virtuous woman, and a faithful mother at the same time. We’re to believe it’s Rome’s fault for killing Lucius’ wife and not Lucius’ fault for bringing his wife into battle in the first place. We’re to believe General Acacius truly felt bad for Rome’s nasty colonial streak, that some kind of new empire can rise from the ashes of self-loathing, and that one more scene of Lucius filtering dirt through his hands will infuse some mote of empathy into our burned-out souls.

But the damage has been done. We just don’t care what happens to Lucius, or Lucilla, or Rome, for that matter.

The film occasionally tries to make up for its shallowness by appealing to antiquity. Ok, says Scott, I get you. You want more depth. Well then, how about some *HATCHAA!* Virgil (“The gates of hell are open night and day”). How about some *BLAMO* butchered Epicurus (“Where we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.”) What about *HADOUKEN* some flashbacks from the previous film.

Sorry Scott. We see what you’re doing there.

But wait! he says. How about vague appeals to brotherhood? In what might be called the granddaddy of all contrivance, Lucius, in his final speech, alludes to Marcus Aurelius’ dream of Rome as “a city for the many and a home for those in need.” He then declares that Rome (you know, the one thing uniting them) is dead, and invites the various amped-up factions to throw down their weapons in order “to rebuild a new dream together.” After many meaningless appeals to “hope” and “freedom,” the camera pans towards the grim and grizzled soldiers as slow smiles begin to sweep over the ranks. Then cheers. “Yaah! Unity and . . . stuff!”

Not only is such a scene patently false (when Rome wasn’t conquering others they were killing each other), it lacks all believability. It’s the kind of speech that would have been unforgivable coming from Maximus. From the lips of the lackluster Lucius, we feel as if we’re owed some kind of reparations for even being asked to consider it.

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Good stories are always true

You can’t glue wallpaper to an ice-fishing hut and call it a chalet. You can’t smear lipstick over a corpse’s gums and call it Miss Universe. And you can’t dress up a derivative piece of tripe and call it a cinematic triumph. Well, apparently you can — but you really shouldn’t. Bad Variety magazine. Bad.

In most of the reviews I read, a general sense of meh prevails. And no one seems to really be able to explain why. I mean, all the elements are there. They even brought back some of the old actors, reused some of the old quotes, and played some snippets of the old musical score. It’s still Rome. It’s still gladiators. What gives? It’s like purchasing a Great Value™ lasagna from Walmart. All the pieces are there — the cheese, the sauce, the noodles — so why does it taste like a stack of last week’s Costco flyers?

The answer, I believe, goes back to Rookmaker’s thesis. It “Depicts as true a world which is limited and superficial, one without God, without the deeper questions in man’s heart, without real matters of life and death, for life and death are reduced to sentiment, or adventures, or crime or violence or cruelty . . .”

Yes, film is an escape. But it can’t just be an escape. For films are just the playing out of stories, and the best stories are a bit like Edmund and Lucy’s experience on the Dawn Treader. At the end of the journey, you should be able to see your own world a little clearer. It’s true that the religious premise of Gladiator II doesn’t differ greatly from Gladiator I. Even so, there’s a humanity; a weight; a vitality present in the first film that just isn’t the second. The tang of eucatastrophe hangs in the air like an old cheese — the highs are higher (Maximus’ victory over the last barbarian tribe) and the lows are lower (his family is murdered for his loyalty). We have drunk the unsatisfying cup of his vengeance and feel genuine resolution when his final concern is to check if the boy is safe.

The best films and novels don’t seek to bypass, or reconstruct, the human condition, but acknowledge it and deal with its consequences. The reason a work like The Lord of the Rings is so powerful is that it resonates on this level. Powerful people really are tempted to accrue more power. Ignoring evil will definitely encourage it to spread faster. The steadfast courage of insignificant people really can bring down sprawling systems of evil. Once the fundamental pillars of nature are in place, do whatever you want. Make a wizard fly on the back of a moth for crying out loud.

Most modern films are so blinded by delusions of their own grandeur — the grandeur of the human condition, the grandeur of special effects, the grandeur of identity politics, etc. — that they miss these fundamental themes. In doing so, they also miss their audience.

You can find more of B.B. Inglis’ writing at The Jolly Carper.

If you asked a 6-year-old what the earth would look like if adults kept littering, he might draw a similar picture.

For anyone not among Gaia’s faithful idolaters, the whole thing feels like you’re about to be scolded by your third-grade teacher for exhaling too much carbon dioxide, so I can forgive viewers who roll their eyes at the premise. Mankind is ruining the earth. We get it. I thought I was watching a fun kid’s movie about a robot, not signing up for a lecture about how I need to recycle.

But the theme of the movie isn’t “humanity has ruined the earth, so you should feel bad and do better.” While humanity has indeed ruined the earth and left behind robots to clean it up, that is not the movie’s final word. It’s just the initial premise.

The theme of the movie is much bolder and more subversive. It flips our expectations in the best way possible. After you read this, you’ll never look at Wall-E the same way again.

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Unlocking Wall-E’s Theme

There is one key scene that unlocks the entire movie. Near the middle of the film, the captain of the Axiom is admiring the tiny plant brought back from Earth. He has just done the equivalent of a 3-hour Wikipedia deep dive on the planet, researching and dreaming, because he has no knowledge of the place, and certainly has no memory of it.

As he looks at the seedling, a tiny leaf falls off. The Captain panics. He rushes to take care of the seedling, giving it some water.

"You came a long way for a drink of water,” he says. “Just needed someone to look after you, that's all...” Then he looks at the globe on the screen and has a realization.

“We have to go back,” he says. The seedling and the Earth need Man to take care of them.

This scene is the hinge of the narrative. The captain, who has nothing to do all day, has discovered something important. He has a home. He also surfaces the theme of the movie.

Mankind has failed in its mission and then abandoned that mission.

This little twist, focusing on the mission, makes all the difference. Contrary to most environmentalist propaganda, Wall-E does not treat man as a scourge or a virus to be controlled and eradicated through population control. Instead, man is the steward of creation. He belongs on Earth.

The typical trope in sci-fi stories, especially more modern ones, is to have humanity leave a ruined earth and ascend to the stars. Or to leave behind our planet before we ruin it. To survive, mankind must spread out and find new homes. For the benefit of both the planet, which has limited resources, and the human species, which must collectively make itself harder to kill, we must conquer the stars. The great adventure is out there somewhere. The final frontier, if you will.

Wall-E reverses this.

Mankind has fallen. What seems to be an ascension to the stars is actually exile. And they need to find their way back. The rest of the movie makes this clear while contrasting humanity with the robots who serve them.

Purpose, Beauty, and Meaning

Every robot in Wall-E has a purpose. A meaningful one. Other than the Captain of the Axiom, who has the modern equivalent of a fake email job, no human has a purpose other than mindless consumption and entertainment. Robots and humans are constantly compared and contrasted.

Mankind made robots in their image, but the robots must help their wayward creators reclaim their purpose. However, Wall-E takes another turn when it shows us that finding purpose won’t be enough.

From the very beginning, we are shown that purpose isn't enough. Wall-E, our main protagonist, is dedicated to his purpose of cleaning up the planet…but he also appreciates beauty.

And it is this appreciation that has allowed him to outlast all of the other robots. He is the last robot functioning on Earth, and his continued operation is not an accident or coincidence. His curiosity and love of trinkets power his mission just as much as the sun powers his battery.

He has hobbies. He likes collecting things. He loves music. He even has a pet. Overall, he finds life fascinating.

Wall-E is not a utilitarian pragmatist, clocking in and clocking out with rote predictability, focused only on his job. By not hyper-focusing on his job, he can do his job better. His appreciation of beauty in the small, everyday things he finds lying in the trash is what allows him to better fulfill his purpose.

Even more importantly, Wall-E’s appreciation of life and beauty allows him to break out of a rigid interpretation of his purpose so he can see the purpose behind the purpose. Or, to put it differently, he can see the weightier matters of the law.

It’s not just Wall-E. All of the good robots in the movie are able to break out of their rigid programming. But not to rebel.

The good robots break out of their rigid programming to better achieve their purposes. They mature. They become more like the childish Wall-E and, as a result, grow up.

This contrasts with AUTO, the bad robot of the film, who wants to keep humanity in perpetual exile, safe and babied for all eternity.

AUTO cannot see the bigger picture. In his quest to fulfill his purpose, AUTO would doom humanity to decay and death. If you've seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, you'll recognize the callback in his design. AUTO's actions end up endangering many of the humans, including babies.

Looking at our other protagonist, Eve, clarifies this point. Near the beginning, Eve is released from her ship, turned on, and immediately gets to work searching for plant life on Earth. As soon as the ship flies away, however, she watches to make sure it is gone, like a cubicle worker pretending to work until his boss disappears around the corner.

Then she cuts loose.

She starts flying around for the pure joy of it. No other reason. It seems Eve, too, appreciates beauty. Up until this moment, Wall-E is only curious. But after she starts skimming through the skies, Wall-E falls in love. He recognizes a kindred spirit.

One more example. Wall-E liberates a bunch of sick and malfunctioning robots. One grooming robot seems only suitable for dolling up clowns. A buffing robot wants to use his arms to box instead of clean. A vacuuming robot can only cough up dirt instead of sucking it up. None of them work right. They all seem to have forgotten their purpose.

But that’s not what the movie believes.

After these robots are liberated, they start singing, mimicking the song Wall-E has recorded. They, too, appreciate beauty. And while they seem to have forgotten their everyday purpose, they end up fulfilling their greater purpose: to help humanity get home.

Wall-E leads them in keeping the more weightier matters of the law.

Exile and Restoration

If you hadn’t noticed, Wall-E is an Adam and Eve story. It is about a new beginning. A new creation. It slaps us in the face with this fact by literally naming one of the main characters “Eve.” It has all the subtlety of a flashing neon sign on a dark, quiet street.

Eve means “mother of all the living,” and there is even a sequence where Eve stops a sliding tram from crushing a bunch of babies. The movie is not shy about what it is doing.

Wall-E and Eve are more human than anyone in exile on the Axiom. And instead of a Fall corrupting all of creation, a sacrifice ensures the rest of humanity can return to the promised land. We even get a resurrection scene.

Our new Adam and Eve lead mankind back to the Garden, where a new tree of life is planted. Wall-E is all about the restoration of the proper order of things. It is about establishing mankind’s stewardship over the earth.

The closing credits hammer this home by enacting the entire history of art, from cave drawings to impressionism to 8-bit sprites. The last image shows our Adam and Eve looking at a new tree of life, the original sapling that is now grown.

Never skip the closing credits when you watch this movie. They are the final few paragraphs of a masterpiece.

Embodied Life

The hopeful vision of the future Wall-E portrays is a return to the land, hands in the dirt, muscles aching with effort, man carving out a living by the sweat of his brow. The solution is not to escape hard work but to lean into it with a specific purpose. We don’t seek to escape our bodies, as if they were prisons, but use them to forge the future. Not a future for its own sake and not a future where survival is the greatest virtue, but a future infused with true beauty.

And now, the robots are not nannies and nursemaids for grown adults but partners in purpose. The ground is still cursed, but the curse has been softened with faithful help and connection and friendship and love. It is our ground. It is our home. We were meant to be rooted here.

Far from being a film about the environmental scourge of humanity on the earth, Wall-E is one of the most pro-human films ever made. We were created for a purpose, and the earth was created for us to rule.

And so we should rule it well. Not as tyrants or corporate CEOs but as benevolent kings. Tolkien once said through Gandalf, “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer.” And the kings of the earth have a lot of healing to do.

Wall-E should inspire us to claim the mantle of our purpose while not being single-minded in that purpose. To appreciate beauty. To stop and smell the roses, much like Wall-E stopped to touch the stars or dance with his crush in the cold beauty of space.

Appreciate the craftsmanship of a fork, the resiliency of a cactus in the desert, and the simple touch of another hand to yours. Because without beauty, our purposes might as well be vapor and ash. They will come to nothing, or they will become a curse to others.

Re-watching Air Force One for the first time in decades was like burning a copy of the Declaration of Independence and snorting the ashes. I was unprepared for the frenetic level of pro-America “hoo-ra” theatrics. A decade as a libertarian goober followed by another decade of disenchantment left me jaded against zealous patriotism, but this movie wants you to feel it even if it has to jab it under your fingernails.

The movie was released in 1997. Now, a lot of 90’s nostalgia is misplaced — Blockbuster and Pizza Hut weren’t that great in and of themselves — but the late 90s really were the height of America’s perceived moral authority. We were on top of the world. It was before the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Before 9/11. Before the revelations of the NSA spying on its own citizens. Before the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This attitude infuses Air Force One. No moral ambiguity exists in this movie. The villain, delightfully played by Gary Oldman, has a few gripes that may or may not be true. But he’s a commie terrorist, so whatever he says is definitely not true.

American exceptionalism oozes so much from the screen that it almost feels like a parody of itself. But it is 100% earnest, without so much as a wink or a nod. No tongues were placed firmly in cheeks during the making of this movie.

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A President for Everyone

Harrison Ford, at the height of his career, plays US President James Marshall. Other than saying threatening things to terrorists, he is a completely apolitical president. Not a Democrat. Not a Republican. Just an American dad ready to kick some terrorist butt.

Ford plays the non-offensive everyman well. He is the President of Saturday morning cartoon specials. If you’re an American, he’s on your side. That’s all you need to know.

About 5 minutes after the news breaks that Air Force One has been hijacked, a candlelight vigil appears in front of the White House. Everyone loves this President.

Unironic, Unadulterated Patriotism

This movie thinks America is the greatest nation on earth, and it assumes you think the same thing. When President Marshall has to choose which wire to cut and splice, he leaves the red, white, and blue wires alone and says, "Red, white, and blue, don't let me down."

When the American fighter jets show up, President Marshall says, “The good guys are here!” Not in a relative sense, either. He means Good with a capital “G.”

The terrorists in the movie hate us because of our freedom. They say things like "Freedom is a disease." Truly wonderful. You are meant to point and laugh and think how silly and misguided these freedom-hating idiots are.

Jerry Goldsmith composed the score, and the music is pure American victory and triumphalism. All the notes sound as if they were inscribed on the stars and stripes, and George Washington himself is playing the drums.

Soft Feminism

I don’t remember the marketing around this movie. People may have made a big deal about Glenn Close playing the Vice President of the United States. I’m sure there was chatter.

But the movie doesn’t care. It doesn’t dance around and point at the fact that Glenn Close is a woman. It’s not there to preach. This is the soft feminism of the 90s before feminism meant fighting for the rights of men in women’s bathrooms and women’s sports. Before it started to play the zero-sum game of “women good, men bad.” Before “woman” was a costume that anyone could drape over their testicles.

Feminism was still dumb, but more like an annoying little sister rather than a crazed hag throwing cat feces at anyone who walks by. It’s honestly kind of adorable.

An example. After the President is rescued, you get a scene within the situation room where everyone is celebrating. The music swells, Glenn Close relaxes with a smile on her face, and one of the generals looks at her and gives her two enthusiastic thumbs up as if she just defeated the school bully in a local karate tournament in an 80s movie.

But What About the Movie?

It still works. It’s a fun twist for a Die Hard clone. Not all of it makes sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds, but it overwhelms you with pure confidence. Air Force One is a movie made with the same swagger the United States had at the time, which is the swagger of a high school QB who just threw the winning touchdown for the state championship and knows he's about to kiss the prettiest girl in town.

It is a product of its time, and there will never be another movie like it. Even if there is a Trumpian return to an American swagger, Hollywood couldn’t pump out a fever dream so earnest and patriotic. Unless they were desperate, big-name actors would never attach their names to it. The Hollywood system itself might not survive the coming decade.

It’s also the softest, most sanitized R-rated movie you’ll ever see, suitable for most families with only minor editing.

7/10

“Romantasy” is all the rage, especially on TikTok. A barrage of books entitled with some permutation of A [Blank] of [Blank] and [Blank] has flooded the YA sections of bookstores. The most notable is the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas.

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. Paranormal Romance has been an entire category for at least a decade, desperate to inhale the exhaust from Twlight’s success. And the YA section has always been filled with soft-core porn. Many of the books can be summarized as follows:

1. Girl heroine meets a love interest who is bad for her.

2. Girl heroine eventually learns that it's okay to be corrupted by this love interest who is bad for her.

The main reading demographic of these books is 30-something women. Why they love reading about the sexual exploits of teenagers is another story.

For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten isn’t any of that. It’s a fantasy romance that isn’t dedicated to titillation and debauchery. It’s classified as “dark” fantasy, but I didn’t find it all that dark. It’s also saturated with real craft, and you can tell the author loves words and cares about how they come across. She didn’t always succeed in elevating the material, but the smudges from the elbow grease she put in were all over the page. And I appreciate that.

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A Fairy Tale Twist…But Not Really

I picked up the book because I judged it by its cover. It’s a great cover. I’m also fond of twists on fairy tales, especially interesting takes on Little Red Riding Hood. Those who love Jin-Roh know what I’m talking about.

For the Wolf isn’t a reimaging or retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, but only wears it as wrapping paper. A dangerous game. If what’s inside doesn’t fulfill the promise of the packaging, you’ve alienated a big reason why many readers would pick up the book.

But the author’s own myth was interesting and evocative enough that I found myself not caring how far she leaned into the original story.

Red is sent to the Wilderwood as a sacrifice for the Wolf. It is the fate of every second daughter of the royal line. Her sacrifice supposedly keeps dangerous monsters at bay. The twist is that the Wolf is a man. A very handsome, brooding man, of course.

As soon as this setup became clear, it bristled my teeth. My guard went up, ready to put the book down if it took a turn into depravity and cliche. I’d rather not wear hip-waders when reading a book.

But it never took that turn.

A Romance That Isn’t Debauched

The book has a slow-building romance, which is one of the main tensions. But first, Red and the Wolf get married.

Yes, you read that right. They get married.

As it turns out, the Wolf is another name for Warden, and he is really the protector of the forest. He wishes he didn’t need help to do his duty, but he does. The reason he is brooding is that he takes his responsibilities seriously, responsibilities that require his flesh and blood, and he doesn’t wish to foist the burden onto someone else. He would stop the so-called sacrifices of the second daughters from coming if he could, but he is trapped in the forest.

So we have a man who is put in a forest to tend it and guard it. And it is slowly killing him.

The whole book is almost a treatise on the phrase “It is not good that man should be alone” from Genesis when Adam is in the garden of Eden. One of the main conflicts is resolved when the Wolf finally accepts Red’s help to share the burden. To build something greater together than he could do alone.

And still, we are 3/4ths of the way through the book and there have been no sex scenes. Red and the Wolf finally do become intimate (again, they are already married, and this is a consummation of that bond), but the camera slides away to focus on something else, giving the happy couple their privacy.

I was, frankly, astonished.

Real Craft

The book has a distinctive tone and voice, and the author exhibits some real writing chops when it comes to individual lines. I’ll just quote a few.

The surface of the gate was moving, slithering like she’d cupped her hand over an anthill.

She froze, familiarity first a blade, then a balm. A library.

Trunks bent and twisted like frozen dancers, and the bits of sky caught between them seemed darker than they should, already shaded twilight."

Her chest was a cage for things she couldn’t trap into language.

For a breath, the four of them froze in suspended silence. Then — a roar, a rush, as if a million stones overturned at once, as if something sped under the ground like some great beast flashing beneath the surface of the sea.

Conclusion

The book wasn’t perfect. The world-building is haphazard at times, and it plays into the trope of “religion is a tool to control the masses.” The pacing is a little slow, and it feels repetitive in parts. The author also casually mentions past dalliances the characters have had as if sex could be so casual in a world like this. The modern-day cursing, while not overwhelming, took me out of the story every time it happened.

So, despite the book’s overall tact, I still wouldn’t recommend it for younger readers. But it is worth reading if you want to dip your toes into “Romantasy” without the need to wear a hazmat suit.

7/10

How to Be Unlucky is three things at once. A personal memoir, a study guide for Beothius’ The Consolation of Philosophy with practical teaching tips, and a reflection on the purpose of life. It weaves these elements into a competent rope that tugs the reader along at a good pace, all while allowing reflection on the deeper themes the author brings up.

At a minimum, the book made me want to read The Consolation of Philosophy, one of the classics of the Western canon. That alone makes the book worthwhile. It always points toward something better than itself while still shining with its own luster.

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Godzilla Minus One takes a premise that has been stretched beyond goofiness and injects it with gravitas and warmth. It puts to shame the recent American iterations of the famous kaiju.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) the same way I would enjoy a clown car colliding with a group of cybernetic ninjas. It made no sense, but it wasn’t supposed to. I grew up watching the old King Kong vs. Godzilla movie from 1963 and had a big smile on my face the entire time I was watching the new version. It took me back to my childhood when I played with a wind-up Godzilla figure that would shoot real sparks out of its mouth.

Just like my childhood, Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) is not an experience I will ever repeat. They don’t even sell tinderboxes disguised as toy monsters anymore. Alas.

But Godzilla Minus One is a real movie and one I’ll watch again. It’s also the perfect movie to watch with your kids and introduce them to the world of subtitles. The dialogue is easy to follow and doesn’t require a person to read at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. Even if they miss something, the acting is good enough that they’ll perceive what is being communicated without words.

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A Celebration of Normal, Everyday Men

The heroism in this movie is accomplished not by superheroes but by ordinary men. Most of these men are recent veterans of World War 2, already tired and beaten down from Japan’s defeat, used up by the Imperial Government. But there is also a scene where a bunch of tugboat captains come to the rescue at a pivotal moment.

Every character is likable, and every character gets their moment to shine. The main protagonist is a kamikaze pilot who refuses to kill himself in the final days of the war for a hopeless cause. This could be forgiven and, indeed, is forgiven early on. But he shows additional cowardice when he fails to fire on a smaller Godzilla. As a result, a small garrison is wiped out, and he carries this guilt with him for the rest of the film. For him, the war will not be over until he overcomes this great failure, and his redemption is a worthy story to tell.

Strong women characters also have great moments, but you’ll find no girl bosses and no pandering to modern sensibilities. This is a movie about the quiet resilience and courage of everyday men who do what they need to do to protect their ravaged homeland.

Reajudicating the War

Japan was in ruins after World War 2. Even if you ignore Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing caused devastation that is hard to imagine. The movie shines a light on that devastation. Many of Japan’s major cities might as well have been tossed in a blender and the rubble dumped back out on the mainland.

The name of the movie is a reference to this devastation. After World War 2, Japan is at zero. As they rebuild, they are almost rebuilding everything from scratch. When Godzilla appears on the scene, it sets them further back to negative one.

The movie can be seen as a rehabilitation of the veterans who served, giving them all heroic roles, and a repudiation of the Imperial Government who treated their lives as chaff to throw away in the war effort. Many fighter planes had no ejection seats, for example. There are multiple scenes excoriating the government for keeping information from the fighting men on the ground, pretending everything was going great when, in reality, they had no chance against the American war machine. The ingenious plan to defeat Godzilla, in contrast, is not a hopeless cause, and the architects intend for everyone to come back alive despite the high risk of the endeavor.

War is not treated as something desirable and glorious. One of the most moving scenes of the film involves the younger protagonist, who is the only one on the crew who didn’t serve in the war. He desires to prove himself and is angry when the older men refuse to allow him on the mission.

One of the men tells him, “Not having been to war is something to be proud of.” And as they walk away from the young man’s protests, the same older man says, “We leave you the future.”

The veterans desire to leave the next generation better off than they are, unstained by war. A future where, hopefully, the young men are not sacrificed to pointless bloodshed.

Many of Japan’s movies for the past seventy years have processed these same topics in different ways. When your culture is completely reset, it tends to leave a deep mark. Godzilla Minus One addresses the lingering wound in a way that feels natural and is still 100% entertainment.

Conclusion

If the movie were a little shorter, it would be perfect. It would have been easy to cut 10-15 minutes without losing anything critical.

Regardless, Godzilla Minus One deserves to be watched and rewatched.

9/10

Inside Out 2 is a perfectly serviceable movie. It’s fine. I was almost shocked at how fine it was, given how bad it could have been, how easily gender identity politics could slide in,

I almost thought Disney could no longer help itself. It was too busy careening down a slope usually reserved for suicidal snow skiers. They keep sliding down, not because they particularly want to, but because they don’t know what else to do except propel themselves forward as the concrete below looms closer and closer.

But a show like Andor still happened. And a movie like Inside Out 2 still got made. The engine is coughing fumes, but it still kicks out a little power every once in a while.

Inside Out 2 is not a great movie. It’s a sequel that follows the paths of its predecessor. More of the same but slightly different. I suspect this is why it wasn’t a total disaster. The molds from the first movie were still viable, so they re-used them, which didn’t leave room for many changes to the structure. They handcuffed themselves.

And that’s a good thing.

The New Emotions

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Dune Part 2 could have been a contender. Instead, it tried to give its moral center to Chani, a moral scold who is always frowning and unlikable 99.9% of the time. A bizarre choice.

I found the movie entertaining, with some great shots and sequences. It was clunky at times because it kept handicapping itself, and overall, it was forgettable. It tries so hard to undermine Paul’s triumph, desperate for us to see him as a future despot, as a space Hitler in the making, but it fails every single time. The blinking neon signs are gaudy but easy to ignore because we are speeding along on the hero’s journey.

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What does Paul see in Chani?

Towards the end, when Paul marches in after his victory and declares he will let the Emperor live as long as he gets to marry his daughter, we get a close-up of Chani and her reaction. I suppose this was supposed to be a heartbreaking scene, but I didn't care. The dour Irulan seems a better match for Paul.

There is probably a lot of footage on the cutting room floor fleshing out movie Chani as a character, and in some version, this scene really is momentous and heartbreaking.

But all that was salvaged only made Chani superfluous and annoying.

In the books, Paul and Chani have a son, who is then killed in a Harkonnen raid. In the movie, nothing binds them. There is nothing lost. The movie wanted us to see things from Chani's eyes to externalize Paul's conflict, but it made her one-dimensional and boring.

It also didn’t need her for this role. The movie did fine externalizing Paul's conflict even without Chani's tantrums. The only people who want to look through Chani's eyes are people whose idea of fun at the movies is feeling smug and superior over all the rubes who don't know about media literacy.

Aka, losers.

The movie lobotomizes Stilgar, and he still came out better and more multi-dimensional than Chani.

Unless they put the second book through a paper shredder before they adapt it, Chani will end up as Paul’s concubine in the next movie. Given what we’ve seen in Dune Part 2, this makes no sense. But the movie has already thought of that. Paul says, “She’ll come around. I’ve seen it.”

That’s it. That line will give them the crack they need to squeeze in Chani doing a complete 180 and becoming Paul’s concubine, probably off-screen. I suspect they knew how weak their love story was, and this was the desperate attempt to duct tape it so the next movie would make sense.

Bigotry for modern audiences

Any time Chani used the term "fundamentalist," I almost laughed. That word doesn't belong in the Dune universe. What does it even mean? The word has a long history and evolution in the United States and has evolved over generations. For the Fremen, it makes no sense. Why would they consider the word a pejorative? But couple it with "Southern," and we know what it's supposed to mean.

The audience is supposed to impute their preconceived ideas of the South and the Bible Belt, infested with religious fundamentalists. The place where all of those bigots and backward-thinking people live. In other words, "fundamentalist" is supposed to mean "backward and naive religious bigots."

But it only means that because of "current year" politics. Not only that but the prophecies the Southern Fundamentalists believe in come true. Chani can complain that Bene Gesserit just made them up, but they came true. And what is the test of whether a prophecy is a true prophecy or not?

The split between Northern Fremen and Southern Fremen was unique to the movies, and it represents a complete failure of worldbuilding. They didn't think it through. But the filmmakers sure got a not-so-subtle dig in at people they love to hate. The Southern Fremen are still awesome and imposing. You can't impute "current year" baggage onto them successfully.

Again, like Chani, there is a movie that could have been made that more convincingly played with this north/south split. The hardened realists of the north who despise the religious zealots of the south, the zealots who have seen far less of war and Harkonnen butchery. But they didn’t make that movie.

More worldbuilding failures

I’ve read Dune at least four times in my life. It’s one of my favorite novels, partly because of the worldbuilding. Everything is fleshed out, and even if the author doesn’t explain something, you know he could have. Lots of doors remain closed, but if you opened one, you know it would lead to something vivid and well-imagined. And all the doors are real. None of them are simply painted on the wall to make it seem like the world is bigger than it really is.

For a movie based on a book full of such master worldbuilding, it paints a lot of doors on the wall.

There are many sins, but here are the two most glaring:

1. The Sardaukar's impotence. These are supposed to be the crack troops of the Imperium—unbeatable and fearsome. Part 1 did a decent job, but Part 2 didn't care. It really takes the weight of the victory away and lessens the ferocity of the Fremen. The Sardaukar are NPC enemies to blow away in a video game, nothing more.

2. The other houses did not recognize Paul's claim to the throne, and Paul chose violence immediately. This makes no sense, even if you take the movies and ignore the books. It literally didn't matter whether the houses accepted Paul or not. He controlled the spice. They had to acquiesce. They had no choice. Paul could let them bluster and stew forever. To misunderstand this point is to misunderstand Dune itself.

Verdict

It’s worth watching if you liked the first one and have never read the book. And if you already have the streaming service it’s on. A few fantastic sequences keep this from being terrible.

6/10

Note: My book reviews are typically for paid subscribers only, but I am opening this one up because it covers an important, and urgent, topic.

Critical Dilemma is both helpful and exasperating. I would recommend it to anyone seeking to understand the origins of Critical Theory and how it intersects with every aspect of normal life. Or to someone whose children have said something that intrigued or troubled them and want to know more. I would even recommend it to people who want to lead a study with members of their church.

Critical Theory is part of the water we swim in now. Younger generations have been taught to sort people into classes of the “privileged” and the “oppressed”, and they spout off slogans like “Black Lives Matter” or “Whiteness is oppression” uncritically.

Any resource that equips us to understand Critical Theory and fight against it is a net positive. This stuff can tear through churches like a bullet through tissue paper, and too many people remain naive about it. Or worse, people think it’s a useful tool and have no problem grabbing a wolf by the ears while its teeth are bared toward their enemies.

But sometimes, the book trips over its own feet. It inserts asides and shibboleths for an audience that will probably never read it and which might turn off people who would benefit the most. It has too many target audiences.

So I recommend the book. But I have some qualifications.

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A Great Summary and Reference

The book goes through a history of Critical Theory and its Marxist origins, and it does it by quoting, at length, primary sources. They let the other side speak in their own words. Exhaustively.

If you don’t know what Critical Theory is, this book will fix that for you. If you want a good reference book to pull off the shelf to find a definition, this book will fill that need.

The authors track the history through Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory and then dedicate long chapters to each one in turn. This is where the book is at its best. The authors are not content to stroke their chins and describe terrible ideas with cold dispassion, however. They also critique and dig into the problems, and they do this without resorting to name-calling or pearl-clutching.

Advocates of Critical Theory are given plenty of snacks in the green room, offered plenty of time on the stage, and once they have their say, dropped through the trap door of their own ideas.

The last section of the book is all about engaging with people who hold these ideas and how to spot them in the wild. This is important because, as they say:

The ideas of contemporary critical theory are absorbed via platitudes and slogans that gain the status of conventional wisdom through repitition, not through careful analysis.

“Ideas That Will Devastate Your Church” goes through many of these platitudes and dismantles them one by one. “Justice is part of the gospel,” “Sin is oppression,” “People of color in the US are oppressed,” and many more. If you have found yourself exasperated by these platitudes but unsure of how to answer them, this chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

The chapter “Moving Forward” is less helpful. It offers some good advice but uses phrases like “racial justice” without defining what success would actually look like. This ambiguity is where advocates of Critical Theories live, move, and have their being, always moving goalposts, always throwing accusations, and always casting guilt onto the shoulders of others.

This leads to some of my reservations about the book.

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Understanding the Times, Past and Present

In a book so meticulously researched, I was surprised at the naivety shown on some topics or throwaway lines that seemed nothing more than a wink at a certain audience. At best, these were attempts to make a hard pill go down smoother for some readers, to assure them that the authors are reasonable so that certain readers would be more open to persuasion.

At worst, it shows severe blindspots in the authors, blindspots that show they still don’t understand the times they are living in.

For example, in the second chapter, “How Did We Get Here?” they complain that Donald Trump failed to “send an unmistakable message that racism is a heinous evil.”

While President Trump had repeatedly on record condemend racism, the overall tenor of his actions and comments ended up leading a majority of Americans to believe he is racist.

This betrays no awareness of media manipulation and propaganda, both primary weapons of Critical Theory advocates. The American public was subjected to years of Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing, complete with eyelids held open by force, fed a constant diet of misframings, omissions, and outright lies. Despite this, the authors come very close to saying, “Because Orange Man Bad.”

An example they give of our failure to accurately teach the “racialized history of the United States” is that most college students haven’t watched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” and they know little about its content or themes.

But K-12 students barely listen to, read, or study any great speeches of history, except maybe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Public education in this area is indeed terrible, but not for the reasons the authors claim, and so they fall into the same habit as Critical Theory advocates.

The authors also use terms like the “LGBTQ+ community” and the “gay community” when addressing certain issues. They are unwaveringly polite and, many times, buy into the framing of these “communities.”

The authors open their chapter “Problems with Queer Theory” with this:

From the start, we want to make this point unequivocally clear: Bigotry against the gay community is a sin. It is a tremendous evil that should not — indeed, cannot —be tolerated. Queer theory as an area of knowledge exists partly becuase of this historic marginilization and disenfranchisement of the same-sex attracted. The church as a whole and individual Christians have often failed to love gay people as they should. We lament this fact.

This reeks of “We’re not like those Christians over there. We promise. Listen to us. Please?” If barbarians are flooding over the walls to enslave your children and rape your wives, should you spend time lamenting about the supposed historic grievances committed against them by your third cousin, twice removed?

One wonders what the authors think of the penalties of the Mosaic Law. Would they call them a form of “disenfranchisement” or “bigotry?”

They would have been better served taking off the velvet gloves and engaging in some bare-knuckle brawling.

They certainly know how to do it. Throughout the book, they offer no such patience or special pleading toward racists or slaveholders of the past. No special call-outs for the “racist community.”

To be clear, I’m not saying they should have done that. However, the discrepancy in how they handle fashionable sins versus unfashionable sins is blatant. Dead slaveholders are easier to scold than modern sodomites.

And when dealing with the history of slavery, they are as averse to nuance as a Millennial is to talking on the phone. Anything short of abolitionism was a sin.

…we must face the fact there were real Christians who were guilty of chattel slavery and/or who were guilty of aiding and abetting chattel slavery by looking the other way or not fighting to end it.

Not “the abuse of slaves” or “the mistreatment of slaves.”

Was Paul guilty of aiding and abetting chattel slavery for sending Onesimus back to Philemon?

“But wait!” you might say. “Paul was really engaging in an act of subversive, counter-cultural genius. The gospel…”

Oh, so you mean it’s a little more complicated than how I presented it? We should approach it with more nuance? I agree.

In their rhetoric, the authors have swallowed abolitionist propaganda, which has been heated and refined and adopted as another gospel ever since the American Civil War. In doing so, they tip their hats to the same type of religious zeal they seek to critique.

For more reading on this topic, I recommend A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming.

There is also an entire excursus that introduces Protestant theology, the worldview it typically represents, and why it cares so much about sexuality. It made me wonder, again, who this book was written for. Who was the primary audience? It comes close to landing on one several times but then shifts as suddenly as a professional running back dodging a tackle.

Its confusion does it a disservice.

Verdict

8/10

Buy the book for its wealth of truth and helpfulness. It is needed in the libraries of Christians and churches. But don’t expect the authors to properly guide you in applying these truths.

Anthony Esolen has the distinction of being one of my favorite writers, even though I haven’t read much by him. He earned this on the strength of his Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and his lament on the death of male friendship. That’s all it took.

I picked up his latest book because the title was an obvious statement of fact, and I wanted to see how he expanded upon it. I was not disappointed.

This book is not designed to change hearts and minds. No hardcore feminist will read this and have the scales fall from her eyes absent some miracle. It is not written for that. But the sad state of our culture is that even reasonable folks have begun to doubt that men are uniquely suited for anything. Like King Theoden being led to despair and ruin, the whispers of Wormtongue have worn us down.

This book is like the Horn of Rohan. It seeks to rally the faithful out of their stupor. In the introduction, Esolen says that he is writing a book that should not have to be written. And that is true. This book is full of obvious things.

But obvious things many have forgotten.

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I wasn’t expecting to read this book so soon. I had been looking for a biography of Daniel Boone for a while, though not urgently, and found a copy of this on clearance for $5.99. Serendipitous, so why not?

The book had a place reserved on my shelf where it would collect dust for a while. Then I read the first line. And then I kept reading. And then, I put some other reading on hold so I could dedicate some time to finishing it. This book grabbed me as if I were a fish, thinking he was about to nibble on a nice worm and swim away in peace.

Here is the first line:

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Watership Down is a book about rabbits seeking out a new home. Along the way, they must overcome various challenges, from predators to tyrants from other warrens. Richard Adams, the author, infuses the story with mythology and a language that would have made Tolkien proud, and you’ll never look at a rabbit the same way again.

Netflix released a Watership Down miniseries in 2018. Spoiler alert: it’s not good. The production values and voice talents are fine, but it showed such a profound misunderstanding of some of the book's main themes that it made me wonder whether they read the book or just relied on a quick outline generated by an intern. I’m not a stickler for absolute accuracy when it comes to movie and TV adaptations, but betraying the theme and what a character stood for in the source material is unforgivable.

There is the typical feminist nonsense they litter in the story, so the does, the female rabbits, are also soldiers. That gets an eye-roll, but that’s expected crap smeared on the top. Hopefully, you can still dig down past it and find an unsullied core underneath. But it gets worse.

The miniseries flubs one of the great scenes from the book. Maybe the great scene from the book.

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General Woundwort, the villain, has invaded the new home of the protagonists. Woundwort is a vicious giant of a rabbit. No rabbit dares to stand against him. He rules his territory with fear and pain, and in the end, he is able to even wound a dog during his final scrabble.

Hazel, the small, unassuming leader, has told Bigwig, the loyal soldier, to hold his position until he gets back. Bigwig fights Woundwort to a standstill inside the close confines of the warren. Woundwort is bigger than Bigwig, but Bigwig is smart and tenacious (and plenty big himself.) They are both wounded.

Woundwort tells Bigwig to let him pass, and he will spare his life and give him a command. All hope seems lost anyway because the invaders have opened one of the runs.

But Bigwig stands his ground. He says, “My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here.”

This brings Woundwort up short. He had assumed that Bigwig was the Chief Rabbit because Bigwig was the biggest and strongest. It would never occur to him that Hazel, the small rabbit he met earlier, was the Chief. This realization sends fear through Woundwort and his ranks because they think there is a bigger rabbit out there somewhere. After all, why would a fighter like Bigwig recognize a smaller rabbit as his Chief?

But Bigwig is absolutely loyal to Hazel, and he is loyal because Hazel has shown himself to be a leader with skin in the game, to take risks, and to implement bold ideas. Watership Down is partly a story about how Hazel earns the trust of those under him.

This is a fantastic sequence that is the perfect culmination of the story so far.

But the makers of the Netflix miniseries have no idea why it works. They know they must have this scene, but they don’t trust the story, or they don’t trust the audience. Or both.

In the miniseries, after Hazel tells Bigwig to guard the run, he turns around, as if having a sudden flash of thought, and tells Bigwig what to say to Woundwort. To say that “My Chief Rabbit told me to defend this run…”

Notice what this does to the scene. It is no longer about the tenacity, courage, and loyalty of Bigwig. It is about another trick that Hazel wants to play because he has discerned how Woundwort thinks. Bigwig’s great victory is reduced to nothing more than a cheap ruse. The writers obviously don’t understand the power of loyalty, nor do they understand the importance of good leadership.

And by misunderstanding these things, they miss the point of Watership Down. They don’t even use their extended runtime to play with the worldbuilding of the source material.

Do yourself a favor, and read the book. Read it to your kids. And then read it again sometime in the future. I wish the makers of the miniseries had read it a few more times.

The Force Awakens was a fun blockbuster movie worth seeing in the theater for the cultural gravitas alone. But, in the end, unremarkable. The release of its sequels only diminished its initial luster, as it became obvious that the creators threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what would eventually stick. There was no grand plan. There were no thoughtful character arcs or relationships up their sleeves. And it shows.

I wanted to like it. Heck, I wanted to love it. I was ready. Willing. As a kid, I was immersed in Star Wars. I read all of the Extended Universe books, no matter how mundane. I played the Star Wars Customizable Card Game when everyone else was playing Magic: The Gathering. I knew all of the hard questions to Star Wars: Trivial Pursuit. My room was full of posters and toys.

I waited in line for almost 18 hours for The Phantom Menace to see it at midnight, and I ended up seeing it 6 times in the theater. I was so desperate for a new Star Wars that I sat through that boring mess 6 times before I finally realized I was only there to see the last 10 minutes. Many were wearing the same nostalgia glasses for The Force Awakens when they heaped on early praise. I get it. I really do.

The Only Good Thing About the Movie: Overall Feel

It sort of felt like Star Wars. The music. The set pieces. Parts that genuinely made me smile. J.J. Abrams and company knew how to play certain chords so well that it brought up deep memories of childhood moments long ago. The framework was there and recognizable, like reading what your friends wrote in your old yearbooks. The moment the X-Wings come soaring across the water, you feel it.

The practical effects went a long way toward establishing this feel, with actual models and animatronics as opposed to the green screen shenanigans of the prequels (which have aged poorly). The universe felt real and lived in again.

This is part of what made the movie so disappointing. It could have been a contender. It has so much promise. But instead of a leap to lofty heights, taking some risks, it hopped along a safe, well-trod path.

The Only Character they Got Right

The best scene is the surprising introduction and greeting of C-3PO. It was perfect. Absolutely perfect. And it had me laughing harder than I’d laughed in a long time.

It was both true to the character of the droid, and it made a subtle dig at some of the awful placement of the new CGI effects in the Special Edition of the Original Trilogy.

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The Bad: Laziness and the Mary Sue

I could go on and on about the plot being moved by spectacular coincidences, the vague political situation (why is there a Resistance, exactly?), the lack of both scope and of clearly defined stakes, and sundry other annoyances. But I’ll focus this on what were, in my mind, the worst sins.

Deconstruction and Rehash of the Original Trilogy

Lots of ink has been spilled over The Last Jedi and its attempt to deconstruct Star Wars while sneering at its fans. But this started in The Force Awakens. The only difference is that Abrams seemed to actually like Star Wars, which helped camouflage some of his blunders.

In addition, many gigabytes have already been filled about how The Force Awakens is a shot-for-shot remake of Episode 4, hitting the same thematic beats and using many of the same props to do so, so I won’t retread that ground.

Let’s focus on something more serious and, in the long run, more damaging. As it turns out, nothing our heroes did in the original trilogy actually mattered. This new movie essentially destroys any of the hard-fought gains that made us cheer in the earlier movies. It conveys a strange sort of nihilism, which is odd for a movie that’s supposed to be a fun space opera.

The redemption of Anakin Skywalker? It didn’t really mean anything to the Skywalker family. Luke coming into his own as Jedi? Luke’s now hiding all alone, similar to another crazy old hermit. The death of the Emperor? Don’t worry, there’s another disfigured guy pulling the strings (and also, the Emperor isn’t really dead!). The Empire was dealt a crushing blow? Now we have the First Order, just like the Empire (though maybe a bit less imperial in the true sense of the word), but now with more overt references to Nazism and Hitler Youth. Oh yeah, and there’s still a “resistance,” for some reason. I guess good guys can’t be part of a recognized government?

Then there’s that whole movie titled Return of the Jedi, but now we learn that it didn’t actually result in the return of any sort of recognizable Jedi. Heck, there are fewer Jedi in Episode 7 than there are in Episode 6.

The biggest culprit, however, is the character of Han Solo. While Harrison Ford steps into the role of the character just fine, and it’s thrilling to see him again, we see Solo as a smuggler with some outstanding debts. This is exactly how Solo was introduced in Episode 4, except now he’s more of a bumbling old man. All of his character growth from before…gone. Vanished. He went right back to his old lifestyle, but now it seems he’s a little worse at it than before. There’s a throwaway line that tells us the “reason” for it (covered later in this article), but the line is there solely to explain this vast regression that makes no sense from what we know and love about Han, and it doesn’t do the character justice.

Han says he went back to “the only thing I was ever good at.” Good grief, he was made a General in the Rebel Alliance. I guess they just give those titles out like Halloween candy? We deserved to see an older, wiser Han, one who is actually a mentor. But he can’t actually be a mentor to Rey because Rey already knows how to do everything. The only place Han comes close to a mentor role is when he gives Finn some dating advice.

Instead, the Han who risked his life for his friends several times ends up turning his back on them because “reasons.” Perhaps if we were given time to actually learn about his relationship with his son, rather than it being treated as some throwaway plot device, this could have worked. But we weren’t, and it didn’t.

It’s been 30 years chronologically, and things haven’t really changed. In fact, they’ve gone backward. The Force Awakens should have built on what had come before, offering new challenges rather than stripping the previous trilogy to the bone and using the flesh for scraps. I’m glad Luke didn’t show up until the end because I’m afraid they would have had him whining about power converters at Toshe station.

Many novels of the Extended Universe, most notably Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, did a great job of moving the story forward, using the previous stories as a launching pad, rather than tearing them up for spare parts. It could have been done and done well. The potential was there. The potential was wasted.

Fast Pacing and Lack of Emotional Weight

We are never given any time to stop and reflect. This problem will crystalize into narrative cancer in The Rise of Skywalker, but here we see the seeds of that cancer. The story is always trying to rush us to the next scene, to the next tug at audience nostalgia, to the next moment deliberately crafted to draw forth applause from anyone familiar with the Original Trilogy.

This all resulted in a severe lack of emotional investment. A few examples.

The First Order destroys the Republic with its Starkiller base. However, we don’t know what the Republic even is, other than the fact that they fund the vaguely defined Resistance. Several planets are destroyed, and we are told the Republic is now gone. And we’re supposed to care because we saw a bunch of people look scared, and the music swelled at the appropriate time. But there were no stakes involved. We knew nobody who died. We are barely told one of the planet’s names. Does anyone remember it?

And what happened as a result? Was anyone that we know of actually inconvenienced by these particular planets being destroyed? I don’t even think any of the characters on screen cared very much.

Compare that with the destruction of Alderaan in Episode 4. That was ominous. That was evil. We immediately cared about that planet, even though we didn’t know anyone on it. It was a bunch of anonymous deaths, and yet we felt the weight of them. Why?

Our heroes were on the way to Alderaan. That was their mission. Leia was from Alderaan, along with her (adoptive) family. It is used as leverage to get Leia to give up vital information. We have heard the name Alderaan several times, and it has been important to both the plot and the characters. And then, after Leia pleads that they are peaceful and have no weapons…the planet is just gone.

And then, we are given the opportunity to reflect on it some more as the Millennium Falcon comes out of hyperspace into an unexpected asteroid field. But we know it’s no asteroid field. We then are treated to a slow creeping doom as our heroes realize that “that’s no moon.”

The other example is the death of Han Solo. It should have had some emotional resonance, but it fell flat. Instead, it decided to rely on the familiarity of the character, along with a surprise twist, to provide the emotional heft. But the death of Solo, both how and when, was predictable. And as already mentioned, the character of Solo in this movie was a vast regression, an old man parody of Solo before the events of Episode 4.

The movie had earlier given us, literally in passing, the revelation that Kylo Ren was Solo’s son. And then…on to the next scene! It feels like it was added as an afterthought in the editing room. Again, no time is given to reflect on that relationship. When Han and Leia talk about their lost son, it’s in vague platitudes. We literally have no idea what has happened or what has been lost. When Han confronts Kylo on the bridge, Harrison Ford tries to inject every bit of emotion he can into the scene, but there is nothing really at stake. We still know hardly anything about Kylo. We know nothing about what his relationship with Han was like. This is literally the first time they have interacted on the screen. We’re supposed to care because it’s Han freaking Solo…but, as mentioned earlier, it’s not really Han Solo.

We should have had an earlier scene (maybe replacing the awful, goofy sequence where Han’s CGI monster cargo gets loose in the ship) where Han sits and talks with Rey about why he’s still a smuggler. About regrets. About family. About missed opportunities. About a son who died. Give them something real to bond over besides her magical ability to fix the Falcon. Have more scenes where Han treats Rey more and more like an adopted daughter, so we get a hint of what he would have been like with his son. We also should not have learned of Kylo Ren’s parentage until that fateful meeting on the bridge. This would have done a few things:

• When Han dies, it makes Rey’s sorrow and fury at that moment more real.

• Kylo Ren tells Rey at one point, “You think Han Solo was the father you never had…” This line would have actually made more sense.

• When Han calls Kylo out by his real name and starts asking him to come home, that would have been a huge moment. Han’s son was only “dead” the same way Obi-Wan had said that Anakin was “dead,” and it’s invested with the weight of what we had learned before. It could have been a scene as momentous as Vader and Luke in Episode 5.

But that’s just a “what if.” Instead, we are treated to Han dying a sucker’s death. And it was met with a “meh.” Not even Chewbacca gets time to properly mourn his lifelong friend and companion because…on to the next scene!

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Rey, the Mary Sue

The character of Rey is magically proficient at everything she touches, better than anyone else, regardless of experience. Rey is a lot more interesting when she is struggling to get by on a desert world, but as soon as the action starts, she becomes tiresome. Each occurrence took me further out of the film, lessening the potential stakes the character faced and raising my sense of boredom.

Rey can fight two goons off with a staff, and the whole scene is obviously framed to convey that this is a girl who doesn’t need rescuing. Then she can fly the Millennium Falcon, a decades-old freighter, so well that she can maneuver a damaged and stationary gun into the perfect position to hit a highly agile starfighter. As far as we know, she has never piloted a starship before.

One of the best scenes of the movie is after Rey and Finn escape into space on the Falcon, and they both jabber at each other in excitement and incredulity. We can’t believe they just pulled that off. Neither can the characters themselves. We get swept up in the moment. If this is where Rey’s proficiencies had stopped (at least until closer to the end of the movie), it would have been perfect. Now it’s time to see these characters in over their head, in a universe far bigger than either of them could have imagined.

But no. Her proficiencies continue. It seems she both knows and can fix the Falcon better than Han. It gets to the point where she’s literally finishing Han’s sentences before he does. She also knows how to work the freighter controls perfectly to save Finn from a rampaging beast.

She does get captured, but not for long. She sends the big bad Kylo Ren running back to his surrogate, hologram daddy, full of excuses. Then she successfully alters the mind of her guard to get him to unlock her restraints, something that Luke didn’t do until Episode 6. How does she even know that it’s a possibility?

Last but not least, the final battle with Kylo Ren. She force pulls the lightsaber to her, something Luke couldn’t do until Episode 5, and even then, it was a great struggle for him. And then Rey, who has never picked up a lightsaber before, who has never had any Jedi training, is able to best a man with years of training. And physically overpower him.

I never felt like Rey was in any actual danger. She literally makes no major mistakes, and when she needs to get out of a jam, she discovers a new magical power. What is she, the Dungeon Master’s girlfriend? Was she slipped a weighted die that rolls natural twenties?

Sonny Bunch from the Washington Post makes the astute observation that the character of Rey does make sense when you consider that The Force Awakens is essentially a big-budget fan film. She is every fan’s wish fulfillment injected onto the screen, and therefore perfectly matches up with the Mary Sue trope. How does Rey even know that altering someone’s mind with the Force is a thing? Because we know a Jedi can do those things, and if we were a character in Star Wars, then by golly, we would be able to do it.

Truth be told, if Rey had lost her hand in that final battle, giving her something real to overcome, giving her actual stakes, it would have improved the entire arc of the movie. And it would have made sense because, you know, she had absolutely no clue how to wield a lightsaber.

Or, I don’t know, give Chewbacca something else to do in the movie besides getting shot and lending Han a weapon. Let the Wookie win the last fight for them. He’s probably pretty angry at that point, and the audience needs a more cathartic release after Han’s death. There would be some actual emotional stakes in that fight. Bonus points if he ripped someone’s arm off. What a payoff that could have been.

In the end, Rey never undergoes any real struggle or change. There is no arc. There is a vague emotional problem that is temporarily set aside, one that is left unresolved and with unknown stakes.

Weak Villains

The movie really, really wanted us to see Captain Phasma as threatening and important. As it turns out, her whole point in the movie was to show us that girls can be stormtroopers too…but with more flair! The silver paint for the armor must have been on sale at Hobby Lobby.

Not only that, but it turns out she’s also incompetent. She lets down the shields for Starkiller base because of one verbal threat, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. By the end of the movie, we know that she’s a woman, a Captain who shows up in scenes to sound authoritative, and that she’s horrible at her job.

At one point, Finn ignites a lightsaber and goes up against some random stormtooper with a taser. Why in the world was this not Captain Phasma? If she is supposed to be an ongoing villain for the next movie, why not show her doing something of actual significance other than betraying everyone in the First Order?

And then there is Kylo Ren. He started out with such menace and promise. He stops a blaster bolt and holds it in mid-air. He orders the slaughter of a whole village. Everyone seems scared of him.

But Ren gets less threatening the longer the movie goes on. It turns out he’s prone to temper tantrums. He’s also wearing that helmet just to look and sound cool, like a hipster who wears non-prescription glasses. And then he can’t even best an untrained person in a lightsaber duel. Why are we supposed to be scared of this guy again? By this point, I’d forgotten.

There is one moment towards the end where he stands up and pummels himself in his blaster wound, spilling his own blood. He has just killed Han Solo, his father. He is ready to kill some more. He has built himself up to it. The evil promise from the beginning shined bright. Was this actually a villain worthy of shaping a story around?

Alas, it was not to be. Turns out he’s not that good with a lightsaber, I guess? And in the heat of the moment, he forgets he can paralyze someone with the Force. What a waste.

Conclusion

In the end, the only thing The Force Awakens awoke in me was a strong desire to see something better. It only reminded me of why I liked the Original Trilogy so much. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t make for a great movie. Spiritual successors of Stars Wars, like Serenity, The Fifth Element, and Guardians of the Galaxy, all did a better job at what Episode 7 was trying to accomplish.

Anything redeeming about The Force Awakens was shattered with The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, leaving a pile of rubble that isn’t worth putting back together again. Better to start over from scratch.

In part 1 of this review, I covered the book’s clumsy handling of definitions, and its intent to preach only to a choir that isn’t interested in singing. In the final half, we’ll go over the book’s lack of consistency, its hatred of individuals disguised as enlightenment, and its lame, predictable policy proposals (or lack thereof).

Invisible Individuals

In chapter 4, Kendi writes that “An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals.” Later, in talking about skin color, he will say that “these differences were meaningless to our underlying humanity.” This sounds good. But Kendi doesn’t want to treat anyone as an individual. Everything must be aggregated into a number and then we must stare at that number as if we were reading its entrails to divine some truth.

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When anyone tries to bring in the roles of individual choice, to suggest that, perhaps, Black Americans are more than passive victims, Kendi is quick to call that person racist and then pull another relative number out of his coat sleeve. To ask these questions is to promote what Kendi calls a “racist idea” as defined above. For example, he addresses the fact that Black immigrants do better than African Americans. The Economist in 1996 concluded that “racism does not account for all, or even most, of the difficulties encountered by native-born blacks.” It was an attempt to bring individual effort and agency into the conversation. Kendi accuses the authors, and anyone who would dare to ask these questions, of “ethnic racism.”

An ethnic racist asks, Why are Black immigrants doing better than African Americans? And ethnic antiracist ask, Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups? (67)

He then claims that people comparing Black immigrants to African Americans are trying to say that “transnational ethnicities are superior.” Kendi can’t seem to conceive of an opponent who wants to get closer to the individual level. Then, with amazing mental gymnastics that would get perfect scores at the Summer Olympics, he makes the very case The Economist was hinting at.

The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans…resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. (67)

He doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize he has just admitted that, yes, individual effort makes the difference, regardless of skin color. He does use it as an excuse to moan about the immigration policies of Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump, however. This is how he treats any attempt to address possible behavioral flaws in individuals. To ask any questions about those details is another form of racism.

Of course, he is not above bringing in individual exceptions when it is convenient. For example, when complaining about the fact that millions of people were aghast at the growing percentage of of Black children being born into single-parent households, he shrugs off their concern, saying “even though my dad turned out just fine.” But the main crime Kendi commits is, in the end, refusing to believe that helping the individual is in any way helping the problem he has constructed. He forgets that individuals make up the groups he is talking about. It is the biggest contradiction in a book full of contradictions.

To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological. Pathological conditions are making the residents sicker and poorer while they strive to survive and thrive, while they invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods. (153, emphasis mine)

Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities. (94)

He admits certain programs can help individuals, yet still calls those programs a failure.

Behavioral-enrichment programs, like mentoring and educational programs, can help individuals but are bound to fail racial groups, which are held back by bad policies, not bad behavior. (202, emphasis mine)

We formulate and populate and donate to cultural and behavioral and educational enrichment programs to make ourselves feel better, feeling they are helping racial groups, when they are only helping (or hurting) individuals, when only policy change helps groups. (209-210, emphasis mine)

When discussing failure, he refuses to place any responsibility on the individual.

When our policy does not produce racial equity, we blame the people for not taking advantage of the new opportunity, not our flawed policy solution. (214)

To promote antiracist ideas, you must argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities and never suggest that individual agency might be involved. To be antiracist is to assert that any racial inequity is caused by nothing but racist policies.

Either racist policies or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today. (117)

Kendi has created such a rigid dichotomy that to give even a fraction of an inch to the idea of individual responsibility would be to admit full-scale Black inferiority. In his own words. That is not an enviable trap to be in, but he set the snare himself.

Only the group an individual belongs to matters. It is an infantilization, or worse, an erasure of human beings. To be an antiracist is to make all individual Black Americans invisible. Kendi is yet another in a long line of political activists who have sought to use Black Americans to achieve political goals, and just like them, he cares only for the aggregate numbers they can provide. As Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man put it:

Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see color or men…For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away…I was simply material, a natural resource to be used.

Kendi’s picture of reality requires unlimited power and omnicompetence to override the individual. Antiracist policies should be so powerful that they accomplish their purpose of shifting aggregated racial inequity numbers, whether the individuals involved want to get along with the program or not. And it is indeed power that Kendi actually cares about. It is power that will correct what he sees are the ills of society.

Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist. (209)

Antiracist power must be flexible to match the flexibility of racist power, propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their inequitable interests…What if antiracists were propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their equitable interests? (214, emphasis mine)

Success. The dark road we fear. Where antiracist power and policy predominate. Where equal opportunities and thus outcomes exist between the equal groups. (218, emphasis mine)

People are nothing but cogs to plug into some grand machine, and Kendi wants to be the god of that machine. If they don’t quite fit a particular spot, they will be ground down or stretched out or lubed up until they do. A Procrustean bed writ-large. Only the group matters and Kendi seems to have some Platonic form of “racial groups” in mind that exists somewhere and isn’t made up of individuals. This is not a coherent stance, but he leans into it like a deer staring at the headlights of an oncoming truck. Neither the deer nor the truck wins in this encounter.

He will even admit that racial groups like “Black” and “Asian” are mirages.

Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. (54)

But he will then criticize Thomas Jefferson in the very same breath he (mildly) praises him with. He says Jefferson, with his “all men are created equal” is better than David Hume’s obvious racism. 

But Thomas Jefferson never made the antiracist declaration: All racial groups are equals. (32)

The admitted mirage is all that matters. Kendi desires to make the mirage so incarnate, so opaque, that people have no choice but to organize their lives around it, whether they want to or not. This would be bad enough, but it gets worse: Kendi wants to improve society while having no true objective standards of measurement. Whatever antiracist future Kendi envisions, it will be a future where people are endlessly circling the drain, always scared of finally plunging into the abyss while having no hope of ever being rescued out of the sink.

Hyper-individualism

To be an antiracist is to be a relativist, and to be one in nearly everything. This is funny, given that Kendi wants to erase the agency of the individual because this entails a hyper-individuality where everyone is sovereign over the judgments of the universe. This starts as early as the prologue.

Of course, intelligence is as subjective as beauty. (4)

Of course. He dedicates almost an entire chapter to these shifting sands of reality and so-called objectivity. In the beginning, he approvingly quotes one of his professors saying that “It is impossible to be objective.” Later, he stacks another misshapen brick on top of his wobbling construction:

To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews. (171)

But which one is true? When his professor said objectivity is impossible, Kendi asks what they should strive to do? The answer:

Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth. (168)

Unfortunately, “truth” is another one of those words that Kendi fails to define. He assumes he is making true statements all throughout his book, but given his own arguments, we can dismiss them as simply another “real world.” No better than any of these other “real worlds,” including the White supremacist worlds. Just another worldview tossing in the churn of worldviews we call life. There are no objective measurements we could use to discern this, except the measurements Kendi himself finds convenient to his own worldview. 

To be antiracist is to reject cultural standards and level cultural difference. (84)

Cultural relativity is part of the essence of Kendi’s project.

All cultures must be judged in relation to their own history, and all individuals and groups in relation to their cultural history, and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture…To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference — nothing more, nothing less. (91)

When the Aztecs sacrificed their human captives and built temples with their victim’s skulls, we are just seeing cultural difference. Nothing more, nothing less. Any standard we wish to use is arbitrary. We know what Kendi’s answer to this incoherence would be. He has already told us. Power. Whoever has the power can impose the “truth” as he sees fit. Power sets the standards and power distributes the treasure based on those standards.

In some cases, his hyper-individualist approach has an almost Gnostic conception of an individual that is not affected by their body or their environment. 

As long as the mind oppresses the oppressed by thinking their oppressive environment has retarded their behavior, the mind can never be antiracist. (104)

Sure, we shouldn’t wallow in excuses, but we aren’t disembodied spirits. It is no shame to recognize that it’s harder to walk because you are hip-deep in mud. If an individual can’t be affected by their environment in this way, by the surrounding culture and attitudes of their neighbors, why should we think they can be affected by an antiracist policy?

Perhaps if we had some examples of the policies Kendi has in mind, we might better judge his thesis. What would be a good antiracist policy for one of the specific racial inequities he highlights? But again, the book fails.

Different, but Exactly the Same

For a book that elevates the importance of policy to an almost god-like level, it fails to present any ideas beyond slogans. He gives a lot of examples of what he calls “racist” policies. Many were certainly racist without having to use Kendi’s contorted definition of racist. These policies directly targeted people based on the color of their skin. But then he will also cite policies like Reagan’s War on Drugs. While we can agree that it might have been a boneheaded series of policies, it takes a quantum leap of imagination, and lots of consulting with tarot cards, to say that these were deliberately targeting minorities. Attempts to establish voter IDs also get lumped into “racist” policies. He mentions “Donald Trump’s economic policies” in passing but doesn’t offer any details. At one point, he protests people who

…flatly deny that racial inequity is the signpost of racist policy. (234)

But he has done nothing to prove this assertion. He has only waved vaguely at the columns of spreadsheets.

The policies Kendi cites as antiracist examples feel like they were copied from a pamphlet of the Democratic Party of America. It’s all there. Universal healthcare and the Affordable Care Act. Climate change. Strong unions. Intensification of the War on Poverty and a reliable safety net. Tax the rich. More funding for public education. Public housing. Transgender rights and affirmation. When he points to these policies, he doesn’t attempt to prove that the policy did what he is claiming. He just assumes. You get the feeling that antiracism is really just slapping a different label on the same old can of snake oil.

Another Gospel

Kendi finishes the book with the religious fervor of a doomsday prophet. He has undercut his arguments with his relativism, but he still wishes to judge his own culture. And he brings the judgment like a surgeon who enjoys the sight of blood a little too much. He compares our society’s racism to cancer, tying things back to his own struggle with cancer.

My society has racism. The most serious stage. Racism is likely to kill my society. (235, emphasis mine)

According to Kendi, we have the most serious stage of racism. Worse than the slave trade. Worse than Jim Crow. Worse than the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Black women. The tumor has never been larger. And we need salvation. He closes by saying

…if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free. (238)

And the instrument of this communion and freedom is antiracist power implementing antiracist policy. This is another lie blasted forth from the Tower of Babel. It is another gospel, one that demands confession but offers no forgiveness. It recognizes no god but government action. It erases the importance of individual responsibility but still demands individual submission. It is a gospel that demands you bring all of your other ideological commitments under its banner. It doesn’t want you looking at how you treat your immediate neighbor but only at how “society” treats aggregated impersonal groups. It is a gospel that promises all the joys of an IRS audit. It is a gospel of never-ending accusations and condemnations and it demands you make restitution for sins that are not your own.  It is a gospel that is content to leave people wallowing in their actual sins.

To be queer antiracist is to serve as an ally to transgender people, to intersex people, to women, to the non-gender-conforming, to homosexuals, to their intersections…being led by their equalizing ideas, by their equalizing policy campaigns, by their power struggle for equal opportunity. (197, emphasis mine)

To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. (189)

The Bible demands we show no partiality based purely on externals, like skin color. This is the common sense definition of racism that most people would recognize. Antiracism requires the institutionalization of partiality. It demands the enshrinement of unequal weights and measures based on the color of one’s skin. As Kendi says, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” To justify its entire purpose for being, antiracism must attack the very idea of objective truth.

So make no mistake: to accept Kendi’s definitions and framing means that to be an antiracist is to be anti-Christian. Like the apostle Paul, we should take one look at this claptrap abomination and say: “Let it be accursed.”

How to be an Anti-Racist is an attempt at enlightened schizophrenia. Ibram X. Kendi takes pains to define certain words so everyone knows what he is talking about, and then uses other words as carelessly as a toddler tossing food off of a highchair. He sets up principles only to act against them in the very next chapter. He is careful to provide references to research but then makes sweeping claims with no evidence, claims that only an experienced mind-reader would be able to make with confidence. And last, but not least, his project to fight racism sounds noble and good, but his solutions sound like the screed of a sophomore in college who has just discovered the talking points of the Democratic party of America.

This book is not about fighting racism. It is about fighting racial inequity. And it defines racist in a way that only someone who has swallowed higher education to its dregs could see as reasonable. Even if no single person in the United States ever had a single prejudiced thought ever again, the country could still be a racist country. It is truly a zero-sum game that, along with dogs who love chasing their own tails, only highly credentialed professors could enjoy.

If Kendi wasn’t such a dynamic, engaging writer his book would be lost in the clearance sections of used bookstores across the world. But he is a good writer. He knows how to strum the strings of justice in a way that resonates with any non-sociopathic heart. No matter that the tune depends on playing minor chords in all the wrong places. It almost sounds right.

The longer the book goes on, the less stable it gets. His storytelling assumes that it is helping to shape a wonderful structure. But he has started with a crumbled foundation, built on sand below the tideline, with no surrounding forests to act as windbreakers. He builds higher and higher and the higher he gets, the more his monstrosity sways in the wind, threatening to collapse at any moment. Kendi stands atop his doomed monument that will never be finished until he can touch the sky, a wannabe Ozymandias. Each time it sways, he closes his eyes and pretends he is flying. 

He need not close his eyes, however. He is already blind. And he is a blind man pretending to lead the blind. He is constantly shuffling toward warm glows of light that he can barely sense, constantly shifting his direction like a pinball. Little does he know that each glow he tries to follow is a dumpster fire that goes up in brief, rancid glory before dying an ignoble death. Just one dumpster fire after another.

Like all of us, Kendi needs new eyes.

Like all of us, Kendi needs the Gospel.

A Memoir of Confession

How to Be an Anti-Racist is presented as a memoir. Kendi starts with how his parents met and their introduction to liberation theology. He continues with stories from third grade all the way through high school, college, and up to the present day and how he came to write the present book. Weaving in and out of this memoir, we have Kendi laying out his vision of antiracism, pulling from various other writings, including his own monumental Stamped from the Beginning. This is Kendi’s story, and it is the story of his gradual awakening to the truth about racism and his own complicity in it. For as many fingers as he points at others, he never fails to point fingers at himself and this gives the book most of its credibility and power. “I arrived at Temple as a racist, sexist homophobe.” Yes, he throws around accusations like a 5-year-old flower girl walking down the aisle tossing clumps of petals, but he doesn’t hesitate to confess his own sins (as he sees them) and offer a path of repentance. He gives a good appearance as an honest broker. As he says in the epilogue, “…the heartbeat of antiracism is confession” and he almost drowns us in his own confessions.

Every point he makes is bookended by stories of his life that relate somehow to his current argument. It’s a hard feat to pull off while remaining coherent and organized. There are places where the weaving is not as clean as it should be. For example, while explaining how Prince Henry of Portugal was the first character in the history of “racist power,” he inserts a paragraph about how his middle name used to be “Henry,” named after his enslaved great-great-grandfather. He couldn’t bear sharing a name with Prince Henry, so he changed it to Xolani. This had nothing to do with the story he was telling and could have been placed elsewhere, if anywhere at all.

And that is one way Kendi betrays his bitterness, which seeps through the book whenever cracks start to show up in his arguments. He admits that he went through a phase in college of hating White people and it’s hard to believe he has completely gotten over it. Especially given his reasoning that hatred of Whites is wrong because “In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.”

Regardless of his stumbling, Kendi presents his life in unsentimental terms and it is easy to like him. The book is dedicated to “Survival,” which seems a bit grandiose until you get to the end of the book and you learn that Kendi’s wife fought breast cancer, and survived. Then his mother fought breast cancer, and survived. Then Kendi himself fought Stage 4 colon cancer, and survived. All of this happened inside of five years. And while his axe grinding is bombastic and tedious, telling us that he waited too long to go to the doctor because  “White nationalists were running and terrorizing the United States and their power was spreading across the Western World,” the stories of these cancer fights are understated and human. He is not fishing for sympathy. Even here, where it might even be justified and understandable, he is not trying to wallow in victimhood. He is simply describing the circumstances of his final revelations and how the present book came into existence.

Kendi could write a true memoir about his life and it would be worth reading. It’s a shame he had to pollute it with the ravings of a tent-revival preacher who happened to ride into town on the same cart as the snake-oil salesman.

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The Definition of Redefinition

Kendi wants to come across as an academic, writing an academic essay in an academic tone of disinterested boredom. This clashes with the memoir framing he sets up. He starts well, but he is like a kid who forgot to tie his shoes before the big race and trips after taking just a few strides. Chapter 1 is entitled “Definitions” and he tells us how seriously he takes them.

Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable and consistent goals. (17)

Amen. Language is important. Definitions matter. He starts defining words and then keeps digging and defining so he can clarify previous definitions. Then somewhere along the line, he stops doing this and starts pretending he can read minds. Like someone who is digging a hole, pretends he hits solid rock because he got tired, then sets up a roadside stand offering psychiatric services for 5 cents a pop. But not in an adorable way like Lucy from Peanuts. At one point, he accuses politicians voting against the Affordable Care Act to be “crafting policies designed to shorten [African Americans’] lives.” Designed.

Let’s start going down his list of definitions.

• Racism - a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.

• Racial inequity - when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.

• Racist policy - any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.

• Antiracist policy - any measure that produces or sustains or sustains racial equity between racial groups.

• Policy - written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.

• Racist idea - any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.

• Antiracist idea - any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences — that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.

He prefers “racist policies” over other terms like “institutional racism,” “structural racism,” and “systemic racism” because those are vaguer terms. But he still wants to use them. At the end of the same paragraph, he says that the terms are redundant because “racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.”  He fails to define what these terms mean when he uses them.

He also does not want to use the term “racial discrimination” and we soon discover why. Kendi doesn’t believe racial discrimination is wrong. In fact, he says it is required. He doesn’t like the mainstream definition, claiming that it has been commandeered by “racist power,” so he splashes it with new paint.

But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. (19)

All of this is a build-up for the main thrust of the book: an apology for discriminating against the right people.

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. (19)

Kendi has set up his definitions in a way so he can justify almost whatever he wants, and it starts to sound like Lamech talking to his wives about seventy-sevenfold vengeance. It all hinges on equity and inequity. And the application of these terms hinges upon selective statistics that are worse than the stats they pull up on Monday Night Football to make a mediocre player sound really good. “This QB has thrown more complete passes in the final 2 minutes of the 3rd quarter, while under a blood moon, than anyone else in the past 3.5 years.” It is a desire to craft all policy based on the whims of esoteric data nerds who are still mad about that time in High School when Jennifer ignored their spreadsheets and charts and went to the prom with the other guy anyway.

His example to explain the concept comes from owner-occupied homes from 2014.

Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. (18)

Kendi believes the relative percentages should be equal across all racial groups.  A successful antiracist policy would make these values roughly the same. But here, he betrays how terrible his definitions are. Whether the numbers go up or the numbers go down doesn’t matter. If equity in this metric is achieved, we have ourselves an antiracist policy. Burning down the houses of White families until their ownership percentage reaches 45% would be “success.” At that point, the goalpost could be moved to total square footage owned, and if the numbers weren’t equitable, we could start the entire process over again.

He ignores possible cultural differences or values. He ignores individual choices and efforts. Do they even want to own a home? Is home ownership objectively good? He never makes a sustained argument about why we should we care about this number, or why it’s a problem. The only thing that matters are the numbers, and even then, only the numbers passed through the correct filter.  We are supposed to glance at the numbers, see that they are unequal, and treat this as a profound insight handed to us from the gods. This flaw is carried throughout the entire book.

Tossed Salad

As it turns out, this concern over definitions is a quickly crumbling facade, put up to give the appearance of academic argumentation. He goes from taking time to define what he means by “policy” to throwing around terms as carelessly as an architect using a crayon on a final draft. Based on the way he spews out terms and buzzwords, it becomes clear that he is preaching to an established congregation and not trying to persuade the lost. He knows his ideal reader and gives them enough jargon to tickle their ears so they can nod along and thank God they aren’t like those White people over there.

In just two sentences, Kendi tosses out some howlers that he doesn’t care to define:

The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion…(20, emphasis mine)

As recent as 2018, when the book was written, there were conflicting definitions about “alt right” even among the self-proclaimed alt-right. Who does Kendi mean when he uses this term? He fails to define it. Same for “White ethnostate” and “White nationalist.” Those are heavy phrases to be swinging around willy-nilly. But to Kendi’s intended audience, these words do the job of invoking the proper Boogeymen so everyone can pretend they are on the “correct side.” He does the same with the words “homophobic” and “transphobic” and “abuser.”

In chapter 2, he will make the assertion that “racial groups are already civilized.” We might agree with him, but we don’t know what he means by “civilized” and he is not interested in providing us with a solid definition. Does he mean the 1850 British Empire’s axiomatic usage of the term? Is he using a modern, academic, anthropological definition? Maybe? His audience is left to project their own meaning onto the word. He does this several times. At one point, echoing Black feminists, he asserts that “when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious the freedom of humanity.” (191) What exactly does he mean by “freedom?” In chapter 15, when he says that gay men can authentically perform masculinity or femininity, he takes the time to define what he means by “authentically” but never explains what he means when he uses “masculinity” or “femininity.”

One more example. In chapter 4, he defines the following:

• Biological Racist - one who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.

• Biological Antiracist - one who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.

Emphasis is mine. The word meaningfully is doing an awful lot of work in these definitions. Everything depends upon what he means by that word. Yet he never takes the time to define it. Throughout the chapter, he will keep using it. By leaving this word ephemeral and shapeless, he can let it drift and become whatever he wants it to be in the moment. While it can put on quite a show in this state, it can’t hold or point to anything concrete. Does he contradict himself later? We can’t answer that, because we don’t know what he means in the first place.

Compare Kendi’s work defining terms to C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism. Lewis spends ten chapters defining his terms, how he uses them, and why he uses them in this or that particular way. At the beginning of chapter 11, he says “The apparatus which my experiment required how now been assembled and we can get to work.” There is only one chapter left, with an epilogue, before the end of the book and now he wants to get to work? Lewis is a master essayist and makes it all look easy. We shouldn’t expect Kendi to argue on the same level as Lewis, but we should expect him to put a little more effort into building his own apparatus. Lewis has constructed a mansion and acted as a master tour guide and host. Even if we end up disliking the layout or finding his decoration gaudy, we have been treated as honored guests. Kendi, on the other hand, has thrown a few planks in the backyard and doesn’t seem to care if we follow him out there or not.

Just Believe

Kendi keeps up this facade of caring about definitions not just in this chapter, but also at the beginning of every other chapter. We get definitions of contrasting terms like “assimilationist,” “colorism,” “space antiracism,“ “antiracist anticapitalist,” “gender racism,” and “queer racism.” This is a book that takes pride in defining words in order to frame the terms of the debate. But it never gets around to debating anything. Kendi has prepared the stage, set up the podiums, invited an audience, and then doesn’t even take the trouble of setting up a strawman as his opponent. He stands beside an empty podium, preaching to a choir that doesn’t have any interest in singing, but only in talking about singing.

Kendi writes in Chapter 10 that “Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.” Yet he has written the perfect book for believers. Thinkers will find themselves getting headaches.

In part 2 of this review, we’ll cover Kendi’s attempt to both believe and disbelieve in the individual, his moral relativism, and his failure to present any ideas that aren’t prepackaged slogans.