An Unsentimental Education

Like Coca-Cola, American game shows function as carriers of American “values” (and I use the term advisedly) around the world. Foreign versions of these game shows appeal to a global rising middle class, uniting them with their American counterparts even as they divide them from their own traditional values and social structures. Often, the middle classes in developing economies have more sympathy with our values and very little connection to their own poor.

It is the Indian version of the American game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” that provides the central metaphor for the movie, Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting). It is the story of the clash of civilizations played out in the city of Mumbai, India, a city which recently has been the victim of more violent clashes. Yet that description might make it an “issues” movie, which is always the death of both good film, good literature, and good entertainment. And this movie is all three, because it is at base the oldest and most enduring of stories, that is, a love story.

We meet the hero of this story, Jamal Malik, as he is being tortured by the police. Jamal is a “slumdog,” an ignorant product of Mumbai's vast slums. But Jamal has wormed his way on to the game show, and answered every question. The Indian version of this show looks exactly like the American original, with the same music, set, graphics and shtick. Except that nobody is actually supposed to answer all the question. Brilliant and educated people fail before reaching the top prize, 20 million rupees. Yet Jamal is ready to answer the last question. The game show host suspects that he has found a way to cheat, and has had him kidnapped by the police. When the police inspector cannot torture a confession out of him, he reviews the game show tape and asks Jamal how he knew the answer to each of these questions, questions that range from Indian poetry to American money to French literature. It is in flashbacks to his life that we get the story of Jamal's education.

It is an education that begins as a young boy witnessing the murder of his mother in an anti-Muslim riot. He and his brother Salim become orphans, engaged in petty crime and dumpster diving. It is at this point that he forms his connection with Latika, another orphan of the riots. The three are “rescued” form this life by an unspeakably evil Fagin-esque character, who runs an “orphanage” that is a cover for a begging and crime ring. Some of the orphans are blinded to make them more pathetic. Jamal and Salim make their escape just as Jamal is about to be blinded, but Salim forces Jamal to abandon Latika. It is his struggle to find Latika that forms the heart of the story.

The movie alternates between the game show and the flashbacks, between the sleazy underside of Indian society, and the slick pseudo-American game show. It turns out that Jamal is not in the least interested in the money; he has wormed his way onto the show because he knows that Latika watches it. Latika is by now the consort of an abusive and violent mobster. But in the process, Jamal becomes a national celebrity, with all the underdogs and dispossessed rooting for him.

Jamal's brother, in the meantime, has become a hit man for the Latika's mobster. It is Salim who was responsible for losing Latika in the first place, and for her current life as an abused concubine. Jamal's 15 minutes of game show fame force Salim into finally acting with his brother in mind.

The movie is by turns funny and horrifying, but it is always moving and suspenseful. Be sure to stay for the final credits, because underneath them there is an homage to Bollywood which, though out of character with the movie itself, is still great fun.

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Prophecy

The best science fiction is, of course, neither about science nor is it completely fictional. And though it is frequently set in the far future or the remote past, it is always about the present moment. Indeed, I think sci-fi really succeeds to the extent that it can project the present moment into the near future, and fails to the extent that it depends on special effects and scientific wizardry. Mere technology, as a succession of the “wow!” and the “gee whiz” is ultimately boring, unless we can connect it to the situation of man, both the temporal and eternal.

The is another kind of literature like this: it is the literature of the prophets. Prophecy is not so much a matter of foretelling the future as of foretelling the present. That is, the prophet grasps what is real in his society, and really defective, and shows what must be the results. Frequently, he shows these results as the judgment of God upon his society, and so it is. But it is also the judgment of men; if we persist in our ways, then we must go our way, wherever it leads, and it is pointless to blame the end on God. We may end up shouting (as we always do), “God, why did you let this happen?” when really the fault is in ourselves and not in God. We want to be free—even free from God—and we want God to prevent the consequences of our freedom. God does prevent these consequences, ultimately; he takes upon himself the fault that belongs to us. And in the end, as Julian of Norwich was told by the angel, “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” But in this, the penultimate world, things will not always be well. And it is the job of the Prophet to tell us just how bad things can be. The Prophet is both timely and eternal. Isaiah was a court official and a practical reformer involved with the day-to-day affairs of the Northern Kingdom. And Jeremiah was speaking mainly about Judean foreign policy. But through the temporal, they grasped the eternal, and in examining the actions of the sons of men, they were able to see—albeit dimly—the coming of the Son of Man. But their prophecies were not confined to the distant future only; Jeremiah could see the destruction that was at hand, as well as the restoration that was to come.

In foretelling the present, the prophet does not “predict”; rather, he shows us the way we must go if we do not change our ways. He shows a present moment, only slightly exaggerated, projected to the near moment. Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Dicken's A Christmas Carol, the future is not a given, but a thing in our control; to reform our present is to change our future. All of which brings me to the movie Children of Men, based on the novel by P. D. James.

James asks the question, “what would the world be like if we had no future?” And of course, having no future means having no children. This is the world in the “distant” future of 2027. There has not been a child born since 2009, and the last child born, “baby” Diego, has just been murdered by an autograph seeker. The scenario here is not so freakish as it might appear. In fact, birth rates are already well below replacement rates across must cultures and nations. So this is only a small exaggeration, a slight projection into the future (See The Birth Dearth). The major difference is that now we choose not to have children; in James's future, we cannot have children.

How does the world fare without a future? Not very well. Civilizations and nations have collapsed into chaos, and “Britain alone soldiers On,” as public service announcements constantly remind the British public. The problem is, England is “soldiering on” as a Fascistic “homeland security” state, with heavily armed policeman and soldiers on every corner. Still, there is terrorism in the streets. The chaos in the rest of the world has meant the mass movement of populations, to which England has responded by closing its borders and making immigration illegal.

The novel has been adapted to the screen by Alfonso Cuarón, who left the lucrative Harry Potter franchise (his last movie was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) to make this film. In this childless world, we first meet Theo Faron (Clive Owens), an erstwhile political activist, but now a cowering civil servant. He is kidnapped by his former girlfriend, Julian (Julianne Moore) who is now the leader of the “Fishes,” an underground and occasionally terrorist group working to protect immigrants. They have discovered a pregnant woman, the first in 18 years, named Kee (key?), an illegal immigrant from the Fiji Islands, played admirably by Clare-Hope Ashitey (isn't it ironic that the “key” is played by a woman named “Clear Hope”?) Julian is given the task of smuggling Kee out of England to a shadowy group called “The Human Project,” a group that may be located in the Azores but certainly operates by sea. This is a difficult enough task in a police state on the verge of collapse, but there are even more complications. Julian is murdered by one of her own lieutenants, who wants the baby as a “flag” to rally a rebellion. As a result, the people who are supposed to be helping Theo are now hunting him. Nor is his problem made any easier when he must become a midwife and deliver a baby in the midst of a “refugee camp” that is really an urban dystopia of filth and violence. Finally, he must guide Kee and the baby across an battlefield in the middle of an armed rebellion.

Cuarón shoots the film in long takes, with very few cuts, the camera following the action in a way that draws the audience into it. This is especially true in a long scene shot inside a car as it is being besieged by a mob of bandits, which gives a sense of claustrophobia and danger not seen since Das Boot. The battle scenes are as good as anything since Saving Private Ryan, and maybe better. But much of the real action takes place in the background, in Cuarón's depiction of the London of the near future. It is a gray and shabby place. After all, why repair the roads, or anything else, if you are the last generation? It is a world where Quietus, a suicide pill, is openly marketed with slick TV ads; Why not? If there is no tomorrow, why should there be a today?

We are not told the cause of the universal infertility, nor are we told the nature or the purpose of The Human Project; the viewer is free to speculate on these and to read into them what he will. But we are told of the connection between potency and civilization. And what we are told in the film contradicts everything we are told everywhere else. For in current ideology, a crash in population would be a boon to mankind and to the environment. And on this question, the film stands or falls. Are James and Cuarón engaging in prophecy or fantasy? Are they showing us where we are and where we're headed, or are the leading us astray? The viewer must decide, but history is on the side of James. Population declines are typically the prelude to chaos. When Rome stopped having any interest in children, her population slowly crashed and she could no longer defend her borders; she was given over to the barbarian hoards. Often, a rapid crash presents us with a choice of a slave society or a more egalitarian one. This is because the shortage of men causes the price of labor to skyrocket, and labor must either be suppressed or liberated. This was the choice after the Black Death in the 14^th century. The rulers tried to suppress the serfs and the peasantry (e.g., The Statute of Laborers in 1348), but their rights were too well-established for this to work, and the final suppression of the workers would not take place for another two centuries.

First Things criticized the movie for being insufficiently Christian; as usual, it is First Things that misses both the point of the movie and the point of Christianity. The lack of physical potency leads to a lack of intellectual vigor, including the impotency of writing for First Things. For indeed, civilization is ordered around children; we give them order and so order our own lives; everything we give them, we receive from them. All of Christianity revolves around a single birth, and a child who must, as in the film, flee the oppressor for fear of his life. In the film, Britain places its hope in military order, while its opponents call for armed rebellion. But it is birth that is the real rebellion, the real hope for the future. And our future depends on a single birth—on every single birth—and the hope offered to every single child.

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Casualties of War

By the official count, 3,972 of our troops have been killed in Iraq and another 483 in Afghanistan. More than 29,000 have been wounded (more than 1,800 in Afghanistan). But even these grim numbers may not tell us the full human cost of the war. We are using the same troops over and over again because we have an army that was simply not prepared for such a protracted struggle. It is not uncommon for a soldier to serve three, four, or even five tours. These soldiers have been in combat for a longer period of time than any soldier in World War II. It should not be surprising if such repeated duty took a heavy mental and psychological toll on our troops. I say “it should not be surprising,” but the Bush Administration seems very surprised indeed. The VA doesn't even have statistics on suicides among the returning vets; they can only tell you about those killed while on active duty.

CBS News did it own survey of 45 states, and the results are grim. In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year. Veterans in these 45 states commit suicide at twice the rate of other Americans (18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.) But one group in particular stands out: those veterans aged 20 to 24 who have served in the so-called “war on terror.” They commit suicide at a rate of between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000, as compared to 8.3 per 100,000. But once again, even this understates the problem, since for every soldier who commits suicide, there is likely to be some number who deal with their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in other ways. And finally, since we use a high number of reserves, many of the casualties are among older men, which leaves a larger proportion of widows and orphans than in most wars.

Everybody likes to say that they support the war; few actually do. I recall my own service in Vietnam. In the popular myth, the public turned against both the war and the soldiers who fought it, but I had no experience like that. Rather, I was not only welcomed home, but the VA system and the VA benefits were excellent. But then the whole country was actually involved in the war. Every mother's son carried a draft card and could be called at any moment. Further, we were asked to actually pay for the war with a surcharge on our income taxes. Further, the news was relatively uncontrolled, and the war was broadcast into homes on a nightly basis, in a way that simply is not permitted today. This war, on the other hand, is an abstraction to most of us; we do not have any personal contact with it. It is largely a political issue, for those interested in politics, and for only a very few a personal issue. It is fought by a “professional army” while the rest of the country absents itself. Even the name, “The War on Terror,” is more of a marketing device than a real description. And we are not even asked to pay for it; rather, we have placed the burden for fighting it on the young (and the unlucky reserves) and debt for it on our children and grandchildren. We are asked to “support” this war, but not to inconvenience ourselves in any way over it.

All of this serves as introduction to the film, In the Valley of Elah, which was released this week on DVD. The movie is loosely based on a true story, that of Specialist Richard Davis, who after returning from Iraq was killed by his own comrades after a night on the town. He was stabbed 33 times and his body burned. The army did not even open an inquiry into his case until 60 days after he was reported AWOL, and even that took badgers from Davis's father, a retired career Military Policeman who went to Fort Benning to investigate his son's disappearance for himself.

In the fictionalized account, Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a retired military policeman whose son has just returned from Iraq. He gets a call from the Army that his son is AWOL and asking him to call the army if his son shows up. Instead, Deerfield drives two days to his son's base in New Mexico to investigate for himself. Deerfield is a strict military man; you can take Hank out of the army, but you can't take the army out of Hank. Even when staying in a cheap motel, he makes his own bed each morning with tight military corners. Yet from both the army and the local police, he gets only indifference; no one is much interested in the missing veteran. And when his body turns up, burned and in pieces, there is a jurisdictional dispute between the civilian and military police.

Deerfield finally gets some help from Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a single mom and an outsider in the police squad room. The story proceeds as a murder mystery, but while the story is compelling enough by itself, it mostly serves as a framework to examine the meaning of war and its aftermath. Hank thinks he knows what this means, having been through it himself in Vietnam. When early in the investigation, Sanders wants to treat the murdered man's comrades as suspects, Hank tells her that she is wasting her time; men who have shared the dangers of combat together do not turn on each other in murder. Military comradeship is the fixed point in Hank's life, and the idea that it could have devoured his son is such a gruesome way is incomprehensible to him. Is seems that the institutions he has trusted all of his life have turned on him. Hank is connected to his son by only some grainy JPEGs taken in Iraq on his cell phone. It is in slowly deciphering the meaning of these images that the truth of Mike's war comes out.

Susan Serandon plays Hank's wife, Joan. It is practically a cameo role in this film, but in a short space she gives a glimpse of the ocean of grief of a military wife who has lost her son not to battle, but to battle's terrible aftermath. The tension between the old soldier and the grieving mother is palpable. Tommy Lee Jones gives an understated performance, very similar to the one he gave in No Country for Old Men.

This film is moving and entertaining on its own terms, but it is clear that the director wants to direct us towards the whole issue of the American public's relationship to this war. In Vietnam, there were likely any number of people who let their dislike of the war spill over into dislike of those who fought it. Or so I am told; I never actually met any. But in this war, everybody “supports our troops” with yellow ribbons and political rhetoric, but won't accept being inconvenienced in any way. We will not pay for it, and we will not pay for the “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” The returning troops meet with official indifference to wounds that cannot be seen, but are certainly present. Occasionally, public outrage will force a little reform, such as that at the Walter Reed Hospital. And for the visible wounds, the authorities do their best. But when we send so many of our children so many times to the gates of hell, we must expect that they will have some difficulties when they return. And we cannot be indifferent to that.

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There Will Be Bland

I don't get it.

I just don't get it.

The New York Times calls it “epic” and “mesmerizing.” Rolling Stone calls it a “beautiful beast of a movie.” The Chicago Tribune calls it a “majestic crackpot of a film” (I think that's a compliment.) The acclaim is almost universal. And it is clear that the Motion Picture Academy is going to shower this film with little statuettes. There are but a few dissenting voices, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, and me. While others were “mesmerized,” I found myself looking at my watch several times during the course of the 158 minutes of There Will Be Blood. The movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil!. Now, I have not personally read Sinclair's works, but I am sure that they cannot be as bad, a plot-less, as heavy-handed as this movie about one Daniel Planview (played by Daniel-Day Lewis).

We first meet Plainview as a struggling silver prospector, a human grub buried in the earth picking for bits of ore. 158 minutes later, we see him grubbing alone in his mansion, in much the same poses. Between the mine and the mansion, not much happens. Or at least, not much in the way of plot or character development. That is, we don't know much more about Plainview at the end then we knew at the beginning. That is to say, he is a greedy, driven bastard at the beginning, and is pretty much the same at the end. But we never know why, we never get any insight into him, save some hints about his business methods, which may, perhaps come in handy if you are ever trying to get poor people to sign over their mineral rights; other than that, I didn't learn much from the film, and I learned almost nothing about Daniel Planview, who seems to be on camera about 90% of the time. That's a lot of time to spend with a perfect stranger.

We do meet Daniel's “son,” a boy he adopted so that he could present himself as a “family man” when fleecing the locals, and whom he abandons when convenient. We also meet Eli Sunday, a hypocritical preacher who, like the oilman, is in it for the money. Nor surprisingly, we don't learn much about Eli either. And we meet a man who claims to be Plainview's half-brother, whose stories are as close as the movie comes to revealing something about Plainview himself, but that turns out to be both not much and not very interesting. Plainview kills the man, and serves him right, for adding 20 more boring minutes to this already boring film. Now, I like a good depiction of greedy business men and phony preachers as much as the next man, but I would like to learn a little bit about them, other then the mere facts of their oil leases and phony miracles. In truth, The Simpsons have a more nuanced depiction of Monty Burns and Ned Flanders then this movie gives us of Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday.

This role is not Daniel-Day Lewis's best; there is simply not enough character development for him to exercise his talents. The film has some virtues: there are vast scenic vistas (mostly bleak landscapes) and the odd oil well explosion. Other than that, the movie is bland; the scenery is in Technicolor, but the characters are in monochrome.

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Mere Anarchy

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

--William Butler Yeats

In Catholic Theology, evil has no real existence; it is a parasite, arising from a distorted notion of the good and making us pursue the wrong goals for the right reasons. We commit adultery by convincing ourselves that a real good is there (love or at least pleasure), we kill in the name of justice, lie in the name of truth. But we always end up killing truth and justice, love and even pleasure. In this sense, even evil has a kind of distorted rationality to it, a kind of twisted logic. But carried to its logical end, it destroys all reason and logic; it even destroys any real pleasure. What , then, does the world look like when the parasite infects the whole body, when we can no longer separate good and evil, when our personal wants are all, and other people are nothing but either tools or obstacles to those goals, to be used in the former case or disposed of in the latter?

This is the question that confronts the Coen brothers in their latest film, a faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. No, nor for young men either, or anyone else; it is the country of the mere anarchy that Yeats saw coming. The Coen brothers have dealt with the theme before, many times but most notably in the films Miller's Crossing and Fargo, two films that will surely be compared to this work.

The theme of the film is announced early on, as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) describes a young killer he had once sent to the chair for killing a 14-year old girl. The papers described it as a crime of passion, “but he tolt me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes.” The killer in this film is no misguided youth, but Anton Chigurh, a man of indeterminate accent and background, but a consummate assassin. Some of his murders can be explained in terms of money or professionalism, but by no means all. Sometimes, the fate of the people he meets depends on no more than a coin toss. This evil has no real reason; it is mere anarchy.

On the surface, the movie is about a drug deal gone bad. Llewellyn Moss, a country boy and down on his luck Viet Nam vet, who while out hunting antelope in the West Texas prairie, circa 1980, comes across a scene of carnage, with five bodies, a pick-up full of heroin, and a satchel with $2 million in cash. There is but one wounded survivor who begs for aqua. He gives the man no water, but takes the money. Later that night, he repents of his action and goes back to bring water to the dying man. It turns out to be a big mistake, as the assassin picks up his trail and the hunt is on.

We have many movies in which the lone hero, usually from the country, confronts, by his own wits and courage, the false sophistication of evil, and this movie starts out in the same way. We expect it to develop along those lines, and it does, for a while. But the movie also picks up on other “conventional ways of confronting evil, both from previous Coen brothers' films. One is the theme from Fargo, in which the law, as the embodiment of country virtues overcomes evil, and the other, from Miller's Crossing, in which evil is overcome from within, as it were, by the man immersed in the same evil he fights, but who is able to fight his way out. All three ways of dealing with the evil are tested, and all of them fail; Chiugh is triumphant even over the normal vicissitudes of life that overcome us all.

In the end, there is nothing but nihilism. Two old sheriffs (the “old men”) pronounce a bewildered judgment on the evil that confronts them. “When children no longer said 'yes ma'am' and 'no sir,' I reckon it was all downhill” (I quote from memory). In other words, as the small decencies declined, decency itself must disappear; when the "ceremonies of innocence" depart, then mere anarchy remains. The film offers no hope; in the end, there is only night and nihilism.

The performances from each member of the cast are superb, as is the sparse dialogue (this is a film of mostly silences) which displays a perfect pitch, more eloquent than music, which the film doesn't have. The Cohen brothers present an America in which our collective virtues are no longer strong enough to triumph over evil. It is a chilling vision, but in a day when disembodied violence is marketed as entertainment for small children, a virtual game played on a small screen, we must ask if Anton Chirugh is not a part of the “childhood” we have given to our young, and so have built a country in which there can be no place for old men and old verities, indeed, for any man or woman. The Coen brothers, like good prophets everywhere, have not so much “foretold the future” as “foretold the present moment.”

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Fire the Boss!

In my last post, I discussed the Acton Institute film, The Call of the Entrepreneur. This compelling but intellectually shallow film converted entrepreneurship from a call to a cult, in my opinion; it treated the entrepreneur as a rarefied and special class of individuals crucial for the success of any economy. In this post, I review a film that takes the opposite tack, that bosses are not really necessary, and the ordinary workers possess the entrepreneurial skills necessary to run the most complex operations. Of course, this is not a new theme. The success of such enterprises as the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in Spain, or the entire economy of Emila-Romagna, have long proven the success of the worker-manager to produce and manage complex products at a rate of return higher than the so-called “free market” enterprises, and to do so with fair wages and high social services.

The film is called The Take and is shot in Argentina, where, in the 90's, the United States and the IMF forced a program of economic “liberalization” on the country. Government enterprises were sold off, budgets reduced, social spending cut to bone, taxes on wealth reduced or eliminated, etc. The results, in Argentina as in so many other places, was a disaster. After some initial successes, the economy collapsed, which idled thousands of factories and businesses. The rich were allowed to ship all of their money out of the country, while bank accounts for ordinary Argentinians were frozen, so that people could not get at their own funds.

As the factories were being idled, and the workers laid off, usually with millions of pesos in unpaid wages, one group of workers at a suit factory refused to leave. They took over the factory and kept on producing and marketing their products. They made the bankrupt company a successful enterprise. Of course, there was one little problem: they didn't own the place legally. But they got so much support from the public, that the politicians deemed in inadvisable to evict them, at first, and later attempts to do so resulted in riots. Laws were then written to which could make expropriation possible under certain circumstances.

What is crucial here is that the workers here are not the vanguard of some ideology; they are not socialists, or communists, or libertarians, or even distributists. Rather, they are just workers, whose desperation forced them into desperate measures. But their actions did found a movement, and 180 closed factories and businesses have been taken over by the workers. Many of these enterprises exist in legal limbo and face a hostile government and court system. Nevertheless, they have made a success of it, and made it without bosses. The workers manage the companies democratically and set their own wages, policies, and decisions. They seem to be doing just fine without either bosses or government subsidies.

Many socialists have backed the movement, but in fact this seems to be the opposite of socialism, or at least of state-socialism (Marxism); it is not the government taking over the means of production, but the workers themselves. In fact, it seems to be a return to the libertarian and distributist ideal of self-organizing communities, able to manage their own affairs without help from either government or corporate bureaucracies.

But does that still leave a moral problem? Is expropriation just a fancy word for stealing? In the particular cases involved here, likely not. In the first place, the old owners left millions owed to the workers, as well as to the government, and on these grounds alone the workers have a valid claim on the properties. Further, the special treatment given to the rich by the Menem government, treatment that was nothing less than the transfer of funds from the public purse to private fortunes gives the public in general and the workers in particular another claim on these factories. But in the more general case, we must consider the purpose of property. Private property is meant to serve the common good by making the productive capacity of the earth more plentiful and more available to all. The words of John Paul II in Laborem Exercans are useful here:

The above principle, as it was then stated and as it is still taught by the Church, diverges radically from the programme of collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism and put into pratice in various countries in the decades following the time of Leo XIII's Encyclical. At the same time it differs from the programme of capitalism practiced by liberalism and by the political systems inspired by it. In the latter case, the difference consists in the way the right to ownership or property is understood. Christian tradition has never upheld this right as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.

They cannot be possessed against labour, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession- whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership-is that they should serve labour, and thus, by serving labour, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them. From this point of view, therefore, in consideration of human labour and of common access to the goods meant for man, one cannot exclude the socialization, in suitable conditions, of certain means of production. In the course of the decades since the publication of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Church's teaching has always recalled all these principles, going back to the arguments formulated in a much older tradition, for example, the well-known arguments of the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Summa Th., II-II, q. 66, arts. 2 and 6; De Regimine Principum, book 1, chapters 15 and 17. On the social function of property see Summa Th., II-II, q. 134, art. 1, ad 3.).

In the light of the above, the many proposals put forward by experts in Catholic social teaching and by the highest Magisterium of the Church take on special significance: proposals for joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, so-called shareholding by labour, etc.

And his words from Centesimus Annus would seem to provide a clear warrant for the actions of the workers:

Ownership of the means of production, whether in industry or agriculture, is just and legitimate if it serves useful work. It becomes illegitimate, however, when it is not utilized or when it serves to impede the work of others, in an effort to gain a profit which is not the result of the overall expansion of work and the wealth of society, but rather is the result of curbing them or of illicit exploitation, speculation or the breaking of solidarity among working people. Ownership of this kind has no justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man.

In any case, the film raises the question of whether we really need bosses as much as we have been led to believe. Contrary to the cultic view of the Acton Institute, all men seem to have the spark of the entrepreneur within them, and it does not take the cut-throat world of competition to bring it out. Rather the opposite seems to be true: in a spirit of cooperation, companies flourish even when the “bosses” drive them to bankruptcy. As on of the workers in the film says, “We don't know why accounting was such a problem for the bosses; we are able to do it easily enough.”

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Apocalypto Now!

I watched Mel Gibson's Apocalyto last night, a film which has been critiqued by many for many reasons. I, however, found it a moving and thought-provoking film, well-worth wading through the violence that has become Gibson's signature. But to concentrate on the violence would be to miss the larger points. Gibson has certainly built his career on a certain amount of violence, either the rather pointless violence of his acting career, and the more pointed variety of his directorial career. The Passion of the Christ was certainly violent, but then, so was the real Passion.

In Apocalypto, Gibson looks at violence and the collapse of empires. He announces his theme from the start, with a quote from the historian Will Durant that empires first collapse internally before they are conquered by foreign enemies. We are invited throughout the movie to make comparisons to our own situation. At first, this may seem an impossibility, since he begins with a forest people and village life, a life as foreign to us as the obscure language that they speak. But the scene soon shifts to a sophisticated urban society, a society of stone buildings, elaborate temples and rituals, of deep class divisions, of luxury and poverty, of slavery and of human sacrifice. There is even a Dick Cheney look-alike in a feathered headdress who gives a rousing speech to a cheering crowd about the strength of the empire--just before he cuts the heart out of a victim, beheads the life-less corpse, and hurls head and body down the temple steps, a gesture that pleases the crowd no end.

In this confrontation of absolute power and relative innocence, the later would seem to have no chance. And it doesn't, not as a group. One man alone has the chance to escape the violence and cruelty, a chance he can take only with great courage and suffering. But it is only at the end when we see the ultimate conquerer of both cruelty and innocence, and then we get but a brief glimpse. It is all we need; we already know how the story will end.

The actors are not actors at all, but people who are themselves connected to this history and who speak the language. And since, as in The Passion, the film is not in our language, it is not language that carries the film, but a stunning visual imagery and vocabulary. But even without speaking the language, the acting is as moving as any you would see from professionals whose language we share. Often I found myself ignoring the subtitles to watch the actors; words weren't necessary, the action said it all.

This is not a movie for the squeamish (my wife won't watch it). Yet I think it is a worthwhile effort; in the strange accents and architectures of an alien past, we see the reflection of the present moment.

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