silence (4)

So, Silence. What do i think of it?
.
Well. i think it's good art, and bad theology. i hope nobody goes to that movie in search of theology, because the perspective of faith that it seems to affirm is, in a word, sophistry. However, as a human story, it works very well. A story of human weakness in the face of suffering, its causes and its consequences.
.
In other news. This guy is quite rapidly becoming one of my favourite nonfiction writers. Here's his take on suffering:
.
-------------------------------
.
"We live in a country whose politics and culture sometimes resemble a vast machine designed to deny the inevitability of suffering. The machine works by promoting the fiction that suffering is something that happens to other people, under circumstances so exotic and bizarre as to be statistically impossible. In this manner suffering becomes entertainment. The disease of the week isn't cancer or heart attack but Bubble Boy syndrome. On television more people die of terrorism than in car accidents. The new conventional medical wisdom seems to be that with proper diet, exercise, and lifestyle, nobody has to get sick; maybe nobody has to die except for some fat chain-smokers in trailer parks. Our public policies amount to a symbolic exorcism in which crime, illness, and ignorance are drawn out of the general population and projected into the Gadarene herds of the poor, the black and coloured poor especially. Throughout there's the implication that those who suffer somehow deserve their suffering. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Stupid.
.
This fantasy of immunity arose out of traditional American exceptionalism but became prevalent only amid the euphoric abundance of the postwar years. It is a child's fantasy, and it has made us a nation of children. I believe it accounts for our collective helplessness in the face of illness, our paranoia about crime, our contempt for the disadvantaged. It's why we have no national health policy and vote for politicians who slash medical aid to the poor. It's why antidepressants are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States. It's why the attacks of September 11 plunged us into a paroxysm of incredulous rage and self-pity that, instead of being allayed by the successful invasion of Afghanistan, keeps seeking new cathartic outlets: today Iraq, tomorrow who knows? It's why our government wouldn't let us see the coffins of the soldiers killed in those cathartic wars, and why we didn't want to see them. Because Americans don't know how to suffer, we are inflicting great suffering on others, and in all likelihood we will bring further suffering upon ourselves. I don't want to speculate about what form this suffering will take. However it comes, I'm willing to bet we'll be unprepared for it, unprepared in the deepest psychic and spiritual sense. Clueless."
.
.
(from The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning, by Peter Trachtenberg, 2008)
.
.