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This post takes a look at the song ADAM’S SONG which is about suicide but don’t stop reading there but continue to the end of the post where there is some hope!!

I never thought I’d die alone
I laughed the loudest who’d have known?
I trace the cord back to the wall
No wonder it was never plugged in at all
I took my time, I hurried up
The choice was mine I didn’t think enough
I’m too depressed to go on
You’ll be sorry when I’m goneI never conquered, rarely came
Sixteen just held such better days
Days when I still felt alive
We couldn’t wait to get outside
The world was wide, too late to try
The tour was over, we’d survived
I couldn’t wait till I got home
To pass the time in my room aloneI never thought I’d die alone
Another six months I’ll be unknown
Give all my things to all my friends
You’ll never step foot in my room again
You’ll close it off, board it up
Remember the time that I spilled the cup
Of apple juice in the hall
Please tell mom this is not her faultI never conquered, when you came
Sixteen just held such better days
Days when I still felt alive
We couldn’t wait to get outside
The world was wide, too late to try
The tour was over, we’d survived
I couldn’t wait till I got home
To pass the time in my room aloneI never conquered, when you came
Tomorrow holds such better days
Days when I can still feel alive
When I can’t wait to get outside
The world is wide, the time goes by
The tour is over, I’ve survived
I can’t wait till I get home
To pass the time in my room aloneSource: LyricFindSongwriters: Tom De Longe / Mark HoppusAdam’s Song lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below in 1971 at L Abri

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Dr. Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri Conference, Urbana, 1981

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Reviving the Pop-Punk Innocence of Blink-182

Amanda Petrusich August 2016

Although pop-punk was not invented in the late nineteen-nineties—in the preceding decades, bands like Bad Religion, Agent Orange, Social Distortion, Hüsker Dü, Green Day, and the Descendents did the strange work of injecting either melody or jocularity, or both, into punk’s staunchness—few musical genres now feel as emblematic of that era. And no era is presently being gazed upon with more pie-eyed approbation than the waning years of the twentieth century. It seems deeply bogus to call that adoration “nostalgia,” as many of the folks now knotting flannel shirts around their midriffs and dipping their pigtails into jars of Manic Panic weren’t even born when, say, the Offspring released “Smash”—but it is earnest, and it is widespread. The nineties, they are Cool.

Which means the melodic pop-punk of yesteryear is having an odd return, if not quite a proper renaissance. While a handful of new bands are making vital-seeming pop-punk records, the genre is not commercially ascendant; rather, it seems to have invaded young hearts and minds as an artifact. To that end, one of pop-punk’s most beloved practitioners, Blink-182—a trio born, in 1992, from the skate parks of Southern California—is enjoying a renewed popularity. When the band released its seventh record, “California,” in July, it débuted atop the pop charts both in the U.K. and in the U.S., where it unseated Drake. (Kelefa Sanneh reviewed the album in the July 25th issue of the magazine.) This month, the band will play a string of shows in and around New York, including Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, and the Nikon at Jones Beach Theatre, in Wantagh.

Punk purists were scandalized by Green Day’s leap, in 1994, from the independent Lookout! Records to Reprise, which is owned by the Warner Music Group, one of the “Big Three” recording conglomerates. But by the time Blink-182 released its third record, “Enema of the State,” in 1999, pop-punk was axiomatically understood as a sovereign entity, a subgenre that—unlike punk, which thrived on subverting notions of palatability—was deliberately engineered for mass pleasure. “Enema of the State” has since become one of the genre’s most canonical documents (though it owes its predecessors everything) and also one of its most adored. It is as apolitical and un-self-serious as its title suggests. The cover features a young lady (Janine Lindemulder, then a star of pornographic videos) wearing blue eyeshadow and a red brassiere, squeezed into a nurse’s costume. She is suggestively stretching a rubber glove over her right hand.

In 1999, the three members of Blink-182—the singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge, the singer and guitarist Mark Hoppus, and the drummer Travis Barker—were in their mid-twenties, and deep into the kind of extended adolescence now presumed of young, privileged American men. I’d dare suggest that the band even helped engineer (or at least further normalize) the practice of rejecting traditional beacons of manhood. Blink-182 was brazenly unconcerned with seeming churlish or wayward. Being a clown incited no shame. A year earlier, the band had titled a tour “PooPoo PeePee.” The notion of embracing adulthood, even begrudgingly—of putting aside childish things, of committing to the sort of life that places a person in orbit of something other than himself, of pumping the brakes just a little on the dick jokes—simply did not register or have currency. Life was about gags, and doing whatever you felt like doing—or at least that was the performance. From the outside, it looked glorious. “Enema of the State” eventually sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide, a success by any measure. Blink-182’s snickering nihilism had legs.

On “Dammit,” an early single about a trying breakup, the chorus goes, “I guess this is growing up.” Hoppus sounds devastated each time he sings the line. It seems he was so bummed out by it that he ultimately decided to try and circumvent the eventuality of aging altogether: by the summer of 1999, “What’s My Age Again?,” a single from “Enema of the State,” had become a frantic anthem for anyone unwilling to go gracefully into adulthood. The song continues to function as such. “My friends say I should act my age,” Hoppus sings, but he just isn’t feeling it; he loses the girl. “That’s about the time she walked away from me,” he shrugs. “Nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three.” This isn’t exactly true—twenty-three is, in fact, squarely within our most coveted and courted age bracket—but part of being a perpetual teen-ager is refusing accountability, enacting an endless shuck and jive around the issue of your own cowardice.

Which is not to say that the band was witless. The video for “All the Small Things,” a sendup of boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, is startlingly clever, positioning Blink-182 as a petulant, mischievous counterpoint to dopey, manufactured pop music—when in reality those bands share significant musical DNA. It made the band seem fun, carefree, insouciant. Elsewhere on “Enema of the State,” when Blink-182 attempted seriousness—as in “Adam’s Song,” a track nominally about depression and suicide—it lost momentum. Its finest moments are barked in aggrieved-teen shorthand, like this verse from “All the Small Things”: “Late night / Come home / Work sucks / I know.”

The grievances and pleasures Blink-182’s songs express—the dumbness of adults, how weird sex is, how cool jokes are, how lonesome life can be—are the kinds of things that get worried over most loudly from ages twelve to eighteen. It’s tempting to think that our emotions become more complex and multitudinous when we grow up. But most of us continue following those same early tracks, the ones we gouged in adolescence; the whole spectrum of human experience, all that longing and self-doubt, is perfectly sketched out in those formative years. That’s where pop-punk lives. Its rawness lies not in the music but in the heady newness of those feelings.

This is, I think, at least partially why the band has endured. But I also wonder if we’re clinging to the sound—protecting it—as we would an endangered species. In 2016, a record like “Enema of the State” hits like a shot of oxygen. It’s revitalizing—and comforting, somehow—to revisit the sort of playful, featherbrained temperament made possible only by a decade in which prosperity and safety seemed nearly guaranteed. Most of the kids hollering along to the band’s discography at shows today never even knew a pre-9/11 world. I sometimes wonder, though, if the air has gotten too toxic for Blink-182’s brand of ribald goofiness.

Of course, Blink-182 looks different these days. DeLonge, who turned forty last year, has stopped touring with the band, although it is unclear whether he remains a member. (Matt Skiba, of Alkaline Trio, has been acting as his replacement.) Instead, DeLonge has committed himself to activities involving extraterrestrial life. Lately, he’s been giving loony-sounding quotes to magazines, like in April, when he told Rolling Stone, “I couldn’t tell the band I was working with people in the government. . . . I have ten people that I’m working with that are at the highest levels of the Department of Defense and nasa and the military. Big shit, and no one knows this.” Which is good copy—who wouldn’t delight in the idea that the former guitarist of a terrifically juvenile pop-punk band is now colluding with government officials to untangle the mysteries of space?—until it begins to register that maybe something else is going on.

Or perhaps focussing one’s attention on celestial affairs is a reasonable way to deal with 2016. There is a palpable hunger for balms of any type right now, and, as it gets harder and harder to invent new ones, it makes sense that we’d turn, collectively, toward preëxisting expressions—toward songs or bands or genres that don’t feel marred by a vast pessimism. In that sense, pop-punk—and its ability to express foolishness and, by extension, true joy—feels eternal.

Adam’s song is filled with hope in the last paragraph of lyrics. So many young people stop short of committing suicide and they think more of the hope the future can offer. Take a look at the story below of someone who gave life another chance after he had actually shot himself in a failed suicide attempt.

Last paragraph of lyrics from “Adam’s song: I never conquered, rarely came
Tomorrow holds such better days
Days when I can still feel alive
When I can’t wait to get outside
The world is wide, the time goes by
The tour is over, I’d survived
I can’t wait till I get home
To pass the time in my room alone

Spend It Any Way You Like

by Greg Hartman

Jim Centifanto parked his motorcycle and walked into the Florida woods. He loaded the 12-gauge shotgun he had borrowed and took a deep breath. Holding the shotgun’s barrel in his left hand, he pressed its muzzle into his stomach. Leaning forward, he pulled the trigger with his right hand.

The blast threw him off his feet and left a gaping, fist-sized hole on the left side of his abdomen. Dropping the gun, Jim staggered back to his motorcycle, rode to his mother’s house four miles away, and passed out on her front steps.

Four days later, as he was waking up from a coma, he heard a voice speak to him. “I saved you for a reason,” the voice said. Centifanto looked around, startled. The room was empty.

Centifanto’s father had taught him and his brothers and sisters to respond to problems with violence. Lawrence Centifanto, a career Marine, married his wife, Ysolina, while he was serving in Panama. Soon after Jim was born, his father went to Korea for three years, then to Vietnam for another three years. Centifanto was 6 before he knew his father.

Lawrence Centifanto sent all his money home for the six long years he was at war. He asked his wife to save it up for him, and expected to return home to a sizable nest egg. Instead, she moved her family from New York to Florida and put herself through medical school.

“I’m not sure if he loved my mother,” Jim said, “but I know she didn’t love him. She only married him to get her American citizenship and an education.”

Centifanto’s excitement at meeting his father quickly turned into horror when his father discovered what had happened to his money. He made his children sit on the sofa and watch as he beat and choked their mother.

Living with his father, Centifanto said, was like living with an unpredictable volcano. Lawrence Centifanto viciously beat his wife and children at the slightest provocation or for no reason at all. One time, he tore an earring out of his daughter’s ear. Another time, after being out of town for a month, he pulled up in his driveway and saw Jim pull aside the curtains to look out the front window, excited to see his father. Lawrence responded to his son’s enthusiastic greeting with a savage beating. “He told me I could have gotten dirt on the curtains,” Centifanto said.

Finally, when Centifanto was 9, his mother divorced her husband. Ysolina Centifanto’s solution to her ex-husband’s brutal discipline was to avoid disciplining her children at all. “We went from one end of the scale to the other. She said, ‘This will never happen to us again,’ and she let my brothers and I run totally wild. We did anything we wanted.”

Within a year, Centifanto was expelled from the Catholic school he had been attending and joined a gang with his brother. He began using and dealing drugs.

One day the vice president of Centifanto’s gang, Bobby Hicks, showed up at the gang’s hangout with a short haircut and wearing a suit and tie. “We thought he was going to court,” Centifanto said. “You know, when you have to see a judge you dress up nice and hope maybe he’ll be more lenient. That’s what we thought Bobby was doing.”

Instead, Hicks threw his fellow gang members a curve. “I just got born again!” he announced.

“He could have said, ‘I just went to the moon,’ for as much as we understood him,” Centifanto said. “We just laughed and said, ‘You did what?'”

But when Hicks started preaching at his friends, the gang’s leader stopped laughing and provoked Centifanto to fight Hicks.

“Bobby was 20 — six years older than me,” Centifanto said, “and he weighed about 250 pounds. I’d seen what he did to other guys. I whipped him with a bullwhip and chased him down the street; I totally humiliated him in front of everyone. The day before, he would have killed me. But this time, he wouldn’t fight. I didn’t know what made him act so weird.”

Centifanto soon forgot his former friend’s odd behavior as he sank deeper into his world of drinking and drugs. “I stayed stoned all the time, 24 hours a day,” he said. “I’d take enough drugs at night to keep me stoned until I woke up, then start over again.”

In 1970, when Centifanto was 15, his girlfriend broke up with him. “She was the closest thing to love I had in my life,” he said. “I hated life, just hated it. No one loved me and when she rejected me, too, I couldn’t take it.” He borrowed a shotgun and shot himself in the stomach. Incredibly, he lived.

“I was in a coma for four days,” Centifanto said. “No one expected me to live; they couldn’t believe I’d even managed to ride my bike to my mother’s house.”

Soon after Centifanto awoke from his coma, his mother announced she had had it with him and sent him to live with his father in Chicago. Within a year, his stepmother kicked him out, too. He was 17.

Centifanto got a job at a steel mill and lived with Terry, a co-worker, and his parents. Terry and his father worked at the steel mill with Centifanto. After work, the three of them got drunk almost every night. Then Terry’s mother surprised them all one day: She announced that she had become a Christian.

“She used to try to talk with me about Christ for hours,” Centifanto said, “even though I was usually drunk. I accidentally walked in on her one night and she was praying, just weeping and asking God to have mercy on me. Everyone else had rejected me, and she didn’t have any benefit from trying to reach me. But here she was praying for me. I just couldn’t understand it.”

About two months later, Centifanto joined the Marines, and found he made a good soldier. “I went in there full of bitterness and violence, and they said, ‘Here’s a gun. We like it if you want to hate and kill.'” But peace of mind still eluded him. His drinking continued unabated, landing him in the hospital twice and almost destroying his kidneys.

Two years later, Centifanto was stationed in Hawaii. One night while his platoon was on maneuvers, a soldier from another unit struck up a conversation with him.

“He told me about what Jesus had done for him,” Centifanto said, “and I just started weeping uncontrollably. I could see he’d been where I was and I wanted what he had.” Centifanto asked the man if he could go to church with him, and the man agreed to pick Centifanto up at his barracks the next Sunday morning.

But Centifanto had neglected to get his name, and when he didn’t show up, Centifanto was desperate. Finally, about two months later, Centifanto ran into him again. “I shook him and yelled at him: ‘You said you’d take me to church! You better show up this time!'” Centifanto said with a chuckle. He got the man’s name — Donald Taylor — and eagerly awaited the next Sunday.

Taylor showed up as promised this time, and took Centifanto to church. “I was mad at Don because I thought he told Eugene Stober, the pastor, about me,” Centifanto said. “Every single word that came out of his mouth was about me and my sin.

“When I was 14 and Bobby Hicks got saved, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I heard God speak to me after I shot myself, but I didn’t listen to that, either. And Terry’s mom explained the gospel to me, but it still didn’t stop me from sinning.

“We have to come to the end of ourselves before we realize how desperately we are in need. I was at the end of myself this time. I was so ripe for the gospel. This time it was different; this time the ring of truth was going through my heart.”

Centifanto began attending church with Taylor. A month later, while supervising the armory guard, he read a magazine article about the end of the world and panicked. “I was convinced Jesus was coming back — tomorrow!” he said. He left his post — a court-martial offense — and hurried to the church. Finding Pastor Stober, he begged him to tell him how to get saved.

Eugene Stober led Centifanto in prayer. That night, Aug. 17, 1974, in Oahu, Hawaii, when he was 19 years old, Jim Centifanto asked Jesus Christ to forgive his sin and be his Lord and Savior.

When they were finished praying, Pastor Stober handed Centifanto a quarter. Confused, he took it. “That’s what salvation is like: a free gift,” Stober said. “And that quarter is just like your life, too: You’re free to spend it any way you like, but you can only spend it once.”

“That’s when what had just happened really hit me,” Centifanto said. “It was like scales fell from my eyes. All the hate and bitterness, the way I hated myself and everyone else and hated life so much — it left me; it was all gone, just like that.”

Centifanto returned to the base, expecting to face a court-martial. To his surprise, his commander said, “Well, don’t let it happen again,” and dismissed him. When he awoke the next morning, he received another surprise: His desire for drugs and alcohol was gone, never to return.

Today Jim Centifanto and his wife and four children are missionaries in Guatemala. “The minute I got saved I started witnessing to everything that moved,” he said. “I could never see any way to live after that but in service to God. When Pastor Stober handed me that quarter, God changed my life forever. He really did change my heart and make me a new creation.”Copyright © 2006 Greg Hartman. Used with permission.

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Francis Schaeffer taught young people at L Abri in Switzerland in the 1950’s till the 1980’s (pictured below)

Francis Schaeffer noted:

I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.”

Francis Schaeffer pictured

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 “They are the natural outcome of a change from a Christian World View to a Humanistic one…
The result is a relativistic value system. A lack of a final meaning to life — that’s first. Why does human life have any value at all, if that is all that reality is? Not only are you going to die individually, but the whole human race is going to die, someday. It may not take the falling of the atom bombs, but someday the world will grow too hot, too cold. That’s what we are told on this other final reality, and someday all you people not only will be individually dead, but the whole conscious life on this world will be dead, and nobody will see the birds fly. And there’s no meaning to life.

As you know, I don’t speak academically, shut off in some scholastic cubicle, as it were. I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.” And I must say, that on the basis of what they are being taught in school, that the final reality is only this material thing, they are not wrong. They’re right! On this other basis there is no meaning to life and not only is there no meaning to life, but there is no value system that is fixed, and we find that the law is based then only on a relativistic basis and that law becomes purely arbitrary.

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Francis Schaeffer also observed:

The peak of the drug culture of the hippie movement was well symbolized by the movie Woodstock. Woodstock was a rock festival held in northeastern United States in the summer of 1969. The movie about that rock festival was released in the spring of 1970. Many young people thought that Woodstock was the beginning of a newand wonderful age.

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) himself was soon to become a symbol of the end. Black, extremely talented, inhumanly exploited, he overdosed in September 1970 and drowned in his own vomit, soon after the claim that the culture of which he was a symbol was a new beginning. In the late sixties the ideological hopes based on drug-taking died.

After Woodstock two events “ended the age of innocence,” to use the expression of Rolling Stone magazine. The first occurred at Altamont, California, where the Rolling Stones put on a festival and hired the Hell’s Angels (for several barrels of beer) to police the grounds. Instead, the Hell’s Angels killed people without any cause, and it was a bad scene indeed. But people thought maybe this was a fluke, maybe it was just California! It took a second event to be convincing. On the Isle of Wight, 450,000 people assembled, and it was totally ugly. A number of people from L’Abri were there, and I know a man closely associated with the rock world who knows the organizer of this festival. Everyone agrees that the situation was just plain hideous.

(How Should We Then Live, pp. 209-210)

 In his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Francis Schaeffer noted:

This emphasis on hallucinogenic drugs brought with it many rock groups–for example, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of their work was from 1965-1958. The Beatles’Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) also fits here. This disc is a total unity, not just an isolated series of individual songs, and for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. As a whole, this music was the vehicle to carry the drug culture and the mentality which went with it across frontiers which were almost impassible by other means of communication.

Here is a good review of the episode 016 HSWTL The Age of Non-Reason of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?, December 23, 2007:

Together with the advent of the “drug Age” was the increased interest in the West in  the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: “This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today.”  Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world.  They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life.  By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.

Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase “of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope.”  As modern man searches for answers it “many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine.”  For many people having the “occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning” is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnote #94)

There is also a confirmation of what the Bible says concerning the Egyptian King Tirhakah who came up to oppose the Assyrians. Confirmation of his reality is typified by a sphinx-ram in the British Museum (British Museum Ref. B.B.1779). The small figure between the legs of the ram is a representation of King Tirhakah. The Bible says that when Sennacherib heard that  Tirhakah, king of Eqypt, was coming to fight against him, he sent messengers to tell Hezekiah that help from Egypt would be of no use to him.

2 Kings 19:9, 10 ⁹ Now the king heard concerning Tirhakah king of Cush, “Behold, he has set out to fight against you.” So he sent messengers again to Hezekiah, saying,¹⁰ “Thus shall you speak to Hezekiah king of Judah: ‘Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you by promising that Jerusalem will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. (Isaiah 37:9-10 also says about the same thing.)

The date of Sennacherib’s campaign in Palestine is 701 B.C., and something which has often puzzled historians is the role of Tirhakah, who was not king of Egypt and Ethiopia until 690 B.C. But the solution to this problem is simple. In 701 B.C. Tirhakah was only a prince at the side of his military brother, the new Pharaoh Shebitku, who sent Tirhakah with an army to help Hezekiah fend off the Assyrian advance. But the story in Kings and Isaiah does not end in 701 B.C. It carries right through to the death of Sennacherib in 681 B.C., which is nine years after Tirhakah had become king of Egypt and Ethiopia. In other words, the biblical narrative, from the standpoint of 681 B.C., mentions Tirhakah by the title he bore at that time (that is, 681 B.C.), not as he was in 701 B.C. This is still done today, using a man’s title as he is known at the time of writing even it one is speaking of a previous time in his personal history.

Unaware of the the importance of these facts, and falling into wrong interpretations of some of Tirhakah’s inscriptions, some Old Testament scholars have stumbled over each in their eagerness to diagnose historical errors in the Books of the Kings and Isaiah. But as the archaeological confirmation shows, they were quite mistaken. What is striking about these archaeological finds is the way they often converge; there is often not just one line of evidence but several in which the biblical account is confirmed. We do not have confirmation of every single detail in the biblical account, by any means. Nor do we need such total confirmation in view of the amount of evidence there is. To insist on confirmation at every point would be to treat the Bible in a prejudiced way, simply because it is the Bible. The fact that is a religious book does not mean that it cannot also be true when it deals with history.

Not all archaeological finds have a convergence of many different interrelated lines like these around the life of Hezekiah, but they are no less striking. For example, take the “ration tablets” discovered in the ruins of Bablyon. The Bible tells us that after the Assyrians had destroyed the nothern kingdom of Samaria (around 721 B.C.), the southern kingdom, Judah, survived for almost another 150 years until approximately 586 B.C. By this time Assyria, one of the greatest military powers of the ancient world, had been defeated by Bablyon, a neighboring state to the east. That was in 609 B.C. Four years later the Babylonian general, Nebuchadnezzar–then the crown prince–came west and completely defeated Necho II, king of Egypt, at the battle of Carchemish. As a result of this victory he laid claim to Judah, which had previously been in the sphere of influence of Egypt. King Jehoiakim of Judah thus now paid tribute to the Babylonians. The Bible tells us that Jehoiakim rebelled three years later: “During Jehoiakim’s reign Nebuchadnezzar king of Bablyon invaded the land, and Jehoiakim became his vassal for three years. But then he changed his mind and rebelled against Nebuchnezzar” (II Kings 24:1).

The political background for this step can be understood from the Babylonian Chronicles (British Museum, Ref. 21946, records events from 597 B.C. down to 594). These were a compressed chronological summary of the principal events from the Babylonian court. There had been a crucial battle in 601 B.C. between the Egyptians and the Babylonians. This had left both sides weakened, and Jehoiakim took this opportunity to declare his independence of the Babylonian king. His independence, or rather Judah’s independence, did not last long, for Jehoiakim himself died in 598 B.C., leaving his throne and the crisis to his son, Jehoiachin. Second Kings (II Kings 24:10-12, 17) tells us what happened:

¹⁰ At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. ¹¹ And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to the city while his servants were besieging it, ¹² and Jehoiachin the king of Judah gave himself up to the king of Babylon, himself and his mother and his servants and his officials and his palace officials. The king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eighth year of his reign. ¹⁷ And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah, Jehoiachin’s uncle, king in his place, and changed his name to Zedekiah.

The story of Jehoiachin does not end there, however. The royal family were kept at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Bible says that they , like other royal captives, were provided for by the king with rations of grain and oil (II Kings 25:27-30):

²⁷ And in the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, Evil-merodach king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, graciously freed^[a] Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison.²⁸ And he spoke kindly to him and gave him a seat above the seats of the kings who were with him in Babylon. ²⁹ So Jehoiachin put off his prison garments. And every day of his life he dined regularly at the king’s table, ³⁰ and for his allowance, a regular allowance was given him by the king, according to his daily needs, as long as he lived.

The records of these allowances referred to in the Bible were unearthed in excavations in Babylon in basement storerooms of the royal palace (in Staat-Liches Museum, East Berlin, Vorderas Abteilung; Babylon 28122 and 28126). These are known as the “ration tablets” and they record who received such “rations.” In these, Jehoiachin is mentioned by name.

We also have confirmation of the Babylonian advance towards Judah in Nebuchadezzar’s first campaign. Among the ruins of Lachish were discovered a number of ostraca. Ostraca are broken pieces of earthenware called postherds, which were used for writing on in ink. (The Lachish ostraca are in the Palestinian Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem.) These brief letters reveal the increasing tensions within the growing state of Judah and tie in well with the picture given in the Bible by the Book of Jeremiah the Prophet. In Ostracon VI, the princes are accused of “weakening our hands” (that is, discouraging the writers), which is the very phraseology used in the Bible by the Judean princes against Jeremiah. Also, the use of fire beacons for signaling is found in both Ostracon IV and Jeremiah 6:1, each using the same terminology.

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• Johnny Cash a Christian?May 23, 2012 – 10:32 amI got to see Johnny Cash perform in Memphis in 1978 and I actually knew his nephew very well. He was an outspoken Christian and evangelical. Here is an article that discusses this. Johnny Cash’s Complicated Faith Dave Urbanski <!– var fbShare = { google_analytics: ‘true’, } tweetmeme_source = ‘RELEVANTMag’; –> Unwrapping the enigma of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)Johnny Cash (Part 3)December 23, 2011 – 12:57 amI got to hear Johnny Cash sing in person back in 1978.  Here is a portion of an article about his Christian Testimony. The Man Came Around   A Walking Contradiction Cash’s daughter, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, once pointed out that “my father was raised a Baptist, but he has the soul of a mystic. He’s […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Tagged christian testimony, prayer of thanksgiving, seven deadly sins, spiritual element, walking contradiction | Edit | Comments (0)Johnny Cash (Part 2)December 22, 2011 – 12:55 amI got to hear Johnny Cash sing in person back in 1978 at a Billy Graham Crusade in Memphis. Here is a portion of an article about his Christian Testimony. The Man Came Around Cash also made major headlines when he shared his faith on The Johnny Cash Show, a popular variety program on ABC […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Tagged billy graham crusade, christian testimony, evangelist billy graham, folsom prison blues, kris kristofferson | Edit | Comments (0)Johnny Cash (Part 1)December 21, 2011 – 12:51 amI got to hear Johnny Cash sing in person back in 1978. Here is a portion of an article about his Christian Testimony. The Man Came Around Johnny Cash was not ashamed of his Christian faith—though it was sometimes a messy faith—and even got some encouragement from Billy Graham along the way. Dave Urbanski | […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Tagged conservative bible, dave urbanski, jesus of nazareth, nickel and dime, true vine | Edit | Comments (0)
• People in the Johnny Cash video “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”May 11, 2012 – 12:10 pmWikipedia noted: Johnny Cash recorded a version of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” on American V: A Hundred Highways in 2003, with an arrangement quite different from most known gospel versions of the song. A music video, directed by Tony Kaye,[1] was made for this version in late 2006. It featured a number of celebrities, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Tagged Amy Lee, chris martin | Edit | Comments (0)

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Friedman and Hayek: How Neoliberal Revolutionaries Took over the World

Economic ideas change the world: Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, and Reagan

By Rutger Bregman

In the late summer of 1954, a brilliant young psychologist was reading the newspaper when his eye fell on a strange headline on the back page:

PROPHESY FROM PLANET CLARION
CALL TO CITY: FLEE THAT FLOOD.
IT’LL SWAMP US ON DEC 21,
OUTER SPACE TELLS SUBURBANITE.

His interest piqued, the psychologist, whose name was Leon Festinger, read on. “Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from the great lake just before dawn, Dec. 21.” The message came from a homemaker in a Chicago suburb who had received it, she reported, from superior beings on another planet: “These beings have been visiting the earth, she says, in what we call flying saucers.”

It was precisely what Festinger had been waiting for. This was a chance to investigate a simple but thorny question that he had been puzzling over for years: What happens when people experience a severe crisis in their convictions? How would this homemaker respond when no flying saucers came to rescue her? What happens when the great flood doesn’t materialize?

With a little digging, Festinger discovered that the woman, one Dorothy Martin, wasn’t the only one convinced that the world was ending on December 21, 1954. Around a dozen of her followers — all intelligent, upstanding Americans — had quit their jobs, sold their possessions, or left their spouses on the strength of their conviction.

Festinger decided to infiltrate the Chicago sect. Right off, he noticed that its members made little effort to persuade other people that the end was near. Salvation was reserved for them, the chosen few. On the morning of December 20, 1954, Mrs. Martin was beamed a new message from above: “At the hour of midnight you shall be put into parked cars and taken to a place where ye shall be put aboard a porch [flying saucer].”

The excited group settled in to await their ascendency to the heavens.

The Evening of December 20, 1954

11:15 p.m.: Mrs. Martin receives a message telling the group to put on their coats and prepare.

12:00 a.m.: Nothing happens.

12:05 a.m.: One of the believers notices another clock in the room reads 11:55 p.m. The group agrees it is not yet midnight.

12:10 a.m.: Message from aliens: The flying saucers are delayed.

12:15 a.m.: The telephone rings several times: journalists calling to check if the world has ended yet.

2:00 a.m.: One of the younger followers, who expected to be a couple light years away by now, recalls that his mother was planning to call the police if he wasn’t home by 2 a.m. The others assure him that his departure is a worthy sacrifice to save the group, and he leaves.

4:00 a.m.: One of the believers says: “I’ve burned every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe.”

4:45 a.m.: Mrs. Martin gets another message: God has decided to spare the Earth. Together, the small group of believers has spread so much “light” on this night that the Earth is saved.

4:50 a.m.: One last message from above: The aliens want the good news “to be released immediately to the newspapers.” Armed with this new mission, the believers inform all the local papers and radio stations before daybreak.

When Prophecies Fail

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.” So opens Leon Festinger’s account of these events in When Prophecy Fails, first published in 1956 and a seminal text in social psychology to this day. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”

It’s easy to scoff at the story of Mrs. Martin and her believers, but the phenomenon Festinger describes is one that none of us are immune to. “Cognitive dissonance,” he coined it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.

Mind you, we tend to be quite flexible when it comes to practical matters. Most of us are willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber. No, it’s when our political, ideological, or religious ideas are at stake that we get the most stubborn. We tend to dig in our heels when someone challenges our opinions about criminal punishment, premarital sex, or global warming. These are ideas to which people tend to get attached, and that makes it difficult to let them go. Doing so affects our sense of identity and position in social groups — in our churches or families or circles of friends.

One factor that certainly is not involved is stupidity. Researchers at Yale University have shown that educated people are more unshakable in their convictions than anybody. After all, an education gives you tools to defend your opinions. Intelligent people are highly practiced in finding arguments, experts, and studies that underpin their preexisting beliefs, and the Internet has made it easier than ever to be consumers of our own opinions, with an- other piece of evidence always just a mouse-click away.

Smart people, concludes the American journalist Ezra Klein, don’t use their intellect to obtain the correct answer; they use it to obtain what they want to be the answer.

When My Clock Struck Midnight

I have something to confess. In the course of writing my defense of a 15-hour workweek, I stumbled across an article titled “Shorter Workweek May Not Increase Well- Being.” It was a piece in The New York Times about a South Korean study which claimed that a 10% shorter workweek had not made employees happier. Additional Googling led me to an article in The Telegraph which suggested that working less might be downright bad for our health.

Suddenly I was Dorothy Martin and my clock had struck midnight. Immediately, I mobilized my defense mechanisms. To begin with, I had my doubts about the source: The Telegraph is a somewhat populist newspaper, so how seriously should I take that article? Plus, there was that “may” in The New York Times headline. How conclusive were the study findings really? Even my stereotypes kicked in: Those South Koreans, they’re such workaholics — they probably kept working off the clock even when they reported fewer hours. Moreover, happiness? How exactly do you measure that?

Satisfied, I pushed the study aside. I’d convinced myself it couldn’t be relevant.

I’ll give you another example. I have elsewhere laid out the arguments in favor of universal basic income. This is a conviction in which I have invested a lot over the past few years. The first article I wrote on the topic garnered nearly a million views and was picked up by The Washington Post. I gave lectures about universal basic income and made a case for it on Dutch television. Enthusiastic emails poured in. Not long ago, I even heard someone refer to me as “Mr. Basic Income.” Slowly but surely, my opinion has come to define my personal and professional identity. I do earnestly believe that a universal basic income is an idea whose time has come. I’ve researched the issue extensively, and that’s the direction the evidence points.

But, if I’m being honest, I sometimes wonder if I’d even let myself notice if the evidence were pointing another way. Would I be observant enough — or brave enough — to have a change of heart?

The Power of an Idea

“Keep building your castles in the sky,” a friend quipped a while back after I sent him a couple of my articles. I could understand where he was coming from. After all, what’s the point of crazy new ideas when politicians can’t even manage to balance a budget?

That’s when I began to ask myself whether new ideas can genuinely change the world.

Now, your (very reasonable) gut response might be: They can’t – people will stubbornly stick to the old ideas that they’re comfortable with. The thing is, we know that ideas have changed over time. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense. The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.

Research suggests that sudden shocks can work wonders. James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible. Take the recent success of right-wing politicians who were already warning of “the Islamic threat” back in the 1990s, but didn’t get much attention until the shocking destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Viewpoints that had once been fringe suddenly became a collective obsession.

If it is true that that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts — in shocks — then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions — through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation — is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.

Over the same months that Leon Festinger was infiltrating Mrs. Martin’s sect, the American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that group pressure can even cause us to ignore what we can plainly see with our own eyes. In a now-famous experiment, he showed test subjects three lines on a card and asked them which one was longest. When the other people in the room (all Asch’s coworkers, unbeknownst to the subject) gave the same answer, the subject did, too — even when it was clearly erroneous.

It’s no different in politics. Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all. When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.

But Solomon Asch made another discovery. A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.

Long Was the Night

In 2008, it seemed as if that time had finally come when we were confronted with the biggest case of cognitive dissonance since the 1930s.

On September 15, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly, the whole global banking sector seemed poised to tumble like a row of dominoes. In the months that followed, one free market dogma after another crashed and burned.

Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, once dubbed the “Oracle” and the “Maestro,” was gobsmacked. “Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors,”he had confidently asserted in 2004, “but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.” When Greenspan retired in 2006, everyone assumed he would be immortalized in history’s financial hall of fame.

In a House Committee hearing two years later, the broken banker admitted that he was “in a state of shocked disbelief.” Greenspan’s faith in capitalism had taken a severe beating. “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” When a congressman asked him if he had been misled by his own ideas, Greenspan replied, “That’s precisely the reason I was shocked because I’d been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

The lesson of December 21, 1954, is that everything centers on that one moment of crisis. When the clock strikes midnight, what happens next? A crisis can provide an opening for new ideas, but it can also shore up old convictions.

So what happened after September 15, 2008? The Occupy movement briefly galvanized people, but quickly ebbed. Meanwhile, left-leaning political parties lost elections across most of Europe. Greece and Italy more or less canned democracy altogether and rolled out neoliberal-tinted reforms to please their creditors, trimming government and boosting labor market flexibility. In northern Europe, too, governments proclaimed a new age of austerity.

And Alan Greenspan? When, a few years later, a reporter asked him if there had been any error in his ideas, his reply was resolute: “Not at all. I think that there is no alternative.”

Fast forward to today: Fundamental reform of the banking sector has yet to happen. On Wall Street, bankers are seeing the highest bonus payments since the crash. And the banks’ capital buffers are as minuscule as ever. Joris Luyendijk, a journalist at The Guardian who spent two years looking under the hood of London’s financial sector, summed up the experience in 2013 as follows: “It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”

You have to wonder: Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives?

This last possibility is the most worrying of all.

The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made. But it almost seems that back in 2008 we were unable to make that choice. When we suddenly found ourselves facing the collapse of the entire banking sector, there were no real alternatives available; all we could do was keep plodding down the same path.

Perhaps, then, crisis isn’t really the right word for our current condition. It’s more like we’re in a coma. That’s ancient Greek, too. It means “deep, dreamless sleep.”

Capitalist Resistance Fighters

It’s all deeply ironic, if you think about it.

If there were ever two people who dedicated their lives to building castles in the sky with preternatural certainty that they would someday be proven right, it was the founders of neoliberal thought. I’m an admirer of them both: the slippery philosopher Friedrich Hayek and the public intellectual Milton Friedman.

Nowadays, “neoliberal” is a put-down leveled at anybody who doesn’t agree with the left. Hayek and Friedman, however, were proud neoliberals who saw it as their duty to reinvent liberalism. “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure,” Hayek wrote. “What we lack is a liberal Utopia.”

Even if you believe them to be villains who made greed fashionable and are to blame for the financial crisis that left millions of people in dire straits — even then, there’s a lot you can learn from Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

One was born in Vienna, the other in New York. Both were firm believers in the power of ideas. For many years, both belonged to a small minority, a sect almost, that existed outside the cocoon of mainstream thought. Together, they tore apart that cocoon, upending the world in a way dictators and billionaires can only dream of. They set about shredding the life’s work of their archrival, the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Seemingly the only thing they had in common with Keynes was the belief that the ideas of economists and philosophers are stronger forces than the vested interests of business leaders and politicians.

This particular story begins on April 1, 1947, not quite a year after Keynes’ death, when 40 philosophers, historians, and economists converged in the small village of Mont Pèlerin in Switzerland. Some had traveled for weeks, crossing oceans to get there. In later years, they would be known as the Mont Pèlerin Society.

All 40 thinkers who came to this Swiss village were encouraged to speak their minds, and together they formed a corps of capitalist resistance fighters against socialist supremacy. “There are, of course, very few people left today who are not socialists,” Hayek, the event’s initiator, had once lamented. At a time when the provisions of the New Deal had pushed even the United States toward more socialistic policies, a defense of the free market was still seen as downright revolutionary, and Hayek felt “hopelessly out of tune with his time.”

Milton Friedman was also at the meeting of minds. “Here I was, a young, naive provincial American,” Friedman later recalled, “meeting people from all over the world, all dedicated to the same liberal principles as we were; all beleaguered in their own countries, yet among them scholars, some already internationally famous, others destined to be.” In fact, no fewer than eight members of the Mont Pèlerin Society would go on to win Nobel Prizes.

However, in 1947 no one could have predicted such a star-studded future. Large swaths of Europe lay in ruins. Reconstruction efforts were colored by Keynesian ideals: employment for all, curbing the free market, and regulation of banks. The war state became the welfare state. Yet it was during those same years that neoliberal thought began gaining traction thanks to the efforts of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a group that would go on to become one of the leading think tanks of the 20th century. “Together, they helped precipitate a global policy transformation with implications that will continue to reverberate for decades,” says the historian Angus Burgin.

In the 1970s, Hayek handed the presidency of the Society over to Friedman. Under the leadership of this diminutive, bespectacled American whose energy and enthusiasm surpassed even that of his Austrian predecessor, the society radicalized. Essentially, there wasn’t a problem around that Friedman didn’t blame on government. And the solution, in every case, was the free market. Unemployment? Get rid of the minimum wage. Natural disaster? Get corporations to organize a relief effort. Poor schools? Privatize education. Expensive healthcare? Privatize that, too, and ditch public oversight while we’re at it. Substance abuse? Legalize drugs and let the market work its magic.

Friedman deployed every means possible to spread his ideas, building a repertoire of lectures, op-eds, radio interviews, TV appearances, books, and even a documentary. In the preface to his bestselling Capitalism and Freedom, he wrote that it is the duty of thinkers to keep offering alternatives. Ideas that seem “politically impossible” today may one day become “politically inevitable.”

All that remained was to await the critical moment. “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” Friedman explained. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” The crisis came in October 1973, when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo. Inflation went through the roof and the economy spiraled into recession. “Stagflation,” as this effect was called, wasn’t even possible in Keynesian theory. Friedman, however, had predicted it.

For the rest of his life, Friedman never stopped emphasizing that his success would have been inconceivable without the groundwork laid since 1947. The rise of neoliberalism played out like a relay race, with think tanks passing the baton to journalists, who handed it off to politicians. Running the anchor leg were two of the most powerful leaders in the Western world, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. When asked what she considered to be her greatest victory, Thatcher’s reply was “New Labour”: Under the leadership of neoliberal Tony Blair, even her social democratic rivals in the Labour Party had come around to her worldview.

In less than 50 years, an idea once dismissed as radical and marginal had come to rule the world.

The Lesson of Neoliberalism

Some argue that these days, it hardly matters anymore who you vote for. Though we still have a right and a left, neither side seems to have a very clear plan for the future. In an ironic twist of fate, the neoliberalist brainchild of two men who devoutly believed in the power of ideas has now put a lockdown on the development of new ones. It would seem that we have arrived at “the end of history,” with liberal democracy as the last stop and the “free consumer” as the terminus of our species.

By the time Friedman was named president of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1970, most of its philosophers and historians had already decamped, the debates having become overly technical and economic. In hindsight, Friedman’s arrival marked the dawn of an era in which economists would become the leading thinkers of the Western world. We are still in that era today.

We inhabit a world of managers and technocrats. “Let’s just concentrate on solving the problems,” they say. “Let’s just focus on making ends meet.” Political decisions are continually presented as a matter of exigency — as neutral and objective events, as though there were no other choice. Keynes observed this tendency emerging even in his own day. “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,” he wrote, “are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism.

Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything?

On the one hand, the world is still getting richer, safer, and healthier. That’s a huge triumph. On the other hand, it’s high time that we stake out a new utopia. Let’s rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago. A 15-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders… They’re all crazy dreams — but for how much longer?

People now doubt that “human ideas and beliefs are the main movers of history,” as Hayek argued back when neoliberalism was still in its infancy. “We all find it so difficult to imagine that our belief [sic] might be different from what they in fact are.” It could easily take a generation, he asserted, before new ideas prevail. For this very reason, we need thinkers who not only are patient, but also have “the courage to be ‘utopian.’”

Let this be the lesson of Mont Pèlerin. Let this be the mantra of everyone who dreams of a better world, so that we don’t once again hear the clock strike midnight and find ourselves just sitting around, empty-handed, waiting for an extraterrestrial salvation that will never come.

Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again. “Indeed,” wrote Keynes, “the world is ruled by little else.”

Rutger Bregman is the author of Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek. You can buy it on Amazon.

2016 July 15

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Milton Friedman – The Negative Income Tax

Volume 1: Power of the Market Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: Anatomy of a Crisis
Volume 4: From Cradle to Grave
Volume 5: Created Equal
Volume 6: What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
Volume 7: Who Protects the Consumer?
Volume 8: Who Protects the Worker?
Volume 9: How to Cure Inflation
Volume 10: How to Stay Free

Updated 1990 Series:
Volume 1: The Power of the Market
Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: Freedom & Prosperity
Volume 4: The Failure of Socialism
Volume 5: Created Equal

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Woody Allen On Bergman

Woody Allen On Bergman

Woody Allen Show

Essay on Woody Allen films

Match point Trailer

Match point

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Crimes and misdemeanors

Part 2

Part 3

Woody commenting on Midnight in Paris

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December 16, 2014

Letty Aronson, New York, New York 10001

Dear Mrs. Aronson,

I have just a few questions for you. I know that your brother Woody is very interested in Jazz and especially in meeting great clarinet players and my good friend Sean Michel (who appeared on American Idol in 2007) told me about his uncle who passed away in 1985, Joseph T. “Pee Wee” Spitelera  who played with Al Hirt’s band in New Orleans for about 40 years. If you do a You Tube search for “Dinah Shore Al Hirt” then it will bring up a 24 minute video entitled “Al Hirt on the Dinah Shore Chevy Show 1960,” and at the 4 1/2 minute mark Pee Wee Spirtelera takes off on a Clarinet solo that is out of this world. Also if you type in “Al Hirt Johnny Cash Show” then you will see a 4 min and 21 sec video entitled “Al Hirt on the Johnny Cash Show,” and at the 1 min mark Pee Wee goes crazy there in the  Clarinet on the Dec 16, 1970 Johnny Cash Show.

Below is a picture of Pee Wee and he has several other fine songs on You Tube too such as “Blue Clarinet” which would be perfect for a Woody Allen Movie.

(Pee Wee is the guy in the Middle)

Therefore, my first question is did Woody ever have a chance to meet Pee Wee? Secondly, I wanted to ask you if you have ever had the opportunity to examine the evidence that the Old Testament predicted the return of the Jews to the land of Israel?

I was fascinated with the movie “Magic and in the Moonlight”and not only have I seen it several times, but I have taken many of my friends to see it and I have blogged about it over and over at http://www.thedailyhatch.org. In the past I have spent a lot of time on my blog taking close looks at your brother’s films. For instance, if you do a google search for the words “Characters Midnight in Paris” then you will find that I have done over 40 different posts on that movie taking closer looks at the historical characters mentioned in that movie.

As you know the main point made in “Midnight in Paris” is that there is no “Golden Age” but all time periods were filled with their challenges just like the period we are in now. Solomon discovered this in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes (verses 9-10) and shared his thoughts also on the meaning of life. In fact, many of Solomon’s thoughts from that book apply to many of your brothers’ films. Again if you google the terms “Woody Allen Ecclesiastes” then it will bring you again to several posts I have done on Woody’s films and the answers Solomon gives in Ecclesiastes. 3000 years ago Solomon pursued six “L” words in his search for the meaning of life and probing the area of LAUGHTER was one of his first places to start. In Ecclesiastes 2:2 he starts this quest but he concludes it is not productive to be laughing the whole time and not considering the serious issues of life. Then Solomon also asserted the nihilistic statement in Ecclesiastes 2:17: “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

In the Book of Ecclesiastes what are all of the 6 “L” words that Solomon looked into? He looked into  learning (1:16-18), laughter, ladies, luxuries,  and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). IRONICALLY, WOODY ALLEN HAS MADE ALL SIX OF THESE BUTTS OF HIS NIHILISTIC JOKES!!!

Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes. The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.” This puts him in the same place that WOODY ALLEN finds himself and this is a center theme of MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT too. 

If you are an atheist then you have a naturalistic materialistic worldview, and this short book of Ecclesiastes should interest you because the wisest man who ever lived in the position of King of Israel came to THREE CONCLUSIONS that will affect you.

FIRST, chance and time have determined the past, and they will determine the future.  (Ecclesiastes 9:11-13)

These two verses below  take the 3 elements mentioned in a naturalistic materialistic worldview (time, chance and matter) and so that is all the unbeliever can find “under the sun” without God in the picture. You will notice that these are the three elements that evolutionists point to also.

Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 is following: I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.

SECOND, Death is the great equalizer (Eccl 3:20, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”)

THIRD, Power reigns in this life, and the scales are not balanced(Eccl 4:1, 8:15)

Ecclesiastes 4:1-2: “Next I turned my attention to all the outrageous violence that takes place on this planet—the tears of the victims, no one to comfort them; the iron grip of oppressors, no one to rescue the victims from them.” Ecclesiastes 8:14; “Here’s something that happens all the time and makes no sense at all: Good people get what’s coming to the wicked, and bad people get what’s coming to the good. I tell you, this makes no sense. It’s smoke.”

Several times during the movie “Magic in the Moonlight” there are references to Friedrich Nietzsche’s conclusion that we must except a nihilistic worldview if we accept the conclusion that science rules out the possibility of God’s existence. I do agree with part of that statement and that is that nihilism is the proper attitude if there is no afterlife (google “Woody Allen Nihilism” and it will bring you to my blog again). However, there is good and sufficient evidence that shows that God exists. Just take a few minutes and look up the Old Testament Scriptures  Amos 9:14-15, Zechariah 12:3 and Isaiah 11:11-12 and notice that they predict the return of the Jews to their ancient land of Israel. ISN’T THIS EVIDENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL that is the subject of MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT?

In fact, my former pastor Robert Lewis at Fellowship Bible Church in his sermon “Let the Prophets Speak” on 1-31-99 noted that even the great Princeton Theologian Charles Hodge erred in 1871 when he stated:

The argument from the ancient prophecies is proved to be invalid because it would prove too much. If those prophecies foretell a literal restoration, they foretell that the temple is to be rebuilt, the priesthood restored, sacrifices again offered, and that the whole Mosaic ritual is to be observed in all its details, (Systematic Theology. [New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1871; reprint Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1949], 3:807).__

Robert Lewis went on to point out that the prophet Amos 2700 years ago predicted the destruction of Aram, Philistia, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab and Israel, but at the end of the Book he said Israel would one day be returned to their land and never removed. We saw from Isaiah 11:11-12 that the Lord “will assemble the outcasts of Israel and will gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” And that certainly did happen after World War II.  I corresponded with some secular Jewish Scholars on this back in the 1990’s such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell but they dismissed these type of Old Testament prophecies. Then on  Friday July 18, 2014 I had the opportunity to visit personally with Bill Kristol who is the founder of THE WEEKLY STANDARD MAGAZINE.  I actually gave him a copy of both letters I received back from his father Irving and their family friend Daniel Bell and he read them both as we stood there. I told him that those copies were his to keep, and he thanked me for that.I went on to explain how the correspondence started.  I had come across several quotes from Daniel Bell when I was reading the books HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?  and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Francis Schaeffer (and this second book was co-authored by Dr. C. Everett Koop). Dr. Koop’s name caught Mr. Kristol’s attention and he said he found that interesting. I pointed out those quotes by Bell led me to eventually begin a correspondence with both Bell and Kristol’s father Irving on the subject of what the Old Testament scriptures have to say about the Jews being returned from all over the world back to the land of Israel. (By the way, Schaeffer also quoted Woody Allen extensively in his works too.)Let me sum up what the Bible predicts concerning the Jews. First,  the Old Testament predicted that the Jews would regather from all over the world and form a new reborn nation of Israel. Second, it was also predicted that the nation of Israel would become a stumbling block to the whole world. Third, it was predicted that the Hebrew language would be used again as the Jews first language even though we know in 1948 that Hebrew at that time was a dead language!!!Fourth, it was predicted that the Jews would never again be removed from their land.

 Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

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Midnight in Paris trailer

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The mass media turned Picasso into a celebrity, and the public deprived him of privacy and wanted to know his every step, but his later art was given very little attention and was regarded as no more than the hobby of an aging genius who could do nothing but talk about himself in his pictures. Picasso’s late works are an expression of his final refusal to fit into categories. He did whatever he wanted in art and did not arouse a word of criticism.

With his adaptation of “Las Meninas” by Velászquez and his experiments with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, was Picasso still trying to discover something new, or was he just laughing at the public, its stupidity and its inability to see the obvious.

A number of elements had become characteristic in his art of this period: Picasso’s use of simplified imagery, the way he let the unpainted canvas shine through, his emphatic use of lines, and the vagueness of the subject. In 1956, the artist would comment, referring to some schoolchildren: “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

In the last years of his life, painting became an obsession with Picasso, and he would date each picture with absolute precision, thus creating a vast amount of similar paintings — as if attempting to crystallize individual moments of time, but knowing that, in the end, everything would be in vain.

The movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS offers many of the same themes we see in Ecclesiastes. The second post looked at the question: WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT?

In the third post in this series we discover in Ecclesiastes that man UNDER THE SUN finds himself caught in the never ending cycle of birth and death. The SURREALISTS make a leap into the area of nonreason in order to get out of this cycle and that is why the scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Luis Bunuel works so well!!!! These surrealists look to the area of their dreams to find a meaning for their lives and their break with reality is  only because they know that they can’t find a rational meaning in life without God in the picture.

The fourth post looks at the solution of WINE, WOMEN AND SONG and the fifth and sixth posts look at the solution T.S.Eliotfound in the Christian Faith and how he left his fragmented message of pessimism behind. In the seventh post the SURREALISTS say that time and chance is all we have but how can that explain love or art and the hunger for God? The eighth  post looks at the subject of DEATH both in Ecclesiastes and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. In the ninth post we look at the nihilistic worldview of Woody Allen and why he keeps putting suicides into his films.

In the tenth post I show how Woody Allen pokes fun at the brilliant thinkers of this world and how King Solomon did the same thing 3000 years ago. In the eleventh post I point out how many of Woody Allen’s liberal political views come a lack of understanding of the sinful nature of man and where it originated. In the twelfth post I look at the mannishness of man and vacuum in his heart that can only be satisfied by a relationship with God.

In the thirteenth post we look at the life of Ernest Hemingway as pictured in MIDNIGHT AND PARIS and relate it to the change of outlook he had on life as the years passed. In the fourteenth post we look at Hemingway’s idea of Paris being a movable  feast. The fifteenth and sixteenth posts both compare Hemingway’s statement, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know…”  with Ecclesiastes 2:18 “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The seventeenth post looks at these words Woody Allen put into Hemingway’s mouth,  “We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all.”

In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Hemingway and Gil Pender talk about their literary idol Mark Twain and the eighteenth post is summed up nicely by Kris Hemphill‘swords, “Both Twain and [King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes] voice questions our souls long to have answered: Where does one find enduring meaning, life purpose, and sustainable joy, and why do so few seem to find it? The nineteenth post looks at the tension felt both in the life of Gil Pender (written by Woody Allen) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS and in Mark Twain’s life and that is when an atheist says he wants to scoff at the idea THAT WE WERE PUT HERE FOR A PURPOSE but he must stay face the reality of  Ecclesiastes 3:11 that says “God has planted eternity in the heart of men…” and  THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING! Therefore, the secular view that there is no such thing as love or purpose looks implausible. The twentieth post examines how Mark Twain discovered just like King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is no explanation  for the suffering and injustice that occurs in life UNDER THE SUN. Solomon actually brought God back into the picture in the last chapter and he looked  ABOVE THE SUN for the books to be balanced and for the tears to be wiped away.

The twenty-first post looks at the words of King Solomon, Woody Allen and Mark Twain that without God in the picture our lives UNDER THE SUN will accomplish nothing that lasts. Thetwenty-second post looks at King Solomon’s experiment 3000 years that proved that luxuries can’t bring satisfaction to one’s life but we have seen this proven over and over through the ages. Mark Twain lampooned the rich in his book “The Gilded Age” and he discussed  get rich quick fever, but Sam Clemens loved money and the comfort and luxuries it could buy. Likewise Scott Fitzgerald  was very successful in the 1920’s after his publication of THE GREAT GATSBY and lived a lavish lifestyle until his death in 1940 as a result of alcoholism.

In the twenty-third post we look at Mark Twain’s statement that people should either commit suicide or stay drunk if they are “demonstrably wise” and want to “keep their reasoning faculties.” We actually see this play out in the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with the character Zelda Fitzgerald. In the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth posts I look at Mark Twain and the issue of racism. In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we see the difference between the attitudes concerning race in 1925 Paris and the rest of the world.

The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth posts are summing up Mark Twain. In the 29th post we ask did MIDNIGHT IN PARIS accurately portray Hemingway’s personality and outlook on life? and in the 30th post the life and views of Hemingway are summed up.

In the 31st post we will observe that just like Solomon Picasso slept with many women. Solomon actually slept with  over 1000 women ( Eccl 2:8, I Kings 11:3), and both men ended their lives bitter against all women and in the 32nd post we look at what happened to these former lovers of Picasso. In the 33rd post we see that Picasso  deliberately painted his secular  worldview of fragmentation on his canvas but he could not live with the loss of humanness and he reverted back at crucial points and painted those he loved with all his genius and with all their humanness!!! In the 34th post  we notice that both Solomon in Ecclesiastes and Picasso in his painting had an obsession with the issue of their impending death!!!

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Related posts:

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In the last post I pointed out how King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN  and that Bertrand Russell, and T.S. Eliot and  other modern writers had agreed with Solomon’s view. However, T.S. Eliot had found a solution to this problem and put his faith in […]

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In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Gil Pender ponders the advice he gets from his literary heroes from the 1920’s. King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN  and many modern artists, poets, and philosophers have agreed. In the 1920’s T.S.Eliot and his  house guest Bertrand Russell were two of […]

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