Use your imagination

My wife and I picked up our new washing machine at Sears on Saturday. When I took it out of the box this morning, both of us had a simultaneous flashback to our childhood. We could remember when our families would get new major appliances--and then we kids could use the box as a castle, or a fort, or a play house. In other words, we got hours of pleasure out of something like a cardboard box. Nowadays, evidence suggests that between television, the internet, cell phones, and video games, children are seldom challenged to use their imagination for play. My wife and I remember that when we were children, the only time that cartoons was on was Saturday morning. Today, children have lots of options--Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney, and so on--to choose from, each and every day of the week. But, as anyone who has seen a favorite book turned into a cinematic production can tell you, it is usually disappointing, and the film rarely does the book justice. Reading, as much as imaginative play, is stimulating, provoking the imagination and firing mental synapses.

Last week and this week in chapel we welcome C.J. Hitz as our guest speaker. He has challenged us to consider our use of media, both as a consumer of our time and as a minefield of non-edifying images and themes. I'd like to supplement his presentation with the assignment to read some of the following links. I have intentionally shied away from those with an overtly spiritual message, not because I do not consider them valuable, but so that we might we aware of serious medical and scientific concerns, and consider them in light of the spiritual concerns that are being addressed by our speaker.

The report, Parents, Children & Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey, is a national survey of 1,008 parents of children ages 2-17, along with a series of six focus groups held with parents across the country. The survey explores such issues as media content, media ratings and the V-Chip, media monitoring, educational media, advertising, and the Internet.

What do I need to know about children and TV? A comprehensive and well-documented guide from the University of Michigan Health System.

Video Game Overuse May Be an Addiction: Experts gathered at the American Medical Association conference to consider adding video gaming to its list of pathological addictions such as gambling.

YOUNG AND WIRED
Computers, cell phones, video games, blogs, text messages -- how will the sheer amount of time spent plugged in affect our kids?

Let's make this a profitable discussion and dialogue this week--and hear with interest what Mr. Hitz has to share with us.

Che chic?

Fresh off its big victories in the Potomac primaries, the Barack Obama campaign turned its attention to the next big state primaries in Ohio and Texas on March 4. Obama’s campaign headquarters in Houston opened amid controversy, as one of the staffers there had juxtaposed the “Obama * Change” banner with a Cuban flag with the image of Che Guevara on it. Obama denied involvement and rejected any idea that he himself supported the ideas of Che or Castro. But local news affiliates were not so quick to let the candidate off the hook, and bloggers likewise saw a linking between support of Obama and support for the revolution of Che Guevara.

Who was Ernesto “Che” Guevara? The image above is all the rage, appearing on T-shirts and other paraphernalia. In my Spanish class at JCC in the first semester, our instructor showed us the 2004 film “The Motorcycle Diaries” that depicted Guevara in his pre-revolutionary days, making a motorcycle trip around South America and doing such noble things as spending three weeks in a leper colony that was ruled over by tyrannical nuns. After viewing the movie, the profesora asked for opinions, and I hated to tell her I didn’t think much of it. Why not, she asked? Because it glorified a commie who was the enemy of the United States and who was a mass murderer.

Guevara died in 1967, executed in Bolivia while trying to foment a communist revolution there. Cuban-Americans despise him and cannot fathom why young American college students think it is “cool” to glorify this evil man. I think it is interesting that the Cuban-American voters in South Florida went 5-1 for John McCain in the Florida Republican primary. Soon afterward, none other than Fidel Castro himself criticized McCain, calling him a liar for claiming that Cubans were among the prison guards at the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain was a prisoner of war for six years. McCain’s answer to Castro? “For me to respond to Fidel Castro, who has oppressed and repressed his people and who is one of the most brutal dictators on Earth, for me to dignify any comments he might make is certainly beneath me.”

Of course, Obama himself is not going to come out and say “viva la revolucion” or “hip, hip for Che!” But those “Americans” who love and admire Castro and Guevara see a hero and messiah in Mr. “Change” himself.

Birds of a feather…

What does America export, anyway?

If you look at the tags of the clothing we wear, chances are pretty high that it was made in a country like Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Honduras. Labor is inexpensive in those countries, but very expensive in the United States. When we are able to buy new clothes at Wal-mart at a price comparable to used clothing at a rummage sale or Goodwill, it is mainly due to the fact that workers in the third world cost so little to the manufacturer.

China is now our country’s #1 trading partner. We now import more goods from there than from Canada, which ranks #2. From consumer electronics to cookware, Chinese products are as coveted as they were in the days of paper, porcelain, and spices, when the Mongols forced open the closed society of China and trade with the west could resume. Why are they in such high demand? They are cheap. Too cheap to be made profitably in America with our high wages and standard of living.

So what is made in America? What do we export that other countries want? There are automobiles, computers, airplanes, and agricultural products. But I’ve come up with a working theory to tie together the law of supply and demand with the relative cost of labor.

In the past couple of decades, labor unions in the United States have been largely unsuccessful in using work stoppage, also known as a strike, to force management to accede to their demands. Consider the United Auto Workers and their negotiations with the big three US auto makers. Labor’s hands are tied. If they demand too much, the corporation will simply shut down its American manufacturing facilities and move them to Mexico or wherever unskilled labor can be obtained cheaply. Michigan’s single-state recession is largely due to the high cost of unionized labor in this state, and the unwillingness of the American consumer to pay significantly higher for products just because they bear the “union label.”

However, two strikes in the past 3 months or so have gotten a lot of headlines because they actually seem to be victories for organized labor. One was the Broadway stage hands union, which succeeded in shutting down New York’s theatre district during the holiday season, costing the Manhattan economy millions of dollars, frustrating tourists and other showgoers. The union won. It’s not like they were going to outsource Broadway to China. And, if reports are accurate, the Hollywood writers’ strike is nearing its end after three months. Without writers, there are no new TV shows, no Golden Globe awards show, no fresh monologues for Letterman and Leno. But the union has won. The writers will get what they want, which is apparently a percentage of future online profits.

My working theory is that these two successful labor strikes help to pinpoint what America makes that the rest of the world wants and can’t live without, otherwise management would call labor’s bluff.

Entertainment.

Mormon leader dies; Mitt Romney pays respects

Last week marked the passing of two prominent church leaders. The head of the Eastern Orthodox church, Archbishop Christodoulos, died of cancer at the age of 69. Under his leadership, the orthodox began to restore the division among two of the main branches of Christianity, namely, the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches, which split in 1054. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) also laid their Prophet to rest on Saturday. Gordon Hinckley, age 97, had been president of his church for 13 years, and made visible attempts to prove that his faith was as much Christian as any mainstream or evangelical group.

Mitt Romney, republican candidate for president, was in attendance at Hinckley’s funeral, taking time off from campaigning to pay his last respects. In a sense, the “prophet’s” death couldn’t have come at a worse time for Romney, because it once again thrusts Romney’s Mormon faith into the limelight. Despite his December speech in which he declared that his faith informs his character but his church would not guide his decisions as president, Romney’s decision to pause campaigning and visit Salt Lake City appears to indicate that he is Mormon first, presidential candidate second.

With Rudy Giuliani’s withdrawal from the race on Wednesday and his simultaneous endorsement of John McCain, the Romney camp hoped that Mike Huckabee’s supporters would see the former Massachusetts governor as the “true conservative” in the race and turn to Romney. This is what always happens when people who are not Christian try to assume that they know everything about Christian decisions and behavior. Gordon Hinckley may have convinced the likes of Larry King that Mormons are just as much Christians as Baptists are, but all Mike Huckabee had to do was raise the question, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan are brothers?” and evangelical Christians were reminded about all of the cultic beliefs of the LDS religion.

The power and wealth of the Latter-Day Saints has continued to grow exponentially. It is reported that they are the second-largest financial organization west of the Mississippi River. Would a Romney presidency increase that prestige and influence even more? When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, that state’s Supreme Court declared that homosexuals have a right to “marriage.” The governor used neither executive power nor influence to restore traditional marriage in Massachusetts. And what if gay marriage were to become the law of the land, a la Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion? Wouldn’t that necessarily mean that polygamy, one of the long-standing tenets of fundamentalist Mormons, couldn’t be found unconstitutional? I mean, if two males can “marry,” then why not one male and four women?

My prediction is that if Huckabee discontinues his run for the presidency, he will not endorse Mitt Romney, and that a majority of evangelical Christians who support Huckabee now will not support a Mormon for the highest office in the land.

Here’s a link so that you can watch The God-Makers II, the sequel to 1983’s The God Makers, the classic expose of Mormonism.

UPDATE: *sigh* OK, Jeffrey, McCain's "attacks" were not dirty. Here's the link to the report that proves that Romney did, in fact, support timetables for withdrawing from Iraq, although he did say that they should be kept "secret" from the enemy. The difference is that McCain answers the timetable question with "100 years, if that's what it takes to achieve victory."

Furthermore, Christians should be as intolerant of false teaching, heresy, and the misleading deception of Mormonism as possible. Belief in their pseudo-christianity is incompatible with salvation.

UPDATE 2: The results are in from "Super Tuesday." McCain is on his way to the Republican nomination. Huckabee showed resiliency by winning five southern states where evangelicals supported him first, McCain second. Romney was victorious in his home state of Massachusetts and several Rocky Mountain states. In heavily Mormon Utah, Romney won a 90% majority of the vote.

I think it's safe to say that for evangelicals and Mormons, a candidate's religion does matter.