Truth
It's been a fabulous few weeks for movies -- at theaters and at home. There are images in the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, recently released on Blu-ray and DVD, that are so beautiful they can evoke an aching longing for transcendent experience. This is entirely the point, for the film is about the search for meaning in a God-breathed universe. A man goes to space to investigate a mystery, discovers himself in the face of his loved ones, and ends in an embrace with the divine -- love itself. It's an astonishing work of art that repays multiple viewings, and serves as nothing less than an icon for worship. This summer's The Tree of Life, the fifth film in 40 years from the Christian humanist artist Terrence Malick, becomes something similar, and in the process makes excellent cinematic use of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn as avatars of contemporary masculinity. It's the most moving film I've seen this year.
Last summer's financial reform bill included something the world has long needed: a requirement that electronics manufacturers disclose whether their products include conflict minerals from Congo. Money from conflict minerals helps fund militias' reign of terror and rape in the country's eastern region. (See activist site Raise Hope for Congo's listing of how 21 leading electronics companies are doing at voluntary disclosure -- no one gets a gold star, but some are worse than others. Yeah, we're talkin' to you, Nintendo.)
Dear Candidate, Party Organization, PAC, Super-PAC or any Committee that happens to be contributing to the non-stop political ads that have flooded my TV:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu's excitement that Congressional leaders were going through a process known as 'reconciliation' was abated last week when he learned that the procedure was not, in fact, a healing process for two bitterly feuding parties, but rather a technical congressional procedure designed to address budget items and bypass a filibuster.
So I finally got around to reading Dan Brown's latest book, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385504225?ie=UTF8&tag=sojo_blog-20&lin...
Did you watch any of the health-care summit yesterday in Washington? Guess what? The Republicans and Democrats are divided and likely can't find any common ground.