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They hate everything we stand for. Their only objective is to destroy what we have. They are evil. Evil. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on evil lately. It seems like an energizing force in our world. Not the actual forces of evil, mind you, but the idea of it. It seems like the most powerful societies in the world make their way by waging war on the forces of evil. America and Britain do it with the war on terrorism. China does it with its anti-Japan protests. Canadians don’t seem to do it much. Perhaps that’s why we’re considered a sideline player on the global stage.

However, this struggle still pervades our society on smaller levels. The Liberal Party is evil, the NDP party is evil, fundamentalists are evil, homosexuals are evil. If someone out there disagrees with you strongly enough, it’s likely you’ll be labelled as evil. But in that context, being called evil can be considered a badge of honor. You become a media phenomenon, with petitions, political lobbies, protest, and increased duct tape sales all just to keep you from getting your way.

Perhaps we’ve overused the concept of evil in political and social discourse. Anybody you label as evil is just as likely to call you evil back. And think of the attention it will visit on your enemies. Not the kind of thing you want to happen on a vendetta.

Pleas read this. It’s a lovely article about Republicans and Jesus.

Well, there you have it. Our new Pontiff is a crusty old white guy. Pope Benedict XVI made the scene today as the choice of a new millenium of Catholicism. It’s tough to figure out what to make of him. With his wide, friendly face he could be your own grandfather. With his sunken, cold eyes he could also be Skeletor. By most accounts, this fellow seems to be a hardliner, not the sexual and social reformer some people were hoping for. I don’t think we should be at all surprised by the results. I mean, the electorate in this case was made of an elite, people with vested interest in maintaining power. Shaking up the status quo is not going to be high on their agendas.

With Pope Benedict’s opening speech, there came out a great buzzword for our time, “The Dictatorship of Relativism”

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as a fundamentalism,” he said. “Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards

Now, so-called liberals and forward-thinking individuals should take note at this quote, and that word, “relativism”. It’s going to be the new insult against people who try to challenge established power structures for the greater good.

When people come up with questions against doctrine of any church, Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, it’s now going to be thought of as “relativism” because if the precious absolute truth of the Bible, Koran, or Torah is challenged, “oh-ho,” the devout would say, “this means you think there is no absolute truth, because MY holy book is the one absolute truth.”

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Without critical thinking we become little more than base animals, automata ripe for slavery. Blind faith alone cannot make for a virtuous society. If we cannot examine or question the pre-conceived notions of our society, we cannot figure out if we’re living up to the ideals of our society.

By not examining the use of contraceptives in the context of AIDS prevention, millions have been infected. If we took a serious look at the concept of priest celibacy, the church might not have had to deal with the allegations of sexual abuse. The whole idea of the church is being sacrificed to the idea that religion is supposed to be the unquestioned and perfect truth.

For better or for worse, the Bible and the New Testament have defined western society’s ideas
about love, sacrifice, and morality. Whether the events of the Bible are true or not is irrelevant. The ideas and truths carry beyond the words of the text, and when the text itself is used as an excuse to abrogate the search for truth, that is true relativism. If we give up the search for absolute truth, it will be as if there is no absolute truth at all.

I noticed in the comments in the last entry that this blog has been noticed by a blog tracker named anime.blogcarnival.com. If you came from that website, welcome. However, I think I should clarify my position on something. This blog tracker had assumed that I was going to Sakuracon to check out the costumes. While this is true, some might take my attitude about it to be derisive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hell, I did it, and it hasn’t kept me single by any means.

With that out of the way, I should go into how Sakuracon went. Once again the convention proved to be more the province of “Chibis”, or younger anime fans in their early teens to early twenties. While that’s all fine and good, the convention isn’t doing much to cater to the needs of the mid to late twenties anime fan like myself. There weren’t very many good panels this year, and much of the Anime being shown in the theatres and closed circuit TV I could rent at the local video store. And again, there’s the problem of fighting the almost insurmountable crowds and increasingly power-mad volunteer staff. If the comfort of friends is all I’m going to this convention for, I might be better off throwing a barbecue next April.

There was a robotech panel that was pretty cool. It had the all the traditional elements of a geek psyche panel. There was the ooh-ing and aah-ing over concept art and animatics, quasi-celebrity guests and door prizes. They were promoting a new television series, Robotech:The Shadow Chronicles. While it looks promising, I’m afraid the good people at Harmony Gold may have once again missed the point about the series they gain their inspirations from. The animatic they showed presented a very deep-voiced command staff belting out life-and-death orders to their equally stalwart subordinates. It looks like all this space opera and hardware will take the place of the character relationships that made the original series great. Don’t get me wrong though, I’ll watch it. It’s got Mark Hamill for God’s sake! But I will keep my expectations guarded to say the least.

However, despite all the inconveniences, I got to spend some time with my friends and my girlfriend. There was a room party with plenty of food and drink, and I got to commune with my fellow otaku. Hopefully Anime Evolution will be better, with less crowds, more room, and of course, better panels.

This weekend I head on to Sakuracon for the 5th time in my life. I go for the same reason other people take drugs, go to DisneyLand, or see Salvador Dali movies repeatedly. I see things that I wouldn’t normally see in polite society, nor would I want to. I get my creative muscles massaged with the sensory overload of candy-colored images flying by at the speed of light. The kind of inspiration I get from anime conventions is quite unlike what you’ll find in art museums or interpretive dance shows (the irony of which has been hacked up and subjugated for a hilariously inflated art market, but that’s another post altogether). It’s loud, brash, and commercial, but it also tries to be different.

Of course some people out there might cry foul at that kind of assumption. What about those shows where girls get magical powers from cute mascots? What about the giant robot shows where the 15-year-old steals a mecha? What about the endless bouts of tournaments for greatest duel master/pokemon trainer/cook/tea ceremony? The shows exist all right, but it’s not my experience with the genre. I got into anime before it was on YTV at 8:30pm on weekdays. I still have VHS fansubs from over 10 years ago dubbed from laserdiscs and translated using the latest Commodore Amiga technology. Sometimes I pop those tapes in and take in the full cel animation and New Wave/hair band soundtracks. True enough, the storylines do seem a lot simpler than when I first saw them. I can’t figure out if the new anime’s gotten sharper or I’ve just gotten older. But what remains is that sense of pushing the boundaries, the sense of rebellion those old shows had.

Take Bubblegum Crisis, for example (Which I now own on DVD ^_^). It’s got the cool robots and good girl art you’d expect from any piece of teenage exploitation entertainment. But anyone who has seen the show knows that it isn’t just any T&A show. The heroines of the show, the Knight Sabres, often have to settle for less than happy endings when fighting off their enemies at the Genom corporation. Even as they get revenge on Genom for their crimes, the Knight Sabres have to deal with terrible losses when their friends are killed, orphaned or even turn out to be blood-sucking androids. Complete victory was never a certainty in anime shows like these. They played with your moral sensibilities while at same time pleasing your aesthetic sensibilities.

Sometimes I wonder, would Roy Fokker have died the way he did if Macross was remade today? Would Kyosuke have had to choose between Madoka and Hikaru? Would Sailor Moon have killed Tuxedo Mask? I think we see that kind of thing less and less in anime today. Without those life and death choices with real, agonizing, consequences, we rob ourselves of the characterization that makes any story worth experiencing.

I saw a very interesting article today in the Vancouver Sun. It says that we could be in for an African pope within the next month or so. It requires evil registration, so I’ll fill in the blanks. Francis Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria has been popping up a lot in conversations about the Pope’s successor. This is due to his strong personal relationship with the former Pontiff and Africa’s increased profile in the Church (due in no small part to Pope John Paul II himself). Electing an African pope would also cement the church’s position with the third world and the poor.

This may be my boyish idealism showing through, but I think Arinze would be a logical choice for the new pope. The article also mentioned that he shares Pope John Paul’s positions on sexual freedom, so politically he wouldn’t rock the boat too much. But more importantly, the election of Arinze would keep with the spirit of Pope John Paul’s work with the Catholic church. He was much more than just an old man with a funny hat. Armed with modern media technology, Pope John Paul II brought the station of the pope into people’s homes on an unprecedented scale. You can even read his sermons right here.

An African Pope would be on every newscast, newspaper, talk-show monologue, comedy routine, protest song, right-left-chicken wing blog in the universe. And that Pope will tell you, “The world is not as it should be, but it could be if you believe.” It’s that message of the future shared by all religions, and by all people who want to leave this world in a better state than when they were dropped into it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in the man’s sexual politics, or that he’s infallible, or anything else. At the core is a belief in the future, in hope, in possibility. Sometimes that’s the only thing that gets you up in the morning.