From Metaphilm:

Donnie Darko
Darko and the Light
A disturbed student walks into the light.
By Annie Frisbie

In Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “A Sound of Thunder,” a time traveler steps off the prescribed path and crushes a butterfly. He returns to the future to find that everything has changed. This is the biggest conundrum in the conception of time travel, and perhaps renders time travel physically possible (at least according to Stephen Hawking) but metaphysically impossible.

Until Donnie Darko, films dealing with time travel have limited themselves to being just cool exercises in the “what if?” Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1996) is perhaps the most elaborate and successful movie mind-fuck, but its final revelation provides no answers to the time travel conundrum. The film remains at the level of example—if time travel is like this, then this is what would happen. It doesn’t explain why and its characters remain caught in a loop, destined to repeat themselves forever. Bruce Willis’s character will always watch himself die.

Donnie Darko follows a boy of superior intelligence whose emotional problems propel him on a very strange trajectory through a tangent universe. Donnie’s journey begins when he dreams about a rabbit telling him to leave the house. He follows the rabbit, and escapes being killed by a falling airplane part of unknown origin. But the rabbit tells him that the world is going to end in twenty-eight days. Donnie’s been given life and death at once.

Donnie Darko boldly attempts not only to transcend the time travel conundrum, but to link it explicitly to the biggest question of all: Does everyone die alone?

If God exists, he must by extension have a plan for the universe, a path for everyone to follow. If we are following a path that God knows from start to finish, then we should be able to jump to any point on that path because it already and always exists. Donnie is able to see these paths as Abyss-like arrows emanating from people’s chests. He tries to ask his science teacher what it all means, but his teacher can’t answer—he’ll lose his job. He can’t tell Donnie how to travel in time because it means telling Donnie that there is a sovereign God who created time and who oversees its unfolding.

Donnie’s bible is The Philosophy of Time Travel, a book written by Darko character Roberta Sparrow, a.k.a. Grandma Death. Sparrows are the birds most commonly associated with God’s providence. In the Bible, Jesus asks that we “consider the birds” to understand how God will take care of us. Shakespeare riffs on these words as Hamlet, confronted with his own mortality and understanding that he must take action, says, “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow . . . The readiness is all.” But the dark side of God’s providence is death. Hamlet understood this—the readiness of which he speaks is the readiness to die. Throughout Jesus’ teachings, the idea is that true devotion to God will remove the fear of death because of the trust that God is sovereign and he will provide, even after death. As the existential optimist Job says, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.”

So why, then, does Roberta Sparrow say to Donnie, “Every living thing dies alone”? This question throws Catholic schoolboy Donnie into a tailspin. He thinks that the world is going to end and he’s going to die and be alone and there’s nothing he can do about it. Even as he falls in love with Gretchen and comes to know the depth of his mother’s love for him, Donnie watches his world spiral out of control. He finds destruction of his own making and destruction that is unavoidable. He can’t make heads or tails of any of it and comes to find that the world is a terrifying, dark place even as there are pockets of goodness.

Donnie is learning the meaning of what the biblical writer John calls “the now and the not yet.” The Christian believer lives in the paradox of knowing that salvation (from the eternal consequences of sin) has already arrived and that salvation (from the sorrow of living in a fallen world) is still to come. The conflict will be resolved only when the believer sees Christ face to face—that is, on the believer’s mortal death. Chiefly loving the “now” will lead the Christian to try to turn this world into heaven, to seek happiness in the temporal. Living solely for the “not yet” sends the believer into exile, devoid of intimacy with God’s much-loved children, dreaming only of an escape hatch. Choosing to (try to) love both creates a holy neurosis that might be what Paul meant when he said, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” Or what Jesus did when he laid down his life for his friends.

As the clock runs out, Donnie makes love with Gretchen and then goes to Roberta Sparrow’s. He’s found love, and now he needs answers. If everyone dies alone, then it doesn’t matter that he loves Gretchen. What he finds is death, destruction, sorrow, and despair. The complete darkness of the fallen world is laid bare before him, and Roberta Sparrow is nowhere to be found. And then the sky starts to fall.

Donnie watches the clouds gather above his house, and then scenes from the movie run in reverse. Donnie is back in his bed on the night of his death. He laughs. He should laugh: he has time traveled, and now he will die—but Gretchen won’t be murdered. His family will weep but the world won’t come to an end at the close of twenty-eight days. He’s sacrificed himself to prove that God exists, that God is indeed sovereign over everything—and if God exists then no one dies alone, it is safe to die, and the world doesn’t have to come to an end. His death does change the future, profoundly, but he laughs because he’s learned that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person, not by half.

From THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Sam Francis, columnist, 57, dies

Samuel Francis, a syndicated columnist and author, died Tuesday night at a Washington-area hospital of complications following major heart surgery. He was 57.
Mr. Francis was an editorial writer for The Washington Times and served from 1987 to 1991 as the deputy editorial page editor. He remained a staff columnist through September 1995.
Mr. Francis received the Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in both 1989 and 1990, and was a finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation's National Journalism Award (Walker Stone Prize) for editorial writing for those years.
Mr. Francis emerged in the 1990s as a leading voice of traditional conservatism.
"He was a fine writer and a brilliant scholar, who had the courage of his convictions," said Patrick Buchanan, who had both social and professional relationships with Mr. Francis. "He had a tremendous depth of knowledge and read as deeply as anyone I've known."
Mary Lou Forbes, commentary editor of The Times, who worked closely with Mr. Francis during his tenure at the newspaper, said: "I remember Sam as a scholarly, challenging and sometimes pungent writer, who distinguished his craft with a remarkable appreciation of history and literature. ... In person, his witty and sage observations of the passing scene brightened the atmosphere where he labored."
A Tennessee native, Mr. Francis staunchly defended the South and its cultural heritage and proudly held memberships in both the Sons of the American Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
"Sam Francis came from a long tradition of scholarly Southerners that is now often forgotten," said Peter Brimelow, author of "Alien Nation," whose VDARE.com Web site carried Mr. Francis' columns. "Sam's great value ... was his unflinching disregard of contemporary taboos. He was always prepared to say the unsayable."
Mr. Francis frequently expressed provocative views on topics of history, race and culture that were often contested by other conservatives. "Mass immigration means revolution, the displacement of one people and its culture by others," he wrote last year. On the 40th anniversary of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling " which declared mandated segregated public schools unconstitutional " Mr. Francis called it "the most dangerous and destructive Supreme Court decision in American history."
In his last column, published Jan. 27, Mr. Francis criticized President Bush's second inaugural address: "The president ... confirmed once and for all that the neoconservatism to which he has delivered his administration and the country is fundamentally indistinguishable" from liberalism.
Mr. Francis graduated from the Baylor School in his native Chattanooga, received a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1969, and earned master's and doctorate degrees in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an analyst of foreign affairs and security issues at the Heritage Foundation and later served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to Sen. John P. East, North Carolina Republican.

From Billboard.com:

Springsteen Stares Down 'Devils' On New Album

Bruce Springsteen re-teams with producer Brendan O'Brien on his 19th album, "Devils & Dust," which
Columbia will release on April 26. The 12-track set follows the format of Springsteen's '90s studio work, in which he was surrounded by a rotating cast of collaborators, including some members of the E Street Band.

The title cut has been in Springsteen's catalog for several years, and was dusted off in soundchecks for the E Street Band's run on last fall's Vote for Change tour, but never performed at a show.

Two of the tracks on "Long Time Comin'" and "The Hitter" -- date back at least 10 years and were performed during the tour in support of the 1995 album "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

Like much of the material on that set, the songs are both first-person narratives, using details and fragmented scenes to sketch out a life's story. The first is about a father celebrating the optimism that comes with an awaited child; the second about a street fighter nearing the end of an unenviable career.

Springsteen will tour in support of the new album, but no details have been announced as to who will back him or what size venues he will play.

"Devils & Dust" is the artist's first studio album since 2002's O'Brien-produced "The Rising," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 and has sold 2.09 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The tour in support of the set grossed $221.5 million from 121 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore.

As previously reported, Springsteen won a Grammy on Sunday for best solo rock vocal performance for the "Code of Silence," which was released on the 2003 collection "The Essential Bruce Springsteen."

Here is the track list for "Devils & Dust":

"Devils & Dust"
"All The Way Home"
"Reno"
"Long Time Comin'"
"Black Cowboys"
"Maria's Bed"
"Silver Palomino"
"Jesus Was an Only Son"
"Leah"
"The Hitter"
"All I'm Thinkin' About"
"Matamoras Banks"

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables at home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

-- Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

From Orthodoxy Today:

Darwin and the Road to Hitler
By Johannes L. Jacobse

We know Hitler was evil writes historian Richard Weikart in his new book "From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany,"* but how do we account for the widespread acceptance of his genocidal madness among the German people? Why is there little evidence of resistance to Hitler's ideas before he established his totalitarian rule?

Most Germans did not see in Hitler the genocidal madman that he later proved to be. German culture was afflicted with a moral blindness that had effectively removed all intellectual barriers to Nazi ideology. The post-Nazi world wonders how a man like Hitler could arise in a nation like Germany. Weikart asks what changed in German culture so that a murderous tyrant was welcomed as Fuhrer?

The moral antecedents to Nazi rule do not rest in Mein Kampf but in the social Darwinism of the German academies starting almost a century before Hitler's rise to power. When Darwin's "Origin of the Species" was first published in 1859, it took the German intellectual establishment by storm and captured the minds of German thinkers in ways that few other ideas did. It would cause a cataclysmic cultural shift that paved the way for Hitler.

To German intellectuals, Darwin's theory posited not only biological scheme that described the development of organisms, but also supplied the key that could unlock the mystery about creating a better society. From the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century, Darwinism would become the dominant interpretive paradigm in most other disciplines as well including history, and anthropology.

Weikart chronicles the cultural evolution of Darwinism from theory to creed in substantial detail, much of it from original sources. The historical road from Darwin to Hitler is filled with many twists and turns Weikart asserts, and while many Darwinists probably would not have countenanced the evil that social Darwinism would finally unleash, they nevertheless became unwitting contributors to Hitler's rise.

In Darwinian theory, death functions as the engine of evolutionary progress. Weaker organisms are eliminated while stronger organisms survive. Natural selection is construed as a positive good ordained by nature, and the traditional ideas about suffering, dying and death undergo change and revision.

A moral relativism arose that redefined the killing of "undesirables" as socially desirable. Since societies and nations also function by natural selection, that killing of the weak could be justified as aiding social progress. Life was no longer held sacred.

Science trumps religion in the Darwinian moral vision, thus any policy that sanctions the killing of innocents also carried the authoritative imprimatur of science. Programs promoting abortion, infanticide, euthanasia (and the concentration camps that came later) always followed this moral logic in one way or another.

The Darwinian ethic contrasts sharply with the Judeo/Christian moral vision that sees death as an enemy that must be destroyed. Death is defined not as primeval force intrinsic to nature but as an aberration -- something that entered the world after it was already created. The Genesis narrative reads that death entered the world only after "God rested." Death is neither created by God nor "natural" to nature.

Instead, death entered the world through the rebellion of man and thus cannot be construed as a social good. This view imposes the moral obligation that the strong must bear the burdens of the weak rather than kill them. Life is held sacred.

In theological terms, Darwinian natural selection posits a secularized Manichean dualism where nature functions as an authoritative god from which both life and death flow. There is no fixed moral distinction between life and death in the Darwinian vision, and the moral value given to life and death is determined solely by arbitrary, socially conditioned, criteria.

Social Darwinism did not arise in a cultural vacuum. Other factors contributed to the Darwinian ascendancy that served to affirm its claim as the key to understanding social progress.

Chief among them was a cult of progress that dominated most of Europe at the time. Many thinkers shared a belief in the inevitable march of progress drawn from a generalized positivism not yet challenged by the carnage of WWI. Second, Malthusian ideas (as a populations increase, natural resources decrease) also contributed. Natural selection fit Malthusian doctrine hand in glove and provided a strong sense of moral justification when the genocidal ideas were put into practice, particularly against non-Germans. Third, the radical materialism of Nietzsche and others defined the transcendent out of existence thus muting the moral reproof of Darwinian relativism intrinsic to the Judeo/Christian tradition.

Darwinism was able to assimilate these currents and give them a coherent and concrete unity under the rubric of objective science. Here is where the value of Weikart's book is most apparent. We see how quickly the Darwinian social ethic took hold in Germany.

Hospitals became killing centers so that by 1939 for example, over 70,000 Germans already perished in the Nazi eugenics program with the full approval and concrete aid of the German medical establishment. The penetration of the Darwinian social ethic ran so deep that the entire Judeo/Christian moral tradition was overthrown. Diabolical crackpots like Joseph Mengele actually believed their experiments would help the human race.

After Auschwitz and the Gulags, it shouldn't be difficult to recognize the speciousness of the claim that totalitarian ideologies are in any way "scientific." The millions killed in the name of Nazism and Marxism alone should evoke some humility toward the limits of science, and reveal the transparency of attempts to confer authority where in fact none exists. In pre-war Germany however, the faith that secular ideology could improve human society towered as high as Babel and would not waver until the bombs rained down on Berlin.

In due course the Darwinian moral logic would be applied to nations. Germany saw itself as the most educated and cultivated in Europe, and by the light of social Darwinism the German advancement served as proof of German supremacy. These racist ideas would fuel German aggression first as colonial occupiers (Germany was notoriously brutal towards the populations they subjugated), and later as European conquerors. The seeds of Hitler's Aryan supremacy and lebensraum were sown here.

By the time Hitler rose to power, social Darwinism was firmly entrenched in German culture. Hitler was able to direct the machinery of state towards genocide without any appreciable public resistance because the moral barriers against this evil were overturned long before he came to power. Germans could already justify killing their own. Killing others would prove even easier to justify.

Why did Hitler single out the Jews? Weikart writes that finding an answer is difficult because the historical evidence is scarce. Anti-Semitism was always present among Darwinian social engineers but usually at the fringes. Popular anti-Semitism was more prevalent and there is some evidence Hitler drew from these populist writings. Beyond this Weikart does not tread.

Darwinism did not produce the Holocaust, writes Weikart, but without it the social and scientific underpinnings would not have existed that justified genocide as morally beneficent by Hitler and his followers. Darwinism turned Judeo/Christian morality on its head. By elevating death as progress and jettisoning any notion that life is inherently sacred, the moral foundation for unprecedented barbarism was laid.

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse is a Greek Orthodox priest and edits the website www.orthodoxytoday.org.

*From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
Richard Weikart
Palgrave Macmillan Press
May, 2004

Thoughtful take on the new Eastwood film from Martha Bayles in her excellent blog at Arts Journal, "Serious Popcorn:"

Observing the Formulas

It took me a while to see "Million Dollar Baby," the Clint Eastwood movie nominated for seven Academy Awards, but it was worth the wait. The film is a beautiful example of why tried-and-true formulas are ... well, tried and true. This isn't faint praise. Every art has its formulas, and success depends on what a given artist does with them. In this case, Eastwood takes a venerable formula - the boxing flick in which the contender's hardest fight is outside the ring - and burnishes it to a rich, glowing patina.

Of course, that's not all Eastwood does. It's impossible to prove a negative, but I suspect that if the contender in question were a young man from the white-trash side of the tracks, the critics would have dismissed the film as (you guessed it) formulaic. By making his star a young woman, Maggie (Hilary Swank) Eastwood makes plenty of room for all that burnishing.

Recently several talk-radio "conservatives" have accused "Million Dollar Baby" of being an advertisement for euthanasia. What can I say to this, except: Come on, guys. Look at the blinking movie.

Frankie, the burnt-out trainer played by Eastwood, is the sort of Catholic who attends mass every day in order to ventilate his doubts with Father Horvak (Bryan O'Byrne). When Maggie is paralyzed by a dirty punch and begs Frankie to disconnect her life support, Frankie asks Father Horvak what to do. The priest tells him (very sympathetically, I might add) that euthanasia is a sin. And Frankie obeys, refusing Maggie's pleas.

But then Maggie starts biting her own tongue in a desperate attempt to drown in her own blood. At that point Frankie does the deed. But not in the spirit of Dr. Kervorkian liberating another paying customer. Rather he does it in the spirit of a stoic, self-punishing man sacrificing his own soul for that of another. Maybe God will forgive him, maybe not. You get the feeling he is willing to take the chance. And despite the wistful closing lines by his old friend Scrap (Morgan Freeman), there is no happy ending. After Frankie disconnects Maggie, he disconnects himself - from everything and everyone he has ever known. He disappears.

What sort of standard are these "conservatives" using, I wonder? If artists are not allowed to show troubled mortals committing mortal sins out of love, then talk radio has a long list of artists to condemn. How about starting with some of the worst offenders, like Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky...?

From The Chicago Sun-Times

On culture front, we're losing war
By Mark Steyn

Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:

1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalized brothel.

2) A British court has ruled that a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained in custody because jail causes him to suffer a ''depressive illness.''

3) Seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Eden of Charlestown, R.I., has been awarded an A by his teacher and the ''Silver Key'' in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled ''Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself.''

A trio of itsy-bitsy little stories from the foot of page 27 of your daily paper, if they made it at all. But they're as revealing about the course of the war as anything going on in Iraq. The Germans, in the bad old days when their preferred field of combat was France rather than Fraulein Helga's government-regulated bondage dungeon, used to talk about ''wehrwille'' -- war will. America, Britain, Australia and a select few other countries have demonstrated they can just about muster the ''war will'' on the battlefield. On the broader cultural front, where this war in the end will be won, there's little evidence of any kind of will.

The waitress forced into prostitution by the government pimp is, at one level, merely an example of the unintended consequences that follow every legislative initiative. But, at another, it's the logical reductio of the modern secular welfare state. Like all those European utopias John Kerry wants America to be more like, Germany has a permanently high unemployment rate and, as a result, penalizes those who refuse to take available jobs -- like providing ''sexual services.'' The welfare office in Gotha ordered a 23-year-old woman to attend an audition for a job as a ''nude model.''

As Queen Victoria is said to have advised her daughter on her wedding night, lie back and think of England. Now the welfare office says lie back and think of Germany. And why not? When you cede to the state the responsibility for feeding, clothing, housing yourself, for your parents' retirement and your own health care, it's hardly surprising they can't see what the big deal is about annexing your sex life as well. If a welfare state were a German S&M club, the government is the S and you're the M. The ''security'' of welfare is not usually quite such literal bondage, but it always is metaphorically.

When the Germans legalized their whorehouses, they thought it showed how relaxed and enlightened they were. The al-Qaida types take a different line: They think it's a sign that the West is decadent and weak and cannot survive. And they have a point: The government forcing women into prostitution is merely the latest example of the internal contradictions of the modern secular state.

That British court judgment is another. SIAC, the United Kingdom's anti-terrorist court, found in 2003 that the 35-year-old Algerian male in question had ''actively assisted terrorists who have links to al-Qaida.'' But he was released from Belmarsh Prison because of his ''depressive condition.'' I'd be in a depressive condition if I were a terrorist: The Afghan camps are gone, the Great Satan's liberated Iraq, and Osama re-emerges from his three-year sabbatical only to release a floppo ''Vote Kerry!'' video recycling a lot of lame Michael Moore gags. The more Islamists in a depressive condition the better. Maybe if they get sufficiently depressed they'll stop being terrorists and become trainee accountants or male hairdressers.

But this surely illustrates the impossibility of fighting terror as a law enforcement operation. By Western standards, every Islamic terrorist is ''depressive'' -- for a start, as suicide bombers, they're suicidal. Sen. Kerry, you'll recall, thought terrorism should be like prostitution: a nuisance. But, if these court judgments are any indication, it seems to be more like German prostitution: They're free to do what they want, and with the full backing of the legal system.

In such a world, it's good to know we still have the guts to finger the real bad guys. Thus, when Chariho Regional High School art teacher Lynn Norton set her pupils the task of expressing an idea three-dimensionally, Jeffrey Eden immediately thought of a diorama comparing Bush to Hitler. You might think that ought to be disqualified on the grounds that characterizing Bush as Hitler is about as two-dimensional as you can get, and it's less of a diorama than the diarrhea of leftist rhetoric, as poured forth by millions of moveon.org drones and nude Marin County feminist protesters and European activist puppeteers. But there's always room for one more, and Jeffrey's schoolmarm was thrilled at the way he did it so cutely, draping a swastika on one side and the Stars and Stripes on the other, and putting in little plastic soldiers -- Nazi and American, though who can tell the difference, right? -- and then adding his own penetrating observations on both Bush (''Saddam had no affiliation with the Taliban'') and his predecessor as Fuhrer (''Hitler's own justification was his own hatred.'' Hmm. What a testament to the quality of Rhode Island's ''Social Studies'' curriculum).

Well, Jeffrey's 17. One day, with a bit of luck, he'll realize Bush isn't Hitler. If he were, Jeffrey would be in the Bush Youth doing patriotic exercises in shorts every morning and singing the special Texan lyrics to the Horst Wessel song, and he wouldn't have time to do dioramas of dissent. But what are we to make of everyone else in this sorry story? The art teacher who gave him an A. The 15 judges in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards who awarded him their ''silver key.'' The proprietor of Alperts Furniture Showroom in Seekonk where the winning ''art'' work is proudly on display. Are there no grown-ups left in Rhode Island?

I'm not worried about Iraq. As they demonstrated on Jan. 30, they'll be just fine. The western front is the important one in this war, the point of intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides. It's not that young Eden knows nothing, but that neither his teachers, judges nor furniture showroom proprietors do. By contrast, our enemies know us very well, at least when it comes to courtroom strategies and canny manipulation of the fetish of ''tolerance.''

It's an open question whether the West will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won't, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilizational suicide. And then the new barbarians will inherit, and young Master Eden will end his days pining for the rosy-hued nostalgia for the Bushitler tyranny.