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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

UD GOES TO THE MOVIES

In a nation riven by the question of same sex marriage and other divisive issues in the culture wars, it was a healing experience for UD, and I think others, to attend Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ the other night. To my eye, the audience seemed almost equally divided between two normally warring factions: morbidly pious Christians, and sadomasochism-friendly Foucauldians. Clearly both groups found something to love in this film, which Josh Levin, in Slate’s review, calls “one of the cruellest movies in the history of cinema.”

For two hours, audience members moaned and sighed through the graphic torments of young Jesus; and whether their ascesis was downward or upward, transcendence was very much in the air. Some might have been seeing an animated Mapplethorpe and others a kinetic Goya, but whether coming from the left or the right, everyone seemed satisfied with the rich spectacle of agony and degradation.

If we, as Americans, can find common ground in these smaller venues of popular culture, UD feels confident we can build on this foundation for the sake of the larger polity.