The Dalai Lama's Talk Dalai Lama visits Woodstock, NY

The Secret Service escorts the Dalai Lama wherever he goes within the United States, a sign not only that he is considered a head of state, although technically stateless, but also that his life may be in danger. The agents are hard to miss, with their wraparound shades, dark suits, shiny black shoes, gold-plated lapel pins, and tendency to occasionally whisper into their raised sleeve. Along with the uniformed police and State Troopers, they may have been the only people in the throng of thousands not smiling at least a little. I appreciate their job, but it's hard not to smile when the Dalai Lama is in your vicinity. His face is frequently lit by an unforced smile that can turn at any moment into a childlike grin. If, as Baudelaire once wrote in reference to the artist, "Genius is childhood recaptured at will,"¹ then the DL is indeed a genius. No sooner had he mounted the stage and sat in the thronelike chair prepared for him than he leapt up and announced that it would be better if he stood, presumably so that all could see him better. He donned a wireless headset microphone and remarked on the "tidy, beautiful" houses in the town. Then, seizing on our precise locale, he pointed over the heads of the audience to the cemetery that adjoins Andy Lee Field where we had gathered. "And there is our final destination," he said with his adult-child grin, quite enjoying the chance to make a quintessentially Buddhist point. Tibetan Buddhists have always had a special relationship with cemeteries. For centuries, they have meditated in charnel grounds where corpses are left to decay in the open air, a practice considered essential to spiritual realization.

Immediately between the graveyard fence and the outer fringe of the growing crowd, as if arranged by an overzealous first novelist, in a playground of jungle gyms and swing sets, dozens of boisterous kids shouted with glee throughout the DL's talk, apparently oblivious to it but perhaps osmotically resonating with his sense of joy. Or maybe it worked the other way around: the man who describes himself as "a simple monk" began his teaching on compassion with stories from his own childhood. We learn compassion, he said, from the warmth and affection we first experience between mother and child, and between humans and animals. Then he told the tale of his relationship with a pet parrot. The parrot's caretaker, an older monk in the palace where the Dalai Lama was being educated and groomed for his role as spiritual leader of Tibet, had a loving relationship with the bird, such that whenever it heard his footsteps coming, it became excited and started to dance around. The young Dalai Lama grew jealous, and tried to emulate the relationship by feeding the parrot as its caretaker did. But the bird was less receptive, and became quite aggressive, grabbing at the food with its beak. The DL decided to teach the parrot a lesson and reprimanded it with the help of a small stick. As a result, he said, "Our relationship deteriorated, to the point where it became irreparable." This was one of his earliest lessons in the nature of genuine compassion.

The Dalai Lama spoke of compassion as transcending religious dogma. "I call it a human value, because it doesn't come from religion, faith, constitution, or education, but by birth." He added that the practice of compassion immediately rewards the practitioner, because it calms the mind and heart and makes it easier to judge right from wrong. "Any decision made when your mind is under the sway of negative emotions is tainted," he said. But he also distinguished different levels of compassion based on one's motivation. "Genuine compassion is to consider the other just like you respect others. Respect their rights and then show a sense of concern when they pass through difficulties, regardless of their feelings toward you. That's the real type of compassion." He compared that to the kind of compassion that comes from pity for others, which puts one on a higher level and subtly demeans the object of your compassion.

His Holiness closed his remarks by stating a strong case for equality of religions. Although Buddhism is essentially nontheistic, emphasizing the value of relying on one's own efforts to achieve enlightenment, the Dalai Lama spoke in praise of the world's many theistic traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Of course, Tibetan Buddhism reveres countless earthly and celestial Buddhas and bodhisattvas, both male and female, that seem to have a lot in common with the many saints of the Catholic Church or the manifestations of the Hindu pantheon. Still, it was encouraging to hear such an explicit voicing of respect for all religions on the part of a respected religious leader who is also a head of state. He told a story about visiting the shrine at Lourdes and encountering a statue of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, who, he said, smiled at him. On a visit to India, he said, a statue of the Mother Goddess also appeared to smile at him. I tried, without success, to imagine Pope Benedict XVI publicly describing a visit to a Buddhist temple during which a statue of the Buddha smiled at him. The DL did express some concern about the apparent paradox of God-loving people waging war on each other. "Some people believe God created them directly, so there is a direct connection," he said toward the end of his talk. "To these people who create trouble in humanity, I really question their love of God."

¹ "Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material." (Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée à volonté, l'enfance douée maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de matériaux involontairement amassée. "L'artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant," Le peintre de la vie moderne, III (1863)

I am a product of post-Tridentine, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, including 12 years of parochial school education. If I hadn't been expelled from St. John's University for leftwing political activities that rendered me persona non grata, I might havemade it 16 years. But God is merciful. The Tridentine church, so named because its rituals and dogmas were codified by the Council of Trent in the 16th century, remained essentially unchanged until the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, which promulgated, among other things, the saying of the mass in the vernacular rather than Latin. Vatican II introduced other reforms in the liturgy that many traditional Catholics found unpalatable, yet it failed to change significantly the church's long-standing aversion to women in the ministry, marriage for priests, birth control, pre-marital sex, and homosexuality. In retrospect, the current pope's outspoken statements against capital punishment and the war in Iraq have seemed almost radical, but still haven't done much to change the attitudes of a majority of American Catholics.

Tridentine Catholicism is in essence the version embraced by Mel Gibson and thousands of other Roman Catholics, although they're in the vast minority today. If I were a practicing Catholic, I would almost certainly seek out a community that still observes the Latin mass, however. (I have the advantage of having been trained as an altar boy before Vatican II, so I still remember most of the original mass Latin. I realized how much this marks me when, during an interview with the lapsed Catholic comedian George Carlin, who had also been an altar boy, we spontaneously recited in unison an especially tricky prayer from the Latin mass known as the Suscipiat.) Since those early days, I've gone through a spiral process of rejecting the church, embracing secular humanism, rediscovering the spiritual life, learning everything I could about the many other religious and spiritual traditions of the world, and in so doing gaining a renewed appreciation for the Jesus of the Gospels. That Jesus was a social radical, which I'm sure is what has always appealed to me most about him. When I later delved more deeply into Eastern spirituality, I began to see the transcendent, Zen wisdom in many of his sayings (although even that seems secondary to his gospel of love and forgiveness). Yet those two aspects combine to make a powerful teacher almost completely at odds with church dogma so torturously wrung from the words of Jesus, and with the selective emphasis on questionable texts purveyed by many fundamentalist Christians.

In my study of the Gospels, I had also read the Gnostic Gospels along with a number of interpretations of the significance of Aramaic in the teachings of Jesus. So the prospect of seeing a movie about Christ that claimed to be based solely on the Gospels, in which the dialogue is primarily in Aramaic and Latin, appealed to me. I've never much liked the church's emphasis on the Passion and Crucifixion, as opposed to the compassion and wisdom teachings of Jesus, however. And after reading about thefilm's graphic violence, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it very much. Unfortunately, I was unable to see the film on its opening weekend, and already the columns and articles for and against the film started flooding the media and pouring into my e-mail box. Without having seen the movie, I did my best to follow the arguments, which seemed to fall into three main categories. Christians-born-again and Catholic alike--largely love the film and find it inspiring, uplifting, if a tad violent, and not at allanti-Semitic. Many Jews are deeply offended and frightened by what they perceive as its depiction of Jews as bloodthirsty Christ-killers with ugly noses. A third group of both Christians and Jews find the accusations of anti-Semitism somewhat exaggerated and rather paranoid, while agreeing that the depiction of the Passion is not quite accurate and not even fully faithful to the Gospels. And, this group is quick to add, the canonical Gospels are themselves the product of the differing agendasof their authors, none of whom is believed by most biblical scholars to have known Jesus personally. Those agendas include antipathy for the Pharisees and Sadducees, sects of Jews who were antagonistic to the early Christians, and a reluctance to offend the Roman authorities who were still the real power in Judea and other parts of the Mediterranean rim where the early church was attempting to gain a foothold. Expecting to get the real facts behind the execution of Jesus from the four canonical Gospels is a little like expecting to read the truth about the invasion of Iraq in The Weekly Standard.

When I finally went to my local multiplex to see The Passion of the Christ, I was determined to watch the film at least as much with my heart as my head, and not to let quibbles about accuracy detract from my appreciation of Jesus and his message. I received an unexpected blessing before the film had even begun, when the ticket seller informed us that there would be no previews. (We nonetheless had to sit through the hodgepodge of commercials that are now a regular and apparently accepted feature ofmovie going. The price of admission is no longer enough; we now have to endure ads for Coke and TV programs like Law and Order and Touching Evil, too.) Some authority-probably the theater chains-must feel that the sex and violence that dominate most film previews are somehow not an appropriate prelude to a devotional film about the Crucifixion. But that brief reprieve from blood and gore was the last blissful moment I was to experience for the next two hours.

The problem with trying to keep an open mind while viewing The Passion was that Gibson had upped the ante so precipitously beforehand that in a sense he had heightened my expectations about its strict authenticity. Gibson had reported that, after seeing the film, the Pope himself had said, "It is as it was," referring to its faithfulness to its biblical sources. (The Vatican denied that the pontiff had ever made that statement.) Yet even a casual viewing of the film revealed that it diverges in a numberof startling ways from the four canonical Gospel accounts. So much for the letter of the textual law. What about its spirit, or Spirit?

Oddly, the movie's unrelenting depiction of what amounts to the brutal torture and summary execution of a nonviolent spiritual revolutionary by a colonial occupying army makes the film more of an indictment of capital punishment and imperialism than a hymn to the compassion of a man so utterly devoid of human ego that millions believe him to be the very incarnation of God. As I watched the gaunt Jim Caviezel being pummeled, chained, dropped from a bridge on a primitive bungee cord, spat upon, interminably scourged, and heartlessly crucified, I involuntarily began to think of the political prisoners who have suffered similar and even worse fates. I've often wondered how devout Christians who feel the message of Jesus in their heart can stomachthe concept of capital punishment (or political torture), especially as it is disproportionately applied in the United States to the disadvantaged elements of society among whom Jesus spent most of his time and to whom he directed his message. TheJesus of the Gospels shows extraordinary openness to and appreciation of women, social outcasts, lepers, and members of despised racial groups such as the Samaritans.

As long as we're discussing race, let's talk for a moment about noses and stereotypes. Critics of The Passion have made much of the bad noses of most of the Jewish characters other than Christ. To complicate matters, although the film's casting director is Jewish, most of the Jewish roles in it, including Mary Magdalene, Caiphas, Herod, and Joseph of Arimathea, are played by Italians. This isn't surprising, since the movie was filmed entirely in Southern Italy, and the majority of the cast and crew werelocals. The Roman soldiers who do most of the grunt work of flogging and crucifying Jesus speak Latin with noticeable Italian accents. I'm not an expert in racial physiognomy, but their noses are no better or worse looking than those of the Jewish high priests who are portrayed in equally unflattering terms in the film. What was especially horrifying for me in watching these sequences is that I grew up in an ethnically unified Italian family. Almost everyone at those countless family gatherings inBrooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, and Long Island looked and sounded like the Italian Americans you see in films like Moonstruck or Married to the Mob. My grandparents and older uncles spoke English with heavy accents and conversed freely in Italian. They were working- class people from peasant stock who resembled in affect and physique the Italian actors playing those brutal Roman soldiers--characters who make the Italian gangsters from the Godfather Trilogy and The Sopranos seem cuddly by comparison. Their casual brutality mixed with vulgarity and crass humor may be the most completely believable element in the film, and the most repugnant. I felt offended and repulsed by them, but I could hardly say that they were unauthentic.

That might have been a lot more reassuring if not for the fact that recent polls have begun to show that a higher percentage of Christians hold the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus after seeing the film. A woman I know, an Irish immigrant who has lived here 15 years, a life-long Democrat and a fierce foe of the Religious Right, was horrified by her own reaction to the film. As bad as the Romans came off, she said, she had to fight her impulse to blame the Jews all over again for the Crucifixion, even though she knew it was wrong. Hers was a visceral reaction to a film that is nothing if not viscerally driven. "I can understand why the Jews would be concerned about it," she said, "because I was starting to blame them myself as I watched the movie."

She agreed that the Roman soldiers were crueler than the Jewish authorities. But Pilate comes off almost sympathetically as a reasonable man whose hands are tied by events and the constant political pressure from the Jewish high priests. And his wife is even more sympathetic, surreptitiously bringing grave clothes to the mother of Jesus, an incredible bit of sheer Hollywood schmaltz that also happens to be ahistorical. Yes, many of the Jewish rabble appear sympathetic to Jesus, but they don't wear the robes and symbols of Jewish authority that Caiphas and the other priests carry with such hectoring hauteur. The ultimate irony, of course, is that, because the Catholic church grew to dominance in the same Roman nation responsible not only for Christ's murder, but also for centuries of brutal persecution of the early Christians, no special anti-Italian prejudice has ever developed among Christians to parallel centuries of bloody anti-Semitism. And, so, the real villains of this story have escaped unscathed.

Having said all that, the Jesus of Gibson's film elicits enormous sympathy, and perhaps the only genuinely moving scenes involve Mary observing her son's excruciating torture and death, and a brief flashback to Christ's ministry during which he preaches forgiveness of one's enemies. The rest of the film appears to be in the tradition of Christian machismo that portrays Christ as having superhuman physical endurance. And this machismo ties in neatly with the image of a superhuman Jesus embraced by millennialist Christians today. As David D. Kirkpatrick wrote in the New York Times, "Writers and artists have been imagining the Second Coming of Jesus for 2,000 years, but few have portrayed him wreaking more carnage on the unbelieving world than Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins," the authors of the mega-best-selling "Left Behind" series, based on LaHaye's interpretation of Biblical prophecies about the Second Coming. "There are signs of the same shift in Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, which dealt almost exclusively with the submissive Jesus of the Crucifixion," Kirkpatrick continues. He then quotes Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University and author of American Jesus, a new cultural history: "When you see him stand up at the end of the movie, he reminds you of Schwarzenegger. I think that movie shows more of a macho Jesus, who, in this case, is brutalized instead of brutalizing. I definitely think the pendulum is swinging toward a darker, more martial, macho concept of the Messiah."¹ In other words, a Jesus for our times, rather than a timeless Jesus.

In 1966, I was a Catholic intellectual and political activist, but was beginning to lose faith in Christianity as a force for good in the world. Over the previous Christmas holiday, I had been expelled from a Catholic university in Queens for supporting a strike by a group of 21 professors who had been summarily fired for unspecified reasons. It was widely suspected that their leftwing political leanings (one professor, Rosemary Lauer, was among the first Catholic feminists) and in some cases all-but-open homosexuality was what frightened a university run by the conservative Vincentian order. At the same time, I was also protesting a Vietnam war that the church was openly supporting in their full anti-godless-Communism mode. How, I asked myself, could one remain a Catholic under these circumstances? Then I went to see a film called The Gospel According to Matthew, which had been made in 1964 by the rising Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, and released in the States two years later. Besides being a rising young filmmaker, Pasolini was a poet, novelist, essayist, and perhaps Italy's leading intellectual. He was also a Marxist, an atheist, and gay, a pungent combination that put him at odds with not only the Catholic church, but also the Italian government and the Italian Communist Party, which expelled him for his sexual proclivities. Pasolini had gotten into film by writing or contributing to screenplays for a number of movies, including Fellini's Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita. The assistant director on his first film, Accattone, was Bernardo Bertolucci. Before directing Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, Pasolini had contributed a short film to an anthology movie named RoGoPaG (from the names of its four directors: Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Gregoretti). The main character in his La Ricotta, named Stracci ("Rags"), is a slum-dweller working as an extra on a film about the life of Christ, mostly for the free lunch. After the pet dog of the leading actress eats his lunch, Stracci sells the dog to a passerby for enough money to buy a huge amount of ricotta cheese, which heimmediately devours. Called back onto the set to be one of the thieves crucified with Christ, he suffers a fatal bout of indigestion during the filming of the Crucifixion. The film-within-a-film's director is played by Orson Welles in an intended self-parody of Pasolini. Apparently the irony was lost on the Italian authorities, who saw Stracci's death on the cross from indigestion as an "an outrage against the established religion," and brought Pasolini up on charges. He received a three-month suspended sentence that was reversed on appeal, and the film was released with major cuts.

The Gospel According to Matthew reignited my faith in Jesus, not as the Son of God he never claimed to be, but as the Son of Man, the preacher of social justice for the poor, standing up to the religious and political establishments, and teaching an inner spirituality that prized love and compassion over ritual and dogma. After the bombastic Hollywood star vehicle of The Greatest Story Ever Told, released the previous year, Pasolini's use of non-actors (including his mother as the aging Mary) and settings in the barren, impoverished landscape of Southern Italy placed its focus squarely on the sayings of Jesus. I don't think I realized at the time how fierce Pasolini's Jesus sounds, raging at the "brood of vipers" and "hypocrites," the rich and powerful, Roman and Jew alike, who were oppressing the common people of his day.

Enrique Irazoqui, who plays Jesus, was a Catalan economics student, the son of a Basque father and Jewish mother, and a Marxist as well. His face is riveting in the way no other portrayer of Jesus on film has ever been. Absent the long hair that appears to have been a Renaissance fantasy, he has the swarthy Mediterranean features that are so much more authentic-looking than the usual handsome, Teutonic Christ of film and sentimental Christian art. Indeed, close-ups of the characters-one hesitates to call them actors-punctuate the film from the opening shots of a befuddled Joseph who has just learned that his betrothed is pregnant; their craggy faces, rough skin, and rotting teeth are thrust lovingly into our awareness as if we are seeing them through the eyes of Jesus. The entire film was shot in the same impoverished rural region of Southern Italy where Gibson filmed The Passion, but Pasolini captures more of the hardscrabble life of the peasants living in what could easily be first-century Judea. Pasolini said that he set out to tell the story of Jesus from the point of view of a believer, but after seeing the final film, he acknowledged that he had made it "from my own point of view."

So how is it that a Marxist atheist made a more convincingly poignant film about Jesus than a devout Tridentine Roman Catholic? I should begin by acknowledging that millions of Christians around the world have found The Passion not only poignant and convincing, but powerfully inspirational as well, and many have returned repeatedly to it. They would hardly be concerned by the opinion of someone who doesn't even go to church. And the film has also had some surprising ecumenical effects on viewers who were not its primary audience. In the Muslim world, the reactions have been complex, fascinating, alarming, and rife with theological contradictions. Islam reveres Jesus as a great prophet, and Mary is singled out for praise in the Qur'an, which devotes an entire sura, or chapter, to her role as the mother of Jesus. Traditional Islam, however, eschews the physical representation of God, the Prophet Muhammad, or any of the 28 prophets mentioned in the Qur'an (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses,Elijah, Solomon, Job, and John the Baptist), in large part because this recalls the worship of idols that Muhammad railed against. The 1998 animated movie about Moses, Prince of Egypt, was banned in Cairo, yet The Passion has been screened there and elsewhere in the Arab world and is adding to the more than half a billions dollars the film has grossed worldwide. Many Muslims have reacted enthusiastically to the unfavorable depiction of Jewish authorities as complicit in Christ's execution-notwithstanding the fact that the Qur'an also declares that Jesus was not crucified, and is quite specific that the Jews were not responsible for his death. On this subject, Allah Himself says:

[T]hey neither killed nor crucified him, though it so appeared to them. Those who disagree in the matter are only lost in doubt. . . for surely they did not kill him.²

Nonetheless, a 21-year-old Muslim woman in Jordan is quoted in one report as rejoicing that Gibson's epic "unmasked the Jews' lies and I hope that everybody, everywhere, turns against the Jews."³ Because much of the film is in Aramaic, which is still spoken by a small minority in Syria, it has been especially well received there. Salim Abraham, a Christian journalist who speaks fluent Aramaic, said: "I was so very happy to see my language, for the first time ever, being spoken on the big screen and in such a powerful movie." Like most Christians, he said he saw no anti-Semitism.⁴

Whether Gibson intended his film to exploit the anti-Semitism openly avowed by his father, a Holocaust-denier, is debatable. His denials have not rung entirely true. But the real problem is that he has interpolated a number of incidents that, for all his assertions of carefully researched authenticity, never appear in any of the four canonical Gospels (nor in the Gnostic Gospels, for that matter). Gibson did remove the subtitles for the line that has been most widely used by Christians to demonize the Jews, from the Gospel of Matthew. When Pilate sees that the crowd won't be appeased by the release of Barabbas, he washes his hands and says, "I am innocent of this man's blood. It is your responsibility!" And the crowd calls out, "Let his blood be on us and on our children!"⁵ Gibson excised that incendiary line from the subtitles to appease objectors, although you can still hear the chief priest pronouncing it in Aramaic. The line does appear in Pasolini's film, which depicts the Jewish priests with only marginally less contempt.

This raises the question of whether any film based faithfully on the Gospels can present an accurate assessment of what really happened. Biblical scholars continue to argue over which parts of the evangelists' accounts are credible and which represent years of scribal accretions and distortions. The Jesus Seminar has famously color-coded the sayings of Jesus and found relatively few of them indisputably authentic, although not all scholars agree with their assessments, either. The entire Passion account is now believed to have been largely gerry-built from Old Testament prophecies meant to add biblical legitimacy. Scholars agree that the evangelists had to make up details of the Passion, because the followers of Jesus would have fled the scene at the moment of his arrest to preserve their own lives--an embarrassment that is covered by the Gospel story of Peter's denial of Christ. The many places where Gibson's film diverges from the Gospels are drawn largely from the devotional Catholic tradition of the Passion, namely, the Stations of the Cross that are an integral part of almost every Catholic church and a mainstay of Catholic Easter ritual. For those who may not be familiar with it, that tradition includes Christ falling three times on the road to Calvary, being refreshed by St. Veronica, who is rewarded when Jesus leaves an image of his face on her veil (clearly visible in the film), and meeting his mother along the way. In addition, Gibson drew on the vision of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th-century German nun whose best-know work, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, is filled with images of a hatefully cruel and tormenting Jewish crowd. The spirituality that informs this vision of Christ is not that of the canonical gospels but the worldview of the neo-Manichean Cathari and the medieval flagellants, according to Mahlon H. Smith of Rutgers University.⁶ By contrast with the film's grim vision of evil, punishment, and retribution, Smith writes, "The kingdom that Jesus heralds is one in which the powerless are supported and those who are crippled by current oppression find strength to stand on their own feet. All four gospels offer hope that the powers of evil cannot ultimately constrain or defeat the cause of good and justice-John through his cosmic dualism of light shining in the darkness, the synoptics through Jesus' exorcisms and resolute example ofhumane humility."

Writing about the astonishing, non-biblical depiction of an earthquake not simply rending the Temple veil, as described in the Gospel, but virtually leveling the Temple itself, Smith asks, "Is Gibson suggesting that God destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in retaliation for the execution of Jesus? If so, what sort of God is this? A loving Father who forgives the sins of his children? Or a vindictive Force, whose awesome wrath wreaks havoc on opponents? If such destructive retribution is presented as the direct consequence of Jesus' crucifixion, what does Gibson want viewers to conclude? That God rejected Jesus' plea to forgive his enemies? That Jesus' theological vision was mistaken and that the supreme Force that controls this world is really not the tolerant, forgiving Providence that Jesus assumed it to be?" I don't buy the argument that Gibson's film is a Passion play and, so, is not intended to deal with Christ's three-year ministry, his wisdom, and his mystical teaching that the kingdom of heaven is within. That kingdom, according to his words and not to the conventional Christian interpretation, consists of living in the present moment, without concern for appearance, either material or religious. One commentator insisted that the some critics disliked the film because it goes counter to the mushy, sentimental view of Christ purveyed by liberal churches. "The guy on the screen is nothing like that insipid, tunic-wearing, lamb-carrying, two-dimensional, felt-faced Jesus from Sunday school," he wrote. "That Jesus was easy. He could be molded and crafted like Play-Doh into anything I - or anyone else - wanted from him. . . . The Passion is so hard because it presents Jesus as we've never seen him and reveals a truth: Come face to face with Jesus in any way and prepare to squirm, or maybe even to hate him."⁷

The Passion didn't make me hate Jesus, but it did help me appreciate Pasolini more than I ever had. When I returned to see The Gospel According to Matthew this year on Good Friday, I felt that I experienced the whole of who Jesus was. In Pasolini's film, the Passion takes up only a few minutes toward the end of a long epic that could probably use some judicious editing. But by then the reason for Jesus' existence on earth has been made abundantly clear. Whether you believe he was the incarnation of the Divine, or simply a divinely inspired human being, you see that his anger at the money changers arises from his love of the common man and woman who are being ripped off in the very act of worshiping God. The Marxist in Pasolini no doubt identified with Christ's sense of outrage, just as the outsider in him must have identified with the compassionate Jesus who dines with tax-collectors and whores and heals all comers. The Jesus of The Passion is neither healing nor compassionate. He represents the masochistic self-loathing of a religion that has never quite gotten over the murder of its founder.

I believe that most religions are somehow indelibly marked by the circumstances surrounding their creation. The Buddha lived a long, peaceful life in the 45 years following his enlightenment, and died a relatively peaceful death. And it's hardly a secretthat Buddhism has been one of the most tolerant, least warlike of the great traditions. Islam was born under the sword, Muhammad introduced such radical new teachings regarding idol worship and the equitable treatment of women that he was forced tobattle for his very survival against the Arab clans who wanted no part of the religion of "surrender." And for the first few centuries of its existence it lived in absolute, if largely tolerant, domination of the Middle East and a large part of the known world. Now that its dominance has been challenged in recent years, it is once again battling for survival. Jesus was a mystical teacher of love and forgiveness among all ranks of society, but he was murdered by those in power. I think that Christians have been consumed by the mixed message in the painful birth of their tradition ever since. Its teachings of compassion for the poor and unfortunate, have been at odds with its tendency to impose its will, by violence if necessary, over those who don't share its beliefs. Mel Gibson's The Passion is a paean to that long-suffering, triumphalist vision, as if by shouldering the worst abuses of the world we can somehow learn forgiveness. That hasn't happened yet. And, given the essential negativity of the message, I doubt it ever will.

ENDNOTES

¹ Kirkpatrick, "The Return of the Warrior Jesus," New York Times, April 4, 2004.

² 4:157. Al-Qur'an: A contemporary Translation by Ahmed Ali, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

And yet, in television land, fuzzy math is rampant. "Those, to me, are casualties of this same war, which is a war against terrorism," said Daphne Scholz, co-owner of a gourmet food store in Park Slope, Brooklyn, speaking of the current toll of fewer than 100 American dead. "We took the first casualties, and the balance of dead is still on our side."

Not any longer, by my reckoning. Television also failed to display anything like the actual toll on American troops fighting the war. Boulder neurosurgeon Gene Bolles, who operated to repair the broken back of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued prisoner of war, has been outspoken on this account. "It really is disgustingly sanitized on television," said Bolles, chief of neurosurgery at Landstuhl, Germany, where the war's most seriously wounded soldiers are taken. He had already who spent 16 months there and seen nearly 300 patients since Operation Iraqi Freedom started, and many more were arriving regularly. "We have had a number of really horrific injuries now from the war," Bolles said. "They have lost arms, legs, hands. They have been burned, they have had significant brain injuries and peripheral nerve damage. These are young kids that are going to be, in some regards, changed for life. I don't feel that people realize that."²

A story in the New York Times carried a brief glimpse of the kinds of details you could expect not to see on Fox News or the other mainstream media channels. It tells of a 19-year-old American soldier named Sylvester A. Prince, who was among those who rushed a sprawling complex of buildings that once housed the famed Republican Guard of Saddam Hussein "under a volley of covering fire aimed at the roof. He clambered over concrete rubble and the corpses of Iraqi soldiers, the grim results of air and artillery strikes that led up to today's raid. 'They were decapitated, bloated, stinking,' he said of the dead."³ (Don't expect a body count anytime soon.)

A later piece by the journalist Peter Maas described the Marines Third Battalion assault on a key bridge just outside Baghdad. "The bridge," he wrote, "was heavily defended on the north side by both Republican Guard and irregular forces, and the battle to seize and cross it took two days. It was, in retrospect, a signal event in the war, a vivid example of the kind of brutal, up-close fighting that didn't get shown on cable TV. The Third Battalion had a consistent strategy as it moved toward Baghdad: kill every fighter who refused to surrender. . . . It was extremely effective. It minimized American casualties. But it was a strategy that came with a price, and that price was paid in blood on the far side of the Diyala bridge."

The Iraqi troops were close enough that an insult shouted across the bridge might have been heard by the Americans, except for the fact, Maas writes, that the battalion "was at that moment lobbing so many bullets and mortars and artillery shells across the waterway that a shout could never have been heard, and in any event the Iraqis had no time for insults before dying. The only sound was the roar of death. 'Lordy,' Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy said of the assault. 'Heck of a day. Good kills.'"

In a recent interview, author Susan Sontag, who has witnessed war firsthand, was asked if images of the war could convey its totality. She replied that no image could possibly convey the noise and fear of war, and that watching them on television had a de-sensitizing effect on the viewer. "When you watch things through an image, it's precisely affirming that you're safe," Sontag said. "Because you are watching it. You're here and not there. And in a way you're also . . . innocent. You're not doing it. You're neither being killed nor are you firing the gun. You become a spectator. It confirms you in a kind of feeling of invulnerability. On one level it's people looking at war as spectacle. But they don't just look at it as spectacle. They just look at it as, well, that's a terrible thing. Really terrible. And they turn the channel."⁴

But I wonder how many even cared to change the channel during the ongoing carnage. Watching those infamous American smart bombs-some of which reportedly landed as far afield as Jordan and Saudi Arabia--detonate yet another target on grayed out Pentagon briefing monitors is not unlike watching a video game with cheezy graphics. And, of course, interrupted by the high-gloss, high-tech gleam of commercials. This is where Gil Scott-Heron was stunningly prophetic in his linkage of TV advertising, American comp lacency, and government. Jean Kilbourne, author of Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, said in an interview with Sharon Basco that she is alarmed at "the extent to which our political system has really been hijacked by the advertisers. That it's all about advertising, commercials, spin, hype, and not at all . . . about the issues anymore." Along with quantum leaps in psychological sophistication that Kilbourne has seen since she began to study advertising in the 1960s, she finds the most distressing aspect of the business to be its increasing omnipresence. "There's so much more of it that it encroaches much more into our private space than it ever did before," she says. "The ads that have come into the schools, for example, the contracts that schools are making with Coke and Pepsi and all of that. Just the ads that show up in spaces where they wouldn't before. There's a new technique now that enables advertisers to stamp corporate logos onto sands of beaches. So you can go to the beach and there might be a Skippy peanut butter logo up and down the beach."⁵

Along with the ability of ads, especially on TV, to distort the electoral process comes a subtler form of manipulation through the fantasies of wealth that the constant barrage of TV ads engenders.

Along with the ability of ads, especially on TV, to distort the electoral process comes a subtler form of manipulation through the fantasies of wealth that the constant barrage of TV ads engenders. Kilbourne sees this as the prime factor behind the apparently illogical support of working class Americans for current Bush tax proposals that can benefit only the extremely rich. "I believe it's because an extraordinary number of Americans identify with the rich," she says, "and believe that they're going to end up wealthy even though they aren't wealthy now and there's no reason to believe they ever will be." She cites surveys indicating that about 40 percent of Americans actually believe that they're going to become wealthy. "So when Bush does something like get rid of the estate tax, which of course just favors those people who are phenomenally wealthy, other people think, 'Oh well, that'll help me when I make my millions of dollars and that will be good for my heirs,' although that will never happen." Kilbourne ties this to the media focus on overnight success stories, lotteries, and game shows in which a handful of people become instant millionaires. "And then beyond that, there's the whole cultural fantasy in advertising and throughout the media that I think really does encourage us to identify, to really long for luxury, to long for all kinds of very expensive goods, and to believe somehow that we are going to be able to get there and to achieve them."

I can relate to that. I often find my own thinking about the future almost involuntarily drawn to the possibility of a best seller that will create endless wealth, and the resulting ability to buy a secluded house on a lake, and a cellar stocked with all the wines I can't currently afford. Shouldn't I be thinking about sustainable living? Maybe it's just the hedonist in me wanting to make the good things in life available on a regular basis. Or maybe Kilbourne is right. It has been said that Americans vote their aspirations, which is why conservative politicians who offer precious little for the working and middle classes other than a patina of respectability (read "no illicit sex in the White House") are able to dominate Congress and the presidency. We live in a fantasy country, partly the result of our virtual invulnerability. SARS strikes the Far East with devastating suddenness, but we barely feel it. Even after losing the World Trade Centers and thousands of people, the nation is still so insulated it seems that nothing in the rest of the world can really affect us. And that's the very aura that Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney project--imperturbability. Ironically, it's the same quality that the spiritual masters tell us we should all cultivate: to remain unaffected by the vicissitudes of fate, to accept everything with equanimity.

But there's an undercurrent of arrogance beneath the imperturbable surface, the swagger of men drunk with power, giddy with the knowledge that they have succeeded in putting one over on the rest of the world, which, in their estimation, is either too naive or too weak, or too . . . compassionate to do anything about it. These men--and the occasional woman, like Condoleezza Rice--are possessed by the shadow side of imperturbability. They do not appear to be profoundly moved by anything except power. It's hard to imagine Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld staying awake at night agonizing over the innocents killed by collateral damage. Rumsfeld could not even be moved by the loss of vast amounts of Iraqi antiquity during the looting of Baghdad that was certainly not televised. "Looting is an unfortunate thing," Rumsfeld said repeatedly. "It happens and it's unfortunate."⁶

Lighted, angled, and almost always accompanied by the perfect backdrop, the appearance of president Bush at campaign speeches disguised as government functions has been tailored by a new team of television-trained producers and cameramen whose goal is to project the same kind of fantasy images for which television is famous.

What has been televised-and extremely well according to experts in the field--has been the current president's physiognomy. Lighted, angled, and almost always accompanied by the perfect backdrop, the appearance of president Bush at campaign speeches disguised as government functions has been tailored by a new team of television-trained producers and cameramen whose goal is to project the same kind of fantasy images for which television is famous. In a recent newspaper account, members of television camera crews covering the president said that they have rarely had such consistently attractive pictures to send back to editing rooms. The president's media handlers "seem to approach an event site like it's a TV set," according to Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. "They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks." This approach was never more glaringly apparent than in Bush's elaborately choreographed speech to returning Gulf War veterans aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, which included Bush's landing in a flight suit so that he could be photographic in full warrior gear.

The entire event was produced by Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer originally hired by the Bush campaign in Austin, Texas, and who now works for Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Sforza and his aides, the article states, "choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the 'Mission Accomplished' banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call 'magic hour light,' which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush."

"If you looked at the TV picture, you saw there was flattering light on his left cheek and slight shadowing on his right," said Joshua King, who was director of production of presidential events in the Clinton administration. "It looked great." For the president's address to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept.11 attacks, the story goes on to say, "the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harb or, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America's symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island."⁷

And so, although the revolution (if it ever comes) will not be televised, and the invasion of Iraq was not televised in anything like its grimy, painful reality, the message of the current administration will not only be televised at every opportunity, but will also be produced, staged, lighted, made-up, and presented in bite-size bits for the average American attention span. According to White House communications director Dan Bartlett, "We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see. Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don't have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators."⁸

An "instant understanding" is what you get when an iconic image takes precedence over actual content. Once again this is, ironically, a desirable thing in many cases. Icons allow us to communicate emotional states rather than intellectual content. They make navigating a computer, or an interstate highway, a lot easier and faster. Authoritarian and totalitarian governments have also used icons with remarkable efficiency, as evidenced by Hitler's own choice and depiction of the ancient Aryan swastika in a circle on a red background (a color he borrowed from the Communists). Icons and symbols appeal mainly to the right brain, and so when used to sway opinion they can be especially insidious. The Nazis not only used the swastika and German eagle to horrific effect, they also took the ancient symbol of Judaism, the Star of David-which, as a pair of intersecting triangles, one pointing up and one down, also symbolized the spiritual principle "As above, so below"-and turned it into a mark of condemnation. So when Gil Scott-Heron said that the revolution would not be televised, he may have been alluding to a desire not to reduce radical political change to symbols and icons capable of being co-opted, as television is wont to do, whether the clenched fist of the Black Panther party or the peace symbol of the 1960s and '70s, which has since become a cheesy fashion accessory. Aside from C-SPAN, there is much truthful political reportage on television anyway, that role having been taken over by the many alternative media sites on the Internet. In the unlikely event that a revolution actually does take place in this country-say, over the canceling of elections because of a sudden declaration of Red Alert status-I would search the Net before turning on CNN and Fox News. Although they might be worth a look just to see the logos they come up with: America in Turmoil, Day 3; or Wild in the Streets: America Revolts (in graffiti typeface). Now those would be images to conjure with.