I'm a pacifist, a minority position, I know. Today is Martin Luther King Day, which is a holiday for a pacifist celebrated by a overwhelmingly war-like country. I was brought to the idea by a professor of mine who was a registered pacifist during World War II, and the movie Ghandi. Sometimes different Christian groups can be very inspiring too. I got my family to go with me to the Shaker meeting in New Glouster, Maine a few weeks ago. There are four Shakers there, the last members of a religious community that started in England in 1772. Shakers are sort of Buddhist Monks mixed with Quakers, with some feminism thrown in (I'm sure they would disagree with this). Some of the elements that set them apart from other groups are their pacifism, celibacy (no marriage or children) and their emphasis on the female. These ideas they have preserved since the 1700s, when they were even more unpopular than they are now. Their first leader was Ann Lee, who brought the original group of nine people from England to New York State. They refer to God as both male and female, which is something unique among Christian groups, I think (maybe the Universalists do that too).
Like the Amish they dress old-fashioned and raise animals and live in what looks like a living history village, but they actually have no proscriptions against technology and use computers, cars, etc. They were ahead of their time (under the terms of my liberal view of history) back in the 1700s and they are still ahead of their time today, though I think the world is slowly slowly catching up with them.
We drove into their steep driveway a little before 10am behind another car. It was icy and snowy and at the bottom of the hill the car in front of us stopped and then started reversing. We honked before she hit us (there was another car right behind us, so we couldn't back up). The woman in the car said she was backing up to look at the cows which were sitting in the yard next to the driveway.
The Shakers and the guests at the meeting were separated in the room, one side men, the other women, facing each other. There are three Shaker women and one man, and that day their were 10 women guests and 5 men, including me. Mostly people spoke about war or the current war. There were sort of general statements about war and its effects and causes. A couple people talked about Benazir Bhutto, her assassination, the problem of violence in the world. They were interested in the world and politics, which surprised me a little. Short Bible passages were read, commented on and they sang about 10 songs. Some of the songs were int eh songbooks on the pews, but there is no way to sing them on a first try. the traditional Shaker songs have very odd counter-intuitive melodies and structures. About 8 people seemed to be really familiar with them, I just kept my mouth shut after becoming lost on the first one.
After we filed out of the male and female doors, we went downstairs and had coffee with them and then looked at their sheep and scottish highland cattle sitting in the snow.
Later that day we went to Charlie Wilson's War, which many kossacks wrote about earlier this month (this was good, and this). The movie depicts the title character who is a hawkish Texas Democrat. In short, when Afghanistan is invaded by the Soviet Union, Wilson is in a position to give money to the CIA that can be turned into weapons for the Afghanis. A bellicose evangelical heiress (played by Julia Roberts- here is her strange real-life web page) from Texas has sex with him and pulls strings to help him. He overcomes obstacles and in the end secretly funnels a billion dollars to them, which causes the Soviet Union to withdraw, and, so says the movie, fall. The theme of the movie is basically "Give War a Chance," which is disturbing, I thought. The main characters are all far-sighted heroes and the later history of Afghanistan is explained by the fact that a Senate committee wouldn't, after the victory, approve of a million dollars for reconstruction. So in case you're going into a career in international relations, the prescription for a healthy third world country is a billion dollars in weapons and a million dollars in school reconstruction. The wrap up, which I knew was going to be an attempt to square the fact that the hero "fixed" Afghanistan with what the audience knew about Afghanistan did not work.
The hero's logic was generally weak, and no attempt was made to explain what was going on with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel afterwards. General Zia of Pakistan is featured as a sympathetic character though there is much light-hearted joking about how he killed Prime Minister Bhutto in a coup (the father of Benazir). If the movie wasn't so invested in lionizing all of the characters then this could have been developed in a complex way. Wilson's support of the Contras in Nicaragua is mentioned very quickly, without getting into details about his friendship with the dictator Somoza. Movies about true stories can suffer if they try to cover too many facts. But it all felt ugly and simple-minded the way it was done.
Then on top of that, the camera constantly panned down into the cleavage of the actresses, or panned down to their butts as it followed them walking around. I love a cleavage shot as much anyone, but at the same time I felt this was an example of the movie totally failing to work as an argument. It almost felt like a desperate apology for the content.
We left and I asked my mom how she liked it. "It made me think about the meeting we went to this morning," was all she said.
It was a real juxtaposition. Wilson, the hedonistic, powerful, coke-snorting distributor of weapons and the Shakers, a hidden, forgotten, ascetic, self-depriving group of pacifist farmers.
I'd recommend a visit to their place. It also about 5 minutes from Poland Spring. Thee Shakers used to own the actual spring in the 1800s before it was bottled. But you can hit their museum and the Poland Spring museum in the same morning.