Some American Stories

I have a Netflix account. Which is maybe an odd thing to have since some time ago I unplugged my TV and all its accoutrements (DVD player and video player --I never got around to connecting up the digital adaptor I got for it). I thought I'd give it all away but it just sits here unused taking up space. I suppose it's handy to have a TV for DVDs, so I'm still somewhat undecided about giving it up completely, but as for movies I've found more than enough available through Netflix's "Instant Play" that can be watched on the computer monitor -- if your computer can handle it, and mine can. So now I just keep the DVD they send for a while and then send it back unwatched (it's too much for me to try to figure out how to set up the TV system again), but I watch many movies on Instant Play. The quality is great and you can watch a movie more than once at long intervals without having to re-order it through the mail. Of course the titles available this way are limited -- but not VERY limited. There's quite a good selection available.

Many good documentaries for instance. One of the very best is Ken Burns' documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition, "Journey of the Corps of Discovery," about the adventures of the few dozen young men who were commissioned by then-President Thomas Jefferson to explore the unknown territory west of the Mississippi for the very first time (for the white man anyway), all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I've watched it twice now a few months apart. Great way to learn about American history. You feel as if you are on the journey with them.

I also watched Burns' biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and the one of Thomas Hart Benton, the painter, and recently finished the one of Mark Twain, all very well done and full of revelations about American history in the process of exploring the individual's life.

These three men were all American to the core, and all were strong-willed personalities with strong opinions about everything, especially their own importance. What as usual interests me most is their opinions about religion.


Wright was a Unitarian, an apostate by the standard of a Bible-believing Christian, a self-styled "free thinker" of a sort that abounded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, quite willing to pontificate for the benefit of all on whatever he happened to be thinking about (kind of like me in my blogs I suppose).










Benton doesn't seem to have had any strong religious opinions. He painted some scenes of American style revivalism but he was clearly not a believer.

Twain for most of his life had a vague idea that there was a God but he did nothing to get to know Him, and when tragedy struck he ended up denying that God exists because the God he'd so vaguely had in mind had turned out not to be much like the true God. One of the commentators said it was because he so much "wanted to believe" that he became so violent against "the Christian God" at the end. This happens to many and nobody bothers to explain that it makes no sense. They get an idea in their head that a "good" God wouldn't allow bad things to happen, having no idea what the Biblical explanation for evil is. Their own imagination becomes the standard for judging God and that's the end of that.