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Cocktail
Catholicism
In
"Toward the
Wet Martini," Fareed Zakaria writes:
Buñuel makes two common
errors. First, he gets the Immaculate Conception wrong, which refers to the
conception not of Jesus but of his mother, Mary--it's the Virgin Mary's mother,
St. Anne, whose hymen is invisibly pierced by the Holy Ghost.
I imagine
(indeed, I hope) that I am one of dozens who point out that Zakaria is also
wrong. Buñuel--born Catholic, even if he opted out later--confused the
Incarnation, in which the Holy Ghost caused Mary to conceive Jesus, and the
Immaculate Conception, which refers to the fact (or belief, if you will) that
Mary was born without original sin, although otherwise by the normal biological
process.
-- Robert M.
Johnson
Note from the
editors: Fareed Zakaria is indeed wrong; he's even willing to admit it. If
only we here at Slate would let him! Zakaria realized his error before
publication and tried to amend his copy, but his editors failed to make the
change in time (though we have now rectified our slip). Slate thanks the
dozens (yes, there were dozens) of readers who pointed out the mistake, as well
as the nuns, priests, and lay theologians who gave them such excellent Catholic
educations.
Brandy,
Capitalist
In "Today's
Papers," Scott Shuger points out that Moesha ranked 124 th
of 139 shows but was nonetheless renewed for another season--yet another
instance of the relentless creep of affirmative action. Might I suggest another
explanation?
In a
Slate
article ("Equal
Opportunism") just before Moesha 's premiere, I reported that
African-American viewing patterns bear almost no resemblance to those of other
groups. ER was No. 1 for nonblacks, No. 20 for blacks. New York
Undercover was No. 1 for blacks but not even in the top 20 for nonblacks.
Only Monday Night Football was in both groups' top 10. A capitalist, of
whom there are one or two among us, I hear tell, might bear this in mind when
targeting malt liquor, fast food, and sneaker commercials.
I have yet
to obtain viewership figures for Moesha , but I suspect the show will be
in the top three among blacks. Brandy is the sweetheart of black America--she's
Whitney Houston before Bobby Brown. Isn't it a little self-pitying to ascribe
misplaced guilty liberalism and soggy altruism to the same folks who bring us
season after season of formulaic sitcoms, spandexed soap operas, and
disease-of-the-week movies? Where's the social purpose in that--affirmative
action for lousy actors and worse writers (most of whom, it must be noted, are
white)? It might just be that Moesha is about advertising dollars and
not about oppressing the beleaguered white man. Just a thought.
-- Debra
Dickerson Washington
The
Future of Futurology
Thank you
for such a perceptive essay ("The Road
Behind,") by Michael Lewis. It astonishes me that so many of the bright
people in Silicon Valley are capable of understanding things like quantum
tunneling and Boolean algebra but are incapable of understanding history or the
future. Forty years ago Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book imagining the future. His
specific predictions were pretty good, but his most insightful observation was
about the business of futurology and the reason people usually can't see the
future clearly. Clarke pointed out that we usually overestimate the amount of
change that will happen in the short term and underestimate how much change
will happen in the long term. Our own achievements seem to loom so large that
we can't imagine what our grandchildren might achieve. Silicon Valley is the
clearest possible demonstration of Clarke's theorem. It sometimes seems that
working at 1,000 megahertz precludes one from having much long-term memory.
-- Jim Quinn North
Canton, Ohio
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