Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 4

Yes, last time, I did actually say Jesus is a contrarian.

I realize that might be difficult to swallow, so I'm prepared to defend what may, at first, seem to be a rather extreme position (and therefore in need of contrarian balance) but the evidence is right there in his Book. So let's take a look through and see.

Let's look, for example, at Luke 11:27-28: As Jesus is passing by, a woman in the crowd calls out, "Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you." Now, I don't know about you, but that strikes me as a very nice thing to say. A compliment: Your mom is lucky to have had you as a kid! (No one, thus far, has said anything like that to me.) But Jesus does not say, "Why thank you." or more modestly, "You're very kind to say it." Or something rather gallant, like, "Well, I'm very fortunate to have had her as my mother." Instead, he says in response, "Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and obey it." Now, take Jesus out of the equation for a moment and insert, say, your favorite politician or movie star or, heck, one of your acquaintances. Kinda, well ... contrary. Maybe a little rude. But Jesus is after something else here. Even though He is certainly who she thinks He is, he wants her and all those who heard her to focus not on the "new prophet in town" (scholars tell us that as many as 500 such prophets came and went — mostly to their deaths — in Israel during the troubled times of the long Roman occupation), but on the message He's come to deliver.

How about John 7:21-24? Here, Jesus delivers a good contrarian retort to those who condemn him for healing on the Sabbath, exposing their hypocrisy. First, he offers a bit of balance to their worship of Moses ("Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs) ....") and then he asks, "Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing on the Sabbath?" Indeed.

A prime example is the famous exchange between Peter and Jesus at the foot washing in John 13: Peter, always a man of extremes, gets balanced not once, but twice. "You're not going to wash my feet," declares Peter, to which Jesus replies, "If I don't, you'll have no part with me." "Then wash my whole body," Peter exclaims, and he gets a lesson on the difference between salvation from our sin nature (happens once) and cleansing from the pollution of sin (an ongoing necessity and a service we are to perform for one another).

In fact, the act of foot washing was a bit of contrarian theater, if you will. Jesus was not trying to institute a new ritual for the church (most of us actually got that). Foot washing is not widely practiced today because Jesus was making a pointed statement not about religious practice but rather about the nature of leadership. The disciples were, to the hour of his death, convinced that Jesus was a closet Zealot, and would lead them all, somehow, to political victory and cultural autonomy in Roman-dominated Palestine. Jesus did all that he could, in very contrarian fashion, to suggest otherwise.

The foot washing and the mountainside transfiguration that preceded it are, in fact, the bookends in a contrarian teaching strategy. Jesus gives James, John and Peter a glimpse of his Glory on the hillside, then washes their feet like a common slave. Then in John 14, he calls them friends (bullseye -- the balance). Those contrasting images and the tensions they create have always characterized genuine Christian experience.

There's no more compelling example of that tension than the episode of the woman caught in adultery (John 8). The teachers of the law and the Pharisees, the story goes, bring her into the Temple and show her to Jesus. They appeal to the Book: "In the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" Before I go further, it's important to note three things: They were upset and agitated, they were appealing to a recognized authority, they were looking for a fight and trying to set a trap. Now, notice also that Jesus was contrarian at each point. He calmly squats down and begins to write on the ground with his finger (sorry guys, I'm not buying into your game, I won't respond in kind). They keep after him for a while, so he stands up and, as my son would say, he "owns" them with that now famous line, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." After the guys all slink out, he asks the woman, "Where are they? Has no one accused you?" No, sir, she says. "Then neither do I condemn you." he says, but then, contrarian through-and-through, he adds, "Go, now, and leave your life of sin." He doesn't deny what the Law says, he just points out that only those who are sin-free have the right to pass judgment. And the woman gets neither pardon nor permission: She gets grace. She'll not be stoned, but she will be expected to amend her life. And so it is with each of us.

I must point out, before I go any further that if you're thinking that, by contrarian, I mean one who seeks balance in the sense of establishing a middle ground or forging a compromise, I have to say that you've misheard what I said.

Contrarians are not great compromisers. Jesus, the Great Contrarian, if you will, was to the modern mind, in particular, distressingly uncompromising. Consider his answers when questioned about the Jewish Law. In Matt. 18-22, for example, Jesus has just given a mini-sermon on forgiveness and then Peter pipes up and asks him, "Lord, how many times may my brother sin against me and I have to forgive him? Seven times?" Now, the rabbis of the time were in the habit of telling people that you had to forgive someone who has sinned against you — when asked with sincerity — at least three times. But then you were more or less off the hook. So ... Peter's thinking, perhaps, that seven might get him a solid "A" in discipleship class this morning. But no pat on the back is forthcoming. Jesus says to him, "I tell you, not just seven times, but seventy times seven!" And all the scholarly folks tell us that that was a way, numerically, of indicating that there was really no practical limit to forgiveness. We're never off the hook. Ouch, pretty harsh, huh?

Or how about Mark 10:2-5: Some Pharisees came to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to divorce her." But Jesus said to them, "It was because of your hardness of heart that he wrote this command for you. But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 'That is why a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh." So they are no longer two, but one flesh. For that reason, Jesus says, "What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." Back in the house, the disciples asked him about this again. So he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery." Double ouch!

There's more. During the mountainside discourse we've come to call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told a society which excluded the physically handicapped from the Temple environs to cut off their own hands or pluck out their own eyes if they cause them to sin, because it was better to enter heaven as a cripple than to be excluded whole. (We're still not sure what to do with that one.) He admonished an ethnic group that had once ruled the Middle East in great wealth under King David and Solomon and longed to reclaim its glory when the Messiah came that they should give no thought to what they should eat or wear but instead seek God's righteousness and let God take care of the rest. (Try quoting that one to the legions of your neighbors who are suffering from our economic follies in 2009.)

Jesus sought at every contrarian turn to impress upon his hearers the radical nature of the kingdom he was initiating by contrasting it in the sharpest possible terms with the kingdom the Messianic myth-makers had imagined for them.

He told Israel and by extension, all who seek salvation, not only that the Law was in full force, but that its provisions were far more demanding and severe than their rabbis had intimated. Such extremity caused Paul to exclaim, in his letter to the Romans, that "there is not one righteous, no not one, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." And those who heard Jesus say it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven asked in horror, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus answers: "With God, anything is possible." Even our salvation.

Jesus' entire life was a contrarian masterpiece. A contrast of extremes to illustrate an almost impossibly complex interweaving of sacred and profane that still defies our poor efforts to codify it into mechanical logic and simple steps on the one hand or magical mysterium on the other: The God born in a stable. The finite human who could die for the infinite sins of the whole world. The teacher who counted a tax collector among his followers but then took a whip to moneychangers in the Temple, who would eat dinner with the Pharisees and with those the Pharisee wouldn't acknowledge in the street. The Jewish rabbi who heaped scorn on Israel's religious elite then healed the daughter of a Roman centurion whose faith he had not seen among his own people. Who appeared after his resurrection first to two women among his followers, putting his appointed apostles second on the list. The One who would say that not one "jot or tittle" of the Law would pass away until all was fulfilled, then at almost every turn, turn the received wisdom inside out so that we could be changed from the inside out by the Spirit because we could not be changed from the outside in by the Law. The God/man, worthy of our worship yet tempted in all our ways and subject to all our weaknesses. The one to whom all power and authority has been given, and yet who was and is fully and ultimately submitted to his Father's will. The Savior who gave up His position and His freedom (he was not captured or detained against his will), so that we could be free. The One who would submit to death, and in so doing, utterly defeat and destroy it.

To be a follower of Christ is to live in the tension of attempting to find the balance between the righteous demands of the Law and reality of our freedom from its curse. Those who camp on one side of the divide inevitably fall into error. That's one reason why Paul insisted on unity in diversity (a contrarian notion if ever there was one). The Church, ideally, a willing assemblage of contrary folk who balance each other out on their common pilgrammage. It's always when that unity/diversity thing breaks down that the church gets into trouble. And as fragmented as it is, these days, it's clearly in big trouble.

Chase out all your contrarians, and your church becomes a cult. Or a monolithic institution run by an elite that slights its poor, or the rich, or the uneducated, or the educated, or its women, or whatever group(s) whose trait(s) do not happen to describe those at the top who make the decisions and wield the authority.

Cults and monoliths have dominated the religious landscape in the last century, and the Church is now hearing, again, from its contrarian children. May She find that ever shifting place somewhere in the radical middle, where saved sinners and sinners who need to be saved can find the acceptance and repentance, compassion and correction, freedom and responsibility, faith and works, exclusivity and inclusivity that are inseparable in the love and grace of Him who faithfully contradicts all we think we know about Him so that we can come to know Him truly.

Susan Boyle

If you haven't heard the name, you're more computer-challenged than I am, and you have my deepest sympathies. I haven't provided the link, but you won't need one. Simply type in "Susan Boyle video," in your browser's search window and hit return. (I'll wait.)

People say the Internet is the Great Leveler. It's Communication for the Common Man. Certainly its the haven for everyone who ever wanted his or her 15 minutes of fame. The online world is positively awash with MySpacing Facebookers who twitter and tweet and text each other incessantly, as they await their moment on YouTube. Talent is not required. This week, however, the Internet proved its worth, again, as a stage for real talent that isn't packaged in pubescent perfection or bought-with-Botox beauty.

Susan Boyle is a 47-year old woman from Scotland. She looks .... well, like most of us. Not Angelina Jolie. Not Brad Pitt. Since she was 15, she says, she's wanted to be a professional singer. Instead, she cared for her ailing mother until she died. Now she lives alone with her cat and, until this week, sang mostly for the smallish crowd at the local pub, with a karaoke machine as her back-up band. Hasn't made a dime. By her own admission, she's "never been kissed."

After a single, seven-minute appearance on Britain's Got Talent six days ago, during which she presumably used up half of her 15 minutes, spunky Ms. Boyle endured chuckles and rolling eyes and earned cheers and a standing ovation, impressing even the almost impossible to please impressario Simon Cowell. Videos of her turn signing "I Dreamed a Dream" (from the stage musical Les Miserables) streamed onto the Internet. More than 25 million hits and counting. A week later, she's famous not only in Great Britain, but all over the world.

Just today, someone turned up a charity CD on which she sang a single song a decade ago. Google "Susan Boyle Cry Me a River," then picture Lena Horne or almost any other famous voice who's sung a similar song in the last 70 years. Oh, my! What a voice.

No money yet, but that will surely follow. Simon Cowell will no doubt see to that, even if she doesn't win the competition. But for now, she's captured the hearts of every plain old nobody whose talents are wrapped in brown paper but still dreams a dream.

Hope she finds that first kiss, too.

Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 3

I've confessed to and defined contrarianism and suggested a general genesis for this under-appreciated tendency, but so far it's been about contrarians as a group. What about me?

Although I remain (necessarily) open to the idea that I'm contrarian in my DNA (yes, my father was one), I suspect he and I became contrarians largely as a result of our religious upbringing. Dad was the preacher's kid, and had all the unhappy experiences a P.K. could have in a small, conservative Mennonite community in South Central Kansas, where everyone knows who you are you and news of anything you do gets back to the church board.

Like my dad, I grew up in the Christian church. Or so I've often said. But recently, I've come to realize, appallingly late, that that is an inaccurate statement for several reasons:

• First, and most importantly, I did little "growing up" in the church. (I'll have more to say about that another time.)
• Second, I didn't do this growing up within a fairly narrow, distinctly protestant/rationalist and thorough-goingly American slice of a splintered church that is as variegated, divided and at war with itself as the world it claims to be here to save. We referred to ourselves as evangelical Christians. The rest of the church and the world, especially in the last couple of decades, have suggested other, less complimentary names for us — not entirely without cause.
  
• Third, I became associated for a number of years with an organization that claimed to represent The Church but often obscured the real church from view. We self-proclaimed evangelicals were, of course, right, and the rest were wrong and, therefore, we had little real contact with other brands of Christianity.
• Fourth, the theologies of the evangelical churches (yes, plural — there are many, which tends to blunt each sub-brand's truth claims) with which I was associated were unfortunately malignant mixes of what I still believe are timeless, eternal truths with time-bound, temporal, cultural conservatism tainted by racism and class bigotry, marred by misogyny and despoiled by a surprisingly pervasive undercurrent of unaddressed sexual dysfunction and gender confusion.
  

Evangelical theologies proved to be true Gordian knots that resisted even the most dedicated contrarians' efforts to untie. If you took another tack or pointed out an alternative, you were "stepping out from under authority" — the "umbrella" of which, we were told, was very small, indeed). If you actively opposed one of the more sacred tenets (by this I mean, something truly critical like, say, you didn't think it was absolutely necessary to have a "quiet time" every day or you were in the habit of not showing up to the "optional" campus chapel service), you could very well be in league with ... you know who. Contrarians weren't welcome.

A Gordian knot, of course, cannot be untied. It seems a truism that those who wish, finally, to grow up in such churches must begin that process (as did a legendary Alexander the Great) by cutting the knot — a decision that it takes a reasonably healthy contrarian to make without plunging headlong into an even more dangerous brew of belief and misbelief or losing faith altogether.

It's a decision one can make only when one finally realizes an obvious and, therefore, almost universally overlooked fact: Jesus is, yes ... a contrarian. (More in Part 4.)

Confessions of a Contrarian, Part 2

Last time, I admitted to being a contrarian and celebrated the contrarian's role in a world too full of those who are too sure they're right and everyone else is wrong. But ... what is a contrarian?

As the term suggests, folks thus afflicted tend to be contrary. Yes, they can be a bit Eeyore-ish, seeing the rain cloud when others are focusing only on the silver lining. They can appear, to those who do not know them, to have a negative attitude toward life. And for that reason, they often are mistaken for curmudgeons or misanthropes.

If those accusations were true, however, they could not be contrarians. Contrarians, in fact, are often hopeful and caring people. They are just as likely to point out the silver lining when others are under a cloud. And they are more likely to take issue with a friend than someone they don't know (or who does not know them), precisely because they are anything but misanthropic.

So, how does one become a contrarian? There's no easy answer to that, because it's a chicken-and-the-egg thing: Which came first? Are we contrarian by nature, and just can't help ourselves? Or have we come into a world owned by the overly sure overlords of rightness, and thus been forced to become contrarians in an attempt to find some kind of balance?

I lean toward the latter option because balance is the contrarian's bottom line. Contrarians aren't argumentative for argument's sake. They aren't trying to win. They seek, instead, a middle ground, a level playing field, a fair airing of a subject's undiscovered complexity, a more thoughtful, less doctrinaire dialogue.

And they will take positions that are quite different from the ones they actually hold, to remind the other that there is always another side to a one-sided discussion. They want the other to leave the scene with a broader perspective, a sense that there may be more to it than they had suspected.

As you might suspect, there is more to this contrarian apologetic. Next time.

Confessions of a Contrarian

A recent article in this past Sunday's New York Times captured my interest and reminded me about something I rarely own up to: I am a contrarian.

The article profiled Freeman Dyson (great first name), the most celebrated of today's small group of scientists who do not accept the current dogma on Global Warming. Dyson is not, as might be imagined, one to pooh-pooh concern for the environment. On the contrary, he is passionately dedicated to responsible use of the environment. Nor is he a crackpot. He is, in fact, one of the most accomplished scientists of his generation. He is, however, inclined to pooh-pooh science used inappropriately, even in support of a good cause.

Global Warming could be all that those who postulate its presence claim it to be. It could be entirely our fault (the result of excessive CO2 in the upper atmosphere, the result, in turn, of our excessive use of hydrocarbon fuels) and the greatest threat yet to our continued existence on this planet.

Alternatively it could be a significant threat that will surely change the way we live and upset the current environmental balance, thus significantly altering things — all things — leaving nothing as we know it now. Disruptive, to be sure, but not catastrophically destructive.

Or it could be a primarily natural occurrence — a continuation of a cycle of warming and cooling that the earth has experienced for far longer than we've had the ability to record history, one which we contribute to by burning hydrocarbons, but one that would happen in any case, no matter what we did.

Or, what we perceive as global warming could be a temporary, and relatively benign, wobble in a much longer warming/cooling cycle, a wobble that poses no serious or imminent threat.

Reasonable cases can be made for each position. Cases that account for the data we possess. (Keep in mind that the scientific claims on which global warming hinges involve a one degree difference in the average annual temperature recorded on Earth.)

Dyson pooh-poohs the idea that we can confidently extrapolate from meteorological evidence recorded over a tiny slice of geological time (one source says since 1847) sufficient evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt any of these theories. He believes that much of the dire claims and warnings Al Gore recorded in his celebrated film are, for all he knows, just so much pooh-pooh. Gore could be right but he could just as easily be wrong. Dyson's basic contention (one I share) is that we just don't know. We simply don't have sufficient data.

Dyson performs the entirely necessary if disruptive service of the contrarian, loudly proclaiming, as a means of pursuing much needed balance, some heresy in the face of the rising tide of scientific certitude.

Personally, I have no problem with people believing that continuing to drive their gas-guzzling cars and denude the world of its forests will kill them. Fear is a pretty strong motivation. So if that's what it takes to motivate people to change, then so be it. We need to stop doing both (and a lot of other foolish things), and the sooner the better, for lots of good reasons (the fact that pollution is demonstrably bad for your health and is, therefore, killing you, for one) that have nothing to do with global warming.

But I don't think people need to believe a lie to do the right thing. And peddling a half-truth or a suspected truth as absolute truth may get things done in the short term, but I think that history testifies loud and clear that a lie, even in support of truth, ultimately tarnishes the truth. Truth that is not entirely true — that is mere supposition or assumption masquerading as truth, is often the worst kind of lie.

More power, then, to contrarians everywhere, who dare to question the received wisdom, sometimes at great cost, when "experts" get so sure of themselves that they no longer ask the questions that got them where they are.

The Absurdity of the "Quality of Life" Debate

This article from BBC News, in which a medical ethicist weighs in on a U.K "right to life" case under adjudication in the British courts, reminds us of the essential futility of making decisions in such cases based on so-called "quality of life."

The case concerns a small child afflicted with a terminal disease. The doctors were suing for the right to discontinue treatment and withdraw life support because they believed the child is subject to "intolerable suffering." The father, a Muslim, believes that the right to take a life belongs to God, not humankind, and the mother contends that, in any case, the child's life is not without its compensatory pleasures. The court, for the moment, has sided with the parents. But the case, whichever way it ultimately falls out, will further reinforce a legal precedent that is dangerous, misguided and patently immoral.

The crux of the issue is the impossibility of adequately defining life's quality. In an age when the requirements of the simple business contract can be argued in court for decades, the very idea that a satisfactory legal definition for what constitutes "quality of life" could ever be forged is absurd. The medical ethicist in this case admits as much when he says (italics mine):

Intolerable suffering is not an objective criterion. Suffering, like pleasure, is a purely subjective experience and there exists no scientific instrument that shows exactly how much an individual is suffering.

In that case, how is it, then, that we continue to pursue such a definition? In his very next sentence, the ethicist finds what he thinks is a partial answer, noting that the only way to know for sure whether a person's suffering is "intolerable" is to ask him/her, which, in the current case, is not possible.

The problem with that, of course, is that I have experienced what I judged (at the time) to be intolerable suffering. And I know many others who have as well. By this man's definition, people afflicted with chronic depression, for example, could tell us at a point of pain, that we need to help him/her end that painful life, and we'd be bound to do it. (That, of course, is the position of the so-called "Right to Die" lobby.) But of course, the world is full of people who are glad that they didn't drive off that cliff, take those pills, pull the trigger or otherwise initiate the end of their own life but instead were prevented form doing so by caring family and/or friends or, on their own, grasped hold of their will to live and let it pull them out of intolerable suffering.

We are no better judges of what's best for us when we're in pain than anyone else would be. And this line of argument has no bearing anyway on the rights of those, both born and unborn, who cannot yet express themselves.

"Quality of life" is inherently one of the slipperiest of ethical slippery slopes, and one down which a society increasingly divorced from God or absolutes of any kind is doomed to go. The medical ethicist in this article, in fact, recognizes the vast, uncrossable gulf between the doctor/scientist, who only deals with what he can see and the parent, particularly the religious parent, who taps into what cannot be seen. He even admits that no one can fault the parents in question:

For the parents, these pleasures are sufficient to constitute a worthwhile life. Based on these beliefs, their decision to fight for their son's ongoing treatment is understandable. Indeed, we would be deeply concerned if anyone with these beliefs willingly allowed their child to die.

Indeed. But then he goes on to make this astonishing statement:

Although commentators have expressed much sympathy for the parents, they have generally overlooked the moral challenges for the medical team. In the doctor's eyes, by continuing to treat Baby MB with painful and futile measures, they are treating a vulnerable child against his best interests and violating a basic tenet of medical practice: first, do no harm Ironically, in these spacial circumstances, it is keeping the child alive that constitutes the harm.

Really!??! Since the greatest harm they could do (particularly from the point of view of the scientist who holds no belief in an afterlife) is to end its existence, it is arguably the lesser evil to treat him. Sorry, that seems to me to be pretty simple. In fact, it is foundational to every legal system that those who end the life of an innocent, and the act was premeditated, have committed murder. But our ethicist persists:

The child's neurologist, Dr S, said: "I have been feeling that what I have been doing as a doctor has been wrong for many months, which is a very difficult position for me to be in." The wrongness lies not only in acting against his conscience (which is distressing enough), but in being complicit in a child's profound and avoidable suffering. It is no surprise that some of the doctors have expressed a reluctance to carry on treating Baby MB if the ruling goes against them — which it now has.

Well, there you have it: This is a case of the medical community "feeling" like its in a "difficult" position and therefore, insisting on its right to relief from its own suffering. And, he suggests, the doctors are not sure they're willing to comply with the court's judgment, despite the fact that the court has ruled against them in accordance with the "quality of life" criteria they claim to live by.

If today's medical ethicists have their way, the world will eventually be robbed of the greatness, even the genius, that is wrought, in part, by people who fight intolerable suffering and handicap and survive to contribute much to the world's more fortunate and less pain stricken. What would the world be without a Steven Hawking? Or, to turn it around, a Mother Theresa, who believed that loving and comforting and valuing those in pain made more sense than to kill them. Who in fact, gave up what could have been a nice life like yours or mine to devote herself to those in intolerable pain?

The answer is, it would be a world in which the weakest, smallest and most vulnerable would be done away with by the powerful who, as a consequence of their own weakness, smallness and vulnerability, would presume to deteremine another's ultimate value.

Hasn't the world had enough of that already?

Watching Watchmen

"Who is watching the Watchmen?"

The answer this weekend is lots of people. A much anticipated film adaptation of this now legendary graphic novel premiered in thousands of theaters Friday. Hotly debated in the entertainment press even before the first trailers appeared, the film was declared a sure failure by purists (called fanboys), disowned by its author and doubted by critics who consider the novel's dense, flashback-laden, multilayered story-within-a-story structure and fantastic imagery unfilmable. Indeed, the film's director, Zack Taylor, had been preceded by many who attempted then abandoned Watchmen film projects.

An unashamed fanboy himself, Taylor spent much time during the film's post-production period explaining and defending his vision of the book as film, reassuring fans that he would be faithful to the original. People went to the theater either in fearful anticipation, hoping for the best, or out of morbid curiosity, unwilling to pass up the chance to discuss a good train wreck over a latte.

How I came to be among the legion of Watchmen watchers Friday night and write this review deserves some explanation. Let me first say that I come late to the party. Until this past Christmas, I had never heard of Watchmen and had only the sketchiest notion of what a graphic novel was (a glorified comic book, right?). But I had determined to get my younger son, who requested only video games for gifts this year, at least one book. At the local book store, the yellow cover and its blood-spattered "happy face" badge caught my eye, and I just had to look. I didn't buy it right then, but did do some research. Turns out I had had in my hands what more than one reviewer called "the most celebrated graphic novel of all time," one that no less than Time magazine had named to its list of 100 Greatest Novels written in the past century. Well. So ... I took a chance.

Written by semi-reclusive Alan Moore, a self-described anarchist and comic book industry demi-god, Watchmen is considered his and that industry's masterpiece. In it, Moore, a Briton, creates a parallel universe version of the U.S. in 1985, in which Richard Nixon was not dethroned by Watergate, we won the Vietnam War, the comic book heroes have character flaws of the sort usually reported in supermarket tabloids, the still-raging Cold War is threatening to get nuclear hot, and a government experiment gone wrong has created a neon-blue superhuman who sees the future and could save the world or destroy it.

Moore envisions America gone mad for crime, sex and drugs after the second generation of a vigilante crime-fighting group formed in the 1940s to clean up America is forced to disband in the 1970s. His unmasked and decaped crew includes the Nite Owl (who still visits his underground lair in an abandoned subway tunnel, where his hovercraft and armored hero suit gather dust; Silk Specter (the daughter of the 1940's original); the embittered Comedian, who embarks on a second career doing government dirty work; and the regal, aloof Ozymandias, reputedly the world's smartest man and one of its richest, as well, having written a tell-all book and reaped the rewards of merchandising his former identity. As the story opens, the sinister Rorshach, an outcast, even among his fellow hero has-beens, and a suspected psychotic, investigates the Comedian's murder. From there, Moore's ingeniously conceived dark plot and complex, chilling characterizations coupled with famed illustrator Dave Gibbons' no-pen-stroke-wasted illustrations draw you into a can't-put-it-down encounter with a creative imagination way ahead of its time. Sometimes cynical, other times sympathetic, Moore's enigmatic commentary on the human condition has earned its high place in the pantheon of popular literature. He asks the question with which I began this review, and leaves us to comtemplate its implications.

So far, however, this is a book review. And I am among those who, having read the book first, rarely think the movie version compares well. But director Taylor's effort proved to be an admirable exception, despite some probably inevitable shortcomings. Visually, the film is startling and stunningly faithful to Gibbon's vision. Gibbon, in fact, was on hand to help Taylor and a small army of CG technicians recreate Moore's dark world and his masked characters with the kind of obsessive faithfulness to detail that was simply not available to film makers of previous generations. And the script writers managed to include in their screenplay much of the story's interwoven fabric, by deftly rearranging and carefully abbreviating lengthier flashbacks and dialogue taken from the book. Nevertheless, several of the book's more inventive devices are missing. The saddest omission is that of a parallel terror tale involving a doomed pirate that illuminates Moore's main narrative. (Ironically, its told in a comic book read by a bit character who haunts a local newstand.) Despite a number of missing elements, the movie is long by Hollywood standards (2 hrs, 43 min), but as I told my son on the way home in the car, I'd have sat through four hours to get more of the book on film.

That said, the film is faithful, at least in spirit, to the story original and, fanboy critic protestations notwithstanding, it delivers. It made me laugh, recoil in horror and relate in all the right places, and think about bigger things, as Moore intended. And it moved me to tears twice — something the book did not do. Taylor's excision of the "aliens" element at the end (can't say more without a spoiler alert) is, in my opinion, an improvement not a problem. Whether its a winner at the box office or not (early returns favor the former), it'll certainly collect my $26.95 for the deluxe two-disc boxed set when it comes out on DVD.

Bottomline? I suspect that Watchmen will narrowly miss the cut as great art when my son's son's kids look back. And its dark vision, violence and nudity (the movie is rated "R") will put some people off. Let me also make clear that I do not necessarily agree with Moore's cataclysmic vision of life on earth nor do I subscribe to the remedy the story's unlikely hero/villian ultimately implements for its troubles. (In the ironic final scene, Moore suggests his own ambivalence.) But the book and the film are an important window into the philosophical universe inhabited by this generation — a generation that has confronted, recoiled from and begun to accept its shadow side earlier than most, yet still believes that truth — even dark truth — is worth fighting for and a dying world of broken people is worth saving.