Author: WarrenBluhm

Warren Bluhm is an award-winning community journalist, twice winner of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s prestigious Robert T. Wright Memorial Award as the best local columnist in the state. His voice was heard in thousands of radio newscasts from Green Bay to Ripon for 22 years, and his words were featured in thousands of newspaper editions for more than a quarter-century after that. He has had a digital presence since 2005 with blog posts he has collected in 10 books to date, and he has seven additional works and collections of his fiction.

Great anticipations

I am just a little bit older than Godzilla. I was a year and a half old when Gojira was released Nov. 3, 1954. Late this afternoon, I plan to sit down in a comfortable chair and watch the first local showing of the latest film in the series, Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to Godzilla Minus One, the first in the 72-year franchise that moved me to tears.

Three years ago I was electrified by the story as I watched it up on the big screen. I walked out of the theater dazed, struck by lightning. It was the most important Godzilla movie since the first one as director Takashi Yamazaki dragged the franchise back to its serious and horrific roots.

The early spoiler-free reviews suggest that the new film may be even better, continuing the big themes that separated Minus One from almost everything that came before.

That 2023 film wasn’t only about a giant monster stomping on buildings, although it did win an Oscar for those special effects. The film was about recovering from war, overcoming shame and devastation, everyday humans rallying against a daunting adversary, building family, building friendships, and of course, “Those of us who survived the war are meant to live.”

Yamazaki leaned into the idea of Godzilla as a metaphor for the nuclear bomb and made a profoundly anti-war film, and that theme above all lifted his movie above the rest of the Godzilla canon, standing beside only the original 1954 entry.

Humanity will advance when it overcomes its monsters and beats its swords into plowshares once and for all. It could be that the monsters will plague us to the end of time with countless sequels, but we do have hope. The ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have kept that monster at bay for 81 years, and may it always be simply a metaphor played out with CGI effects and not actual blood and gore, never unleashed into reality again.

We have a responsibility to live, to overcome the challenges and make a difference. Godzilla Minus One made a difference; I’m hoping that Yamazaki’s lightning has struck a second time.

Back to the basics

It’s late Tuesday night and I turned off the TV after getting a sense of it all. One-party rule has been established in my beloved Wisconsin, and our political trends have tended to spread across the nation over the past 15-20 years, and so … well, you see the illustration I chose for today.

I keep hearing the sage words of the philosopher Tom Petty: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.” I also keep hearing George Lucas’ wise words as voiced by Natalie Portman in Revenge of the Sith: “This is how liberty dies: To thunderous applause.” On the other hand, I have found over the years that Petty has been right more often than Lucas, and so I will try not to worry.

And that is enough about that.

With a minor revision or two, I am going to draw the rest of today’s post from a piece I wrote in July 2024, another time when I’d had enough of the puppet theater and resolved to make this space a politics-free zone.

What would I write about if I eschew politics and government as a topic?

Well, I have already spent a great deal of time emphasizing a very anti-political thought: “Love your neighbor, and everyone is your neighbor.” That’s certainly still a theme worth exploring.

And while I’m drawing a thought from the New Testament, there are plenty of directions I could go with this: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

And, of course, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

I think I would like, from this day forward, to make this a safe space, where the theme is first and foremost, “Let’s love, neighbor, and pursue whatever is lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy in a spirit of joy, peace, kindness and all those other fruits.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel healthier already.

We are born free

My inevitable tour of antisocial media Monday showed a lot of posts intended to get out the vote. None of them had a positive message; it was all “If my opponent wins, the country as we know it cannot survive.” There are no honorable humans to vote for, only scoundrels to vote against. After a while you begin to believe it’s all true and they’re all scoundrels.

It may be true that the ruling class is packed with greedy humans whose main focus is to enrich themselves on the backs of the people they claim to represent and serve. It may be true that the government is always finding new and creative ways to drain our bank accounts and steal our civil liberties.

But Mr. Jefferson spoke truth when he said we are each born with rights endowed by our Creator, and no matter how hard the ruling class strives to abridge those liberties, they can never succeed because they’re fighting the will of God. They may just as well pass a law that says the sun may not rise in the morning.

Freedom does not depend on choosing the right ruler. Freedom is a gift we are given at birth that we may willingly relinquish but can never be taken. Freedom is an internal trait that may be governed (another word for restricted or abridged) but never extinguished.

Whenever tyranny raises its ugly head, it will meet resistance. You can lead someone to the Kool-Aid, but you can’t force him to drink. You can coax and cajole and torture and worse, but you can’t make a person any less free. You may hoodwink them into believing otherwise, but they always have the choice to refuse shackles.

Of course there are no kings here, at least not mortal ones. There is only the King of Kings.

Election Day is an interesting exercise, but it does not replace forces of darkness with forces of light. The choice is always between the lesser of two evils, and so evil will win this round. The battle between light and dark will continue tomorrow, but light will win in the end. Salvation is not found by following the lesser of two evils but by seeking the God of love.