How good is any story?  Logic dictates that it would be impossible to assess while the story is being created.  Only after the finish will someone else, in the telling of the story, know the quality of the tale.  Whether something qualifies as a story or not depends upon the teller and the audience who listen.  How many times must Homer have recited the verses of the great expedition from Attica to the plain of Troy?  Does the tale shed light on the context, upon the life-situation of the audience, offering clues, illumination on the pathway out of the dark wood?

I think the story of Ford vs Ferrari is a great story.  Carroll Shelby died in 2012 at 89.  Only in retrospect is it possible to judge the greatness of the tale.  How iconic of an era was the development of the GT 40 race car,  the chemistry of two strong personalities in friendship and the friction involved with Ford Motor Company which was approaching the apogee of the industrial age.

Did the story teller take liberties with the facts?  Almost certainly.  Would the CEO of a major corporation get into a race car on the fly, without a fair amount of preparation?  I doubt it.  Yet that segment highlights the yawning gap between the world of the executive suite and the grit, the hair-raising hazard of track-side race car development.

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All of which is to say that I had a troubled night of sleep this past evening.  The cause may have been my viewing of NPRs showing of the 1970 Rock Opera by Andrew Lord Webber and Tim Rice of Jesus Christ Superstar.  I know I arrived to the show, almost 50 years late.  Likely you experienced Jesus Christ Superstar some years ago.  I greatly enjoyed many elements of the television special, the special effects and stage craft, a post-modern treatment using construction scaffolding, the costuming a blend of flowing robes and dark leather great coats, reminiscent of Star Wars, Darth Vader-like.  The costuming left no doubt as to which characters were innocent, politically naive and inclined toward “the good.”  And there was the priestly class, and the ruling politicos with ties to the real power of Rome which was palpably present.  You don’t have to guess the image which they presented.

As enjoyable as it was, (who would not delight in viewing John Legend sing), the very concept of the Webber and Rice work was troubling.  The rock opera was the story of a story, the tale of a peasant, working-class carpenter, living in a small town in a small country under the colonial rule of a great power.  As with all great powers, law and order was guaranteed by military presence, and the threat of deadly force exercised by the great power.  Jesus had the misfortune of gaining enough of a following for his message of egalitarian peace and love, to attract the attention of the authorities.  Naturally his ideas gained traction in a society conditioned by a sharp awareness of mortality, and the swift brutal exercise of Roman military power.  Jesus received the same treatment that any originator of a populist movement would have received from the Roman procurator.  He was crucified.  Those are the bare facts as I understand them.

Yet there is a great deal more going on in the New Testament stories, as is suggested by some famous lyric lines from the rock opera:

“Jesus Christ Superstar, do you think you are who they say you are?”

The backstory to the reportage of the bare facts, is that the message of the ill fated carpenter is wrapped in the shiny wrapper of late antiquity son-of-god notions of divinity replete with miracles, and a final super-miracle of his own resurrection.  The straightforward message that equality between all members of humanity, and reciprocal solicitude as a way forward, was not enough.

The message has to be enhanced with the accoutrements of institutional religion.  Could such embellishment be necessary if one has a product that one wants to sell? A suffocated, lifeless Jesus covered with sweat and gore is repulsive. That is, unless you clean him up on a crucifix and elevate him upward, slowly into a heaven of blinding light, — as was the concluding scene in the musical television special…..

The stories about Jesus in the four gospels,  his message  — is the foundation of Western democracy and society: the sacrosanct status of the individual, freedom of speech, the rule of law and reason rather than rule by decree, etc.  This is the main strand, amalgamated with other historical influences that has served the West and all of humanity well.  I am troubled that what was for generations regarded as sacred, inscribed in existential awareness of everyone, — is conceived as a piece of really good entertainment.  In the story as told in the original edition, Jesus labels organized religion a “den of thieves” something scandalously monetized, and then he cleans house.  Nowadays a major religious denomination is widely regarded a den of pedophiles.

Perhaps it is as well that I got around to experiencing Jesus Christ Superstar some 50 years late.

The wheels came off that story a long time ago.