Midlife Meditation

No, he can't really get away with murder. He just thinks he can. Nothing says "Trump" like impunity. The man blusters, blows, blabs as if he believes himself to be untouchable. With his entire regime under federal investigation, he regularly self-incriminates via the Twitter account his handlers have struggled in vain to regulate. By the reckoning of the  New York Times  he will, by the end of his first year in office, have told well over a hundred bald-faced lies , many of them repeatedly and with a clear effort to convince his most rabid followers of their veracity. In contrast, the  Times  found that, over the course of his entire Presidency, Barack Obama had told at most 16 falsehoods. Arriving at that number meant, in some cases, stretching the definition of falsehood to include exaggeration. On top of that, when notified he had been caught in a lie, Obama was quick to apologize and correct the error. Trump's response is to double down and insist all the ...

I rarely post memes, but this one grabbed me, and went straight to my Facebook feed: The issue addressed by the meme is a case before the Supreme Court: Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker and owner of Masterpiece Cakes, refused to bake a custom wedding cake for two men on the grounds that he was religiously opposed to gay marriage. Colorado has a non-discrimination law that applies to businesses, and the couple complained to the state's Civil Rights Division, which found Phillips to be in violation of the statute. Phillips has now appealed that decision to the highest level, and sometime in the next year, we will learn whether public businesses can discriminate against protected minorities by appealing to the First Amendment. The case is complicated by many factors, including the conflict it presents between the freedoms of expression and religion, and the right of state governments to offer a higher standard of protection to historically victimized minorities than that provid...

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, Washington, D.C. Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.  Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. These words come from a sermon by Theodore Parker, a Unitarian Minister, Transcendentalist, and Abolitionist. They first saw print in a collection of sermons published in 1853, and, quoted by essayists, preachers, and politicians, were ultimately boiled down to this aphorism: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." In that form, the quote found its way into the sermons of many a pr...

A perfect fit. Birds of a feather, peas in a pod, two putrid tastes that taste even worse together, a match made in the second, fourth, and sixth circles of hell : ex-Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore and President Donald J. Trump. The two have so much in common: an utter disregard for common decency, contempt for the U.S. Constitution, the fanatical embrace of the most deplorable segments of the American electorate, a steadfast conviction that the norms and laws of 21st Century American culture do not apply to them, impulsively violating those laws and norms with impunity, and a predilection for accosting, ogling, and fondling attractive women without their consent--including some so young they couldn't legally give it if they wanted to. No wonder Trump has, after weeks of squirming under the counsel of his staff and Congressional allies, enthusiastically endorsed the racist demagogue in his campaign to fill Jeff Sessions's Senate seat. In the process, Trump has d...

Garrison Keillor during a performance with the Seattle Symphony The list continues to grow. Pixar's John Lasseter. NBC's Matt Lauer. And now, just minutes ago, Garrison Keillor. Add them to the shameful snowball of probable sexual harassers whose careers in the media have been endangered, if not ended, by allegations of inappropriate conduct around co-workers and employees. Lauer lost his job with the Today Show yesterday. Last night, I saw Lasseter's name in the credits of a movie that moved and amazed me-- Coco --and found the wonder I'd felt at its craftsmanship and humanity tainted by thoughts about how he'd abused his power to make unwelcome advances. And today, eating lunch in a hospital cafeteria (as I write this, Amy is having bi-lateral knee replacement surgery), the headline about Keillor popped up in my news feed: he'd been fired by Minnesota Public Radio, a powerhouse of thoughtful audio content whose reputation rests almost entirely o...

Al Franken. Roy Moore. Donald Trump. Louis CK. Charlie Rose. Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Jeffrey Tambor. George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton. Clarence Thomas. Dustin Hoffman.  That's just the names that pop into my head at this moment. You know what they've got in common: every one of them has been accused of touching women without their consent. There's a spectrum of misbehavior--some are serial offenders who've broken laws; others playful gropers who got just a little too handsy; still others sick people who need psychiatric help. Some have issued deep apologies. Others have spun stories. Some have threatened to sue. Some are Democrats, some Republicans, some defy partisan labels. But back to the commonalities: they're all men. More specifically, they're middle-aged and older men. They're men with power: actors, prominent comedians, members of Congress, news anchors, judges, Presidents of the United States. Something about the power they had led ...

Is his apology sincere? Does it matter? Before becoming a Senator, Al Franken had a life in entertainment. Wait, it gets worse: he wasn't just an entertainer. He was a comedian. Worse still, much of his career was spent writing for the often disappointingly unfunny Saturday Night Live. In fact, my first and only consistent experience of SNL , during my freshman and sophomore years of college, came as the original cast was falling away, leaving just Franken to carry on. His appearances on camera then were limited to the midnight "Weekend Update" news bit, where he played a comedically exaggerated version of himself doing commentary on the "Me Decade." I loved these moments, which were frequently the only funny bits in an entire 90 minutes of misfires. They were thoughtful and clever, the whole joke hinging on the insertion of his name into a rhetorical question, thus changing its meaning from the general to the specific. He'd summarize a current po...

Yes, these guys, too. Three thousand years ago, the founders of Judaism had a breakthrough. It concerned a common practice in Bronze Age religion: the use of an item--a carving, sculpture, painting, found object, it didn't really matter what it was, just as long as it was visible and touchable--to enhance the religious experience, granting the worshipper some kind of tangible connection with the deity. The spiritually enlightened understood that these items were simply tools, aids in deepening the believers' experience of the ineffable. Unfortunately, trapped as they were in their tangible bodies, taking in information through the tangible senses that were all they had, humans quickly came to mistake idols for gods. But idols are not gods. Made, as they were, of impermanent materials--wood, clay, stone, forgeable metal, canvas, paint--idols wore out. Drop the idol and it might dent or shatter; bring it too close to a sacrificial flame and it might be consumed; leave ...

I knew I wanted an opening image that combined the American flag with a Bible, but until I googled it, I had no idea something this perfect existed. Yes, this is a thing. It's available on Amazon. It's not just Bible wrapped in a flag cover, mind you: it's the God's Glory Bible , and it's the King James Version (known in Britain as the Authorized Version), so it's all written in the language of the empire the creators of that flag revolted against. And all that irony is, I suspect, completely lost on the people who will plunk down $39.99 to own it. I googled the image because I've had a Trumped-up controversy on my mind. I've already written (was it really just seven weeks ago? Seems much longer...) about the Trumped-up controversy around NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem , and I thought I'd said all I needed to at the time. But then I spent four days in Texas, and it all came flooding back: the three years I spent tread...

Mourners in Sutherland Springs, Texas There is no conference like an Orff conference. When music educators who practice the Orff philosophy gather, we celebrate. We play, sing, dance, laugh, and rejoice in the incredible privilege of sharing our love of music with children. For three days last week, that's what we did, and in every way except one, it was exactly the conference we all needed in this Age of Trump. That one exception, though, was huge: this was the first time I've ever known a conference to begin with the host telling us what to do in the event of an active shooter. The announcement could very well have happened anywhere the conference was held. It came, after all, just weeks after the worst mass shooting in American history--and just days after the second-worst shooting. In each case, a white American used assault weapons to slaughter innocent people who had gathered to celebrate. In the first instance, they were attending a music festival in Las V...