Midlife Meditation

He certainly likes to show off executive orders. Congratulations, Bill Maher. Your lifelong dream has come true: the United States of America has an atheist President. Of course, Maher, being a principled atheist, will insist that Trump's lack of knowledge of or interest in religion does not make him an atheist. The President is not actively anti-Christian; much to the contrary, he insists his faith credentials are as legitimate as anyone who's occupied the Oval Office. He has to: evangelical Christians are a large part of his base. During the election, he actively courted their votes, reaching out to readers of the Christian Right who, after endorsing him, sought to downplay his obvious discomfort with fundamental Christian values like charity, mercy, and tolerance, not to mention his long record of marital infidelity and sexual assault. He'll get us the Supreme Court, they said, and that means overturning Roe V. Wade, protecting religious homophobia, revivi...

First things first: there are few things I enjoy as much as my weekly dose of Bill Maher. Real Time , Bill Maher's politics/celebrity chat/comedy hour, appears every Friday on HBO. Maher has been playing this game for two decades, putting together panels of pundits, politicians, and celebrities to discuss whatever current events are of interest to him, mingling them with comedy bits, and closing out the hour with a commentary that is always thoughtful, often hilarious, and occasionally moving. When it aired on ABC, the show was called Politically Incorrect. Then Maher took things too far, insisting that the 9/11 terrorists may have been many things, but cowards they were not. Soon after that, he moved to HBO, where he was given much freer rein not just to say unpopular things, but to sprinkle them with four-letter words. There are times when the show devolves into a shouting match, as liberal and conservative voices try to talk over each other, and I find those moments frustrat...

I might be losing a lot of you with this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it: I hate bullying. Still reading? Because I really needed to get that off my chest. I know it's an unpopular position, but we can't all be bully lovers now, can we? If you read much of what I write, you probably know that I'm a Bill Maher fan. If you're not, because you think he can be a jerk, an asshole, reductionist, argumentative, confrontational, condescending--in sum, a bully, I completely get it. When he's engaged in bullying behavior, I don't care for it, not one bit. I don't like to see anyone, including bullies, being bullied; and now, I will not make allowances for him being a comedian, because I don't care for bully humor, no matter what the political persuasion of the comic. With that disclaimer out of the way, I will point out that the commentaries that conclude every episode of Real Time with Bill Maher  are some of the best op-ed pieces I see. (I say ...

"Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting." (Karl Wallenda) I doubt that the great Wallenda was talking about ambivalence, the condition of balancing two contradictory positions while working toward a decision. Most likely he was talking about the supreme focus required to move across a cable suspended in the air, a focus which, once obtained, renders the height of that cable irrelevant. I've never attempted such a thing--my balance has never been very good to begin with, and I have no desire to subject myself to the countless bruises it would require for me to teach my body otherwise--but I can certainly relate to the idea that to be utterly focused on a task is to be truly, powerfully alive. Writing, composing, performing, running, I have locked into a level of concentration that disengages me from clock-time, yet has me utterly aware of every relevant stimulus around me. I stop thinking, and simply act. Life on the wire is orders of magnitude better than life ...