Midlife Meditation

This is how I greeted kids arriving at the music room last week. It's come down to which uncle I'd rather have in charge of the country. I'm fond of Uncle Bernie. When there's a family argument, I can always count on Bernie to be on the right side of issues, and to argue his points vigorously and with unshakeable certainty. Bernie knows he's right, and when you're right, why even consider compromise? And Uncle Joe can be a bit foggy at times. He's not always sure what his position on issues is. He's spent so much of his life hashing out compromises that it can be hard to know where he stands on anything. Sometimes his faulty memory leads him to rattle off a story that just isn't true. One would think, then, that given Bernie's rectitude on so many moral and social issues, the choice should be easy. But stop a moment to consider what we're talking about here: the softest of sciences, politics. Even dealing with hard scientif...

St. John of Patmos, the Dragon, and the Beast Hey choir! Yes, I'm talking to you: the faithful few who are here every Sunday, come heaven or high holy water, up there in the loft waiting for your special moments to shine. You're the glue that holds this congregation together. Your nods, smiles, scowls, "Amens" and "watch yourself, preacher" are the applause sign on this variety show. You've seen it all, heard it all, since long before I entered this pulpit, and you'll be here for whoever fills it once I'm gone, and the next one after that, on and on until this church is no longer here. As reliable a core constituency as you are, you're still human. Sometimes you shine, sometimes you fall hard on your face, most of the time you're just normal folk like anyone out there in the pews. You need the magnifying glass of scripture too, convicting you of your shortcomings; and you need the word of grace, releasing you from the burden of g...

The subjects of Trump's latest assault on American values. There are so many ways to say "no" to this president. No, the four congresswomen you attacked are not going to be flown "home" by Nancy Pelosi to get them out of her hair. No, they're not foreigners, aliens, or even immigrants (even though one of them once was), they're citizens. No, the color of their skin does not make them any less American than invasive pink-skinned you. No, the act of criticizing this country is not unpatriotic (in fact, you did plenty of it during your own campaign). No, no, no, no, no. Since Donald Trump began his campaign with an attack on Mexican-Americans, "no" has been the prevailing message of every thoughtful pundit, regardless of political persuasion. No to the misogyny, the lying, the sabre-rattling, the racism, the rabble-rousing, the bluster, the threats, the incompetence, the corruption, the grifting and graft, the assaults on anything and eve...

Entrusting the governance of a nation to democracy is like turning a horse loose in a hospital: the best result that can be hoped for is that no one was severely injured. Reading the Constitution, it's easy to see just how skeptical the founders were of this system they'd chosen for the fledgling United States of America. They were in agreement of the principle that power should reside in the people, but they were unsure how to channel that power into governing authorities. Looking back on history, they could see that classical experiments in democracy had been limited to city states, and none of them had lasted long. For democratic government on a national scale, they had only Britain to compare themselves to, and that system's reliance on a hereditary monarchy was the very thing they had rebelled against. They'd also had several years to experiment with a weak central government, and the results had been so chaotic as to mandate a major revision of the ne...

Two tanks arrive for Trump's National Mall speech. In yet another you-can't-make-this-shit-up moment, Donald Trump delivered a hackneyed, mostly non-partisan address mainly to his biggest fans while flanked by two state-of-the-art yet obsolete war vehicles. Getting the tanks to the Lincoln Memorial entailed an enormous feat of engineering, as simply driving them through Washington would have caused extensive damage to streets and infrastructure. Instead, they had to be shipped first by rail, then on flatbed trucks on a carefully selected route to the Lincoln Memorial, where they were parked on pads designed to distribute the enormous weight and protect the surface underneath. As journalist and Iraq War veteran Elliot Wood points out in a New York Times op-ed, tanks are relics of a form of warfare that no longer exists.  These mobile bunkers were created to break the brutal, bloody stalemate that was trench warfare, and they accomplished that goal: World War II saw fa...

A Bradley fighting vehicle at the Lincoln Memorial. Lies told and retold without fear of consequence. Cabinet positions exploited for personal gain. Nepotism on an international scale. Children locked in cages. Journalists accused of treason. Truth labeled as fake news. Scientists marginalized. Polluting extractive industries subsidized and promoted. Democratic allies shoved aside while authoritarian murderers are lionized. And tomorrow, in just the latest abomination to be committed by the Trump regime, the traditionally non-partisan Capitol Mall Independence Day celebration transformed into a militaristic political rally for a populist demagogue who stumbled into office in not just an example, but the apotheosis of Murphy's Law. We're well beyond the point at which Washington has become a dark, satyrical parody of itself. The Republican party surrendered any last vestige of being a force for good shortly after Barack Obama was elected, when Mitch McConnell stated t...

Not nearly as scary as Trump wants you to think. It's been yet another time-dilated week, a week crammed with presidential verbal bullying, dehumanizing policy proposals, racist fear-mongering, and on top of all that, pipe bombs sent to prominent critics of the Trump regime, an arrest revealing the bomber to be a rabid Trump believer, and finally a synagogue massacre. That last atrocity was committed by a right-winger who believes Trump colludes with the Jews he mowed down with an assault rifle, but it's still of a piece with every other horror that has issued from the putrid mouth and thumbs of our monstrous accidental president. In an effort to escape the horror of the news cycle, Amy and I took advantage of a break in the weather to walk through a new development near our home. The neighborhood was still going up, and we passed several houses under construction. The carpenters' work was lent an air of festivity by the music they had playing: mariachi-style Mex...

No, it doesn't make me believe him--but maybe I'm weird. Once or twice a school day, one of the two hundred children I see makes a bad choice that results in another child being in tears. Classmates are quick to finger the perp, who initially will point at innocent bystanders as the true culprits. When that fails to impress me, the child will say something along the lines of "It was an accident" or "I didn't mean to." My response is consistent: whether or not you meant to hurt someone else, you did, and now you need to apologize. In some cases, the denials take on an angry edge, with raised voices and furious eyes accompanying the insistence of innocence. Sometimes this works, to an extent: I'll investigate further, wanting to be absolutely sure who was responsible for the incident. As often as not, though, the stridency of the protest correlates with the guilt of the protestor. The louder they deny, they guiltier they are. For much of my ...

First Lady Melania Trump visits Elmina, a Cape Coast slave castle. This means nothing. That's all I could think when I read of Melania Trump paying a visit to a slave castle and being moved by what she saw. I've been to that castle, both in 2014 and, again, three months ago as I concluded my second trip to Ghana. It's a shattering experience, seeing the horrific conditions slaves were kept in even before they were crammed into ships for the middle passage. Knowing about the abuse, torture, and murder experienced by untold millions of West Africans ought, if this were a just world, to transform the way we who are descended from the abusers live our lives every day, opening our hearts to the plight of refugees, immigrants, and impoverished people. If we took these lessons seriously, there would be no question but that our borders should be open, our nation generous, and our world utterly interdependent. Instead, we live in a country whose president makes it a habit t...

Neither of these men belongs in public office. Of all the candidates Republican presidents have nominated to the Supreme Court in my lifetime, Brett Kavanaugh is the least qualified. That list includes both Robert Bork, whose nomination was withdrawn once his then-too-extreme opinions became known, and Clarence Thomas, whose more-extreme-than-Bork views were nothing next to the extent of his inappropriate behavior around women. The extent of Kavanaugh's own history of sexual assault and alcohol abuse may never be known, unless the House of Representatives goes Democratic, and a genuinely thorough investigation is launched; but even without a full reckoning of his youthful history of beer-drenched recklessness and aggression, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have demonstrated, to any rational, principled legislator, that he has no business joining the court. Faced with credible accusations of both sexual and alcohol abuse, a qualified candidate w...

Antman and the Wasp is an enjoyable summer movie, a lovely palate cleanser after the loud, gloomy, and commercially cynical (of course they're not killing off all those franchises! Money!)  Avengers installment. As my time on earth steps more fully into its downhill phase, I'm far less likely than I used to be to see movies multiple times, but I didn't mind at all seeing this one twice. Most of the jokes held up very well (though one unfortunate trope involving a Hispanic character and a hot little car really bugged me on the second viewing), and one in particular, with clever callbacks throughout the movie, resonated with our contemporary political situation in ways the filmmakers may not have anticipated. To set the stage very quickly: Antman is under house arrest for something having to do with his involvement in the last Captain America movie (it's never really explained what law he broke). To entertain himself, he's taken up a variety of hobbies, including...