Midlife Meditation

This is not a review. I haven't seen Noah , the just-released blockbuster about the Flood, nor do I plan to see it. Between previews and word-of-mouth, I'm 98% certain I'd spend the entire two hours and eighteen minutes critiquing both the liberties it takes with the Biblical narrative and the ways in which it chickens out on the real scandal at the heart of that story. I've already written about that scandal, calling it " The Worst Story in the Bible ," and I don't intend to repeat much of that argument here. What I do want to do is just zoom in on the key aspect of it, which Noah  almost certainly glosses over, as does every popular interpretation of the story I've ever encountered. (Case in point, this:  ) Simply put, the central character in the story of the Flood is not an old man with a big boat; it's the bloodthirsty God who, on a whim, destroys all life that won't fit on that boat. This is genocide on a cosmic scale. When the com...

Yeah, I know. It takes all the whimsy out to see the people drowning because they wouldn't listen to Noah. Then again, as the story goes, they had it coming. After all I've written lately about the innocence of children and the selflessness of teachers, this is going to be one hell of a cynical blog post, of the "humans suck" variety. You'll see me tap into a variety of issues I have previously addressed, including health insurance, football helmet butting, capitalism, and that most horrible of children's bedtime Bible stories, Noah and the Flood. I may figure out a way to end it that's a tad less dark; the preacher in me is always looking for grace, after all. And let's begin. America's real God is the dollar. It's appropriate that our money has the motto, "In God We Trust," because profiteering is the greatest American virtue. Capitalists despise a monetary vacuum. Anything that creates a demand will be monetized as quickly as ...

When I was in nursery school (what they used to call preschool, back in the olden days), my favorite toy was a plastic Noah's ark, complete with plastic Noah, plastic Emzarah (Noah's wife), and two each plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic lions, plastic tigers, plastic et cetera. When my own children were of preschool age (because that's what we called it in the not so olden days), they had their own plastic Noah's playset, though this one was bigger and cuter, probably made by Fisher Price or Playschool. I spent many a happy hour with mine, and my kids did with theirs, walking the animals up the ramp and onto the boat, floating it off in the air, perhaps even in the bathtub, never stopping to think about this: The artist's name is Flora Tucinovic, the title is "Accurate Noah's Ark," and it depicts quite well the part of the story that we don't tell our children, because it really is a horrible, ghastly, abominable tale of global genoci...