Midlife Meditation

O would some power the giftie gie us  to see ourselves as others see us. --Robert Burns Well look at that, Andrew. You're keeping company with Robert Burns. Andrew is a Comedy Sportz veteran, a brilliant improviser who has performed in more shows than I can imagine. He's also a world traveler, both for business and pleasure. Right now, he's in Barcelona, attending an international improv festival. That's what led him to make this observation on Facebook earlier today: You know how our shorthand for French people is smoking, and our shorthand for Italian people is hand gestures and kissing on the cheek? Well here in Europe, improv shorthand for American people is grabbing guns and shooting. That landed him squarely in the company of Robert Burns, and the quote at the top of this blog. Improv shorthand is an occasionally uncomfortable thing for me as I do my work behind the keyboard. I hear that we're doing something French, and I fi...

James Garner is dead at 86. As an actor, Garner played wise rascals who got out of fixes using their wits. In his iconic television roles as Brett Maverick, a gambler in the Old West, and Jim Rockford, a private investigator in 1970s Los Angeles, Garner created characters who preferred charm to gunfire. Rockford pointedly left his gun at home. Reminiscing about The Rockford Files , I found myself nostalgic for another icon of my childhood: the G.I. Joe Explorer line. As the Vietnam War heated up, Hasbro found demand for military action figures was dropping off, and revamped its most famous toy line. G.I. Joe toys no longer wore uniforms, and the names of the toys emphasized the adventures in which they and their lifelike hair were engaged. I had the space explorer, which came with a scale model Mercury capsule my silver-suited astronaut Joe could ride in. My brother Stephen had (appropriately) a sea explorer, with red hair and beard, knit cap, and inflatable raft. Jim ...

I know how some of you will react. "Guns by themselves don't kill anyone!" "It's mentally ill people and criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, who are the problem!" "It's our Constitutional right!" Yes, I've hard all these arguments, ad nauseum. I even feel some sympathy for them, particularly the one about how our society no longer cares for the mentally ill as it once did, and something needs to be done about that. I've also been reminded, by Michael Moore of all people, that Canadians own more guns per capita than Americans and seem somehow to manage not shooting each other thirty times a day. His reframing of the slogan goes like this: "Guns don't kill people. Americans kill people." But here's where the rubber meets the road or, better euphemism, the hot lead punches through the rib cage: people are dying, boatloads of them, and apart from sympathetic speeches, empathetic arms around the shoulder, and choreog...

"You're going to tell one of your stories! I can't stand to hear another one of your stories!" (Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln ) For a good chunk of my life, I was a preacher. Preachers use stories to illustrate. It's a practice that goes back millennia. Jesus told many a parable, as did Buddha. The points made by the stories are not always obvious, and in fact, it's often best if there's not a simple, one-to-one correspondence between the story and the lesson. Parables, in particular, are stories that come at a teaching from an odd angle, and may contain multiple lessons, some of them not even intended by the storyteller. The sign of a great story, as with any work of art, whether performed or visual, is the life it takes on independent of its creator. A truly masterful story will have a different meaning for every person who hears it. This can be frustrating for people who would rather have something simple, de...

That's Gyp Rosetti, a very scary gangster in HBO's Boardwalk Empire. He spoke that line during a tense standoff, one of the few times in the series when everybody having guns didn't end in a shootout. In Boardwalk Empire , guns exist to be used on others. It happens a lot. The third season climaxed with a citywide gun battle, bodies piling up all over Atlantic City. Everybody having guns is a symptom of everybody being scared. For the last twelve years, Americans have been afraid. Someone sent me this graphic in 2002:   With planes hijacked and crashed into buildings, anthrax in the mail, terrorist organizations plotting further attacks, perhaps we had cause to be afraid. In such a climate, it should be no surprise that Americans are buying guns, that people who previously would never think of owning a killing device would want one in the nightstand. But there are some real problems with that kneejerk reaction. First, none of the people we were afraid of in 200...