Midlife Meditation

After sitting through 78 minutes of gaslighting, Nancy Pelosi sums up the feelings of the majority of Americans. Tuesday night, Nancy Pelosi spoke for millions of Americans without using her voice. President Trump had started the evening by playing the "psych!" game, refusing her handshake as he arrived at the podium for the State of the Union address on the eve of his acquittal by a cowardly Republican Senate majority for blatant abuse of the powers of his office. She returned the favor with curt dignity, introducing him to Congress without the flowery flourishes traditional to that task. Then for 78 minutes she sat behind him as he spoke to that part of the Union that agrees with him, delivering a campaign speech accompanied by manipulative and sometimes shocking gestures culled from his years in reality TV. (Disclaimer: I did not watch the speech, and have only heard snippets of it from the politics podcasts I listen to. I have lost the ability to hear Trump...

Lance Corporal Schofield's message could save a thousand lives--but only if he can deliver it. "All my stories are true--and some of them actually happened." --Nikki Johnson "I've been to the movies, I've seen how it ends." --Brandi Carlile When the credits finally began to roll at the end of 1917 , I felt like I'd been in the theater for far more than the 117 minutes of the movie I'd just seen. I mean that in the best way. 1917  is a thriller that never lets up. Its quietest moments were nail-biting scenes of soldiers picking their way through No Man's Land, scouting abandoned barracks, and exploring a recently-vacated farm, during which there was always a sense of death lying just over the next hill, around the next corner, just one step deeper into the unknown. The concept is a well-used one: to avert a disastrous advance into a deadly trap, two young soldiers must hand-deliver a letter across miles of craters and barbed wire, d...

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...

My fellow Americans, I'm not in America right now. I woke up this morning in Antwerp, and will go to bed in a few minutes in Amsterdam. Tomorrow night, I'll begin my journey to Ghana. Last week, I was in Britain with my beloved wife. During our travels, we encountered a number of non-Americans who wanted to know how we feel about our current president. We talked with them of being ashamed, embarrassed, and happy to be away for awhile. This morning, when my phone reminded me at 9:00 local time (midnight back home in Portland) that it was Independence Day, I was astonished: I'd almost forgotten it was July 4, usually one of my favorite holidays. I spent the day doing my best to continue forgetting this was a day to celebrate America, a country I fear may never come back from the horrible place it is being dragged by Donald Trump and his minions. This evening, enjoying some beer in a Dutch bar, I encountered a young American who was having a European adventure, and who ...

It's true: he doesn't care what you think. He's not your President, either. It dates back at least to the debates, when candidate Trump referred to Barack Obama as " your (meaning Hillary Clinton's) President." Of course, that attitude toward the 44th President grew out of years of single-handedly keeping the "birther" movement alive, as Trump refused to accept even the documentary evidence of a birth certificate that Obama was born an American citizen. Many, including Trump, have criticized Clinton for engaging in identity politics: promoting the ways in which her policy goals would benefit women, persons of color, the LGBTQ community. In doing so, the critics forgot the essential truth, voiced by Tip O'Neill many decades ago, that "all politics is local." It's the job of government to address the needs not just of the whole populace, but of its fractions, even its individuals. The Constitution exists not to defend t...

Too soon! As in so many other things, Donald Trump has defined the impending era for us via Twitter. Trump was commenting on an incident involving an American drone submarine being impounded by the Chinese navy. He called it "unpresidented." The tweet was later corrected to read "unprecedented," and there's at least a chance Trump knew that was the correct word, and just slipped up and used a nonexistent homophone instead, something I've done myself in the heat of passioante writing (both with a keyboard and a pen). Merriam Webster spun it into a "not" joke with its own tweet, saying "unpresidented" was NOT the word of the day, as that honor was reserved for the word "huh." Social media seized on the neologism, and it's been everywhere, as the nation tries to come to grips with what's going to happen on January 20. The scrambling to correct the Freudian slip--and the ironic glee with which it's been welcom...