Midlife Meditation

This could have been me. This was the week of Comey. I listen to a lot of podcasts as I'm driving to and from school, taking a walk, working out, doing chores, running errands, anything that doesn't suffer from having my brain taking in information at the same time. Many of those podcasts are political, and those that aren't explicitly political are still newsy enough to bring in politics from time to time. For the last week, they've been dominated by James Comey, either discussing the contents of his new book or interviewing him about it. Much of what I've heard has been critical of the choices he made to reveal information about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, and not to reveal information about the probe into Russian involvement in the Trump campaign. The case can be made that these two decisions turned an election that should've been an easy win for Clinton into a ...

The worst part of it is that I still kind of like 24. The Fox action drama that spins out a very bad day in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer distinguished itself from the beginning with the extremes he would go to to extract information not just from obvious villains, but from well-meaning but misguided innocents. Shouting, threatening, torturing, even shooting one in the head to get his crony to talk--no action was too atrocious if it got Bauer the intel he needed to avert a far greater catastrophe. He was the ultimate pragmatist, doing whatever it took to defend his country, even as his friends, colleagues and superiors cried out in protest. He became a patriotic martyr whose actions, even though they had saved countless lives, rendered him an outcast, rejected by the country he loved. In the process, he endured torture, abuse, gunshots, even death (CLEAR!), not to mention the loss of every friend and family member he had. With its compressed storytelling, each...