Midlife Meditation

The ninth, tenth, thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh Doctors. In my hour of sickness, the doctor I turned to was a 2000-year-old alien with thirteen faces. It took me almost fifty years to warm up to Doctor Who. Star Trek , Lost in Space , Battlestar Galactica --I was on board for all of those shows. I even enjoyed The Six Million Dollar Man  and Space:1999  for the first few years of their runs. Finally, I decided to check out Doctor Who  sometime last year, and while I wasn't immediately hooked, I warmed up over time to the show's strange mixture of whimsy and over-the-top space/time fantasy stories. This week, as I've been stuck on the couch with a respiratory virus, I've been powering through the complete three seasons of the twelfth doctor, and today just met the thirteenth actor (and first woman) to inhabit the role. Doctor Who  is unapologetically British. The show's universe--and it actually spans many galaxies--is populated entirely by aliens wi...

It seems I'm not the first person to think of this. Just so you know, I think bullfighting is an abomination.  I also think this year's three Presidential "debates" were an abomination. So there's some resonance there. Reading up just now about bullfighting (that's called "research"), I learned that a bullfight is a highly ritualized spectacle, most of which involves goading, torturing, and weakening the bull to render the final, fatal sword thrust more effective. Bulls intended for the ring are raised in conditions that render them more wild than domesticated. The bullfight itself is extremely hazardous, frequently leading to injury and even death for the humans and horses involved in the ritual. Of course, the bull is almost always dead at the end of the show, so maybe there's some justice in that risk. Back to the debates: each reinforced the impression that what I was watching was a ritualized spectacle, a confrontation be...

Careful, Bernie. Winning these battles could mean everyone loses the war. Risk is my favorite board game. Just in case you've never been exposed to The Game of World Conquest, this is what it looks like: Each player has a box of plastic armies. At the beginning of the game, all players distribute their armies across the board, claiming countries in as strategically advantageous an arrangement as their opponents will permit. Once every country is occupied, players take turns invading each other's neighboring territories, trying to consolidate continents, building up frontier defenses, and eventually eliminating each other from the game. The winner is the player who controls the entire world at the end. Success comes through a combination of strategy and chance: the attacking player rolls three red dice against the defending player's two white dice. The attacker's two highest dice are matched against the defender's roll, with the higher die winning--though t...

The passion's undeniable. The strategy? Hmmmm... Let me get this out of the way up front: I agree with everything in Bernie Sanders' platform. He's on what I believe to be the right side of every issue save gun control--which, if I was a single-issue voter, would be my single issue. But I'm not. I'm a strategic voter, checking the box of the candidate I think is most likely, if elected, to make the most substantive progress in making this nation more free, open, compassionate, and affirming of diversity. If Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee for President, there is no question but that he'll have my vote. Until that happens, though, I've got some concerns about Bernie. I've spelled them out in this space. I'm not convinced Bernie's electable, given this nation's long-running distaste for socialism, and I worry that this could put Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the White House. The possibility of Michael Bloomberg entering th...

Great wish list. Too bad Santa isn't running for President. Before I launch the rant, here are my qualifications: 1) I first realized I was a socialist in 1980, when a conservative friend asked me some leading questions to which the answer, for me, was obviously yes (I can't remember what they were, but I expect they had to do with federal regulations, labor unions, and the social safety net). "Congratulations," he said, his voice heavy with irony, "you're a socialist." "Huh," I replied, "if believing that government should protect the interests of ordinary people against corporate interests, then I'm all in!" Or something like that. 2) I'm no Hillary Clinton fan.  There are many reasons, but the clincher was her evasiveness around the obviously political evolution of her views on marriage equality in a 2014 interview with Terry Gross. The rhetorical knots she tied herself in were eerily reminiscent of her husband...

Just over half the Republican Presidential candidates. In the end, will there be anyone left to vote for whomever survives the GOP presidential nomination race? Donald Trump set the tone for the campaign with his vicious, unapologetic assault on immigrants. He started by slandering Mexican immigrants, and under criticism, doubled down to propose eliminating birthright citizenship, the crown jewel of post-Civil War Constitutional reforms. Following Mitt Romney's embarrassing defeat in 2012, the Republican Party did some deep navel-gazing. One of its conclusions was that the party had to start appealing to immigrants if it was to have any chance of ever winning the White House again. Trump's two-month tirade against immigrants is a brutish repudiation of that conclusion, and the speed with which so many of his opponents for the nomination jumped on the Constitution-scrapping bandwagon demonstrates the shallowness of the introspection. Ted Cruz has downplayed the immigra...