Midlife Meditation

Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh, c. 1982 I was not one of those boys. The boys I hung out with were not like those boys. But I certainly knew some of those boys, knew how they behaved, how they talked, and what they did when they weren't at school. I'm a few years older than those boys. The high school I attended was a rural public school, not a posh urban prep school like those boys went to. But I knew athletes like those boys--and also athletes who were definitely not like those boys. I also knew other boys whose love of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana kept them off the teams, and some of these non-varsity boys very likely engaged in similar pastimes to those boys. Again, I didn't typically associate with them. I willingly embraced my parents' puritanism around controlled substances, and while my attitude toward them has loosened up in my adult years, I still am uncomfortable around people who use them to the point of impairment. As a college student...

Garrison Keillor during a performance with the Seattle Symphony The list continues to grow. Pixar's John Lasseter. NBC's Matt Lauer. And now, just minutes ago, Garrison Keillor. Add them to the shameful snowball of probable sexual harassers whose careers in the media have been endangered, if not ended, by allegations of inappropriate conduct around co-workers and employees. Lauer lost his job with the Today Show yesterday. Last night, I saw Lasseter's name in the credits of a movie that moved and amazed me-- Coco --and found the wonder I'd felt at its craftsmanship and humanity tainted by thoughts about how he'd abused his power to make unwelcome advances. And today, eating lunch in a hospital cafeteria (as I write this, Amy is having bi-lateral knee replacement surgery), the headline about Keillor popped up in my news feed: he'd been fired by Minnesota Public Radio, a powerhouse of thoughtful audio content whose reputation rests almost entirely o...

Al Franken. Roy Moore. Donald Trump. Louis CK. Charlie Rose. Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Jeffrey Tambor. George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton. Clarence Thomas. Dustin Hoffman.  That's just the names that pop into my head at this moment. You know what they've got in common: every one of them has been accused of touching women without their consent. There's a spectrum of misbehavior--some are serial offenders who've broken laws; others playful gropers who got just a little too handsy; still others sick people who need psychiatric help. Some have issued deep apologies. Others have spun stories. Some have threatened to sue. Some are Democrats, some Republicans, some defy partisan labels. But back to the commonalities: they're all men. More specifically, they're middle-aged and older men. They're men with power: actors, prominent comedians, members of Congress, news anchors, judges, Presidents of the United States. Something about the power they had led ...

Yes, these guys, too. Three thousand years ago, the founders of Judaism had a breakthrough. It concerned a common practice in Bronze Age religion: the use of an item--a carving, sculpture, painting, found object, it didn't really matter what it was, just as long as it was visible and touchable--to enhance the religious experience, granting the worshipper some kind of tangible connection with the deity. The spiritually enlightened understood that these items were simply tools, aids in deepening the believers' experience of the ineffable. Unfortunately, trapped as they were in their tangible bodies, taking in information through the tangible senses that were all they had, humans quickly came to mistake idols for gods. But idols are not gods. Made, as they were, of impermanent materials--wood, clay, stone, forgeable metal, canvas, paint--idols wore out. Drop the idol and it might dent or shatter; bring it too close to a sacrificial flame and it might be consumed; leave ...

Not just this guy. Really? This is what it takes? Donald Trump's campaign has been off at least one of its rails as long as it's been running. Trump was never interested in being respectable, civil, eloquent, diplomatic, statesmanlike, or even coherent. He was always a loud, bellicose, attention-demanding incarnation of masculine id, with a dog-and-pony show that was irresistible to a large enough plurality of Republican voters that it overcome all the shallow business-as-usual candidates--as well as a few other wingnuts who lacked his eye-catching vulgar appeal--to bequeath him with a nomination to become the world's most dangerous head of state. His rhetoric was scattershot when it came to positions on any of the issues the serious candidates were debating, but consistent in one regard: he hated the same people as that large plurality of voters, and cared not a farthing for how his targets felt about that hatred. The size of his following, while not large en...

I've been putting off writing about the misogynistic motives behind the Isla Vista shootings for a variety of reasons. Slate  magazine, my main source for journalism these days, has covered it well, including the meta-coverage of the hashtag activism growing out of it. Some of the opinions expressed in their many essays and podcasts have caused me both to nod in agreement and squirm with recognition. Writing and publishing my own angle, tiny though my audience may be, has felt like it would be redundant, and might also shift me uncomfortably into a no-win zone I am loath to enter. With all that said, there were two pieces published today that got me thinking I could add a perspective that is, if not unique, at least underrepresented in what I've seen elsewhere. The first, an essay by Christin Scarlett Milloy in Slate 's "Outward" blog, asks the question "Is It Natural to Be Queer? "and comes to the surprising conclusion that it doesn't matter; t...