Midlife Meditation

Today I did something I haven't done in many years: I saw a movie for the third time in less than four months. The movie was Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  I saw it in a tiny second-run theater in Boise because there just weren't any first-run movies left in town that my son and I were both interested in seeing, and we needed to fill a few hours while my grandbaby napped after entertaining us for most of the afternoon. The first time I saw this movie, I wasn't completely sold on it. I'd not liked the first installment of this trilogy, which felt abbreviated, unnecessary, and a real downer to me, as the grand victory of Return of the Jedi  turned out to be hollow and temporary, with a resurgent empire not just overthrowing, but destroying the galactic republic. And this second movie certainly takes the depressing direction of its predecessor to a new level: by the end of this installment, the resistance has been reduced to a few dozen people, all of whom can fit on th...

The next school shooter will probably look like this kid. When I was four years old, my parents gave my younger brother and me our first Lego set. It was 1965, and Lego came only in red, yellow, and white bricks of varying lengths. We took that set and made ourselves a pair of pistols. Our bullets were smaller bricks we hurled at each other. There had never been any kind of toy gun in the house, nor would such toys be permitted for many years to come. Our father was a pacifist, a conscientious objector to the draft, and a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. While we did watch a lot of television, it all fell within the "family hours" of prime time: animal shows, Disney, family-oriented sitcoms. The only exceptions were Lost in Space  and Batman , campy fantasies which, nonetheless, gave us an appetite to shoot each other with lasers. The G.I. Joes we got for Christmas in 1969 were not soldiers, but explorers (mine was an astronaut; my brother's was an o...

John Dieffenderfer I didn't know him well enough. And I wish I'd known him better. John Dieffenderfer passed away at about 1 a.m. this morning. To those who performed with him, Dieff was a genius, an improviser whose instincts could be counted on to hew to the best practices of improv: listening, accepting, honoring and embracing whatever a fellow player offered, tu

Mid-twentieth century students practicing for the apocalypse. No, I'm not that  old. Duck and cover drills ended before I started school. I did get a heavy dose of "Your Chance to Live" lessons, courtesy of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (formerly the Office of Civil Defense), during my middle school years. This lessons took the forms of films and filmstrips about a variety of disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, floods and, yes, nuclear war, the existence of which made the whole series necessary. Curiously, I don't remember any of those lessons taking place once I started high school, which leads me to wonder if having them be such a large part of public school was just an Idaho thing. (My family moved to Oregon the summer before my freshman year.) Whatever the reason for exposing impressionable young students to so many ways we could all die, the result was probably not what the preparers of the curriculum intended. Being prepared didn't...

Students at a memorial service in Parkland, Florida If he hadn't had the gun, those seventeen people would still be alive. I can't say that truth will get lost in the pointless ritual that follows every school shooting. There are always commentators making this point, and plenty of people--the majority of Americans, in fact--who agree with it. And yet, I know that in the end, it will be ignored. How do I know this? Let's start with the responder-in-chief, the President of the United States, who, for once, spoke with measured, careful tones about what had happened at that Florida high school as an angry antisocial ex-student smuggled an assault rifle on campus and indiscriminately picked off students and teachers, then disappeared into the crowd of terrified fleeing teens. Trump didn't mention guns once in his speech. He's not alone: most politicians treat the truth at the heart of America's gun problem--that it involves guns--as a third rail. Fr...

America has a survey problem. That's actually too broad. American businesses have the problem, though it's American consumers who do the heavy lifting. Businesses are hooked on customer satisfaction surveys, but it's consumers who are asked, multiple times a day, to fill them out. Transactions, interactions, casual contacts, small purchases--it seems everyone who's selling something, or helping consumers feel better about having purchased that item, wants our opinion on how the contact with the salesperson or customer service representative went. Every time I call Kaiser Permanente to schedule an appointment, I'm asked to stay on the phone afterward to take a survey on how it went. Any purchase I make from the Amazon Marketplace results in a deluge of emails pleading with me to write a positive review of the item. Grocery store and restaurant receipts come with offers for extra fuel points or a free side in exchange for taking an online survey. It seems everybody ...

"What are your superpowers again?" "I'm rich." And that, my friends, is why we have an idiot in the White House insisting that he is "like, smart" on Twitter. But I digress before there's even been an ingress. This essay was inspired by a tweet straight from the thumbs of the Chief Twit, but it's framed by a movie I saw a week ago: "Justice League." That movie is every bit as awful as you may have heard from those superhero completists unfortunate enough to have subjected themselves to it, but it does contain some saving graces, one of which is the brilliant casting of The Flash with a twitchy nerdy fanboy who can't believe he gets to hang out with his heroes--and yes, that's a device that was ripped off in its entirety from the introduction of the new Spiderman as a twitchy nerdy fanboy who can't believe he gets to hang out with his heroes in both "Captain America: Civil War" and "Spiderman: Ho...