Pensive Pensées

• You know that odd spoon or fork in your silverware drawer that you never use or remove? You know the one I am talking about. Well, that's me.
• Mel Gibson, drunk as a skunk and obviously fraught with pain, once said some stupid things about "the Jews." I wonder if Woody Allen and Martin Scorcese signed a petition demanding Mr. Gibson be forgiven. Maybe they would have if Mr. Gibson was an Academy Award-winning movie director like Roman Polanski.
• If global warming is real then why do I feel chilled (tonight)? A touch of mortality, no doubt.
  
• The other night I stepped out of a friend's house (I was pet-sitting, sort of) and saw, somewhere in the southern sky, what looked like the end of the world. My mind searched for an explanation: was it a nuclear attack? an exploding planet? the return of Christ? The first thing I told my wife when I finally returned home was that "I saw something." The night sky had never before left me so unsettled. More than a week later, I learned that it was a rocket launched from Virginia sent heavenward to make a noctilucent cloud. To freak me out.
• I see that a mega-church in Florida has fractured because of disagreements over succession. It seems the great flock does not entirely like its new shepherd; when the old shepherd, who first raised the flock, died a couple of years ago, well, things went to hell. Which proves, does it not, that such is less about God's "mighty spirit" and more about the cult of personality?
• How often do we use language that is deceptive? Take, for example, how men answer their wives' questions: "Does this dress make me look fat?" The other day, I watched a talk show host prompt a guest whose lengthy anecdote had failed to elicit an entertaining payoff: the host's cue, articulated as a seemingly innocent question, invited the guest to embellish the tale to give it the necessary nudge from the banal to the amusing. The guest got the cue, invisible and inaudible as it was, to add the necessary punchline that was not part of the original tale; false as it was, it did finally make the audience laugh. I am reminded of Father Zosima's argument in The Brothers Karamazov, that we all push each other into sin, consciously and unconsciously; we are not our brother's keeper but his betrayer. Dmitri was damned by his neighbors; his sin -- the one he did not commit that nonetheless led to his conviction -- was encouraged and created by the townsfolk with whom he lived. And yet, apparently, none of them could spot a thing they may have done wrong. Is the discipline of prayer God's answer to that? That if we pray for each other we are declaring to the cosmos that we -- despite our convoluted language and our much-veiled envy -- wish not to destroy but to save our brothers? Let your yes mean yes. Let your no mean no. Yes.
• Is it true that what is newest under the sun in American civil discourse is incivility? Really? Imagine that. People are claiming to be checking themselves out of the political arena because things have gotten "too divisive." Where have they been the last 20 years (or 200)? The thing I resent is not this sudden umbrage, as if incivility has just fallen from the sky. What I resent is that politics has become so all-consuming. So important, so pervasive. One can't find solace in music, art, theater, film, poetry; there is no safety in the words of a sports columnist, or a game show or sitcom, or even in the phone call from an old friend. Politics is ubiquitous, demanding, scolding; pleading its case -- against you. Don't you care? Are you not engaged? Are you not paying attention? Have you not chosen sides? What is your answer? (No. I will hide here in the silverware drawer.)

Pax vobiscum.