What Price for Papal Resignation?

When I was growing up, my family treated religion just like the decorative, high back chair my mother placed in a corner of the living room:  It was so uncomfortable that no one ever sat on it; but it was always there, just in case we needed another seat for special occasions.

So even though the impending resignation by the Pope will have as much impact on me as Lance Armstrong getting stripped of all his cycling championships, I still feel compelled to comment.

We know that President’s can resign…

But a Pope?  The last Pope resigned over 600 years ago because of the Great Schism (look it up yourself if you care!).

Think of this: When the search committee (a.k.a. the College of Cardinals) meets to select a new Pope, one of the great mysteries of Catholicism occurs: Sitting at the head of the conference table of the Papal-picking group of wannabe Popes…is divine intervention.

So after the cardinals deliberate…and argue…and cajole… and finally the white smoke replaces the black smoke and billows from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel…we have a new pope! But only through the highest executive order and not by the Cardinals.

(While this divine authority would not be covered under the expressed powers of a Heavenly Constitution – if there were one – it would be covered under the “implied powers.”).

And when God intervenes, you don’t get elected Pope for a puny four-year term like an American President.  You’re “it” for life.  There are no term limits in God’s time.

You have to answer to over a billion catholics, Pope Benedict. And don’t try to claim that you can’t be wrong because of the doctrine of Papal infallibility…because guess whose authority made you infallible?

Still want to resign Ratzinger?

I wouldn’t want to be you when you go into the confessional and St. Peter slides open that screen…

Should John Wayne have Killed bin Laden?

I’d like to think that you could “suspend your disbelief” and join me on this flight of imagination; but if you’re not a baby boomer, I suspect you barely finished reading the title before you left.

As they say: Youth is wasted on the young.

If you saw “Zero Dark Thirty” and you’re a boomer, you have to wonder what if John Wayne had played the Seal Team 6 soldier who killed Osama bin Laden?

We know John Wayne the actor was that larger-than-life American.  Once more, Wayne was instrumental in “pushing” our heroes into mythic figures (I thought briefly of using Errol Flynn here…his Englishness not withstanding).

Think of John Wayne as Davy Crockett in the 196o movie “The Alamo.” Did he not continue the exaltation of Crockett for baby boomer teenagers that started with Crockett played by Fess Parker for baby boomer children?

In the Alamo, John Wayne’s Crockett is run through by a lance and then blown up as he ignites the powder magazine to kill more Mexicans.  But in the tradition of Fess Parker’s Crockett, who swings his rifle at the Mexican soldiers after running out of bullets, we never see either one die, because we want them to live on in the American spirit.

But movies were for entertainment…and historical accuracy had no business in show business!  What could be better than sitting in the movies at fifteen with popcorn and John Wayne as Davy Crockett? Hollywood history brought us back to the movies again and again.  Remember Errol Flynn as the “fictitious” George Armstrong Custer?

So imagine if John Wayne had played the Seal Team 6 member who killed bin Laden.  It would have gone something like this: Wayne confronts bin Laden alone.  They’re face to face. Bin Laden kicks the gun out of Wayne’s hands and pulls out a big knife. Wayne hits bin Laden with a right cross and pulls out his knife.   Then they grapple for a while before Wayne finally kills bin Laden…as the stirring music reaches a crescendo.  And you stuff your face with the last of your popcorn.

I know.  That was then. And this is now.  And thanks to Kathryn Bigelow, her “now” proves that the truth can be more dramatic than fiction as she did in “The Hurt Locker.”

Zero Dark Thirty reminded me of an old TV show called “You are There,” in which Walter Cronkite was the commentator for re-enactments of historical events, such as the assassination of Lincoln. Like that show, I felt I was there as Seal Team 6 assaulted bin Laden’s compound.  I lost a sense of time, a sense of anything but the moment. And it was stunningly dramatic – with or without popcorn.

Still…John Wayne killing Osama bin Laden?  If you’re a Baby Boomer, it’s hard to resist that picture.  And if not Wayne…how about Flynn?

 

The Winds of Love

The hawk lives in the wind around the Golden Gate Bridge.  When we lived in California, Alexis and I walked along a trail near the bridge and watched the hawk one day. It was suspended in air, in the high wind.

We watched it swoop down for food and then fly upward like a rocket to perch on the bridge.  Then it was in full flight, soaring on the wind toward the majestic hills of San Francisco.

The hawk knows every feature of the wind: How to glide in the summer breeze of shining days…how to navigate the wind in turbulent times… And when the Pacific fog buries its world, the hawk moves slowly toward the fog’s edge, waiting for it to lift.

When you fall in love, you live in a summer breeze;

when you stay in love, you learn to live in the winds of love.

Like the hawk, you glide together on the summer breeze of shining days. You navigate together through the times of turbulence, until it moves on and the beauty of your world emerges again. And when the fog buries your world and you lose sight of each other, you hold hands and move slowly toward the fog’s edge, waiting for it to lift.

When you learn how to live in the winds of love…when you learn that the shining days sometimes give way to the gusts and the squalls and the storms and the fog of life…only then do you stay in love.

 

Where Have You Gone, Bert Parks?

Yes its true.  In a time when a historic twenty United States senators are women, on a day when half of the Punt, Pass, and Kick national winners are girls, young women still parade around in bikinis and high heels at the Miss America Pageant.

No different, it seems, then in the days when Bert Parks sang “There She Goes, Miss America…”

On Saturday in Las Vegas, shapely, beautiful young women strutted around on a stage as always. Yet something changed:  And what changed is the distance they can strut once they leave the stage. That is very different than in Bert’s day.

When Bert Parks serenaded a victorious Miss America as she walked down the runway in the mid-twentieth century, she could then strut onto a narrow road with limited exits and without even knowing it, she just might strut right into a cul-de-sac… called a kitchen.

But in the intervening years, that road and its destination was so confining that there were loud cries for better roads with new destinations.  And the builders of those roads succumbed to the pressure, and so they created those new roads with more exits and more palatable destinations.

So in 2013, long after Bert Parks sang his last song, the newly crowned Miss America looks out onto the roads that await her.

And if she can negotiate the speed bumps, which are the remnants of the roads from the days of Bert Parks, she can strut right onto the freeway.

And once there…who knows?  She just might strut right into the Oval Office.

 

The Long, Happy Life of a Christmas Tree

When I was young, I hated the end of Christmas and the holidays.  I used to think about ways to keep Christmas alive.  My favorite way was to become one with the Christmas tree.  I would stand in front of the Christmas tree and imagine that I could shrink into a miniature person and climb into the tree and live there for a while. And because no one could find me, my parents wouldn’t dare take the tree down until I emerged from the wilderness, like Robinson Crusoe.

So there I would be, hiding among the pine needles and moving stealthily from Christmas ornament to Christmas ornament.And if I hid there long enough…then, as an added bonus, I wouldn’t have to go back to school when the holidays were over.

That was a long time ago. About fifty Christmas trees have gone up and come down.  They all had the short, happy life of a Christmas tree…and all were gone during the first week of January.

But not this year. 

It hit me sometime after I had watched that annual “roll call” of dead people on TV.  You know, they play this profoundly sad music as they show you images of all the famous people who died this year. After that finality, I was determined that I wouldn’t allow Christmas to be final.

So my wife Alexis and I agreed to leave the tree up.  To break the “rules” of Christmas trees.  To live change. She still waters it…I still put the lights on every night.  There are still gift boxes under the tree. Incredibly, hardly any needles have fallen.  Our dog Sophia steals a Christmas ornament every now and then and we find them in other rooms. She, like us, doesn’t want Christmas to end.

We’re now nine days into the post holiday dead-of-winter season; but that’s what’s happening outside; inside…it’s still Christmas.

Each day is Christmas again. And right at the moment that I’m writing this last sentence, James Taylor is singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

We’re living the “The Power of Now,” as Eckart Tolle calls it. It’s Christmas in our house…Now!  And for as long as we want.

This year, we gave our tree, and ourselves, a gift:

The Long, Happy Life of a Christmas Tree  

The Words that Killed 58,000 Americans

“This is your text-book,” Mr. Anderson said  as he held up a small paperback on the first day of class. It was 1967. He was my American history teacher in my senior year of high school.  He was short and stocky and his face seemed to be in a perpetual pout.

“It’s the only book you’ll need until Christmas,” he told us.

After he said that, my friend Nick and I looked at each other as if to say, we have finally reached Heaven in school: How could it get any easier?

The book was American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 by George Kennan, a former foreign policy analyst for the State Department.

We didn’t know, of course, that this was not just any book.  And we really didn’t care.  But soon enough, we learned that Mr. Anderson was bent on teaching us a powerful lesson about life through this book.  He was bent on getting us to think…and to question what people claimed to be the truth.

Mr. Anderson showed us how Mr. Kennan’s words led to the war that was raging in Vietnam.  It sounded crazy to us.  Words caused a war?  So Mr. Anderson went on to teach us how words and war are linked.

Mr. Anderson then explained that Mr. Kennan had formulated  the “Containment Theory.” It was supposed to block the spread of communism.  Before long, Mr. Anderson went on, the Containment Theory became the backbone for the Truman Doctrine’s anti-Soviet Union policy in 1947.

Mr. Anderson also referred to Mr. Kennan’s theory as the “Domino Theory.”  In the domino game, if you tipped one domino over, it would topple all the others in line.  He taught us that Mr. Kennan said countries would fall in the same way to communism.

One day Mr. Anderson lectured us about the Korean War.  He recounted how the Chinese domino had already fallen and the Korean domino was next in line. It was already teetering, he said, so we sent troops to “prop” up the South Korean domino.  Mr. Anderson, with a pout more sobering than his usual one, said that it took 36,000 American lives to keep that domino from falling.

Then Mr. Anderson focused on Mr. Kennan. He told us Mr. Kennan complained that the politicians distorted his views in order to justify an aggressive stance toward communism. Eventually, Mr. Anderson said, Kennan became a critic of the foreign policy he helped to create.

When I look back, I believe that Mr. Anderson was successful in teaching us to think and question.  He taught us that when the ideas of thinkers like Mr. Kennan get into the hands of politicians, they often get a new interpretation to justify the actions the politicians want to take anyway.

And so as we studied Mr. Kennan’s book in our history class, we couldn’t have known that some of us who were turning the pages of his book today could be killed in Vietnam tomorrow.  We didn’t know that the words we were studying, words written a generation before, had already shaped our immediate futures…

…because it would take 58,000 American lives to prop up that Vietnamese domino …

and then it fell anyway.

Long ago, Mr. Anderson had taught us to think…to question…and to understand how words and war are linked.

What I Owe Tony Robbins

While I lived in California a few years ago, I flew to Orlando, Florida from San Francisco for a four-day Tony Robbins event called “Unleash the Power Within.“

I was overflowing with energy and confidence and believed I could do anything during the event and after it was over. It was something I thought I could never do… that’s what made it even more special for me.

It was more than inspiring.  That “burst” of energy during the event lasted four days…that euphoria of walking across hot coals barefoot was exalting…

that soaring celebration of life that hovered in the hall like endless beautiful music was transforming…and that positivism of Tony Robbins, I truly believe, was a once in a lifetime experience.

 

After the event was over, I wanted to fly the fuckin’ plane back to San Francisco myself!  That’s how I felt.

I knew I could do anything after that.  After struggling for years to write with any consistency, I went back to The Napa Valley where my wife Alexis and I lived and feverishly wrote a 50,000 word novel in a month: It was NaNoWriMo – November, the national novel-writing month.  Then I wanted to get in shape, so I joined a gym and worked out vigorously everyday.

But alas…the fanfare of Orland dimmed and I couldn’t sustain my “edge” for long. It was the great challenge that Tony dares us to take.  The event was the kickoff; but we have to sustain it by playing the game for life,  just as we “played” at the event.

The experience for me was so powerful that it was just sitting in the archives of my brain and waiting for me to have the courage to release it into my life again.

And so I’m bringing it back.  I’m turning the memory of that four-day burst of energy I had in Orlando into a lifelong burst of energy to write.

I’m releasing the power within (Thanks Tony!).  I’m working myself into a peak state again. Because I failed to sustain it then doesn’t mean I will fail to sustain it now.

Your beliefs determines the action you take – or the inaction you rationalize. Thanks again Tony.

So now I just laugh at the excuses for not writing that assault me like a winter blizzard and forge ahead.

 

 The Napa Valley in Sunset

My New Year’s Resolution: 5 Reasons for Writing

I’m going to write this year.  I know.  You’re already thinking:  Isn’t this the guy whose Twitter profile claims that “I write unfinished fiction?” You would be within your rights to say that I’m full of crap about writing in 2013!

I’m going to write this year.  I know.  You’re thinking this is a smidgeon more meaningful than saying I’m going to breathe this year. Write what?  How much?  How often? I could literally write one sentence all year and then claim that I achieved my New Year’s resolution. Okay.  Stop shaking your head(s).

I’m going to write this year. I work as a grant writer.  So I could make the case that by writing grants, I’m writing.  But the kind of gargantuan vagueness in my New Year’s resolution, if applied to my grant writing, would get me nowhere and my successful grants would be as rare as a seat on a NYC subway during rush hour.

 

I’m going to write this year.  I’m tired of hearing it myself.  So I imagine that if you’re still with me on this blog post, it’s because you can’t even fathom where I’m going with this… but you’re curious enough to find out?

I’m going to write this year.  I’m now on the threshold of one thousand followers on Twitter. I was sure that this would motivate me to write.  I fantasize that my followers are my audience. I imagine them sitting in a theatre and waiting with baited breathe…because they read my blog and see my great potential as a writer! Even so, I can almost hear an undercurrent of “Is this guy ever going to write?” as my followers fidget in their seats.  And then I get nervous, because I know if they don’t see any writing from me soon, they’ll start to unfollow me faster than Eagles fans unfollowed them during the 2012 football season.

So I am going to write in 2013.  Starting two days from now. But my wife asked me why wait?  Why not start to write now?

But I tell her it’s New Year’s Eve…and tomorrow is New Year’s day…and then there is the Mummer’s Parade…and the Rose Bowl.  What’s another couple of days?  Hmmm…almost forgot, I have to go to work on the day after New Year’s day and…

Why is Wayne LaPierre Smiling?

Wayne LaPierre is not a moral philosopher.  The NRA is not an advocacy organization for the reduction of gun violence.

Wayne LaPierre is a salesman.  A lobbyist.  The NRA advocates for guns.

Wayne’s job isn’t to analyze the linkage between assault weapons and the slaughter of babies with assault weapons…

Wayne’s job is to lobby for gun dealers so nothing inhibits their ability to sell more assault weapons.

So let’s be fair to Wayne.  His job is to help gun dealers sell more guns and to ensure that Americans can buy all the guns they want.  Crime, it turns out, is Wayne’s LaPierre’s greatest alley.

And the media reporting crime, it turns out, is Wayne’s second greatest ally, even though he claims that the media demonizes the NRA.

The more crime;

The more fear;

The more exposure by the media;

The more people buy guns.

The more Wayne LaPiere smiles.

It’s not Wayne’s job to bring a sane voice to the alarming proliferation of guns in our society; it’s Wayne’s job  to be the mouthpiece for the proliferation of guns in our society.

This is Wayne just doing his job. 

So if you thought that Wayne would deliver a reasonable message that could help us understand the slaughter at Sandy Hook and how to prevent more Sandy Hooks, then I have a roller coaster sitting in the ocean  you might like to buy.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

This is Wayne just doing his job: Helping to sell guns.

And when every media outlet in the country carried Wayne LaPierre’s speech last Friday, they helped him do his job in a way that all the millions that the NRA spends on lobbying and marketing could never do.

Columbine…. Virginia Tech…. Aurora…. Sandy Hook  =  record gun sales.

This is why Wayne LaPierre is smiling. He’s just doing his job.

WHY?

We go to the ends of the earth to find out why.  We believe there’s a reason, a purpose to this madness.  We think everything has a purpose, no matter how destructive.  We believe fervently that if we retrace the steps that led to this horror, if we can find out what he was thinking, then we could at least make some sense of this senseless act.

And if we could make some sense of this senseless act, then maybe we would have a clue on how to stop the next slaughter.

And we’re desperate for clues because we know it will happen again.  Every stranger on a train could be a murderer. Our anxiety heightens in public places. Our thinking has been altered forever. It’s the way we have to live now. Even the threat of terrorism doesn’t make us feel this way.

Mass killings are commonplace.  Why do they do it?

How many are out there planning their murderous acts?

…and stockpiling their guns

We live with the fear that someday, we will be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And then people again will ask why?

Did he really shoot some of these babies eleven times?

As he killed again and again, the why is meaningless, because the shooter’s brain, for reasons beyond our understanding, had already transformed into something so alien to the rational basis from which we ask the question… WHY?