SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN: One of my biggest challenges right now is finding something to believe in. When I was young, it was easy to find things to believe in. Lots of things seemed good enough to put your faith and hope in. But after a while, those things showed their dark sides. And sometimes, the things that you would never believe in showed you their brighter sides. (Even the Republican Party? Well, OK, maybe that’s a stretch). Everything started equivocating. So I became a man without a cause; well, no one overwhelming cause, anyway.

I’m finishing up a book about Dan and Phil Berrigan, and whether you agree or disagree with what they did and why they did it, you have to admire them for believing in something. I myself work in a prosecutor’s office — arguably, the sworn enemy of the Berrigans and their ultra-resistance anti-war tactics. And yet, I sometimes see people who truly believe in criminal prosecution (not that I don’t believe in dealing with crime, but I don’t get all excited and swell with pride when I think about the actual system that we have in place to apprehend, prosecute and punish criminals). And I have to admire and envy those people almost as much as I do the Berrigans. They have something to believe in. (Hey, there are things to be said for the rule of law within a constitutional democracy and the maintenance of civilized conduct).

Yea, that’s one of the biggest battles in life — finding something to believe in, and to keep on believing in it.

SIDEBAR: I was looking at a list of the largest American corporations and what they own these days. It turns out that Philip Morris (now called the Altria Group) owns Tombstone Pizza. Does anyone else find it ironic that a corporation that has promoted tobacco use for the past 150 years or so takes out ads asking “what do you want on your tombstone”? If that weren’t enough, PM/Altria also makes “Life Savers” ….

I read an article the other day saying that the movie Antoine Fisher had inspired a lot of male viewers to cry. I didn’t catch Antoine Fisher in the theater, so I can’t comment directly on that; fact is, I’ve hardly been to the movies at all in the past 6 years. I used to patronize the box office a lot, but after a while the films started blurring together on me. After reading the reviews of Antoine Fisher, however, I regret that I missed it. It sounds as though it would have met my heightened criteria for paying $10 or more for two hours of visual entertainment in a darkened chamber.

Back when I did get out to the flicks a lot, I don’t ever recall being driven to tears. The article on the Fisher film said that Field of Dreams was also considered a “guy cry”. I didn’t know that. It didn’t have that effect on me. (I guess that I’m just not tuned into baseball mysticism). And I suspect that even though Antoine Fisher would have been an edifying experience for me, I would have left the theater dry-eyed.

I’m not saying that as a brag. I don’t consider myself to be a “tough guy”. Actually, I think of myself as a highly sensitive fellow. Maybe even too sensitive and emotionally vulnerable at times. But there’s something about crying that I find rather irresponsible. I’m not saying that people should deny their emotions and the power that they have over our lives. I willingly admit that I express many emotions throughout the course of a day, some rather sublime, some very childish, most quite ordinary.

But the act of crying seems so self-indulgent to me, so inwardly focused. I personally prefer an emotive expression that can be shared in public without overwhelming everyone. One of my favorite emotional stylings can be seen on the CBS series “The Guardian”. Simon Baker is generally a wooden actor, but when he has to share some bad news with one of his pro bono clients, he does a great job of lowering his eyes, looking down at the floor and pursing his lips in a regretful fashion. Baker does that “sorry, but I just don’t know what to say here” look so incredibly well.

The article said that the emotional hot button that Antoine Fisher pushes with men is the subject of paternal relationships. If I recall correctly, Antoine Fisher himself never knew his father, who was shot and killed before Antoine was born (the Fisher story is quite real, and is in many ways even more interesting than the movie; Fisher fought his way out of a low-income, high-crime urban ghetto into a responsible job as a guard at a West Coast movie studio; he wrote up his life story while on lookout, and got it into the hands of the right people after learning that they passed by his guard booth every day). In the film, Fisher goes through some intense therapy scenes with a US Navy shrink played by Denzel Washington (who also directed the film). Obviously, a lot of the intensity focuses on Fisher’s lost father.

I myself have some unsettled issues about my own father, who died when I was in college. Looking back, I wonder sometimes if we could have settled the things that seperated us back then and moved on towards a closer relationship as I progressed through my 20s and 30s. On the night that he died, I told him in the intensive care unit that I loved him, something that I had never said to him before. Did I really feel what you might call “love” for him at that point, and did he share that emotion? He looked rather confused and distressed when I said it, as if he knew that he was in big trouble if I was saying something like that! It wasn’t quite what you’d call a Hollywood moment. But then again, at least it said that I would have liked us to have gotten along better, had we been given the time.

But to be honest, I don’t feel much need to shed any more tears over it. What happened happened; I said about as much as I could have given the circumstances. I learned from it, and I think that’s about what my father would have wanted. He was the kind of guy who, after you did something wrong, was more interested in knowing if you had learned your lesson, than wanting to whip your behind in retribution. His emphasis on practical learning is probably an important foundation of my own “eternal student” life philosophy.

But hey, I agree that there are times for emotional intensity. I’ll admit that I have cried a small handful of times during my adult life. But it was mainly at night. Thus, I strongly agree with the lyrics of that Gerry and the Pacemakers tune from the mid-60s: “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying”. (Or the end of a movie, for that matter.)

I was browsing around in a bookstore the other day, and I heard some intense young men discussing history. At one point they spoke of the Cold War and how Ronald Reagan vanquished the Soviet Union by starting a military spending war that eventually bankrupted the Commies. One of the young men pointed out that this nearly bankrupted the US too, and that we’re still paying the price.

Later on in the day, I thought about that. As a person with training in economics (boring, I know), I realize that military spending is generally an economic deadweight, as it does not promote long-run economic growth as do infrastructural improvements such as better roads, more education, better health care, and increased scientific research. I wonder just how much economic betterment was lost because of Reagan’s “spend them into the ground” military policy of the 80s, and the Soviet response to it? But let’s not single out Ronny and the Ruskies. Let’s look at the big picture. Just how much economic potential is lost because of world-wide military spending? What would happen if all of the economic muscle devoted to tanks and canons and jet fighters could be devoted to more schools, more roads, more energy-saving innovations and more high-speed railways on a world-wide basis?

What if growth and economic opportunity increased to the point that all nations and all villages reaped at least some share of the benefits, even the most destitute areas in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia? If everyone on the globe could learn to share the pie by playing nice, wouldn’t there then be less reason for all of the guns and bombs?

Hey, I’m not trying to be Pollyanna here. I know that it ain’t going to happen anytime soon. Since 1900 or so, the US has played an activist role in world politics because it’s good for the economy. The US wouldn’t be nearly as wealthy without access to world oil and gas reserves. It depends almost exclusively on foreign sources for strategic materials such as bauxite, platinum, tin, cobalt, potash and tungsten. And as consumers, we have developed tastes for high-quality electronic goods, diamonds and coffee — just about all imported.

If the US weren’t as willing to exert military muscle and financial intervention in world politics — i.e., if it avoided the hard ball and played fair all the time — we clearly wouldn’t have the luxuries currently available to many Americans (including myself). And despite our strength, we sometimes blithely ignore local tragedy in order to continue doing business. For example, in the Congo, the US bows to local ethnic warriors who have killed over 3 million people in the past 5 years, in order to maintain access to gold, diamonds and coltan (an essential material in cell phones). Saddam Hussein was a bloody killer, but not quite THAT bloody. However, unlike the Congolese warriors and their coltan, Saddam wouldn’t cooperate with his oil (nor with Kuwaiti oil and Saudi oil, stinker that he was). So Saddam got the 3rd Infantry, and the Congolese still go about their bloody business.

Nevertheless, I wonder. Americans are terribly innovative. If tomorrow the President were to say that the US was going to absolutely respect human rights, work for environmental sustainability and promote economic justice throughout the world, and was going to fully support the UN and avoid unilateral intervention, and was furthermore going to stop doing business with all purveyors of genocide, the US economy would clearly be in for a fall. But given 5 or 10 years, I really wonder if we wouldn’t be just as well off, given our nation’s tremendous ability to innovate, to make better use of what we get locally, and to make wiser use of what we could still get from abroad. But given all the vested interests involved, I doubt if that is going to ever happen.

The thing that scares me is that America continues to mix “one-world” technology like the Internet with its own version of tribal economic mentality. Al Qaeda has proven that any one tribe can rain death and destruction down onto any other tribe anywhere in the world. Within a decade, just about every nation and every trans-national movement like Al Qaeda (which are made possible because of the Internet) will have lightweight nuclear or biological missiles that can reach New York, Hong Kong, London, Jerusalem, Tokyo, New Delhi, you choose it, from hidden mobile launch sites such as old freighter ships. (Missile defense? extremely expensive, partly effective; as with a mosquito net, anything less than 100% can make you miserable).

Is our human race locked into some tragic set of circumstances that will soon squander every bit of progress made since the “dawn of civilization”? Are we involved in some kind of huge board game with 6 billion players and rising, organized into 250 or so “teams” (nations, ethnic tribes, transnational corporations, revolutionary movements), all which act according to a similar mix of self-interest and quest for betterment, all making generally intelligent choices, but where all of these choices combine to foment an unforeseen and unintentionally tragic outcome? And if that’s the case, as I increasingly suspect it is, then let me ask: is it too late to change it, perhaps by reducing our American thirst for a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, and at the same time sharing our wonderful technologies so as to help others leave their poverty and backwardness behind?

For you Christians, it’s Easter Sunday. For you Jewish folk, it’s a day or two after Passover. For Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and atheists and agnostics and whatever — well, it’s a nice Spring day here in the Northern Hemisphere. And that’s still a sacred thing.

I was brought up as a Roman Catholic, so I suppose that qualifies me as a Christian (although some Christians here in the USA might not agree with that!). Despite the fact that I’m not tied to the myths and dogmas of any one religion anymore, I still feel the tidal surge upon the spirit that an important Christian holiday causes. But I’m going to celebrate it in a Buddhist manner, by recalling a lesson the Buddha gave to his followers by just holding a flower up in front of them. I just went outside with my cheap-o digital camera and took a snapshot of a flowering plant in front of the house. In the spirit of that Buddhist lesson, let me share the picture here with you, and say no more.

This being Good Friday, I’m pondering the various artistic depictions that have been made of Jesus’ last supper and crucifixion, especially the cinematic ones. Perhaps the most melodramatic depictions are those old Italian and Spanish movies, with all the contorted faces and dark shadows and droning music, meant to be shown to sobbing old ladies wearing lots of black. Yea, nobody does the Passion like those southern Europeans.

But I’m an existentialist American, and I’d like something a bit more cynical. So I’m imagining my own cinematic depiction of Jesus at Gethsemane, based around the lyrics to a song called “Bother” by Stone Sour. From what I’m told, Bother was used to good advantage in the movie Spiderman to depict a moody young superhero having his moment of doubt; not being a cool young guy, I didn’t see Spiderman.

(Hmm, now, that’s an interesting thought: cartoon superheros as modern day Jesus Christs. Or Jesus Christ as a cartoon superhero.)

In my movie, we would not see a Jesus who already had his flight booked to Paradise. Nope, the Jesus who would voice the lines to “Bother” would be pretty burned out and disgusted about things. He wouldn’t be particularly pleased with God the Father either. Jesus traded a skilled career and a suburban home for the poverty of an itinerant preacher, so as to enlighten humankind and save the lot of Israel. And now here they were, about to repay him by handing him over to the Romans. And God couldn’t even spare an angel or two to stem the tide. The refrain to the song would obviously come when a disciple took a sword to the slave of the high priest: “you don’t need to bother, I don’t need to be”.

Next, some Good Friday reflections on Newark, New Jersey. I work there and I commute by train sometimes. The rail line goes through an abandoned station in one of Newark’s many low-income neighborhoods, and I’ve been noticing some of the sights there lately. On the old eastbound platform is a dead dog. On the westbound platform is a smashed up computer monitor, which some kids probably threw from the embankment above the tracks. Somehow, this makes me think of the refrain to a song by Sponge: “in a world of human wreckage”.

Then just a bit further up the line, the train passes the Garden Spires high-rise apartment complex. Over the past two weeks at Garden Spires, a one-month old baby was drowned in a bucket of water and bleach, and a two year old boy fell to his death from a 17th floor window.

Earlier this week, an advocacy group released a report on child well being in Newark. According to this report, 4% of all New Jersey children under the age of 15 live in Newark. However, 13% of the children from that age group who die each year came from Newark. In other words, a child in Newark is three times more likely to die before reaching the age of 15 than the average child in the state of New Jersey. Makes you think about Faheem Williams and the thousands of other kids who go to grisly endings in Newark. Talk about a world of human wreckage.

Perhaps every Friday in Newark is Good Friday.

Anyway, here’s a link to the Stone Sour lyrics: BOTHER
As to Sponge, try this: PLOWED

The older you get, the more you realize that life ain’t easy and the world ain’t always a wonderful place. One of the things that makes life worth living nonetheless is when you discover some unsung little corner where good things are happening, mostly unnoticed by the world at large. Such places are hard to find, but I think that I just discovered an example, right in my hometown. It’s a mini-planetarium located inside of one of our middle schools. Recall that a planetarium is a domed shaped theater where you see what the night sky should look like but doesn’t due to pollution and haze and too many lights (unless you’re out in the Arizona desert). They show you the planets and the Milky Way and the Moon and the constellations, the Big Dipper, Andromeda, Orion, all that stuff, right from the comfort of a movie-theater seat. You usually find them in big city museums, not in local middle schools.

I’m long past middle-school age and I grew up in another town, so I didn’t discover the local planetarium as an 8th grader. I’m not a parent either, so I didn’t hear any kids talking about it. Nope, I’m just a middle-aged guy who still likes to learn, so I signed up for an astronomy course offered by the town’s evening adult school. That finally brought me to it, after living in this town for 15 years. Even after I signed up for the course, it still took a bit of trial and error to actually find this planetarium. The adult school bulletin gave the address for the middle school, but when I got there for the first class, all the doors seemed locked. Next day I called up the school and found out just where the planetarium is — it turned out to be in the back, at the far corner of the parking lot. OK, so I missed the first week’s session, but there were still three more to go.

On the following Wednesday night, I joined a small group of fellow adult learners on an in-progress guided tour of the heavens courtesy of Mr. Miller, the school’s planetarium instructor. Mr. Miller works mostly with the middle school students by day, but had agreed to open his theater of the stars to adult learners for an evening session. And I’m glad that he did.

It’s nice to know that our town’s youth have access to their own planetarium and to an inspired instructor like Mr. Miller. He’s one of those showman teachers who would not impress you much if you saw him standing in line at the supermarket checkout, but who revs himself up with enthusiasm and knowledge when placed in front of a group of students. The man clearly has a passion for the world of astronomy and science, and knows a lot of tricks to share his knowledge with his audience.

One technique is an obvious one, i.e. “here, see for yourself”. So, during the third session, we went outside with binoculars and a telescope, and looked at Orion and the Big Dipper. Using the scope, we were able to see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn in all their glory. On another night, he had us hold a sheet of plastic and he rolled various objects, some like softballs, some more like marbles, to help us conceptualize the modern-physics views of space topography in keeping with Einsteinian relativity principles and the bending of light by gravity. (What he was demonstrating was that space is not exactly defined by straight lines, but gets twisted around a bit due to the effect of mass and gravity on light beams; he demonstrated the effect of a black hole by severely twisting and distorting a part of the plastic “reality” sheet). And at the final class, he had us make crude spectroscopes out of juice drink cartons, to show how astronomers analyze the light from the stars as to find out just what they are made of and how they are moving (red shift, etc.).

A lot of people didn’t enjoy most of their science classes in high school and college, because science can be a bit abstract. (Unfortunately, science has to be abstract, in order to progress). But maybe once or twice, if you were lucky, you ran across a teacher with so much enthusiasm for the subject that you just couldn’t help but get interested yourself, which increased your willingness to slog through the boring stuff (endless textbook chapters and tough math problems for homework) in order to share a few peaks of enlightenment with your teacher. Or if not, perhaps you watched those introductory science TV shows, like “Mister Science” or “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. Well, it’s nice to know that in some obscure corner of one of our local schools, there’s a guy something like that, in a little cave with a light projection machine getting kids interested in becoming astronauts or astrophysicists someday. And even occasionally making some adult school students regret that they didn’t go that route.

Oh, you might ask, how do I know that the kids actually like him? Well, some of the adults in the class had kids at that school, and two of them attended some of our classes. In other words, these kids actually gave up a bit of their precious after-school time to hang out some more in Mr. Miller’s planetarium. I could see that he had a good rapport with them. One final bit of evidence: Mr. Miller’s own web site, which is obviously set up for the benefit of his students. Let me share his “see for yourself” technique, and give you a LINK to it.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS: Did you ever look at somebody’s personal web site and say to yourself, wow, this guy really has a crazy mix of interests? Maybe something like Roger Maris baseball cards and 19th century ballet arrangements and occult symbols taken from the pyramids and the history of the James Knox Polk presidency? I was recently thinking about my own web site, and it struck me that I’m also presenting a rather eclectic mix of information. That made me think about my life and about the things that have captured my fancy over the years, and I concluded that they represent an even crazier mix. It’s hard to see the connections sometimes. If I could figure out how everything related, maybe I could figure myself out. But right now I can’t. Just when I thought I had myself figured out, back to the drawing board.

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favorite things. See if you can make any more sense of it than I can:

• Vegetarian food and cooking
  
• Taoism
  
• Red Wine
  
• Non-fiction books
  
• Modern physics
  
• Collecting stamps
  
• Railroads and trains, esp. from the 1950 – 1980 years
  
• Space exploration
  
• Meditation
  
• Book Stores and Libraries
  
• Growing Herbs (oregano, basil, parsley, etc.)
  
• Rainy, foggy nights
  
• Photography
  
• Microbrewed Beer
  
• Preventative Health Practices (including exercise)
  
• Looking at stars
  
• Aircraft carriers
  
• Spring flowers
  
• Theology
  
• Uncrowded public places
  
• Computer programming and web page composing
  
• The historical aspects of Jesus of Nazareth and his brother James
  
• Social justice efforts, esp. urban poverty outreach
  
• Myers-Briggs temperament analysis
  
• Critical thinking, in general
  
• Politics (from afar; I’m not running for office!)
  
• Monks and monasteries
  
• Fighter jets
  
• Peace and harmony, cultural diversity
  
• Systems and how they work
  
• Ecology and environmental preservation
  
• Hiking
  
• Old buildings and neighborhoods
  
• The Ashcan school, esp. John Sloan paintings
  
• Rock music
  
• Mornings and sunrises
  
• Histories of empires and wars
  
• Sleeping late
  
• Economics
  
• Comfortable clothes (the older the better)
  
• Most anything that’s intelligent and wise (not that empires and wars and politics and rock music and sleeping late always fit that category!)

Oh yea, and learning (that’s why I’m the eternal student).

Well, what can I say. That’s just me.

“What I wear is pants. What I do is live.”

Thomas Merton, Day of a Stranger

Now tell me that quote wasn’t made for a Dockers advertisement. The problem is, Merton was a Trappist monk, and the Trappists own the copyright to everything he wrote. The Trappist (Cistercian) Order would never allow that great Catholic spiritualist’s words to be used in such a tinseltown manner. Or would they? Maybe there’s a deal waiting to be made.

Here’s my idea: Dockers puts out a full-page spread in some trendy youth magazines featuring a photo of Merton (in his work pants, obviously, not in his monastic robes). The quote is placed in the upper corner of the ad, and a little bio is given just below the pic; maybe “Thomas Merton, 1915-1968, Cistercian Monk, Priest, Poet, Author, Peace Activist”. Then on the lower right side, in discreet lettering, “Dockers … nice pants”.

Dockers comes out looking good for putting out a soft-sell, public service type ad, and the Trappists get to market the thoughts and writings of Thomas Merton to a new generation, one that otherwise might never have heard of him. The ad helps to sell pants, religion, and Merton’s books (which the Trappists still make money off of) to the younger crowd all at the same time. It’s a slam-dunk win-win.

Hey, just an idea. Not that I’m endorsing Dockers here. I never owned a pair of them in my life (showing my age here). As to Merton, well, I AM endorsing him; I own plenty of his books. Regarding the subject of advertisement design, this isn’t the first off-beat idea for an ad or a video that I’ve had. But I keep my day job, because my ideas are generally very off-beat. Oh well, maybe in another life …

I’m not an historian by profession, nor do my hobby interests in world history run very deep. However, the current US-Iraqi war has inspired me with an historical question: what are the parallels, if any, with the Crusades of the Middle Ages? Is there any common ground between George W. Bush in 2003 and Pope Urban II in 1050-whatever?

I myself think there are some broad parallels, even some relevant ones. In both instances, the most powerful men of the Western world seek to impose a change in government in some highly strategic territory east of the Mediterranean. In the eleventh century, the Turks were threatening western access to the spiritual resources of the Holy Land. One millennium later, a blood-thirsty Mesopotamian despot threatens American access to the economic resources of the oil fields. In both instances, there were deep underlying differences in religious and philosophical outlooks, focusing around the ways of Islam (admittedly, Saddam Hussein is not recognized as a devout Muslim, but you can’t deny that Islam has something to do with the current situation). In both instances, the western leader decided to fight force with force, not for national survival but in the name of a belief.

Hmm. Unless you are a true pacifist (which I admire, even if I don’t have the guts to be one), you must admit that force sometimes has to be answered with force. But the most robust and legitimate cause for the use of responsive force is self-preservation. Unless you’re a pacifist, it’s hard to argue with that. But when higher level ideologies become involved, or when the issue focuses upon economic benefit, the waters become murkier. Was Urban the Second justified in using force projection in order to re-establish Christianity within the Middle East? And is President Bush today justified in using American military might without world support in order to encourage representative government and free-market capitalism in that region?

Admittedly, it will be a better world without Saddam Hussein in power. But the medicine that Mr. Bush has administered seems almost as bad as the disease, given its rending of multilateral security relationships and institutions built up over the past 50 years. And perhaps the ideals of democracy, human liberty and economic freedom become tarnished when enforced too vigorously at the point of a gun. Let me ask this, quite rhetorically: just how successful in the end were the Crusades in promoting within the Levant a system of spiritual thought that had originated there? And can our current military ventures be any more successful in transplanting a system of philosophical and economic thought that is more remote in origin?