A Parable

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FLYNN
Call the Pastor. Ask him why I left! It’s perfectly innocent.

SISTER ALOYSIUS
I’m not calling the Pastor.

FLYNN
I’m a good priest!

SISTER ALOYSIUS
You will go after another child and another child, until you are stopped.

FLYNN
What nun did you speak to?

SISTER ALOYSIUS
I won’t say.

FLYNN
I’ve not touched a child.

SISTER ALOYSIUS
You have.

FLYNN
You haven’t the slightest proof of anything.

SISTER ALOYSIUS
But I have my certainty.

[…]

Did you give Donald Miller wine to drink?

FLYNN
No.

SISTER ALOYSIUS
Mental reservation?

FLYNN
No.

SISTER ALOYSIUS
You lie.

— Doubt

New Melrose Place

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I watched the original Melrose Place for about a year. The show premiered in the summer of 1992, when I was 18, and the main reason I started watching it is because I read that there was going to be a gay character. (He turned out to be totally boring, but I took what I could get.) When I went back to college for my second year, a bunch of us would get together to watch it every Tuesday night.

For the first few months, it wasn’t a trashy soap opera. There were no villains, no killings, no amnesia. Episodes didn’t end with cliffhangers. It was just a one-hour drama about a bunch of 20somethings trying to get by in Los Angeles, and it was a bit more realistic (by TV standards, anyway) than it eventually became. Once it got all trashy and unbelievable, I lost interest. I rarely watched it after that first year.

The new version of Melrose Place premieres tonight. I’m going to tune in to the first episode and probably get bored after the first few minutes and turn it off. But in tribute to the old series, here are the original first-season credits, with that theme music that takes me back to 1992. See how buddy-buddy everyone is? Nobody was trying to kill each other! Bill Clinton and Al Gore were campaigning across the country by bus! What a great time.

Justice Stevens

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So, it looks like Justice Stevens might be retiring next spring, or so say the Supreme Court kremlinologists. Justices usually hire clerks a year in advance, and Stevens has hired just one for the 2010-11 term instead of the usual four. The man’s going to be 90 years old in April, so it wouldn’t necessarily be surprising. But I thought he was going to stick around until death, and he apparently still plays tennis regularly. Anyway, retirement announcements don’t usually come until the spring, so we won’t know for a while.

If Stevens announces retirement effective at the beginning of the summer recess, like Souter did, that would peg his retirement at about 300 days from now, and he might just miss surpassing Justice Field as the second-longest-serving justice. If he announces a retirement upon the swearing-in of his successor, like O’Connor did, then that would be a couple of months longer (or even more, if we get a Roberts–>Miers–>Alito situation, like we did four years ago), and in that case he would definitely surpass Field, leaving him second only to William O. Douglas in longevity — who happens to be the man Stevens replaced on the bench in 1975.

Think about that. If Stevens retires next spring, then only two justices will have held that particular Supreme Court seat since 1939. And who held it before Douglas? Louis Brandeis! That’s how long it’s been.

On Julie and Julia

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We finally saw Julie & Julia over the weekend. I’d been wanting to see it for a while; not only do I love Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, but the plot sounded fascinating. I hadn’t read the blog or the book, although I’d heard of both, so this was my first introduction to the whole thing.

I loved it. I related to it as a blogger, as an aspiring cook, and as an autodidact. Several critics have said that the Julie Powell parts of the movie are not as good as the Julia Child parts, but I thought both were done equally well. Even though Meryl Streep was phenomenal, I think I actually found the Julie Powell story more interesting — or at least it resonated with me more.

This must be the first mainstream movie about blogging. How could I not want to see it? I got totally sucked in, and it made me nostalgic for the world of blogging as it used to be. Julie Powell’s story takes place in 2002-2003, back before Twitter and Facebook. Back then, you could write a blog and hope that someone would discover it and want to publish you. I always wanted that to happen to me. It never did.

Julie Powell’s living the dream. There’s a scene in the movie where she and her blog are featured on the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times. She gets home from work and there are 65 messages on her answering machine from agents and editors. I don’t know if she really had 65 messages overnight, but as I watched that scene, tears of envy welled up in my eyes. In the last couple of years, I’ve realized that I don’t need to be a published author in order to be happy or validated. Still — I sooo would like it to happen.

As for perfectionism and self-learning: the idea of teaching yourself something by working your way completely through a book appeals to be immensely. I tried to do it with Latin — I didn’t finish. I’ve tried to do it with the so-called Great Books; I’ve read some of them, but not very many.

And when you apply this to cooking, how wonderful! I’ve tried to do more cooking and baking in the last few years. My mom is terrific at it, but she’s so good that I was always scared to try it on my own; it always seemed like a mysterious art. So teaching myself to cook and bake is like unlocking a door I always thought was closed to me. Not only that, but when you make a new recipe, you’re making something tasty and you’re learning how to do something new.

But here’s what really made the whole thing resonate for me.

It strikes me that we admire Julia Child and Julie Powell for different reasons: Julia Child because she seems perfect, Julie Powell because she doesn’t.

Julia Child was not actually perfect; there’s that famous pancake-flipping incident where she tells you that you don’t actually have to be perfect. And she comes off as totally fun and unpretentious. But still: she’s Julia Child. She’s a legend. You can admire a legend; it’s a bigger leap to aspire to be one.

Julie Powell is different. She’s everywoman. You can relate to her because she seems normal, with her boring job and her tiny kitchen. You, too, can cook your way through Julia Child’s cookbook! You, too, can start a blog and get it turned into a book and a movie starring Meryl Streep!

Maybe admiring and liking someone are not the same thing. I admire perfect people; I like people I can relate to. And this is the flaw in perfectionism, if you turn it around: perfectionism will get you admired, but it won’t get you liked. I used to think that these were the same thing, but now I know they aren’t. And if I have to choose, I’d rather be liked.

In the past I desperately wanted the perfect people to like me. If they liked me, then that meant they admired me, since these were the same thing. And if they admired me, that meant there was something in me worth admiring. And if you are admired, you are loved by millions!

Except that it’s not true. The only people who love perfect people are people who feel bad about themselves. And why would you care about the judgment of people who feel bad about themselves? Wouldn’t you rather be liked by the people who already like themselves? Wouldn’t you rather be liked by the people who accept their imperfections?

In other words, if you’re perfect, people will like you for the wrong reasons. If you just try to be yourself, people will like you for the right reasons. And the people who don’t like you don’t matter.

Now if I could just make all of this sink into my head…

RIP Ted Kennedy

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“If his father, Joe, had surveyed, from an early age up to the time of his death, all of his children, his sons in particular, and asked to rank them on talents, effectiveness, likelihood to have an impact on the world, Ted would have been a very poor fourth. Joe, John, Bobby … Ted.

“He was the survivor,” Mr. Ornstein continued. “He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he will end up by far being the most significant.”

– from Ted Kennedy’s obituary in the New York Times.

Celestia

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I’ve been on a space and astronomy kick since the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing was celebrated last month. I just finished reading This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, by William E. Burrows. It’s incredibly thorough, covering all aspects of the space program from humanity’s first strivings to fly into space, through Galileo’s discoveries, through the development of rocketry, all the way to the end of the 20th century. (The book was published in 1998.) Now I’ve moved on to The Fabric of the Heavens, a history of astronomy from Babylonian times to the discoveries of Newton.

I’ve also discovered an amazing free downloadable computer program, Celestia, that lets you simulate travel throughout the universe. It contains models of every planet and moon in our solar system, rotating and revolving at their actual speeds, as well as pretty much every star we know about; man-made satellites, such as the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope, in their proper places; comets; and countless galaxies. You can see things from any vantage point, you can speed way up or slow way down, you can move around. It’s also expandable — you can download addons for numerous spacecraft, comets, asteroids, and even fictional planets and spaceships, such as the Enterprise or the Death Star, Vulcan or Tatooine.

You can do so many cool things with it, and playing around with it can bring interesting insights. For instance, if you zoom way out so that so you can see the sun and the first four planets, and then tell the program to put Earth at the center of your screen and keep it there no matter what happens, and then speed things up, it looks like the sun and the planets are orbiting around Earth, just like the ancients thought. Venus and Mercury do these weird loop-de-loops around the sun, creating the epicycles that we see here on Earth, while Mars looks like the “wandering star” people used to think it was.

Or you can go to the surface of Mars and see the Earth as a tiny dot, just as Mars looks like a tiny dot from Earth. Or you can go to another star and see the Sun itself as just another dot.

Or you can press a button that shows you the lines that make up the constellations, and then you can zoom way, way out from the Sun, past Neptune, past Pluto, without the constellations seeming to change shape at all. They don’t start to change shape until you get about 0.1 light years from the Sun. That’s how far away they are! We know this intellectually, but it’s amazing to see it actually simulated.

I don’t know why I never knew about Celestia, but it’s my new toy, and it’s absolutely free.

Health Care Basics

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So, the health care debate.

But first, a really long tangent. Feel free to skip this part, but it does kind of relate.

* * *

One day when I was a boy, I was reading some old Jewish folktale that took place in a shtetl. There were some robbers, and they were stealing from a family’s home. My dad was shaving in the bathroom, and I went in and asked him, “Is there such thing as robbers?”

It seemed so weird to me that there could be a group of people who snuck into someone’s house and stole their stuff. It… just didn’t make sense. It was too scary and unsettling. It was… wrong. Why would people do something that was wrong?

I tend to be idealistic about humanity — or naïve, depending on how you look at it. I like to throw away the assumptions and ask the questions a child would ask. Why do dogs have four legs? Why is the sky blue? Why are people mean? Why can’t they just not be mean? Grow the hell up, someone might say. People are just mean. What? Come on! I can’t even ask why?

I believe, or I want to believe, that every human being wants to be good, that human beings care about their fellow human beings, and that if you just try to communicate with someone who is ill-informed — if you calmly lay out your reasoning, clearly and logically — the other person can’t help but come around; perhaps not right away, but eventually. Even if the person protests, I believe (or, again, I want to believe) that your words will seep into the person’s subconscious, take root, and flower when the time is right.

I believe deeply, almost religiously, in the power of logical argument. That doesn’t mean an argument divorced from emotion or morality; ultimately, arguments for the preservation of humanity or for the idea that we should treat each other well are moral ones, not logical ones. But the process by which you get from a moral premise to a moral conclusion, that involves logic.

As for the substantive part, the moral part: I do think everyone wants to do good. We can be selfish, fearful creatures, but we are also capable of great empathy and generosity. That empathy and generosity just needs to be teased out sometimes, and it has to be done in the right way. I don’t always know what that way is, but I believe it’s possible. I just refuse to believe that there isn’t a person who can’t ultimately be convinced.

Again, call me idealistic or naïve. I don’t care.

* * *

Okay, that’s the end of the tangent. You really should have read it.

But back to the health care debate.

All the craziness is making people forget what this is all about:

Either you care about what happens to strangers, or you don’t.

Either (1) you believe your fellow citizens deserve health insurance, or (2) you don’t believe your fellow citizens deserve health insurance.

Either (1) you see other human beings — most of whom you will never meet and who may have life circumstances or cultures that are completely different from your own — as actual, living, breathing people, or (2) you see your fellow human beings as subhuman.

Why do I say subhuman? Because if you don’t ascribe to other people the same three-dimensionality that you ascribe to yourself and your own family members, if you don’t think their lives matter as much, then you’re not treating them as human beings. You’re treating them as less than human. As subhuman. (This is why good fiction writers are probably better people than the rest of us: because they take the time to imagine fully real, fleshed-out characters. Because they appreciate that every human being has value.)

It’s weird. For most of 2008, and most of the years before that, I thought that the health care debate was about the fact that millions of Americans don’t have health insurance. Either they can’t afford it or they’re denied coverage, but for whatever reason, they don’t have health insurance. So they get sick and die because they can’t afford to see a doctor for minor issues that become major issues or even for preventive care. Or they have an accident or develop a catastrophic illness and then they go into bankruptcy because they have to pay for everything themselves.

So health care reform is about insuring all of our citizens, like every other modern nation tries to do.

But then suddenly it’s 2009, and people are saying, “Health care reform, as we’ve long said, is primarily about reducing costs.” What? When did this happen? I thought health care reform was about insuring all of our citizens. When did it become about cost? Cost is an issue, but it is a secondary issue. The primary issue is that there are millions of Americans who lack health insurance.

The cost isn’t really a big deal. Why are people so selfish that they’re not willing to pay higher taxes to help out millions of other people? Our taxes are already so low compared to other countries. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, taxes were way higher than they are now — the top rate was 91 percent — and the economy thrived.

The response is, “Are you kidding? I’m struggling as it is.” Well, guess what? There are millions of Americans who are much worse off than you.

“But this is my money. I should be rewarded for my hard work.” Yes, but you have a moral obligation to the rest of human society.

“But if these other people just worked harder, they’d be doing as well as me.” Tell that to the woman working two minimum-wage jobs to feed her family.

“It’s not my fault she’s worse off than I am.” No. But again, you are part of human society, and therefore you should care about her.

You should care about her.

“Why can’t we all just give to charity?” If that worked, we wouldn’t be in the mess we were in. Besides, mandatory payment — taxes — takes the social pressure off you. We care about how we’re doing in relation to other people, and if you know that everyone else has to give money for the common good, you won’t feel like a chump for being the only one doing it.

I don’t understand why more preachers and pastors and other religious leaders aren’t pleading with their congregants to support universal health care and the higher taxes that are necessary to achieve it.

I can be selfish and irritable and scared and suspicious just like anyone else can. But that’s why I need to be made to contribute, just like everyone else. We can’t rely on charity. Charity relies on our moods and our moods are inconsistent. We need to be made to pay higher taxes.

I don’t understand why citizens have to carry guns to rallies and why politicians have to spread blatant lies. (Chuck Grassley.)

Either you care about what happens to strangers or you don’t.

I guess I’m just naïve.

* * *

[Update: I don’t mean to suggest that health care costs are not important at all. There’s no need for our taxes to go toward inefficiencies or for us to pay more taxes than are necessary. But reduced health care costs are a means to an end — health insurance for as many people as possible — and not the end in itself.]

Orestes Arcuni

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Via Gothamist, here’s more information about the cute guy who played the bellhop on the season premiere of Mad Men: his name is Orestes Arcuni.

Also via that Gothamist post, here’s a long radio interview with him and here’s an interview with Bryan Batt (Sal) in which he talks more about his character.

And if you really love Mad Men, Vanity Fair has an extensive piece on the show, including a visit to the set and an interview with Matthew Weiner.

Matthew Weiner Interview

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I eagerly awaited and then watched the season premiere of Mad Men last night, and I was surprised to see that they had only jumped forward a few months. Since the first season took place in 1960 and the second season took place in 1962, I was expecting this season to take place in 1964, with JFK already assassinated and LBJ as president. But apparently not. I’m a little disappointed, because I’m impatient to see the characters advance through the decade.

Alan Sepinwall has an extensive interview with Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, head writer and producer, and they talk a little bit about the time setting of this season and why Weiner chose it. And Weiner still plans to end the show around 1970.

They also talk about Sal’s kiss:

We were having a debate about this when I watched the episode with a few other critics: is this the closest he’s ever gotten?

I think so. I think this is the way it had to happen, and from what I can tell, it’s the way it did happen for a lot of people. There’s a little insight into a subculture, but listen to the things he’s saying: “Jesus” and “Oh my god.” I can’t even imagine it, but to deny yourself that and finally get it, it must be like a switch went off in his brain.

I didn’t totally buy the encounter — I was surprised that a gay man (the bellboy) would be so bold in 1963. And yet, Matt and I saw The Temperamentals yesterday afternoon, about Harry Hay and the founding of the Mattachine Society, and I’m reminded that not all gay men were shrinking violets before Stonewall. Stonewall was not the stark dividing line it’s made out to be. So I guess the encounter was plausible.

Speaking of The Temperamentals, the cast includes Michael Urie, who plays Harry Hay’s lover Rudi Gernreich. It’s a very small theater and the cast comes out into the audience a couple of times, so at one point we were like three feet away from Ugly Betty‘s Mark. It was exciting.

Anyway — I’m glad Mad Men is back.

Are We Alone?

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Between the Earth and the Moon are about 240,000 miles of empty space, as this image shows [via Metafilter]. Imagine the Apollo astronauts on their four-day journey to the moon, encountering along the way absolutely nothing.

This page puts it in perspective, using pixels as an analogy.

There’s so much empty space out there — not accounting for dark matter, of course — and it makes me wonder whether our species will ever encounter another intelligent life form in the universe — even if that intelligent life exists.

Imagine you’re the only person on planet Earth. Or at least you think you are. Unbeknownst to you, there is another person on Earth, but you’re in Kansas and the other person is in Sydney, Australia. You have no car or horse, no way of getting around really quickly. What are the chances that you and this other person will ever meet? Even if there are a couple of other people out there — say, one in Moscow and one in New Delhi — it’s still not likely you’ll ever become aware of each other. You could live your entire lifespan and never realize there are others out there.

Maybe one day, if you’re supremely lucky (but it’s incredibly unlikely), you’ll find a message in a bottle that has washed up on shore from halfway around the world. But it will be in a language you can’t read — heck, who knows if it will even be writing — and anyway, you will have no idea how long ago the sender threw it into the ocean or if the sender still exists.

What if it’s even worse — what if you’re the only person on Earth and this other person lives on the moon?

Even if there is intelligent life out there — not just life, but intelligent life — it’s unlikely we’ll ever encounter it.

We are, for all intents and purposes, alone in the universe. We are a cushy oasis in a vast nothingness.

We are all we’ve got.

Hunter’s Soufflé

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Matt and I have been watching True Blood. A few weeks ago we devoured the first season in about a week and a half, and then we started watching season two, and now we’re all caught up. Last night we watched the most recent episode.

Spoiler below.

I don’t think anything on the show has grossed me out as much as the Hunter’s Soufflé. (Well, okay, the way vampires die in Bon Temps is much grosser than in Sunnydale.) There’s Michelle Forbes, slicing up the heart with a sharp knife! Ick! I nearly couldn’t watch. And then later, Tara and Eggs walk in the door, and you know what’s going to happen, but you really hope it doesn’t. But then, yes, she brings out the soufflé. Oh god, no, no, no! And then, yep.

Ugh!

I think the second season of True Blood is missing some of the Southern gothic that made the first season so addictive. And Sunday’s episode was the first time in weeks that Sookie and Jason (mmm… Jason Stackhouse) have had a scene together. Sookie and Tara haven’t seen each other in a long time either. I miss watching the relationships between these humans.

But the show is still wildly entertaining.