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Mohammed at Four O’Clock

What’s so funny about …?

Oh, let’s say, a Muslim guy walking through the airport, or the bride of Frankenstein … or saliva. It’s all there — and more! — at an exhibit called “What Makes Us Smile?” at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which I saw with my daughter a few days ago. Even though the world is still caught in the jaws of hell, I decided to write about this raw celebration of humor because the tears of amazement and joy that flowed as I walked through it felt like my definition of peace.

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Predator Syndrome

There are twenty thousand nuclear weapons on the planet, a quarter of them ready for launch at a moment’s suicidal impulse, aimed at countries that stopped being enemies two decades ago. It’s six minutes to midnight. “Disarmament” has as much cachet in America’s corridors of power as “socialism.”

And the U.S. House, bless its evil heart, has just sliced the Achilles tendon of peace. It recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, which has many seriously worrisome provisions, two of which stand in stark, grinning contrast to one another.

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A Bad Day That Never Changes

I get so soul-sick of the war news because it’s a bad day that never changes. Over the weekend, NATO kills 14 people in an airstrike in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Ten of them are children. President Karzai cries, “No more!” A NATO spokesperson pats him on the head, regretfully shrugging that the alliance works hard to “limit” civilian casualties.

Oh sacred Earth . . .

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Ignorant Certainty

Now that the end of the world didn’t happen, I can’t stop thinking about it. What chutzpah, what a diminished worldview, not simply to make such a prediction, but — even more incomprehensible, to my relentlessly self-questioning mind — to know you’ll be among the saved.

In 1011, a guy like Harold Camping would probably have been able to generate more panic than bemusement. A millennium later, with science taught in the public schools and all, we have a little more collective resistance to such thundering certainty leaping from highway billboards. I confess, however, to feeling a deep, reptilian tug last Friday morning, as I saw the sign — SAVE THIS DATE, MAY 21, 2011, CHRIST IS COMING — while driving through eastern Wisconsin. Yikes, that’s tomorrow.

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Raw Heart

Frank Ferrante, an overweight guy with deep spiritual wounds and an enormous sense of humor, thought he was signing onto a sort of vegan life fix: 42 days of raw foods, a shot of liquefied wheatgrass every morning, exercise, weigh-ins, holistic medical exams, weekly colonics, daily affirmations. And then all of a sudden he’d be thin and happy.

But transformation isn’t a technical fix. What Frank learned — and what we learn as well as we travel the journey with him in a powerful, intensely honest documentary called May I Be Frank — is that transformation turns you inside out.

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Wanted Dead or Alive

When President Obama, summing up the killing of Osama bin Laden, said, “Justice has been done,” the problem wasn’t simply that he misspoke — justice, after all, can only emerge at the end of an impartial judicial proceeding — but that, in so misspeaking, he hit the emotional bull’s-eye.

“Justice has been done.”

We got him, America! Oh yeah, sweet! Who can’t feel the pop of satisfaction in those words? “He should have said, ‘Retaliation has been accomplished,’” Marjorie Cohn pointed out recently at Common Dreams, and that’s true, of course, but the president wasn’t summoning the dry, sober rule of law. He was evoking, just as George W. Bush did before him, the Wild West, America’s deepest font of mythology, where justice, you know, comes from the muzzle of a revolver. As with Geronimo, so with Osama: Wanted Dead or Alive.

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The Unholy Grail

Perhaps the eeriest thing about Osama bin Laden’s death is how little it means.

Yeah, I know: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The raid on the devil’s compound outside Abbottabad, Pakistan this week apparently kick-started our patriotic fervor, which had been languishing over the course of a pretty bad decade of military quagmire and economic collapse. Killing Osama — turning him, as the New York Times put it, into “a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head” — brought back a rush of national purpose and glory.

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