EPISODE 211 – SAM OR SARUMAN: THE FUTURE OF BREAKFAST
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
This is going to be relatively short, mostly because as we speak I am sitting in a hotel room on the island of Kauai. I know, it’s appalling (and undeserved). It’s for work, believe it or not. But take heart, I will undoubtedly pay for it sometime soon.
A while back I found myself in a conversation with a bunch of younger Jesuits talking about how it’s “over”.
"It": Our Mission (at least as we have understood it for a long long time). “Over": “There’s fewer and fewer men”; “greater and greater demands”; “not a lot of planning going on”. Big picture, “Might as well enjoy the ride before the ship capsizes once and for all.”
This is not entirely unfamiliar patter. Everyone's entitled to some darkness. (Coincidentally, that was also the motto I chose for my senior yearbook photo.) But usually the people speaking are much older Jesuits who have invested their whole lives in an institution and now see that where they used to get ten new men a year now they don’t get any, and three others retire or move on.
And so they wonder what’s going to happen. And even more, whether it’s all been for naught, whether the whole “loving God looking out for us” thing was just a story we tell ourselves to create some sense of purpose or validation and in fact we have been fools this whole time. (Who said existential angst can’t be awesome?)
Given the changes that have happened in the Church in the last fifty years, it makes sense for an older Jesuit to be asking those kinds of questions. Shoot, in my current career they’re even a little familiar to me now (he says, having convinced the Jesuits to send him to film school but having not yet gotten to a point where he can be certain he wasn't ridiculous for believing in it).
But it’s not so typical to hear guys thirty, forty years younger looking ahead and saying Send some flowers, the party’s over, let’s all drink the last of the champagne.
It reminds me of a Jesuit meditation called “The Two Standards”. Here’s how it goes: Imagine a battlefield before the fighting begins. Two sets of troops under drawn up on either side. Under the standard of the Cross, we have Jesus and his supporters – the poor, the marginalized, the sick and lame and not SWM. And on other, under some other standard, the Devil and those people who are with him.
The idea of the meditation is to spend some time with each group; imagine who is in each, what they look like, how they’re behaving, what they want. And then, see where you feel called, and where you feel resistance, where you might rather have cocktails with the “pitchforks and tail” set than to actually stand with God (he says, as he wonders where his coconut mai tai has gotten to).
Sometimes that battlefield imagery makes a lot of sense to people. Sometimes it seems a little too violent and us vs. them. But as I was listening to my friends, I found myself thinking of another, SUPER-nerdy way of approaching it.
In “The Lord of the Rings”, maybe my favorite element is the Palantír, crystal balls that certain characters obtain that supposedly allow some glimpse into the future. It was assumed the Palantír were all long gone, but in fact as we head into the second and third books we discover that there are a bunch of these things still around.
Saruman, instead of the future you should maybe be looking into a mirror.
That hairstyle? Not magic.
And with rare exceptions they are nothing but trouble. Once characters start getting glimpses of the future they are HOOKED on it. And wouldn’t you just know, the futures they see are always pretty darn bleak. Sauron, AKA Sky-ball, has too many troops and advantages, too much power, it’s only a matter of time until he defeats everyone. And it’s all just so daunting, the characters lose whatever nerve they have. Denethor, King of Gondor, gets so depressed he tries to burn his son and himself alive. Saruman, once upon the time the greatest wizard of them all, is so convinced they’re doomed he starts to work against his own people and for El Baddy.
It turns out Sauron had his own Palantír, and that’s why they’ve been such bad visions of the future. The future...as Master Yoda likes to put it, “Always in motion.” Easy to misinterpret or manipulate, very hard to accurately predict.
In contrast to these characters, we have Frodo’s fellow Hobbits, each of them focused more or less on the moment they’re living in – the taste of their beer, the monster in front of them, the virtues of the second breakfast. They’re earthy, our Hobbits, but that also seems to make them much more grounded than others.
I wonder if the Two Standards for many of us today isn’t more in that frame of, Am I going to look to the difficult worst case possibilities of the future and despair? Or am I going to sit here and enjoy this liquorish drink with a crinkly umbrella in it?
The latter position can seem naive, childish, even irresponsible. (And that’s true in “The Lord of the Rings”, too. No one really takes the Hobbits seriously, except for Gandalf.) But I have to say, sitting through conversations where we all spitball on the comet probably coming for Planet Church, a solid hour spent eating eggs and sipping tea seems much more sensible. Certainly a path that leads mostly to despair is probably not a great path to take. Although if you like drama...
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I saw two great examples of that choice between life and despair this last week. The first is a spoiler regarding the new “Love Actually” semi-sequel that aired in the U.K. over the weekend as part of their brilliant yearly “Red Nose Day” fund raiser for children, and will air in the U.S. during our own RND in May. If you want to wait and be surprised until then, best to skip to the next bit.
Ready?
So the new short, which they’ve dubbed “Red Nose Day Actually”, is basically just a greatest hits version of the film, but set in the present. We get Andrew Lincoln doing the Christmas singers sign bit again, Hugh Grant dancing in Downing Street (to “Hotline Bling”, an excellent choice), Mr. Bean working at a department store and insisting on ridiculous levels of wrapping, and Bill Nighy talking to the same radio DJ about who he’s shagged.
In keeping with that “Hey, it worked once!” aesthetic, the short ends with Hugh Grant, having just been re-elected as Prime Minister after five years out of the job, being asked this question at his first press conference:
“Prime Minister, when you came to power the first time you were very optimistic, you said that the power of good would finally win, that love actually was all around. Fourteen years later, do you still feel as upbeat?”
And here’s his response (which you could also watch here):
Interesting. Obviously times for many people have got harder. And people are nervous and fearful. And it’s not just in politics that things are tough. Usain Bolt has run his last Olympics, the Harry Potter films are finished, Piers Morgan is still alive.
But let’s look at the other side of the coin – Metallica’s new album is an absolute cracker. And on a deeper level, I’m optimist. Wherever you see tragedy you see bravery, too. Where you see ordinary people in need, you see extraordinary ordinary people come to their aid.
Today’s Red Nose Day and people are giving their hard earned cash to people they’ll never meet, but people whose pain and fear they feel and want to fight. So it’s not just romantic love which is all around. Most people still every day everywhere have enough love in their heart to help human beings in trouble.
Good’s going to win. I’m actually sure of it.
Don’t mind me. It’s just my hay fever acting up.
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Three years ago, Showtime aired a new documentary mini-series called “The Years of Living Dangerously”, in which each week a different celebrity would go out and report on a major global issue (like deforestation, energy production or species extinction).
I don’t think many people ever heard about it – probably in part because there’s not a lot of America that has much tolerance for celebrities lecturing people about what should be the make up of their social conscience.
But the series won an Emmy, because it was better than that. It even came back for a second season last year on the National Geographic Channel. And its first episode got some real buzz; it was the first post-“Late Night” appearance of David Letterman. (The episode has Letterman going to India to talk to people about the challenges of producing enough energy for 1 billion people, and “SNL”-comedian Cecily Strong in the States talking to U.S. solar power supporters about their struggles with the big utility businesses.)
It also features this:
BEARD.
As I discovered this week, some of it is pretty freaking bleak. India’s energy demands are crazy huge, and mostly coal and diesel-fueled. What’s worse, their energy infrastructure is so bad that they typically lose 30% of their output before anyone ever gets to use it.
Meanwhile in some U.S. states “Big Utility” has effectively made it illegal to go solar. One former employee of an energy company tells stories of his company buying out all the lobbyists in a given state to prevent them from being hired to oppose their efforts to kill solar. It’s basically the Tobacco Industry all over again, but this time in place of “cancer” we get to insert “End of Days” and/or “Our Grandchildren’s Ruin”.
But it turns out there’s a lot of hope in show, too. David Letterman...the man is a national treasure. He talks to everyone he meets with the same level of curiosity and respect, and it gives many of them an importance and a value they don’t yet have in our world today. And I don’t know, even the bleakest moments still somehow seemed better because people are actually talking about them, and some are trying to do something. Honestly, I had a whole other bout of hay fever watching it, and I was on a plane, too, so it was a little embarrassing. (I’m just not sure “sobbing hay fever” is a thing.)
The “Years of Living Dangerously” project is still active on National Geographic’s website. You can also buy the Letterman episode (which is called “A Race Against Time”) and others on things like Miami’s struggle to face rising waters, the refugee crisis in Africa, electric vehicles (with “Modern Family”’s Phil Dunphy), and the fight in Waukegan, Illinois to shut down a coal plant, here.
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Lots of Stephen King in the news this week. The first movie based on his “Dark Tower” series dropped a cool new poster.
That tag line (and the moment in which it is said) is one of my most favorite lines in all of fiction. Can’t wait to see it play out this summer.
The feature remake of King’s coming of age story “It” – think “Stand by Me” but with a nightmare monster clown that’s murdering children – also got this scary freaking trailer.
(I’m reading “It” now. Boy, that Stephen King can write, and not just for creeps and shriekles. People wonder why his books are so long – a lot of it is, he really sees every character as having their own story to tell. Even very minor characters will randomly get a whole chapter or subchapter from their point of view.
It may seem odd to say about a guy who writes about horrors, but time and again King shows an incredible amount of empathy.)
And speaking of horror and empathy, if you’re a fan of the U.S. version of “The Office”, check out this story about the many fan theories suggesting that Toby “Worst H.R. rep ever” Flenderson is in fact the Scranton Strangler.
(Honestly, I’ve always thought it was this guy. So not right.)
Do we actively choose to hope? I don't know. Maybe we do, but to me, it’s usually more something that comes upon us and blows away the cobwebs of sad and ugh when we’re looking at the ocean or watching a movie or with friends. We choose to live, and that brings to hope.
Forget the voices telling you it's all going into the toilet. There's still today. Listen to some music. Have another breakfast.
