Cinemorphosis

Tag: bible

  • Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

    Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

    During my junior year of high school, I spent a weeknight cruising East Fourteenth—the gritty artery that runs through San Leandro and Hayward—until one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of Martino’s tomato red Ranchero, the two of us flexing imaginary muscles and real teenage bravado. Martino was my bodybuilding partner, my brother-in-biceps, and together we patrolled the boulevard like suburban centurions on a mission to kill time. And we succeeded.

    When I finally crept back into my house under the cover of darkness, I wasn’t met by a parent’s scolding. No raised voices. No lectures. Just a deafening moral hangover. A private throb of guilt that came from inside—the inner thermostat dialed to “waste detected.”

    That night, the dissonance hit me hard: I had thrown away hours of my finite life, not with rebellion or passion, but with asphalt apathy. 

    Some people never feel that throb. For them, life is a sandbox without rules. Morality is performative, calculated just enough to avoid arrest or awkward silences. These are the functional nihilists—those for whom nothing is sacred, so nothing is squandered. There are no stakes, no salvation, no damnation. No trembling because there’s nothing to tremble about.

    But Kierkegaard wouldn’t have cruised East Fourteenth. He’d have stayed home, in existential dread, kneeling before the void, trying to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. Not a metaphor. A mandate. A gun-to-the-temple kind of urgency.

    And that gun? I’ve felt it every morning. Not the literal kind, but a cold steel thought pressing behind the eyes: Work or be worthless. Create or decay. Hustle or rot. I didn’t coast through college because I loved knowledge. I ground through it because I feared poverty, failure, and the humiliation of becoming a soft tomato with four toothpicks sticking out—Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym tank top.

    Fear built my body. But can fear build a soul?

    That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Muscles are visible. Measurable. The soul, by contrast, is a ghost that flinches from mirrors. What makes a good soul? Is it, as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson suggests, acts of reciprocal kindness—a kind of moral evolution, godless but decent? Or do we still need to shake in our boots, to feel that Kierkegaardian quake that says tend to the soul or become monstrous?

    Then there’s modern self-care, the secular sacrament of our time. Meditation, hydration, positive affirmations—pampering routines dressed up as spiritual growth. But is self-care just aromatherapy for the abyss? What if the soul needs something harder than scented candles?

    And what of the artist, the compulsive maker? Is the act of creating a form of salvation—or just another idol, a beautiful golden calf carved in your own image?

    Forgive me. I’m in my sixties now. The questions don’t resolve; they just echo louder. I know indulgence makes me miserable and discipline brings fleeting peace. But that’s not the kind of salvation Kierkegaard meant. That’s just emotional maintenance.

    So I remain agnostic, trembling not from conviction, but from having more questions than answers. 

  • Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère recounts the strange, fevered period of his life when he became a practicing Catholic—a conversion that lasted three years and hovered somewhere between epiphany and breakdown. During that time, he rose each morning to take meticulous notes on the Gospel of John, scribbling like a man possessed. He now looks back at that period in the early 1990s with bewilderment, even embarrassment. What surprises him most isn’t that he converted—it’s that, years later, while immersed in researching the origins of Christianity, he failed at first to connect that research to his own religious episode. When he finally does, the realization is so jarring he feels compelled to dig out the old notebooks. And yet the thought of reading them fills him with dread.

    The last time he looked at them, in 2005, he was deep in depression and under the care of a psychiatrist. At the height of his religious zeal, Carrère had been suicidal. He was prescribed antidepressants—ones whose warning labels included the possibility of “erroneous beliefs,” a caveat that made him laugh darkly at his own conversion. He’s careful not to reduce religious yearning to a single cause, but it’s hard to miss the pattern: a man desperate to avoid self-destruction turning toward a story of rebirth, redemption, and divine rescue. Perhaps, instead of ending his life, he baptized it into another.

    As he flips through the old pages, he’s confronted by a younger self who no longer believed in free will or personal resolve as meaningful paths to goodness. He saw human beings as hopelessly frail and himself as incapable of rescuing his own life. At the time, he clung to God and marriage with equal desperation, hoping both would serve as anchors to prevent him from drifting into the abyss. But the notebooks also reveal a darker truth: his marriage to Helene was deeply unhappy. They loved each other, but they drank too much, blamed each other for their suffering, and fed each other’s neuroses. His writing—once the purpose of his life—had stalled completely. He hadn’t written anything in three years. He was a man sinking.

    Carrère eventually crawled out of that pit, but not through faith. What saved him wasn’t a god, but a set of daily disciplines: yoga, martial arts.

    A spiritual system that promised absolutes had failed him. A life that combined a focus on mind and body resulting in relaxation and clarity of thoughts, helped empty his anxieties and depression. With a strong mind and body, he was able to be productive as a writer. He eventually made lots of money from his craft, and he became the least likely to become religious: He became the rich man for who is about as ripe for salvation as the camel walking through the eye of a needle. 

  • The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère draws a sly, subversive line between Les Revenants—a moody French zombie drama—and the early days of Christianity, when Paul’s disciples waited breathlessly for the world to end and the dead to rise. They were the original doomsday cult: spiritual outcasts and apocalyptic misfits, not unlike the “true believers” Eric Hoffer famously described in The True Believer. What bound them together wasn’t political ideology or economic despair—it was a single cosmic rupture: the Resurrection. One dead man, allegedly not dead anymore, changed the course of Western civilization. It’s not hard to see the resemblance to Les Revenants—a town full of dead people quietly returning, not as ghouls, but as eerily normal people who nonetheless shatter reality.

    Carrère, never content with simple metaphors, brings this comparison to a dinner conversation with his urbane, rationalist friends. One of them, Patrick, accidentally blurts out something true and uncomfortably sharp: millions of otherwise intelligent, educated, and mentally stable people believe in something as outlandish as Christian theology—and no one bats an eye. If someone today claimed Zeus turned into a swan to seduce their cousin, or said they kissed a frog that turned into a prince, we’d laugh or lock them up. But tell a roomful of professionals that a crucified Jewish preacher, born of a virgin, rose from the dead and will someday return to judge the living and the dead—and you’ll be offered wine and a seat at the gala. As Patrick notes, “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

    Carrère is not the first to dwell on this strangeness. Nietzsche, he reminds us, was equally dumbfounded that people who believed in rationality, science, and history could also believe in what is essentially a fairy tale with incense and stained glass. And yet, the tale persists. Presidents still bow to bishops. Cathedrals still echo with sacred music. Maybe it’s not belief that sustains Christianity, but aesthetic inertia—what Carrère calls “pious sentiment.” It’s not that people believe Jesus walked on water. It’s that the stories—and the cultural power they evoke—feel too grand to abandon. You may not believe in Santa Claus, but you still get misty-eyed when the lights go up and the music swells.

    So Carrère offers us a taxonomy of belief: There are the literalists, who treat doctrine as GPS coordinates for their soul. And then there are the sentimentalists—the lukewarm faithful—who love the rituals, the candles, the elevated language, but leave the miracles in quotation marks. For them, religion has become spiritual décor. They still crave spiritual ritual but instead of going to church, they attend yoga classes. The creative power that once summoned cathedrals and crusades now hums gently in the background, just another playlist in the cultural mix. Belief, in this world, doesn’t have to be true—it just has to be beautiful enough to preserve.

  • Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”

    Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.

    Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.

    Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.

  • Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    As I consider Cicero’s call for self-restraint in Tusculan Disputations, my thoughts return to a story that’s haunted me for over twenty years—Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It is, in essence, the tragic fable of a Maudlin Man, told with surgical clarity and Chekhovian cruelty.

    His name is Nicholai Ivanich, and he’s not merely pathetic—he’s morally revolting. He marries an aging, unattractive woman for her wealth and waits with predator patience for her to die. Once she obliges, he buys himself a country farmhouse ringed with gooseberry bushes, retreats from the world, and crowns himself a minor deity among the local peasants by handing out cheap liquor like some portly, provincial Dionysus.

    Chekhov doesn’t give us Nicholai’s voice. He gives us Ivan, the disgusted brother, who sees this man for what he is: a swollen, self-satisfied corpse in waiting. Ivan calls Nicholai’s farmhouse dream a “definite disorder”—not a goal, but a fixation, a fever dream dressed up as a life plan. For Ivan, his brother’s pastoral retreat is less Arcadia and more open-casket viewing. “He looked old, stout, flabby,” Ivan observes. “His cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.”

    That image sticks: Nicholai, the human piglet, grinning over his plate of gooseberries, believing he’s achieved bliss when in truth he’s just decaying in comfort.

    And then comes the moment that seals it—Nicholai’s nightly ritual: he’s brought a plate of gooseberries from his estate, and upon seeing them, he literally weeps with joy. “He looked at them in silence, laughed with joy, and could not speak for excitement.” He is consumed by the performance of happiness. It’s not the berries he loves—it’s what they symbolize. In his mind, they are proof that his life is complete.

    But it’s all delusion. Nicholai isn’t fulfilled—he’s embalmed in maudlin sentimentality, drunk on nostalgia for something that never really existed. His joy is cosmetic. He’s not flourishing. He’s fermenting.

    And this, I confess, reminds me of myself—and my fellow watch addicts.

    We, too, have our gooseberries. Ours just happen to tick.

    We post videos of our “grail watches” and glow with reverence as we hold them up to the camera like relics from a sacred shrine. We give breathless soliloquies about our “perfect” collections, our “ultimate” configurations. We praise bezels and dial textures the way Nicholai praises his berries—with trembling hands and watery eyes. And like Nicholai, we’re not convincing anyone but ourselves.

    Because deep down, we know: the drama is maudlin. The joy is hollow. The entire pageantry is just a way to distract from the torment our hobby brings us. We spend hours obsessing, comparing, flipping, tweaking, always convinced that this next watch will bring balance and peace, only to find ourselves more anxious than before.

    We are men who weep over gooseberries. And worse—we make YouTube thumbnails about them.

    If we were honest, we’d admit that one decent, mid-priced watch would offer more peace than any “holy grail” ever could. But that would mean giving up the theater. The drama. The illusion that our fixations have meaning. And that, for the Maudlin Man, is the hardest loss of all.

  • Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    In the early 90s, my brother managed a spa restaurant at the Grand Wailea in Maui—a temple of eucalyptus steam and $18 cucumber water. His girlfriend, the head chef, ruled the kitchen with the calm authority of a health-conscious empress. I visited one summer and found myself one morning alone at breakfast, sipping coffee and trying to look like a man deep in thought rather than a tourist waiting on papaya boats.

    At the table next to mine sat a striking brunette with the kind of diamond on her finger that doubles as a paperweight. She started talking. To me. Boldly, intimately, as if we were two old conspirators.

    She was thirty-five, married, and bored. Grew up in Santa Monica. Modeled a little. Dabbled in chaos. Now she was married to a man forty years her senior—a retired Navy officer turned business tycoon currently swimming laps in the resort pool while his wife flirted with the help. She pointed out one of the servers, a freckled boy in his early twenties pouring her orange juice with the dreamy smile of a man about to be devoured.

    “I’m sleeping with him,” she said, as casually as if she were announcing she’d tried the papaya last time and found it too sweet.

    She spoke of her marriage like a real estate deal: mutually beneficial, emotionally vacant, and efficiently managed. Her husband financed her yoga retreats. She provided him with public companionship and discreet absence. After breakfast, she was off to a vegetarian cooking class to learn how to live forever.

    She told me she was researching longevity, obsessed with health, and that she was trying to convince her husband to move to Sedona, Arizona—“the best place in the country to live a long life,” she said.

    Back then, I filed Sedona away in the brain folder labeled someday. That place. The Holy Grail of Health. A desert Shangri-La where your body becomes pure and your soul gets exfoliated.

    I didn’t make it there until a few weeks ago.

    We drove in from Prescott, and I’ll admit it: the landscape is jaw-dropping. Red rock formations that looked carved by gods on steroids. Mountains with biceps. Cliffs that scowl. One ridge looked like Zeus doing a lat spread.

    Then we hit the town.

    One-lane highway. Organic restaurants. Shops selling mystical crystals and dreamcatchers made in China. Every storefront promising to “align your energy” or “awaken your inner light”—assuming you have a functioning credit card.

    We took a bus tour. The guide cheerfully explained that tech billionaires ship their Lamborghinis in on trucks just to drive them through town for a week of synchronized flexing, tantric massages, and moon-circle manifesting.

    The mysticism was so heavy-handed it became farce. At a matcha tea stand, a man with unblinking eyes dropped a sugar butterfly into my daughter’s drink and, with complete sincerity, instructed her to make a wish so the butterfly could “help it manifest.”

    That was the moment.

    That was when I realized I hated Sedona. Not the place—God no. The place is stunning. I hated the idea of Sedona.

    Sedona the place is geology and wonder.
    Sedona the idea is a branded hallucination.

    It’s the lie that you can downshift your soul into first gear while screaming through town in a Lamborghini. It’s the peacock strut of spiritual materialism—buying essential oils and amethyst pendants as if they’ll excuse the $5 million home and the $10 million ego inside it.

    Sedona wants you to believe you can live forever if you just buy enough gluten-free sage bundles and whisper affirmations into your Yeti thermos.

    The sugar butterfly? It’s not a wish. It’s a warning.

  • The Gospel According to the CEO: Why Work Became Worship

    The Gospel According to the CEO: Why Work Became Worship


    Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys and veteran of the tech world, argues that many recent college graduates, adrift without a guiding philosophy or any grounding in the psychological architecture of religion, redirect their spiritual hunger toward the workplace. In particular, they latch onto tech companies as secular stand-ins for organized faith. These firms offer more than a paycheck—they offer a sense of belonging, higher purpose, and the illusion of transcendence.

    The tech campus becomes a modern monastery, where the faithful eat, sleep, exercise, and labor. With its cappuccino bars, Michelin-level cafeterias, on-site laundry, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries, the workplace becomes not just a job, but a lifestyle. Employees live in an upgraded dormitory fantasy—one where comfort masks control.

    At the heart of this corporate spirituality is the CEO, the charismatic founder who plays the role of messiah. Workers are fed lofty slogans about “changing the world” and “disrupting paradigms” while toiling for long hours in service of a vision that often benefits only the top brass. The leader isn’t just admired—he’s revered. The Kool-Aid is organic, gluten-free, and laced with grandiosity.

    This phenomenon has become cultural fodder, explored with increasing skepticism in shows like Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs. Documentaries such as The Inventor, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened expose the blend of megalomania, fraud, and collective delusion behind these so-called missions.

    What drives this mass suspension of disbelief? Part of the answer lies in what Derek Thompson calls “Workism”—the belief that one’s job is the core of one’s identity and life’s meaning. Combined with groupthink and CEO idolatry, Workism completes a trifecta of modern manipulation. In this new faith, the altar is a standing desk, and salvation is just one IPO away.

  • The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    Last night I dreamed I was a mid-level drone in a sleek, glassy corporate tower, the kind where the espresso is artisanal but the moral rot is industrial grade. My friend John, a man of questionable appetites, had conducted an ill-advised workplace affair with a pale, mole-flecked woman who looked like Tina Louise if she’d been exhumed from a Victorian tomb. The office scorned her, and by association, John had become persona non grata. Worse, the affair had left him with a gastrointestinal affliction—proof, apparently, of both his guilt and poor judgment.

    My boss, a mustached bureaucrat whose entire personality could be summed up as “nonstick,” summoned me to his office. With the casual menace of a man ordering a sandwich, he instructed me to write up John. Not for the affair, mind you—that would be too human—but for the stomach condition. It was, he explained, an external manifestation of moral decay. HR, he added blandly, would now monitor John’s “future movements.” Orwell would’ve blushed.

    Instead of complying, I wandered over to the mole-riddled femme fatale. As we spoke, her moles seemed to multiply like a corrupted Photoshop clone stamp tool—deepening, darkening, replicating. I felt a twinge of pity, but mostly revulsion, and an impending fear that I’d soon be ordered to file a medical report on her as the first step in her “quiet dismissal.”

    I excused myself and found John, whose flat affect suggested either Zen detachment or full-blown delusion. He shrugged off the HR inquisition and announced, with the conviction of a man four bourbons deep, that the boss would soon be fired and that he would lead the company into a new era. He was the messiah of office reform, apparently, and his gastrointestinal bug was just a minor martyrdom.

    Then I woke up. I padded to the kitchen, made my usual overnight buckwheat groats, and watched in disgust as the microwave turned into a groats splatter crime scene. I was done. No more splatter. It was time for a change. A prophet had spoken—probably me—and I obeyed by ordering a $145 Staub cast iron cocotte. Sure, it’s wildly expensive for boiling breakfast grains, but I now had divine justification: a dream packed with plague, prophecy, and intestinal punishment.

    Sometimes, self-delusion makes the best retail therapy.

  • The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    I like to be financially comfortable—let’s not lie. I like having gravy money: the kind you drizzle over an already-satisfying existence just to make it rich, indulgent, and entirely unnecessary. A decadent dinner, a silly watch, a rare Japanese radio I’ll only use twice—it’s not about need. It’s about comfort laced with a whiff of thrill. But every time I partake, I’m haunted by that grim little proverb: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    The older I get, the more I suspect that money is only part of the problem. The real barrier to heaven isn’t wealth—it’s pleasure. Or more precisely, the addiction to pleasure. Call it spiritual insulin resistance: too much sweetness, too often, until nothing satisfies and everything corrupts.

    A more accurate update to the proverb might be: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a pleasured man to get into heaven.

    By “pleasured,” I mean a man gorged on delight—hedonistic, unrestrained, swimming in his own self-curated fantasies. A man whose moral compass has rusted from disuse. And when I think of that kind of dissipation, I’m haunted by a story one of my students told me in the early ’90s—an unforgettable parable dressed up as a locker room anecdote.

    This student was a soccer player who spent a season with a club team in Italy. One of his teammates, an American, was almost offensively beautiful: tall, tan, muscular, with a jawline that could slice through marble and hair that obeyed no gravity. When the season ended, he refused to return home. He stayed. He found a nude beach. He became, in every sense of the word, The Stallion.

    Locals called him that without irony. He strutted the shoreline like a marble statue sprung to life. Women adored him, men envied him, and he lived the fantasy to its fullest: a gigolo in linen pants and nothing else. At first, it was all sun-kissed pleasure and consequence-free sex. But then came the rot.

    Somewhere along the way, he crossed an invisible line. He stopped caring about the actual act of intimacy. His addiction mutated. It was no longer about pleasure—it was about being desired. He would stand in clubs in a sheer white shirt, unbuttoned to the naval, chest gleaming, waiting for women to approach. When they did, he would reject them. The proposal was enough. The look in their eyes? That was his fix.

    Eventually, he went mad. His personality fractured like overused glass. When my student returned to Italy months later, he found The Stallion pacing the same beach—sun-kissed, glistening, and vacant. He didn’t recognize his former teammate. He walked past him with a thousand-mile stare, a ghost trapped in flesh, wandering his personal Eden turned hellscape. The pleasure that once adorned his life had hollowed it out from the inside.

    He had reached The Point of No Return.

    And every time I reach for a little unnecessary luxury—something shiny, excessive, self-soothing—I think of him. The Stallion. Proof that there’s such a thing as too much beauty, too much indulgence, too much affirmation. He wasn’t rich. But he was pleasured. And that might be even more dangerous.

  • Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    Be a Poor Speaker at Your Own Peril

    On the latest Dishcast, Andrew Sullivan interviewed the ever-cantankerous Chris Matthews—nearly 80 and still sharp enough to cut glass. Matthews, with his gravelly baritone steeped in decades of political brawls, made a blunt but brilliant point: the failed American presidents—Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden—shared one glaring flaw. They couldn’t talk. They mumbled, stumbled, or sounded like nervous librarians scolding kids in the back row.

    Now contrast that with the great performers of the Oval Office—Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama. Each could command a room, a camera, or a nation, not because they had better policies, but because they could speak. Kennedy practiced endlessly, even in the bathtub, channeling Churchill’s thunderous cadence while scrubbing his armpits. Reagan rehearsed like an actor because—well, he was one. Matthews’ thesis? If you’re a politician and can’t speak, you’re in the wrong line of work. There’s no excuse. Oratory is not some divine gift—it’s a muscle, and you’d damn well better train it.

    I couldn’t agree more. In my forty years teaching college students, my most potent teaching tool wasn’t my syllabus or my grading rubric—it was my voice. My persona. My ability to perform indignation, irony, sarcasm, and revelation—all in the same breath. I played a character: part prophet, part stand-up comic, part disappointed parent watching the nation stick a fork in the toaster. And that outraged character got through to students. It entertained while it educated. It gave ideas a delivery system my students could remember.

    So when I watch politicians stumble through speeches like deer on roller skates, I want to scream. You are leading a country. You should not sound like a sedated hostage reading a ransom note. At their worst, some of these men sound like toddlers in a supermarket, lost and wailing, unable to pronounce the word “mommy.” And yet they expect to run a superpower.

    Chris Matthews is right: if you can’t speak, you can’t lead.