0. What I won’t discuss
Yesterday the sky was blue and the sun shined down from the sky as Trudy and I ran our six-mile long run.
Yesterday our Rain Lilies exploded into a white-and-yellow supernova, attracting butterflies away from the other delights here and there in the back and front yard.
Yesterday, I saw a Monarch imbibing on the blossom of a Blue Mist Flower, drunk perhaps with the nectar of it, focused perhaps on making it to Costa Rica for the winter.
But I will not discuss these things.
Rather I have three links to share. In the past weeks, they helped me be (in some sense) more joyful than I might otherwise have been.
They helped me put my head together.
1. Black Jeopardy
SNL has been hitting it out of the park, lately. The skits have been funny, which we might expect of them. But they have been (in my opinion) deep. Perhaps the most significant in my limited sampling of SNL (which I do not watch per se, because we do watch TV and frankly don’t care to devote that much time to something that had of late descended into irrelevance) is the Black Jeopardy skit with Tom Hanks as a good-ol-boy Trump supporter.
It was funny. But more importantly, it was… important. It showed the turning of our left-right political spectrum back on itself. It showed the red and blue ends meeting in some kind of intersection (without over-romanticizing it). This was something I tried to talk about here. It’s something that the establishment (pundits, politicians, bureaucrats, the press) managed to completely ignore.
It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. There’s a very important message for the left to be derived from it.
2. Live From New York
You’ve probably seen the Clinton skits on SNL. They’ve been going on for a while, and if nothing else they have given Kate McKinnon a chance to show how good she is. In particular, the SNL cold open debate skits in which she and Alec Baldwin parodied Trump and Clinton have been blockbusters.
Last night, McKinnon played Clinton at the piano singing Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja.
This isn’t comedy. This isn’t what I think of as SNL. It’s literature. It’s philosophy. It’s consolation. And it is something quite different from what I have come to expect from television.
3. Culture Matters
This Golem XIV article is a long read. It’s worth it. I can’t do it justice here.
There’s Brexit. There are immigrants on the beach. There’s a painful clash of cultures. There’s globalism and free trade and the emptiness of being nothing more than an economic entity in a world otherwise devoid of meaning.
The writing is spectacular. The discussion is provocative and profound. It outlines an intellectual framework for making sense of a lot of things that have been bouncing around our society.