Both the war’s aims and its raison d’être also change by the hour. Because we receive so many conflicting domestic messages, I find myself trusting Iranian reports more than those emanating from my own government. Not a good feeling, but one made necessary by the symphony of lies conducted by our current president, the Leonard Bernstein of bullshit. According to him, we’ve already won this thing ten times over.

So why is the Strait still closed?

At the same time, the worst-case scenarios of economic shock predicted at the start of the war have, so far, failed to materialize. Yes, fuel prices have climbed and inflation for other goods is also up. Global GDP is expected to shrink. But we haven’t seen the “$200 barrels of oil” some analysts warned about at the war’s outset. Nor have we yet seen the predicted food crises, although it’s still early days.

It now seems like the war will only be resolved when enough players feel enough economic pain to force its cessation. Whoever blinks first loses. But I have to say, it’s hard for me to imagine the country that’s been a pariah state for 47 years is going to be the first to wave the white flag.

Meanwhile, another war has entered its fifth year, with Ukraine now appearing to hold at least a small edge in its conflict with Russia. Putin’s military is now depleted, his economy a shambles, the nation on a communications lockdown, his personal safety less-than-guaranteed. What happens should Putin, as so often happens in Russia, fall out of a window?

Closer to home, I remain overwhelmed by the breathtaking corruption infecting my government. I don’t just mean the flagrant financial self-dealing at the top, which runs into the billions. This corruption also takes the form of constitutional abdication, which we’ve seen from Republican Congresspeople. Then there’s the endemic corruption-by-obeisance occurring at every level of our federal government, in which lackeys are only too happy to ignore their department’s charters and their own oaths of office to satisfy the whims of a man who does not know the difference between the words “incursion” and “excursion.”

On top of everything else, RFK is over there playing with raccoon dicks.

In the background of all of this remain the Epstein Files, which exposed a rather-large cabal of influential men trading children. The extent of this network, and whether Epstein was its central player or just a node in a larger web, remains unclear because that same guy whose face, for some reason, will now be on our passports, has done everything in his considerable power to prevent Americans from learning more.

It’s probably hard for readers even a decade or two younger than myself to imagine, but there used to be a time in this nation when people could go weeks at a time without paying much attention to politics at all. Presidents, Democratic or Republican, would get the gig and then govern without posting to social media or insulting late night comics or arresting journalists. We may not have liked the guy in the Oval Office but most of us trusted that its occupant generally had the best interests of the nation at heart. And maybe I’m betraying my own continued naivety here, but I think we were right to believe that. Until our current president, every single one has said something along the lines of “The office humbles you.”

Now, though, he has humbled the office.

Actually, “humbled” might not be the right word. Humiliated?

Worse, this sense of being overwhelmed doesn’t end with world affairs. Every aspect of human culture feels equally unsettled. Science, the arts, philosophy. Dig into any of it and you find the same confusion. The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered galaxies that should not exist. AI is capable of generating entire books in a moment. AI music floods streaming services. Full-length AI movies aren’t far behind. What will all of this do to human creativity? As for philosophy, they can’t even decide on what constitutes consciousness.

If I’ve found respite anywhere, it’s sports. People throwing a ball through a hoop remains blissfully easy to understand. Guys racing big dumb cars around a track. Or hitting each other in the face. I understand that stuff. What I don’t understand is everything else.

Every institution now feels provisional. Every truth comes with an asterisk. Every breakthrough arrives with some new species of dread. Maybe this is what it feels like when one era is ending and another is beginning. If so, let’s hurry it along. If I have hope, it’s that whatever follows this awful episode of As the World Burns will be better than what we left behind.

I have to wonder: for whom will the loss of Rudy Giuliani be a tragedy?

His daughter, Caroline, has said that a “chasm” arose between them over Rudy’s fealty to Trump and that she has gone years without speaking to him. Even his MAGA son, Andrew, has gone through periods where he cut off communication with his father. I don’t think he’s on good terms with any of his ex-wives. I’m not even sure he’s in communication with the girl from the Borat movie. Sad.

The last approval rating I was able to find for him dates to 2023, at which time it stood at 16%. Sixteen percent! This is a guy who ran for president. A guy who made a plausible case for himself as “America’s Mayor” following the 9/11 attacks. And, perhaps most impressively of all, a guy who once appeared with me, Mia Hamm, and the Village People at a 25^th anniversary celebration for Trivial Pursuit at Toys R Us in midtown Manhattan (I was there in my capacity as the Pets.com Sock Puppet). All of it thrown away for money and proximity to power so common among New York types.

Giuliani was one of those power-hungry guys. We didn’t know that about him when he burst into New York City politics as a hotshot young ADA. He presented himself as a modern-day Eliot Ness hellbent on taking down the Mob. That fact took on a weird psychodrama when, years later, we learned that his own father, Harold, was a Mob enforcer who served 18 months in Sing Sing. Of his father, Rudy told the New York Times in 2000, “His influence on me was to drill into my skull from the time I was a little boy that I had to be very honest, that you had to be honest to yourself first and honest with others second.’‘

It’s a lesson, apparently, Rudy did not learn.

In 2023, he was ordered to pay $148M to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, after committing “procedural fraud” against the two women, defaming them and participating in a criminal conspiracy against them. For this crime, he was disbarred in New York. In 2025 he was twice found in contempt of court for failing to comply with his court-ordered restitution to the two women and for continuing to disparage them.

And why did he do all this? In service of Donald fucking Trump, who wrote a pathetic missive about Giuliani this morning, in which he seemed to blame Democrats for Rudy’s health troubles. Rather than, say, everything we know about the way Rudy lives his life. In other words, Trump is making Rudy’s death all about Trump because of course he is. That’s the man for whom Giuliani chose to throw away everything.

Was the good table at Rao’s worth it? The appearance on The Masked Singer? The couple of Yankees World Series rings he had to surrender as part of the judgment against him? What did any of it amount to?

Rudy will be remembered as a corrupt and venal sell-out who squandered every ounce of goodwill he earned during New York City’s worst day. Chances are, though, he will be forgotten. Just as all of the Trump stooges and hangers-on will be forgotten. Because, in the end, he will have served nothing greater than his own appetites.

It was the law to which he devoted his life – first by upholding it, then by skirting it. Every good thing he ever did earlier in life will be viewed through what we learned about him in his later years. The lasting image of Rudolf Giuliani will be that of black hair dye running down his face while defending the indefensible. “America’s Mayor” will be dead soon. America will not mourn.

When we lived here a few years ago, I found it odd how many of the restaurants have almost identical menus. It was explained to me that the reason for this is that, in every other city in the world, restaurants compete with each other for who does the newest and best thing while in Rome they compete to see who can do the old things best.

Last night, for example, I ordered tonarelli caccio e pepi, which you can find everywhere; it was excellent. Tonarelli is basically superior spaghetti. Thicker and squared off. Made fresh, it’s one of the best noodles you can slurp. The star of the meal, though, was our appetizer, a single slice of bruschetta loaded with so many perfect little tomato chunks and garlic I kind of wanted to stab my hand with a fork to remember the moment as vividly as possible.

We arrived in Rome with our two adult kids a couple days ago, and have been doing little besides walking and eating since. A big breakfast and a big lunch at my favorite pizza place in Rome, Mariuccia. Plus, drinks and gelato and various snacks before meeting our friends for dinner. Just quickly running the numbers in order to estimate my calories from yesterday: 325,000.

Today is Italian Labor Day. A big deal, apparently. Our friends explained that the nation takes celebrating the worker seriously. I tried to explain the difference in America, but one of the guys stopped me and explained it to me better than I could do him: “In America, you go shopping on Labor Day to watch other people work.”

Well yeah, pretty much.

We figured most, if not all, of the stores would be closed today so we decided to devote the day to showing the kids Rome’s big tourist destinations. Bad idea. Apparently, the entire European continent had the same thought. I’ve never seen the city so crowded. People everywhere crowding the Coliseum, filling the Forum, and packing the Pantheon.

Too many friends, Romans, and countrymen. Especially countrymen. American accents abounded. Which was, of course, irritating. Particularly when people assumed we were also American. How dare they.

Thankfully, there was more gelato to soothe my frazzled nerves. And fantastic sandwiches from Mozio’s Street Food. From what I’m told, Mozio’s always has a line out front. We waited about half an hour just to get in the door, during which a crow shit directly down my daughter’s shirt. Kind of a one-in-a-million-shot, and we were all very impressed.

Tonight was more pasta, fusilli with gorgonzola and walnuts. Followed by cannoli. Followed by a six-month fast.

We return to Lake Como tomorrow, thank God. Although we’ve been eating well this entire trip, our Roman waystation did me in. I am now primarily composed of bread, cheese, and Italian sweets. I am now more pizza than man.

There was some talk about going to a big Labor Day concert happening about twenty minutes away by foot, but we would have to roll ourselves there like wheels of parmigiana. So we will remain at our little Roman residence on our last night and exert as much of our energies on digesting as possible.

Rome is maybe my favorite city in the world. “An open-air museum,” is how one of my dinner companions from last night described it, which is exactly correct. Every half-block brings another incredible artifact from the previous three millennia. And every half-block also brings something fantastic to shove in your face.

You can absolutely get a bad meal in Rome, but you can also fall in love with a single slice of focaccia topped with fresh chopped tomato and garlic. 325,000 calories, and I wouldn’t give back a single one.

If it sounds like I’m being glib, I am. It’s not that I don’t care that somebody tried to kill the president. I very much do. Thankfully I can be glib because that person only succeeding in getting himself arrested. What I can’t be so flip about, though, is the nonsensical reaction to this latest nut jobbery.

Two irrelevant conversations have sprung up since Saturday’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner: we need to build a ballroom, we need to stop being mean to Trump.

Nothing about the fact that gun violence is out of control in this country, as it has been for decades. The Mass Shooting Tracker lists 152 mass shootings so far this year, a year which is only 117 days old.

None of those people had private ballrooms with seven-inch bulletproof glass. None had Secret Service protection. None had metal detectors installed hundreds of yards from their person. Nor did they have the nation’s federal law enforcement agencies at their beck and call. All they had to protect them were the works of the same political class insulated last Saturday night from the same gun violence that’s taken too many of their lives.

So why is the conversation about a ballroom instead of the fact that forty thousand plus Americans lose their lives to guns every single year? Why are we, again, focused on the ills of rhetoric rather than the impact of rounds? Why are we, again, talking about every other thing except the problem at hand?

That problem is an American gun violence problem so systemic that a man shooting eight children and wounding two women in Louisiana a week ago barely made the news. The problem is that, a few days later, in another part of Louisiana, a mall shooting left five injured and one dead.

Both of these in the state that Mike Johnson represents. The same Mike Johnson who, following this latest Trump assassination attempt, found his way to the cameras to call Trump the “most attacked, maligned political figure in history,” a spurious claim to be sure, but one that allowed him to demand the completion of a fucking ballroom.

For the eight dead kids, a moment of silence on the House floor.

No legislation. Not a call to limit the easy access to gun. Nothing about domestic abuse. Just a few pro forma words of sorrow and his worthless thoughts and prayers. Prayers from the literal spot from which he could propose laws that might have some hope of turning those prayers into reality. But nah.

None of the dead children could be reached for comment.

And I’m supposed to be worried about a president already half-dead? Look, I wish no physical ill on him nor anybody in his Cabinet. But it makes me wonder: why do we operate from the position that political violence is unacceptable, but run-of-the-mill gun violence is just something we have to live with?

Are Republicans grading the sanctity of life on a curve now? Are they now placing politicians alongside fetuses as inviolable? Because they certainly seem to care about the lives of the unborn almost as much as they care about their own comfort and well-being while the rest of us are out here dodging strays.

So, it’s hard for me to get overworked about an “assassination attempt” that was thwarted before it even began. I’m not minimizing the danger the gunman may have caused had he not been stopped; it could have been catastrophic. But the nation is (understandably) in a dither over one foiled plot at the same time we’re shrugging our shoulders at the tens of thousands of successful ones.

Like the gunman who shot five and killed one in Columbus, MD today. The one who shot four in Queens, NY yesterday. Or the six victims, including two children, in Lansing, MI a few days ago. Again, those are just the mass shootings.

Your normal everyday American “guy shoots his wife then himself” stuff doesn’t even show up in the media much at all. And the thousands and thousands of (mostly) men who kill themselves with guns every year? They don’t even merit a mention, let alone the Speaker’s thoughts and prayers.

And they certainly don’t merit legislation.

Who are we to condemn any regime for killing their own citizens when we do the same? Not in the same way, of course. But we kill them just the same.

We sell our people guns in great quantities. We tell them it’s the patriotic duty to purchase such weapons. We tell them their liberty depends on it. We require no insurance, no training. We maintain no federal registry. We tell people to feel free to carry their weapons on their persons – concealed, if they like. We pass laws, such as “Stand your ground,” which make it easier to kill other people without consequence – laws which lead to increases in firearm-related homicides, such as the 32% increase following Florida’s adoption of the law.

America is killing her own.

Thank God the nation does not find itself mourning another slain president. One act of gun violence averted on one Saturday night in Washington DC. How many others were not so lucky? How many late-night knocks on the door last Saturday? How many heart-rending phone calls? How much blood spilled in the streets, in living rooms, on the floors of bars? One act of gun violence didn’t happen. How many more did?

The solution to the nation’s epidemic of gun violence has been staring us in the face this whole time: we need more ballrooms.

Yes, ballrooms. In every school, every house of worship, every movie theater. Ballrooms in malls. Ballrooms in Waffle Houses and 7-11s. Every new home should come with a Panic Ballroom, and all older homes should be retrofitted to include them.

Make America Ballroom Again.

Those who advocate for greater restrictions on guns have failed to slow the rate of gun violence in this nation. The headlines over the past week - 8 dead children in a mass shooting in Louisiana, 6 shot in Lansing - have made that abundantly clear. So why not try this new, bold solution? As our great president so often asked when campaigning for the job he now holds, “What have you got to lose?”

What would a nation of ballrooms even look like? I’ll tell you: like a nation of people who do the foxtrot. The benefits would be extraordinary. Not only would Americans be immunized from gun violence, consider what such a project would do to their waistlines! You want to slim Americans down? Teach them the mambo, the tango, and the Viennese Waltz.

Plus, consider the economic boom that will result from the purchases of all of those ballgowns and corsages. Tuxedo sales will skyrocket! Cummerbunds will replace saggy jeans as the style trend of choice. Americans will look better, dress better, and most important of all, dance better.

Think about how many lives could have been saved over the last few years if only we’d combined Trump’s solution of more ballrooms with Ted Cruz’s solution of fewer doors. The “More Ballrooms, Fewer Doors” solution is the only practical, realistic plan I’ve heard to deal with the otherwise intractable problem of Americans’ easy access to weapons of mass destruction, and then turning those weapons on their fellow citizens. There is, literally, no other way to deal with the problem.

MAHA, indeed!

A wise man looks at a crisis and sees an opportunity. If nothing else, I think we can all agree that Trump is a wise man. Last night, our president could have repeated the same age-old platitudes about “thoughts and prayers.” He didn’t do that. Still in his tuxedo from the night’s gathering, he stood at the podium of the White House Press Briefing Room and made an impassioned case for the power of dance to heal this country’s wounds.

“For too many years, this nation has known the terror of gun violence,” he began. That scourge ends now. Tonight, I call on America’s business leaders and choreographers to join hands. Let us come together on the nation’s dance floors like John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney in Saturday Night Fever. Let the White House ballroom inspire us to beat our swords into tap shoes. Dance, my fellow Americans, dance!”

And lo, America danced.

No doubt there will be those who say we cannot defeat the influence of the gun lobby with the influence of Twyla Tharp, but those nattering nabobs of negativity have never known the joy of a well-executed pas de deux.

Yes, pas de deux is a ballet term, but ballet forms the basis of all dance and I just think a commitment to constructing millions of domestically-sourced ballrooms would inspire a concomitant growth in ballet schools.

I also anticipate objections from the nation’s critical supply of dudebros who may object to dance as a solution to gun violence. “Too beta,” our alphas may say. “Not enough mogging.” To those worried that all this dancing will lead, inevitably, to the further feminization of America, I offer two words:

Patrick Fucking Swayze.

Nobody puts America in a corner. Nobody.

Plus, consider how many fewer doors we’ll have to go through on a daily basis. There’s nothing more annoying in daily life than crossing the threshold from one room to another by way of doors. Eliminate those and you’ve eliminated 99% of the reason people are so upset in the first place. This country has gone door crazy! Big Government mandates doors on everything these days: doors in homes, in cars, in elevators. You practically can’t go anywhere these days without having to pass through a door. I thought this was the Land of the Free, not the Land of the Door. It’s unamerican.

How terrible that we had to endure yet another episode of gun violence to reach this point, but we’re here now and I say, “Thank God.”

But more than God, thank President Trump. Maybe those people upset with Trump for portraying himself as Jesus Christ last week should have good, long look in the mirror because not even Jesus Christ himself would look at the mass murder occurring every day among his children and thought, Ballroom.

God bless President Trump. God bless ballrooms. God bless us, every one. At this point, we need all the blessings we can get.

My confusion about the term “war crime” comes from my limited understanding of war. To set limits on war-fighting seems like a good idea. My problem, which is the problem I struggled to articulate on the podcast, is that the United States (and others, but I’ll focus on the US for the purposes of this piece) has violated the Geneva Conventions time and again. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

We’ve never not violated them in wartime since their passage in 1949. So why do we feign outrage at the thought of either Trump violating them or other nations doing the same?

You want to say that blowing up civilian infrastructure is a war crime? Ok, I hear that. But I also understand the other side of the argument: if civilian infrastructure can be used to further a nation’s military efforts, does that infrastructure not become a legitimate target? The problem with that argument, as I see it, is that, literally, anything can be used to further military aims. Which would mean anything/anybody is a legitimate target.

In 1998, the International Criminal Court (ICC) passed the Rome Statute, which defines modern war crimes. These crimes include “willful killing,” “torture,” “inhuman treatment,” and “willfully causing great suffering” among others. When has a war not included all of the above?

By all means, we should define the “legality” of war. In practice, though, the only thing this accomplishes is to provide a legal framework for the prosecution of the defeated. When has the leader of a victorious nation ever been charged by the ICC for war crimes? As far as I can tell, it’s never happened.

Isn’t war already a crime? From the highest possible perspective, isn’t government-sanctioned murder as much of a crime as that which is not sanctioned? I get that it’s a naïve question, but shouldn’t war provoke naïve questions? Questions like, “Why are we doing this?” “Who stands to profit from it?” “Why is it right when I do it but wrong when you do?”

To slot the actions of Country A into “acceptable murder” and Country B into “unacceptable murder” seems arbitrary to me, even though I’m fully on board with the effort to do so. Where the idea of “war crimes” rubs me the wrong way, as I said, is in their selective prosecution.

George W. Bush is a war criminal. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice. All war criminals*. They invaded a country for no reason, killed hundreds of thousands for no reason. They tortured Iraqi combatants. They broke the entire world.

They suffered no consequences.

We are a nation of war criminals because we are the world’s largest purveyor of war. That’s what we do. If you make war, you make war criminals. Which isn’t to say we don’t sometimes fight wars or support others fighting wars for “good” reasons. But there is no such thing as a good war and there’s no such thing as a legal war (at least from that higher perspective). There are only gradations of bad.

So, yeah, I plead guilty to ignorance and historical illiteracy. I do not understand the concept of “war crimes” if we’re only going to selectively prosecute them.

I do agree that the US has, historically, done a better job at protecting prisoners of war than many other countries. I also agree that the US military does a better job at minimizing civilian casualties than other countries. But, again, these are only gradations of bad. I mean, we blew up a girls’ elementary school. When do you expect American officials to stand trial for that?

Exactly.

*If you want to throw Barack Obama in my face for his campaign of drone warfare, you can certainly make that argument and I won’t object too strenuously.

After I wrote the piece about my own smooth brain, for example, I wrote about just such a person for The Daily Beast. One Kashyap Pramod Vinod Patel, better known by his trademark, K$H. You guys follow the news as much as I do and so you’re already well-aware of the Atlantic exposé detailing Patel’s alleged drinking which has, apparently, gotten bad enough that his colleagues have grown concerned he’s a national security threat.

I sat down to write something funny and scathing but could not quite muster the requisite venom. Instead, I found myself feeling kind of bad for the guy. (I know, I know.) As I wrote in the piece, I grew up with a lot of guys just like him. Insecure, grasping, needy. Hell, I’m one of those guys.

Patel grew up on Long Island. I grew up in New Jersey. The two places are so similar it seems likely they were once connected via land bridge across Staten Island. He’s eight years younger, but we’re close enough in age for me to have a pretty good sense of what it must have been like for him, a first-generation American in a wealthy, mostly white neighborhood. My own neighborhood was the same, minus the wealth.

The guys around him would have been a lot like the guys around me. Jocks. Muscle heads and metal heads. He got into hockey because hockey is the national sport of Long Island. Kash would have done everything in his power to fit in, to be one of the guys, to be accepted by the same type of people to whom he has now sold his soul. To be - and I don’t know if there’s a better way to say this and all it implies - white.

In doing research for the piece, I came across his high school yearbook quote, which is so sad it almost broke me: “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel. How could the boy who used this for his yearbook be the man now pursuing the most racist policies of any American government since Reconstruction?

The only explanation I can find relates to yesterday’s piece: when we are unwilling to see ourselves as we truly are, we are unable to see ourselves at all. That is Kash Patel. But it’s also me. And probably you. The person we see in the mirror isn’t us at all.

For years, I’ve had a difficult time articulating why I cannot watch myself perform. It’s not uncommon among actors. The reasons why, I imagine, vary. For me, it’s because the person I see in my head while I am performing is never the person I see onscreen. So when I see myself acting, that person is giving a totally different performance than the one in my head. That person, in other words, isn’t me. I don’t know who it is. Does that sound unsettling? It is.

That’s a highly-concentrated version of what I imagine most people experience day-to-day. This sense of disconnect between who we believe ourselves to be and the person others believe us to be. How do you think K$H sees himself, for example? Strong, courageous, loyal. How do I see him? Boob, buffoon, self-obsessed. The same grasping kid I would have recognized in high school.

A couple of the books I’ve read for my podcast, Obscure (in which I read a work of classic literature out loud and comment on it as I go) are about exactly this. There was Jude Fawley from Thomas Hardy’s Jude, the Obscure who sacrificed everything to escape his life’s station, losing everything in the process. Ditto Victor Frankenstein. Ditto Clyde Griffiths from this season’s An American Tragedy. All young men whose striving proves their undoing.

But what choice do we have? We Americans are all raised to surmount the status of our births. To reach for more. To be more. To surpass our parents in every way. No matter if our ability to do so becomes more constrained by the year. And when we find ourselves unable to climb higher, to find purchase on the next tree branch, we blame ourselves for tumbling back to the hard ground. How can I recognize that in myself and not recognize it in the various dunderheads currently salting the earth beneath them?

What suck is, I can. Maybe it’s simply absence making the heart grow fonder, but I find myself feeling some sympathy with these broken people because I’m broken, too. Why else would so many of these people literally change their faces for the man at whose pleasure they serve? That man - caked in make-up and obsessed with his mediocre hair transplant – is more broken than the rest of them combined. My sympathy for him, however, remains tempered by the fact that he’s such a colossal fuckhead.

Anyway, all of this is a roundabout way of acknowledging that we’re a flawed bunch of simians. All of us. How we choose to navigate our brokenness is the story of the human species. I reject the Christian idea of “fallen Man” but I embrace the Buddhist idea of suffering as a precondition for human existence. That suffering is the friction from which we spark meaning. To recognize our true selves at all surely must require recognizing ourselves in others, no? Even if everything in us wants to dismiss that other person. Even if, God forbid, that other person is K$H.

Last year, I bought Hannah Arendt’s (unfinished) book, The Life of the Mind. It’s a doorstopper, hundreds of pages exploring the differences between knowledge and thought, on how thinking happens at all. I didn’t get far before setting it aside for a dumb thriller. I never picked it back up.

I mention it only because Arendt represents the kind of mind I once told myself I had. For years, I believed I was a smart person capable of doing smart things. I’m not sure that was ever true, and I’m fairly certain it isn’t now.

What’s changed over the past few years is that I’m finally exposing myself to actual thinkers – people who delve deep into the loamy stuff of the mind, work it over, and sculpt it into something new. People who take intellectual risks. People who chase down esoterica for no reason other than to satisfy their own curiosity. And, too, the people who chase their ideas right over the cliff.

You can find those people everywhere you look, in every human endeavor. Pioneers, mavericks, philosophers. The people Steve Jobs used to plaster on billboards with the tagline “Think Different.” I always kind of hoped I might be one of those people.

I’m not.

Why am I telling you this? Because you’re probably not, either. And because maybe you, too, surprised yourself with the realization that you’re not special. Growing up when we did (I’m speaking broadly here in order to encompass our American milieu), we were taught to believe that we can do anything. Be anything. We were taught to prize our individual selves at least as much as we prize our collective self. We were encouraged to, as Casey Kasem used to say on the radio, reach for the stars. But the stars were never in our grasp. At least they were never in mine.

What all of this aspirational talk did for the American psyche was to cast our ills at the feet of the individual. We were given bootstraps and told to pull. If we failed to rise, it had nothing to do with the impossibility to hoisting one’s self off the ground and everything to do with a failure to defeat that which cannot be overcome alone.

For me, that meant using my best assets to get out of a shaky home life. I had some advantages. A good, but unextraordinary brain. An uncommon amount of motivation and perseverance. A supportive mother. And a dead father who had the foresight to purchase life insurance. Without those internalities and externalities, I would not have traveled as far as I have.

As an actor, a common interview question is, “When did you know you’d made it?”

I always answer the same. “I still don’t know.”

Which is both true and disingenuous. It’s true that I’ve never felt as if I’ve “made it,” whatever that means. It’s also true that I’ve gone further than most in my field, even though I’m perfectly capable of recognizing that I am leagues behind many of my peers. It used to rankle me. No longer.

What I’ve lost in IQ points I’ve gained in at least a little wisdom. What I now know that I didn’t when I still carried around my pretensions like a sack of rotting vegetables is that our famous American individualism is a trap. 250 years of myth-making have set the trap. Hundreds of millions of us fell right in. We fell for the lie of our individual greatness and our collective exceptionalism. We drew the wrong conclusions from the Americans who either won the lottery or gamed the system. We thought they were proof of our greatness rather than the exception to the rule.

That’s not all bad, of course. A certain amount of self-delusional thinking might be required to get anywhere in this world. Self-confidence, even the unmerited sort, can take a person pretty far in this nation of fakers. We need look no further than our current government as evidence. But such aplomb is rarely more than skin deep. Look at any of the poseurs currently running things and you’ll likely see, as I do, a collection of the terrified. The ultimate glass menagerie.

Their own fragility has illuminated ours. Or, at least, mine. Confronted with such idiocy, I find myself forced to confront my own. And I don’t love what I see. Because when I look at those I oppose – morally, intellectually – I find my own surety just as off-putting as theirs. I find myself recoiling from what I know to be wrong from them, but equally recoiling from my own condemnation because all the fevered back-and-forth does nothing but keep this entire stupid soap opera on the air. And the exercise itself, this hamster wheel outrage workout, leaves me feeling ever-dumber for having laced on my boots in the first place. Forget pulling myself up by them; these days, I’m lucky if I can even get the damned things tied.

Lunch has become our main meal because the ferry and buses from our little town run frequently during the day, less frequently after seven. It makes sense, then, if we’re going to venture out, that we do so during the day when our ride back will cost us public transportation prices rather than private.

Today, for example, we took the ferry to the next town over, Torno. All the towns on Lake Como, aside from the actual town of Como, are variations on a theme. A little dock, a few sleepy restaurants. Maybe a shop or two is open but probably not. The houses are mostly shuttered. Perhaps because these are summer towns and it is not yet summer. Como, I think, is always bustling except, maybe, in deepest winter; having spent almost two hours there, I consider myself an expert. Today, though, was Torno.

Before we’d even take a few steps into town, I felt as though I recognized the place. “It’s Disney World,” I told Martha. Which was a weird thing to say about a village that’s been there since the Middle Ages, but that’s how it felt. The streets were immaculate, the dockside houses adorable, the old men at the little bar looked as if they’d been plucked from the restaurant scene of Lady and the Tramp. Not sure why Italy decided to rip off Disney World for their little “town,” but there it was. Mortifying for them

We found one of those little bar/cafés that have no American analogue. It’s a place where people come at all hours of the day to have a café or grab a frozen treat or gab for hours over a couple glasses of wine or, in our case, have a full meal. It’s not a coffee shop and it’s not a diner or bar, but it’s also all of those things. These are communal places. Like if Cheers made homemade gnocchi.

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit what I got because one should not order pizza from one of these places, but that’s what I did. A very mediocre pizza Napoli, which is just a cheese pizza with anchovies. Martha got a delicious-looking bowl of pasta along with a faro salad served with vegetables which we shared. Not a place I’d return to, but if I lived there, I could see making it a regular stop if I didn’t want to think too hard about food.

Thinking too hard about food is mostly what we’ve been doing since we arrived. As I said, lunch anchors our days. Afterwards, it’s usually some form of stair-climbing. Usually up. Like Lady Gaga, the stairs in these hillside towns go both ways, but they strongly prefer one direction over the other. Up. For every step you take downwards, you can expect to take two going back up. I don’t know how that works, but it seems to be the correct formula. Either that, or it just feels that way.

Torno, as we suspected it would be on a Monday before the season kicks in, was mostly dead. So, after lunch, we got back on the ferry and returned to our town of Moltraiso for the next part of our day, lounging.

For me, post-lunch lounging involves opening a book and falling asleep. I just finished a Michael Connelly paperback I picked up at Goodwill and have now moved onto a story collection by Italo Calvino entitled The Complete Cosmicomics. I picked it up because I figured I should read a book by a guy named “Italo” while in Italy, and because the back cover blurb from Salman Rushdie read “If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you the most joyful reading experience of your life.” So far, I have read two of the short stories within. Is it the most joyful reading experience of my life? Not so far, but they’re certainly whimsical and don’t we all need a little whimsy in these terrible times? I do.

Today’s reading did not prompt sleep, so I had to kill a little time before the next phase of our day: sitting on the balcony drinking Aperol Spritz. For the last few days, we’ve whiled away hours out there looking out at the lake, watching the seaplane, admiring the well-mannered Italian dogs walking by, and pointing out the fluffiest of the famous fluffy Italian clouds. So f’ing fluffy.

As the sun fades, we fetch sweatshirts and discuss whether or not we’re going to have dinner. Sometimes si, sometimes no. If we do have a nighttime meal, it’s light. Maybe some salad or a little pasta. Or, as I ate last night, 35 Italian cookies.

Once the sun is gone, we retire to our devices. Maybe we watch something together or not. A couple nights ago, we watched this very popular YouTuber neither of us had ever heard of named Rocky something whose schtick is hanging out with sad dogs at animal shelters. The whole thing was so goddamned heart-wrenching I couldn’t bear to watch another one even though YouTube is now convinced it’s the only thing I want to watch forever more. No, YouTube! Sad dogs are too sad!

From there, to bed. Rinse and repeat.

Perhaps you are wondering why we are not doing more. Aren’t we going to visit the sites? The wonders? Eh.

We’ve seen sites and wonders. What we love is the pace. The colors. The air. We’re going to do more stuff while we’re here. The kids are meeting us in about a week and we’re going to take them down to Rome for a few days where we’ll DO stuff, Once they leave, we’re debating between a trip to Turin or Verona. All well and good. But, for the most part, I’m content to be more of an experiential (lazy) traveler. Give me a lake, a balcony, and a mediocre pizza, and I’m good to go. Actually, let me rephrase that: I’m not good to go. I’m good to remain in place.

This whole notion of doing very little while abroad is probably not everybody’s idea of a great vacation, but it’s ours. Yes, get out there and see a little of this and a little of that. But what are we going to do, exert ourselves? Of course not. I’m already thinking about tomorrow’s lunch.

The insult never stung because I never felt relevant in the first place. At least, I’ve never found any purchase in the larger culture and I’m not sure I would want such relevance even if I found it. That anybody would worry about the measure of their own “relevance” strikes me as fundamentally sad because it implies that the worrier is reliant on the opinion of others to form an opinion about themselves.

We’re all guilty of this to one degree or another. Show me the person who says, “I don’t care what anybody thinks,” and I will show you a person whose principal concern is what other people think of them. I’m certainly no different. I very much care what other people think because I’m a human being. Human beings are social creatures who depend on the group for our survival; to totally disregard the opinions of others is to invite exile. At the same time, being too reliant on the opinions of other is to subsume one’s individuality. Neither works.

“Relevance,” in the sense that we usually mean it, only enters the equation when one has established individuality. To be relevant is to stand both within and without; in the group enough so that one’s opinion commands respect but far enough apart from the group so that one doesn’t get mired in the status quo.

Relevance, in other words, is measured relationally. Which is why one can be relevant one moment and irrelevant the next, even if the people themselves have not changed. Kristi Noem, for example, is no longer relevant. Eric Swalwell, we hardly knew ye.

The word has come to mean something like, “in the conversation.” By that measure, Clavicular is currently relevant while the Hawk Tuah girl is not. In six weeks or so, when another internet weirdo has supplanted Clavicular, he will also lose his relevance, even if he has a difficult time mogging on that now. (I’m almost certainly using the word “mogging” incorrectly. I don’t care. I find the word irrelevant.)

We elevate the idea of relevance because it speaks to our innate desire to be seen. In our lightspeed culture, those who manage to place themselves into our collective conscience for whatever reason strike us as worthy of our attention for as long as they manage to keep us titillated. Jake Paul is more relevant than, say, the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, but Kastrup’s work will likely endure longer than Paul’s.

Even if it doesn’t - even if Kastrup is forgotten by the time you finish reading this piece - does that mean Kastrup is less valuable that Paul? Again, valuable to whom? Because relevance has become an uncomfortable placeholder for value. Uncomfortable because relevance has little correlation with value. We can all think of any number of people who are highly relevant but who have little value. K$H Patel (who does not have a drinking problem no matter what anybody says), for example.

To be relevant is to be somebody people care about. But all of us are somebodies that other people care about. You are. I am. Corey Feldman. We’re all relevant. Not just because we’re here, which is, itself an incredible miracle, but because we’re the only ones here just like us. Our relevance isn’t defined by what we do or don’t do. And it’s certainly not defined by what we say on social media. We are made relevant by the simple fact of our existence.

I don’t mean to get woo-woo here, but it’s true. I sometimes freak myself out thinking about all the things that had to go exactly right for me to be here. The infinitesimal odds that any of us should be here at all. That any thing should be here at all. That there should even be a universe seems like a dicey proposition. Yet, here it is. And here we are to look around at it and wonder at it, all of us together, in this moment. That feels extremely relevant.

Too many of us, I worry, feel invisible. Another body taking up space in a world already chockablock with them. But think on what you’ve already accomplished and how much you have to give. Holding a door open for somebody. A smile at a stranger. A moment of grace for somebody who needs it, including yourself. To think that any of those things could ever be irrelevant strikes me as the height of foolhardiness. Does a bird worry about its relevance or does it understand that its job is to be a bird and nothing more?

I think our jobs are to be people and nothing more. Which means whatever we do is relevant to the job at hand, the job of being ourselves. Viewed in this way, the question of relevance fades to, well… irrelevance.

Maybe I’m feeling a little more reflective than usual because I’m looking out a lake as I write these words. The lake has been here for two million years; it will likely be here for two million more. What is any of our relevance compared to that? All of us will disappear soon. All of us will be forgotten soon after. Even the planet itself will be engulfed by the sun before too long. And so what? That doesn’t make our time here any less relevant. It doesn’t erase this moment, the only one that will ever be.

The lake. The birds. The universe. None of it cares if I’m relevant. But I care that I’m here to take part. And I care that you’re here to share it with me. This terrible culture will continue hurtling us forward at warp speed. To hell with it. We’re here to be here. Let’s be here together. You, me, Corey Feldman. All of us. Happily, fully irrelevant.

Italians are a languid people. Unhurried cappuccinos in the morning. Shuttered storefronts at lunchtime. Dinners that stretch into the night. On the street, they walk with purpose but with none of the buzzy energy so common in American cities.

Even their dogs are languid. Watch an Italian walk their dog; the pace is leisurely. The dog maybe sniffs a little, maybe lifts a leg. Yesterday when we were eating sandwiches in Como, a woman walked by with her big russet-colored dog. As they passed, the dog glanced at us and at our food. I felt like I could almost see the animal offer a silent prayer to Santa Maria at the effrontery of two Americani devouring all the good stuff without even the courtesy of offering some to a native. But, in its Italian way, it merely shrugged and strolled off without so much as a “Ciao”.

When we lived in Rome a couple years ago, it took us weeks to acclimate to the slower pace. An appointment for Wednesday at 10 might occur Wednesday at 11 or Wednesday at 12 or, perhaps, not at all. Whatever must be done today can be just as easily done tomorrow. And if it can be done just as easily tomorrow, why not two weeks hence?

This relaxed pace offended our delicate American sensibilities. In the States, we are governed by the clock. To arrive past the appointed hour indicates not only a lack of respect but a lack of character. In this way, Americans are much closer to the Northern Europeans who prize efficiency. The Germans, the Swiss, the Scandinavians. All those Teutonic pale faces with their fancy engineering and dull wardrobes. So different from these florid, hand-waving Italians.

A good case study: gardens. Italian gardens are the opposite of how we do such things back home. An American garden is an act of conquest. The American gardener ambushes an unsuspecting plot and, through force, transforms the land into something new. The Italian garden is a ramshackle affair. Natural and sprawling and lower case “o” organic. The Italians garden in a more authentic but less tidy way than their British and American cousins. Less taming of the land, more coaxing.

It’s not just Italians who live like this, of course. People from hotter climates tend to behave the same. When we lived in Savannah, for example, we found our own pace slowing as the barometer inched higher. One simply cannot operate at a German pace in 90-degree weather and 90% humidity. Slowing down becomes a necessity and, in bending to necessity, one finds a bit of contentment. Let the mint julep sweat on the front porch a little. And let the Aperol spritz breathe in the piazza.

One way of living isn’t better than the other. Both have their advantages. The American/Northern climate way offers a quicker path to material wealth, the Italian/Southern climate way offers a quicker path to spiritual wealth. This slower pace, I’m convinced, is better for the soul. Not, sadly, the pocketbook.

We’ve only been here a few days but I already feel myself moving a bit largo. A lighter footfall as I walk the centuries-old pavers. My hand moves to Martha’s waist a bit more often. Some of this, of course, is romanticizing another people’s way of living. It’s always tempting to cast envious eyes at a foreign culture because, when we drop in and out like – well – tourists, we have a tendency to exoticize people. Look how different everything is!

But we’ve now spent enough time in Italy that I feel I can say with some confidence that things really are a bit different here. I’m comfortable culturally appropriating some of what I like about Italian culture. The couple hours we spent last night on the balcony watching the boats on Lake Como. The easy mornings. The afternoon strolls. I’m too much of an American to ever fully adopt, I think. For example, why am I spending my time here writing another Substack piece instead of sipping my Aperol? No reason at all. Which is why I’m ending here. The piazza, and my wife, and waiting.

We’ve speculated about the seaplane’s purpose. It goes up, and a little while later, it comes down. Perhaps it’s a tourist gimmick—a way for deep-pocketed Americans, Brits, and Swiss visitors, who have already descended on Como like locusts, to sightsee from above.

Today was the first day we ventured into Como proper. We’re staying in a nearby sleepy town called Moltrasio. There’s not much to do here other than walk up and down the various steep staircases that run to the lake. One of them is called “The Holy Staircase,” because trying to walk up it provokes cries of “Holy shit.”

The Italians are big on staircases. There are the famous Spanish Steps in Rome. If you’ve never been, oh boy, you’re missing out. It’s a staircase—but big. Very big. Also not Spanish in any meaningful way. They were commissioned by a French diplomat in 1723 and named for their location near the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican. So the Spanish get credit for a French creation. Then again, the French horn was mostly invented by Germans, so those Frogs had it coming.

There’s also the famous double-helix staircase in the Vatican Museums, La Scala Elicoidale, built in 1932, which allows people to go up and down without bumping into each other. I’m thinking of having one installed in my home to minimize contact with my family.

Back to the Holy Staircase: my favorite feature are two sizeable ledges about halfway up with large indentations shaped like giant oyster shells. These recesses were designed for women carrying heavy laundry baskets—panniers—to lean against, rest, and curse the gods—and their husbands.

Yesterday, we walked down the Holy Staircase to the water’s edge but chose a different route back because the name alone made climbing it again too daunting. Big mistake. The second staircase we found, “La Caurga,” means “to hollow out.” The stairs were carved from the hillside, but the name equally described how we felt after ascending even a third of the way. By God, that was a lot of stairs. Martha stopped twice to catch her breath, which was a relief to me because if she hadn’t, I would have. Thankfully, she spared me the emasculation, and I took every opportunity to remind her how strong I am. (I very much needed to stop.)

Going down La Caurga wasn’t much easier. We had to descend it this morning to catch our ferry to Como. Hours later, my right calf is still complaining about the injustice.

Taxis here are exorbitant, but public transit is cheap and good. Our ferry to Como cost about five euros per person and offered amazing views of the lake and nearby towns as we chugged from port to port. Twenty-five minutes later, we disembarked and almost immediately regretted it. Regret is too strong a word, but Como felt overrun with people, like ourselves, not-of-Italia. It’s always disappointing to travel someplace foreign, only to arrive and discover other tourists. The last people we want to hang out with are people like us.

Even so, Como has its charms. It’s clean, colorful, and well-kept. The town of Bellagio is nearby, and it struck me that the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas actually nailed the vibe. I’m not sure if that reflects well on the casino or poorly on the Italians.

We ambled, peered into shop windows, stopped for excellent sandwiches, ate our requisite gelato, and tried to catch the ferry back.

“Two hours,” we were told.

“Grazie,” we said, and headed for the bus. Perhaps we should have booked the seaplane, which we watched take off as our bus hugged the cliffside road back to Moltrasio.

There’s something thrilling about taking public transportation in a foreign country. It’s both utterly mundane and mildly anxiety-inducing. You have to find the right line, buy the correct ticket, count the stops. Yesterday, Martha overshot hers and, finding herself on the side of a highway with no idea how to get back, called an Uber and paid thirty euros for a mile-and-a-half ride. (Yes, I’ll be taking it out of her pay.)

The good news is that the bus dropped us above our hillside apartment rather than below, so the only stairs we had to take were downward—modern, anonymous ones with evenly spaced risers and a sturdy handrail. No need to recline our panniers.

A few minutes later, we were back on the balcony, watching the lake, the boats, and the seaplane, sipping our aperitif. (I had tea, but still.)

The sun is down now, and the hills across the lake are a velvety purple. The bells of the Church of Santi Martino e Agata toll the hour, just as they have since the 11th century.

I haven’t traveled extensively, so I won’t say Italy is the most enchanted country in the world—but it’s close. It’s not perfect: the government’s a mess, the economy’s a mess, and Sofia Loren is dead. Even so, the Romans were right to make this land the heart of Christianity. God smiled on Italy, and the Italians smiled right back. At least when they weren’t carrying their laundry up from the lake.

Ciao for now.

UPDATE: Apparently, Sofia Loren is alive. But SHE’S DEAD TO ME!!

Lake Como is in the north of the country, a couple hundred kilometers from the Swiss border. The lake is one of several in the region, which include Lake Maggiore and Lugano. These lakes formed about two million years ago, when two glaciers decided to pack up and move north, carving what are known as “moraine hills” behind, and backfilling these hills with their own water. I have an impossible time imagining the size of those glaciers, especially considering that parts of Lake Como are 400m deep. Incredible.

There are traces of humans in this area dating back 30,000 years. Como itself was founded in 59 BCE by Julius Caesar, most famous for the salad named in his honor. The city flourished under Roman rule for 600 years, until the Empire fell. From there, various duchies and bishops and one Queen Theudelind took over the city’s administration until the late 20^th century, when it became the exclusive domain of George Clooney.

One can understand why the Clooney clan decamped here. The area is gorgeous. Those rough glacial hills are now covered in green and large houses. The city also boasts a funicular, which connects Como to the nearby village of Brunate. I’ve never ridden a funicular, but I’m going to wait to board this one until my son arrives in a couple weeks. He was a big Thomas the Tank Engine fan as a little boy and I think he’ll get a kick out of it. If nothing else, I think he will enjoy saying “funicular” as much as me.

We haven’t done that much yet. The first few days of international travel are always a little woozy-making. Yesterday, for example, we managed to take the local bus to a supermarket. It was all I could do to walk in a straight line, let alone figure out how to purchase bus tickets and navigate the public transit system. Thankfully, Martha has been studying Italian since we visited Rome a few years ago and was able to cobble together enough words to get us to the Lidl.

Every time I travel overseas I’m reminded of how easy it is to feel stupid in a new culture. The little things that we take for granted in our home nations quickly become incomprehensible abroad. Bus tickets, laundry machines, ATMs. Everything is both familiar and alien, and one immediately feels even more sympathy for our own immigrants who not only have to figure out how to make lives for themselves in their new nation, but now have to do so while being hunted by men in masks.

We have not paid much attention to American news since arriving, although both times we happened to be near televisions, once at a café and once at a train station, both were airing the news, and while I could neither hear what either was saying nor would I have been able to understand even if I could, both featured chyrons with the words “Trump” and “The Pope.” It was obvious, even to my untrained eye, that the Italians are currently less than thrilled with their American cousins.

We are not going out of our way to talk about our country with anybody.

Even so, conversations invariably occur. Yesterday, we had to go to Milan to record the latest episode of Have I Got News For Your Ears. We were driven into town by a lovely guy named Andrea, whose English was excellent and whose love for his people was only mitigated by his hate for his people. “I love Italy. I love my people,” he said, before launching into bitter complaints about Italy and his people.

I can relate.

There are whole generations of over-educated and under-employed Italians. I suspect Andrea was one of those. He gave us a great education about the history of the area, was filled with recommendations for places to go, knew the deep history of the region. His English, excellent. We’ve met many Italians just like him, waiters and shop workers and even an honest-to-God butler. People with university educations but no job prospects. So they do service jobs for jerk-off tourists like us and bemoan their nation’s current state.

Of their prime minister, Georgia Meloni, I had a conversation with the woman who ran the podcast studio. It was obvious during the recording that “Mapi” (her nickname) thinks our president is a fool and a bully. What about her own prime minister, I asked? “This is a difficult question for me to answer,” Mapi began. “She is not good. But maybe she could be worse. She does not do enough.”

I suggested that bad people doing little is better than bad people doing too much, such as in America.

On this point, she was adamant. “No,” she told me. “There is too much silence.”

By this, I think she meant that Meloni hasn’t stood up forcefully enough to people like Trump and others. Later, when we got home, I happened to see a social media clip of Meloni berating Trump for his comments about The Pope - perhaps she’d been watching the same news station as myself. Trump then followed up by attacking Meloni. And so on. The shamefulness of the current world order continues apace. It doesn’t matter how far you go to escape it nor how lovely you find your surroundings. The whole world finds itself in thrall to a madman, with more insanity clearly on the way. It’s enough to give you the night sweats.

We last went a few years ago. Rome. Three months, half of a six-month sabbatical. The sabbatical owed its existence to Hollywood being on strike. No work, but also, unfortunately, no money. We shoestringed it and had a great time. An Aperol spritz and a ramekin of potato chips need not cost more than a few euros. We drank a lot of Aperol and ate a bunch of potato chips.

Italy is magic. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the landscape, which is luscious. A spine of hills that run down the country’s center. Ancient little towns perched atop. Above, balloons of what we took calling, “Italian clouds.” The clouds of Italy are distinct. Puffy like zeppole. The pine trees, known as “stone pine,” are tall and spindly and topped with leafy pom-poms. I used to see trees like that painted on the walls of the pizzeria where I grew up and assumed that whoever painted them didn’t know what they were doing. No trees like that could exist. They do.

People, rightly, extol the food. We haven’t been further north than Venice – and that only for a couple days – so our knowledge of Italian food is confined to southern Italy. Pasta and pizza Italy. When we lived in Rome, we ate pasta nearly every day for the first week or so, at which point I grew sick of the stuff. Then my body adjusted to the Italian atmosphere, the way climbers adjust to thinner mountain air, and I returned to pasta. Craved it like dope. Once we got back to the States, my appetite for the stuff returned to normal. Bizarre.

We’re staying in a little town northwest of Lake Como. I can’t remember the name, and I suppose I should figure it out before we land. From the Milan airport, we take a train, followed by an Uber. From there, we probably collapse for a day.

Martha’s a little nervous about how we will be greeted as Americans. She suggested we disguise our Americanness. Guess that means packing one fewer black “wolf howling at tattered American flag” t-shirt. I’m not worried about how we will be received, but just in case we are going to bring apology bottles of prosecco everywhere we go.

Our plans for the month are sketchy. Over the last few years, we’ve discovered that we enjoy slow travel. Show up someplace for a month or longer, settle into your residence, take walks. Cook at home. Do the occasional tourist thing, but mostly amble and luxuriate. Day trips to nearby towns. No rushing. Nothing too demanding. And, of course, glasses of Aperol to wind down the day.

For all the obvious reasons, I know getting away for a month or longer isn’t possible for many people. One advantage of a career in show biz is that the downtimes are frequent. Often too frequent. Like any profession, it has its upsides and down. Being able to depart for a month just because is an upside. (Also: fortune and fame.) As I said, it doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, when you really think about it, can you afford not to do it?

(I mean, yes, you can afford not to do it.)

When I was in high school, I had a public speaking teacher who’d just returned from a yearlong around-the-world adventure with her husband. They just sold everything they owned and went. I don’t think they had much more of a plan than that, and I can guarantee that neither regretted the decision. I remember nothing of what I learned in her class, but I remember that she went. And I thought I’d like to do that one day becasue I didn’t yet recognize about myself that I am not a fun person.

Needless to say, I haven’t yet traveled the world but I’m taking baby steps. To be out there, in the world, watching the puffy Italian clouds slide by, is my belated attempt to make up for at least some of the time I’ve wasted on my phone. For the next month, I’ll be on my phone in ITALY!

Arrivederci!

Sarcasm aside, I keep hearing that phrase - “Western Civ is under threat” - but when I think about what that means, I actually have no idea. I first posed the question on Bluesky last night and received a bunch of, as expected, snarky responses about the term “Western Civilization” being little more than a fig leaf covering what they actually fear: a white minority.

I wasn’t satisfied with that answer, reasoning that there must be a more nuanced anxiety palpitating all those delicate western hearts. After a little searching, I found a May 20, 2024 article entitled, “Will Western Civilization Be Conquered From Within?” written by a Hungarian sociologist named Frank Furedi. I hadn’t heard of Furedi and didn’t do further research on him because I wanted to go into his essay unbiased.

In the article Furedi bemoans “Moral disarmament,” which he defines as a turning away from what he calls the “civilizational attributes of the Western world.” He gives an example of the sort of appalling moral disarmament, which, apparently, occurred during that year’s Eurovision:

The grotesque spectacle that unfolded in Malmö during the course of the recent Eurovision contest exemplifies a display of uncivilized boorishness. The crowd did not only behave badly but through the booing of the Israeli singer they also highlighted their emotional affiliation with a cause that is zealously opposed to the civilizational accomplishment of the West.

I mean, ok, yeah – rude. But does it foretell the end of Western Civilization? What are we even talking about here? And what, exactly, are the civilization attributes of the West which he claims are under threat? He speaks of a “crisis of normativity,” by which he means that a culture’s present health is conditioned upon a web of long-established cultural norms that give meaning to the moment. When we disrupt those cultural norms, we run the substantive risk of ruin.

I can’t say for certain which norms to which he’s referring as being disrupted, but I would have to imagine his concern is tied to the rapid cultural changes we’ve seen in the West since the mid-50’s, beginning with the American Civil Rights Movement, followed by the Sexual Revolution and its attendant Women’s Right Movement, which led to the Gay Rights Movement, which takes us to the current Transgender Rights Movement.

It’s just too much movement!

Look, it’s hard for me not to be flip about this stuff because where he sees ruin, I see progress. Where he sees threat, I see opportunity. Furedi is a good writer and a considered one. In fact, I agree with at least some of what he wrote, in particular his observation that much of the West seems to be undergoing a “crisis of meaning,” writing:

The search for meaning has been an integral feature of human civilization. Through the struggle to endow experience meaning important insights about the human condition have been gained. The search for meaning has been a constant feature of Western Civilization in the modern era and continues to influence its art, philosophy, science, and spiritual life. The crisis of meaning only becomes a problem when society becomes resigned to it, accepts a condition of meaninglessness, and seeks to dispossess humanity from the insights and truths it learned through the ages.

For many on the Right, I think they find comfort in looking backwards. I don’t just mean to their childhoods, I mean backwards backwards. Like, Renaissance backwards. Roman Empire backwards. Strangely, though, so many of those on the Right look to the past as proof of their correctness of their ideas while ignoring the facts that those very ideas butt up against the reality of the lives they seek to emulate.

They look at crowning moments of Renassiance artistic achievement and, somehow, see in themselves the great accomplishments of the homosexuals Leonardo Divinci and Michaelangelo. They look at a Middle Eastern Jew running around preaching against intolerance and, somehow, despite their own intolerance, see themselves. And they ignore or excuse or - and this is what I think people like me worry about - long for the implicit power imbalances in those cultures.

They romanticize the past because the past is malleable to their liking. They can celebrate the Western church while somehow ignoring the centuries of pedophilia that accompanied its growth. And I’m not even going to start on Colonialism.

But I agree with Fureli that we shouldn’t turn our backs on the good to be found. I mean, without Mozart there are no Bay City Rollers. The literature. The philosophy. The scientific method, for God’s sake. All of it should be celebrated. But to suggest that the West has it all figured out is absurd. After all, the same Western Civilization that produced Aristotle also gave us Adolf.

All cultures cut both ways. They struggle from without and within. They build on each other. Western Civ had its precedents and will have its antecedent. But music isn’t going anywhere. Human expression isn’t going anywhere. Science, I’m confident, is here to stay. Whether Christianity hangs on another couple thousand years or not, I don’t know, but I’m guessing even if disappears, they’ll still be reading the Bible the way we still read The Mahabharata.

(Ok, maybe that’s a bad example because, honestly, how many people have read The Mahabharata? But do you feel like your life is any worse for not having read it? Probably not.)

In the end, I guess I’m just not that concerned. Hasn’t every culture worried for its own future? Don’t they all celebrate their glorious pasts? The point isn’t that Western Civilization, whatever that actually means, isn’t important. Of course it is. The point is that all the hand-wringing about its imminent demise is both overblown and irrelevant.

Overblown because no, Western Civilization is not under threat and irrelevant because Western Civilization is too baked into world culture for it to ever disappear. The world has gotten too small for some New Thing to come along and erase the last 2,000 years (or wherever you want to put the start date on “Western Civ”). We’re stuck with both our Aristotles and Adolfs for the foreseeable future. If you’re concerned, however, fear not. There are plenty of people like Furedi out there seeking solutions for a problem they cannot identify using terms they struggle to define. Why can’t these people just act normative?

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a piece for the Wall St. Journal comparing three new shows about rich, middle-aged white dudes in crisis. That piece comes out online this weekend and then in print the following weekend. DTF St. Louis was one of the shows, and I did not have high hopes for it. I was wrong. It’s one of my favorite television experiences of the last decade.

It’s a tough show to write about without giving away the plot, but my love for the show has little to do with the story, which is compelling, and everything to do with the show’s depiction of male friendship.

Jason Bateman and David Harbour play men in middle-age who meet and fall in deep, unreserved, platonic love. How they do, and why they do, is best left for viewing, but what stands out about the show is the rich portrayal of male sensitivity, vulnerability, and how those more “feminine” attributes reveal the hidden strengths of men struggling to live in a world whose shine has worn away.

We’ve seen depictions of cinematic male love before. There’s no Butch Cassidy without the Sundance Kid. And it’s Bad Boys, not Bad Boy. What distinguishes the men from DTF is their willingness to reveal their deepest selves to the other in ways that would be unthinkable for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s characters. (Ok, here I have to confess that I have not seen any of the Bad Boys movies, so maybe I’m wrong.) These are men living the prescription for how we’re told an evolved modern male ought to live. The result is equal parts beautiful, hilarious, cringe-worthy, pathetic, and inspiring.

Contrast this with the manosphere’s exuberant misogyny, aggression, and testicle-crushing trousers. The Andrew Tates and Jake Pauls of the world shoveling mountains of shit to young men who equate money with happiness and confuse sex with intimacy.

At long last, the culture appears poised to struggle with the problems of men. I say “poised” because, while we see the conversations slowly dripping into the mainstream, the issues surrounding contemporary manhood (underperforming girls in school and in the workplace, decreasing life expectancy, loneliness) have yet to reach the men most in need of hearing them.

In my own book on the subject, A Better Man: A (Mostly) Serious Letter to My Son, I wrote that this work is likely to be generational. The women’s movement took 200 years to come to full flower. I don’t think we need quite that long for men, owing largely to the work women have already done (thanks, ladies!), but I expect it take at least 50.

When I wrote the book a few years ago, I said that I didn’t even think the work had begun. Now, with the daily demonstration of everything we don’t want men to be coming from the White House, I suspect more people are at least primed – poised, if you prefer - to be receptive to new ideas.

One of those ideas took the form of DTF St. Louis. Whether more men will take their cues from David Harbour’s hip-hop American sign language interpreter character, Floyd Smernitch, I don’t know. Probably not. But what’s important isn’t the specifics of the relationship. What matters is that the show models a kind of male closeness that we don’t see enough of.

In fact, I can’t recall seeing it before. Not on TV and not in life. Not in an America in which a 2021 American Perspectives study found that 15% of men have “no close friendships at all”.

I know this as well as anybody. For all my high-minded talk on the subject, I’m just as walled-off as most other dudes. I’m more comfortable keeping things surface, sarcastic. Less willing to reveal myself to other men than I am with women. I have to work to maintain my male friendships and often find myself falling short.

Men are struggling. I don’t expect the women in our lives to feel sorry for us. What I find myself in need of, far more than pity, is inspiration. I need men modeling the kind of behavior and relationships I want to see. I need to see what it looks like when men confess their full selves to other men. To see what supportive, non-competitive friendship looks like. To see what masculinity looks like divorced from the toxicity too often associated with it, even when it flails. Even when it ends up biting you in the ass. For that reason, I am as in need of what DTF St. Louis has to offer as the men for whom I write today.

Will a “whole civilization die tonight,” as Trump promised in an early morning social media post? I don’t think so, but I absolutely believe former HIGNFY guest and MAGA try-hard Mike Lawler when he said that Trump isn’t bluffing.

Remember Trump’s Achille’s heel: humiliation.

To back down now, after twice threatening to destroy the nation and twice pushing back his deadline, will make him appear exactly as weak and feckless as his critics claim. Trump can’t handle the criticism. Which means he would rather push the remote button on the garage door to perdition rather than back down. Personally, I would prefer the critics shut the hell up. I’m rooting for Trump’s legendary cowardice. Cheering on all the TACO Tuesday talk. Practically doing The Wave in support of us turning tail.

Discretion, Mr. President, is the better part of valor.

After recording, I spent the remainder of the day monitoring social media, checking in with the news, seeing if anybody knows anything. Nope. All I see is confusion and concern. Apparently, B-2s are in the air on their 15-hour journey from Missouri. By itself, that doesn’t mean much since the US would send up the bombers regardless of Trump’s actual intentions. I imagine even the pilots don’t know yet if they’ll be dropping their payloads on Iran’s civilian infrastructure. My best guess right now is they will.

Of course, better minds than mine have gone broke betting on Trump’s words in the past, so I don’t put much stock in my own forecast. But I’m reading the tea leaves. In addition to Lawler, a bunch of other Republican flunkies took to the airwaves today in support of the Orange Ayatollah.

Here’s what I think will happen based on yesterday’s press conference. He promised to first destroy their bridges and power planets, but I think he’ll choose the least destructive option while still being able to credibly claim he fulfilled his promise. In other words, I think he’ll half-ass it, which is a far better option than full-assing it. He’ll blow up some important bridges and take out a few power plants but will stop short of the promised annihilation.

At least that’s my hope.

But what happens when the bombing fails to accomplish anything? Presumably more bombing. And when that fails to achieve anything? I hesitate to guess, but I bet the president has spent at least a few minutes staring at himself in the mirror practicing his best “authenticating nuclear weapon” voice.

The problem for Trump, as I understand it, is that the Iranian regime has no incentive to stop the war. What deal could they cut right now that would be both acceptable to the Americans and ensure they retain full control over the Strait, preserve their power, and keep American and Israel from returning? The one deal they cut with us got blown up during the first Trump administration. Why would they trust him on another? Now that Iran is in it, I imagine they’re in it all the way.

Nobody’s going to 25^th Amendment this guy. Impeachment is off the table. Congress isn’t even in session. Nobody in this administration will do anything but snap to attention and follow their Burger King into the abyss. Must we all follow?

I’m only writing now, as I did last night, to do something with all this spiky anxiety. Even if no bombs fall tonight, the anxiety will remain. Everybody knows our naked mad emperor is hurtling the nation, and the world, towards cataclysm. Whether that cataclysm arrives tonight or sometime over the next few days or years, we’re as close to a Diet Doomsday scenario as I’ve ever seen. (I say “diet” because I don’t think we’re facing all-out nuclear war like in the Cuban Missile Crisis and because, as a Ufologist, I’m banking on alien intervention. Not sure if Polymarket has a line for “aliens save Earth,” but I’m betting the over.)

I’ll end with a prayer of sorts. May somebody in this administration stay the hand of this president. May a ceasefire be reached. May it hold. May we resolve our differences amicably. May the good people of Iran survive the night and all the nights to come.

If the president does not back down, my prayer transforms to a curse. May the good people of the US take to the streets and accomplish what our Iranian brothers and sisters could not – may our dictator fall. May he fall hard, and into a puddle of pig shit. May he suffer for the suffering he caused so many others and may those who enabled this madness all sprain their ankles at the same time. May they be walking to the gallows when they do so.

UPDATE: Well, it turns out Jim and Jodi were entirely correct and I was entirely incorrect, much to my delight. What I didn’t anticipate in my analysis was the possibility that Trump would just cut bait and run, allowing Iran to, essentially, declare victory since it seems like they’re in a stronger place now than they were six weeks ago. All of Trump’s bellicosity had me fooled, particularly after the insane missive from this morning. Obviously, we’re only a few hours into this thing and it may have fallen apart by the time I even post this update but for the moment at least the missiles seem to have stopped falling. I’ll just note that I prayed exactly this outcome. I’ll take my Nobel Peace Prize, please.

UPDATED UPDATE: A day later and the ceasefire is already under considerable strain, summed up by this near haiku line from the New York Times: “Iran said the deal included Lebanon. The U.S. said it did not.”

Also apparently not cleared up before the deal was struck: whether or not the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed.

Don’t those seem like two pretty significant points to get clarity on before declaring a ceasefire? And, on top of everything else Israel apparently either didn’t get the memo about a ceasefire or they just don’t care because they’ve been bombing the hell out of Lebanon, hence the above near-haiku.

I don’t know where any of this goes. Hopefully the peace holds. Trump has sent crackerjack team of Kushner, Witkoff, and Vance to Pakistan to begin peace talks. Another near-poem, this one more like a bad limerick. You can see how optimistic I am.

As we wait to see what happens when a deal does not pass, I’m going to put my prognosticating hat on. It’s a hat I rarely wear because the damned thing has been on the fritz for years. My ability to predict the future is terrible so anything I say should be taken for what it is – a dumb take from a dumb guy. I’m just anxious and playing fortune-teller because why not?

Before you read on, just know that anything you read below will be, literally, the most surface-level analysis you’ve ever had the pleasure of skimming. The only reason I’m writing it at all is to deal with my anxiety about what I’m guessing will be a nerve-wracking few days for the world. Hopefully, that’s all it will be.

Anyway, I already made one prediction: there will be no deal. By deal, I mean a permanent cessation of hostilities. I think a cease-fire is possible, although I don’t see what Iran has to gain since any cease-fire would necessitate opening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has zero incentive to do.

Right?

I mean, it’s their single greatest leverage. Why give up on it when the world economy is basically holding its breath and since your economy is fucked, anyway, why not make the rest of the world suffer along with you? Which leads me to conclude we’re not going to have a ceasefire before the deadline passes.

What happens?

Trump’s threatened to go after their entire civilian infrastructure. I’m no legal expert but the legal experts seem to think that would be a war crime. Then again, invading a sovereign nation for no reason, I imagine, is also a war crime. As is invading a different nation and kidnapping their president. As is blowing up boats on open waters because you suspect them of doing something illegal. So, I’m not sure “war crime” is the deterrent people seem to hope it is.

He’s 80. He’s almost dead. Nobody is better at evading responsibility than this miserable fuck. Do we really think he’s worried about war crimes?

What he worries about, if I had to guess, is this stupid gamble further eroding his already shaky grip on power. The numbers have turned against him, hard. Trump may be a maniac but he’s not an idiot. Okay, he’s a maniac and an idiot, but he’s not stupid. Ok, I’m just saying: he can read the tea leaves better than most. He needed to get out from under the ICE scandal and, especially, the Epstein scandal. So, he bet that a quick tactical victory in Iran, similar to Venezuela, followed by a popular uprising against the regime, would turn around his fortunes. No doubt that’s the pitch Bibi gave him when he told Trump Israel was going in with or without the US. (I mean, that’s what was reported, but I don’t buy it. There’s no chance Israel would have done this without the US.)

If anything will restrain him in Iran it’s the concern that following through on his threats will harm him politically. Which means, as everybody’s been saying, he’s boxed in. He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. And, if idiots like us all understand this, then obviously Iran does too.

They’re probably calculating that he’s screwed no matter what he does, so all they have to do is sit back and wait. For the regime, the threat is existential. They obviously don’t want to lose civilian infrastructure but if they do, it will be advantageous. For one thing, civilian targets and the inevitable civilian deaths will turn the rest of the world even more against the US than they already are. For another, the regime is probably guessing an American bombing campaign against civilian targets will only strengthen their own grip on power.

Which means right now Iran holds all the cards. I mean, as long as the senior (and junior.. and junior junior) leadership manages to stay alive, which is certainly not a given.

They’re making money hand over fist from oil. They’re in full control of the world’s most valuable piece of maritime real estate. The protests have stopped because everybody’s too afraid to leave their homes. If it wasn’t for all the bombs dropping, these would be heady days in Tehran. All the regime has to do to win this thing is survive.

But the US can’t let them survive because if the regime survives, they go right back to doing what they were doing before. Why wouldn’t they? And what are we going to do about it? But the US doesn’t appear to be able to end the regime without a full-scale military invasion, which I don’t think Trump wants to do.

So what does he do to resolve this thing? I think he’s going to bomb the shit out of Iran to start. I think he will make good on his threat. I think that will do nothing to topple the government or re-open the Strait. Duck and cover has worked so far for Iran. I see no reason why it won’t work again.

Does he then order the dreaded boots on the ground? Or does he do what I suggested he might at the top of this piece? Don’t know, and I think I’ve done all the prognosticating I care to. Any more is likely to give the vapors, and my fainting couch is nowhere to be found.

Well, I wrote this to ease my anxiety and I only made it worse. If you made it this far, please tell me why I’m overblowing this. Either way, I had some pretty good pizza last night. Thanks, Frank Pepe.

Personally, it took me decades of writing professionally – beginning with comedy sketches – before it even occurred to me to think of myself as a writer. Maybe that’s because I always put writers on a pedestal. Writers, I thought, were people with big ideas. They were ponderous. They drank too much and had fistfights. They knew when to say “who” and when to say “whom.” No writer of any merit, I thought, could spring from my dubious brain.

In some ways, my self-assessment was correct. I am not a writer of any particular merit. I am, however, a writer.

Words have always delighted me. I like the various ways they fit together. Sometimes snuggly like a couple. Sometimes awkwardly like riders on a crowded subway. I like the way words can be playful or grave or even, as in the case of yesterday’s New York Times headline, “FEMA Official Says He Teleported to Waffle House. Experts Are Dubious.”, both.

I like the musicality of words. Their rhythm. Texture. I like that can be staccato and sharp or legato and loose. I like that words can be aimed with precision or scattered in a spray like buckshot.

Words are characters unto themselves. Compare the words “banquet” and “feast.” They convey almost the same thing, but not quite, like twins whose personalities reveal their differences.

English words, especially, are elastic. They can be made to wrap themselves around any conceivable notion. Notions, themselves, are spun from words. It is the job of the writer to set forth into the thicket of words at her disposal and chop down exactly the right ones for her needs.

Writerly work is now under threat. Large language models like ChatGPT can generate competent paragraphs – even entire novels – in seconds. Journalists are copping to a reliance on these LLMs. Copywriters are now seeing their entire field upended. At the same time, shattered attention spans have reduced the number of people who read for fun. A 2023 New York Times study found that only 16% of respondents maintained a daily recreational reading habit, down from 40% in 2003.

Writers can rail against LLMs all they want, but the technology isn’t going anywhere. It may be that writing goes the way of painting following the invention of the photograph. Before cameras, it was painters tasked with rendering the world for the eye. Along came the photographic plate, and what used to take a talented painter months could be accomplished in minutes and at greater resolution than any wielder of horsehair brushes could do.

Painting had to adapt, and it did. Following the introduction of photography, we saw an explosion of creativity in painting. Impression, abstract expressionism, surrealism, pop. At the same time, however, painting became more rarified. Now, after a century of pushing and pulling the form in every conceivable manner, the arts patron is required to ingest a graduate-level visual vocabulary even to understand the painting before them. I don’t want the same thing for writers, but I worry we may be headed in that direction.

What do we lose when we lose reading?

I’m not sure that we know yet. Already, the United States literacy rate ranks 36^th in the world. Fewer readers, coupled with a bizarre and persistent strain of American anti-intellectualism, suggests that number will likely decline even further in the years ahead.

A less literate population is likely to be a poorer population and a more incarcerated population. Their life skills will be worse, leading to worse health outcomes, which, in turn, leads to higher medical expenses for the population as a whole. Such a population is also more likely to perpetuate a cycle of poverty since they do not, themselves, have the skills to elevate their own children from a disadvantaged lifestyle. Individually, it’s a tragedy. Collectively, it’s a disaster.

If writing is how I make sense of the world, reading is where I go to understand how others see the same. Even so, I still find myself forcing the laptop screen shut. The phone kept at a greater-than-arm’s-reach away.

Books, increasingly, pile atop my nightstand for months on end, half-read or barely begun. At times, twenty minutes into yet another YouTube hi-fi component review, I feel my brain atrophying.

The advocate is often the worst adherent.

I don’t even think I’m making a case for reading and writing so much as I’m making a case for thoughtfulness. The act of plumbing the wet matter beneath our skulls so that we might escape our own myopia. The entire world is mediated through the filter of our senses; books and other acts of creation take us into the minds of others, which can only inspire and expand empathy. We need inspiration. And we need empathy. We need people who care about the words they let loose into the world.

Language has its limits, of course. The photograph is more immediate. The symphony more active. The film often more exciting, if more contrived. Text, though, succeeds because of its limitations. Writing and reading text is an act of co-creation because the medium of text demands interpretation. Literal and figurative. An elephant can enjoy Chopin but not Chaucer.

There will always be writers and readers, I think. Just as there will always be opera-goers even if opera no longer commands the attention of the masses. The good news is that words, as the saying goes, are cheap. One can write and self-publish. One can go to any thrift store and pick up a dozen paperbacks for the cost of a grande Frappucino. There will always be that floppy-haired kid peering at the spines of mysterious titles in libraries. There will always be those, like me (and you) who take delight in words.

May it be ever so.