THE ABSOLUTE, LIKE, NECESSITY OF OLD SITCOMS' LEADING MEN IN REINFORCING HUMANITY AS MORE THAN ONE BIG DRUNK LEANING AGAINST A LAMPPOST

Is humanity itself (and I'm definitely including myself here, although others might debate the validity of my inclusion) fundamentally, at its coure, the equivalent of Woody on Cheers? Or Barbarino on Welcome Back Kotter? Or Bull on Night Court?

Are we all, at our fundamental core, way down deep, just plain and simply stoooooooooooopid?
Sometimes I think so.

Sometimes I don't.

But sometimes I do, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that I've been around a little bit these last few years. I've been to Hiroshima. I've checked out the killing fields. I've taught former heads of Toshiba, and Cambodian orphans, and been almost robbed by a motodop at midnight in Phnom Penh, and ridden a double-decker bus in Hong Kong, and had a personal tour of director Akira Kurosawa's former film studio by his long-time art director (and even got to hold the actual mask worn by the dude who plays Godzilla). There are many, countless, untold thousands of things I haven't done, and still hope to do, but I have certainly seen and heard and felt and thought about much, much more than I had ever anticipated. I used to think that life could be learned through a book; now I know that's not true.

I also know some other things, too.

The variety of life. The variety of people making their way through that life, this life, our life that we all share. It's mind-boggling, it really is. You can tell yourself all you want that you are a sane, rational, clear-headed individual -- but when you are stuck in a foreign land where you do not know a single soul, and you can't speak the language, and you are far from home, if that home still exists, you will be confronted with the essential fragility of who we are and what we think that we can be. It's not a pretty picture, or an enviable experience, but it's definitely a human one, and I recommend -- if for no other reason that it will allow you to feel like an immigrant, alone and forgotten, and that has to be a good thing, a good feeling, I'm sure of it.

The variety, though, is what leads to the questions. Questions that can't be answered.

Are we all the same, us humans? I guess so, yes, I think so, but after living in Japan for four years, and in Cambodia for almost two, I can also that there are differences, and these differences arise from living in groups, and these groups are ethnically and nationally oriented, and there is very little that we, as humans, can do that to rectify this imbalance.

Do we need to rectify it?

I don't think so, actually; perhaps that's too strong a word. What we need is balance. What we need is perspective.

Perhaps this goes back to my earlier post on the pope's passing (scroll down if you're interested).

We all want to believe what we believe. That's fine. All well and good. And we're in a certain stage of civilization's development where we have now, thankfully, accepted that other people's beliefs do not necesarily match our own. In other words, you are Jewish and free to perform your rituals and observe your holidays and do what it is that the people in your faith do; I am Muslim (for example; I haven't converted -- yet), and I practice my faith, and we agree that while our faiths our separate, they are also equal.

That's the theory.

Still.

Much of the world if not most of the world is composed of varying civilizations that offer unique and singular takes on religion and culture; I'm sure Iran and Japan share many things, but there's a lot that's different, too.

And yet our cultures breed us to believe, deep deep deep down, that we are right.

Think about it. The way we talk, the way we dress, the way we eat, the political opinions we hold -- our culture gives them to us.

Recently (and by 'recent' I refer to the last, oh, two hundred years) things are shifting because people are moving, travelling from one culture to another for work and for play, cross-pollinating their species, merging cultures. There is a fertilization of ideas and outlooks that is taking place; I recognize this. Things are changing for the good, I believe. In part.

But still...

A roundabout, long-winded way to get to my point (and it's debatable that I have one), which is: People are good and decent and kind, yes, but we are, I've come to conclude, also more than a little stoooopid. We harbor our resentments. We root for the home team simply because we live in the same city as the team; we root for our country against their country simply because we live where we live. We go around proclaiming that our country is the best country in the world to live, while dozens, if not hundreds of other countries'citizens shout the same repetitive mantra. We worship the faiths of our family simply because they told us to.

We instinctively align ourselves with others who feel the same way that we do, the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination.

It thus serves a purpose, this lamppost does -- but not the one it was intended for.

Maybe that's what my fears come down to.

We, as humans, absolutely crave support, not illumination; it's what gets us through the night. We listen to those who will tell us what we want to hear. We listen to the radio stations that play what we like. We watch the shows that confirm our own conceptions of the world. We approach life based on the models that have been formed by us, or by what we form ourselves. We are firm, and unflexing, and do not want to change. We are stubborn.

So are we stooooopid?

I guess so.

But I take consolation in the fact that Woody on Cheers, Barbarino on Kotter and Bull on Night Court were mere supporting players. They leaned on others for support -- and if those leads, those Sam Malones and Mr.Kotters and Judge Harrys did not offer total illumination, they at least provided a little bit of light.

Which is maybe all we can hope for.

WHY POPEYE, EMBODIED BY ROBIN WILLIAMS, IS GOOD FOR THE CHILDHOOD SOUL

Something you loved at five years old should not be the same thing you love at twenty-nine years old. You're supposed to have matured in your artistic tastes, put your childish thoughts away, realized that our preschool likes and dislikes, even loves and fears, are something to be left behind, not intentionally sought after.

But after watching the DVD of Popeye, I can state, unequivocally, once and for all: Naaaaah.

Viewed objectively, as a so-called adult, Popeye is a strange movie. It's photographed and directed like a drama, because the director is Robert Altman, one of the most respected, if not revered, directors of the last fifty years (MASH, The Player, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs.Miller, Short Cuts, The Long Goodbye, and on and on). It's paced like a drama, too. The story is episodic and rambling, without even a hint of a plot. The characters are, by necessity, cartoons; Robin Williams plays Popeye brilliantly, and Shelly Duvall as Olive Oyl is, well, the cartoon come to life. And yet they are given adult quirks and lines of dialogue that I didn't understand at five but can certainly appreciate a quarter of a century later. To top it all off, it's a musical.

The whole idea is ludicrous. "I know! We'll make a big-screen version of the old Popeye cartoons, but it'll be live-action, paced like a drama, and, of course, it'll be a musical! What's not to love?"

A crazy notion.

But what a great film.

Again, I can't really view it objectively.

Nor do I want to.

As a child, there was something altogether right about seeing your animated, comic-book heroes come to life in a format that at least approximated reality. Such adaptations showed that there was a definitive link between the 'real' world and the world of comics and books; it was possible for one to transcend the other. I could read the Superman comic books, then see Christopher Reeve's version of the character boldly fly across the screen. I could devour Batman's adventures at night in my bed, then watch him on TV in the campy-but-as-a-kid-I-didn't-know-it TV show. (I knew there was SOMETHING odd when Adam West, as Batman, pulled a can of Shark-Repellent Spray to fend off a bothersome great white, but I couldn't place my finger on why.) I could catch Popeye cartoons on Sunday mornings, which were straightforward and simple and funny and goofy, and then see Popeye transformed into a living, breathing person as embodied by Robin Williams -- alert, funny, a simulation of the cartoon but there, a real person (or as real as any of us can be).

A lot of stuff in movies and TV shows goes sailing directly over kids' heads, but that's an altogether good thing; it allows children to understand that they can still enjoy something on a basic entertainment level while subtly, almost covertly implanting the notion that there's something, well, more going on underneath the surface, ideas and messages and allusions that point to a world larger than the one they know.

Popeye can jump out of a cartoon into the real world, yes, but this real world will be strange and funny and slightly off-kilter and, while similar to the world you know, only vaguely so -- that's the message, at five, I unintentionally, against-my-will, got.

As for the message I got at twenty-nine, while watching it again?

I can't do better than what the man himself said:

I am what I am and that's all that I am.