HOST ADAPTS
that something we really want to burn to the ground?”
And the problem with tone is: How close can I get to the fire without being in it? Cynicism is an enormous problem. I’m actually a hopeful person. But the way to stay hopeful is to acknowledge and to not accept what is absolutely amoral, mentally ill behavior as normal.
Trump’s speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree comes to mind. You’re the father of an Eagle Scout. That had to make you angry.
To get children to boo and hoot. “Better a millstone be tied around your neck and you be tossed in the deepest part of the river than you should scandalize one of these.” There’s a moral heresy involved with the president getting children to engage in his own behavior.
Tricky to dance next to the fire with that kind of thing …
I’m not here to scold … and, again, imperfectly, because you can’t help but engage in that. The times you see me being my harshest or scolding, I promise you, that’s not what we wrote. I just get swept up in the emotion of the moment while I’m talking about it.
I’d imagine that it’s hard sometimes not to be swept up …
It’s hard but that’s part of the job, to maintain the discipline of pointing and not finger-wagging. Don’t think you’re changing the world through mime, as I like to say. You’re here as a release valve for people’s emotions. And that’s a very valuable thing.
People would say, “Oh, you say you just do jokes.” I don’t just do jokes. I do jokes. Jokes are important. They saved my life when I was younger. Hopefully we’re making things nicer at the end of the day for people. That’s the entire goal, and that’s the touchstone and the North Star for the tone.
Would the Putin-Trump [vulgar reference to oral sex] joke you made be an example of getting too close to the fire?
I’m not familiar. I’m not familiar. You say you’ve got a “sock holder”? I think I see the lawyers about to come in the room. Yes. That would be an example of perhaps letting my emotions get the best of me. Yes, I would say that would be in the fire, not dancing next to it.
Do you remember a story you once told about a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to a priest who was upset with Tolkien for treating death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall, but as a gift? And Tolkien wrote back: What punishments of God are not gifts? Maybe that’s a way to look at these times of ours.
[Laughs] I hadn’t thought about it that way. That quote’s a good guide for everything. That response — aren’t all punishments God’s gifts? — is such a bigger thought, bigger than a political thought. That’s a personal thought. And the personal is bigger than the political because the personal is almost unfathomable.
Now I feel like I’m the one getting the tone wrong with that question …
[Laughs] I do it all the time myself.
But we’re hitting on the ideal here — the unfathomable in every person — recognizing that and treating people with understanding and empathy …
But you absolutely can’t do it! It’s a goal, but you absolutely can’t do it. I don’t think I’ve ever said this in an interview, but when I was younger, my parents used to quote this French philosopher, Léon Bloy, who said that the only sadness is not to be a saint.
And I always think about that. That’s the great sadness, not to be perfect, meaning not to be a saint, not to see the world the way God does. Which is that everyone is going through a battle you know nothing about. But of course not, because I’m sitting here making absolutely joyful fun of the Mooch [former incoming White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci]. Or Donald Trump.
But you’re not talking about a person. You’re talking about ideas. Donald Trump, yes, he’s somebody’s little boy. But he is his ideas because his ideas are what’s going to affect us. As a man, he can do very little. But his ideas could [pauses for drama] kill us all.
Sounds like you’re just buying into the script of the Fake News Media.
Fake news and fake media … the interesting thing about that is that it’s a heresy against reality. Again, as a Catholic, I was taught that the greatest sin was heresy. Because not only are you a sinner, you are proselytizing and inviting other people into your sinful state through your heresy. You’re a recruiter for your own fallen state.
So Trump is a heretic against reality. Basically, he’s lying for sport. He’s inviting people into his heresy that there is no objective reality.
Your grasp of theology is impressive, sir.
I still carry a pocket Gideon around with me wherever I go.
Wasn’t that a turning point in your life, meeting a Gideon on the street when you were a young man?
Yes, I picked up a box of little pocket Gideons — New Testament, Proverbs and Psalms — from a Gideon on the street in Chicago. It was one of those 20-below days and it was so cold, I had to snap [the New Testament] over my knee to get the pages to turn. And I immediately opened it to Matthew 5 and it was the Sermon on the Mount. “Do not worry, for whom among you by worrying can change a hair on his head or add a cubit to the span of his life?”
Really, that moment changed my life. I understood what “it spoke to me” meant because it didn’t feel like I was reading it. I just felt like it was literally just talking.
You must feel a debt of gratitude toward that guy from that cold Chicago morning.
That impulse toward gratitude is what originally relinked me to the idea of God.
What are you grateful for these days?
Well, it’s always the same thing — which is to exist. That’s the baseline. There’s a great line from this Neutral Milk Hotel song … [bangs on his desk] ... I think it’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” It goes:
And when we meet on a cloud I’ll be laughing out loud I’ll be laughing with everyone I see Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all
So why is there something instead of nothing? Why am I here instead of nowhere? That’s the first thing I have to be aware of. And then I’m grateful for my children and my wife. That’s first and then as the hymn goes, “For the beauty of the earth” comes after that.