john cleese wrote a sermon

I. Yes, That John Cleese
There's nothing exactly groundbreaking in this sermon (printed as an essay by Harper's) from John Cleese. Except. I mean. JOHN CLEESE GAVE A SERMON. Growing up, my family had The Screwtape Letters on audiobook and John Cleese was the narrator. Always thought it was just a coincidence, but his sermon's pretty much in earnest (and drawn from various religious traditions):

People are changed not by exhortations to do things but by experiences. For example, people who have had near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences, whatever they may be, are changed by them in a way that could never in a lifetime be achieved by good advice.

Think about what Christ asks us to do: “Love your enemy.” Can any of us begin to do this? It’s a great aim, but how do we acquire the capacity? As far as I’m concerned, I might as well have been advised to move backward in time. “Thou shalt hover unsupported four feet off the ground.”

The best part may actually come a few paragraphs earlier, when he summarizes and expands Aldous Huxley's idea about there being "two religions":

These two types of religion—the religion of immediate experience, of direct acquaintance with the Divine, and this second kind of symbolic religion—have, of course, co-existed in the West. Mystics have always formed a minority in the midst of the official symbol-manipulating religions, and this has been a rather uneasy symbiosis. The members of the official religion tended to look upon the mystics as difficult, trouble-making people. [...] And on their side, of course, the mystics have spoken—not exactly with contempt, because they don’t feel contempt, but with sadness and compassion about those who are devoted to the symbolic religion, because they feel that the pursuit and the manipulation of symbols is simply incapable in the nature of things of achieving what they regard as the highest end: the union with God.

"I evangelize in your general direction," so to speak.

II. Opinion
Everyone is talking about voting. I'm going to vote. I'm probably even going to vote for people and not just ballot issues. I'm probably going to because, yes, I'm conflicted about the human detritus we're being asked to choke down in the name of democracy. There are at least two kinds of abstention relevant to this instinct, one is indifference in the face of wickedness ("stop that man! he's stabbing me!"), the other is the withdrawal from wicked complicity ("I will not go to war and kill civilians for the sake of war profiteers"). Both are simplistic and not generally helpful, as is the case whenever one hopes to find a principle that will be somehow actionable when the moment comes. "Never lie, unless there are Nazis searching your house for Jews, then please, lie!"

But what I keep coming up against is the brute logic of our democratic republic - our realpolitik posturing and unspoken consequentialist conniving. Even voting third-party is heretical. Why? The only way that filling in the name of someone I'd actually like to see elected could be considered a "waste" is from this consequentialist perspective. That my action exists most forcefully on a personal level (a law-ethics/spiritual level?), and that I maybe don't want to vote for a lesser evil because, surprise!, I don't want to support any kind of evil, this is being mocked? People have become shills for power and fundamentally leveraged their own virtue on behalf of a two-party oligarchy, but voting seriously as if my opinion matters and could change the nation - that's the joke?

Uh. Look. No one freak out. I'm just spit-balling here.

Anyway, I'm not sure who I'll vote for yet, not because I don't know who I would vote for within the party alignments. Rather, there are principles at stake that presuppose the importance of voting. Even worse, voting itself has become some sort of de facto virtue, as if chopping wood for arson was as virtuous as chopping wood for s'mores. And I gotta tell ya, there are no s'mores in this scenario! Not in my state, at least. I'm told that there's no place for idealists in the ballot box, because people's lives are at stake. Yet people were dying under Obama, many from the same backgrounds that are still being threatened, and if you voted for him you should be praying every night for the drone strikes sweeping the globe. You're complicit.

That's democracy: The blood of the empire is spread between us with ritual box-ticking. Oh, and taxes. 

(He said, in a newsletter to friends and family! Haha. Eesh. Relax, Joel.)

TL;DR Voting may be good, but not because participation is inherently the moral superior of inaction. An "I Voted" sticker is vanity. (Go vote. Still vote. I'm voting, remember?)

III. Sorry Things Got So Heavy
Happy November! Never shave again.

I love all of you.