One of the diaries about Roman Polanski's arrest got me thinking, but way off on a tangent from most of the heated discussion about whether he should go to jail, have a new trial, etc.
I'm going to recycle as a diary a comment I put on one of those 'Polanski Arrested' diaries.
My comment may have gotten no attention because it was way off the main subject of the discussion.
Of course, maybe my comment got no replies because it was boring.
Roman Polanski is in the news, and that got me thinking about the movie Chinatown. There may have been an element of self-reflection in Polanski's making of that movie.
Chinatown has one of my all time favorite lines, spoken by Jack Nicholson:
How much better can you eat?
If you don't know the context, rent the movie. I put that line up there with a similar quote attributed to Nelson Rockefeller,
You can only eat one steak at a time.
Rockefeller's quote has less punch, but it doesn't need context.
In a time when "millionaire" has come to mean someone who gets paid a million or more a year (rather than someone who's total assets are a million or more), when health insurance company executives build fortunes in the billions on the profits from committing murder by spreadsheet, maybe we should throw those quotes around more often.
One more quote, from the musical Wicked:
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities,
So we just pretend they don't exist.
To take an ethical lesson from a Roman Polanski movie, we have to at least tolerate moral ambiguities, if not be at ease with them. But I think it's worth putting up with the ethical confusion.
Maybe that's my thought for Yom Kippur, which begins tonight. For those not familiar with it, Yom Kippur is a total immersion wallow in a mud bath of guilt, if you take it seriously. But most or all of the prayers put the guilt in the plural: "We have sinned", not "I have sinned". If you can't think of 24 hours worth of personal sins you need to atone for, you can atone for the sins of your community, or your country. We're all trying to atone for everyone's sins, rather as a group effort. (It's collective atonement and forgiveness. Oh my gosh, Yom Kippur might be a socialist holiday!)
You're sort of supposed to fast for the 24 hours of Yom Kippur, starting at sundown tonight. And it's about as strict a fast as you can imagine: no food, no liquids, not even brushing your teeth, no bathing for pleasure, and probably no doing anything else for pleasure. (If you scratch an itch on Yom Kippur, and it feels good and you think "aaahh", you probably just did another sin.) But there's a big 'out' available: Everyone is his own judge of whether the fast is too hard on him; if you find fasting is distracting you from praying and repenting rather than helping concentrate your mind, you don't have to get permission from anyone else to excuse you from fasting or finishing the fast. You can excuse yourself.
For anyone who's going to try it, have a good fast.