I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.
The strike won’t affect me much. I grew up evangelical back when we were anti-Hollywood and if you loved the Lord you didn’t go to movies and didn’t have a TV. I didn’t set foot in a movie theater until I was 17 and went to see “Elmer Gantry,” and so my brain never developed an affinity for visual entertainment. I can’t remember movies I’ve seen, whereas parts of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount, Psalm XXIII, are vivid and powerful. “Whoever increases knowledge, increases sorrow,” I read in Ecclesiastes when I was young and this turned me away from scholarship and journalism and toward a life in comedy. My wife is smarter than I am and she knows it and she is more anxious and she grieves more deeply, but when I walk into the room and pass gas, she laughs like crazy. I’m happy to oblige.
Solomon said some powerful things about the meaninglessness of life that Governor DeSantis, if he had his wits about him, would prohibit being read in Florida public schools, such as his line: the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, or the one about Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Do we want our third-graders to carry that around in their heads?
