Divine Retribution

She was crying about Il Papa dying, and I think she may have used the word "tragedy;" I don't recall. At any rate, I overreacted. Not snappily, not with anger, pique, or even flippancy, but still, I could have been more considerate. "It's not as though he was a teenaged Bangladeshi amputee suffocating in his own filth after watching the murder of his parents. He was an Octogenarian who had lived a fulfilling life of creative writing, soccer, mountain-climbing, and priestifying. No sex, but lots of fun. Then, as the richest and most powerful man on the planet, he spent nearly three decades living in the most offensively opulent wealth, with an entire order of nuns dedicated to attending to his every personal whim, with millions loving and obeying him, believing that we was the infallible mouthpiece of Christ on earth and that he would spend the eternity that awaited him after his universally bewailed death in incomprehensible bliss. That's a pretty good run. Whatever you think of his tangible effects on the world (thumbs up to passive defeat of totalitarianism; thumbs down to reactionary stances on women's issues), you can call his passing sad, but tragic? No."

After the above harangue, I spent a few days feeling smug, then a couple feeling unaccountably melancholy (see sources of stress below), and one day I went to my mailbox and greeted the red Netflix envelope with glee, thinking' "Ah, yes, this will pick me up!" What movie to I get? The Passion of the Christ. Touche, Karol.