I’m a fool for zombies.

That’s right: the dead guys – and gals. Love to watch them in any movie -- make that almost any movie. It’s not like I’m a dedicated fanboy, who has zombie screensavers and can reference zombie scenes at you all day. But I do dig the post-mortem shufflers.

Is pessimism any more distorted a perspective on life than optimism?  Isn't it centered in fact much more so than a sunny perspective?

So why not enjoy comedies that work from a misanthropic view of the universe -- yet leaven the gloom with a sort of philosophical levity?

It just so happens that I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” a few weeks before my students -- I am teaching them a college course in American movies this semester -- are due to watch Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”

It’s a bitter human irony that we can be at our ugliest when we’re fighting for our most passionate verities, including democracy, freedom and the American dream. And it seems to happen most often in the politics of immigration.

We are complicated. We are the best of people and, moments later, the worst. Can we ever calculate our full moral totality? Can we ever draw up a satisfying ledger balance of ourselves -- or anyone else?