(“Oath of the Horatii” painting courtesy of the artist, Joe Forkan)

For about ten years now, I have watched The Big Lebowski on my birthday. If you have seen the film, you will easily remember one of its first scenes: two thugs have erroneously broken into The Dude’s apartment to shake him down, having mistaken the disheveled “loser” for a millionaire who has the same name, Jeffrey Lebowski. As one of the thugs, Woo, “micturates” on The Dude’s rug, he utters a seemingly Shakespearean line, and I realized this year that I had never before heard it properly: “Ever thus to deadbeats, Lebowski.”

The “deadbeats” part makes perfect sense: The Dude is seen by nearly everyone in the film as a layabout hippie, a non-contributor. But “ever thus?” Hardly the phrase one expects from a hired goon, particularly one whose idea of articulating his displeasure is aggressive urination. A quick investigation reveals that “Ever thus to deadbeats” is a paraphrase of “Ever thus to tyrants,” or “Sic semper tyrannis,” a pronouncement supposed to have been made by Brutus as he helped murder Julius Caesar. The phrase has subsequently been invoked by, among others, Virginia as its state motto, John Wilkes Booth as he assassinated President Lincoln, and Crazy Joe Davola, Jerry’s would-be assailant on Seinfeld.

A reference to throwing off tyranny is not at all out of place in The Big Lebowski: the film’s prologue features the first President Bush on television, taking a stand against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein (another character in the Lebowski universe), insisting, “This will not stand—this unchecked aggression against Kuwait.” The Dude’s best friend, Vietnam War veteran Walter Sobchak, looks for any opportunity to free himself from oppression—perceived or otherwise—even yelling at a grandmotherly waitress who has the nerve to ask him to keep his voice down after he shouts profanity in a quiet coffee shop. Moreover, there’s the tyranny of Woo soiling The Dude’s rug as he does the bidding of Jackie Treehorn, the terror campaign of the nihilists who smash up The Dude’s private residence, and the fascism of the Sheriff of Malibu, who lambasts The Dude both physically and verbally, “stay out of Malibu, Lebowski—stay out of Malibu, deadbeat.”

However, what is so bizarre about Woo’s Sic semper is that he attacks the tyranny of The Dude’s desire simply to be only after it is clear that they have staked out the wrong Lebowski. Throughout the film, The Dude’s commitment to absolute, peaceful being is contrasted with a zealous drive to achieve: the millionaire Lebowski boasts of his achievements in business, charity, and political connections—just think of his “Time Man of the Year” magazine cover made from a mirror! And because Mr. Lebowski has achieved in spite of a physical disability, he expects The Dude to be even more impressed with his self-serving accolades and, consequently, The Dude should be even more ashamed of his own failure to achieve. Mr. Lebowski berates The Dude’s wardrobe, intelligence, and lifestyle, insisting that his “revolution is over,” and that “The bums will always lose!” The Dude is deplored not only because he does not serve Mr. Lebowski’s vainglory, but also because he does not buy into the ideology of achievement: he isn’t even employed—the horror!

The pursuit of achievement embodied by the millionaire Lebowski is macroscopically represented by the film’s many references to America’s Manifest Destiny. To call The Big Lebowski a Western may seem peculiar, but it self identifies with this genre, one that has in the history of literature and cinema expressly promoted the Manifest Destiny agenda. Narrated by a cowboy known only as The Stranger, the film begins with a desert landscape, a tumbleweed, a song called “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and the line “A way out West, there was this fella . . . .” With his cowboy hat and drawl, The Stranger is our link to the motifs of the old Westerns, and less-obvious tokens keep us in mind of Manifest Destiny throughout the story, such as little Larry Sellers’ social studies homework on the Louisiana Purchase and Smokey, the film’s only Native American Indian character. The mere accusation of Smokey having stepped over the line into forbidden territory while bowling is enough to send Walter, the Vietnam veteran, into a violent rage during which he points a loaded gun at Smokey’s head and forces him to change a written document under duress. By 1991, when the film takes place, the westward advance of American civilization has long since ended, and Los Angeles is as far west as our Manifest Destiny can take us. “Westward the wagons” and the pioneer work ethic have given way to laziness and decadence. And The Dude is, in the words of The Stranger, “the man for his time and place”—in this time and place, he is the hero of the Western, the somewhat absurd culmination of America’s Manifest Destiny.

While everything around him works within the paradigm of achievement, The Dude simply wants to “abide.” Understanding what it means to abide has been my way into understanding Woo’s dictum, “ever thus to deadbeats.” The word is only uttered three times in the course of the movie: first, by the millionaire Lebowski who swears to The Dude, after handing him a severed digit (ostensibly belonging to the millionaire’s wife), “By God, sir. I will not abide another toe.” The sense of “abide” here is “to tolerate, endure, or withstand.” Mr. Lebowski, who has concocted this double-cross to frame The Dude for stealing Bunny’s ransom money, insists that he will not abide any further harm to a wife he actually hopes will be murdered by her captors. He feigns exasperation and refuses to endure any further tyranny from the situation he, in fact, controls. His pseudo-achievements and his unwillingness to abide contrast directly with the most significant instance of “abide,” which comes from The Dude himself in his last proper line of the film: “The Dude abides.” The line is immediately repeated by The Stranger in a direct address to us, the viewers. “Abide” in this context has most readily been interpreted as “to live” and, more specifically, as an encapsulation of The Dude’s Zen desire to just be. While this meaning of “abide” certainly holds, I want to suggest an additional, complementary meaning: “to pay a price; or, to suffer for.”

Curiously, this is the same usage of “abide” that is found in Julius Caesar. Brutus speaks to the conspirators and witnesses, saying “let no man abide this deed, / But we the doers.” The deed is the murder of Caesar—during which, incidentally, Shakespeare does not have Brutus speak the line, “Sic semper tyrannis”—and while Brutus means something different, Caesar is the one who has literally abided and, simultaneously not abided, it. He has suffered the consequences of their deed, but he has not survived to continue abiding. Far from this explicit meaning, however, Brutus here intends that no one should suffer the consequences of Caesar’s murder but the conspirators themselves; he has convinced himself that theirs is a just crime and that they are, therefore, safe from judgment. By using the word “abide,” however, he simultaneously curses himself and his co-conspirators, commanding that none should live with this deed, nor suffer it to go unpunished, and the plebeians quickly say as much: “If it be found so [i.e. that Caesar was not ambitious] some will dear abide it.” Ultimately Mark Antony & Co. do not abide the murder, and Brutus, Cassius, et al. are made to abide their deed.

“The Dude abides.” He is neither ambitious nor tyrannical—he just wants to be. He tolerates the tyranny of those who label him a loser deadbeat bum. And, as The Stranger points out, he suffers on our behalf in an inverted Christ narrative: “The dude abides . . . I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, The Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.” In this version of the Western, the cowboy’s task is laid to rest long before the narrative begins, and he is free to drift with the tumbleweeds, ultimately unharmed by the worries of civilization, be they thugs, nihilists, slow-witted middle-schoolers, phony millionaires, pedophile bowling rivals, price-gouging morticians, or known pornographers. He can absorb and diffuse that which the world rolls his way. On a conquered frontier governed by inertia, where the tyrant is the one who proclaims Sic semper, this long-haired, bearded, sandaled peace lover, abiding our sins, is the one who has transcended the triviality by being ultimately trivial. So, when my next birthday comes, I’ll watch the movie again and abide getting another year older as best I can, knowing that a way out West, The Dude will abide the rest for me.

Despite their relatively low casualty rates, zeppelin air raids were a terrifying aspect of the new warfare confronting Britain. Of an air raid in late 1915, D.H. Lawrence famously wrote:

I cannot get over it, that the moon is not Queen of the sky by night, and the stars the lesser lights. It seems the Zeppelin is in the zenith of the night, golden like a moon, having taken control of the sky; and the bursting shells are the lesser lights.

So it seems our cosmos is burst, burst at last, the stars and moon blown away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared, with a long-ovate, gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on the earth, to burst away the earth also. So it is the end—our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air.

A new natural order, unnaturally wrought, had overturned the world, and Londoners lived each night knowing that they may be blasted out of existence from on high without warning. Even so, many on the ground—including Lawrence—could not resist witnessing the massive zeppelins as they floated through the night sky. These spectators stood in the streets, unprotected, knowing the power of the bombs that might be dropped at any moment.

On the German side, Mathy and his crew were impressed by the destructive power of the zeppelin, as well. In a 1915 diary entry, Mathy describes the “flames bursting forth” as he orders bombs to be dropped judiciously on Holborn and then rapid-fire over Liverpool Street Station. All the while, he is aware that “at any moment we might be plunged below in a shapeless mass of wreckage.” The Chief Machinist on L31, Viktor Woellert, shared Mathy’s anxiety: “I dream constantly of falling Zeppelins. There is something in me that I cannot describe. It is as though there were a strange tunnel of darkness before me into which I am compelled to go.”

Having set out from Nordholz, L31 advanced toward London in the dark of night on October 1; the other ten zeppelins that had set out from Germany had turned back due to ice build-up or had been blown off course. Mathy drifted as silently as possible toward the heart of the city, but was discovered by the search lamps. In a decision of self-preservation, he ordered all of the bombs to be released so that L31 could climb out of danger as quickly as possible. More than 50 bombs were dropped at once on Chestnut, damaging hundreds of homes, but injuring only one person.

As Mathy turned west, a single B.E.2c fighter plane pursued and—in reportedly one pass, all while steering and hand-cranking a broken fuel pump—the British pilot fired incendiary ammunition into L31, an act which at first seemed ineffective but quickly transformed the gleaming central luminary into “an immense Chinese lantern.” More than a million cubic feet of hydrogen erupted into flame as the zeppelin plunged toward the earth, the British pilot frantically maneuvering to save his own life from the wreckage raining down toward him. He would later crash on landing and sustain minor injuries.

Meanwhile, the 19 crew members of L31 faced an overwhelming decision: ride down with the ship and burn to death or jump into the darkness and hope to be killed instantly by the fall. Kapitanleutnant Heinrich Mathy wrapped around his head a scarf, which had been a gift from his wife, and climbed over the side. He landed in the Potters Bar field as the ruin of his mighty zeppelin drove itself downward. Nearby, the aluminum skeleton of the nose enfolded what would become known as Zeppelin Oak.

Mathy and his crew would be given a funeral with military honors in a local churchyard in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. According to Mathy’s diary, this act of generosity by his enemy had also been afforded to another zeppelin captain, Lieutenant Peterson, who had been found in a field in Essex, wrapped in his grey army coat, having jumped from his own burning ship.

Among the crowd of Potters Bar onlookers on October 2 was Second Lieutenant Wulstan J. Tempest, the B.E.2c pilot who had singlehandedly brought down Mathy and L31. After nose-diving and cork-screwing his wooden plane to avoid being consumed by the fireball and then nearly killing himself as he destroyed his plane’s undercarriage on landing, Tempest discreetly paid his shilling to behold the scene that he had created. Surely if there were any time in the course of a human life when one would be excused, even praised, for gloating, that morning in the field of Potters Bar would have been the moment for Tempest. And yet he chose to walk through the throng anonymously.

To hear people cheering his accomplishment and to see the great oak that had become Zeppelin Oak must have pushed the young man to a state of disbelief. But to see the very spot of earth where German captain had fallen and lain for a few minutes before his death was surely uncanny.

In that moment alone amid a crowd, Tempest thought of King and Country, of his family, even of the widow Mathy. These thoughts dissolved into the background, though, as Tempest was confronted by a realization that nothing in his life had yet prepared him for (indeed, nothing in the life of the world before this war had prepared any of them for): that, only hours before, he had been diving toward the ground, perhaps toward this very spot in perhaps this very bodily position; yet it was he who moved anonymously through the crowd, gazing silently at the ghostly mark on the landscape.

I have been thinking about the transit of Earth ever since I heard about it. Surviving for a century has never been a priority for me, as it is for some people. However, finding out that a transit of Earth from Mars will be taking place a few weeks before I turn 104½ has made me, for the first time, want to live to such an age. I envision myself there, on Mars, watching the Earth float past as I stare at the Sun. A human born on Earth, now seeing home as a black spot against a star.

Colonizing the red planet will be more economically feasible if we send astronauts one-way, knowing that they will never return to Earth again under any circumstances. What a frightening, powerful thought, though, to know that they will never be home again, but to choose to leave at a moment in human history when the comforts of indolence beckon. All so that they may live the rest of their lives on a planet that is barren and lonely.  It is a staggering prospect, and when I consider it, I want to say that I would go without thinking twice, but I am afraid.

What would inspire someone to make such a choice to go? It is a mistake to interpret any desire to leave Earth behind as a mark of cynicism. Surely things are not going well here and the instinct escape is understandable. However, giving up the planet of one’s birth in order to help light the way for us to venture to the stars cannot be seen as an act of despair. In fact, it is an act of great hope. Those people—now walking among us—who will be the first extra-terrestrial settlers carry within themselves the true spirit of exploration shared by those in our collective history who pushed themselves to do something truly new for the benefit of all future humans.

By striving for a more thorough understanding of our universe and ourselves, at least we will have continued to try. Even with a forceful effort, I don’t know if I can make it to see the 2084 transit, but it gives me something to dream about. And, if I don’t make it, I hope you will see it for me.