W., the Movie

(Please first click on this link to go to my nightmare scenario for the Electoral College, as posted on the Huffington Post. I'd appreciate your visit and your comment. Thanks!)

Yesterday, we went to see W.--the new film by Oliver Stone about the current tenant in our White House. Having seen Stone's earlier movies, I was expecting frankly something more tendentious in its political leaning. What I got was more of a character study, the portrait of a man constantly trying to make up for his wasted younger years with a fear of failure so intense that the ends up courting it. Dominated by a father whose standards he can never satisfy, hiding his inner insecurities with macho shows of bravado, Stone's W comes off as more pathetic and ineffectual than ill-intentioned, manipulated by others who use his malleability as the vehicle for their own nefarious needs, notably Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

Stone's movie effectively focuses on the story of the Iraq war--its boastful assumptions, its incompetent pursuit, its eventual descent into impenetrable chaos--as a kind of necessary projection of the Bush character. Aside from oblique references, and much to its credit, I think, it avoids the temptation to exploit the 9/11 disaster. I thought it succeeded very well in what it attempted, but felt uncomfortable about making a "story" out of the Bush debacle. It reduced the scope of the effects of his presidency to a character flaw--mythical in dimension, yes, but somehow intimate and personal in comparison to the vast damage his tenure in office has wrought in the real world. I wanted something bigger in its reach, in the light of this historical moment, perhaps more damning than this very humanly compassionate portrayal.

Sounds un-Buddhist, no? But for me, in this instance, it's not about the man; it's about the planet and the survival of all living species, including our own, which have been needlessly endangered by this one man's blind arrogance and presumption of divine approval. The damage is far more extensive and potentially catastrophic than the Iraq war, and I think for this reason that "W" gets off much too lightly in Stone's movie. He's human-scale. The fallout of his reign is global.

Walking the Precipice

I woke early this morning from this nightmare: I am near the front of a line of people walking along a narrow ledge at the top of a sandstone cliff. I have no idea who this group of people is, nor why I have chosen to be among them. I am petrified. I have a long-standing fear of heights, and above and below me there is only the canyon wall to my right, and to my left... nothing but the long drop to the canyon floor. The face of the cliff is smooth, its features rounded: there is nothing to grasp on to. At one moment, I see what appears to be a hand-hold, but when I touch it, it turns out to have the texture of a knitted shawl. As we progress, my head reels, the path narrows. I become more and more terrified...

Once I woke, my mind insisted on continuing along that narrow ledge. I was unable for some minutes to shake off the image, nor the fear. Later, thinking back on it, I realized that this of course is how I'm feeling in my life at the moment--as I suspect are many others: at the edge of the precipice, and not a little scared. Scared about money, housing values, financial commitments. Scared about the elections and the quality of the debate leading up to them. Scared about what's happening to America and the world. Scared for my children and grandchildren. I feel like I'm walking along that very narrow path, with nothing to grab onto in order to feel more secure. I'm sure that the feeling haunts the lower levels of my consciousness, even at those times when I'm not aware of it.

Then, after I was up and about, after I'd made our morning cup of tea, the person who has made it his mission to make America feel more "secure" appeared on my television screen--the man who currently occupies our White House and whom I still can't bring myself to call by the title he appropriated. And I listened once again to his blather and asked myself again how a man of this inferior intellect had come to be the "leader of the free world." And I wondered once again how intelligent men and women of the media could sit there listening to this man answering, or failing to answer their intelligent questions with his usual bluff and blather, and later report on it as though it had made some sense. How much more often can this little emperor appear naked before the cameras of the world and still be treated as though he wore the full regalia? Once again, I'm stunned by the inarticulate simple-mindedness that governs this country and exerts so huge an influence on the world. How could this come about?

And then of course I remembered that this man is us. Like it or not, he's the mirror of who we are. We Americans enabled his elevation to the White House. We tolerated his excesses and rushed off with him to war. We allowed him to get away with his cronyism and incompetence. In our greed, we embraced his economic policies and his tax cuts. We threw up our hands in submission when he deprived us of our most basic civil rights. We still, to this very day, have failed to do what it takes to halt him in his tracks. Where we should have impeached we chose, timidly, to wait.

I'm sure I'll hear a chorus of protests: not me, that man in the White House does not represent what I stand for, I raised my voice against the war, I protested Guantanamo and the abuses of Abu Ghraib. Well, yes, you did. And so did I. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a collective responsibility for who we are, as a country. I'm talking about who we have allowed ourselves to become--not simply during the Bush administration, but in the course of the past four decades, slowly, inexorably, as we have made collective choices that have led us down this path. I'm talking about our misuse of power, our love of luxury and money, our contempt for education, our lack of circumspection for our place in a planet full of people.

So here we are, on the edge of precipice, and scared. If the housing market is in chaos it is the result of improvidence on the part of some, and greed on the part of others. If the financial markets are in chaos, it is for the very same reason. What I'd want to be hearing from the man at the podium this morning is not the blame and petulance I heard, but a rallying cry to all of us to be prepared, finally, to sacrifice some of our petty needs to the common good, to pull up our socks and roll up our sleeves and get to work on the real and urgent problems that we face.

And, failing to hear it from the Great Pretender, I'd want to see those in a position to do so take the responsibility for a merciless, objectively analytical exposure of his nakedness and the abject failure of his policies on every front. Unless and until we're prepared to acknowledge our responsibility for our current situation, we will not be able to move forward. Like the addict in the recovery program, we must first quit pretending that it's everyone else's fault, and recognize ourselves for who we are. We must quit squealing in indignant protest when a potential leader like Obama holds the mirror up for us to see. That's us, in the mirror there. And it's not a pretty sight.

"Vengeance Is a Chain...

... there is no room for hate." So says Ingrid Betancourt, out of the wisdom of her six years of captivity in Columbian jungle camps by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia. "You have to pardon," she continues. I think that's the key of everything. We're human beings. We think different, we act different, but we are human beings."


I watched the few moments of her interview with NBC's Ann Curry that their morning show could spare, and was glad indeed to encounter her humanity. She spoke of the necessity for compassion not out of some philosophical belief, but out of a heart and body exposed to worst a human being might have to experience; extending it not only to those she loves, but to her captors, imprisoners, and torturers. There's true wisdom for you, compassion in its most generous and non-judgmental form. Let's call her "enlightened." To watch Betancourt and listen to her speak is to see and hear Buddhism in practice, with none of its religious trappings but all of its human understanding. Perhaps she, seemingly a devout Catholic, would call it simply Christian. If so, it's Christianity as Christ surely intended it.

"Vengeance is a chain." Listening to these words, I could not help but think about our hapless situation in Iraq, and how the piously "Christian" man in the White House and those he chose to appoint as his advisers exploited our instinctive (read "primitive") need for vengeance after the 9/11 attacks in order to promote his aggressive resource war for oil; and how we are now "chained" to the Middle East in ways that might have been avoided, had he chosen instead the path of wisdom and compassion. Clearly we needed, at that moment, to do what was necessary to protect ourselves from further attack: I personally think that a forceful response to Al Qaeda and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan was necessary, if regrettable--not as an act of vengeance, but rather as a practical strategy for self-defense.

The invasion of Iraq was a different matter entirely. It could not have been achieved, I think, without the provocation of 9/11. I don't believe the American people would have tolerated the aggression without the exploitation of their emotional reaction to the 9/11 attacks. As a nation, we were still hot with shock and righteous anger, and still grieving those thousands of us who had died. In our rage, we were persuaded to overlook the well-established truth, that violence breeds only violence, and that vengeance never fails to wreak as great a devastation on its perpetrator as upon its victim. Compassion was the last thing on our minds as we surveyed the wreckage of the World Trade Center, deprived of even the bodies of the dead to bury.

Had we done more to address the root causes--among them, the genuine feeling in the Muslim world that the West was out to exploit their resources at the cost of their cultural and religious heritage--we might find ourselves in a very different situation today. Had we been just a little more Buddhist--or more Christian--in our response, we might now have more friends than enemies in that part of the world. Had we really paid attention and fully realized the role of oil in all this global instability, we might have begun to address our own addiction and be headed, already, toward a diminished dependency and a less threatened planet.

Instead, we chose vengeance. And what a powerful chain it has proved to be. We have yet to learn the lesson of Ingrid Betancourt. "We're human beings. We think different, we act different, but we are [all] human beings."

44th 4th; Freedom--and Responsibility

I was calculating, as I woke this morning, that this is my 44th July 4th in the United States. Happy Birthday, everyone! As I have suggested on several occasions in the past, I'm continue to wonder whether it's not getting to be time for us Brits--or, in my case, ex-Brits--to recolonize this place and bring it back into the civilized world. Just kidding.

Independence Day, then. I get the independence part. But what about "freedom"? It seems to me that this is a word, like "patriotism", much bandied about with little real sense as to its meaning. When it falls from the lips of the current (not for too much longer!) occupant of the White House--I still refuse to dignify him with the honorific "President"--I can't help but hear the clink of money accompanying it, along with a naive kind of ideology that believes that the American concept of freedom is good for everyone else in the world. It dovetails neatly with the notion of "free markets" and the kind of economic prosperity that benefits those with the skill and the mind-set to exploit them. It glosses too easily over the desperate poverty, hunger and disease with which too many of the world's inhabitants do daily battle--as though, once granted "freedom", their problems would be solved. For many, "freedom" would be little more than a survival ration of food and clean water to drink.

The idea of individual rights envisioned by those who founded America must surely have been more complex than it seems to be today. Did they envision a nation of millions upon millions, whose individual "rights" must inevitably clash, and whose "freedoms" might well impinge on those of their neighbors? Surely their idea of freedom was compounded with a sense of social responsibility, a willingness to compromise, even sacrifice some of those individual rights to the benefit of all? Today, it seems to me, we have lost much of that willingness to place "me", "my needs," "my rights" in the context of the common weal. (How about that "right to bear arms," to take but one example?)

I look around America today and I see freedom run amok. Consider the current Democratic election campaign. The kind of uncompromising, "my way and no other way", ideologically-based whining that I've been hearing, first from disappointed Hillary fans and now from disillusioned Obama supporters seems to me no different, really, than the ideologically-driven Bush administration. If we Democrats, particularly we so-called progressive or liberal democrats are incapable of listening to anything other than our own convictions, let alone modifying our ideological positions in order to work together for a greater goal, then we deserve, once again, to lose in November.

As I was saying just the other day, there are points on which I personally disagree strongly with the positions Obama has publicly embraced. I was brought up a good socialist, in Europe, and I wish he were able to speak from the much further, much more secular left. But this is America, "land of the free," where freedoms have been seriously eroded by successive, increasingly conservative administrations, and where a vast section of the electorate has supported and elected them. At this critical time in our history, I do want to keep our candidate on course; but let's allow him to be election-savvy as much as, if not more so than, ideologically correct. Let's for God's sake do everything in our power to get the man elected, even if it involves some sacrifice of our noble ideals.

Impeachment: To Heal the Wound

Buried in the news (NY Times p. 21, short para., LA Times no mention that I could find): Congressman Dennis Kucinich has the guts to call for the impeachment of George W. Bush on the floor of the House. Finally someone does the right thing--and no one pays attention. It might have escaped my own, but for a Huffington Post link shared with me by an anonymous correspondent. Back when he was still a candidate, struggling against the neglect afforded him by the media, Kucinich would have been my first choice for President, based solely on his policies. I wrote to that effect back then. Now, despite the opposition of his party leadership, he speaks out for the truth and I applaud him.

Quixotic, perhaps. But necessary. The first time I heard this matter discussed by a Democrat was shortly after the mid-term elections, when the party emerged victorious over the still powerful Republicans. I was at a small gathering with Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, where she was asked her opinion of impeachment. Her response was essentially that it was too late, potentially too time-consuming and unnecessarily divisive, a misplaced use of the new Democratic advantage. I suppose this was the rationale that Nancy Pelosi and other leaders applied in rejecting efforts to bring the Bush administration to account for its actions. At the time, I myself was swayed by Sanchez's argument.

I now think differently, and have done so for some time. I believe that a wound must be cleaned if it is to heal properly, and that the wound to the American Constitution, to our political system and our society is a grave one. It will continue to fester below the surface for many years to come if it is merely patched up carelessly or ignored. So far as I can tell, our body politic has not yet recovered from the disaster of Vietnam and the lies of Richard Nixon; the wounds of Bush's ill-advised rush to war in Iraq, his dishonesty with the people he was elected to serve and his besmirching of America's reputation in the world are deep and still bleeding. He and his co-conspirators must be held accountable if for no other reason than the need to heal these wounds, and impeachment is the most powerful means at our disposal.

Kucinich is right. Bush should be impeached, not out of malice--well, maybe a little out of malice--but so that we may finally learn the truths he has so long hidden from us, and begin to heal.

Little Things...

I've been noticing an interesting phenomenon recently, and I wonder if others share the same experience. It's the little things that get me going, far less than the big ones. Horrific expenses, global warming, the election campaign, George W. Bush, these things I can take with a certain equanimity these days. They seem to fall easily into the perspective of the larger picture, the long history of humankind on the face of the planet Earth. Perhaps this is the gift of several years of meditation practice, the daily simplicity of sitting quietly and watching the breath.

But the little things... ah, these can enrage me suddenly and without discernable reason: the screw that's lost its thread and won't come out, the light bulb that blows, the trip on a crack in the sidewalk, the damn toaster oven that will neither toast nor ove, the driver in front of me who has not the first idea how to make a left turn at the traffic light, a casual misspoken word, these tiny, meaningless events will cause a surge of rage and a stream of obscenities that takes me by surprise--and justifiably offends my wife!

Maybe that line of thought is right, that we each carry our own internal volcano, a reserve of overheated lava that we hide somewhere in our body and that erupts with fury when a tiny fault line happens to open up. Maybe it's the unhealed wounds of childhood that we have learned to hide away and keep tamped down until spontaneously released at a moment of vulnerability, when we're caught off guard.

Or maybe it's just me.

But I think not. I think about the words that Angela wrote in the piece I linked to yesterday--and cross-posted on Accidental Dharma--and I'm reminded just how deep those childhood wounds lie buried in the human psyche. I also went, yesterday, to catch a preview of a new art show called "Inner Battles of the Imaginary Male" at Andrew Shire Gallery and was reminded, yet again, of what I have learned about myself and other men in this regard. How much of the violence and the rage for power that dominate our global life today springs from that inner battle that many men have not yet learned to conduct appropriately, in the mind? Back to George W., then. A prime example of what it is I'm talking about.

But more of this later. I plan to do much more work on that exhibition, including an episode in my Art of Outrage podcast series. Meantime, I'd be interested to hear what others think...

Peter Saul, Painter

It has been, as predicted, an unusually busy week. I have been working to assemble not one but two hour-long segments in my "Art of Outrage" series for Artscene Visual Radio, and have had a rather hectic schedule of recorded telephone interviews. Yesterday I spoke to two artists and a museum curator, and today I have a follow-up call with one of the artists, Peter Saul, and another museum curator. It's all interesting and lively, but it means that I don't get around to thinking about The Buddha Diaries and the blogosphere as much as I would like.

I have admired Peter Saul's work for many years. In fact, I have lived with an early work of his--a large-ish untitled 1960 pastel drawing--on the wall of my house. Ellie and I first borrowed, then inherited it from her parents, who bought it at a long-defunct Los Angeles gallery probably around the time that it was made. Like all of Saul's work, it is lively, energetic, full of spontaneous humor, and thoroughly engaging to the eye. After at least twenty, and perhaps even thirty years, I continue to explore it with the same pleasure, and never fail to find something new in it to surprise me.

In the line of the German expressionist artist, Georg Grosz, Saul is unafraid to jump into politics and social issues with both feet. He lampoons politicians, plutocrats, exploiters of human frailties of all sorts with unabashed zest. At one level, his work is cheerfully scatalogical, erotic, finger-pointing, satirical, parodic, absurd... all in a joyful welter of color and image that imposes itself rudely on the viewer's eye and skewers his cherished prejudices and beliefs.

What I discovered yesterday, somewhat to my surprise, is that his impulse is not primarily one of outrage. He was clear, in our conversation, that he is primarily a painter, doing what all painters do--that is, indulging their own inner need to put paint on canvas and shove it around to create an object to his own satisfaction. What's likely to come out is what's on his mind, and for Saul that has to do with his observations of what's happening in the world around him. It's not so much a matter of coming up with a political statement about, say, the incompetence and inanities of George W. Bush, as it is of having fun with paint on canvas with George W. Bush featured as its subject. Far from being angry with Bush, as many of us are, Saul expressed his infinite gratitude to the current occupant of the White House for providing him with an endless source of material.


(He had fun from Ronald Reagan, too. I purloined this image from the George Adams Gallery website.)

Talking to him, I found that sense of fun extraordinarily appealing--and refreshing. That attitude does tend to put it all into perspective. When you get right down to it, the important thing is for each of us to do what's given us to do to the best of our ability. Which is why I play around with words in something of the same spirit, I hope, as Saul plays around with paint. It's a matter of each of us using our given medium to find out what it is we need to say.

Ask Not...

A number of observers more qualified than I to pass judgment on George W. Bush’s State of the Union address earlier this week have noted the absence of the slightest trace of a call for Americans to sacrifice or to share significantly in the burden of the current crises that afflict us. It was all a matter of “trust”—a word that occurred at least a dozen times in the speech, and about which I am writing at greater length in my Huffington Post blog, to be posted shortly. It was a matter of “You trust us, we have the solution to every problem. Just do my bidding, and everything will be okay.” Well, this was the subtext, anyway.

Given the record of the Bush administration in coming up with solutions to serious problems, I say “Fat chance.” No more trust from this quarter, at least. Not that there ever was much anyway.

The most offensive part of the speech, for this listener, was the mockery this “President” chose to heap on those ready to make a sacrifice to help those less fortunate, and to get the country back on track. “Others have said,” he proclaimed, delighted with his own incisive sense of humor, “they would personally be happy to pay higher taxes. I welcome their enthusiasm. I’m pleased to report that the I.R.S. accepts both checks and money orders.”

Ha ha ha. It happens that I am among those pitiable people. I am not as fortunate as some, but more fortunate than many. From having lived for many years in Europe, I know how relatively little Americans are asked to pay in taxes, and I am always bewildered—and frankly irritated—by the whining self-pity that characterizes virtually every conversation on the subject over here. Speaking for myself, I would prefer to have good schools and transportation systems, a humane medical health care program, and care for the poorest of the poor. (I would prefer, of course, to spend a good deal less on weapons and the technology of destruction, and regret what I judge to be a misuse of the money that I pay, but that’s another issue.)

To be mocked by the childish sarcasm of this man is galling. It is doubly galling when he uses the privileged platform of his formal address to the nation to indulge in such inanities. I wish that the Congress of the United States had the balls to impeach him for his abuse of office and the Constitution, and for his lies.

Obama

Just back in Los Angeles, and settling back into the office here. Before Monday goes the way of every other day, and with comparable speed, I have a quick word or two on politics for the blog. I have been sitting on the sidelines for quite some time about the Democratic candidates for president, and have been going along perhaps too easily with the "inexperienced" tag that has been tied onto Barack Obama. At the weekend, though, I read two pieces in the current Atlantic Monthly that shifted my thought a bit: the first, "Goodbye to All That" (nice title, by the way: Robert Graves used it first) by Andrew Sullivan made the simple but to me compelling point that Obama's face alone would speak volumes to the world at large about a new America. "Change" would be more than a word: it would be unmistakably, inarguably visible. And change, as I see it, is what we desperately need. I'm no Democrat-basher. It was Ronald Reagan's commandment, of course, that no Republican should speak badly of a fellow Republican--and it worked for them. The Democrats are not above criticism, but let's for God's sake get one of them elected.

The second article, "Teacher and Apprentice,"by Marc Ambinder, revealed a different side of Obama, one that is more ambitious for the job than I had somehow imagined--a good thing, perhaps, given the high office he seeks. I'm glad to learn that he's not above a little Machiavellian strategizing when the need arises, and that he can be ruthless. It's not a quality I myself aspire to, but I do believe it's needed by a man who seeks to represent this country to the world.

I plan to float a while longer in this fluid situation. I gaze sadly at the lonely Kucinich button that hangs on the bulletin board above my desk, and wish that it made sense not only to agree with what he says, but to support him with my vote. But I'm not that idealistic. And I remember with some anger what Ralph Nader did in 2000. In drawing the idealist vote, he assured election victory for the man who sits in the Oval Office today. I still can't bring myself to grace him with the title that he stole.

Bumper Stickers

I have never once put a bumper sticker on my car--until now. It's a bit like wearing your heart on your sleeve, something I was taught, as a young English male, was never proper to do. The polite thing is to keep your opinions to yourself in all circumstances. And besides, who wants to drive around these days with an ad for a Kerry/Edwards ticket on one's rear end? Too painful. Or worse, Bush/Cheney. You'd risk brickbats, rotten eggs and tomatoes, or at the very least rude gestures on the freeway. (Though I like the simple W with a diagonal line through it.)

I do sympathize with a good number of the messages I see. I'm not opposed to peace, and all messages that signal support for that noble end never fail to warm my heart. I just worry that as soon as an eternal verity morphs into a bumper sticker, it degenerates into a cliche. "Support Our Troops" suggests so much that's different--and to me unacceptable--than what it's message purports to say that it makes my skin creep. I get a good laugh out of some bumper stickers, most recently "Honk if you like thinking about conceptual art." But once you get the joke... do you really want to be sharing your laudable sense of humor with every other driver on the freeway until your car finally makes the journey to its just reward in the junk yard? For me, no thanks. For the same reason, I personally reject tattoos.

Nature conservancy is good. I want to save the planet. I want to save the whales. I worry about the bees, and I do hug trees, of course, whenever the opportunity presents itself. As for those random acts of kindness... they used to be a refreshing bagatelle, but they have long since had their charm eroded by over-familiarity. Or am I just being cynical again?

Having begun this entry earlier, I took more than usual interest in the rear ends of cars as Ellie and I took our morning walk around Silver Lake. A lot of traffic there, believe me, and a lot of parked cars on the streets. I was surpised to see that only a tiny fraction of them were adorned with stickers. Perhaps they're going the way of the ill-starred John Kerry. Out of the literally hundreds of free advertising spaces, I saw only five in use. "WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER." Certainly. One of those verities I was mentioning above. "USC MOM"--a higher education version of the "I'm a Proud Parent" syndrome. "Shirley Chisholm For President." No kidding! (She ran in 1972, and died on January 1, 2005--having lived long enough to witness the current assault on the U.S. constitution which she so nobly served.) One (very small) JOHN KERRY 04 sticker. And an advertisement for CATNAP, with a www address for easy contact.

Anyway, here's the point. I received from a friend the gift of the only bumper sticker I have ever actually attached to my car. Here it is, on my super energy-saving, self-righteously environment-conscious car. (It's name itself is a bumper sticker, no?)



Okay, accuse me of wearing my heart on my sleeve. I just feel comfortable with this one. First off, it asks a question, it doesn't come up with the answer. It invites contemplation. I like that. Second, it's modest both in scale and color. Third, it's playful--a parody of the whole WWJD thing. And fourth... well, I like it.

What do you think? Do you have a bumper sticker? Kucinich, anyone? (I thought he was great in the debate last night!)

Torture

There's no other word for it, is there? The Mukasey appointment, approved yesterday despite the man's refusal to acknowledge the simple truth and with the connivance of a pair of Democrats I had previously admired, is but one more instance of our craven capitulation to the venal abuse of power on the part of Bush and his administration.

How did we get to this point, in America, where we allow ourselves to be led around by the nose by a man who apparently lacks the honesty to acknowledge what is plain to the world? "The United States does not torture," he repeats like some crazed mantra, as though by their repetition the words might somehow be believed. A man of this kind would surely in previous generations have been hounded out of office. Instead, our elected officials seem mesmerized into letting him have his way at every turn, and we are condemned to stand by and watch this cynical dishonoring of the most basic of human standards, the most basic of principles on which this country was founded. We have surrendered ourselves into the hands of men without conscience or consciousness, men who lie and abuse the power with which they were entrusted, men who ignore our will and spit in our eye with impunity.

How did this happen? How does it continue to happen that this man and his crew of bullies and liars work their will in a world that increasingly despises them? I am disgusted. I am disgusted with myself, who continue to sit here and blog, as though that were some significant action in the face of a government--my government--that ignores the plight of the poor, the sick, and the needy not only in our own country but around the world, and instead makes needless war and squanders the country's wealth on those very "weapons of mass destruction" it deplores in the hands of others. How does it happen that the voices of reason and conscience are belittled and ignored?

Enough for now. This morning, I woke with more than my usual share of outrage. What's a Buddhist to do, in such a dire circumstance? Breathe? Await the forces of karma to set things aright? Smile the smile of the Buddha?

You see what I mean?

Free Tibet: The Dalai Lama Gets the Gold

Gotta love that Dalai Lama, right?



That smile, that giggle. That ability, despite obviously vast intellectual and diplomatic power, to maintain an apparent childlike innocence and wonder... That ability to look upon the disasters of the world with equanimity, and to find his happiness where he is.

Still, I could wish he had not chosen to accept his congressional gold medal from a man with so much blood on his hands.



I suppose he had to do it for his country, poor Tibet. But isn't there some rule about a monk accepting gifts of gold? I suppose it's uncharitable of me to be pissed off that Bush should be able to pick up so much in the way of brownie points by inviting His Holiness into his office to spite the Chinese, and use the occasion to lecture them on democracy and the freedom of religion. Very un-Buddhist of me.

And isn't there some rule about monks getting kissed on the cheek?

Ah, well, I'm off to try to practice a little metta.

"The Lives of Others"

This seems to be a week for movie reviews. Last night we rented "The Lives of Others"--a great film, and an uncomfortably timely reminder of the cruelty and the futility of torture in a week when the Burma junta of generals again comes to world attention with their human rights abuses; and on a day (yesterday) when the New York Times headlined the shameful story of Bush's continuing, secret authorization of techniques "to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics" in the course of interrogation.



"The Lives of Others" is the story of a state-sponsored eavesdropper and torturer--not the kind who pulls out toenails and applies electrical shocks to the genitals, but one who gets results by sleep and sustenance deprivation and prolonged, relentless and implacable questioning followed up by threats to the subject's loved ones. The first scene shows that he's very good at what he does. He's on his way up in the Stasi (the former East German secret police) organization. He seems bloodless, pitiless, intent--and deadly fearsome in his impassivity. (A brilliant performance, by the way, by the actor Ulrich Muehe.)

Once it begins, the story involves a famous playwright of conscience and his actress lover--the unfortunate object of lust of a senior state official who orders the exposure of the playwright as a national enemy. Our hero is given the assignment to bug and monitor the apartment that the couple share, and the story is of his gradual awakening to the realization that neither he nor the state have the right to spy on the private "lives of others." Falsifying the reports from his nightly surveillance from a loft above the apartment, he increasingly puts his own career on the line, risking exposure, disgrace, and imprisonment himself.

The plot thickens with the suicide of a despairing friend of the writer in this oppressive regime, and his decision to smuggle an illegal article on the subject to a West German magazine. The events lead to a climax that is at once heart-breaking and, finally, uplifting, as our spy comes to listen to the voice of his own conscience with unintentionally tragic results. Forced by the Stasi to practice his dark art on the actress this lonely man has come, in some strange way, to love, he is confronted decisively with the inner conflict between the path his life has taken and a good, human, even compassionate heart.

The tragedy here is the senselessness of it all, the way in which truth evaporates in the grip of the police state, where torture and compulsion stifle it, wrecking lives along the way. It is shameful, indeed, to think that our own country practices such methods, employing terror in the name of fighting terror. It is shameful to have a President and a Department of Justice who sanction such behavior, in the face of common consensus that it is not only inhuman but that its results are as likely to be false and unreliable. We are not a police state in this country, but we have unforgivably allowed our government to adopt some of the police state's tactics; and to see this gripping movie about a period we have supposedly left behind us, along with the Cold War, is to be reminded, tragically, of what is still being perpetrated in our name.

(Oh, and then I open up my New York Times this morning and find this picture on the front page.



Remind you of anyone?)

Addictions

I was halfway kidding when I entered a comment on Thailandgal yesterday. Chani had mentioned (in her response to my own thoughts about Bush and his cavalier use of language) that she generally avoids involvement with American politics, and my comment included a reference to my "recovery from my earlier blog addiction: The Bush Diaries." As I told her, "I got tired of waking up with [Bush] in bed with me every morning. The Buddha is MUCH better company."

As usual, of course, the casual humor provoked a deeper truth with which I woke this morning: even a positive addiction can enslave us.

Let me explain. I have been noticing some inner turmoil recently that has caused a kind of chronic low-grade sense of dissatisfaction in my life--dare I say, to give it a Buddhist cast--"unhappiness"? You might have picked it up in a number of my entries. This morning I woke with the realization that I have formed a whole new cluster of habits that have started to create that sense of compulsion that is a kind of enslavement of the mind. I have even prided myself on them a bit, dignifying them with the name of "practice." They include the morning meditation, the blog entry, the time for exercise... and so on. All good things, you will agree. But my thought is that I have become attached to them in such a way that their benefits are in danger of congealing into just one more addiction--or should I say another network of addictions? To the extent that the breach of them induces an inner feeling of anxiety, dissatisfaction and--there we go--unhappiness.

Not that I want to lose the benefits of any of these good things. My meditation practice continues to bring me insights and some measure of serenity. Am I demonstrably the better for it? I don't know. I still get mad on the freeways, but I tend to mutter the imprecations rather than yell them out. I still get mad at Bush, and all the terrible things he's doing to our increasingly vulnerable world. I still get mad at other people, for their imagined offenses to my autonomy or dignity! But I am aware of a greater sense of peace pervasive in my life, a greater sense of acceptance... And I do love those moments when the meditation goes so well that I feel in harmony with the universe.

As for the blog, well, you have to know how much I love it. Aside from anything else, it has provided me with the forum for a more satisfying writing practice than I've ever known before. To have the challenge to write every day with the knowledge that what I write will be published, read, in some cases appreciated, and often responded to--this is a writer's dream come true.

And still, and still... there is that insight: even positive addictions such as these can enslave us, and I have--truth, now--been feeling that compulsion, that sense of obligation, that enslavement. And the whole point of Buddhist practice, as I see it, is to gradually free myself from those things that constrain me and control my life, to achieve, yes, happiness. This is the central teaching of the Dalai Lama; this is what he tries so hard to get across to stubborn, materialistic, competitive, goal-oriented Western minds.

So what to do with this realization? I guess, make changes. I plan to find other times to meditate, and other times to blog. I plan to feel less compelled to make that daily entry, to dis-organize my life a bit, and trust that a little bit of chaos, a little bit of not-knowing what's coming next will knock me out of orbit just enough to make the course correction that I need.

That said, well, I did my meditation this morning--but no so early. And (gasp!) in bed. And here I am, writing my entry in The Buddha Diaries. Am I beyond help?

Here's to greater wisdom and blessings in the world!

Kicking Ass

I realize I'm a bit slow in responding to this one, but frankly I was expecting everyone else to. Naive me, I thought there'd be some kind of an outcry when it was widely reported that the man who sits in our Oval Office boasted to the Prime Minister of Australia that the U.S. is "kicking ass" in Iraq.

Now I'm no prude when it comes to language, and "ass" seems to me a relatively inoffensive word anyway. But in this context, it's what it suggests about the attitude of the man who used it that bothers me. On the one hand, it suggests a kind of high school locker room mentality that unhappily no longer shocks with this particular individual. We've heard enough from him to know that his grasp of the subtleties of language is less than one might wish from "the leader of the free world." We've seen enough of his antics to understand that his sense of humor is, well, boyish at best. We have grown used to, if not weary of, his immaturity.

Worse still, though, is the delusional quality of his observation. "Kicking ass," in all its pathetic boastfulness and arrogance, suggests an ease of victory, an ability to impose one's will on others that simply appears absurd in the context of the war in Iraq, where progress--if indeed one concedes such a concept in the first place, has been slow and painful at best. It continues to be slow and painful. Whose ass exactly, I might wonder, are we kicking. The insurgents'? Al-Qaeda's? If so, they show a remarkable resilience to having their ass kicked, since they are still pretty much as virulent as ever. With American troops and Iraqi civilians being killed by the score each day, the concept of our having "kicked ass" in that environment seems wildly off base. Does this man really believe the words he lets so casually slip?

And worst of all, of course, is the fact that he's talking about human lives and limbs. In this context, the casual humor is--sorry, I'm not humorless, but really--inexcusable. What it has to say about the man is deeply troubling, even if it isn't news. The fact that it passes by with barely a ripple of critical response from press or public is a sad commentary on the state to which our society is reduced. (I have not checked the political wing of the Internet yet, but I'm sure that here I might find some of the outrage I'm looking for. Naive me, I just wish that the entire nation would rise up in anger.)

The Buddhist concept of "Right Speech" seems useful to me here. Would that the man who currently poses as our president might have learned a small piece of that wisdom.

The Gonzales Resignation

Okay, friends, my apologies in advance but here I go again. Another rant. Is it very un-Buddhist of me to be so outraged? I don't know. But this is what's coming up for me, so here I go.

I'm not alone, surely, in concluding that the man who sits in our Oval Office--I still can't bring myself to dignify him with the title "President"--suffers from a debilitating and apparently irremediable character flaw: he seems constitutionally (!) unable to accept responsibility for anything. Ever. No matter what the circumstance. Thus, yesterday, in his mendacious remarks on the resignation of the man he had appointed to be this country's chief upholder of the law, he saw fit to blame others for having "dragged his name through the... [significant pause] mud, for political reasons," conveniently passing over his (Gonzalez's) incompetence, his rampant toadyism and his cavalier disregard for the truth; conveniently passing over his (Gonzalez's) role in the infamous torture memo, his willing participation in the abuse of those rights he was appointed to defend in the scurrilously misnamed Patriot Act, his trashing of centuries old human rights in the form of Habeas Corpus, his discreditable memory loss if not outright perjury before Senate and Congressional committees...

No matter all these and other transgressions of the law by the chief law officer of the land, he (Bush,) whose intransigeance has resulted in more bitter and fruitless partisanship than any other politician in living memory, had the gall to stand before the television cameras and impute it to others, in apparent denial or ignorance of his own partisanship and abject failures of judgment. Despicable, in my humble opinion.

This same man lays claim to salvation through religion. My question: does giving oneself to Jesus entail abdication of responsibility for oneself? I would hope not. It does seem, however, to lead certain of its practitioners into the habit of casting guilt and shame on those who do not share their rectitude. Am I guilty of hypocrisy here? My own "religion," such as it is, teaches (not preaches, please!) that our actions have consequences--the very subject of last Saturday's retreat: "dependent co-arising,"If this, then that. Good actions, springing from good intentions, lead to good outcomes. From those actions which prove, through their results, unskillful, we are invited to learn not to repeat them.

Seems like a good and healthy principle to me. It leaves no one to blame for anything that happens but myself. Such a revolutionary idea. I wonder, though, does this religion (Buddhism) deprive me of the right to be critical of those I perceive to be in error? I would hope not. But when I get so angry--as, today, at Bush--does it not behoove me to express that anger? Or does the expression of it result simply in more chaos and confusion in the world? Does my anger reflect the kind of rectitude, on my part, that I so readily attribute to them? A bit of a conundrum here, I think. But I would not wish to be silent in the face of what I see to be harmful unskillfulness on the part of others.

A Colonoscopy; and George the Dog

I see that George Bush got reamed yesterday. His turn. He has been reaming the rest of the world these past few years. They found five polyps up there. Bill Maher expressed surprise, in his comedy act last night, that they didn't find his head--since that, Maher surmised, is where Bush must have been keeping it. Oh, and how about that Cheney, taking the reins of power for more than two hours while Bush was under anesthesia? Scary.

But anyway, it was another George I set out to write about this morning. Our George. George the dog. We took him out for an early walk along the beach. They don't allow dogs on the beach here between the hours of eight a.m. and sunset, from Memorial Day through mid-September. I guess they're afraid the dogs will take over the beaches, drive the tourists off. So if George wants to go to the beach, it has to be early morning. And on a leash. Dogs are never allowed off leash on the beaches here, not matter what time of day or what time of the year. We have seen cops stationed with binoculars on the cliff tops, if you can believe it, scanning the beach for offenders so that they can write them hundred dollar tickets. Who knows why they spend their time this way. Though I suppose one dog off leash could spoil it for the others. One bite...

Anyway, the beach with a ball is George's absolute all-time favorite thing. Unfortunately for him, we have to keep him tethered on a long line when we throw the ball--though sometimes, when things seem quiet and we don't see the glint of binoculars on the cliff top, I'll admit we cheat. We take him down to the far corner of the beach and let him off the leash. He loves that. Absolutely loves it. George is ball crazy. In fact, he's so ball crazy that he gets hysterical already when he see us take the long-line leash down from its hook by the door. He's that smart. And then he drags us all the way down the hill in his desperation. Or, if we drive down, as we sometimes do if the eight o'clock curfew hour is imminent, he drives uscrazy with his hysterical barking when we park the car.

Which is how it was yesterday. But he did have a great time on the beach, and came home sandy, salty, bedraggled, and in need of a bath. He didn't get one yesterday, but this morning... Well, the marine layer of cloud has lifted early and the sun is shining. And our sangha will be sitting later in the day because this is the once-a-month Sunday when our teacher, Than Geoff, comes to join us. That's Thanissaro Bhikku. We're lucky to have such a distinguished teacher on a regular basis, and we value his monthly visits. For a variety of reasons, Ellie and I have missed his sessions. Travel. Needing to stay in town... Today we have no excuses--for George's bath or for Than Geoff. More later... Have a great Sunday.

The Fourth

Happy Fourth everyone! My annual joke is that you guys might have done better to stay with us Brits--but we're working to re-colonize this place. Have you noticed how many British accents you hear these days? We're working underground to re-civilize the barbarians. Not much success so far, I have to say. Ah, well.

I've been thinking a bit more about that "excessive punishment" that Bush commuted yesterday, and frankly it galls me that this rich and powerful white guy should be the beneficiary of presidential sympathy while so many others pine in jail for far lesser offenses. Think only of those many thousands crowding our prisons for minor drug offenses; of those imprisoned for life for pecadillos under the vengeful "three strikes" law; of the president's special prisoners in Guantanamo, deprived even of the right to know the case against them, let alone to challenge their imprisonment. This president is the same man who, as governor of Texas, expressed not the slightest regret or sorrow for signing the execution order for many prisoners, many of them remorseful--like the ill-fated Karla Faye Tucker who died even though, like the man who rejected her plea for clemency, she had "found Jesus." (Read this excellent 2005 article on Governor G.W.Bush's remorseless implementation of the death penalty from The New York Review of Books.)

But when one of his inner circle gets caught in an act of perjury--an act directly connected with a larger action that affected the fate of the entire nation--our Bush suddenly finds mercy in his heart. Aside from the familiar cronyism, the only explanation I can find is that this act of mercy derived from pure self-interest, to protect what's left of the president's own tattered reputation.

I guess the Buddhist view is to practice goodwill--but Buddhism requires it to be practiced even-handedly, across the board, not selectively, for the privileged few. As I've said in the past, the big challenge for me personally is to find goodwill in my heart for those my heart tells me to despise.

Well, there's my squib for the day. Have good one!

Executive Privilege

I don't often allow myself to be drawn into politics these days--not in The Buddha Diaries, at least. I tried to cut the Bush albatross from around my neck when I abandoned The Bush Diaries several months ago. I'd had enough of waking up every morning with this president in my bed. I guess I had grown tired of believing that he could listen to what I or anyone else might say, when all evidence pointed to the contrary. For whatever reason--and I've come to suspect some deep, intransigeant psychological disconnection from reality--the man seems completely isolated in the delusional confines of his own mind, to the lasting cost of the world over which he wields such untoward and harmful influence.

I would have hoped that the latest action of this imperious boy-man--the commutation of the prison sentence of his Vice President's former chief of staff--would prove the final straw. It's evidence of a complete contempt for the judicial system and a clear belief that the law applies to everyone except to himself and those he has elevated into his administrative circles. I understand that the action is within his legal authority as president, but it is also breathtakingly arrogant in its dismissal of the judgments of various courts and juries in favor of his own opinion that the sentence is "excessive."

Excessive? For a man who took it upon himself--presumably under orders from his boss, the Vice President of the United States; and from his boss's boss, the President--to reveal the identity of an American undercover intelligence agent as an act of petty revenge against her husband? For a man who lied under oath--presumably to spare his boss, and his boss's boss, the embarrassment of public exposure for the lies they used to lead this country into a wholly unjustified war, at the needless and inestimable cost of human life?

Was there, as I'm sure I'm not alone in suspecting, a bargain from the start? That this Libby would take the fall for his superiors with the understanding that he would be spared the consequences? The president's pretense that a quarter million dollar fine still constitutes "harsh punishment" is rendered absurd by the knowledge that a quarter million dollars is no more than a flea bite for the wealthy backers of this administration who will rush to Libby's aid; and the notion that his career has been somehow irreparably damaged is equally laughable. I imagine that future joblessness is the least of his fears, with friends like Cheney's Halliburton, to name but a single obvious example. No, Libby will not want for gainful employment in the future.

When, finally, is enough enough? When will this country awake to the damage that has been done to its reputation in the world, its military forces, its financial security, its judicial system, the health and welfare of its people--to the very Constitution of which it is so inordinately proud. When will we all recognize that the democracy we blithely preach to others has been subverted in our own country under our very eyes. Democracy, indeed! Under the apparently hypnotic sway of a petty autocrat and his team of hatchet men and sycophants? It seems to me that we sacrificed democracy some time ago on the altar of complacency.

So the question now is whether this tight ball of secrecy that has concealed every preremtory and perhaps even illegal act of this administration will finally begin to unravel. Will those senators and congress people we have elected to represent us finally find the guts to listen to their conscience rather than what they imagine to be political contingency?

I'm afraid I doubt it. We're too far gone down the road of apathy and willful ignorance. I hope I'm wrong. Because it seems to me that we must now ALL take some action to retrieve our national identity and our national honor. We are ALL required to play at least a small part in the recovery of democracy, if it is to be saved from the ideologues who have have seized it from us. This little piece, put out to the world, is a part of my part. I'm also planning to make my voice heard to the White House, as well as to my representatives in Congress.

Changes

Perhaps spurred by the thought that I'll be back in the United States tomorrow, I checked in to the New York Times today for the first time in three weeks. It seems that virtually nothing has changed in the important things--things like war and peace--except that relations with Russia have deteriorated since we left. Do we blame Putin, for his insistence on making a grab for the power that his country and its satellites once wielded in the world: or Bush, for his arrogant bellicosity? Does it matter who deserves the blame? The world, it seems, is still in the deathly grip of men who are incapable of change, and for whom the old--and by now widely discredited--models of power, territoriality and ownership are still the governing principles.

I note from Bob Herbert's column that Al Gore has a new book out, attacking the Bush administration's assault on reason in favor of an extreme and misguided ideology. Good for him. Gore, I mean. As Herbert is at pains to point out, the world would look very different today if the man who won the most votes in the 2000 presidential elections had actually moved into the White House. With regard to running again this year, Gore tells Herbert that he now realizes that he's "not a very good politician." Just what we need, in my view. I wish he'd heed the many voices begging him to run. He's the most fully qualified, the most visionary, and the least compromising of the lot.

All this from Harpenden, Herts., UK, where I sit looking at my adoptive country from a useful distance. It has been good, honestly, to be away. It has felt like there is still some sanity in the world, though perhaps not much. There are many huge changes that we must make, if we're all to survive the results of our own base impulses.