FUNK

 I woke this Monday morning in a horrible blue funk, dreaming of fire lines approaching a city with a mayor who could or would do nothing, and images of a patio covered with fresh dog shit that no one had picked up. Sound familiar? The profound depression in my mind was matched by a body in pain everywhere, mostly (age-related!) aches in every joint, and muscles that felt depleted of all physical strength. 

Not a good way to wake up!

Meditation was a challenge, with words darting everywhere in my head--words trying to describe what it was I was feeling as I sat. Well, "writing." It's my mind's way of dealing with what's troubling it. Namely...

... a country in chaos, with one political party mindlessly obstructing every effort of the other to reach out and help the millions of Americans who are out of work, hungry and, too many of them, sick and dying; with a leader coming in from the golf course to issue senseless and unhelpful executive orders in an attempt to project the impression of powerful action; a leader who so badly needs adulation that he calls in dozens of his hundreds-of-dollar annual fee golf club members to applaud him loudly at a "press conference..."

... a country riven by discord, mutual hatred and mistrust, one-third of them fed on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour diet of misinformation and outright lies, and driven by a hateful fear of the invented specter of "liberals" and "socialism..."

... and a personal sense of dislocation and disorientation: what am I even doing here, in this, my adopted country, that now feels so alien? Where do I belong...? 

I breathe in, I breathe out. That's one saving grace. The other is more mundane: it is that I have enough "English" left in me to get up from my chair and head off to the kitchen to brew up the solace of a morning cup of tea.

How (Not) to Succeed in Business

The spectacle of those automobile CEOs arriving in Washington on their corporate jets and heading into town in their limousines in order to hold out the tin can at those congressional hearings offered a remarkable insight into the other-planetary thinking of the very wealthy and the very powerful, and their separation from the reality that most Americans are faced with. Were these men incapable of imagining how this might look? Clearly, given the trouble their companies are in, their minds reach no further into the future than the next bottom line--but why make it so obvious? Why play so mindlessly into the most cliche'd impression of who they are?

Which had me thinking about corporate America--from the ethical as well as the practical point of view. Is it greed, as I suppose, that makes them so incompetent? That makes them... well, so devious, not to say dishonest?

Here's my own experience, yesterday, opening up just a couple of the monthly bills. Take American Express (please!, as the vaudeville comedian used to say about his wife.) I found two charges, totaling one hundred and seventy-two dollars and six cents, one for a golf club membership (ME!) and the other for something generically titled "Elite Traveler." I called. The operators were very polite. The charges were canceled. It turns out that in returning one of the company's "Million Dollar Sweepstakes" promotional deals, I had unwittingly signed up for these two unwanted "benefits." Okay. My greed. I had stupid visions of an easy million coming my way. I did not read the fine print. Mea culpa. I succumbed to the come-on. Still, it seems to me that the company had knowingly attempted to trade on my laziness, and that I had been tricked.

Then the Verizon telephone bill. My fault again. I have been paying thirty dollars a month for a totally unneeded feature, which I had been given "free for a month" when we bought the telephone. The catch was, we were supposed to call at the end of the month and cancel this useless freebie, or keep on paying, as I had been for months on end, for something that was of absolutely no value. At least the company gave me credit for the past month, but I still feel conned out of several hundreds of dollars.

Okay, call me an easy mark. I should have picked up on this long ago. I didn't. But am I alone in thinking that I was somehow cheated?

And then there was AT&T, also yesterday. (It seems to have been my day of encounter with corporate America.) My business with this company was finally concluded yesterday, after a month of Kafkan miscommunications, nightmare marathon sessions with digital menus and telephone operators, and repeated delays. It was a month ago, with the intention of coordinating the communications systems in my house--telephone, television, computers--that I rashly responded to an AT&T come-on offering a system that seemed to mesh perfectly with my needs, at less cost than my previous mis-matched assortment of servers.

Talk about ineptitude! The first delay (a week) was my own: I was out of town. On my return, I duly received a visit from an AT&T technician, who was to install my system for me. Hurrah! He poked around the house and finally decided that he was unable to install it because there was a "split" between two lines somewhere under the house or behind a drywall. I needed a "direct line" from the box where the outside line reached the corner of the house to a telephone jack beside my desk. Okay. A disappointment, but...

I called the company--in fact, I think it was the technician who called the company, because I did not have the necessary language skills to communicate what was needed--and arranged for a different kind of technician, the jack-installing kind, to come as soon as possible to fit me up. A few days went by. A technician arrived, unannounced, on my doorstep, I assumed to install the jack. He poked around the house for a while, and announced the the first guy "didn't know what he was talking about"--that the jack was simply unnecessary. More calls. More confusion. More apologies.

Then, early this week, another AT&T tech arrived. This one, to my surprise, had been dispatched to install the very same jack the last guy had decided was not needed. We spent half the morning trying to sort things out, with calls to various supervisors and dispatchers. No one knew what had happened, or why. I told this latest guy to install the jack anyway, to remove all possible doubt--a feat that he managed with skill and much appreciated concern for the interior and exterior of our house. I spoke with some ire to several good people at the other end of the AT&T telephone office, and insisted that the problem be resolved without further delay.

All of which produced, finally, another technician, who arrived yesterday and managed to successfully install the system.

A saga, then. You would think that a major corporation like AT&T would be able to make good on its offer with a certain promptitude. But no. Ineptitude all around. One thing I'll say for AT&T, however. Everyone has been exceptionally nice, from the telephone operators to the technicians who made the house calls. Nice, and eager to please the customer. Every time I called to complain, the apology was accompanied by a little adjustment here, a little adjustment there... Very nice. But inept.

One day in the life, then. Small stuff, perhaps, and personal. But the accumulation of these little symptoms may betray a major systemic disease. If the business of America is business, as President Calvin Coolidge said, I fear that our sickness is only just now beginning to incubate. My quick online search tells me that Coolidge added words less frequently quoted: "A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business"--a thought with which I absolutely concur. If simple ethics and efficiency are sacrificed to the gods of profit, it seems to me, the very foundations of business are gone. It's hardly a surprise to see those corporate houses collapse.

I'd be interested to hear your stories...

As American...

... as apple pie?

Ellie and I watched the Obama interview on Sixty Minutes on Sunday evening with enormous pleasure. What a thrill to have as a President-elect a man who speaks in whole sentences on every issue put before him, who has clear and well-enunciated thoughts, a serviceable and readily accessible grasp of history—and a sense of humor to boot. What a delight to have as a prospective First Lady (I’ve always kind of disliked that title) a woman who is so evidently smart and well-informed, dedicated to her family, and supportive of the man who will be President. It seems like a long time we have waited for such people in our White House. Apple pie, at last!

Did I mention last week about being asked if I was “proud to be an American”? I answered, No, out of principle, because I have seen in my time on Earth what the nationalistic spirit can lead to, and because I believe with Samuel Johnson that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But just as I can be proud of something I have done rather than of who I am, I can be proud of what America has achieved; and in this instance it has achieved something truly praiseworthy and remarkable.

Alas, not everything American is apple pie. I also watched, later in the evening, a couple of episodes of the Ken Burns-produced documentary, The West, and was confronted with the dark side of the American experience in the wanton slaughter of the buffalo and the government-sponsored decimation of the Native American tribes with a litany of broken treaties, betrayals, and promises unkept—all in the spirit of expansionism and the accumulation of excessive wealth. I could not help but wonder, by the end, whether I was not witnessing some unsavory part of the American character that persists to this day: is it not the same greed that caused the senseless mass killing of animals for the sake of the money their dead bodies represent, and the senseless pursuit of superfluous wealth in the financial world today? Am I being unkind? Unpatriotic? Am I speaking of basic human characteristics, not peculiarly American ones? But then I think of the hapless Indians, who had lived on their lands for centuries, taking from it only what they needed for survival…

I know that I risk seeming down on America, but it’s one of my fundamental and recurring arguments that we must know who we are, as a people, if we are to move forward into a viable future for ourselves and those with whom we share the planet. We have, to put it bluntly, a tendency to indulge rather easily in self-congratulation about ourselves and our country, and to skip the important critical part which leads to the kind of clarity we need if we are to make our contribution to the world. If we fail to acknowledge the truth of our materialism, our insatiable desire for MORE, our willingness to promote our own interests above those of our neighbors, our too easily-aroused instinct to resolve delicate issues with aggression, our role as the world's 900-pound gorilla will be undiminished and I fear for the outcome...

But then, of course, we elect an Obama, which leads me to hope that, this time, we have truly listened to our better angels. Good for us!

OBAMA!

Well, he did it! We did it. They did, Obama's extraordinary campaign staff and millions of those who, like my daughter, were inspired to work their hearts out to assure that stunning victory last night. Our neighborhood down here in Laguna Beach, in the heart of conservative Orange County, California, exploded at eight o'clock when the election was called by the chattering media. The sight of the Obama family on stage at the time of the acceptance speech was stirring beyond words. Most moving, perhaps, was the face of Jesse Jackson, tears streaming down, recalling all those years it took to make this happen.

The media commentary this morning--as did the gracious Bush speech outside the White House--made story of Obama's victory to be about race, extolling the fact that a black American could win the presidency and the proof it offered that America is the place of unlimited opportunity. While this is true, I think the historical shift if greater and more important than this interpretation allows. The paradigm shift has more to do with the evidence it offers of a deep cultural tectonic event; it's a repudiation of that mean side of the American character that has been manifest these past thirty years and more, the smallness that has promoted the whole me-first mentality that was reflected first, in my opinion, in the so-called tax revolt of the 1970s. It's a repudiation of Ronald Reagan as much as George W. Bush, of the trickle-down theory of economics that made a travesty of the American notion of fairness and opportunity. It's a repudiation of the politics of division that has pitted Republican against Democrat, right against left, liberal against conservative. It's Barack Obama's appeal that he has insisted throughout on transcending these divisions.

The much-touted change is only partly about these things. But the relief that was tangible in the air last night was not just an American relief. You could almost feel the entire world taking a new breath. Obama's election is also about the realization that America must now take its place again in the community of nations, and that the world at large has much at stake in America's change of heart. I have heard it said that voting for the American President should not be restricted to Americans, since the choice affects the lives of people everywhere. There's truth to that. The world has become so small, so "flat"--to use NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman's term, that we can no longer hope to survive as a species if we cling to our old notion of a collection of competitive nation states. As a man whose very humanity is a complex blend of national and racial identity, Obama has the look of a person who transcends the old categories we must now discard.

I am convinced that the new President will make good on his promise to reach across the ideological divides. I hope that he will find a source of support in the new "old McCain" who made a reappearance last night in his gracious concession speech--a man of generosity and courage and dedication. I fully expect to see and hear more from him. I trust that the same is NOT true of the biggest mistake he made in the course of his campaign, the mistake that undermined the trust he had worked so hard to build in the American electorate. I refer, of course, to the Governor of Alaska, whose hysterical and pusillanimous campaign rhetoric did so much to discredit the ideology for which she stood.

Needless to say, we in this household are overjoyed to enjoy the prospect of a President Obama, and are prepared to do what we many need to do and make the sacrifices we may be called on to make in order to out this country back on track to fulfill its promise to itself and to the world.

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.

Infant Mortality: A National Scandal

Okay, good. The debates are over. Obama won all three, no question. He won with poise, grace, calm, compassion, and an easily accessible resource of knowledge and understanding. He has done an incredible job thus far, with a finely calibrated campaign and a personal commitment that have never wavered. Now it's our turn. He won the debates. We need to see to it that he wins the election...

Speaking of compassion, I wonder if Governor Sarah Palin, that ardent defender of the rights of the unborn, and self-annointed supermom, took note of this report in yesterday's Washington Post about the infant mortality rate in the United States. This country, which she touts constantly as "the greatest in the world," is clearly not the greatest when it comes to giving birth to its babies. This most powerful and wealthiest country in the history of the world today ranks 29th among all nations in its record on infant mortality. 29th! In 2000, we ranked 27th. In 1960, 12th.

You'd think the governor would be out there shouting from the rooftops about this scandalous state of affairs. Well, no. So far as I know, not a peep. I suppose you could argue--albeit somewhat cynically--that abortion is a conscious choice, and therefore sinful, according to a particular religious belief; and that infant mortality, on the other hand, is no more than an unfortunate accident of nature. I myself would argue, though, that given the advanced state of our medical knowledge and the technology at our disposal, infant mortality is also a choice we make, as a society. In failing to provide our citizens with the health care they deserve--whether pre- or post-natal, or at the moment of birth--we are in fact choosing, I suspect in the large majority of cases, to allow those babies to die.

What moral universe do we live in, that we permit ourselves to make these scurrilous distinctions? How easy for the Governor to pick up on this report and make it an issue in her campaign! How great a service to her country and its people! I'm not holding my breath, however, for to draw attention to the problem would be to admit that, in this area at least, we are far from great; and that, to address it, we would need to make some serious improvements in our health care system and--I'm guessing here that, as with most other problems of this nature, it's the poor who bear the brunt of it--in making care available to the poor as well as to the wealthy.

So how about it, Governor? You'd pick up a pinch of much needed respect from voters if you were to champion such a cause, instead of simply bloviating about our supposed greatness. Drop the hot air. Talk about something that shows you really care.

Contraception

(But... before we start, I loved this picture on the front page of the NY Times:




It's actually the detail of a larger image, which features the "brain cells of a laboratory mouse glowing with multicolor fluorescent proteins." And I thought it was a painting!)

NOW...

I have been thinking about contraception since reading the Nicholas Kristof op-ed piece, also in yesterday's New York Times. It's a disgrace that our current administration, driven by its sadly literal-minded "pro-life" ideology, "is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa." "Thus," Kristof continues, "the paradox of a 'pro-life' administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth."

The moral issue, I agree with Kristof, is less to do with preventing birth than with causing death--and incidentally promoting the spread of disease and the persistence of poverty. Birth control, clearly, precedes conception, and therefore sidesteps all arguments about when human life begins--unless there are those who want to argue that it begins at the moment of that gleam in the eye that precedes the sexual act. Given the absurd notions of creationists, I suppose that those people might exist, but to allow them into this argument is to give them too much credit.

What are the objections, I wonder, to contraception? That it frustrates the laws of nature--and thus, perhaps, of God? That it encourages promiscuity? I'd hazard a guess that our consumer society, presumably with the blessing of our free market conservatives, does much more to promote sex among the young--and the not-so-young!--than the availability of condoms. And the teaching of abstinence in our own schools, here at home, has done little to prevent the advance of teenage pregnancy, so far as I can tell. The morally righteous folk who so fervently preach abstinence--think no further than the Governor of Alaska--look more than slightly foolish in the context of a world in which their fine advice and proscriptions are routinely ignored by the young.

And that's here at home. Who are we to be preaching the fringe values of the more repressive of our own religious fanatics to the poor in other countries? Who are we, indeed, to impose them by administrative fiat on countries where hunger, disease and poverty are rampant, and where population growth threatens the fabric and stability of whole nations--while their inhabitants themselves are asking for nothing better than education and material support to back it up?

(This is another excellent reason, by the way, to support Barack Obama, who opposes the Bush policies in this matter. John McCain has consistently supported them, and is even shockingly indifferent to the suffering they cause. Kristof writes, "when a reporter asked [McCain] this spring whether American aid should finance contraceptives to fight AIDS in Africa, he initially said, 'I haven’t thought about it,' and later added, 'You’ve stumped me.'” Really?

Since the actions of the Bush administration are based primarily in religious convictions, I spent some time yesterday searching through Buddhist sites to ascertain what teachings on the subject are available. They are sparse, and such as they are they dovetail neatly with broader teachings on sex: the central principle, for lay people at least, is not to abstain from sexual activity but to do no harm--either to oneself or others. The teachings call for skillfulness and awareness of consequences, not for abstention. Thus, "Contraception is accepted by Buddhists. According to Buddhist tenets, the life cycle of a sentient being begins when consciousness enters the womb, and traditionally this has been considered the moment of conception. Therefore, there is no objection to contraception which prevents conception without damaging sentient life."

This, like most Buddhist teachings, is profoundly sensible, compassionate toward humanity and its foibles, and practicable without harm. How very different from Christian teachings, ranging from Vatican Catholicism to Protestant Fundamentalism, whose harm in this regard is widespread and, in view of the rapidly expanding population of the planet, even potentially catastrophic! And how much more realistic and humane. Once more, I find good reason to go with the Buddha...

The Many To the Few...

Our friend Nancy is an artist, who heads out from Los Angeles to the country each week for a sheep-herding lesson for her border collie, Jasper. This past weekend, she had him entered in a sheepdog trial--entry-level, as I understood, for the beginners--and was happy to report that he did well in his class. That means, of course, that she did well. Only one snag, she told us: at one point, just as the sheep were about to be herded into the pen, one of her ovine charges decided it was time to lie down and play possum. A moment's panic. All the rest of the flock were behaving according to plan, how to deal with this one recalcitrant beast? It could be a disaster, to have the dog go back to fetch the one and lose the rest of them.

"And then," said Nancy, "I kept hearing my teacher's voice saying, 'The many to the few. The many to the few...'" So that was the solution, to have Jasper bring the whole flock back to surround the one exceptionalist--who then stood up and went along meekly with the gang.

And as she told the story, I could not help but think how relevant it was to our political situation. With those hold-out independents lying there stubbornly in the grass, better for the all rest of us to go back there and work on them through a process of inclusion than to whistle and beckon them impatiently from afar, with the demand that they catch up with us.

Does that work? I thought it was a nice metaphor anyway. Or at least a very nice story.

Bring On the Clowns

I have heard it argued that the clown is the closest we can come to a tragic hero in the modern world, and that farce is as close as we can come to tragedy. In a world inhabited by supreme beings whose omnipresence gave human beings a sense of order and necessity, in other words a rational context for the evidence of disorder everywhere in our lives, the human experience could be explained in the form of tragedy: the murder and mayhem we see everywhere is the expression of the will of the gods, or of God, who can prove our judge as well as our redeemer.

In a world abandoned by the gods—they/he/she left us, remember, with the arrival of the Age of Reason?—such experiences no longer have a “rational” context and appear absurd, accidental, either meaningless or with meanings that remain forever obscured in our limited understanding of the workings of the universe. This is the world of the clown, where chaos and nightmare take the form of punishing events—the exploding taxicab, the brickbat over the head—to which we can respond only with the laugh with which we disguise the inner terror. (I realize that the vast majority of Americans will tell the pollster who asks them that they believe in “God.” I happen to believe—excuse my skepticism—that this is desperation rather than true belief.

These thoughts occasioned by a particularly privileged visit, yesterday afternoon, with the great writer and director, Blake Edwards, whose movies—notably the Pink Panther series, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “10,” “S.O.B.”—are classics in anybody’s history of contemporary film. The heroes of Edwards’s movies are often clowns—Inspector Clouseau, of course, is the prime example—whose “tragedy” is found in the fact that they are desperately, futilely trying to make sense of the senselessness around them, to find order in the chaos. We laugh at them out of the knowledge that they are ourselves, and that their frantic actions succeed only in producing more unintended consequences, mor chaos in their lives. We live on the edge of insanity.

Blake Edwards is also an artist, and his artwork was the reason for my visit with him. But our talk seemed especially appropriate in the light of the current political campaign, with all its brickbats and pratfalls, its increasing absurdity, its nightmare implications. Here we are, stuck in the middle of it, disbelieving, trapped… Hasn't this become a Punch and Judy show. Here's Punch, (90% Bush) in a clever image artfully created by a new friend, Water Kerner at lati2d.com ("Latitude," that is)...



As for Judy, the head-basher... well, I'll leave that one to your imagination.

The Lewes Pound

Not, that's not the dog pound. It's the pound sterling. Or something approaching it. Thailand Chani raised an interesting question yesterday in her blog: Does anyone think capitalism is a good thing? I have been wondering the same myself, and it's a good question in view of the economic chaos in which we now find ourselves. The domino-style collapse of major American financial institutions is evidence enough that capitalism is not the invulnerable fortress it was supposed to be.

If capitalism is in crisis, it has been ailing for some time, though the symptoms have been well hidden from general public view. Not a hard trick, perhaps, in a country that appeared to be thriving so well on the system for so many years and became--for the blink of an eye, at least, in the long history of the planet--the top dog in the financial world. But it's pretty clear by now that this situation can't last for very much longer. Capitalism--with the help of more than a little slave labor, let's not forget--produced this country's wealth. Today, under the capitalist system, that wealth is slipping more and more from the hands of the average citizen and into the hands of the corporations and their wealthy beneficiaries. I don't believe it's a "good thing" for the vast majority of people.

By the same token, though, socialism has also showed its weaknesses. I was brought up in the belief that socialism would best serve the interests of the underprivileged and the needy, but it has not worked out the way many hoped it might. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire is evidence enough that this alternative--and rival--to capitalism has also run its course.

I'm thinking more and more small. I was intrigued to hear a report on the BBC World News about the Lewes pound: the little town of Lewes in Sussex, in the south of England, recently took to printing its own money, for use exclusively in its own community, with the idea of stimulating the local economy and keeping the money made and spent by its citizens within the general confines of the town. It might seem a step backward, in a globalized world. But it could also be seen as a step forward, into a future where tight communities become more and more self-sustaining, and self-regulating. Where democracy can be practiced on an intimate scale more successfully than by countries engaged in internecine competition and conflict.

Naive? Perhaps. According to the BBC report, the desired result of keeping local money in circulation locally has been foiled, thus far, because people are buying the Lewes notes and hoarding them for souvenirs or selling them on Ebay. The whole thing reminds me a little of a Peter Sellers movie (remember "The Mouse That Roared"?) But still a nobly eccentric British experiment, and one that stimulates further thought about the twentieth century financial systems that have so badly failed us, and that are so urgently in need of adaptation to the needs of a changing and ever-growing population of the human species.

I know I'm not alone in believing that the current century will have to see the evolution of a whole new way of thinking about money, the use of resources, and the provision of life's essentials to vast new numbers of human dwellers on this planet. I personally lack the economic prescience to imagine what this new way will look like, but our post-industrial systems have clearly failed to provide the matrix for a safe and humane future for our species. We will need to to do much better than this if we are to survive.

Bias: Andrea Mitchell (et al)

I have a bone to pick this morning with Andrea Mitchell. I have been meaning to pick it with her for some time, but this morning her reporting on the impact of the financial crisis on the political campaign was so blatantly biased that I cannot let it pass without comment. I get that NBC promotes Mitchell as the exemplar of the impartial observer--and must assume, therefore, that the network shares her bias. So here's my beef: in reporting on the two presidential candidates and their statements in response to yesterday's events on Wall Street, Mitchell saw fit to introduce AND conclude her commentary with a snide reference to a long-scheduled Obama fundraiser to be hosted tonight in Hollywood by Barbra Streisand. The unavoidable and clearly not accidental inference of this way of bracketing her story is that Obama is not only an effete snob, but a hypocritical and money-grubbing effete snob, more interested in hobnobbing with the rich and famous than with the problems of the national economy.

I know that there's much ink spilled, from left and right, about the bias of the media. The right have made a great point of being the victims of supposed liberal bias. It's my own belief that the corporate-controlled media have the interests of their corporate controllers at heart. And while I don't wish to get personal about this, I wonder whether it's really appropriate to give so much public air time for commentary/reporting (the difference is blurred, these days) on matters of vital public financial interest to the wife of the man who promoted and enabled the policies that many believe were responsible for the current disaster.

It was a day that, in the opinion of many experts, was the worst for the American economy since the Great Depression, and we heard from the Republican contender for the Oval Office nothing more than a repetition that old Bush mantra that the "fundamentals" of the economy are strong. Worse, when his Democratic opponent presumed to disagree with this view, John McCain quickly claimed--in a mendacious pander to the blue collar vote--that by "fundamentals" what he really meant was the American worker, and that Obama, in disagreeing, was once again insulting hardworking patriots.

What a farce. Another mind-boggling "how can he possibly get away with it?" day. With long-established financial institutions crumbling and thousands losing their jobs, with the Dow average capsizing with a loss of more than 500 points, with the federal government having stepped in with taxpayer money to rescue giant corporations whose greed the Republican government itself enabled with decades of deregulation, the fundamentals are sound? Well, no. Not from my point of view. Like many others, I now live on a fixed income, and it's distressing to watch my nest-egg terribly depleted. But I'm fortunate. Others have lost jobs and homes, lack health care for themselves and their families, and can barely afford the essentials. Sorry. There's something "fundamental"-ly wrong with a system that places so many at extreme risk while it rewards others with fabulous--and fabulously unearned--wealth. There's something wrong with a system that extols the "free market" and then uses taxpayer money to bail out those who have abused this freedom with a mixture of incompetence and sheer greed.

And the rich continue to thrive. How else to explain, on the evening of this day of world-wide economic collapse, a Sotheby's sale in London where a single artist--Damien Hirst, an entrepreneur par excellence--walks off with a haul of $127 million (on just the first of a two-day sale; and was that dollars, or pounds?) in profit from the sale his incredibly high-priced baubles. Talk about bulls and sharks! Hirst's bull (with gold-plated hooves) sold for a reported $18 million; his shark in formaldehyde (the small version!) for $17 million. The mind reels. I'm still trying to understand what this has to say about the free market and the world economy, but I'm sure that it's not healthy.

And speaking of art, is it not quite strange and weirdly appropriate to read that Jeff Koons, that other immensely successful art entrepreneur, is exhibiting his (incredibly high-priced) baubles of gaudy kitsch at the Palace of Versailles, the over-the-top home of the monarch who presided over the demise of the last great Western socio-economic model to bite the dust? There's an irony here that's hard to miss. Unhappily, though, today's corporate "royalty" are walking away with both their heads and their piles of cash intact.

So you can see why I'd be mad at Andrea Mitchell today. She, it seems to me, is a part of both the financial establishment that gave us deregulation, unbridled greed, and the belief--passed down to the populace, but without the wealth to back it up--that growth and credit have no limits; and the media establishment that is supposed to provide that fourth estate check on power. How then can she pretend to be impartial, and cast a truly critical eye on those with whom she associates, and those who provide her bread and butter?

If I pick on Andrea Mitchell, let me hesitate to add, it is not out of any personal animosity. It is rather because she represents, in my view, not only a network but an industry--and industry that has a vested interest in preserving the conservative status quo. With reporters like these, Obama has a tough road ahead, to cut through the incessant, self-protective crap of the corporate-dominated media and their 24-hour news cycles, and to open the eyes of the American electorate to the simple truth of their exploitation and abuse.

Service, and More...

(Before I begin, as a courtesy to a friend, here's his birthday tribute to Les Paul--a musician and endlessly inventive tinkerer whose work I have always admired...)

Now, did anyone catch the Palin interview last night? I'd be interested to hear. I was out, but I doubt that I could have brought myself to watch it anyway. Was she questioned about the lies she has been repeating about herself with apparent impunity on the campaign trail? Thanks by the way, to Paul Krugman for a powerful column on this subject in today's New York Times. In case you missed it, here's his conclusion:

how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Well put, indeed. But I still like to hear impressions of that interview.

Much more important, of course, was the Forum on Service following the two candidates' visits to the World Trade Center site--an event that I recorded, to play back on my return home later in the evening. The two men were interviewed separately, but in depth, with serious questions that were for the most part seriously answered. Citizen McCain (he of the seven mansions) went first by toss of the coin, and spoke honorably, with evident sincerity, about the value of service to one's country and those who share both our neighborhoods and our planet. He seemed to me, however, to epitomize precisely what he has used to often to castigate his opponent: rhetorical eloquence with very little in the way of substantial proposals to back it up. Obama, on the other hand, spoke not only with his customary, inspirational eloquence of the big picture, the honor and the rewards of service, but also with the detail of practical--and practicable--programs to encourage Americans to serve. You know, substantial stuff.

Speaking of service, I mentioned earlier that I was out yesterday evening. Ellie and I went downtown with a friend to the opening of an exhibition of art by the homeless on Los Angeles's Skid Row, and the premiere of a related documentary movie. It's the dedication of another friend of ours, the artist Lillian Abel, that brought this about. For years, she has been championing the creative potential of those who have fallen on hard times--some as a result of psychological disorders, some by reason of financial catastrophe--and find themselves "on the streets." She does not "teach," she insists, but she does create space, both physical and mental, where a joyful creativity can blossom in the heart of human misery.

The results are truly remarkable. We're a rather snobby lot, truth be told, in the world of "contemporary art," and we tend to look down our noses at the work of those we consider to be more amateurish than ourselves. But look at these paintings by unschooled artists, and you'll find an outpouring not just of emotional depth but also of real, raw talent. I'd show you pictures, if only I hadn't forgotten (wouldn't you know?) to take the digital camera with me, and there was no brochure I could see to bring away as a reminder of the names of the artists and their work. They'll remain here, reprehensibly, nameless. But each one of them had something remarkable to offer, something of their own vision and humanity. Both the movie and the exhibit were extraordinary reminders of the human treasure that society casually brushes aside in its precipitous rush for wealth and progress. Thanks, Lillian, for this truly remarkable and selfless work. This service.

What a scene in downtown Los Angeles! It was the night of the monthly Thursday art walk, and the streets were literally teeming with mostly young people around the area that has seen new galleries and exhibition spaces popping up on the ground floors--and second floors--of buildings that are still under redevelopment. I have never seen such crowds, such liveliness, such obvious engagement and enthusiasm on streets that have traditionally emptied themselves of all but the destitute after dark. Here were artists, street musicians, performers, a bedlam of creative energy that was quite exhilerating to experience and gave hope that our species might yet devise ways to survive its current phase of insatiable greed and insanity. I just hope that it's powerful enough to resist the encroachment of those developers, with their condos and their luxury office suites, their boutique storefronts and trendy restaurants, their warehouses converted into high-rent lofts...

Education

Did I suggest, yesterday, that I was already ready to jump ship? Not quite so fast. I'm still holding on to the railing as I put my hope--my last hope, really--in the November election. I watched the Obama speech on education at a Virginia high school this morning, and it renewed my faith that this is indeed a man of intellect, understanding, and commitment.

But first, I have been hearing a lot about the passion issue in the past few days. Is Obama running out of steam? Does he seem listless? Is he less forthright, less powerful in intention? Has he said "Enough!" enough? The Tom Friedman opinion piece on the op-ed page of today's New York Times suggested that he is losing/has lost that gut connection with the American voters--and that, no matter her lack of qualifications or preparedness, the Republican nominee for the vice-presidential spot has managed to seize it. I like to believe--I'm hoping--that he knows how to pace himself. A continuous high level of passion is not only hard to maintain, it gets to be irritating, even counter-productive. Palin's high pitch (I'm speaking of intensity, not her voice: would I presume to use the word "shrill"?) is already proving tiresome. I'm confident that Obama will know the right time to switch it on again.

He did say "Enough!" in his speech on education. Twice, in fact. He was referring, in his preamble, to the amount of ink that has been spilled and airspace filled with the absurd brouhaha over his use of that common political speech cliche about "putting lipstick on a pig." It was seized on, of course, in the context of Palin's use of the word "lipstick" in her acceptance speech when, to her audience's delight, she compared herself favorably to a pit bull. When Obama uses it, of course, it's taken as a slur on her feminine virtue. There are bigger issues in this election, he pointed out with quiet clarity, than the trivialities that the Republicans grab on to and the media feed into their twenty-four hour a day hoppers of scandal and irrelevance.

Education, then. Have I mentioned my conspiracy theory in these pages before? I may have done. I've been nursing it ever since Hillary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" remark which provoked such mirth in the world of politics. I thought then, and still think she was not far off target: for the past fifty years, the right wing has been responsible for the slow throttling and eventual near-demise of America's once-great education system--not merely by starving it, increasingly, of adequate funding for its survival and treating those who practice it with little more than condescension, but by poisoning it at the very roots with a contempt for science and rational thought in general. By "dumbing down" the populace and robbing them of the last vestiges of critical thought by starving them of real education, they have assured themselves virtual control over the direction of the country. The now vacant minds of the public wait eagerly to be filled with whatever lies it takes to sell the product--whether hair spray, giant SUVs, or politician. Uneducated, these minds have no means to resist what is fed into them. They have no language skills to distinguish truth from lies, no mathematical skills to measure their own impoverishment at the hands of those who grow rich. They drink in the toxins of Rush Limbuagh and his ilk in the belief that such people are speaking in their interests. We have reached the travesty of civilization that George Orwell predicted, though in much more subtle and noxious ways than he predicted it.

With such power over minds, it is not hard to persuade a certain part of the voting public that Obama is nothing but hot air and that McCain and his cohort are blessed with infinite wisdom. Obama's speech this morning, for those who took the trouble to listen to it with an open mind, cannot fail to have inspired confidence in his commitment to the improvement of education and opportunity for America's young and his thoughtful, practical and practicable plans to achieve those goals. It's simple, really: if America is to compete with countries like India and China in a globalized economy, education and knowledge are the indispensible tools. If we are to meet such pressing challenges as those presented by climate change, we must educate minds to think in innovative ways.

I have yet to hear substantive plans from the McCain camp on this issue. The politics of resentment and victimhood is not enough. It appals me to be told, by McCain's top campaign advisor, that "This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." That's not even good English, but it's clear what it means. In this campaign, lipstick trumps education any day of the week.

Stealing America

My friend Bill forwarded this link to the website of Stealing America, a movie about electronic voting and its susceptibility to error and outright fraud. After what happened in the last two presidential elections, NOW might be a good time to start insisting on adequate protections. It was the hanging chads and other egregious failures in Florida that brought us to the sorry state in which we find ourselves; and shenanigans in Ohio and elsewhere that led us deeper into the mire. I for one am grateful for the reminder that, this time, we must not allow ourselves to be caught napping.

On the political front, also, I checked out the New York Times this morning, and found virtually unanimous criticism of the Palin selection; this article may help explain why. The story of her petty tyrannies as mayor of Wasilla reveals an attitude toward executive power that is frankly pretty scary. I don't see how McCain can get away with this one. I'm sure she will rally the forces at the convention tonight, but am doubtful she can stand much further scrutiny in less adulatory circles. I could be wrong, of course--as I often am!--but I think McCain has served himself a large helping of Baked Alaskan trouble for dessert.

Having watched the effect of Gustav on the Republican convention, I now wonder what the imminent arrival of three other tropical storms on our shores might have on delegates who are not predisposed to dismiss the contribution of human activity to climate change. Will the timing of these successive events change any minds, shift any positions? Is the Earth's voice loud and persuasive enough to compete, in the minds of doubters, with what they believe to hear as the voice of God? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

For myself, a disbeliever in deities of all colors and stripes, the dual voices of science and reason are powerful enough. It dismays me to see the current Republican candidate pandering once again to the voices of unreason, who find a way to twist each manifestation of failure into a token of success; who bend their dearly-held principles to fit the contingencies of the moment; and who find justification for their inanities in the supposed approval of an infinitely malleable God.

I heard, today again, the argument that the parties are essentially "the same"--that whichever way you turn, you find mendacity and abuse of power, self-righteousness and intolerance of the opposition. I understand that this argument comes from years of disillusionment and disenchantment. But a look at the policies of each party--and the tone of their politics--suggests to me otherwise. They are not "the same," and the preponderance of fanatical ideology rests clearly on the other side. Bush spoke last night (via satellite, courteously disinvited from his Party's party!) of the "angry left." Does that imply a beatific state of tolerant equanimity on the right?

And finally, watch even a few minutes of the convention as cameras pan across the sea of faces and you can hardly help but notice the nearly universal homogeneity--and its stark contrast with what we saw last week in Denver. Should this not be of pressing concern to us, in a country that prides itself on its founding insistence that all [men] are created equal, and which preaches equality of opportunity for all?

No, these parties are not "the same." Prefer one or the other, as you will. Or neither of them. But I won't be persuaded that they are "the same."

Recklessness--Or Discipline: Our Choice

It's important to say this right. I understand that John McCain and his supporters take great pride in the maverick qualities by which he seeks to define himself, and to be defined. And there's something extraordinarily attractive about the maverick--the guy who bucks the system, holds feet to the fire, speaks truth to power, all those old cliches. It's a part of the American myth, the archetype that catapulted Ronald Reagan to power--and assures him seemingly everlasting sainthood in the memory of vast numbers of Americans, despite the evidence that suggests, to rational minds, that his true legacy is far from the unmitigated triumph it is made out to be. It also played an important part in the George W. Bush ascent to power--and its catastrophic outcome.

Now comes shoot-from-the-hip McCain, proclaiming his gunslinger credentials, and it's important for us to understand that the dark side of the maverick's willing--perhaps even romantic--embrace of risk is recklessness. The dark side of the fighter pilot's courage is the flyboy's arrogant impulsiveness and fatal attraction for danger. Am I "unpatriotic" in wondering if we yet need to hear the full story of the events that led to the downing of that aircraft in Vietnam, before McCain's much-touted stay at the Hanoi Hilton? Is it irreverent to ask for an accounting of those events, now that this same fighter pilot seeks to be entrusted with the controls in this country's cockpit and make life-or-death decisions for us all, for the next four, perhaps eight years?

These thoughts arise from my observation of McCain and his vaunted willingness to take a risk and, when all else fails, to throw the hail-Mary pass. (Apologies for the mix of metaphors, friends!) Clearly, the latest example of this quality is the choice of Sarah Palin for McCain's vice-presidential running-mate. And this is not, please, about Sarah Palin. I have no reason to disrespect her, although I suspect I would disagree with her on virtually every issue, from birth control and abortion and a woman's right to control her destiny to her disbelief in the human contribution to climate change. It is particularly not about a seventeen-year-old being pregnant and unmarried. No, this is about a man who spends months building political capital on his urgent promotion of the war in Iraq and on his opponent's supposed unpreparedness to handle the dangers that face us in that part of the world; and who then turns around and picks, as his immediate successor in the event of his incapacity, a person who is clearly, indeed dangerously under-qualified in this very area. And this for no other apparent reason than to appease those social and religious conservatives who have mistrusted him, and to poach democratic votes from the angry, disappointed Hillary support group. Oh, and to have a fellow "maverick" on the ticket.

I don't know about you, but I don't want another risk-taker in that office. I admire the quality in less high-stakes situations, but this is not a game of football. We're talking, now, about the task of steering this country back to calmer seas (ouch, those metaphors!) and re-establishing our position in the world, as Teddy Kennedy eloquently put it, by "the power of our example, not the example of our power."

In contrast to the jumpy maverick qualities of John McCain, I see the quiet, forceful approach of Barack Obama. There are those who like to characterize Obama as aloof, unapproachable--not the kind of guy, they say, you'd want to sit down and have a beer with, unlike the current occupant of the White House. They are fooled, I say, into overlooking the one quality we desperately need in our next president: a true, unflappable mental discipline, a clarity and determination that see past the contingencies of the moment and hold fast to the big picture, the need for sanity, mutual respect and justice in the world, if we are to survive the baser aspects of our human nature.

Drawing, as I often do, on my admiration for the teachings of the Buddha, I honor not only Obama's quite extraordinary equanimity, but also the natural ease and clarity with which he embraces "Right Speech"--his steadfast refusal to advance his interests by slandering others, even those who gladly slander him. Who could fail to admire his immediate, forthright and unambiguous response to the current flap over what is, after all, no more than a family matter? I honor the dignity with which he had consistently refused to succumb to those who demand that he descend into the political mire, or risk appearing weak. His acceptance speech, last week, was ample evidence of strength combined with dignity.

Dignity, it's true, is not the most fuzzily "approachable" of qualities. It risks making its wearer seem a bit remote. But we have had ample time to contemplate the results of electing a folksy, scrappy pugilist and undisciplined thinker to hold our highest office and represent us to the world. Isn't it time for the corrective of some quiet balance, some serious forethought in judgment, some intellectual rigor and, yes, some dignity? Do we really need another reckless jolt into a future filled with known and unknown dangers? For myself, in the matter of global politics, I favor predictability over excitement, the dignity of dialogue over the bloody legacy of the sword.

A Busy Weekend

We do not often stay in town for the weekend, these days. We love the serenity of our Laguna retreat, and we so much value the Sunday morning session of our sitting group. But this past weekend was a particularly busy one, and there was much to keep us here in Los Angeles.

There was, first of all, the party I have mentioned earlier on The Buddha Diaries: I learned a while ago that there are twenty-nine men and women in the Southern California area who graduated from the Cambridge college I attended in the 1950s. They are mostly men, I have to say, since Gonville & Caius College did not admit women until the latter years of the twentieth century, well after my time. I have only recently begun to fully appreciate the privilege I was afforded, as a young man, by that experience, and it was with that sense of debt--and with a certain curiosity as to what the experience of others might have been--that I reached out to all twenty-nine in the hope of bringing us together for an evening's celebration.

That evening came around on Saturday. There were a number, of course, from whom I never heard in response to my initial contact. There were a number who declined because of other commitments. But quite a number did in fact show up--men only, regrettably, though with their wives; I would have loved to have met some of the Caius women on my list--and we enjoyed a splendid summer evening out on the deck.




Our group included men of all ages, including one who had matriculated in 1948, seven years before I myself arrived in 1955, and one who was my exact contemporary--though we did not know each other at the time. Then a number of younger men who had matriculated in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ellie and I had laid on wine and a generous table of hors d'oeuvres--too much, it turned out; we have quantities of left-overs to dispose of in the next few days, and we all spent a while chit-chatting and comparing notes until the last of the late-arrivals had showed up. Then, not least to satisfy my own curiosity, I arranged us all in a large circle and invited everyone to check in with the brief story of the path that brought them from their Caius days to living here in Southern California.

An extraordinarily diverse group of people we all turned out to be. Not only the Caius men, but also the women spoke about their lives, and I was impressed by the quality as well as the diversity of the paths we had chosen. What I found particularly striking was what seemed to me something of a common trope, a shared sense of redirection toward a less conventional set of values and beliefs. There was one who had devoted the better part of his life to a traditional medical practice, turning now toward alternative medicine; the lawyer turned software engineer turned hypnotherapist; the production designer returning to her original aim to be a painter; a neuroscientist applying his skills to the study of art and the imaginative work of creating special effects for film; there was the computer specialist turned yoga teacher; the corporate business woman now devoted to nation-wide charitable fundraising; and the philosopher pioneering efforts to promote mutual understanding between the world's great religions. As one who quit a conventional academic career to devote myself exclusively to writing, I felt not out of place. (By the way, if I have misrepresented any here, I offer my apologies: chalk it up to the fact that our time together was too short to offer more than a brief sketch of fascinating and productive lives.  Then, too, my memory is not so sharp as it used to be...)

Is it a natural part of the aging process, I wondered in retrospect, that so many of us seem to be looking for something different, something perhaps more meaningful as our lives progress? Or, possibly, as my sister often argues, is there some radical change taking place on our planet--indeed, as she would have it, in the universe? A movement away from the bad old, primarily Western goals of material comfort and individual success and toward a greater understanding and respect for the one-ness of us all, and our unity with nature? On the political front, is our Barack Obama at the forefront of a new wave of global cooperation and resolve to save our planet and people from the ravages of the misguided human ego? Or am I simply projecting my own desires and understandings on the world around me? It's fun, at least, to indulge in some innocent--though perhaps idle--speculation.

We invited our Caius guests for 6 - 8 PM. The last of the group left after midnight. Everyone was grateful to have been invited, and several specifically requested a repeat performance, even an annual reunion. We felt that the party had been a success! So much so that I protracted it, in dream, for what seemed like another few hours after falling asleep, and awoke in the very early hours with the impression that our last guest had left at five past two.

A morning, then, in bed with the newspaper. I did my morning sit out on the balcony, missing our sangha. Then off to brunch at the home of our friend Gina Stepaniuk (here's a 2006 painting of hers; it's called "Petite Mort"--"little death", a French euphemism, by the way, for sexual climax...)



We found ourselves in the company of other artists, some old friends, some new, enjoying good conversation, good humor, a glass of wine, good food... Our mutual interests and shared dedication to the creative life inspired me to think that my speculation might not be quite so idle after all. It's hard, in such company, to bear in mind that there are vast numbers of American voters, still, who do not share our enlightenment!

And then, to cap off a rather hectic weekend in the rarefied atmosphere of creative minds, we managed to stay awake for long enough, on Sunday evening, to betake ourselves to a dingy dive in Echo Park, on Sunset Boulevard, where our daughter's band, The Pickup Sticks was playing a gig. A tiny space, packed with young people and filled with the deafening sounds of hard core rock music. Sarah is a drummer and backup singer...


Her friend, Ed, is the lead singer in the band.


Our unprejudiced opinion was that they were great! We loved the energy and passion of the performance--though I personally wished I'd had a song sheet to be able to follow the words. As Ellie says, I'm "such a word person." The only ones I got were "cookie cutter." Still, I have to say that much of the emotional impact was delivered despite the lack of words. I've been hoping that The Pickup Sticks will soon get around to finishing their CD. They're good enough to deserve a bigger venue than this tiny space--appropriate though it was for their style and energy. It was great, too, to reconnect with many of their friends, and be welcomed by them with such warmth and interest.

Another late night, then. And a slow start this morning for the week to come... But much gained, over the weekend, in terms of the imaginative juices and the confirmation that there are many good people in this world, doing many good things; along with a salutary reminder that the encounter with creative minds is a healthy antidote to the woes that all too often afflict us.

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.

That New Yorker Cover

Satire? They have to be kidding. Are the editorial staff of the New Yorker so tone-deaf to the political realities in this country that they don't understand how their self-indulgent "satire" will be put to use? By reducing the argument, as they do in their response to criticism, to purely literary and aesthetic considerations, they prove themselves to be asinine beyond belief. As others besides myself have pointed out, this idiocy hands the yahoos a weapon they themselves would not have had the wit to hone. In their sense of intellectual entitlement, they forget the vast mass of voters who lack the critical discrimination to read their cover in other than literal terms: those many who will understand it at face value, not for its ironical intention.

I notice that Obama's poll numbers have dropped significantly in the past week alone. along with his fund-raising potential. Thank his liberal friends, from Reverend Jesse Jackson to the idealist left-wing bloggers and mind-bogglingly stupid "literate" liberals like the New Yorker. I'm planning to send in another few dollars to support this candidate. I hope my readers will judiciously put aside their disagreements--no matter how much I might agree with their arduments--and join me in renewing our support. We simply cannot afford to sacrifice an entire election to our individual principles one more time. There's far too much at stake.

I'm hoping that the example of the New Yorker cover will prove a useful lesson to the liberal conscience about the risks incurred by this lack of circumspection. There's a single, over-riding goal at stake this time around. It's nothing less than the rescue of this country from self-destruction, not to mention the planet that we share with others. And that, to my way of thinking, is no exaggeration.

By the way, I have never done this before, because the gesture has seemed no more than petty spite, but I felt I had to make a statement, no matter how small: I canceled our subscription to the New Yorker. I hope millions of others do the same.

"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."

To My Great Nephew: Re the American Elections

What follows is a letter I wrote yesterday to my remarkably well-informed and curious ten year-old great-nephew, Hugo, who lives in England and was nice enough to inquire after my thoughts about the American elections. I have been slow in responding to his e-mailed question, but I hope these thoughts are better late than never. It's useful, sometimes, to try to boil it all down to words intended for a bright ten year-old who may well be wiser, in some ways, than we adults:

Dear Hugo,

It has been a couple of months since you wrote to me, asking what I thought about the elections here in America. I'm afraid I did not give your question much thought at the time, and wrote only a quick response. But I have been thinking about it since then, and wanted to let you have a proper answer, so here goes.

First, a lot has happened since you asked the question. Senator Hillary Clinton has dropped out of the race, leaving the way clear for Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate. And, surprisingly, because he seemed at first to have little choice to survive the early battle among the Republicans, John McCain is now the Republican who will run against Obama. Interesting, isn't it, that before Hillary Clinton dropped out, the main contenders were 1) the first woman to have ever reached so far; 2) the first black man to have ever reached so far; and 3) the oldest man ever to have reached so far in the presidential race?

So here's my first thought: that speaks well of America, that it is no longer only sprightly young white men who can qualify for the position! And while we're on the subject, let me add that I was delighted to see a woman so clearly in contention--but extremely disappointed when she felt she had to prove how "tough" she was in order to gain the nomination. During the last part of her campaign, I have to say that she lost me--along with many others--by trying to prove that point in every way she could imagine. For myself, I think it's time for us to abandon that old notion, that America needs to be the tough guy in the world. I believe that it's time for a more compassionate, "feminine" energy in leadership positions in this tired old world, where men, I fear, have contributed more than their share of trouble in grabbing for wealth and power no matter what the consequences to this small planet we inhabit.

That said, I also believe that Barack Obama has some of that energy. Until recently, when he became the "presumptive nominee" of the Democratic Party, he was able to articulate a wonderfully broad, inclusive, and humane vision of the change that we humans must be ready to make in our lives--and our relationship with each other--if our planet is to survive. We can't go on forever exploiting it and making wars with each other over the food we need to eat, the medical attention that we need to remain healthy, the resources that we need to run our lives. Because that's what it's coming to, isn't it? I read in the New York Times just this morning that more than 30 countries have already experienced violent internal battles over food. America is still the richest and most powerful country in the world, and we need to provide the leadership and the example, and to exercise the generosity it will take for all human beings on the planet to live together in peace and harmony.

I had high hopes that Obama envisioned an America of this kind. I still hope he does. What has happened in recent weeks, however, is that he has been voicing ideas and opinions that sound quite a lot different from those he was expressing before he became the front runner. It's my belief that he has been doing this out of a sense of realism--that he must take positions that will attract the support of the many, many voters it will take to get him elected; and to avoid alienating them from his ideas. The truth is that many Americans are deeply conservative, they resist change, perhaps even fear what it may bring. They value the old ways, and those ideas they feel made America "a great country." Obama will need a good number of their votes if he's ever to be elected.

Obama's opponent, John McCain, the "presumptive nominee" of the Republican Party, is making his appeal based largely on those values. He is making a great deal of his "patriotism" and his past service to this country, as a brave Navy fighter pilot who endured five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He wants to persuade Americans that he is the one with the experience that can be trusted, that he's the "tough guy" in this race, that he knows how to deal with those ruffians in the rest of the world. He's trying to persuade voters that Obama is weak and inexperienced, and that he can't be trusted to run the country. In my view--and bear in mind, Hugo, that these are my views I'm expressing, not necessarily true facts!--McCain represents that old school I was talking about earlier, the one that thinks America should lead the world with military and economic power, and protect itself from every potential "enemy" out there. He seems to believe in America's God-given right to economic prosperity and world leadership, at a time when I myself believe that we must learn to become a nation among nations, in a whole co-operative, sharing, mutually-concerned global community.

I think that Americans--if I can generalize--tend to be idealists: I'm sure you've heard of "the American dream." We hear a lot about it over here. And it's a short step from being an ideal-ist to being an ideologue, the kind of person who is so convinced of the rightness of his own ideals that he's blinded to any others--something like the current president and his cronies! Ideals are important, of course, but it's also important to recognize and accept some of the limitations of the real world. It's hard to be both an idealist and a realist all at once, however, because reality keeps demanding that we compromise a little on the ideals in order to get things done; and ideals, by definition, don't want to be compromised!

So that's where we're a wee bit stuck right now, as I see it. And I have to add that Americans are mostly just tired of this election at the moment. I think I'm right in saying that most of us want to have it over and done with. We are mightily tired of hearing the candidates trade petty insults with each other, instead of discussing real, urgently important issues like global warming, world hunger, poverty, war and the threat of widespread disease. Instead we hear them talking about who's more "patriotic" than the other guy, while we begin to wonder who's the more "idiotic." You can tell from what I've written, I'm sure, that I support Obama. I hope he wins. I just can't wait until it's over with. (Did you know that we have another 196 days of Bush?)

With love to you and your Mum from your great-uncle,
Peter