KING-KILLERS

THE ART OF PERSONAL AND POLITICAL

ASSASSINATION: Some Thoughts on the Tour de

France and the Shirley Sherrod Fiasco

In the men’s work in which I engaged for many years, we called them “king-killers.” These are men—or women, why not?—so consumed by greed or envy, ambition, insecurity or fear of weakness, that they are driven to bring down the one whom they have chosen, or the one who stands up for leadership. They tend to show up, like their cousins, the wolves, or like sharks in the ocean, when they smell blood; or when they sense weakness or hesitation. Then they attack in swarms…

From many, I choose but two notable current examples: the one-time leader of the Tour de France and the current “leader of the free world.”

I hold no particular brief for Lance Armstrong, though I confess that I would like to believe him to be real. He may, or may not have been aided in his multiple Tour victories by performance-enhancing drugs. I hope not, but I do know that these drugs are prevalent not only in cycling but in all professional sports. I deplore their use. It’s a sad fact that, today, we are unable to trust a winner—whether track star, tennis ace, home-run slugger, or cyclist. Winning by cheating is not winning. But this is not about doping, nor even particularly about Lance Armstrong. It’s about king-killing, about the desire to bring the man down.

In Armstrong’s case, the blood was smelled early in this year’s race. The first cut came even before the 2010 Tour de France with accusations from a former team-mate, Floyd Landis, timed to coincide with Armstrong’s participation in the Tour of California. When the—let’s face it—aging champion fell and abandoned that race with injuries, the Schadenfreude was already evident in the press. More recently, the New York Times reporter on the Tour de France chose to drag out the accusation again on the first day of this year’s race, and has reported almost daily since then on the federal investigation.

It was soon clear that Armstrong would be unable to win to 2010 Tour. When the disasters came—he crashed on several occasions in the early stages—we began to hear delightedly malicious comments from some quarters: he was too old, he could no longer stay upright on his bike, he had given up too early, or had not given up when he should have done and stayed too late… After the sixteenth stage, when he chose to ride with familiar aggression in order to take some small victory away from his last Tour, and after his still impressive display of strength in the climbs clearly provided leadership for others in the stage leaders’ breakaway, the New York Times banner headline read: “In What May Have Been a Final Push For Old Times’ Sake, Armstrong Fails.” Not inaccurate, but pointedly phrased. The French press, too, long inimical to the man who stole their Tour, has reportedly been happy to pile on.

Let me say again, it’s not my business to defend Armstrong, nor does he need any defense from me. What’s of interest to me is to take note of the attack. The attack on Barack Obama is something else. I have a stake in this young President. I voted for him, I want to see him bring his campaign promises to fruition. I believe in what he stands for. In fact, I myself stand for the most part to the left of where he does—understanding his need to hold the center, out of political necessity—but I’ll take what I can get.

Once again, however, the sharp knives are out; the king-killers abound, and to judge by his falling poll numbers, their attacks are taking a toll. They come from left as well as right on virtually every issue: the economy, the conduct of the wars, health care and financial reform, his choice of officers and judicial appointments—even, ironically, for our first African American in the Oval Office, race. The unprecedented speed and spread of the Internet and associated technologies facilitates the attacks: a blog entry, a YouTube video, even a casual email can set off a nation-wide storm and promulgate its progress. The memory banks are immeasurable and accessed with incredible ease. No President has ever faced the challenges that confront those of the 21^st century. No king-killer has ever had such a vast array of effective weapons within such easy reach.

It’s a fine line, certainly, between legitimate and necessary criticism and what I’m talking about. Let it be noted that I personally am far less than delighted with progress toward those goals Obama laid out in his campaign. But we must know how to make a usable distinction between the two, and I fear that we too often fail to exercise the judiciousness that is required of us to do that. Meanwhile, the welter of attacks and dissatisfactions increases daily, along with the all-too real disasters and the teacup tempests, despite the fact that many of them soon prove to be utterly without foundation in reality or truth—as in the latest Fox News-generated kerfuffle around Shirley Sherrod at the Department of Agriculture. The calculation is that if enough mud is thrown, some of it will stick.

Obama, certainly, like Armstrong, does not need my pity or defense. I am amazed, in fact, by his ability to rise above the pettiness that swirls around him, maintaining a voice of solid reason—when we get to hear it—in the cacophony of irrational anger, and sometimes the hatred hurled in his direction. The man is not perfect. He is a politician. Surprise! And no matter the damage they intend, if we listen carefully, these king-killers succeed mostly in betraying themselves and their own agendas. Examine what they say and how they say it and you’ll find that most often they are projecting their own worst qualities—their timidity, their incompetence, their racism and hypocrisy, their political partisanship—on to the object of their scorn.

When I hear the negative judgment of a king-killer, I try to remind myself to turn that judgment around and apply it to its source, to see whether the indictment not more about the accuser that the accused. I find this to be a useful and reliable test of the difference between sheer malice, for personal gain, and sound critical judgment.

Le Tour: Suffering

It's a word that's constantly on the lips of every rider interviewed, every coach and trainer, every commentator on the television coverage. Suffering. It's hard to imagine how much suffering those men incur for twenty-one days on their high-tech machines, riding often over one hundred miles a day, and up mountainsides, day after day, any one of which would challenge the strength of most powerful of men on a single day. They must have been grateful, yesterday, to reach the finish line on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. The Spanish rider who won the race, Carlos Sastre, credited a former team manager for having "taught me to suffer."



All of which led me to wonder what the Buddha might have to say about the Tour de France. He didn't own a bicycle, of course--though I enjoy the image of the Buddha on a bike. He walked. He walked great distances, accompanied by his closest disciples, I suppose with many stops along the way to teach what he had learned. Walking such distances may have caused discomfort--the occasional blister, surely, and sore muscles in the legs--but nothing like the suffering incurred by choice in competitive sports events like the tour.

We suffer enough in our daily lives. Is it "right effort" to incur more suffering by choice? Or is it mere human vanity? No doubt but that it's a discipline requiring incredible focus and concentration--perhaps even an extreme form of meditation, and certainly an extreme test of the stuff we human beings are made of. The slightest weakness is laid bare, the slightest vulnerability exploited by the competition. There's no room for self-pity, no room for distraction, no room for excuses.

The Buddha himself completed a marathon of a kind, in the course of those years of ascetic wandering, when he was reputed to have survived on nothing but a grain of rice a day. (An irreverent aside: I've often wondered how that grain was prepared. He can't have eat it uncooked, can he?) His conclusion was that this form of self-inflicted torture was unnecessary to achieve the goal of happiness. It was not necessary, he discovered, to intensify the suffering in order to find the way to end it. On the contrary, suffering is intensified by what we add to it to satisfy our ego-driven needs.

Egos abound, of course, in an event like the Tour de France. It's a daily battle to win--to win the sprint, to win the stage, to win the daily awarded jerseys: white for the best young rider, green for the best sprinter, polka-dotted for the best climber, and the famous yellow for the overall Tour leader. The competition is intense, and it's easy to get hooked on it--as I have been, this year, for the umpteenth time. Team strategy and individual performance are intertwined in plots and patterns that get more complex by the day. Wild surprises and bitter disappointments alternate to compel attention and wrench the emotional response.

Hardly a Middle Way, then. Strangely, though, it's Buddhist values like concentration and persistence--and of course equanimity in the face of suffering--that pay off in the Tour as in any other challenge that life offers. Depending on how you look at it, it's all a teaching.

Le Tour, Part Trois

What I've been missing in the Tour de France this year is the fireworks--and I'm much afraid that it may have been the doping that made them possible. It has been a solid race, no question. The competition has been fierce, at times, and there have been exciting moments almost every day. What I miss are those thrilling moments, usually in the mountains, when a single rider light on fire--or perhaps a pair of them--and puts in a gargantuan, superhuman, eye-popping performance to wrest the yellow jersey from the competition. The most notable this year, by the Italian Riccardo Ricco, proved shortly afterward to have been a cheat.

Thus far, it has all been strategy. Not that strategy has not always played a major role in the way teams support their star riders; and not that the CSC team, this year's standout, has not put up a truly admirable show. But it has been more than usually about the peloton, about playing defense, about keeping things safe for the handful of likely general category contenders, about the careful conservation of energies and planning for future stages. No fireworks. But a lot of hard work. The work it takes to get up those mountains is extraordinary in itself. And I guess I'd rather do without the fireworks if they can't be done without the dope--I'd opt for the honest race.

I'll be watching today as usual, at some point. I'm not much of an electronics fan, but I'm grateful for the recording system on my cable box that allows me to record and watch at my leisure, speeding through the dull parts and the commercials.

Today we head back down to Laguna Beach and plan to spend the next couple of weeks there, watching construction progress in the basement and preparing the house for the two-month process of total demolition and reconstruction in the kitchen. Then, early August, we leave for a long road trip north with George the dog. Not sure what will happen to The Buddha Diaires in that time period. Ellie has been pushing for a "Travels with George" story, along the lines of John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley in Search of America." We have it on order from the library...

Le Tour, Part Deux

I've been enjoying the Tour much more than I had expected this year. In fact, I had not intended to be watching at all, given the disaster of last year when even the winner was disqualified after the event for doping. But I got hooked again, and was persuaded by the efforts that have been made this year to ensure that the competition would be honest.


Other than the exclusion of some riders and teams before the race, there has been only one incident so far this year--with the expulsion of Miguel Beltran, a "domestique" with the Italian team Liquigas. ("Domestiques" are riders whose chief job is to to the heavy lifting that allows the sprinters and the mountain men to shine. Beltran paved many a path for Lance Armstrong, in his days with U.S. Postal.)

Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this was an isolated case, and that the teams are finally smart enough to control their riders. As a Wall Street Journal article made clear yesterday, it's only good business. The article cites Jonathan Vaughters, the directeur sportif of Team Garmin-Chipotle, as "an anti-doping stalwart" who asserts that "teams like Garmin, Columbia and CSC-Saxo Bank are putting up enough empirical evidence that sponsors are buying into something they can believe in and isn't going to damage their brand."

It's nice that the two American teams, Garmin and Team Columbia, have been in the forefront of the anti-doping movement. "Garmin-Chipotle and Columbia," writes the Wall Street Journal, "(formerly Slipstream and High Road, respectively) in particular are at the front of the movement to clean up professional cycling, and the teams are awash in favorable press. Garmin-Chipotle captain David Millar, for instance, is an admitted former drug user who has since become an anti-doping advocate; and both teams conduct internal testing that exceeds requirements in an effort to always race clean."

"Bob Stapleton," the article continues, "owner of Team Columbia, agrees. 'These clear and concise anti-doping measures need to be implemented by all teams across the sport,' he said. 'Then I think you've removed the biggest risk element for sponsors and you can focus on what is fundamentally attractive—it's a growing and healthy sport, and it caters to very influential consumers.'" It's a good thing, then, that Team Columbia is performing so well, maintaining an overall lead in the race with Kim Kirchen, from Luxembourg, in the yellow jersey four days in a row; and with their young sprint star, Mark Cavendish, winning a stage on Saturday.

Okay. So, fingers crossed, I have been watching. There are those who felt that the new anti-doping move would deprive the sport of its excitement. Not so. From the flats to the individual time trials and, now, the mountains (the riders are in the Pyrenees, with one of the Tour's most exacting days today, le quatorze juillet, July 14, Bastille Day, have been no less exciting than previous Tours. Young, previously obscure cyclists have come to the fore, with extraordinary speed, skill, and endurance. The handful of prospects for the final yellow jersey, on the podium at the race's end in Paris, have ridden strong, canny races, and are likely to have to show their mettle today. The French, particularly, on Bastille day, go all out to make a patriotic showing, and we can expect to see them making a strong challenge to the leadership.

Yesterday, the first serious mountain-climbing day, gave the Italian climber, Riccardo Ricco, the opportunity to streak ahead of the main peloton on a steep mountainside and lead them all the way to the finish. I marvel at the strength of men like this, and their ability to persist despite the obvious pain involved in pushing the human body to its limits and, seemingly, beyond. I'm trusting, for now, that he did it honestly.

Le Tour, Revisited...

(... but first, thanks to Cardozo for his clear-sighted and well-reasoned defense of Obama in response to yesterday's entry in The Buddha Diaries. I trust that readers will check it out. It deserves not to languish in obscurity.)

Those who have followed The Buddha Diaries for a little while will not be surprised by my confession of a long-standing addiction to the Tour de France. It came about because I was myself a cycling enthusiast for a brief period during my teenage years. My sporty red drop-handlebar bicycle offered me the opportunity, a couple of times a week, to escape the confines of my all-boys boarding school and pedal off, alone, into the Sussex Downs--not incidentally with a contraband pack of cigarettes aboard for a furtive smoke behind the bushes. My enthusiasm did not, I'm sad to say, extend beyond those school years: the slacker's choice of a motorized two-wheeler called--and cigarettes, unfortunately, were abundantly available and no longer forbidden. Of these twin addictions, it was certainly the least desirable. It took me another thirty years to quit.



But I still do love to follow the Tour de France--available these days, thanks to the marvel of satellite TV, from start to finish every day. (I record the stages, so that I can skip through the plentiful commercials.) I was anticipating that last year might prove the final straw, with the doping scandal reaching its direst moment in the exclision of a number of riders along the way, and of the winner at the end. Am I wrong to approach this year's event with trust in the efforts that have been made to clean things up? I was wrong, certainly, to judge from the first three stages, to fear that the race would be less exciting with several of the major teams--and most of the familiar champions--banned from participation. Despite bad weather, the racing has been fine, the contest hard-fought, the results surprising.

I'll keep watching, then, in the hope that no major scandal will disrupt the proceedings this year, and that the race continues to hold challenges and surprises. I might even mention it, now and then, in the pages of The Buddha Diaries. Who knows...? (Please don't tell me who won Tuesday's time trials. I won't get around to watching until later in the day!)

Photo Credit

Vancouver--Day 2

Dawn
Our twelfth floor
hotel balcony: a pink
dawn. Down below us, a score
of seagulls drift
and scream incessantly.
Below them,
a screech of brakes:
the city wakes.

Thus, yesterday morning during meditation; thus, too, this morning.

Ah, yesterday! A fabulous day in Vancouver. The sun shone all day. The locals marveled: all last week, nothing but rain, and now two days of nothing but sun.

I crossed the street early for a cup of Starbucks—and in the hope that Starbucks here would carry, as they do down south, the New York Times. Anxious for news of the Tour… No, no Times. But coffee…

We made an early start, walking back down Robson Street and turning down Burrard, as instructed, to the little tub-boat ferry that took us across a narrow stretch of bay—blue, blue water!



—to the huge market on the Granville Island wharfs.


Quite a spectacle, with dozens of fruit and vegetable stalls inside, bakeries and flower shops, and a host of small café counters. Needing breakfast, Ellie opted for a slice of grape bread, I for a small wheat loaf and a pat of butter picked up at a different stand, and we sat out on the dockside with a cup of coffee, feeding bread crumbs to the gulls.

After wandering for a while down the narrow streets behind the market and visiting a couple of rather junky souvenir shops, Ellie found a jewelry stall to her liking and sprung for $15 for a couple of pairs of craftsman-made earrings. Then, venturing on, we began to think about visiting the Museum of Anthropology and discovered, on inquiring from some friendly natives, that it was way out along the peninsula on the campus of the University of British Columbia.

Not to be daunted, we decided on a bus, and found the number 4, (appropriately, on 4th Avenue) which took us out to the edge of the university, where some very serious swimmers were taking advantage of the sunshine, doing laps in a huge Olympic pool. A long walk through the beautifully landscaped campus—trees, lawns, flowers—to the very furthest edge from where we started out, pausing for pictures in a truly lovely rose garden with a view across the (blue! blue!) water to the snow-capped mountains and the (blue! blue!) sky beyond.

The Museum of Anthropology—currently under serious renovation—proved an extraordinary experience. The café was not up to much—and eggs salad sandwich, a bottle of lemonade—but the exhibits were spectacular, from the stunning collection of Northwest totems to the seemingly endless cases chock-a-block with artifacts from all parts of the world: baskets and jewelry, woven textiles, articles of clothing, ritual masks and carvings, weapons, hunting and fishing gears, utensils, musical instruments of all kinds—flutes and whistles, clappers, drums…




An amazing testament to the endless inventiveness and creativity of the human spirit, and one which left us awed—myself even somewhat overpowered with a strange fit of nausea and dizziness—by the pent-up, discarded spiritual power invested in these objects. Strangely, the nausea returns even as I think about them. I recall a poem I wrote a while ago about the incongruity of our "civilization" relegating such objects to the sterile confines of a museum.

On our way back through the campus, we stumbled on the university art gallery and another powerful exhibition—this one of the contemporary African American artist Glenn Ligon, who turns an unrelenting gaze on the issue of skin color and the racism still inherent in our society. Huge canvases, in which loaded texts are spelled out—and left only partially legible—in coal dust. An ironic series of "Runaway" prints, runaway slave posters featuring the artist himself in a variety of inept descriptions. And another series of strong paintings with the texts of numerous, and truly scurrilous Richard Prior "nigger" jokes—his term, borrowed by the artist, not mine, I have not earned that right.

A bus ride back to Granville Island, a ferry ride over to a different point in the city, Yaletown—a renovated downtown warehouse area, now teeming with what appeared to be trendy restaurants and boutiques. A stop to buy a new battery for our digital camera, and another long walk back though the city to our hotel. We discover that there is to be a fireworks display tonight—but are told that our room, regrettably, faces in the wrong direction. I study the map, where the fireworks barge is supposed to be, and think, well, maybe...

A shower, a catch-up on the travesty of the Tour de France—Michael Rasmussen, the overall leader, now fired by his team for not showing up for drug tests, and out of the race—and out to dinner at Cin Cin, an excellent, second-story Italian restaurant overlooking Robson Street, where crowds of people are streaming down toward the site of fireworks. We shared an excellent fig and prosciutto starter, a salad, and a lobster linguini, and enjoyed a glass of wine recommended by the helpful (Chinese, from Calgary!) waitress, then headed back to our hotel. To discover, miracle of miracle, that we had front row and center seats for the fireworks…

A spectacular end to a spectacular day.

A Group Dynamic

Over the years I've grown more and more and more to appreciate the power of a group of human beings sitting together in a circle to exchange experiences, thoughts, and feelings. The men's work in which I have been involved since the early 1990s gave me the first glimpse of this power; in a very different way, our small sangha, or meditation sitting group in Laguna Beach, has served to reinforce my sense of the value of the group dynamic. The "therapy group" is but a new manifestation of a very ancient ritual, practiced as a matter of course--a matter of necessity--by our tribal forebears. In a circle of this kind, it's as though each member shares in the energy and the wisdom generated by the whole, a way of actually experiencing oneness in the day-to-day separation that distinguishes our lives.

These thoughts after a wonderful session last night, in which Ellie and I brought together both of our monthly artists' groups for a summer celebration. It was the first time several of them had met. All the more amazing, then, that a sense of intimacy was so quickly established. We ate, we drank wine, we sat and talked, we looked at artworks that each individual had brought, and talked about them. It is soon apparent, in a group of this kind, if any participant is less than fully authentic, fully engaged in their own work and the work of others. In art schools, such sessions are usually called "critiques." Ours, I think, are no less rigorous in their own way, but kinder, more supportive, because they come from a place of a shared intimacy and a fuller understanding of each other's individual humanity.

It was a good evening, then, and one that left us all with that feeling of inner satisfaction for having experienced that contact. That's how I saw it. How I felt it. From what I heard from participants as they lingered on and finally made their way home, I trust that others did, too.

(A thrilling finish to yesterday's Tour, by the way. I had recorded the broadcast, and watched the last few minutes of the race before going to bed. A breakaway of four riders had held off the peloton for two hundred miles, and it seemed until the last minute within their reach to cross the finish line before being overwhelmed. After all their work, they certainly deserved it. Alas, within just the last few hundred yards, the horde bore down on them, and the Swiss yellow jersey wearer, Fabian Cancellara--the overall winner of the race--made a canny last-minute move to streak out in front and steal the stage victory to secure his lead.)

Le Tour

Okay. Today a change of pace. Time for some fun. Readers of The Bush Diaries--the blog that morphed a few months ago into The Buddha Diaries--may remember my curious passion for the Tour de France, the mother of all bicycle races. I caught the bug as a teenager, when I had my own red racing bike, which I rode somewhat klutzily around the Sussex downs. To feel the rush of wind through my hair and around my body was an escape from the confines and the miseries of boarding school, a kind of ritual cleansing in the salt air along the tidal river in the valley. Being a somewhat unaccomplished mechanic, though, I suffered through countless breakdowns and tanglings of the Benelux derailer gears, and remember often sitting by the roadside fixing flat tires and adjusting worn cotter pins...

Ah, youth! Anyway, back then the only way to follow the Tour was to read the French newsapapers. My favorite was Le Firgaro. And my heroes were the like of Francois Coppi, the great champion of his day--this was the 1950s, friends, a good while ago. I confess that I abandoned the Tour for much of my adult life, and was drawn back by the victories of an American, Greg Lemond, followed by the spectacular feats of his successor, Lance Armstrong. In my younger day, the prospect of an American winner of the Tour would have been unthinkable. But, as the saying goes, times change.

Despite the doping scandal--and a huge disappointment last year with the controversy that threatened to deprive Floyd Landis, the putative winner, of his title--I have tuned again this year. The giants from recent years have mostly been eliminated from the cast of characters, either by age and fatigue or by association with doping investigations. But some of them pedal on, as furiously as ever; and there are new faces to watch. I'm grateful for daily coverage by Versus, with its great team of reporters and commentators, a couple of whom have sweated through the gruelling Tour more than once themselves. Their commentary is articulate, leavened with intelligent and entertaining humor--the droll Bob Roll can be allowed his admittedly generous share of corn--and remarkably well-informed. And the countryside through which the riders pass is a reminder of the joys of European landscape and the magnificent architecture of buildings great and homely. This year's start in London and progress through the county of Kent to Canterbury was a symphony of green hills and forests, with the occasional reminder, in a church or country manor, of the centuries of history still alive in English life.

And then there's the excitement of the race. I guess it takes a bit of a fanatic to sit through those hours of watching the patient "peloton"--the main group of a hundred or more riders--sweeping along behind a small breakout group and waiting for the right moment to catch up with them: it's a dramatic moment when they do, swallowing up those few brave souls who sped out ahead like a whale ingesting a stray mouthful of plankton. The most exciting moments are inevitably the last few minutes of each stage, when the teams' individual expert sprinters vie for the chance to cross the finish line first. These are dangerous moments, too, as witness yesterday's massive pile-up yesterday in Ghent. Battling for position in a swarm of a hundred or more speeding bicycles can easily lead to a slip or a collision that will bring the whole delicate balance crashing down. Fortunately, I believe--I have not yet heard the final tally--while many fell, few were injured in this spectacular crash.

Anyway, just to give neophytes a taste, here's a picture of yesterday's finish line, with two Belgians (in blue jersey's) finishing first and second in their native country--a cause for celebration.



More, I'm sure, as the race progresses over the next three week.