the possibility of fire

shifting venues

2006-09-15T04:29:00.000-06:00

Good morning!

I have moved my blog to my new website. Here's the URL:

Please update your bookmarks, and if you have linked to this blog (thank you!) also consider updating your links so that they point to the new site.

I will not be making new entries here.

Thanks - WCH

PS - If you are reading this, you don't have javascript enabled on your browser.

open foot, insert mouth

2006-07-04T13:48:00.000-06:00

Joe Lieberman does it again. First he can't imagine why the liberal wing of his party might think him a little too Republican in his support of the war. Then he can't imagine how an upstart like Ned Lamont would have the termity to imagine challenging his eighteen year old hold on his Congressional seat.

Finally, he can't imagine why his Democratic party peers might question his party creds after his announcement that he would run as an unaffliated Democrat because "independents and Republicans" would elect him if Democrats didn't. Mr. Liebermann doesn't seem to have much imagination.

Mr. Liebermann, if he had the power of the convictions he so loves to claim, would tell the party hacks to pound salt. So what does he do when faced with criticism from inside his party? Back pedal, it seems.

This isn't the first time that I have had the opportunity to question Mr. Liebermann's sincerity. It probably won't be the last.
_____
tags: democratic party, liebermann, politics, opinion

Severance, Threshold, Return (vi/vi)

2006-06-26T17:49:00.000-06:00

I recently returned from a week-long group and solo retreat a canyon whose mouth lies near the Delores River. I have posted some stories from my time there over the last week or so. This is the last one. -- WCH
________________________________

Fractal. Each phase of the entrance into and return from liminality holds within itself the complete and perfect reflection of the complete cycle. Like a fractal. I sit with my back against Big Rock, feeling the cycle of death-transit-rebirth. I stumble. Reference points disappear. Sitting, watching west and waiting for dawn, have I been here an hour, a day, a lifetime? Looking up at the mirror-rock canyon wall, looking at the mirror-rock I hold in my hand, it seems absurd to wonder. Like a fractal. An hour, a day, a lifetime? I realize that it doesn't matter. Rock reflecting rock. Cycle reflecting cycle.

Talking Stick. Death Lodge. Vigil Circle. No way to say big or small, long or short. Each is the nature of the cycle from which it came, each contains within itself the cycle waiting to be born. It is, as they say, “turtles all the way down”. Rising. Abiding. Ceasing. Each perfectly containing and reflecting the others. The lessons, then, are always here, always available to be learned, even in the mirror of my habitual patterns. The form changes, but the essence? Dogen Zenji said:

The self and the things of the world are just as they are. The gate of emancipation is open.

The sun lights the sky over the canyon behind me. I unseal the Eastern gate of the Circle and offer the last of my tobacco and water. It is time to walk home.

_____
tags: personal, vision fast

Direction (v/vi)

2006-06-23T17:47:00.000-06:00

I recently returned from a week-long group and solo retreat in a Utah canyon whose mouth lies near the Delores River. I am posting some stories from my time there over the next week or so -- WCH
________________________________

Still determined to have my own way and certain that my vigil circle needs to be in a certain direction, I spend the afternoon of the third day north of my sleeping place, looking. The search reflects my mood: frustrated, resistant, doubtful. I am, I tell myself, too skeptical, not honest enough, not quiet enough. I haven't worked hard enough.

I don't deserve it. Pure and simple. So why would it happen?

Disgusted with myself and certain that vigil is pointless, I walk back to Cornerstone, ready to return him to his place. I climb up the draw, drop him onto the redrock sand and then turn to see the vigil circle in a ring of stone and junipers. It is lower and in the exact opposite direction of my searching. I pick up Cornerstone again and, for a moment, beat myself up for continuing to be willful. Will I ever learn? Yes, but slowly. Like a rock. Like me, says Cornerstone.

I begin drumming as soon as the rain stops. I drum my contentment, my wet feet and my gratitude. I drum a prayer that my guides and teachers, my fellows, out in their tarps and tents are okay after the wind. I drum the thunder and my fear that nothing will happen, that I will hear the morning bird call but not an answer to my question. The drumming is finished. I sit down to wait.

The light of the almost-full moon comes and goes as the clouds scud across it. I am cold, wet and still too full of myself to hear anything but my own story. It is difficult to stay awake. Crying, I begin talking to the stone and juniper that hold me. I tell them about everything that has happened so far, what I learned watching the Talking Stick come to be, what the Death Lodge wraiths had to say, why I have come to sit here and wait for the sun. I thank them for their implacability in the face of my unwillingness to let things be as they are. I cry and talk until I am, for a moment, empty.

Two words. A question. Eight words. Silence.

Later, holding Talking Stick, I remember a bit of Adrienne Rich.

Nothing but myself? ... My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.

Filling up again, I pull my tarp up around my legs and watch for the Sun.
______
tags: personal, vision fast

An Insight (iv/vi)

2006-06-22T17:45:00.000-06:00

The Cornerstone of the Death Lodge is heavy and rough, rougher than the rocks around it, as if it has consciously resisted all efforts of rain and blowing sand to make it into something that fit in with its fellows. It doesn't announce itself and it isn't until I watch it for two or three minutes that I see the thin, alternating bands of blue and white that swirl around one another. Like Van Gogh's Milky Way. He agrees to be the bedrock of the place I will build. Later he would help me in other ways.

As I carry him to the place that will serve for remembering, Cornerstone describes to me the space I am to build, the way I am to enter it, how I would know that it is time to leave. Yes, this too, has its severance, threshold and return, he said. If you are willing to let the unfolding happen, the one who returns will not be the one who entered. Perhaps “too many consciously performed ceremonies can mask your essential experience”1 but this doesn't feel like too much. It feels right to be listening to a rock, to be preparing to sit on the ground and talk with spirits and demons, to be rattling and offering. How much more essential could things get then to make things right? How could I do so without asking one who knows what to do, what to do and then doing it?

The rim of the canyon is bright red as I close the north wall behind me. I rattle and drum, make an offering and sit. I remember a story that my Zen teacher told, that Zen teachers everywhere2 tell, about trying to make mirrors by polishing bricks. I don't know if I am the brick or the one polishing but I begin sitting zazen, like the old days.

Ghosts come and go. Contracts are presented. For payment. For forgiveness. For remembering. I laugh at myself. So many deals I made, so many deals.

Do you understand what is to be done? Severance is not enough. The trees along Beaver Creek rattle dryly in the evening canyon breeze.

_____
tags: personal, vision fast

catalysis (divertissement)

2006-06-22T04:06:00.000-06:00

You arrive early, as you usually do. You are having dinner with an old friend, one that (suddenly) you realized has been part of your life for a quarter-century. You can't imagine how you could have gotten old enough to have anyone in your life for that long, let alone managed to navigate with them, for all that time, the rocky shoals of friendship. Yet here you are, about to enjoy the profoundly simple act of sharing a meal. You touch the quiet joy beneath this realization and wander into the bar to wait.

As you pass the dining room, you notice several tables have been pushed together and set for a sizable group, perhaps nine or ten. You wonder if it is a birthday celebration or rehearsal dinner and, over a glass of wine, you drift and remember tables at which you have sat. You half watch people arrive, choose seats, shake hands, chat, hug.

You recognize a face.

And then another. And another. Soon the table is filled with people you know but whom you didn't realize knew one another. They seem to be on very familiar, friendly terms. You are puzzled. Given what they do not have in common, how could they possibly have come to be together?

A wave of remembering and melancholy washes over you as you realize the catalyst for the gathering. Nostalgia threatens, but before you can drop into a reverie of sorrow, your friend's hand is on your shoulder. You turn with a small smile and ask, do you mind if we walk to the place down the street? He nods, knowing well enough that he will find out why in good time.

Talking Stick (iii/vi)

2006-06-21T17:44:00.000-06:00

After she heard the news, Juniper offers the three foot limb, hairy with bark but free of leaves or berries, with a loud snap. Older and wiser than me, she sees the Talking Stick hours before I do. I want a different branch, one better suited, I think. Juniper is patient, though, and allows me to worry a couple of alternatives before reminding me, do not take what is not offered. I give some tobacco to the wind and ask that she forgive my stubborn nature.

I don't expect Talking Stick, but then, very little of what I expect to happen is happening. I sit and feel the weight of it in my hands, wondering at the way the branches join the main limb and try to figure out what I am to do next.

Stubs of once-joined branches, bark and sweet-smelling shavings grow in a pile between my legs. I try to sit quietly each time I don't know how to do something – smoothing the knots, preventing splitting as I carve, staining the bare surface to protect it, – and let the wood show me know what is needed. Rising, abiding, ceasing. Juniper branch, paring away, talking stick. Severance, threshold, rebirth. Taking the leather thong from my rattle and fastening it around the large, hooked knot that is there to hold it in place, I touch something: what would I be if I was able to let things just happen sometimes? Maybe Talking Stick will remind me. Not to expect. To listen. To wait.

Maybe.

_____
tags: personal, vision fast

The Mirror (ii/vi)

2006-06-20T17:42:00.000-06:00

The mirror rock walls of the canyon reflect perfectly: how I show and hide myself, what bugs me, what doesn't, how I move, sleep, demand, eat, shit. Whatever I present is offered, in flawless detail, for my consideration. After a while, my guides and fellow seekers start to reflect, too, as if the canyon is seeping into them, like mineral-laden water works its way into soft stone, changing them into same mirror-rock that towers above me, that glitters in every draw.

It is awful seeing this constant, perfect display of my habitual patterns, my character flaws, my defects. It is worse seeing my inability to set them aside. I try to cloud the mirror over by telling myself more stories, by beating myself up, by criticizing my guides, by judging my fellows. Anything to generate obscuring smoke. Finally, I run out of fuel. It is only now that I begin to see something else, something more completely human, something workable. I set an intention to pay attention without judging. Sometimes I do.

_____
tags: personal, vision fast

Three Gifts (i/vi)

2006-06-19T17:35:00.000-06:00

I recently returned from a week-long group and solo retreat in Utah. A canyon whose mouth lies near the Delores River. I will post some stories from my time there over the next week or so -- WCH
________________________________

A talking stick.

An insight.

A direction.

These were among the gifts I received in Beaver Canyon. There were others, too, many of them, but I won't talk about them now. I couldn't offer anything of like value in return for any of them. I worried about my lack for a while, but the Canyon reminded me it is in the nature of a gift to be without the quality of expectation; I tried to write these stories with the same intention.

I won't speak of what was contained by each gift; to name them is enough and, anyway, what they are is a private conversation between me and Reality. That, too, I learned, is the nature of a gift, especially from Reality: what it means is between giver and receiver. But I will tell you a story or two about how I received them and about the places in which they were offered to me.

There won't be a great deal of why or even how in it. Why didn't really matter much to juniper, hawk, rock or lizard. How seemed beside the point to wind, rain, sun or sky. After spending a week with all of them, I tend to agree. With that, here are a few stories about what-happened-out-there.

___________
tags: personal, vision fast

on retreat

2006-06-02T08:34:00.000-06:00

I am, or soon to be, in my truck and driving toward Utah for a wildnerness retreat. I will, I imagine, be back in a couple of weeks.
_____
tags: retreat, personal

Stuff happens - Donald Rumsfeld, SecDef

2006-06-01T17:08:00.000-06:00

It is time to bring our troops home. Whether the killings of civilians is intentional or not, when it happens like this, as often as it seems to be happening, the United States is not supporting the development of democracy with its presence but anarchy.

Women Shot Dead Racing to Hospital
Eleven, including Women and Children, Killed in Isaqhi
Haditha: Massacre and cover-up?

The second and third stories were reported after Iraqi journalists or insurgent forces released videotapes of sites where United States soldiers claim to have been in firefights with armed insurgents, claims that are looking less and less likely.

Mr. Bush, please bring our troops home. No matter how laudable your vision of democracy, can we really afford to purchase it for you with the deaths of unarmed women and children, innocent lives taken by our soldiers?
_____
tags: bush, iraq, civilian deaths, politics, opinion

cracking

2006-05-28T23:09:00.000-06:00

...open old wounds like there's nothing else to do on a saturday night, wishing i still smoked because, damn a camel would taste good right now, and wondering at the arrival of the pain even as i probe, like getting a telegram i expected but not so soon...

nothing's ever healed STOP we just get used to the pain STOP

i wish i could remember but i can't. i will always be cracking it open, grieving, looking over my shoulder, dodging the blow, protecting the sore spot, waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering why i think that there is something i have missed. but i don't so i only remember that i already have everything through the act of picking at the scabs covering the dead memories of a life that doesn't matter, like an eight-year-old knowing better but unable to resist because he wants to believe that this time cracking it open will heal it even as he knows, in his eight-year-old heart, that it won't.

searching for a last minute present
to prove to you what i said was real
for something small and frail and plastic
because baby cheap is how i feel.

half-moon in the sky tonight
bright enough to come up with an answer
to the question why
every time i see you
my love grows a little stronger

but your memory leaves my stomach churning
feeling like a light about to be revealed
but i hold all this to myself
because cheap is how i feel

without a cigarette, nursing my old wounds, wondering why the cold, dead moon can figure it out, why can't i.
____
tags: personal, cowboy junkies

borderland (remembering ts eliot)

2006-05-28T22:08:00.000-06:00

there are lines across which i do not dare. a coward, i have spent a lifetime in their vicinity, holding them with my hungry eyes. they are a unspoken promise, never kept but always remembered, a contract i wrote but refused to sign, the momument i have carved to what i am not. i live my paltry life on the edge of these borderlands and convince myself that i am provisioning for the crossing. in reality, i am only verifying my existence (limited, fixed, unremarkable) through the ache that their unforgivable, unforgettable, palpable realness provokes. i have not the courage to make my way into them, even as i know that i am nothing without them. afraid of the giving up what they require i remain, broken, on rocky ledge of my own desire:

if the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
if the unheard, unspoken
word is unspoken, unheard;
still is the unspoken word, the word unheard,
the word without a word, the word withn
the world and for the world

spent, wordless, knowing that i will not leap, drifting close enough to experience what i am not, looking at what i will never be, bound by a blindness that i have spent a lifetime cultivating, a vision of not-seeing what i dare not recognize, my heart aches tonight. where i look for courage, i find an empty heart, waiting, always waiting, to be filled with something that lies across that uncrossable border.
____
tags: personal, ts eliot

the logic of withdrawal (review)

2006-05-26T11:10:00.000-06:00

I had hoped that Anthony Arnove's new book Iraq: the logic of withdrawal would do a good job of making the case for bringing our troops home now because the anti-war movement needs spokespeople that articulate the "why" of ending the occupation simply and clearly. Unfortunately, though the book is drawing rave reviews from some (Arundhati Roy said it is "an urgent book, a complete manual for those who wish to resist the occupation.") I believe Arnove muffed the chance to construct a compelling argument that everyday Americans will buy.

In an effort to convince us of the wrong-ness of the occupation, Arnove veers into territory, such as suggesting American soldiers are war criminals and the United States owes Iraq war reparations, that most Americans won't accept and which will limit the book's power and appeal. However important it is (and it is vitally so) to address our government's failure to respect our own laws, let alone international treaties to which we are signatories, discussing this dereliction in the context of arguing for withdrawal is, at best, a distraction and, at worst will close the ears and minds of the very people that the anti-war movement must attract to be successful: everyday Americans that voted for the people that implemented this policy. Without these Americans demanding that U.S. troops be brought home, bipartisan congressional support for the occupation of Iraq will continue unabated. With them, the last troops could be home by the end of the year.

Arnove's basic premise, that Iraq and Vietnam have parallels that Americans ignore at their own peril, combined with his eight reasons supporting immediate withdrawal, provide a strong basic argument that Americans can understand. It is based on what we already know: the personal, economic and social costs of a unwinnable war in the eleven years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the subsequent fall of the government we installed in the South. We learned, from Haiti and Somalia, that we cannot stop civil wars or unrest. We know, by listening to the words of the mothers and fathers of our dead soldiers, that more killing will not ease their pain. In these things that we Americans know are the undeniable arguments for bring the war to an end now. So it is regrettable that Arnove did not focus his attention on these reasons, and make them the core of the book, rather than the material on the "history of occupation" and the "reality of the occupation", material that most Americans will reject outright.

Had Arnove focused on these issues rather than his sense of moral indignation, the "logic of withdrawal" would have been irrefutable and his book, a valuable support in the effort to convince Americans to end the war now. As it is, Iraq: the logic of withdrawal, will only be bought and read by people that are already convinced. That's a shame because they aren't really the people that need to read it.
_____
tags: iraq, war, anthony arnove, book review

bring them home (now)

2006-05-26T10:34:00.000-06:00

Like many, I believe it would be better for the people of Iraq and the United States if our troops came home now. I have never understood the argument that "while I disagreed with sending our armed forces, now are are there, we have to stay" and its foundational assumption that American soldiers, occupying a country that does not want them there, will eventually calm the chaos and leave behind functional governing institutions. Can anyone give me one example of our "campaigns of liberation" ending in a democratic government chosen by the people? History seems to tell a different story: rather than freely chosen governments, our military occupations invaribly end in repressive right-wing governments that survive (the Philipines, Cuba and Haiti) or ineffectual, corrupt and undefendable ones that fall (Vietnam) soon after our departure. In both cases, civilians suffer terribly, first at our hands and then under whatever government arises. Why will Iraq be any different, whether we leave now or in 2010?
_____
tags: iraq, withdrawal, democracy, opinion

let them keep it

2006-05-23T19:07:00.000-06:00

Recent articles in the Economist, New York Times and other mainstream news outlets explore the possibility of the Democrats retaking the House and, possibly, the Senate in mid-term elections. Republican strategists like Karl Rove have been playing this idea for all its worth in hopes of rousing their conservatives activists (who are none too pleased with Bush et al these days) and keep their majority. Rove and others suggest, for example, that Democrats would open an impeachment investigation into President Bush's alleged lies regarding WMD in Iraq, approval of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens and other mis-deeds, real or imagined. The latest news piece is in today's Washington Post: Elections are Crux of GOP Strategy. However unlikely the possibility of a Democratic win, I have a suggestion for progressives in this country:

Let Them Keep It.

That's right, let the Republicans stay at the wheel until our venerable President heads west to build his Presidential Library deep in the Heart of Texas. Let them keep the Senate. Let them keep the House. Let us remain in a state of one-party Federal government for the remaining six hundred seven days of Mr. Bush's administration. Let us, especially those of us most concerned with the state of the government, stand aside and leave Mr. Bush and his cohorts in Congress and the Courts the time to make it very, very clear who's been in charge for the last six (or twelve, depending how you count the days of the Gingrich clan) years.

I would like to suggest that there are three excellent reasons for progressives to let the Republicans win the mid-term congressional elections:

It will make clear just who is responsible for the mess that is our country today.

It will allow us time to formulate a cogent program for progressives, so that Americans can figure out why they should vote for a return to liberal democracy.

Electing a few Democrats that look like Republicans won't change anything we wish to change.

To wit:

The Republican Party, led by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and guided by folks like James Dobson and Ken Connor, have created the mess we are in: taking us into Iraq, cutting social programs, cutting taxes for the wealthy, raising the defense budget, blurring the line between church and state, diminishing our rights to privacy and property and substituting myths for science. The result is the gaps between wealthy and poor, between citizen and immigrant, between the races, between the center and coasts have grown ever wider in the last six years.

These are gaps for which the Republican party must be clearly credited. The way to make sure that they are is to let them remain in power until they can no longer shift the blame for what has happened to our country on progressives, foreigners, liberals, terrorists, illegal aliens, Democrats and whomever else they claim must "hate democracy" because they disagree with the Republican agenda.

Yet, rather than focusing our efforts on reminding people that today most Americans are poorer, that the ones who cannot escape the dangers of drugs, drive-bys or hurricanes, are in more danger, that jobs are not being lost to immigrants but to government subsidized trans-national corporations, that compassionate conservatism is, in fact, neither, let us do something different. Let us articulate what we think right and proper as government policy, put it down in writing and share it with those we wish to ask for a change in government. Let us do so even if doing so causes us to lose the mid-term elections. Let us do so because it is time to step away from pointing to what they are doing that is wrong and begin to talk about what we can do that is right.

Finally, we should let the Republicans keep it because we cannot elect, at this point, enough non-Republicans to clearly make a difference; all we can do is give them an excuse for a Congressional lockdown. Simply put, there aren't enough Progressives out there worth our vote and electing Republicans-in-Democratic-clothing or Republicans-who-aren't-quite-as-bad isn't a strategy for anything but a continuation of the social, economic and war policies we have now. Progressives not only need to formulate a clear view of what kind of government they want, they need to figure out whether anyone running in 2008 might possibly be interested in implementing it for them.

Let the Republicans keep it. Spend our energy articulating a governing vision that resonates with the values we Progressives say we support. Find some politicians that want to bring the vision into being and have the guts to support them.

Simple as that.
_____
tags: bush, republicans, democrats, progressives, mid-term elections, politics, opinion

shark

2006-05-15T23:46:00.000-06:00

i lived like a shark for years, always moving. waiting of any kind seemed like waiting for death to take me. to be still was to be invisible or worse than invisible, nonexistent. not understanding the value of stillness, i was constant motion, constant doing, constant expression. mistaking stillness for passivity -- that which waits for its end without resistance -- i converted my trembling fear into the kind of motion that is easily mistaken for achievement, especially in our culture. it wasn't that i didn't do well or help others. rather it was that my doing was not based in any sense of being-as-i-was but in my fear.

after a freak infection i could no longer move as i had. even lifting a filled kettle of water from the sink to the stove took more strength than i could muster some days; generating the sort of motion that defined me in other times was not within my possiblity. the first time this happened, i stood at the sink and wept like a child. the fifth time, i began to appreciate the lesson being offered.

i stopped but i did not cease to be. i was stunned. this, i think, was the real beginning of my training. (even my meditation practice, from a certain point of view, reflected my doing-with-fear). no longer able to do as i had done, ceaselessly to that point, i began to see that there was a difference between passivity and stillness. and because i had no choice, because doing-me was out of the question, i began to explore this difference.

i have not gotten very far in my investigation. my old ways still cloud my experience and my fear distorts it so that i often mistake stillness for passivity, and back peddle into a kind of panic'd doing. but there are glimpses, i think, moments of openness in which not-moving arises and, suddenly, there is no longer a shark, there is waiting or not-waiting. there is stillness, complete and expressive, without fear.
_____
tags: meditation practice, stillness, personal

knowing

2006-05-14T09:19:00.000-06:00

knowing is the pure essence of waiting. it is distilled in the fire of patience; only those confident of their alchemical skills ever taste it.

motivation (waiting)

2006-05-13T07:47:00.000-06:00

as near as i can tell, my life motivations have been mostly fear or the need for approval. when i look back at what has driven me forward, whether in schools, jobs, beginning relationships or ending them, it is often difficult for me to find much more than fear or approval behind my choices.

fear of failing, of being alone, of being suffocated, of not-being-good-enough, of not-being-liked, of violence, of boredom. the fear list goes on and on. i worked lousy jobs, stayed in bad relationships, let myself be abused or abused myself and generally stayed in awful situations far longer than was healthy for me, all because i was afraid.

same for approval: my parents, my peers, my bosses, my partners, my teachers, my lovers. i spent a life time looking to others in order to find myself. as existing at all seemed in question, existing well didn't seem an option. i allowed myself to be defined by what others thought important, what they decided i should be because the alternative seemed to be, well, nothing.

fear and approval. i know that i am not completely free of them (all you have to do is read anything i write about the political situation in which we find ourselves today to see a fearful me) but they don't have the hold over me that they once did. i wonder what comes after they are gone? what will make me go?

i wonder what comes after, what will move me forward now that the energy of fear and approval no longer powers me as it has for so much of my life? it is like trying to start my truck in the morning and discovering that, magically, my reliable old gasoline engine was replaced in the night; of what has replaced it, i do not understand its workings nor what sort of fuel will power it. there is something there, to be sure, but i do not recognize it.

and until i do, until i am able to find that which makes it go, it sits. waiting.

like me. waiting.
_____
tags: motivation, waiting, personal

One Hundred Posts (Paydirt!)

2006-05-09T20:52:00.000-06:00

as you know, i have been wrestling with insomnia for a few weeks. exhausted and brain-fuzzed, i could see no good that might come of my exhaustion, no good at all. i tried everything. home remedies. sleeping aids. all night web surf-a-thons. i attempted to read some of my homework assignments but even this old standby failed.

so, in desperation, i tried reading blogs. your blogs. the blogs you read. the blogs of the blogs that you read. i read hundreds of them. maybe thousands of them. i thought myself mad but i could not, in my sleep-addled condition, stop. i was a man posessed.

and now i know why.

i have discovered the root. the very center of creation. that from which all blogs flow.

it is here, in this unassuming blog. i am honored to share it with you.

all the sleepless nights, all the bad writing i read, yes, even the thumb nerve damage from all that clicking is worth it.

i can die a happy man.

it gets worse (1:48am)

2006-05-09T01:37:00.000-06:00

because now, having read every post in every one of your blogs, i am now clicking on, and reading, all the blogs you read.

i so depended on you to have a blogroll that i could breathlessly explore on desperate, sleepless nights like this. you, of all my blog friends, would be sure to have a collection of thought-provoking, uplifting, educational blogs for me to ponder. a spiritual respite. a bloody good yarn even. i am stunned.

no offense but gawd, your taste is much worse than mine. i had no idea. really.

i am going to be up the rest of the night just trying to fathom the import of my discovery.

a horrible thought flashes... what would i find if i visited your profile and start clicking on your interests...
_____
tags: blogrolling, insomnia, pointless, personal

brain fuzz

2006-05-09T00:37:00.000-06:00

the last week of school. the last papers turned in, except for one. only seven term papers to grade and a whole day to get them done.

so going to bed at ten seemed a no-brainer. especially since i am physically exhausted and barely able to keep my eyes open.

lights out. brain on. brain on like an old tube radio stuck between two far-away all night talk show stations.

bits of the article that i read earlier in the evening for that one-last-paper, the bass beat from one of the songs on cafe ibizia (volume two), a very short telephone conversation i had tonight (unabridged), lojong slogans from today's exam, a to do list that i won't remember in the morning but which seems pretty damned important at this moment, the first two lines to a poem i am working, flashes of other before-the-fire may nights...

well, you get the idea.

its forty minutes past midnight. so what do i do? pick up systemic treatment of families who abuse? nope. make a pass at those yet-to-be-graded term papers? no-can-do. try and find an ambien? of course not. i wander downstairs, pop my laptop open and begin wandering through my bil list, that is blogs i like, an ever lengthening list of the stuff i read when i am not reading my stuff. so that's what i have been doing. reading your blogs. each and every one of you. i promise.

some of you are incredible writers. some of you are less so. but good, bad or indifferent, tonight i read you with the enthusiasm of a twelve year old boy who has found his dad's lost stack of penthouse stashed behind a case of forgotten iron city beer. that is to say, hopefully. relentlessly. without qualm and with great anticipation. tonight, i appreciate you in ways you cannot imagine.

but for you, i would have a four page hypertext-linked to-do list covering the years of 2006 and 2007 done by now.

i am eternally grateful.

_____
tags: blogrolling, insomnia, pointless, personal

why nothing is personal

2006-05-03T17:39:00.000-06:00

reality, like politics, is local. any concensus that exists between you and me as to the nature of the world is simpy a convenient agreement that we each find to be, for whatever reason, useful.

consensus, however helpful, is optional. we, collectively and individually, decide to construct reality in a certain way and so it is constructed. those who choose not to particpate in its manufacture we label psychotic, visionary, moronic, pathetic or prophetic as is our want. that it appears to be a certain way to so many of us in any given moment is, in the final analysis, rather amazing given the circumstances of its making.

______
tags: reality, practice, personal

almost done

2006-05-02T20:39:00.000-06:00

about two weeks ago i was sitting in class, minding my own business, when an instructor reminded me that i had four papers to turn in before the end of april. nonchalantly, i jotted down a little list of papers due, with page count, due in the same time frame.

eleven papers.

one hundred twenty pages.

two research papers. a thesis proposal. my internship final report. seven other assorted chunks of writing, big and small.

i considered pleading the fifth. i pondered taking three incompletes. i wondered if i could turn the seventy or so credits i already had into some other masters degree. or a bartending certificate. i wondered if it was time to make manifest my lifelong dream to hitchhike around the world.

two weeks and one hundred ten (not including bibliographies, title pages or footnotes) pages later, i am a mere six pages away from completing the semester.

except for the seven exams, seven term papers and fourteen reflection papers that i have to grade this week.

sigh

see you on may 10th.
_____
tags: graduate school, survival, moan, personal

losing my footing

2006-04-24T07:11:00.000-06:00

dawn waits. terror is a bone-tension, unreleasable. knowing that the ice will not hold me, not unaware that the water beneath is deep (too deep) and finding the safe, solid earth ten feet behind me anyway. being able to swim will not make any difference, so it is a small matter that i don't know how. listening for the crack! to the wind, to the scrape of my boots against crusty snow, to a cacophony of why, why not, why, the endless questioning, the i am afraid. keeping my balance is if walking a tightrope, looking down to see a surface a thousand times wider than my bootprint, waiting even as i am carried forward. walking toward the clear smooth spot that i watched the darkness take before sleep had its way with me, without any idea why it seems to matter so much that i stand upon it, even if for only a moment.
_____
tags: dream, personal

nothing personal

2006-04-22T18:44:00.000-06:00

it is the hardest thing for me to remember, that it is not about me. ever. when the tornado appears on the horizon, i can shake my fist at it and rant or get into the fruit cellar with gramma and kids and wait 'til it passes over. the tornado? same thing either way, me in the cellar or out, tornado gotta blow.

the tornado is just doing what tornadoes do.

people aren't really any different, you know. they are just doing what they do. the angry ones are being angry, the loving ones being loving, the indifferent ones...

well, you get the idea.

when i forget this, that people are just doing what they do, that they aren't loving me up or running me down because i am special or because somehow i matter, i get handcuffed to my pain. just as the world comes together in a certain waym, causing a tornado to spin whether there's a house to blow over or not, some people love and other people hate, whether i am in the line for kisses or blows or not. its nothing personal even when i choose to stand outside rather than head for the cellar.

when i remember this, even for a moment, i glimpse the awesome beauty of people, i see them as they are, as forces of nature. it is an incredible sight, seeing them angry like thunderstorms, violent like tornadoes or indifferent as a summer day. they are forces of nature. they love, rage or turn away, apathetic, and it is nothing more or less then them expressing them.

perfect. not a thing to change. just as they are.

_____
tags: meditation, true nature, personal

nothing special

2006-04-16T23:35:00.000-06:00

he sees things about people and the situations in which they find, or place, themselves. it can cause great pain because he hasn't learned how not to hang on, how to give up believing that he can do something other than witness. because he takes things personally. he has not yet learned to just see.

because seeing is so often disturbing, because he cannot do anything about what he sees, he denies what is happening. when he does acknowledge things-as-they-are, he usually does so poorly, and what others perceive of as arrogance is really an inadequate attempt to overpower the rawness. he cannot yet help either his ignorance or arrogance. he doesn't know, more or less, that seeing isn't really anything special, that everyone is raw, that there are only broken hearts.

_____
tags: meditation, vipashyana, tonglen, personal

go listen to this

2006-04-15T18:53:00.000-06:00

my friend and dharma brother jake labotz is one awesome musician and this is his fourth incredible album. you won't hear this stuff on clear channel. way too dark, way too honest, way too good. don't believe me? listen to a little bit of tiny or lost child and you will see what i mean.

hear jake here and if you are ever in lax, go catch him playing live.
_____
tags: music, jake labotz, personal

nothing in my pockets (still dreaming)

2006-04-13T00:00:00.000-06:00

i turn from the guard box and press my hands against the rough, high, sloping wall to which it is attached. i was in there. i want to push the wall over, i want to get back inside.

or at least a part of me does.

i let it try for a while before turning away. the space around me is open, endless and filled with people, people with things to do, moving from there, going over here. moving around me. it is not quite as if i am something to get around, like a bus shelter or an old man sleeping on a grate, i am more than that. but not much more.

i know that i could turn around and walk through the wall behind me but i my mouth tastes of the world of suffering it would create and so i do not. i stand and watch. suddenly my awareness is above me, above the crowd, taking the whole thing in. the sea of people goes on forever, is movement itself.

i stand and watch. i may stand and watch forever. i don't know why i might move from this spot or why i might not. not-knowing, i turn slowly in a circle, watching the motion, watching the part of my mind that wants back in, that aches to reclaim what was left behind, curious. what will happen next? smiling, i realize that i am not waiting for anything in particular but, then, i am not not-waiting either.

spacious. curious. nameless.

completely alone, forever and always.
_____
tags: dream, personal

true lies

2006-04-12T13:03:00.000-06:00

the latest indication that bush knew that iraq had no WMDs but continued to say that it did.

there seems to be reasonable evidence that an american president lied to the american people in order to maintain support for a war that he wanted to prosecute whether or not anyone else thought it a good idea. would any reasonably qualified district attorney empanel a grand jury on the strength of allegations of a similar strength? would a reasonable law enforcement officer investigate the allegations of similar strength, if of a different nature, to discern whether or not charges are warranted?

i am not a lawyer and i am not a cop so i don't know for sure, but i have been around enough of them to think so.
_____
tags: bush, iraq, chemical weapons, lies, politics, opinion

new man (dreaming)

2006-04-11T21:16:00.000-06:00

i am on a gurney, in a hospital gown, in the middle of an otherwise empty and sterile room. not quite a cell but even from where i lay i know that the door is locked from the outside. it is very late and the building is quiet, waiting.

i am being wheeled down a long hallway. i seem to know where i am going though in this moment i could not have told you. anticipating. hopeful. anxious. there are two women with me, both in hospital blues. they are quiet. tense. poised.

we are in another room, this one with a one-way window. the window is behind me. i can see a clock, high on the wall. the women are preparing two intraveneous solution bags and a needle, which one of them pushes into a vein on the back of my left hand. i don't feel any pain.

the first solution will make you unconscious. the second will stop your heart.

i am not strapped down and there are no guards. i am afraid. the women are too. but i don't struggle and they seemed resigned. as the clock strikes the hour, one of them triggers the iv. my vision goes black.

i am standing outside, along a wall, uncertain. the sun is blinding. i am in well-made clothes that i do not recognize. i don't know where i am or how i got there. i don't have a wallet or any kind of identification. there is a guard, standing in a windowed box outside the gate. i ask about me and am told that i was executed seven hours ago, at midnight.

i don't exist any more. i am nobody. for a moment i am as terrified as i have ever been.

i am free.
______
tags: dreams, personal, freedom

when all you have is a hammer

2006-04-09T10:57:00.000-06:00

all the world looks like a nail.

with two apparently endless conflicts (mr. bush has acknowledged that bringing the troops home from iraq will be another president's job) already sapping our country - not to mention bringing unspeakable suffering to those we are allegedly liberating - the administration is exploring a military strike "option" in iran in an effort to convince that country's government that we are serious about curbing their nuclear ambitions.

in another time, under a different kind of administration, i might see such planning as sabre rattling, designed to make a point but unlikely to result in american troops being placed in harm's way. unfortunately, this administration's literalist bent (do we need any better examples than afghanistan and iraq?) means that a plan made is a plan put in motion. this is not a group of men (sorry ms. rice) that plans without the intent to act, let alone one that seeks to learn from the mistakes they have made. it is hard to imagine messrs. bush, cheney and rumsfeld letting the sorrow and anguish that has resulted from their mistakes to cause them to wonder if, perhaps, they might use a tool beside armed force in their quest to remodel the world in their image.

mr. bush, what if iran turns out to be, not another nail, but a blasting cap?
_____
tags: bush, middle east, politics, war, opinion

sealed manila envelope

2006-04-06T00:33:00.000-06:00

no one can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.
edward murrow

after a week in retreat i decided to take my ease by watching a movie. of a certain age, i do not look for comfort, moral direction or certitude from hollywood; depending upon a movie as anything other than a good yarn and an excuse to eat well-buttered popcorn is the domain of children and fools. but about twenty three minutes into good night and good luck, when edward marrow began talking about the "sealed manila envelope" i was reminded how much our time is like that time. when rights like habeas corpus are seriously threatened -- as they are now -- does it really matter whether it is a fake red scare or a fake terrorist menace that is the excuse for taking them away? you don't think it is? why? because such things are only "suspected terrorists" and "enemy combatants" are the only ones denied such things?

watching good night and good luck forced me to question, again, what i do to combat the gradual erosion of my freedoms. on one hand, being a privileged white, educated and employed male, i am not likely to be one of the profiled or questioned (i am decidedly without arabic features or name and unquestionably loyal by dint of my race, age and money, right?). so why should it matter to me? i have nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying or doing anything that might move me from privileged to not-so. on the other hand, the erosion of liberty is difficult to halt once started. how long before "suspected" organizations come to include those in which i was once a member or support now? how long before publicly believing in the wrong ideas gets me on a government surveillence list? how long before being economically well-off, white and male won't be enough?

i allow myself to believe that voting against bush is enough, that giving money to amnesty international and the aclu is enough, that speaking my mind publicly is enough. i allow myself to believe that i am, by these acts, not responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves, as others before me thought themselves immune to mccarthy and the ravages born of the fear of communism. they thought themselves not responsible for mccarthy, a grasping charlatan that they did not vote into office nor support once he arrived. they saw, as turned out to be true, the congressional hearings he conducted (not the first nor, i am afraid, the last that will look for "unamerican activity") as nothing more than a cynical, clever grasp for power. they didn't think it would last.

it doesn't sound so different from now, does it? we live in an era of constant yellow and red alerts that seem more a public relations gimmick than an indication of our relative safety. our friends are going to jail because they dare to say that what is happening in our country is wrong. the administration, congress and courts that are supposed to represent our interests are working to enshrine the president's alleged disregard of wiretapping laws with legislation that retrospectively legalizes actions that might in other times be cause for impeachment. and you, your friends and your family might be caught in a dragnet for suspected terrorists, randomly stripped-searched at an airport because of your support for a suspected terrorist organization or jailed without access to a lawyer because, american passport or not, someone decides you are an enemy combatant:

The September 18, 2001 Presidential Miltary Order gives the President of the United States the power to declare anyone suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism, as an Enemy combatant. As an Enemy combatant that person can be held without charges being filed against him/her. Enemy combatants can be held indefinitely without charges or a court hearing and are not even entitled to legal consult. (from wikipedia)

this is what is happening in our time and even if it doesn't happen to you or your family, do you want to have it happening in your name?

in the 1950s, mccarthyism thrived because people of sound mind allowed power-hungry small men and their minions to distort a fact - that our democracy was being challenged by stalin's soviet union - into a nightmarish story that populated the world with fellow travelers sworn to the task of turning the united states into a gulag run by robotic communist functionaries in the pay of the politbureau. in the first years of the twenty-first century, people of sound mind are allowing a group of power-hungry small men and their minions to distort another fact - that a small and dangerous group of men want to supplant the ideal of liberal democracy with theocratic rule in the islamic world - into a nightmarish story that populates the world with millions of swarthy-looking, suicide-bomb-wearing, america-hating foreigners, intent on destroying christianity and our way of life and completely capable of doing so. it was wrong then. it is wrong now.

stalin was dangerous then and, yes, osama bin laden is dangerous now. but what mccarthy did to our civil liberties in the name of purging communism from the halls of government had little to do with destroying the "red menace" we thought existed then and what bush is doing now to those same liberties in the name of "stopping the terrorists" will have little to do with destroying the fundamentalist islamic menace we think exists now.

we are being told - as we were told then - that we have to give up our freedom in the defense of freedom. does that make sense to you? if it does not, what are you going to do about it? we are being told - as we were told then - that we have nothing to fear if we have done nothing wrong. but is that how liberty is supposed to work, that our freedoms are contingent upon someone else's suspicions regarding our character? now, as then, we will be called fools, bleeding heart liberals, treasonous or worse for suggesting that the price we have been told to pay (for we have not been consulted by those that have presented us with the bill) for the illusion of safety is too high, that the fact - that a dangerous group of men hate us - has been distorted into a nightmare that is being used to destroy what we value most.

look, it is easy to say that no one is will notice if you and i take a stand. history is, after all, much bigger than either of us. but mccarthy and his ilk did what they did to so many people for so long because people like you and me - educated, intelligent, comfortable people - let him get away with it. people like us knew that what he was doing was a perversion of our values and we let him do it anyway. maybe stalin was the monster under our bed or we thought our democratic institutions wouldn't stand the likes of joseph mccarthy for too long or we figured that someone else would speak out so we wouldn't have to. whatever the reason, people just like you and me let him do what he did for far too long.

but others did speak out. we were lucky to have them stand up for us.

what do you think? would you have been a pinko in 1956? is osama bin laden knocking from the other side of your bedroom closet door? is the illusion of safety that karl rove, the bush administration and the republican-controlled congress offer worth the loss of your civil liberties, values and self-respect? is the fear of another terrorist attack, of being labeled a fellow traveler who is "soft on terror", of hoping that bush, delay and company will found out and shown the door sooner rather than later, of imagining that someone else with less to lose will stand up, giving you an excuse to stay quiet?

are you an accomplice?
_____
tags: politics, bush, mccarthy, communism, radical islam, democracy, opinion

found (network upgrade)

2006-04-05T11:53:00.000-06:00

nick changed his name to albert (though he was instantly recognizable by his accent), sent me a new modem that i don't need and charged me for a month of dsl service that i didn't have, along with one hundred hours of dialup service that i didn't use. but my dsl service is up and running again, six weeks and approximately nine hours of customer service muzak later, so what the hell.

of course, my voice service was disconnected in the process so i can't make phone calls any more, but that's another story.
_____

tags: earthlink, qwest, dsl, personal

re-entry

2006-04-03T10:28:00.000-06:00

i thought this time would be different. it seemed like it was. the moment of re-entry, even after a short retreat, usually finds me slow and level. i find trying to read, writing, return or pay attention to my to-do list pretty much pointless and prefer to spend my time sitting in one of the big, worn teak chairs i have on my porch to paying bills or returning phone calls. but driving back i seemed, well, normal. i thought about what i needed to do after my saturday class, made a mental list of appointments and meetings to schedule, even pondered my thesis and some writing that i wanted to convert from retreat-scrawled notes into something readable so i could post it.

i thought, wow... i am finally used to being in short retreats. no post-retreat hangover!

wrong.

i have spent the last two days wandering around my house in my sweats and t shirt, mail unopened, email and voicemail unanswered. not a single to-do list item crossed off. every time i pick up a textbook, i sigh and set it back down. papers to grade? maybe later. taxes? the 15th is over a week a way. you get the idea; post-retreat hangover big time. my lack of interest is stunning, even to me. once again, i thought i had it figured it out. once again the lineage reminds me - oh so gently - that i haven't a clue.

i know i left my appointment book around here somewhere...

E MA HO!
______

tags: retreat, meditation practice, personal

retreat

2006-03-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

maybe the lack of an internet connection - and the silence it has imposed upon me - was prepatory. spring break has arrived and so i am departing for ten days of solitary retreat. no people, telephones, faxes, emails or blogs. just me, a cushion, a bag each of oatmeal, rice and beans and a fair-sized pile of carrots, onions, potatoes and peppers. i am looking forward to it even as i hold my usual assortment of retreat anxiety, neurosis, fear and trepidation.

i wonder if i will have anything to say when i get back?

____
tags: mediation practice, retreat, solitude

lost (network upgrade)

2006-03-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

held hostage by the whims of the technical support group, resigned to the place of the damned and disconnected, a place without wi-fi where the word online is never uttered...

fallen into a world in which i cannot touch the web, a world that holds my words but does not allow me to spew them into cyberspace, i weep and long for a time when earthlink remembers that it has condemned me to a loss of service, when the powers-that-be remember that network maintenance is supposed to be a temporary state of being and not a new and permanent reality and so reunites me with my beloved port, a time when i will no longer wander the streets of boulder hoping against hope to encounter a wep-free network, and a time when the torrent of my precious bits will once again mingle with the great stream that is the blogsphere.

alas, it is not clear when this time will come. my new friend nick (he of the new delhi accent), holder of soothing words and little useful information, whose only power is to offer a free month of service (an offer of small meaning to one who is lacking not a credit card but a connection) says that it will be soon and i do my best to accept his word, for he is kind and doing his best even as he is telling me a small untruth about his name.

but for all his kindness, i admit to him that i am full of doubt. i tell him that i have been offered these hollow words before, yea, many times i have heard them. worse, i say, i remember. i remember when i was nick, i was the technical support guy, verily, i remember when i said, don't worry for your connection will be remade soon and yet, like nick, i knew that i uttered meaningless words for i knew not.

and so i wander, laptop on the seat beside me. i wander, knowing, as the police officer notices the strange, dim, grayish light filling the interior of my cold, dark truck cab and approaches, slowly, cautiously (my thumb sliding over the pad toward publish post and tapping gently), that this too, shall pass though i know not when.
____
tags: personal, dialup, technical support

practice (reading master Dõgen)

2006-03-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

Eihei Dogen Kigen Zenji is one of my root teachers. He died almost eight hundred years ago. While he was alive, he practiced meditation while he composed poetry, letters to followers, meditation instructions and monastic instruction manuals. Most of all he wrote Dharma talks for his students. These Dharma talks are Dõgen’s marrow. Some of them are collected into a four-volume (in English) work called Shõbõgenzõ or The Eye and Treasury of the True Law. While we often do not know what inspired them, we can assume that most came into being as Fuganzazenki (his instruction on zen meditation) did: as a response to a question from a student monastic or layperson.

Dõgen wrote using classical, court and dharmic Chinese intermixed with court, vernacular and dharmic Japanese. Trained in Japanese and Chinese monasteries, he knew and taught from the Sutras and Vinaya as well as any senior monk. Born and raised in the Kamakura court, he studied Japanese literature. He worked with sutras, folk stories, personal experience, kõans, allegory, metaphor, legends and puns. He switched from one form of writing, one language, one dialect to another in mid-sentence if the change served his purpose as a teacher. He anticipated Burroughs, Joyce and Elliot by seven hundred years. He translated dharma material from one language to another freely, re-making the material in unusual and surprising ways. Most of his essays were constructed from notes taken from his talks by his senior students and the collection itself was edited and published after his death. All of this makes Shõbõgenzõ a beautifully rich, complicated and difficult-to-understand Dharma text.

Its difficulty, complication and beauty apparently mattered little to Dõgen. For him, language was upaya and sparking insight was more important than literary convention, conventional commentary or literal translation. Yet nothing was wasted. Dõgen was neither cryptic nor ornate and he wrote as he experienced the world: directly. He wrote as a teacher, not as a writer, he wrote as if he had a snake on this lap, as if he had swallowed a red-hot ball that he could not cough up. His writing is beautiful not because he tried to make it that but because it was the only way it could be made.

We, unable to speak the languages of twelfth century Asia, without the training of a Japanese monastic, unskilled and without much insight (but struck by the power of his words) seek to understand a little of Dõgen. Confused, without a store of knowledge of the sutras or kõan collections, yet sensing that his words are a moon lighting our path, we wonder if there is a way to make something of our time with him.

There is, but first it requires us to read as he wrote, as if we had a snake in our lap or as if we have swallowed a red-hot ball that cannot be coughed up. Dõgen cannot be read casually. He cannot be read if we are not willing to practice. But most of all, Dõgen cannot be read if we are not willing to stew in our confusion, ambiguity and uneasiness. Reading Shõbõgenzõ will not quell our fears, ease our uncertainty or give us a place to settle into. Even the most casual reading tugs at our shaky stand enough that we realize this. To read Shõbõgenzõ means to read it as it was written, with nothing added or taken away, as directly as we capable.

Reading Dõgen also requires that we train ourselves. He cannot be read if we are not willing to study the ground of his teachings. As Dõgen drew from the Tathagata-garbha, Madhyamaka and Yogãcãra teaching, so must we. If we do not exert ourselves and gain a little of Dõgen’s understanding of the Dharma, we will not penetrate even the surface of his teachings. Thus in reading Dõgen, we must see that these three as the ground, path and fruition of his practice.

Dõgen’s ground is Tathagata-garbha, the Buddha-nature. It pervades him so completely that, in Busshõ, he re-makes the opening lines of the Nirvana Sutra to read, “whole-being is Buddha-nature”. There is no place that is not this ground and, as a result, Buddha-nature perfumes all of Dõgen’s reality. But this Buddha-nature is no-Buddha-nature; it cannot be grasped and is outside any idea we might have of an essence, the eternal or the created. It is not a ground that we can stand on but there is nothing that is not it. To really have a glimpse what we Dõgen is offering us, we have to go back and study the Samdhinarmocanasutra and the Uttaratantrasastra. To really see it, however, “We must know that the ‘possess’ of ‘totally possess’ is not related to possession or non-possession.” We must consider this deeply, study it and manifest it if we are to read Dõgen.

Dõgen’s path is Madhyamaka, but it is a practitioner’s, not logician’s, Madhyamaka. It is not a logic designed to win debate but one that asks us what we are holding on to in our practice. Nãgãrjuna and Aryadeva are Dõgen’s ancient masters but they make their way into his writing, not as scholastic philosophers, but as mahasiddhas for whom words are upaya. In Shõbõgenzõ, they confront the inadequacy of our ordinary use of words. Dõgen, with these teachers as his guide, takes apart words, word by word, revealing their nature to be relative, illusory and ultimate and yet, without contradiction.

“The Fifth Patriarch said, “You say I have no Buddha-nature because Buddha-nature is empty.” and Dogen answered:

Be careful here; don’t interpret empty as meaning nothing. If you seek to clarify the emptiness of Buddha-nature, avoid light expressions, rather speak of the finality of ‘no’. When we say empty we do not mean empty; likewise when we say no we do not mean no. We say no because Buddha-nature is emptiness. Through no used as a standard, we understand emptiness, and through emptiness we understand no. Emptiness here differs from the emptiness of ‘form is emptiness’ ‘form is emptiness does not mean form is transformed into emptiness or that emptiness is transformed into form. This emptiness is that of emptiness is emptiness. Within this solid rock is emptiness.”

Dõgen takes everything designation we hold – “time”, “being”, “Buddha”, “sentient beings”, “emptiness”, “fruition” – and illuminates them one by one Asking us what it means to be mean empty when we do not mean empty, he gives us an opportunity to let go of emptiness. Each letting go is path, the way that brings about the fruition of practice-attainment.

Dõgen’s fruition is the Yogãcãra of practice-attainment, a demonstration of our right understanding that all beings are Buddha-nature, empty of all concepts. Helping us to see the Tathagata-garbha, he then offers us the path for carving away what hides this essence, thus opening the gate to fruition: practice-attainment. This fruition is not “doing anything” or “accomplishing anything”, it is:

“the essential point is to practice Buddha without trying to become Buddha. Practicing Buddha is not becoming Buddha, thus it becomes the actualization of enlightenment.”

This is the practice-attainment of Dõgen, the practice that is not practice and completely and only practice. He said it this way:

“The essential function transmitted from Buddha to Buddha is the dynamic element passed from Patriarch to Patriarch. It is actualized in not-thinking and appears in equanimity. Actualized as not-thinking is actualized as self-awareness. Appearing as equanimity appears as self-enlightenment. Actualized as self-awareness is undefiled; appearing as self-enlightenment is beyond relative and absolute. Undefiled is awareness, awareness that relies on nothing, and is thus liberation. Beyond absolute and relative is enlightenment that has no definitions, and is thus real practice. The water is pure to the bottom and the fish swim like fish; the vast sky extends to the heavens, and bird fly like birds.”

This is the heart of Dõgen’s practice-attainment and what our reading, when we are reading with exertion, as if our hair is on fire, as if Dõgen were sitting in the room reading to us, can point to. Dõgen’s Tathagata-garbha illuminates the gate of the practitioner’s logic but we must pass through it and into practice-attainment on our own. It is only in this way that we discover the self-practice-attainment that reading Dõgen reveals has been ours all along.

Hoping that other people will find the dharma gate of Dogen's tireless efforts, I wrote this.

_____
tags: dogen, zen, practice, personal

even in water

2006-03-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

there is the possibility of fire.

you look me as if i am mad. water quenches fire. everybody knows that.

mad or not, this is so: water is made from fire.

to see the essence you have to take chances. you have to be willing to handle acid, play with electricity, risk an explosion. you can free the fire. even from the heart of water.

but freedom has a price.
_____
tag: personal

not ready

2006-02-28T17:19:00.000-07:00

i didn't talk much about it because who would understand what i experienced unless they, too, had been there? and if they had, nothing need be said.

i couldn't find my body, let alone open my eyes - whatever they were - like they were telling me to do. yet i could hear the intensity in their words as they tried to figure out what was happening; what was listening? i imagine that there must have been time there even if there wasn't any here, where i am, where i am time has stopped or, more likely never begun.

i remember being terrified. i remember thinking, all that practice and i am still not ready, and suddenly feeling incredibly incredibly sad. i remember an undercurrent of angry curiosity, of wanting to leap and wanting to stay. i remember wondering why dying seems so ordinary and whether i was or if this, too, was just another story i was telling myself.

all at once, i feel my throat and something in it that wasn't supposed to be there and light was pushing on my eyelids (eyes!) and so i lifted them up to let them rest. i tried to tug at my ventilator and they held my arms (lightly, lightly like spirits) and i felt the tension drain out of their hands and over my forearms, soaking the bed.

last night. soaking the bed again. tears this time. remembering, i realize. i am still not ready.
_____

tag: personal

yachat

2006-02-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

the water and the wind crash against the cliffs, with noisy fury, as if they need to remind themselves of their power. the rocks give way slowly, gracefully, without a hint of rancor. you would never know, from watching, that the water will fill that space, too. the rock doesn't seem to change at all, the waves are always different.

yet water always wins.
_____

tags: personal

dun (thirty-three)

2006-02-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

there are no words. it is not that there is nothing left to say but that there is nothing left with which to say it. the chasm between experiencing and writing is vast, deep and dark. it cannot be spanned, at least by any skills of mine. i am told that it is the season of withdrawing, to give the thing between its life, to honor silence, to allow this, too, its time.

waiting. the hardest thing of all. waiting, even if waiting is the only thing i ever am.
____

tags: personal

nothing else to say

2006-02-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."

Abraham Lincoln

Prophets and Quartermasters

2006-02-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

If A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. were the prophetic voices that powered civil rights progress in the forties, fifties and sixties, Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin were the engines that moved it forward. The civil rights movement demonstrates what can happen when the prophetic voice and the strategist come together. The prophet’s spiritual energy and voice cannot denied but he or she remains in the wilderness unless the call is transformed into a movement. Such transformation requires a personality of doing that is not typically part of the prophetic temperament; this is the job of the organizer and strategist, the person I call the quartermaster.

Leaders like King, however charismatic and visionary they are, don’t build sustainable movements. The logistics of managing a year-long bus boycott or bringing together the resources to allow a quarter-million people to converge on the Lincoln Memorial for a peaceful rally take a different kind of talent. Prophets may birth movements but it is clear that the background person -- the organizer -- keeps them alive by attending to the critical business of logistics, money, strategy and tactics.

The evidence shows that the sheer organizational complexity of events like The March on Washington and the Montgomery bus boycott hinders viable social movements unless the prophet meets the quartermaster. It seems clear that movements have a “voice” and a “back office” and, for reasons that will soon be clear, I wanted to know about the people that I didn’t see, the people that didn’t make speeches or appear on television. I wanted to know who they were and why they do what they do. Who were the people that bought the airline tickets, arranged the press coverage and trained the masses?

I began my study of the civil rights movement with much different intentions. I was in the last phases of a fifteen year career as a mainstream, amateur activist. I sat on boards, created new economic development programs, raised money for worthy causes and helped to start a social venture fund. But I came to realize that by working within the system, I was actually reinforcing rather than eliminating the structural poverty, racism and violence that I grew up in. I watched helplessly as the original intention of programs in which I worked was washed away in a sea of politics, power dealing and ego aggrandizement. I discovered that I was making little real difference on the ground because the power structure that brought my programs into being was more interested in “negative peace” than “positive justice”.

Worse yet, I realized that I had become part of the root cause of the suffering these kinds of programs perpetuated. This was devastating, especially since I had spent my adult life becoming part of that very power structure. I had believed that I would be able to help people by investing my professional capital in social change. I was wrong. This realization originally drove me to study the civil rights movement. I hoped to figure out why what I had tried to do wasn’t working.

I also knew that the usually-proposed alternative – overthrowing the system “by any means necessary” – was not the answer either. I grew up in the last years of the sixties and seventies. I saw firsthand that “the system” was too big and well-armed to be set aside by force and, in any case, I could not support answering violence with violence. I also understood that almost all of the people and movements who sought to topple the system had nothing more in mind than replacing one sort of hierarchical power with another. They didn’t seem to offer anything but a different version of the same power dynamic at the heart of institutionalized suffering. If being in the system was a bad idea, this alternative seemed much worse.

Based on the little that I knew of the civil rights movement, I thought its history might show me a way between these extremes. It seemed to me that the leaders of the movement, especially in the late fifties and early sixties, charted a path that incorporated nonviolence and compassion by proposing an alternate future of mutuality. If my intuition was correct, studying how they did what they did would help me to chart my own way forward.

Because King was the most visible manifestations of the movement, I initially focused on his biographical history and writing. My first lesson was that things were more complex than I supposed. While much of popular writing and filmmaking on the civil rights movement can make it seem as if King brought it into being and sustained it single-handedly, more balanced treatments locate him within a web of organizations and people that prepared the ground for him and dealt with many of the plain and daunting practicalities of organizing, funding and guiding the movement. I discovered, as I noted earlier, prophetic voices power social movements while the quartermasters, the makers of this web, sustain them. With this in mind, I began to pay as much attention to the people behind the scenes as I did to King and the others on the podium. This is when Bayard Rustin first came to my attention and I had little idea how important he would be to my own path.

Rustin was relatively unknown outside the movement until the publication of Lost Prophet by John D’Emilo and the PBS airing of Brother Outsider, a documentary on Rustin’ life. He is mentioned, almost as an aside, in Claybourne Carson’s Autobiography of Martin Luther King and appears briefly, during March on Washington, in the seven segment civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize. Even Taylor Branch’s two volume study of King and the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire, barely mentions Rustin. I was quite surprised to learned that Rustin, who appeared to be a fringe player in the movement, was instrumental in the founding of the first Journey of Reconciliation and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the primary organizer of the March on Washington . I was also quite encouraged. Finding that the movement was sustained by people like Rustin, people not on the podium but behind it, addressed the biggest obstacle I had uncovered in my own path.

Simply put, I know that my talents are not of the prophetic sort. I had learned through painful trial and error that I am more the quartermaster than the charismatic speaker. My path of service, whatever I might wish it to be, is more likely to involve making sure that the microphones work than it is to stand in front of them. Though I have exhibited some talent for leadership, I know there was no path for me as a prophetic voice. Discovering Bayard Rustin brought a different path to light: the way of the organizer, strategist and tactician that builds the platform upon which the prophet stands.

Rustin, like other behind-the-scene players, managed the movement’s logistics, trained its members in the theory and practice of anti-racism, pacifism and nonviolence and engaged in direct action himself. He was in the front lines but rarely on the podium, well known inside the movement and little seen outside it. He was, without being the visible face of the movement, one of its leaders. He, and others like Ella Baker, brought organizations like SNCC and the SCLC into being, raised money to keep them running and showed their leaders how to build the infrastructure necessary to make them viable. And it was out of these organizations that movement campaigns against institutional racism and violence were waged. It is safe to say that without the Rustins and the Bakers of the movement, it would not have accomplished nearly as much. But Bayard Rustin’s life was also to give me guidance in another way, guidance that I didn’t suspect I would need when I began my study of the civil rights movement.

Rustin’s life took on a completely different direction after his arrest on a morals charge in 1953. Before his arrest, Rustin was a rising star in the anti-war and anti-racism movements. He was in demand as a public speaker and educator on nonviolence and racism in the United States and Europe. Protégé of AJ Muste, well known in the tight-knit New York world of social activists and carrying an arrest record for de-segregation activities as early as 1930, he had a resume that marked him as a front line leader in the civil rights and pacifism movements. Being caught by the Santa Monica police in the back of a car with two young men would negate all of these hard-won accomplishments in a few moments.

Muste and other leaders in FOR could abide Rustin’s sexuality as long as he kept it under wraps. A public, and publicized, arrest of a “leader in nonviolence” on a morals charge was too much for his Christian peers; Muste demanded his resignation and banished him from the American pacifist community. Rustin’s credibility as a speaker and leader was destroyed. It was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Historians like D’Emilo argue that the anti-war and anti-racism movements lost their most articulate voice when Rustin was pushed back stage. I think that they gained their most important organizer and strategist in the bargain. Moreover, I think that a careful reading of Rustin’s biography and writing show that Rustin’s banishment gave him the freedom to focus on what loved and what he did best: teaching, organizing and strategizing. Free of the shackles of the label ‘movement leader’ he was able to move between projects and organizations with few constraints; he contributed as he was inspired and in ways that best exercised his particular talents. Rustin’s crisis was the gateway to his accomplishments for the next thirty years.

No longer able to depend on the sinecure of Muste, Rustin threw his energy into organizing, fundraising and strategizing for Philip Randolph and the War Resisters League. Rather than becoming a bitter and marginalized outsider – as often happens – Rustin blossomed as the consummate back office contributor. Much of the progress that the civil rights movement made can be directly attributed to Rustin’s expulsion from FOR and his subsequent focus on organizing. For me, this is the most important part of Rustin’s story. Discovering that one of the leaders of the civil rights movement had found a way through a personal crisis that destroyed his power base was incredibly freeing.

I began my study of the civil rights movement because I realized that the work I was doing as a part-time activist was contributing to the structural violence, racism and poverty I was dedicated to eradicating. To stay true to my values, I had to found a way between the extremes of gradualism and anarchy. Finding this way fueled my first research into the civil rights movement. As my study deepened I learned that movements are borne on the prophetic voice and sustained by organizer. To effect significant societal change, both must be present. I also came to understand that any contribution I might make was going to come out of my skills as an organizer. I had chosen Bayard Rustin as a person that I might emulate because he seemed to me to embody a combination of skills and temperament not that different from my own. I only began to look how he dealt with his crisis when my own came to be.

While I was studying Rustin, I faced my own crisis: being forced out of the company I had spent much of my adult life building. Being tossed out of my partnership and suddenly finding myself outside the circle of power I had inhabited for years demolished any pretensions I had that I might be able to “choose” my path. With the loss of my position in my firm, I no longer had a platform or mentors. All of my assumptions about “being of service” were founded on the exercise of institutional power. I no longer that power and no idea of how to be helpful without it. This is why his story has been so powerful for me. I not only found confirmation that the organizer – a role that I could identify with -- stands next to the prophet, I discovered a person that came into his own after a personal crisis destroyed his ability to ‘succeed’ in predictable ways.

Rustin’s willingness to accept responsibility for his part in his “downfall” was as instructive as his ability to see the hypocrisy of Muste and the other Christian leaders of FOR. He demonstrated that our principles are more important than where our name is printed in the rally program by stepping in where he was needed. He had developed enough clarity about himself to realize that doing the work is more important than being right. Over the rest of his career, he made significant contributions to the civil rights, anti-war, anti-poverty, nuclear disarmament and gay rights movements, without ever being considered a spokesperson or leader of any them and it didn’t seem to bother him at all. For me, this speaks louder than any writing he might have done about his principles or beliefs. He simply lived them.

I didn’t know that I would learn all of this, or find such a compelling role model, when I began to study the civil rights movement. I also didn’t know that I would come to the conclusion that most activists probably have more in common with Bayard Rustin or Ella Baker than Martin Luther King or Thich Nhat Hahn. While I resonated with Rustin’s experience and resolution of crisis, my suggestion that we see him as a role model is based on how much he looks like most social activists. We should study King and Thay, learn from them and even aspire to their greatness but we would do well to choose people like Rustin as our role models. They are more reachable because we are less likely to make them into saints; they look too much like us for that.

Our life stories and our talents are more likely to echo Rustin’s story than those of the people that we typically view as leaders in social action. We are less likely to meet the President of the United States and more likely to be thrown in jail during a direct action. We have more in common with a man marginalized by his race, sexuality and failures in personal judgment than someone we lionize as a prophet. We are more likely to be found stuffing fundraising envelopes, organizing buses to a protest or orchestrating a rally than we are to be interviewed on Meet the Press. We are simply more like Rustin than King and more likely to be of service to others if we take his lead and invest our lives in organizing, teaching, strategizing and sustaining.

To see ourselves as more like Rustin than King does not mean that we have to sacrifice the idea that social activism is borne on the wings of the prophetic voice but it does require us to remember that the wind upon which it rides comes to be because of people like him, those who build podiums rather than stand behind them.

We could do worse for role models.
_____

tags: civil rights, martin luther king, bayard rustin, ella baker, personal

path

2006-02-15T18:40:00.000-07:00

Imagine an old piece of furniture, perhaps a bureau. You see it at a yard sale and discern something fine under the paint, varnish and lacquer, under a lifetime of layers, under the places where it has been bumped, dropped, well used. It demonstrates its history implicitly, the days and years spent moving from room to room and house to house, its drawers a storehouse of plans, thoughts and secrets, its surface a reflection of stories told, bills paid, letters written and not. It has spent many hours around children and adults, been emptied and filled, stored away and found again, used as a desk, a tool bench, a place to store old scrapbooks. It is a story, revealed and hidden.

Loading it into your truck, you aren't really thinking of all that. No, you have a thousand ways to make it valuable and beautiful again; what purpose, all that history, to you? You know, somehow, that there is something fine under all those layers. You imagine how it will reveal itself after you remove all the paint, varnish and lacquer, after you repair all the old injuries to its surface. You know that you can make it perfect again.

In your garage, you eagerly address the work that you perceive needs to be done. You cannot wait to finish the job and show off your refinishing skills. You are already planning where you will put it and how you will use it. You are already explaining to your friends how you accomplished this very difficult task and how you knew what a find there was underneath it all. You imagine how quickly things will go now that you have begun.

Soon, difficulties arise. The old paint is more stubborn than you imagine; releasing the bond between each layer often requires tools and methods that you do not have and cannot imagine. You find yourself asking friends, reading books, experimenting. How do I do this? You struggle and are often painfully frustrated. You cannot imagine why you ever thought this was a good idea. You consider giving up the project, and more than once, begin dragging the bureau out to the curb to leave for the next fool. But you always stop, you always remember the promise that you saw back at that yard sale. In spite of the difficulties, you cannot let go of it. So you begin again.

Progress is so slow. The work will never be finished. You are certain that you will rub and rub and rub only to find that whatever is underneath isn’t worth the effort and time you have invested. You contemplate having your own yard sale. Then, unexpectedly, the grain of the wood appears, first in one place, then another. It is just a glimpse, but it is enough, for what you encounter in that moment is fine and worth the effort you are making. So you continue, leaving each rare moment behind, hoping that there will be another.

Slowly, and often for reasons you do not fully understand, a layer lets go to reveal the one beneath. Each is a revelation and a secret. Each is intimately bound to the layer before and after. Each must be addressed appropriately; the choice of sandpaper or steel wool or turpentine can only be decided by clearly understanding this layer in front of you in this moment. You learn that paint has many forms. You learn what it means to find a correct method for each as it appears.

Time passes and you realize that you have forgotten how long you have been working. You care less about finishing or what drove you to start than you once did. You begin to find that each layer is complete in itself, that each layer reveals less a challenge than a lesson to consider and learn in its own time. You see the bureau differently now or maybe, you think, you just see.

Because you have worked with it as you have, you begin to understand, intimately, the days and years it spent moving from room to room and house to house. Somehow now, you are its storehouse of plans, thoughts and secrets, you reflect its stories told, bills paid, letters written and not. The hours, emptiness and fullness; storing and discovering; the time as a desk, a tool bench, a place to for old scrapbooks, all are yours now. That paint, that history, is now revealed and hidden in you, in your muscles, your nerves, your memory. It is that part of you with no words.

You laugh as you consider how important it was for you to get rid of all that paint, how important it was to make this bureau new and beautiful again. You wonder when you realized that it remained, through all your sanding and rubbing, worrying and thinking, planning and doing, just a bureau, that there was nothing to be added or taken away from it after all. You cannot, but are glad that you did.
_____

tags: practice, path, meditation, personal

cartoon violence (interlude)

2006-02-08T22:11:00.000-07:00

The Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, announced a contest to find the twelve most offensive cartoons about the Holocaust. The newspaper wishes, it says, to see if Western newspapers are willing to defend as free speech a view of the Holocaust as offensive to Jews as recent cartoons depicting Muhammad were to Muslims.

Interesting question. I imagine that most Western newspapers will take the same approach with the Harmshahri cartoons - if they are ever created - that they have with the Jyllans-Posten cartoons: lament the content while defending their right to publish it, but who knows? Maybe the editors of Hamshahri are right and the Western world will tell them that their freedom of the press rights don't extend to such material.

Somehow I doubt it.

But here is the more interesting question: if, upon seeing such patently offensive cartoon published, will Jews rally in capitals around the world, attempt to kill Muslims and burn down the embassies of Iran, Syria and other suspected supporters of the Islamic Conspiracy as recompense? Or will Danish, Norwegian and Swedish governments tacitly support the destruction of those embassies in their respective capitals by standing aside as mobs toss firebombs? Or will Jewish religious leaders incite their followers to more extreme violence, including rampaging through minority communities, by creating and including even more offensive images and bundling them with those to be created by Hamshahri?

Somehow I doubt it.

Postscript -- As Bird reminded me in her comment, the original cartoons were published in Jyllans-Postenin last September. Islamic political leaders didn't figure out how to use it to their advantage, apparently, until December.
_____

tags: cartoons, iran, iraq, jews, muslims, violence

living with the rich man

2006-02-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

(a parable in four parts, second verse)

the rich man, of course, did not live by himself. there were other people in his compound and while they were not as well off as the rich man, living on his side of the walls did have advantages. when things were going well, those that lived with the rich man - let's call them the compounders - lived pretty well. in fact, they lived so well for such a long time that they forgot how the compound came to be and why it was so wealthy. since they couldn't (or didn't want to) remember that they hadn't really built it all themselves, the rich man invented a story for them and it went like this: the compound's wealth was the result of their superior way of living and nothing else. that the compound was rich and the village was poor was the natural order of things.

nobody, not even the villagers, questioned the rich man's story, at least until the devil moved into town. to be fair, the compounders more than pretended this story, they really believed it, especially since it helped them to imagine that whatever trouble the village was in, it must be the villagers' fault. if the villagers were beginning to think that this wasn't the natural order of things, that must be the devil's fault, too. after all, everything seemed just fine before he showed up.

(the rich man, of course, never told the compounders that he had invited the devil up from hell to help out with a little problem in the village. so the compounders blamed it, of course, on the villagers for asking the devil to dinner and this gave them another reason to believe that they were Right and the villagers, Wrong.)

so when the rich man called the compounders together to tell them that the devil was inciting the villagers to destroy their Very Way of Life, they were inclined to believe him, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt. the rich man might be a little strident but, after all, it seemed quite clear that those inside the walls were Rich and those outside, Poor, and it was easy to see that it was because our Way was better than their way. when the rich man suggested that the best way to protect their Very Way of Life, was to give a little less money to doctors and teachers and hire a few more guards, it made a great deal of sense to everyone involved.

even when the rich man said, in the name of Security, that he needed to bend the rules that guided life in the compound, the compounders went along. after all, the rich man wouldn't do anything that wasn't absolutely necessary for Security (he said so, didn't he?) and if a compounder didn't have anything to worry about then changing the rules wouldn't matter, would it? the rich man also promised that as soon as Danger had passed, things would return to normal but to remember that this was an Emergency and would be one until the devil was driven away and everyone knew their place once more. so the compounders sighed and said, it doesn't seem quite right but what can we do? it will only last for a while.

unfortunately, the Emergency never seemed to end. in fact, things only seemed to become more and more dire. why, the news got worse every day and it seemed that Terrorists - a terribly deadly creature, that the rich man said, though the compounders never, ever actually saw one - must be hiding in almost every village closet, bus station and polling booth. things were so bad that, after a while, the new, temporary rules seemed rather permanent as did the fact that the compounders couldn't afford a good doctor any more and their children weren't really educated as well as they used to be. but, the compounders signed, that is what one did to preserve our Very Way of Life; they make sacrifices. if a compounder noticed the rich man's house in the compound was starting to look like a compound, too - with only the rich man inside - he or she didn't say anything. and if a compounder disappeared once in a while and anyone asked about it (which they did less and less) the rich man would nod knowingly and say, he was one of them, and end the conversation.

as time passed, smart compounders put their heads down and concentrated on making money and being as Patriotic as possible so that no one would accuse them of being a Security risk. But that became more difficult, too, since no one but the rich man knew just what a Security Risk, let alone a Terrorist, really was.

and that was just how he liked it.

rich man: a parable
____

tags: politics, parable, fear, security

rich man

2006-02-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

(a parable in four parts, first verse)

i know a rich man who lives in a large and elaborate compound at the center of a village. his home is beautiful and it is filled with many works of art and technological marvels. it is always warm, well-lit and filled with the sound of music and laughter. the kitchen, too, is a marvel; the man and his people have plenty of food and wine with every meal.

oddly, though, the house is surrounded by high, thick walls. there are only a few ways in and each is barred by heavy gates patrolled by large, angry dogs that bark and growl fiercely. you look at all the guards and find it hard to understand why someone with so much would need so many dogs and guards or why he is constantly spending money on alarm systems, bigger, tougher, scarier dogs and the ever growing number of people he hires to watch the village. you might almost imagine that the rich man is trapped in his compound and you might wonder how that could be.

but if you spend a little time watching the rich man you would wonder less and if you lived in his village for a while, well, you wouldn't wonder at all. you see, the rich man gets almost everything he needs from outside his compound. even the money he is using for his new moat and searchlights comes from outside. he heats his house with fuel from the village and his beautiful furniture and jewels are made from trees, gold and diamonds that he gets from there, too. even his food and much of the money that he is using to build his walls and hire his guards comes from the village, too.

now you begin to understand. of course the rich man is afraid. everything he needs to live the way he does comes from outside his compound. he knows that he takes far more than he really needs to have a satisfying life but he so used to living the way that he does that he can't seem to help himself. of course he is afraid; he is completely dependent on the village. he is terrified that someday they will figure out that maybe things don't have to be this way or that he needs them more than they need him.

but the rich man is smart. he figures that if he builds his walls high enough and makes his dogs fierce enough then he will be safe if the people on the outside get angry about the situation. and if he pays just the right people in the village, people that will tell him when the village is angry, he will still have access to all those things he needs, like wood for his stoves and money to pay his guards.

after a while, though, these things don't hold back the rich man's fear. most nights he can't sleep because he dreams that the people in the village have figured out that the rich man is fed and warm and they are hungry and cold. he imagines that the village gets so angry about their poverty and his wealth that it decides to stop lending him money for his walls and dogs. in his dreams, his village spys decide that their community is more valuable than the rich man's bribes and the village decides to keep its food and wood for itself rather than sending it to the gates of the compound.

the rich man can see that the village is getting restless, the villagers are starting to question the order of things. the rich man could cut back on his lovely lifestyle and still have plenty but frankly, he can't see why he should. the village has always supplied my needs, he thinks, and i am damn sure that it keeps doing so or there will be hell to pay. that gives the rich man an idea and so he calls hell and asks for a little help. after a little bargaining he gets it. a little brimstone, a cadre of demons in the square and a couple of days later, the village is a bit worse for the wear - hey, a little collateral damage is to be expected - but not so restless anymore. the rich man thanks the devil for his help, give him a bag of gold and shows him the front gate.

but the devil just smiles. he says, you know, you have such an interesting place here that i have decided to move in for a while. who knows, maybe i'll teach the villagers how to raise a little hell, too.

and now the rich man knows what it is like to be really afraid.

living with rich man: a parable
_____

tags: politics, greed, security, parable

reclaiming king (long post)

2006-02-04T22:56:00.000-07:00

Michael Dyson, in I May Not Get There With You, argues that the Martin Luther King we talk about today is not the Martin Luther King that led the civil rights movement. As Dyson puts it, King “was no namby-pamby, we-shall-overcome-at-all-costs integrationist who advocated blindness to color...He was capable of calling a spade a spade, and accordingly, he mocked the self-righteousness of many white liberals by calling them racists, too.” But this is not the King that contemporary textbooks and comfortable liberals imagine as “the moral guardian of racial harmony”, a sanitized and unthreatening saint of equality and pacifism, the King of the “I have a dream” speech.

The mainstreamed Martin Luther King is a poor substitute for the man that described racism, social inequality and militarism as the “triplets of social misery”, who wrote “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” and who continually critiqued capitalism and economic injustice. The human King is radical and prophetic. The saintly King obscures the power of radical social vision. We must fight this obscuration if we want to manifest that power and stem the tide of today’s suffering, suffering that is rooted in the very racism, materialism and militarism that King fought. If we are to make a difference in this world, we need to set aside the King presented on public television and hear his uncensored, human and prophetic voice clearly once again.

Bringing this King back into our consciousness is critical in a time when, as Murray Bookchin notes, “ ‘radical’ is an odious mockery of three centuries of revolutionary opposition, social agitation, intellectual enlightenment and popular insurgency.” Our social movements have largely lost the radical, life-affirming energy that King embodied. We have fallen into the trap of substituting technique for idealism. We are good at televised, meaningless mass action and lousy at personal sacrifice, deep technologists and shallow thinkers, long on rhetoric and short on attention span.

To bring our movements back to life, we need to re-align ourselves with the Martin Luther King that wrote:

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy, now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to end the long and desolate night of slumism. Now is the time to have a confrontation between the forces resisting change and the forces demanding change. Now is the time to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

This is the King of Amos 5:25, radically prophetic and uncompromising in the Old Testament sense. Even when this King speaks of Jesus, it is not the Jesus of redemption-in-heaven but the Jesus that drove the money changers from the temple. When this King talks about the Cross, he does not present “Jesus suffering for our sins” but Jesus demonstrating the power of sacrificing our lives for our beliefs. King’s Jesus was a poor Jew, a member of an oppressed minority who chose to actively resist domination. He was a prophet that looked much like the people he sought to serve. It is this Jesus, a Jew willing to risk his life for ideals, not the Sunday school Jesus, that King sought to emulate. This is why King’s voice echoes Exodus more often than the Sermon on the Mount and has more in common with the prophecy of Isaiah than the testimony of Paul.

This is the King that I want to remember and the King we should take as a model. I want to bring this King to light because significant social change is only possible when social movements are powered by a prophetic voice like his and because I believe that this voice has been missing from the movement for many years. We must recover our prophetic witness if we hold to lighten the long, dark night of oppression. King, the Old Testament prophet and radical son of Jesus, lit a torch that held that darkness off for a while. We must learn from his prophetic witness and learn to light another.

King’s interactions with his community and the power structure that oppressed it reflected the Old Testament view that oppression is neither natural or supernatural but a form of disorder in God’s Kingdom. King saw the unjust and unsupportable misallocation of power and economic goods in the South (and eventually, America) as evidence of this disorder. Segregation and black economic oppression, which almost all whites and most blacks viewed as the natural order of things, King denounced as an aberration of God’s intended order. He gave the black community a way to voice their pain and rise out of their numbness. This assertion - that things are not working - is the first act of a people throwing off their oppressors and the signature call of the prophet. King makes this call over and over again in the letter from Birmingham Jail, but no where is it more clear than when he says:

We have waited more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights...Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

The prophetic voice always speaks in vivid images that make the pain of the oppressed impossible to dismiss. Bringing that pain into public view is politically subversive because it gives lie to the power structure’s assertion that things are workable as they are. But King did more than preach about the pain; he made sure that it appeared in the living rooms of middle class Americans who preferred to pretend it did not exist. He did not sugarcoat what was happening to his people and pointed directly at the hypocrisy of “decent” Americans, especially in the clergy, that let such conditions exist:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block is not the White Citizen Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice...”

King’s charge echoed Isaiah’s reminder to the priestly castes of Israel that it was their duty to “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” King’s prophetic call reminded the clergy of their role in oppression and demanded that they come into a more true relation with their vocation.

Ultimately, the prophetic voice speaks because God has assured the prophet that his or her voice will be heard. King’s “kitchen table conversion”, like the meeting with God of every reluctant Old Testament prophet, was this assurance. It shaped the rest of his life. King may not have wanted the prophetic role but, like Moses, he could not deny the voice that told him to “stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.” The night that King spoke at the St. John A.M.E Church, announcing the Supreme Court order desegregated local bus service, reflects this knowledge and calls attention to God’s place in the struggle:

There have been moments when the roaring waters of disappointment poured over us in staggering torrents. We can remember days when unfavorable court decisions came upon us like tidal waves, leaving us treading in the deep and confused waters of despair. But amid all of this we have kept going with the faith that as we struggle, God struggles with us, and that the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending toward justice.

King makes clear that he knows that his peoples’ suffering is heard by God and that God suffers with them. But he does more than that, because he assures them that the suffering God hears their cry and will answer. When the community hears this and comes to trust that it is true, the prophet’s voice becomes their voice and their call the prophet’s call. Accepting this call, King commits to his people as God has committed to him. The people can believe that it is through him, in his prophetic role, that God hears their cry.

King understood that the hoses and police dogs of Bull Connors, like the crucifixion of Jesus, “stripped the powers of the last covering that disguised the towering wrongness of the whole way of life their violence defended.” He also understood, as he expressed in the letter from Birmingham Jail, the soul-killing effect of supporting the absence of tension when what must be called-for is the presence of justice. He exempted none of the complicit, however distant they might be from the center of oppressive power. In his message, he teaches us that we must be willing to be spokespeople for the pain that we see and we cannot exempt those that, however well-meaning, contribute to its perpetuation. We must commit to the presence of justice even at the risk of protracted and painful conflict. We must be, like King, the voice that will not be silenced.

But King also tells us that we must couple these teachings with the faith that pain, once expressed, will eventually be healed. King’s prophetic theology assumed that the chaos and hatred of segregation could be replaced by a world in which “all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” King’s prophetic message, like the message of the Prophets, offers a path to redemption now, not in some future existence. Our witness to pain must be leavened with the understanding that this world is redeemable within this lifetime.

Once the prophet and the community understand that pain expressed in this world is heard and addressed by God, it develops ritual that recognizes and incorporates this knowledge. In the Old Testament, this recognition is captured in the songs of Israel’s cry for help and God’s answer. For Black Americans, it was captured in the reworking of the old Gospel songs like Eyes on the Prize into the songs of the movement, the use of churches for movement meetings and the pulpit for movement preaching.

This reworking makes the recognition of pain and its expression a historical event that cannot be forgotten by the next generation. King took this reworking a step further by ritualizing the act of accepting imprisonment as an act of witness. When he extended this ritual to the children of Birmingham, he gave it a strength that guaranteed the next generation’s stake in what was being fought for and the cost of fighting. He wanted to “give to our young a true sense of their own stake in freedom and justice.” Nothing that King did could more certainly guarantee that the young would not forget. The children that marched in Birmingham were infused with a “foundational critical restlessness and a refusal to endure disorder passively.” They, like King, would never be the same.

Finally, King realized that black rights would not be secured if the entire community, black and white, did not allow its healing to remove the artificial boundaries that caused the pain in the first place. King did not want white America to treat black America differently. He wanted all of America to live differently, to live as a society in which the racism and hatred that he fought was not possible. Like his lineage teachers, he sought not the destruction of his oppressors but their revelation as equal brother and sisters:

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society that can live with its conscience. That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.

King knew that if only part of the community healed that no one would be whole. In preaching from this knowledge, he fulfilled what Walter Bruggeman calls the definitional act of oracle: to move directly from a critique of an unacceptable present to an alternative, workable future. As Bruggeman describes and King demonstrated, prophetic vision requires more than the courage to call attention to the actions of oppression, it must offer an alternative that reveals the equality of oppressed and oppressor. The truly prophetic voice sees past the pain of the current situation and into what is possible when the pain has addressed.

King was able to help people see that they could resist oppression without violence because he believed that he had been affirmed by a loving and nonviolent God. He gave them a voice for expressing it and a way for God to work through their actions to remove it. He helped those same people to see that redemption was not in the next life, as they had been taught as Christian slaves, but in this one. This King taught:

It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee... Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be.

King fully participated in what his preaching brought to himself and his people. He could do little else, for the power of the prophet to make his people believe arises out his own belief that his is a call that cannot be denied. He voiced his peoples’ pain and showed them the way to hear their cry answered. He gave them ritual and a way to remain in community during periods of great suffering. He was willing to, and eventually did, give his life to his prophetic calling.

This is the King that we who wish to ease the suffering of oppression need to remember, study and model ourselves after. To honor King, do not need to name streets after him or declare a national holiday in his name, we need to fire our social work with the prophetic energy that he brought into being. We must commit to King’s understanding that “basic social change may require the labours and dedication of a lifetime.” We must recognize, as King did, that dedication requires the sacrifice of our comfortable self-righteousness and the safety of our often-privileged place in society. We must find, no matter how small or local the cause, our own prophetic calling. This, not flashy mass action or pretty websites is how to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.

What the powers-that-be most fear is that we will discover our own prophetic voice as King found his or that we will heed the steady, fearless prophetic call as King’s people did. We must recognize that to be called is to challenge the system, not in big ways but in small, to name oppression as oppression and to demand that things not remain as they are. This is what King did and asked others to do, to follow the path of Isaiah, to choose to set free the oppressed and break every yoke:

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then light will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: here I am.

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness and your night will become like the noonday.

The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a scorched land and you will be a like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

_____

tags: politics, martin luther king, prophetic, opinion

not so easy (long post)

2006-01-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

In 1963, Thich Quang Duc sat down in a Saigon square in full view of bystanders, monks and journalists, allowed a combination of diesel fuel and gasoline to be poured over him and struck the match that caused his death. Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk in his late sixties or early seventies, was the head of ritual for the United Buddhist Church. He and the monks that assisted him were well prepared when he entered that Saigon intersection. He had written a letter to the Diem government asking for an end to the persecution of Vietnamese Buddhists. When his demands went unanswered, sacrificed his life.

In 2002, Ayat Akhras, an eighteen year old woman blew up herself and two Israelis outside a supermarket in Jerusalem. She was in high school studying to be a journalist, engaged to be married and a member of a family that taught her to “love others”, yet she put on a vest packed with explosives and detonated it in a supermarket packed with children and teenagers. She was apparently well-prepared and willing to sacrifice her life for the Palestinian cause when she left for school that morning. She left behind a video in which she chastised Arab leaders for standing aside while Palestinian women worked and died in the resistance (New York Times, March 31, 2002).

Thich Quang Duc and Ayat Akhras are our brother and sister in a suffering world. On the surface, their actions are very different. Underneath, however, it is not so clear. If we don’t look deeply, it is easy to see one as a saint and the other as mad, to call one bodhisattva and the other, murderer. We feel better by making judgments but judging does not help us diminish the suffering at the root of their actions. If we really wish to alleviate suffering, we have to do more than analyze people like Duc and Akhras or put them into neat boxes with labels like “disturbing” or “inspiring”. We have to set aside labels, look deeply into their actions and come to know them intimately. We have to work to see that Duc and Akhras are us and we are them in the most inseparable way. Having a glimpse of this is the starting point of alleviating suffering. Before we are this intimate with Thich Quang Duc and Ayat Akhras in this way, we can be no more than blindly compassionate or condemning of them.

That is not to say that we should set aside critical analysis. Ayat Akhras and Thich Quang Duc were manifestations of a complex social, political, spiritual and emotional world. They were born into, experienced, learned from, lived and died in that world. If we want to become intimate with them, we must begin by knowing something of their world. As Thich Naht Hahn says about the self-immolators in Vietnam:

I wouldn't want to describe these acts as suicide or even as sacrifice. Maybe they [i.e., the actors themselves] didn't think of it as a sacrifice. Maybe they did. They may have thought of their act as a very natural thing to do, like breathing. The problem [however,] is to understand the situation and the context in which they acted. (The Raft is Not the Shore, 1975)

To understand them we must, “understand the situation and context in which they acted.” Our understanding must “take into account the utter complexity of human action as well as the many scales of analysis on which participants and non-participants describe, interpret, understand, and explain these actions.” (Manufacturing Religion, 1997). Understanding the context in which people act is important to developing this kind of intimacy.

But however carefully we work, we will never become fully intimate through mere analysis. We may be able to describe the flowering of their suffering -- their life and the act that brought it to an end -- but we will not uncover its root. To become intimate, to get to the root, we have to look more deeply. We have to take our analysis and let it soak in to us. Doing this, we get closer to the root of suffering. Contemplating in this way, we find intimacy rather than the dead end of easy judgment.

As we look more carefully at Thich Quang Duc’s life, we see a man who watched his land destroyed, his people maimed and killed and his sangha brothers and sisters persecuted. To get this sense, we can read stories like this one in Lotus in a Sea of Fire:

In the province of Phu Yeh, there were fifteen cases of forced conversion [to Catholicism], three cases of calumny, and threatened liquidation directed against the Buddhist population, three cases of arrest, torture, and liquidation, one case of the live burial of two Buddhists in the same tomb (Lotus in a Sea of Fire, 1967).

From this we can imagine that Thich Quang Duc knew of dozens or hundred of incidents like this. We begin to get a sense of his suffering. When we read a book like Learning True Love and learn that young Buddhist social workers were killed by pro-government forces for the crime of helping war-ravaged villages, we are getting closer to the root. If we deepen our understanding of his experience and sit with it, what we share with him becomes more clear. We are beginning to open ourselves to Quang Duc as our suffering brother.

Ayat Akhras, too, watched her land and people being destroyed. She lived in a refugee camp, steeped in the myth, history and daily lives of the Palestinian people. In the month before she set off her bomb in Jerusalem, a neighbor was killed by Israeli troops in a sweep operation:

[...]the uprising that began in September 2000 started to touch her life directly: her brother was shot and wounded by Israeli troops. Three cousins, all members of Hamas, were killed in the Gaza Strip. And a close family friend and a member of Fatah, was shot dead while planting a roadside bomb near a Jewish settlement. Her anger peaked when the Israeli Defense Force rolled into the Dehaishe camp. On the evening of March 8, a neighbor was playing with his daughter in his home when he was shot through the window by Israeli troops (Newsweek, April 8, 2002).

In Ayat’s world, death and martyrdom are, like the poverty and ruins, everywhere:

The walls and shutters facing the lane are covered with stencils and posters depicting previous martyrs. As in other places where poverty meets dense population, little children find their space to play in the lanes and alleys of the camp. No doubt they will soon see Ayat's face all around them (Newsweek, April 8, 2002).

If we study what is happening in Palestine and Israel, we begin to get a sense of Ayat’s world. When we sit with what we are learning, it becomes more difficult to see only Ayat’s act and ignore her suffering. We begin to see that she, too, is our suffering sister. It is less easy to label her a terrorist and leave her behind.

Thus we learn to take the product of our study and analysis and begin to contemplate it. We can decide not to draw conclusions, not to make decisions but just come back to the reality of their worlds. As we contemplate, it becomes easier for us to imagine the situation that someone like Ayat or Quang Duc found themselves. We should contemplate their worlds until it is clear that we no longer know what we might do in similar circumstances When we are no longer able to label them as terrorists, agitators, saints, martyrs or bodhisattvas, then we are beginning to know the suffering that brought these acts into being.

How do we understand self-immolation at this point? What does the idea of detonating a bomb in a crowded supermarket mean to us now? If we have truly begun to look deeply into the world out of which these acts have arisen, our judgment has begun to drop away. We will find it difficult to name these acts as good or bad and we will feel both the pain that they were rooted in and the pain that they caused very deeply. We will find it impossible to separate their act from their world of war, killing and destruction. We will begin to touch directly into the pain of these acts but we will not be able to separate it into the pain of the actor and the people that he or she affected. We will find that we can no longer name victims and perpetrators. We will only see the suffering.

Thus, the act drops away. We are now wordless, past condoning and condemning. Analysis is behind us, no longer important except as a means to bring those who suffer into sharp focus. Ayat Akhras and Thich Quang Duc are more than our sister and brother. They are us and their actions are our actions. We are the monks that pour the diesel fuel onto Thich Quang Duc and the seventeen year old woman that died when Ayat Akhras pushed her button. We can finally begin to understand what Thich Naht Hahn means in the poem, Call Me By My True Names:

I am the 12 year old girl, refugee
on a small boat,
Who throws herself into the ocean after
being raped by a sea pirate,
And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

Having let of judgment and labels, we are able to see deeply into the nature of the suffering of Ayat Akhras and Thich Quang Duc. Sitting with this, we are able to practice what the Buddhist tradition calls exchanging self for other. Breathing in, we take on the suffering of Ayat Akhras as she puts on her backpack of explosives. Breathing out, we give her our peaceful surroundings. Breathing in, we take on the fear of Thich Quang Duc as he enters the square. Breathing out, we give him our homes, free from war. Breathing in their suffering, their pain and fear. Breathing out our freedom, safe surroundings and peaceful lives. We put ourselves in their place and offer them ours. We recognize their suffering and our desire to alleviate it. We are becoming truly intimate.

Exchanging ourselves with Akhras and Quang Duc, breath by breath, we discover that we are the bomber and the bombing victim, the monk and the policeman that clubs him. We are more than just connected, we are inseparable. Out of this insight, our ability to truly alleviate suffering first appears. Without this intimacy, we may try to help but our compassion will be colored by our judgments and ideas. By following these steps; studying a situation from many angles, contemplating what we learn and using what we have learned to become intimate with the people and suffering involved, we can let go of our judgments and become truly intimate with their suffering.

This does not mean that we need to attain complete intimacy before working to make it un-necessary for Ayat Akhras or Thich Quang Duc to do what they did. It also does not mean that we should study and contemplate for a very long time before we feel qualified to take action. We do enough to be sure that we are not jumping into a situation without seeing what is needed. We contemplate as we work and we stay open to new information that can help us to see more clearly and deeply. We return to the practice of exchanging self and other often to maintain our intimacy with their suffering and our ability to help alleviate it. We will know if we are not doing enough of this study, contemplation and meditation if we find ourselves jumping to conclusions or acting on judgments.

Thich Quang Duc and Ayat Akhras are our suffering brother and sister. As we study and contemplate we find that they are not so different from us. We see that their suffering cannot be separated from the suffering world in which they arose. As we meditate and practice exchanging self for other, we see that who is killed does not matters as much as “there is killing”. When Thich Quang Duc and Ayat Akhras our brother and sister, their suffering is no different from ours. When we are intimate with them, we are neither inspired nor disturbed by their actions but respond to them with compassion; we do not need to condone the action nor do we need to condemn the actor. Without labels or judgments, we do what needs to be done.
_____

tags: compassion, politics, palistine, vietnam, practice

already gone

2006-01-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

it was like opening a closet i thought long empty and finding a diary, in the corner, in the darkness, its last pages unused, like picking up a a page torn from a composition notebook that i saw in the gutter and turning it over to find a suicide note, undated and unsigned. coming across your journal here was like that, and it was other things, too. it was a place i had never been but knew in my heart. it was despair and joy. it was an echo of my dreams, of what i have wished for and lost and that which i never hope to gain. as i read your poems i wondered whether it was always like this, this darkness that seemed, to me, to envelope you like a dank blanket of pain. i wondered how it came to cover you and whether you were ever able to cast it aside, whether you ever blinked against the sun or felt the rain on your skin. did you ever taste a smile or laughter? you must have, i thought, because we all do. and then i read some more and i wasn't so sure anymore. i read and i cried and i thought this shouldn't happen to anyone. it shouldn't be this hard.

you were more than alone, you felt abandoned by everyone that you cared for and for reasons that you did not truly understand. you knew what it was like not to be alone and that broke your young, aching heart more completely than you ever imagined possible. you could not bear it and you wrote hoping to ease your pain, hoping someone would hear, that someone would tell you that it is enough that there is sun and rain, that being alone is what we are, that self-hate wasn't the only reference point for existence. i wanted to tell you these things, wanted you to know that somebody heard you but by the time i found you, you were already gone, leaving behind only that one, last poem, the unfinished one in which you imagine that you can still imagine something different.

i go back there, even now, hoping that you returned to finish your poem and i conjure a world in which your cry was answered even i feel your never-to-be-filled hollow in my gut and know that you aren't coming back, that those last pages are empty for a reason.
_____

tags: personal

silience is betrayal

2006-01-26T00:24:00.000-07:00

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy,especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty.

martin luther king spoke these words from the pulpit of the riverside church in new york city in 1967. i encourage you to read the text of his speech; what he calls us to consider is more important today than ever before. king risked his reputation as a civil rights leader to "meddle" in war politics, an issue that many black americans considered to be far less important than consolidating their gains in voting rights and civil protection. he risked losing his influence with white, democratic politicians that supported civil rights and the war and was vilified by many in the movement. why did he make this speech? dr. king's reputation as a leader and visionary was secure and he had a life's work to do advancing the rights of his people. it was a dangerous and reckless thing he did.

but dr. king could not be silent. he was "called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation". as i re-read his words i wonder why we think we can do any less. since dr. king's call to action we have watched as our leaders, democratic and republican, led us into granada, haiti, iraq, afghanistan and again, iraq. few would imagine that any of them are better off after our interventions than they were before. but for the lack of economic incentive (and the threat of chinese involvement) we would be in north korea and all too soon, we may be in iran. we continue to watch our government support with guns, money, training and troops, east asian, south american, african and middle eastern regimes - including saddam hussein's government before the first gulf war - that brutalize their people, jail and kill their opponents and support terrorism. we continue to buy the same rationales - that our invasions, training programs and military aid are necessary to fight terrorism, promote democracy or protect national security - again and again, even as we read the newspaper articles that describe the fabricated intelligence, paid-journalism and pre-war marketing campaigns used to support them. a majority of americans now believe that the bush administration lied to garner support for the invasion of iraq. in spite of all this, we continue to send people to washington that vote for war and talk about being against it.

seventy-seven senators, including twenty-one democrats, and two hundred ninety six representatives voted to authorize the war in iraq. almost all of them have, or will be, re-elected in the next election and it is a simple fact that those that aren't, won't be tossed out because they supported this administration's war but for some other reason. we won't go to the polls or if we do, we will vote for our incumbents because they bring the pork to our district or because we always vote the party line or because we are convinced that the "economic safety" they promise us is more important than something as ephemeral as our values. we will ignore their baldfaced assertion that they were always actually against war even as they vote, over and over, to continue financing it every time our president - democratic or republican - decides that its time to send our troops overseas.

we say that we live in a complicated world; it is difficult to go against the stream of opinion. it is a time without easy answers, a time when it easier to withdraw, easier to conform, when meddling in politics can get you called unamerican or worse, a time in which dr. king's words, "the calling to speak is...a vocation of agony" ring very, very true. it is difficult and dangerous time to speak truth to power. but if we believe that allowing our country to continue on its current course demeans our values, our beliefs and plain commonsense than it is a time in which our silence is a betrayal of all these things. we may be labeled traitors, radicals, patsys or appeasers for saying so, but if we see our current course to be a fundamental breach of our values, we must demand that those we have chosen to lead us do the right thing or stand aside. we must demand that our leaders take seriously the idea that what we claim to be - a liberal democracy governed by the people - is actually what we manifest.

in 1967 dr. king reminded us that if we allowed our nation to choose war over justice, we would eventually "be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight". he recognized the danger facing our nation and he could not be silent.

can we?
_____

tags: politics, war, vote, mlk, opinion

seventy-five percent

2006-01-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Today, more than seventy-five percent of the Palestinians able to vote will do so. Seventy-five percent. Palestine has been devastated by war, many of the people living there have been in refugee camps for two generations and the unemployment rate often hovers around fifty percent. The Israeli government is threatening to stop remitting tax money due to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas wins a significant place in the government, a move that would cause further suffering.

And none of this is stopping them from voting. Not the threats, not the guns, not the violence. The Palestinians know that things won't change for them if they don't step up and say, we demand our voice be heard even if the powers-that-be do not like what we are saying. Palestinians know that if they opt out, believing that things can't change, that they won't.

One party politics is dying today in Palestine.

One party politics needs to come to an end here, too. Don't wait for a movement. Don't wait for someone to show up at your door and ask you to sign a petition. Don't wait for Martin Luther
King, Jr to appear and lead you to the steps of the Capitol. Don't wait for a Million Woman or a Million March or Burning Man or a rally for your favorite cause.

You don't need a movement. You already have what you need to change things in this country: the right to vote. If you aren't using it then you already know why things are the way they are here.

And you already know how to change them.
_____

tags: politics, voting, palestine, one-party-politics

rome is burning

2006-01-24T10:07:00.000-07:00

a washington post article on a closed-door deal between house and senate republicans is yet another result of one party politics. the article describes how republicans have apparently handed big insurance companies a twenty-two billion dollar break in medicare payments through negotiations between the chairs, respectively, of the house ways and means and the senate finance committees.

both committees chairs are held by republicans. the chairs barred democratic committee members from the meeting. there was no vote by the conference committee, let alone debate. two men from the same political party sat in a room, surrounded by their staffers, decided what they wanted to do and did it. if it happened in new york or chicago or bagdhad, we would call it a backroom deal and we would be enraged. this is not how a representative democracy is supposed to work.

but more and more, this is how it works in the united states.

that they apparently gave another big business another big break so soon after cutting social, education and healthcare programs for the poor does not surprise me. the republican controlled congress and white house have been shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor and dismantling programs for the poor and middle class for six or seven years. i am not even surprised that republican chairs like bill thomas and charles grassley, who have been members of congress for twenty-five and forty-five years respectively would prefer to work this way. wouldn't you? closed door deals mean no pesky questions from the public and no pesky democrats slowing down your decisionmaking. no muss. no fuss.

as the post story notes, more and more house-senate conferences, where many of our laws, regulations and budget decisions are actually made, are closed conferences, that is, not open to the public. us. the ones that vote and pay taxes. and now more and more closed conferences are becoming one party closed conferences. no public debate and no opposition. only a done deal presented to congress as a fait accompli. what is happening is not surprising. when one party controls all three branches of the federal government, as the republican party does today, there is little need for it to recognize that there are opposing views, let alone listen to them. couple this with a prevailing trend of politicians being (apparently) elected for life and closed door deals really don't have costs, but only benefits, for the dealmakers.

what is surprising is that we, the ones who pay for all this, let them continue to get away with it. we are watching our country be destroyed in back room deals like this one, deals made by politicians who are increasingly sure that we care so little about what they are doing that they no longer even try to hide their contempt for our democratic institutions. they know, it seems, that we will bitch and moan but we probably won't vote and if we do, we will decide based on our congressperson's ability to bring home the bacon for our district or state rather than what is ultimately good for our community and country.

it is time for each of us to decide what we want our government to be and to do something about it. we don't need a movement, a party or website. we need a personal willingness to step up, get educated and act. each and every one of us that believes that what is happening is wrong and needs to change has to let congress and the white house that what they are doing in our name is no longer acceptable, that we are tired of one party politics, back room deals, the erosion of our rights and the destruction of our institutions. even if we believe that we are the only person in the entire country doing so. even if it seems pointless. even if we can't imagine that it will make a difference. because it is the only chance we have. if we wait for someone else to organize us, we are aiding and abetting the process we see unfolding in front of us.

while we fiddle, rome burns. if we don't start taking responsibility for what is happening in washington and try to do something about it, there won't be much left but ruins. well, except for those nice places high up on the hill, above the flames. and if you haven't figured it out, you and i might have paid for those impressive walled estates, but we won't be living there.
_____

tags: politics, congress, democracy, vote

if i say

2006-01-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

that i am concerned about the expansion of presidential powers and the potential destructiveness of one party politics, i am a hopelessly outdated progressive. if i say that i think al queda presents a grave threat to the united states and that our government should do what it can to destroy its ability to cause harm, i am a muslim-hater. if i say that our government should do so while respecting our laws and values, i am treasonous. if i say that i am as concerned about the erosion of our rights as i am about their actual loss, i am a spoiled and lazy child. if i say that i believe that the current administration has embroiled my country in a pointless, destructive war i am unamerican. if i say that, sometimes, there are reasons for a country to send its troops into battle, i am a war monger. if i suggest that those of us that have money, a job, education and a safe existence should invest what we have been given so that others might have them, too, i am a hopelessly naive liberal.

and i have said all of these things.

you have given me other labels, too. you have told me that i am good, bad, different, special and ordinary. you have let me know that i am an ideologue, appeaser, communist, meme pimp, hater of women, hater of men, hater of christians, fundamentalist, atheist, queer-lover, queer-basher, republican, democrat, liberal, neofascist conservative, anarchist and whiney navel gazer. you have told me that it is obvious that i have this kind of background or that kind of education or that i have lived in this place or never lived in that or that it is clear that i have these leanings or those.

would it be any wonder if i felt confused?

but i am more than confused; i am amazed, because you know all these things about me without asking me a single question.

not one.
_____

tags: personal

barkbarkbark

2006-01-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

K9, i was happy to find that you read my post and i appreciate your response. i am going to need a little time to read your post before i can give you a thoughtful reply. i will respond, but first i want to talk to you about an idea that i would like you to consider.

i am concerned about the difference created by me posting and you commenting. while it may not actually put you or me in a one-down position, i would prefer us to be face-to-face. would you be willing to be my co-partner in another blog, one in which you and i could talk more directly?

if you are willing to do that, i will set it up. i would suggest that, given that we are both dogs, we call it barkbarkbark, but i am open to other suggestions. if that works for you, i have one other request: that our conversation be two way. that is, we both get to propose topics, ask questions and have the option of answering or not. i would like this to be a dialogue rather than a debate; i have no interest in converting you to my point of view and i do hope that i will learn from talking with you.

if this does not work for you, i hope you will stick around and offer your views. i respect your opinions, K9, even if i might disagree with them with all my heart.

how about it?

ps - you have an awesome fucking sense of humor and i am glad that i encountered it.
_____

tags: politics, dialogue, differences

tea cup poodle

2006-01-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

i printed a copy of your letter, the one you wrote in response to my post five out of six, and i read it three or four times. it was difficult for me to read what you wrote but it was also clear that i needed to try. even now, i do not know that i heard just what you wanted me to hear, so i would like to share what i took from your note and see what you think:

you want me to recognize how much easier life is here, in the united states, than in the third world and how fortunate i am to be living here rather than a country like china or iran. you know that we have cleaner water and air, adequate food and a safer daily life than people that live in those places and you want to be sure that i know it, too.

you also want to be sure that i know that i have rights here - like the right to say what i wish in this blog - that i would not have in those places. when you compare issues of wages, class and rights in the united states against many of those places, you see that we are much better off and you want me to appreciate the difference.

finally, you wonder if i am able to see the both the beauty of the world around me and how fortunate i am have a job, a safe place to live and much more freedom than many people. you want me to remember the advantages i have and that they come from living here in the united states.

if this isn't what you meant me to hear, i would like to know. if this is what you wanted to say to me, i think we share some common ground and i would like to explore that with you.

we have rights, privileges and advantages here in the united states that are very rare. our air, water and food is safer than it is in many parts of the world and many of us are able to get an education, find a job and raise our families in relative comfort. we are not in a police state like burma, do not have to fear being jailed for speaking out against the government as in iran, egypt or sri lanka and do not live in a war zone like iraq, afghanistan or many parts of africa. drug lords, rebels and death squads do not roam the neighborhood where i live, as they still do in many parts of central and south america.

i have all these advantages and others, too. i am white and male, a combination that puts me at the top of the food chain. i managed to get an education and so have been able to get and hold a good-paying job for most of my adult life. by any historical measure, and certainly relative to the suffering of most of the third world, i have a life of ease and comfort. i would not have had the chance for this kind of life outside of north america and western europe. more than that, what i have been able to do is possible because i live in an age when the united states is relatively free and very powerful.

but i also aware of the cost of my freedom. we live in a place where more and more people are living in poverty while more and more wealth is concentrated in fewer hands. the education i pursued and the job that came out of it are not available to many, especially if they are immigrants, of color or women. my food is safe and my water is clean but that, too, is not true for many americans and it is becoming less, rather than more true, in the third world. and with one in three black american men likely to serve prison time (and one in thirty-seven americans currently in prison), wars in iraq and afghanistan, it seems clear that my "safety" is being purchased at an appalling cost in human lives. american citizens being jailed, without access to lawyers and without being charged with a crime and our government apparently believes that defending these advantages i have with torture is a good tradeoff.

i wonder if you are willing to hold both sides with me? can you see a way to recognize our advantages without taking them for granted and without believing that we have to hoard them for ourselves? i would enjoy having that talk with you.

i wanted you to know that i read what you wrote and thought about it. i do see all these advantages you describe and i consider them important to defend. i also hope you might be willing to talk with me about the cost of the life we have here, what be an appropriate, or inappropriate, kind of defense and how we might offer what we have to those that are not as lucky as we are.

tags: politics, advantages, defense, response

damn (tagged)

2006-01-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

warning - this post is lacking the sort of deadly serious nature you may have come to expect here. as a precautionary measure, the font type and color have been changed for your protection.

i have been tagged by graffitti. is that redundant? anyway, here goes:
four jobs i have had

1. pumping gas
2. launching weather balloons
3. producing a film
4. stocking shelves

four movies i could watch over and over

1. ran
2. harvey
3. ghostbusters (painful but true)
4. like water for chocolate

four places i have lived

1. a tent with seven other people
2. on the road
3. a hospital cardiac unit
4. in my head

four tv shows (note: last tv disappeared in 1984)

1. the bugs bunny hour
2. the man from uncle
3. general hospital
4. chiller theatre

four websites

1. jj
2. technorati
3. google/gmail
4. alternet

four favorite foods

1. islay scotch
2. pizza from this little place in positano
3. amazingly stinky cheese
4. anything that someone who knows how to cooks, cooks

four places i'd rather be

1. more at home in my body
2. in the trees on blitz
3. on retreat
4. watching the sunset

four bloggers i'd tag

1. sunshine
2. jennimi
3. the rest of you
4. have been taken...

_____

tags: graffitti, tagged, lists-of-four

untitled (fear revealed)

2006-01-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

the uncomfortable quiet suddenly reveals what is available to us, a place unexplored, fecund and beckoning. i wonder if you have in your kindness shown it to me, if you see it too, are lost in some other vision of what might be or are just still and waiting. memory beckons, reminding me that i can step into it and that if i do, if i accept what it offers and give what it asks in return, that i will finally find what i seek.

i am present to it for less than a moment before averting my eyes. trembling, i bury experience. i drown memory, i cannot do this. not ready to give and unable to accept, i turn away and try to forget. and yet, even as i whisper, that was only a dream, my self-broken heart prays for another glimpse.

five out of six

2006-01-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

the wildfire season was one of the striking discoveries i made after my move west. being from the rolling green hills of appalachia, forest fires aren't something i thought much about. we must have had them once in a while but it wasn't something one really worried about. imagine my surprise not only at the number of fires each year (about 1,100 in colorado alone) or the size and ferocity of some of them (the Idaho Sawtooth fire consumed 40,000 acres). what surprised me was how normal everyone around me found the fact that (a) eighty-five percent of forest fires are started by intentionally or carelessly and (b) we can't do much about it.

most of what we are suffering -- attacks on americans at home and abroad, dropping real wages, increasing race and class discrimination, deteriorating environmental conditions and personal health, the loss of personal rights and the growing sense that we are a pariah among nations -- is the direct result of intentional policy choices or run-of-the mill incompetence in the white house and congress. yet we seem to accept this as a fact of nature, like a lightning strike that starts a fire, rather than seeing it for what it is: elected officials intentionally pursuing policies that make life much more difficult for the vast majority of americans, the ones that do not have trust funds, political connections or top ten business school degrees and master-of-the-universe jobs.

in the same way that lightning starts one out of six forest fires, well-meaning policy choices sometimes turn out to have bad consequences. but that means that five out of six fires -- and five out of six bad policy outcomes -- arise out of intention or incompetence. five out of six happen, not because of an act of nature or well-meaning intention gone wrong, but because human beings wanted a particular result. people often start fires on purpose. they also make policy decisions with intent.

the good news? we can do something about it. resistance, like fire prevention, is not futile. it may be difficult. it may be exhausting. but it is not pointless. in some ways, political resistance is a good deal easier than fire prevention. we have more means to force policy change than the prevention expert has to enforce a campfire or smoking ban. the expert doesn't know who the backpackers are and can't see what they are doing, only what they have done. but we know where the administration lives. congress meets in the open (most of the time). government doesn't carelessly drop a butt into a pile of brush outside our view. what government does, it does on purpose and it does, mostly publicly, in press conferences, public hearings and published legislative agendas. what we can see, we can prevent.

five out of six. whenever you think, i can't make a difference, remind yourself of this number. remember that it is not lightning you are trying to stop -- an impossible task -- but an intentional act of political destruction. the truth is that the harmful effects of the vast majority of policy decisions can easily be seen before they happen. and if they can be seen, most of the time they can be stopped.

remember this, too. forest fires like the sawtooth detroy tens of thousands of acres of forest along with the wildlife, people and communities that depend on them to survive. they cost millions of dollars, and often the lives of firefighters, military personnel, police and civilians, to extinguish. the emotional, physical, environmental and psychic damage takes generations to heal. if you have ever seen one of these fires or its aftermath, let alone had your life changed by one, you know that the time, energy and money poured into prevention pays an incalculable return. the same thing goes for bad government. stopping it before it makes bad policy is so much less economically, socially and politically expensive as to be a no brainer.

if you don't step up and demand that our policy makers put away the gasoline and matches, who will? if you do not resist, if you do not refuse to endorse what is being done in your name, if you do not say it is wrong, if you do not vote, write, protest... how can you not take responsibility for the next big blaze?

five out of six. wildfire season is here and the world is tinder dry. a good time to make sure that the kids aren't playing with matches and fireworks, don't you think?
______

tags: politics, bush, government, resistance

sometimes

2006-01-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

i read your posts and i am sure that you are talking about me, about us, about where we have been and what we have gained or lost by parting or staying together, by finding that we are, after all, on the same path or sadly realizing that we haven't a thing in common. i find myself wondering, how did she end up living there, before i startle and realize that you are not her but someone i have never felt pressed against me. you spark visions in me like stone against stone on a dry summer night and, as you write, i burn on a pyre of memory.

there was that time in the restaurant, or on the plane or in the west village and the appetizer or the rough landing or the argument about whether to spend fifty-five dollars on a bottle of wine for dinner that night even if he was your boss. you describe being kissed, deeply, on the train, in the park, as we waited for a ferry and i think, how could she remember that now, she always forgot time and place and only ever smiled and said, oh yes, that kiss. you describe our arguments, passion and indifference so cleanly that i cannot even be wounded; i can only nod and remark, yes that was how it was after all. i will never meet you and yet you tell my stories as if we are sitting together recounting old times with friends who wanted to hear everything that had happened since that vacation years and years ago.

it is as if you kept a journal of every hour, as if you had slept quietly next to me, smiled as i laughed about the cold coffee and burnt diner toast, turned to watch me cry and then carry the last box out to your car. i cannot imagine how you were not there but you are not her and cannot be. one night i dreamed that you must be a sorceress and i wake laughing, why would she bother with you if she were, and know instantly that you would not. no, there is something else at work in you, something that i don't understand, and as your words lift and drop me into a well of memory, as cool, dark history closes over my eyes, i understand that it doesn't matter. you know me so well. you speak my life, intentionally or not, and that is enough.

generals and politics

2006-01-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

caution for the fainthearted - flame is on

have i become completely paranoid (not that i don't have reason given the sort of executive orders, illegal detentions, journalist purchases, wholesale corruption and alice-in-wonderland press conferences issuing from washington these days) or are the barriers that have long kept the united states military out of domestic politics being eroded? from oneworld.net on january 8th:

Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who had backed the war, said this week in an ABC News interview that were he eligible to join the U.S. military now, he would not and nor would he expect others to join.

General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the unusual step of wading into an ongoing political controversy Thursday, when he told a Pentagon news conference that Murtha's comments were damaging to troop morale and recruitment efforts.

Murtha, the House of Representatives' top Democrat on military spending, replied in a statement that 'the military had no problem recruiting directly after 9/11 because everyone understood that we had been attacked. But now the military's ability to attract recruits is being hampered by the prospect of prolonged, extended and repeated deployments; inadequate equipment; shortened home stays; the lack of any connection between Iraq and the brutal attacks of 9/11; and--most importantly--the administration's constantly changing, undefined, open-ended military mission in Iraq.'

unusual is an understatement. in the united states, active duty generals, especially active duty generals that run the pentagon, don't offer their opinions about politics or politicians. ever. they fight wars, even wars they don't like, because a civilian government decides that it is time for war. generals don't govern or suggest that they might. it is more than bad form or even poor judgment for general pace to challenge mr. murtha publicly. by doing so, he threatens one of the cornerstones of liberal democracy: civilian control of the military.

we remain a free, liberal democracy by insuring that politicians don't direct combat and generals don't govern the republic. there have been days when it seemed to me that rumsfeld, cheney and bush were doing a bit too much of the former. now i can also worry if we have generals leaning toward the latter.

democracies cease being so when it becomes difficult to tell the politicians from the generals. just ask the citizens of burma.

flame off - you may return to your normal level of paranoia.
_____

tags: politics, iraq, murtha, democracy, flame, opinion

old news (nixon redux)

2006-01-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

i managed not to write about politics for almost four hundred ten hours. this, in spite of jack abramoff, tom delay, newt gingrich (no stranger to ethical censure himself) recommending tom delay be barred from house leadership and a congressional office report suggesting that congress, in fact, did not give bush authority to bypass the courts and authorize wiretaps on u.s. citizens by executive order thirty times since september, 2001.

i cannot count the times that i found myself seriously tempted. the fact that i did not post after finding this january 6th washington post photo of abramoff is a clear indication that i gain more control over my addiction each day. i mean could abramoff have made himself look any more like a minor gotham city thug in batman if he tried?

but i didn't write a word for seventeen days. then i opened the new york times this morning and read this that bush has, during the recess, appointed julie meyers to be the assistant secretary of homeland security. to quote a september 20th, 2005 washington post article:

The Bush administration is seeking to appoint a lawyer with little immigration or customs experience to head the troubled law enforcement agency that handles those issues, prompting sharp criticism from some employee groups, immigration advocates and homeland security experts.

The push to appoint Julie Myers to head the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, comes in the midst of intense debate over the qualifications of department political appointees involved in the sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina.

Concerns over Myers, 36, were acute enough at a Senate hearing last week that lawmakers asked the nominee to detail during her testimony her postings and to account for her management experience. Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) went so far as to tell Myers that her resume indicates she is not qualified for the job.

the senator quoted in the article is not exactly a rabid, left-wing, commie liberal, so you can imagine the reaction on the other side of the senate.

in parallel with the meyers appointment, mr. bush made tracy henke executive director of the office of state and local government coordination and preparedness. henke, a justice department political appointee apparently demanded that information regarding racial differences in how police treat people during traffic stops be deleted from a department press release. i could go on but you will find plenty of press on these people and other appointments in the new york times, washington post, this excellent-if-depressing post and, of course, the daily koz.

it is not surprising that the bush administration hasn't learned a thing about qualifications or competence from michael brown's management of fema or the failed attempt to ram harriet miers onto the supreme court. it is not even surprising that the bush administration is resorting to recess appointments; this is par for the course in an administration that seems to view congress and the courts less and less as inconvenient checks on presidential power and more and more as entities simply to be ignored. it is not even surprising that congress continues to roll over and allow itself to be ignored. what is surprising? that neoconservative republican strategists have not yet figured out that the bush strategy is creating the conditions for a return to post-nixon-like controls on the office of the president that they hate more than anything.

let's look back... nixon wins a major re-election victory in 1972 at the top of an economic cycle and in spite of the vietnam war. his popularity begins to dive with the first of the oil shocks. the economy crashes at the same time it becomes clear that the watergate break-in is one part of pervasive pattern of the abuse of power by the president and his team. eventually the press reveals that the administration used illegal wiretaps, used secret executive orders to bypass congressional oversight and hid evidence using executive privilege. in time it also becomes clear that nixon and his top staff are personally in charge of the various illegal efforts. through it all, nixon continues to assert executive privilege to block congress or the courts from oversight of the executive branch.

is any of this sounding familar? an apparently healthy economy may be the only thing holding the bush administration together right now. bush's popularity rating is now lower than nixon's at the height of watergate. if one or more of the economic bubbles currently keeping us going - such as the housing debt financing that is currently supporting consumer spending - bursts, mr. bush's last prop will be knocked out from under him. when it is, the republican powers-that-be will turn on him faster than those abramoff campaign contributions became post-guilty plea charitable contributions.

the nixon administration was characterized by the arrogant assertion that it had a right to unlimited presidential prerogative in domestic and foreign policy. no one had any right to stand in nixon's, or his administration's, way in the exercise of power. today, this view can be found by anyone who hears a speech or two from the president or vice president or has been following the nsa surveillence, cia torture, miers nomination, and now, recess appointment stories.

the legacy of the nixon presidency was a series of congressional reforms that temporarily re-balanced the three branches. we can argue about their lasting effects but the post-watergate laws brought the fbi that nixon used as a personal police force to heel, created the independent counsel office, enacted campaign finance reform and created limits to illegal domestic surveillance. it has been thirty-one years and reforms haven't held up well. as with all limits, those that are held back by them will ignore the rules. they may even get away with it for a while. but sooner or later, as jack abramoff and richard nixon found out, even the best of the bad guys find out that they aren't, after all, the masters of the universe they imagined themselves to be.

you can read the full list of the presidential recess appointments here and if you would are interested in reading more about the nixon years, i highly recommend the arrogance of power by anthony summers. who knows, maybe he will soon be writing "volume two: the bush years".
_____

tags: politics, bush, nixon, reform

longing

2006-01-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

one of my writing conceits is to use we when i am talking about some limitation, dream or fear of mine that i am not yet ready to own. as this includes almost all of my limitations, hopes and fears, i write we much more frequently than i ought. this post is, like almost all of them, about me, not us. and it is high time that i admitted that.

most days i cannnot escape my idea: if i stop doing i will cease to be, that all i am is motion. i try but i am shark-persona pretty much twenty-four hours a day. when i am not, when my idea of me drops away, it is because the world has startled me in spite of my endless desire not to be surprised. jolted into a place not of my choosing and beyond my control, my idea of me dissolves. for a moment, there is only still, bright awareness. to say it is anything is a mistake, but i will say this: these moments are outside time, joyous and blissful. there is a witness to them, but i do not understand for they cannot be witnessed. i re-appears, an apparent contradiction of desire and fear.

there is longing for these moments even as there is endless hope that each will be the last. the illusion that i will always hold on to just enough of me that motion is inevitable dances with the contrapuntal recognition that this desire is as fictitious as the i that holds it. there is, in the moment of stillness, a gate into silence so deep and vast that entering holds the end, not just of me, but of all things. knowing that it cannot be named, in my terror, i name it anyway: silence outside of not heard or not-heard; outside of life and death; the mother of stillness, which is its echo and gate, it is that which brings an end to desire and motion.

and naming it, motion arises. i arise. longing arises. now it, too, is just another idea that i am having, another story that i am telling myself. i do not know what lies through that gate. how can i? it cannot be entered by i and i is all i have. bereft and relieved, i am left with my imagination, my ideas, my fear and my longing.

always my longing. to be continuously surprised. for the end of fear. for the silence in which all things are.

tags: personal, practice

she would learn quickly

2006-01-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

but he knew that before he did it. people, after all, are much easier to train than dogs or horses because they can actually suffer from what they imagine what might happen to them whether it happens or not. he also knew this because he had done it before, with other women and learned that what he did once he rarely had to more than suggest that he would do again.

of course, she could not know that. and he would make sure that she never did. the act itself created the conditions in which nothing more than the hint that it might happen was enough and that if it did, it would be her fault, that she provoked him, that he didn't want to do but had to because she asked for it. that was the beauty of it from his perspective: it was so fucking efficient. having beaten her once, viciously, thoroughly and without apparent cause, he could blame it on her and she would buy it because she couldn't be sure why it happened. more than that, he knew that his unpredictability would make her extremely paranoid about triggering him again. and the nicer he was in between the threats, implied or otherwise, the more paranoid she would be. she would always wonder, how do i make sure he stays nice? or is it going to happen again? or maybe if i change he won't hit me. she will always be on edge and a woman in that state is much easier to control.

that is exactly how he liked his women: afraid. paranoid. unsure. it gave him power. he got sex when he wanted, ran the house as he wanted, spent money as he wanted, could be as demanding or capricious as he wanted. after a while, he knew that he wouldn't even have to raise his hand, hell, he would hardly have to raise his voice, and she will do exactly what he tells her to do.

every time. every single time. and if she doesn't, he will make sure that she gets a lesson that she will not ever want to repeat. he promised her that, the first time, and it was a promise he would keep.

if you have been, or are being, physically or emotionally battered by your partner, please, please reach out for help. what you are suffering is not your doing, no matter what you are being told. the violence being done to you is, plain and simple, wrong.

if you have a friend in this situation, please do not turn a blind eye. if you do, she might be badly injured, raped or killed. call someone. help her get help. it will make a difference.

here are three national program hotlines to call:

Battered Women Support Netwok: 800.572.2782
Battered Women-Women's Taks Force: 800.646.8275
Domestic Violence Hotline: 800.799.7233

here is website with information about domestic violence and a hotline number:

National Domestic Violence: 800.799.7233

and here is a website that has local numbers:

open source project: domestic violence prevention

tags: domestic, violence, women

i never expected you

2006-01-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

...to find me here, let alone click on that comment link. i filled in my email address without the slightest expectation that you would write. but you do and that has been an amazing and heartening experience. you write and i learn something i need to know: some bit of new information, a point of view that i had not considered or inappropriately discounted, or most often, a part of myself that is stuck, frozen or afraid.

the last part is difficult for me. but honestly, the moment it happens is the most valuable in all the hours of writing my posts and readng your comments. when i have enough sense to stop and pay attention to your provocations, i inevitably find out something about myself that i have been trying, usually with great success, to ignore. as painful as it is for me to see the serious mismatch between the myth i am always telling me about me and the me that i actually happen to be, i am grateful that you are willing to point out the difference.

you know, when i wrote "read, respond, provoke, connect", i meant to provoke you, rather than you, me. thanks for ignoring that. i didn't realize how much i needed it to be the other way around.

tags: personal

help for the password weary

2006-01-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

one of the challenges to including source links in my posts is the growing prevalence of free, but login-obscured, access to news articles. when i write about current events, rather than ask you to buy my particular line, i prefer that you read some of what i have read and come to your own conclusions. i include links but you are often frustrated; the link is blocked and you have to register on the site before accessing the article. if you are like me, the last thing you want to do is leave your email address and other information when you don't know how it is going to be used or you don't think you will be back. result: you skip the article.

the solution: bugmenot, a website that collects logins and passwords to free sites so you don't have to register every timeyou want to get access to a news article or other reference material. it is simple to use and, most of the time, has a good login name and password combination.

for the javascript-saavy, here is a bookmarklet you can use that pops up a separate window and preloads a username and password so you don't have to navigate away from the page you are trying to access:

javascript:void(w=open('http://www.bugmenot.com/view/'
+escape(location),'w','location=no,status=yes,menubar=no,
scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=500,
height=400,modal=yes,dependent=yes'));

you can also find a bookmarklet and firefox extension that does the same thing on bugmenot's homepage. the next time you come to a site that wants a password, click on your bookmarklet and a window with a user name and password will pop up. if you come across a site that isn't in the database or doesn't have a valid login, you can create one and offer it for others to use.

user maintained sites like this represent the internet community at its best: a common good developed and maintained by the people that want and need it. i love finding stuff like this and i hope you find it helpful when you whether you are surfing other people's posts or writing one yourself.

happy new year!

tags: bugmenot, links, utilities

leap

2006-01-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

there is a presumption in our society that those who do not, or cannot, move at a culturally-determined pace are doomed. we have come to believe that, like sharks, we will suffocate if we are not in constant motion. we must always be moving, always be doing and never, at any cost, still. to stop is to die.

this is not questioned by most of us, most of the time, though there is plenty of evidence that "move forward or die" is little more than a story we have been told by others and continue to buy into. that society would like us to believe this story makes sense. that we do, less so. we do not have to be in constant motion to survive. in fact, if we wish to live, really live, we must set aside constant motion and step into a world that is often still. but to do that we have to take the frightening step of stopping while we still believe that we will die if we are motionless.

if we are able to do this, however briefly, we find that the world around us is not in constant motion, let alone in constant forward motion. it is not trying to get anywhere and we are not like a shark. we begin to see that the idea that we must keep moving, that we do not have time to be still, is just that, an idea. we can have other ideas and choose to believe that motion for its own sake is rather pointless. perhaps the story we have been told is keeping us from being in the world as we are meant to be: free to choose when to move and when to be still.

this discovery, of course, comes at a personal price. having been still we know that stillness exists. what we have taken for granted, we now know not to be true. the myth of motion is a little less solid and a little more difficult to maintain. stepping outside movement, we cannot deny that it has an end. we may choose to step back but we do so understanding that our story is just a story and a fairly hollow one at that. to leap into stillness is to give up our comfortable, if painful, understanding of ourselves and the world we live in: we are no longer exclusively those-who-move. we are something more.

a society that does not admit the possibility of stillness imposes its own penalties on those that step outside the myth of motion. it marginalizes those that stop moving with labels such as malcontent, radical, alcoholic, fool or mentally ill and drowns their question - must there be only motion? - in a flood of press release journalism, litigation and character assassination. in more dangerous times it calls them homosexuals, communists, reactionaries or treasonous fools and silences those who have stopped and begin to question more directly.

afraid of the consequences, we don't leap. we stay in the story. we chase and aquire, win and lose, climb and fall. knowing what might happen to us if we admit that there is something other than movement, we do not stop moving. we can't imagine being an outsider, even of the mildest sort, or what life might be like if we weren't always moving.

what we don't know and can't until we have leapt? that there is no reason to be afraid of being outside movement. like any story, the myth of motion only has the power to hold us while we accept it as the only way to live. once we step into stillness, we finally know that we are more than movement. we are not suffocating and the air we breath is sweet and ever new. we realize, maybe for the first time, that to be still is not to be doomed but to be completely alive. we are free.

leap.

tags: personal, practice, outsiders, freedom

link problem fixed (i think)

2006-01-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

to the people who sent me email about the wierdness they experience as they hover over links: i think that i have found the problem, some code that creates problems for certain browsers, and fixed it. the links seem to be behaving now. thanks for letting me know what was going on and let me know if you experience any other strange behavior.

okay, not any other strange behavior. just strange behavior related to misbehaving links and such...

confession

2006-01-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

from jefferson:

man, this blog sucked. talk about something you know about, not what you think everyone wants to hear. go to my blog because everyone loves gossip and mess

jefferson (who visited yesterday) isn't very happy with my choice of topics but i don't think that writing what you want to hear is much of a problem for me. as tempting as it is to try and figure out what someone else wants to hear - and it becomes really tempting when you get feedback that people are really reading what you write - i don't fall for it often. why? well, i have a confession to make.

i am a hopelessly self-centered author. i write to fall into the words that will crystallize my own legion of angers, fears, frustrations and longings into something i can work with. i write because i hope that writing will reveal to me why i am often so often cruel and cynical, why i cause suffering, why i find the world so difficult to understand. i write because i suffer and wish that i did not. i write because i cannot bear the suffering of others or my own sense of helplessness as i witness it.

but why do i write here, in this very public way? to be honest, when i sit down with my laptop and compose an entry for this blog, i don't see a keyboard, i see the marbled black and white cover of the mead composition notebooks that i have been using as journals since my teens. i remember all the angry op ed pieces, awful poetry, petulant self-reflection, shallow dream analysis that i have never shared and all the love letters that i have never sent. i wrote in those notebooks believing that i was exposing my self to the world. in reality, i was hiding from the world and, in the process of hiding, becoming an enigma, a cipher, even to myself. i write here because i am tired of invisibility, even to my own eyes. i want to encounter what others imagine when they see me through my words.

because i write for me and not you, i am amazed when you show up and spend a few minutes reading. i am grateful when you leave a comment that reveals a little more about who i might be. i am writing not because i expect you to hear me but because i need to talk. but you do. and each time you do, i see a little more of who i might acutally be.

thank you.

tags: personal

fear

2005-12-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

i am standing in line, holding my cowboy boots under my arm as i strip off my jacket and sweater and wonder if i forgot to take my penknife out of my briefcase this time. waiting to pass through the metal detector, i glance at the new york times and see the photograph again: an italian soldier on a balcony, hidden from view, pointing his automatic rifle at the crowd standing in line at the airline counter below. as the line moves forward, i look at the people around me and wonder why they seem to be so accepting. i wonder about how afraid we must be to want that soldier on every balcony. even if the weapon is pointed at us.

we live in a time when fear informs even the simple act of entering an airport or dropping a package into a mailbox. we accept this fear, not looking deeply at the methods by which it is provoked, and allow ourselves to believe in a world of thwarted but undescribed terrorist threats, a world composed of red and orange alerts provoked by unseen enemies engaged in activites that we cannot be told about for our own good. afraid, we are willing to set common sense aside and agree that a postal package weighing sixteen ounces can be a bomb while one that weighs fifteen can't. cowed, we allow our government to listen to our phone conversations, ignore our constitutional rights, keep track of what books we read, internet sites we surf and charities we support in the name of "fighting terrorists".

but that's not the worst of it. the truly awful aspect of our fear is our willingness to set aside what we already know of tyranny and how it comes to be and allow things that should not happen in a liberal democracy to happen. we accept searches without warrants, a "war on terrorism" that evades inconvenient treaties like the geneva convention and kidnapping people as norms rather than outrages. in our fear, we convince ourselves that it only happens to the bad guys. we tell ourselves that what matters is stopping these unseen enemies at any cost and we are willing to pay for our protection with our principles.

this is what we allow our fear to do to us. afraid, we compromise our values, learn to turn a blind eye to what is being done in our name and to bend the laws that make us what we are as a nation. and each time we look away, it seems that we lose a little more of what distinguishes us from the bad guys.

i stand in line and i wonder: how soon before we won't be able to tell the difference?

tags: politics, fear, democracy, freedom, opinion

no compromise

2005-12-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

that has been the bush white house negotiating strategy since the beginning of the administration. it does have the advantage of being simple: this is what you will do, this is how you will do it and this is when you will do it. you don't need much nuance and when it works, it is very efficient. unfortunately for mr. bush, it ain't working so well anymore. and unfortunately for the rest of us, he doesn't seem to be figuring that out. in the last three months, bush demanded that his latest supreme court nominee, samuel alioto be approved by the senate before year end, the patriot act be extended without change and that john mccain drop his bill against torture. alioto's hearings will begin in january. the patriot act was extended for several months so that congress can negotiate changes that will protect civil rights. bush met with mccain and agreed to the torture ban after seeing that it would pass congress whether he liked it or not.

there may be other vague evidence that the no compromise strategy is a bit worn. italy issued eu warrants for twenty-two alleged cia agents, including the head of the milan station for the kidnapping of an milanese imam. this follows the recent disclosure that the nsa has been spying on americans without clearance from the court specifically set up to approve such efforts, press on fbi surveillance of mosques, also without warrants, the fourth circuit court's denial on the padilla venue switch and the protest resignation of judge james robertson, one of the secret court judges supposed to oversee the nsa effort. institutions inside and outside the united states are suggesting that, perhaps, the bush administration is not quite as above the law as it sometimes seems to think.

one would think that a string of bruising lost battles in congress and reminders like the robertson resignation would cause bush to consider another approach for dealing with the world outside 1600 pennsylvania avenue. hell, even congressional democrats seem willing to disagree with mr. bush et al these days. how much more evidence than that do you need to see things aren't going your way? i am betting that even your small town pol could look at the win loss column about now and decide it is time for a new, more flexible strategy.

but the bush administration has a better idea, a small modification of the original strategy: don't compromise. on anything. do whatever you want, when you want. damn consultation, negotation or the rule of law because you know that you have all the answers and that your opponents are stupid, unpatriotic or worse. if turns out badly, make believe that the disaster that came of your unilateral decision-making didn't really happen. and if you can't pull that off, claim that what did happen is what you wanted to happen all along.

really. that's it. that's the new plan. don't believe me? spend twenty minutes reading president bush's accomplishments in 2005 and then decide. has the administration learned anything this year?

piercing my heart (repost)

2005-12-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

folks have been asking me why i write as i do. when i began to answer the question, i realized that this old post (it was called piercing my heart) says as much about why as anything else i might write tonight...

looking inward and writing about what we find to avoid looking outward at our world of war, refugees, starvation and natural disasters is no different than giving up reading the newspapers and listening to the radio, moving to a empty mountain cabin or, for that matter, closing our eyes like two-year olds and pretending that the devastation all around us has gone away because we can't see it.

it is not that looking inward is not helpful. it is. looking inward, we grow as humans and become kinder, gentler people. but is it enough, in a world awash in pain and suffering, to be able to say that "i try not to hurt others"? is it really okay, in such a world, to do nothing more than avoid causing more suffering?

to say that it is not okay forces us to acknowledge that we have to do more than that. it is to recognize that this suffering will pierce our hearts because we will not be able to cure, fix or end the suffering. wounded with a wound that cannot heal, we will do what can be done while bearing witness to the world as it is. knowing that we cannot change anything we try anyway because only the wounded can truly help the wounded.

whatever your path, stop for a moment each day, open yourself and look at the news stories. allow yourself to be pierced. let whatever you do to help arise out of that wound. bear witness. practice this and even if you practice nothing else, your self-reflection will bear richer fruit than you can imagine.

my friend jj

2005-12-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

my friend jj. jj and i were in the mdiv program at naropa until he developed a rare form of leukemia a couple of years ago. jj is a hoot. dryer, funnier and smarter than most of his classmates, most especially me. jj has been fighting for his life since he was diagnosed and has survived a failed bone marrow transplant and more chemotherapy than the human body is really able to take, even a twenty-four year old body. tomorrow, jj is going to begin another round of chemo, the worst yet, as preparation for a cord blood stem cell transplant. the procedure is an experiment and the outcome is uncertain.

please pray, meditate, offer tonglen or just stop for a moment for my friend and his family. tomorrow sometime during your day, think of jj and the journey he has been on. let yourself see what a beautiful, painful reality we inhabit; let it touch you completely. if you have time, stop by and read jj's blog. leave him a comment. his courage and good humor is his remarkable gift to you. to all of us. you can find his blog here.

the importance of being tentative

2005-12-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

it seems that a fair number of people who have passed by this blog think that i think that i have all the answers. or if not all, at least enough of them to be exceptionally impervious to any point of view other than my own.

there was a time, unfortunately not too long past, when this would have been an accurate assessment. some days it still is. but i am a lucky man, if you categorize getting kicked in the balls by the universe whenever you get a little too uppity about yourself (what used to be called in my neck of the trailer park a little big for the britches) as lucky. reality, as it manifests itself for me, is quite happy to remind me as often and bluntly as i need to be reminded that the corollary to question authority is:

make decisions, not conclusions

this handy rule is why i suggested, a couple of posts ago, that destruction and denial, two of our three usual responses to authority (our third is, of course, accept without question) are terribly unhelpful things to teach to our kids. why? because each of these responses to authority is based on the idea that we know, with great certainty, what is happening in our world. if you think about it for a minute, you will see that we very rarely do. and that means that the most important authority to question is actually our own smug self and the conclusions that self draws about the world around it.

but before i talk about us, let me talk about my favorite hydrogen-filled dirigible, the politcian. it is easy to deflate politcians, whether of the left, right or center persausion. i prove that once or twice a week. pick up the newspaper, read the right column article, log on to your blog and have at it. if you link a couple of supporting references in, even better. score? you ten, politician zero. easy. why is this?

well, try the same thing on yourself. allow your mind to wander for five minutes and visit all the dumb decisions you've made over the last two weeks. set aside the run-of-the-mill boners and linger on a truly bad one for a little longer. remember how deeply right you felt? remember how certain you were that you said, "how can i be wrong about this?" and you knew your conclusions were absolutely, had-to-be-true true?

there is nothing easier than taking on politicians because politicians do what i just described all the time. the problem is making decisions. the problem isn't the awful decisions that sometimes get made. it is assuming that the conclusions that the decision is based upon can't be wrong, even when the world is telling us just how wrong they are. seeing our conclusions as infallible, decisions that should reflect "our best guess on what to do about this" become "the only answer based on unquestionable truth". with this transformation, we usually get into trouble. lots of it.

hence the importance of being tentative.

the politician's inability to be tentative is the root of my not-infrequent rants about contemporary politicans. it is not that they make decisions. or even that they make decisions that i, on a heart-level, disagree with. they do both. often. it is that their decision-making process seems, far too often, to go like this:

collect information,
draw conclusions based on this information,
make decisions based on conclusions,
decide incomplete,unauthoritative data is absolutely and utterly reliable,
announce decision as indisputable because conclusions are indisputable,
therefore, never change course. ever.

as i see it, things start to go wrong in step four, when someone takes an imperfect view of reality, shines it up and declares it to be the way things are (WMDs in iraq?). things go downhill from there. the lack of tentativeness in this process appears as "we were right, we are right, we will forever be right". personally, my favorite version of this is the person that screams "usa rules" and similar slogans at me whenever i suggest that things are quite as clear as they make them out to be.

if you are of a certain age, you will remember the phrase and poem brittania rules. now try this test: drive to your local high school, wander into the world history class, ask the question, "what is britannia?" count the number of hands raised. enough said.

nobody rules forever. not spain. not van halen. not great britan. not us. more than that, one's time to rule shortens in direct proportion to how well or poorly one remembers that our understanding of the world is uncertain. we don't have all the answers. ever. not for the simple situations that we ecounter in the grocery store, let alone on the stage of world politics. when we make decisions and then refuse to change them - even when reality is telling us we missed a thing or two - we set ourselves up to get that kick in the balls i mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago.

soreness in the mid-parts is a consequence of thinking you can do anything more than look at a moment of a world that is far too complex for you to ever fully understand and made a reasonable guess in response to it. don't ever forget that your conclusions are faulty. they have to be. the world is changing faster than you can imagine. what you think "is", is old news by the time you thunk it. so look at the world, draw conclusions and make decisions but do it tentatively, knowing that what you think is probably wrong and what you need to do will change. because it will and sooner than you expected.

make decisions, never make conclusions. look at the data, draw conclusions from it, figure out what you think needs to be done and do it. and if you are wrong, change your mind. make a new decision, one that reflects the information you have now. no matter how bad you think it will make you look. be tentative is better than being kicked. ask george bush. i am betting he is mighty soe around now.

could not bear the new york times today

2005-12-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

though i tried. it was somewhere in the morass of back-to-back articles covering the news that the united states ranks sixth in the number of journalists it is currently jailing (A5) (a flawed statistic but sobering nonetheless), a piece on cia kidnapping of suspected but uncharged terrorists (A9), and one on the army's new rules on just how much an interrogator may abuse another human being and still be within the letter of the law (A1) that i surrendered to my despair. i couldn't write a paragraph, let alone a whole post. the only thing i could come up with? honoring the "post another photo, i can't tell what the hell you look like" requests i have received.

lame. i know. but it was a tough news day. anyway, maybe we can work together to make something of all this. here goes...

tell me what you think. honestly, doesn't this photo prove that i have what it takes to work for the tsa?

tags - personal, nyt, tsa

who, if i cried out, would hear me?

2005-12-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

tonight, i want to think about poets, about what it must have been like to be eliot or rilke or wallace or lorca. tonight, i want to dream that i am adrienne rich's passion. i want to be rilke's desire and eliot's despair. i want to know that their sense of the world-as-it-is is still possible, even for me...

in my beginning is my end. in succession
houses rise and fall, crumble and are extended,
are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth.

i want words like eliot's east coker to force themselves out of me, because they must, because they are about things that matter, that will matter for so much longer than what we call ourselves, the causes to which we belong, the little piles of this or that we divide up and name so that we can fight to the death over them. tonight, i want to be choiceless, to write like lorca, as if my heart were ripped from my chest and shown to me as i was told, "you only have a moment. write. for your words no longer matter. you are free."

tags - poets, wallace, eliot, rich, lorca, dreams

porsches and james chu pumps

2005-12-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

if i taught introductory political science or economics to high school kids or university undergrads, i am pretty sure that the entire course would be founded on a single notion:

question authority

why? because i believe that too many of us don't and so find ourselves doing things - like choosing who we put in office and what we buy in the grocery store - out of greed, fear and ignorance rather than thoughtful consideration. i would like to think, given an education that keeps them curious about reality and skeptical of easy answers, that our children might do a better job than we generally have of asking why things are as they are. if we teach our kids to question authority and then encourage them to actually do so, they might not makes some of the dreadful mistakes we have been making.

notice that i didn't say destroy authority, deny authority or pretend the authorities don't exist but question authority. i am not suggesting that humans can avoid working within the power structure of authority and, moreover, i believe that we have quite a bit of work to do on ourselves before we try. but i do think - consider the current discussion on u.s. policy on iraq as an example - that we confuse (dis)respecting authority with not-questioning it. we are not-questioning if we accept or reject authority in a wholesale fashion. when we fall into this way of being, our world becomes black and white. our decisions are easy to make because we are letting someone else make them for us. but do we want us, or our kids, to live in a black and white reality?

when i talk about authority, i mean authority of every kind. political, educational, religious, spiritual, commercial and parental. i also mean authority at every level. cultivate your curiosity and skepticism. ask questions of authority, even if you ask them only to yourself. take responsibility for what you buy, who you vote for, how you spend your time, what spiritual path you follow. don't pass the buck to the powers-that-be. every time someone tells you (or you tell yourself) that you "should do x because of y" hear a little voice whispering, "why?" teach your kids to do the same. it will make your home life a little more complicated but it will be worth it, don't you think?

you may question something and then decide that the authorities have this one right. after all, authorities often become authorities because they know things we don't. that's fine. just ask why. why am i buying this? why do i like this blog? why am i deciding on a career in law or social work? why should i vote for this candidate or that one? am i doing this because i think it is a good idea or because someone else told me it was? it is not that authority is always wrong, just like it is not that authority is always right, but that it is not infallible. it may help to remember that authorities don't have to live with the consequences of your decisions. you, however, do. still want to let someone else decide your life for you?

asking why may feel a little odd, especially in areas that you normally don't question. you may have to overcome your not-questioning training (especially if you have been schooled in the twentieth century western tradition) but that is actually not so hard. consider developing a personal list of "things that don't sound quite right" and using it. here's mine; a "you should do this because" list that i keep handy:

we have always done it this way.
we never do it that way.
you will be cool, in, happy, whole, etc if you don't.
you will be odd, out, sad, incomplete if you don't.
if you don't, war-mongering capitalists will destroy the world.
if you don't, tree-hugging atheists will destroy the world.
i will like you if you do.
i will hate you if you do.

i could continue but i bet you get the idea. whenever i hear someone starting a sentence with one of these gems, my little whisper kicks in. why? why should i do this? why should i believe this? why does this person think this way? why do i?

question authority. give up your labels. ask yourself why and then buy what you want. vote for the person or party you want in office. it doesn't matter if you get the porsche to get the girl or the james chu shoes to get the guy or vote for candidate x because you think candidate y is a plain old moron. but it does matter if it was your idea or someone else's, doesn't it?

but i don't teach in a high school or university. so may i ask that you teach it to your kids for me? even if they question you.

tags - politics, economics, power, opinion

why is it

2005-12-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

...that people think i must be a democrat because i think we would be better off with someone other than mr. bush and his management team in the white house? and why is it that i am thought a democrat because i think that one party government - which is the current state if you consider that same party controls the white house, the senate, the house and holds the majority of federal court seats - is a bad idea?

is it possible that i am not? could it be that i just think that americans voted for the wrong guy, and that in doing so, have ended up in a world of hurt? or that i might prefer a country in which multi-party politics, the kind of politics that brings new ideas into being, might be better than our one-party-masquerading-as-two system? is it possible, lo these many posts, that i haven't signed up for either side?

when we decide that not choosing one side automatically means that we have chosen the other, we set aside our capacity to reason. and when we are content to let thoughtful dissent be classified as treason, we are not only setting reason aside but dignity as well. as you think about politics, consider whether or not a world that only has a right side and a wrong side, a world in which disagreement is deadly, is the kind of world in which you wish to live.

for that kind of world is dangerous if you don't have power. very dangerous.

tags - democrats, republicans, power, dissent, opinion

okay, mr. lieberman, i admit it

2005-12-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

from the new york times, december 10th, democratic senator joseph lieberman:

"it's time for democrats who distrust the president to acknowledge that."

and

"we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

senator lieberman, since you asked, i guess that i have to tell you: i don't trust president bush or his administration. i am not a democrat, but i thought you should know anyway. i value my rights, so i vote, but i honestly don't care much for democrats or republicans. most days, in fact, i have a hard time telling them apart.

i am a registered independent though i feel free to change my party identity depending on the collection of candidates and issues that confront me in any given election. you may assume from this that the reason i mistrust mr. bush has nothing to do with party affliation and everything to do with the difference between what the bush administration view of reality and what seems to be happening in the reality that i inhabit. in bush's world, iraq had WMDs and collaborated with al queda to destroy the world trade towers. in bush's world, global warming is a theory without proof and creationism is a fact. in bush's world, outing a cia agent to punish her husband is standard operating procedure. in bush's world, dissent is tantamount to treason.

in my world, no one ever found a WMD in iraq or a shred of evidence that saddam hussein and osama bin laden discussed destroying western civilization over a beer. around here, most of us are more than a little worried that manhattan is going to look a lot like venice by the end of this century. and yes, in my world, revealing the identity of a cia agent, for any reason, is a criminal offence and dissent is the heart of liberal democracy, not the other way around.

of course, i may be delusional. but it appears to me that the bush administration has a fairly well-established track record of distorting or ignoring intelligence that doesn't meet its needs, denigrating the science and scientists that point to flaws in environmental and war policy and attempting to destroy the reputations and lives of people that disagree with them. if you and i were friends and it appeared that i consistently lied to you and then denied doing so, even as you waved the evidence in my face, wouldn't you feel a little queasy about trusting me? or, at least, be concerned about your own level of gullibility?

hate to say it but honestly, mr. lieberman, i do not trust president bush. or dick cheney. or rumsfeld, rove or rice. i have a longer list if you want to see it but i think you get the idea. and why should i? i have a pretty good idea that they have been telling me porkies for almost five years and i guess i am tired of playing the fool.

now about that second quote, mr. lieberman. exactly who thinks the president is credible these days? i would love to have a conversation with them. maybe they could convince me that i have misread the situation. and would you mind explaining to me how questioning mr. bush's honesty puts our nation in more peril than continuing to conduct an unsanctioned war that appears to be creating dozens of eager, new suicide bombers every day?

tags - politics, bush, lieberman, nyt, opinion

capitalism as a law of nature

2005-12-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

i was a venture capitalist for thirteen years, investing OPM in tiny technology startups. before that i worked in computer and software startups. i went to a top business school and taught entrepreneurship and finance courses for a couple of years. i have a retirement account and some other money invested in mutual funds. no one looking at my tax return or resume would likely categorize me as anything but a red-blooded american free market capitalist.

and they would be right. though i vote for politicians that support social programs and wealth redistribution through the tax structure; donate money to amnesty international, doctors without borders, the aclu and their left-leaning ilk, i also hold a deep belief that free market philosophies, however imperfectly implemented, have done more to eliminate poverty than any other system of politics and economics that humans have tried. liberal democracy and capitalism aren't perfect but all of the alternatives seem much, much worse.

but as i watch what is happening in our country and in places like afghanistan, iraq, south america and israel, i am no longer so sure. in the last fifty years, it seems that we have transformed our theories about capitalism and democracy into laws of nature. we no longer question what it means to be a democracy or how free markets should work. we know all the answers now and are making all the definitions. and we'll kill anyone that disagrees with us.

in the west, the language and concepts of free market capitalism are so much a part of our way of thinking that it impossible for us to imagine a world in which ideas like cost-benefit analysis, structural unemployment and marketing do not exist. we are no longer able to imagine an existence that does not commoditize sentient life, nature, time, transcendence or the relationships between them. we evaluate the quality of our lives using a mythical measure called economic value and consider everything in terms of this measure. free market ideas are so pervasive as to seem, to most of us, descriptions of an immutable reality – like the law of gravity – that we must work within. we can no more consider our world as having a reality outside the marketplace than we can envision tossing an apple into the air and watching it drift upward into the infinite sky.

imagine we decide that wearing very dark glasses is a good idea when the sun is bright and then we forget that putting them on is a choice. we leave them on day and night because they are so useful when the sun is bright that we think that they must be good for seeing everything. when we stumble on a cloudy day or can’t see any details at all on a moonless night, we assume that our eyesight is bad. we are so used to the glasses being in place that we can’t imagine taking them off to see if things get brighter or more detailed. such is our relationship to the assumptions of free market capitalism. the language of economics, which we developed as a means of describing has become a filter on perception through which all of reality passes.

believing that economic concepts have an inherent, immutable existence and filtering all of our perceptions through them, we have mistaken capitalism’s ability to overwhelm other systems of economic theory as evidence that we have made a good decision in adopting it. we believe that free market capitalism overcomes other systems because it the best “genetically”. we have confused free market capitalism's ability to best other systems of exchange with its worthiness. by analogy, we should consider people with cancer to be the healthiest human beings among us because cancer is terrific at overwhelming the “less efficient” immune system.

mistaking free market capitalism’s ‘success’ for its worthiness; economic concepts as immutable laws of reality; and economic language as filters of perception, we have fallen prey to two additional misunderstandings. first, we assume that the side effects of free market capitalism are inevitable and, indeed, acceptable consequences of “progress”. second, we believe that we will eventually grow our way out of those consequences.

free markets have allowed us to concentrate wealth and poverty, accelerate the conversion of nature into commodity goods and ignore anything that cannot be assigned economic value. free market capitalism justifies these results by the use of two concepts, “the long run” and “the average”. in “the long run” of one hundred or two hundred years, the growth of “average” income hides the fact that the world is increasingly composed of the very rich and the very poor. since the worldwide average lifespan is increasing, the fact that in parts of Africa it has dropped from sixty to forty years in the last decade is beside the point.

the long run and law of averages hide a simple, but devastating, paradox: if things are, on average, getting better why are more people starving to death than ever before? why is the real working wage in the united states lower than it was ten years ago? why is our water more polluted, our air more difficult to breath, our rate of cancer increasing? we numb ourselves to all of this by claiming that free markets will cure these problems in the long run as the law of averages take in more and more people. this is a doubtful proposition at best but even if it is true, how much suffering occurs in the meantime?

we justify this acceptance with our second major misconception: that free markets automatically solve all problems, even the problems they create, given the appropriate economic incentive. not enough oil? we’ll find more in iraq or build nuclear reactors. no place to put the nuclear waste in the united states? we’ll pay someone in russia to take it. the people that live near the waste dump get cancer? we’ll invent new ways to cure cancer and eventually the law of average income says that they will make enough money to afford it. if a few people die between now and then, in the long run the value the wealth created from the sale of medicine to cure cancer and the marketing of more consumer goods powered by the energy from the power plants we built more than makes up for it.

we are so used to this logic that we are no longer able to see how crazy it actually is. We accept the paradox of inseparable great wealth and great poverty. we do not question the idea that anything that does not have economic value does not exist. we perceive the world in terms of exchange and trade and have come to believe that it is really this way. even if we do have a glimmer that things may not be right, free market capitalism is so pervasive that we see it as a law of nature rather than a choice that we have made.

we can start questioning our assumptions. even those of us who have made our living by being part of the system. and we need to. the damage we are doing to ourselves and the rest of the world may soon be unrepairable if we don't.

tags - politics, economics, markets, opinion

no tough questions

2005-12-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

after several weeks of expressing concern and indignation over alleged cia-run prisons on their soil, our european allies have caved. before leaving for europe on monday, condoleezza rice simply noted that european intelligence agencies had helped the cia "extract information from suspects" and reminded our eu friends that we are "all in this together". the european response? "rather than focus on specifics, the conversation is more about the underpinning concern of how detainees are treated."

may i translate?

rice: "you all are in this as deeply as we are, so drop the hypocritical righteous indignation bullshit or i will hold a press conference to discuss just how involved you are."

eu: "we are terrified that our submissive complicity will be brought into the open so we'll pretend that we didn't really ask the question and let you set the agenda."

the end result? the eu will not launch a probe because they now know that they won't be able to contain the damage if they do. their image of themselves as liberal democracies is too precious to spend it trying to contain the excesses of the united states, even if we are kidnapping and torturing their citizens on their soil. the bush adminstration is now freer than ever to distort international treaties we have signed, like the geneva convention and the international covenant on civil and politcal rights and re-define long established laws such as rendition however it suits them.

it is really simple. george bush, dick cheny, condoleezza rice and the rest of the admininistration will leave office as rich men and women. they won't have to bear the fruition of their work. but we will. we will be paying for these policies for generations. and honestly? if we continue to support politicans that allow these things to happen in our name, we are as much to blame as they are.

you know, it is a lot more fun to write about bruce cockburn.

in case you want the mainstream view, this is from reuters (full story):

NO TOUGH QUESTIONS

A senior U.S. State Department officials said ministers had avoided pressing Rice on specific questions about alleged U.S. practices, such as running secret prisons in Europe, and had instead sought assurances about the treatment of detainees.

Even then, he said, European governments had not asked about specific tactics, such as whether the United States uses waterboarding, meant to make a detainee feel he is drowning.

"Rather than focus on specifics, the conversation is more about the underpinning concern of how detainees are treated," he said.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the ministers' discussion on Wednesday had improved the atmosphere.

"It cleared the air," he told a news conference, adding that Rice had been "on good form" during the discussion.

European allies have shown little appetite for a head-on confrontation with Rice over allegations which could explode in their faces if any complicity emerged on their part.

Rice sought to deflect criticism of U.S. policy before leaving for Europe on Monday, saying that European intelligence agencies had helped Washington extract information from suspects and urging allies to see "we are all in this together."

tags: politics, bush, condoleeza, eu, cia, torture

the problem with not being bruce cockburn

2005-12-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

i am not bruce cockburn though i look enough like him when i have my hair buzzed (like my profile photo) that people in bars send me drinks to congratulate me on my latest album. not being bruce is really a hassle sometimes.

the first problem with not being bruce is an ethical one, that is, "do i send the drink back?" or do i enjoy it and pray that no one hands me a guitar and asks to hear a verse or two of if a tree falls. god knows that i wished i had written that song, especially the line "hacked by parasitic greedhead scam". but i didn't, so i have to smile, say, "no, i am not bruce" and, almost always, pay for my own scotch.

not being bruce is also a financial burden. if i was bruce, with thirty albums under my belt and a place in the canadian music hall of fame (okay so its not the rock and roll hall of fame but it ain't bad) i am sure that my ira would be in most excellent condition. i don't imagine that bruce worries too much about whether he should punt his dsl service in favor of sitting at the trident cafe for three hours every day because there's free wireless. i love the trident but how much sencha tea can i drink?

now i know that this may be difficult to imagine, but not being bruce is cutting into my social life. i am pretty sure that bruce goes to much more interesting parties, much more often, than i do. i mean, the guy gets to hang out with sam phillips. how fucking cool is that?

but the most important shortcoming in not being bruce? if i were bruce i am positive that i would be a "blog of note" in about two minutes.

damn. i wish i played guitar.

tags: cockburn, envy

plan for victory in an undeclared war that ended two years, seven months and four days ago

2005-12-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

does anyone but me see anything odd here? no, not the photograph. we all know what was odd about that.

i am talking about the administration's plan for victory to bring an end to a war that was neither declared by the president nor authorized by congress, more than two years after the "end" of combat operations.

as you might recall, president bush announced the invasion of iraq on march 19, 2003 and declared the end of combat operations on may 1st of the same year. in his speech from the deck of aircraft carrier uss abraham lincoln, mr bush said:

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country."

on the day the mr. bush landed his jet on the abraham lincoln to make this speech, the pentagon announced that one hundred thirty eight members of the armed services had died in battle. that means post-combat operations tooks the lives of another two thousand american soldiers and support personnel; these men and women died "reconstructing" iraq.

the pentagon numbers do not include twenty-five to thirty-five thousand iraqi civilians who have also died in since the american-led and financed invasion or losses suffered by our coalition partners.

the war in iraq lasted for forty-four days, cost approximately one hundred forty americans their lives and ended in may, 2003. in the almost nine hundred days since "major combat operations have ended in iraq" (mr. bush's words, not mine) the work of "securing and recontructing" iraq (again, mr. bush speaking) has caused the deaths of another two thousand american soldiers, along with thousands of iraqi civilians.

i seem to be missing something here. a plan for victory? when does "securing" the "reconstruction" of a country require a "plan for victory"? or involve u.s. combat troops being maimed and killed by roadside bombs, suicide bombers, snipers and ambushes? or, for that matter, in the continued killing of civilians?

mr. bush and his administration are fond of finding metaphors in the annals of world war ii. but if we had "reconstructed" post world war ii france with the same skill that the bush administration have been reconstructing post operation iraqi freedom iraq, today's kabul and paris would look very much like the same city.

tags - politics, bush, iraq, kabul, paris, bodycount

fun? lefty? serious?

2005-11-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

my dharma brother and university colleague, tharpa, recently gave me a plug in his wonderfully well-written and pleasingly obscure blog, rebelkitten. i must admit that i am pleased by the attention, though a part of me can't help but wonder if, by being placed in the category of blogs for "people who are serious and think about serious things" i have suffered a subtle insult. "serious" after all is coming from a blog called "surreal sneer" and headed with a quote by georges bataille. is there a man on the planet more serious than bataille, the "metaphyscian of evil"?

i didn't think so.

now moving on to "fun" and "lefty", the other two adjectives used to describe this effort. i guess that i can live with fun, but do you consider dragging yourself through my ranting about politics, the dharma and (of course) me, fun? but i have to question "lefty". you might think - based on my less-than-adoring reviews of george bush and his minions in the administration and congress - that i am a dyed-in-the-organic-wool lefty. any such perception arises only because the democratic party is so powerless right now that they can't engage in the same sort of hijinks that the republicans seem to be having so much fun with these days. and because they can't, i am not able to rant about democratic imperialism, corruption, incompetence and fundamentalism quite as readily as i can the republican version. but i am sure that someday soon i will have that chance. after all, the only thing is it seems that democrats are interested in changing is who gets call the shots on invading iran.

i hope that clears things up. now i have to head back to tharpa's blog to figure out whether i really have been insulted; damn surrealists, you can never tell...

custom-fit meditation

2005-11-29T00:44:00.000-07:00

for all the books on meditation practice available to us and for all the wonderful teachers we visit, we seem to have a very hard time really getting what meditation practice is... and isn't. why is this?

it is not because we don't have access to teachings and teachers. there is probably more dharma, more widely available, now than ever before. we live in a time of dharmic plenty. so it can't be that we don't have plentiful access to authentic teachings.

in the same vein, it is unlikely that we can't find a tradition that really engages us on a personal level. we can encounter dozens of authentic, tested traditions in the west. a trip to the library, amazon.com or your bookstore will reveal a vast array of choices. so will a web search. we have the opportunity to explore many traditions and, in doing so, find an explanation of meditation that speaks to us directly.

we also can't suggest that authentic practice is impossible because we aren't free to practice or that we can't find communities of practitioners. while we may not be in a time of true religious pluralism, we do have a great deal of religious freedom; the number of authentic, practicing teachers and buddhist communities in the united states and europe is testament to that.

so we are free to practice authentically within one of many streams of buddhist meditation and have access to teachings and teachers that make such practice a reality, yet so few of us seem to really get what practice is. why is that?

it seems that the very conditions that bring us into contact with such bountiful dharma also allow us to maintain our narrow views about what practice actually is. the richness of our situation allows us to dump one teacher and pick up another when we are disappointed by their refusal to be what we think they should be. it enables us to wander from practice to practice picking and choosing what fits our conception of practice as a tool that to create a better life for ourselves. we use religious freedom as a foundation for a shopping mall approach to the dharma: mixing and matching the teachings and teachers we encounter to create a comfortable meditation practice that "meets our needs".

such a custom-fit practice may be comfortable and cozy. it may even help us to feel better or be a little kinder. but it is not authentic. if we examine the teachings of any of the traditions we encounter, we quickly realize that authentic practice doesn't do anything for us and what it does do isn't comfortable. it doesn't abide our desire to have things our way and so it can't be custom-made to fit our conceptions. above all, we find that authentic practice is not about "meeting our needs" but about meeting the world as it is. knowing this, how could we imagine that a dharma we construct from what we liked about this teacher or didn't like about that one might possibly be authentic?

exploring tradition is an excellent idea. hearing many different teachers teach is, too. access to so many teachings and teachers is a precious blessing that we should partake of wholeheartedly. but at some point, we have to settle down, choose a tradition and immerse ourselves in it. we don't stop studying with other teachers or learning but we do give up the notion that we are going to custom-fit practice to our expectations. we stop picking and choosing and get down to the hard work of seeing the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be. this is authentic practice in every tradition.

tags - buddhism, meditation

slow kissing

2005-11-29T00:39:00.000-07:00

i am sitting here tonight, prepping for a lecture that i have to give on family systems theory and treating alcoholism, and all i can think about is how i like really long, slow, kissing: making out in its most essential form. i realize that i am an oddity in these fast, zipless times. after all, i prefer one good evening of making out with someone that enjoys it as much as i do over getting laid, however completely and efficiently, by four different women, four nights in a row. but that is how i am. old-fashioned, maybe.

is there anything like teasing a really hot kisser for five or ten minutes at a time before you finally bring your open mouth against theirs? nope. don't think so. and i can't imagine anything better than making out for an hour or two before my mouth touches that lovely hollow above the collarbone or my fingers undo even a single button. like i said, old-fashioned.

you might think that such a prediliction would be in heavy demand but, alas, you would be wrong. there aren't many good kissers these days, let alone women that place more value on a slow seduction than one shot chemistry that satisfies once, never to spark again. i am a lost romantic in a world of efficient fuckers, it appears, a man that likes to kiss, in a sea of women that value the staying power of viagra far more than a good bottle of wine, a stack of cliff brown vinyl and a man that enjoys waiting until the fourth or fifth date before spending two or three hours undressing a woman slowly and carefully.

so tonight, while i plow through a stack of books from the cu library and try to figure out how to say a single interesting thing during this upcoming lecture, i admit that i'd rather be in sitting up on flagstaff road, on that stone bench overlooking the city, with my beautiful woman leaning against me, exploring that little place right behind her ear. oh, to revisit those times when kissing was an art, when the ability to kiss slowly and well was just something a gentleman was expected to be able to do...

tags - kissing, reflection, romantics

my unshaven head (hi mom!)

2005-11-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

though i guess it looks like that in my profile photo. while i am talking to my brother tonight, he says something like, "hey did you go krishna on us? mom's worried that you shaved your head and joined some freaky cult."

no worries mom. i am sporting rather fashionable middle-aged guy hair, curtesy of maddie at al's barber shop. i just don't have photos of me (a) smiling and (b) having said fashionable cut, so i settled for a smiling, albeit short-shorn photo of me.

and the krishnas don't require you to shave your head any more to join. hear for yourself on utah (yes utah!) based krishna radio...

making pictures

2005-11-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

one of the things that i do is make images, mostly black & white, using a couple of old cameras i bought years ago. like my writing, my photographs are pretty much self-reflective and i wouldn't expect anyone else to "get" what i am doing. in fact, one of the things i liked most about doing gallery shows is watching people create incredibly complex stories about the simplest images, stories that had no connection with my intent, however ill-formed it was.

figuring out why i do what i do is pretty important to me. so much so that, before my first show, i spent days trying to write an 'artist statement' that compressed twelve years of making photographs and thinking about photography into about two hundred words. as you might imagine, the result was a completely opaque, if somewhat amusing and unintended, parody of artspeak. the fundamental lesson from that first show and that first statement was: trying to explain why one would spend three years taking photographs of busted furniture and broken windows inside an abandoned cork factory is rather pointless. so i stopped explaining. the stories people made up were better anyway.

but why do i make images? or, rather, why did i? i pretty much put my cameras away six years ago (except for the occasional furtive photo taking expedition) because i couldn't answer this question very well any more and it seemed important to know what i was doing even if i didn't tell anyone else. but all the old reasons were gone and new ones had not appeared; without reasons, my photographs became static and lifeless. i am asking the question again because i am circling around my camera like a crow trying to figure out if that road kilt skunk is really as dead as it looks. sooner or later i am going to pick it at again, just to see. i am hoping i don't need reasons this time around.

enough about politics

2005-11-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

okay, i am going to quit ranting about the dismal, absurd and enraging state of politics in this country. i mean when i got the news that a bunch of rich northern californian democrats actually believe that they are holding the mantle of progressive politics because they started an organization that "sells" non-profits to other rich, northern californian democrats, i knew it was time to give up the ghost. living in a time when the best we can muster for "thoughtful" political commentary is whatever rabid, aging white guy that fox or air america is currently promoting, what difference do backwater blogs like this one make? exactly... so back i go to examining my navel and writing long, tortured, sexton-like self-referential posts. sure, no one reads them but at least i don't have to pretend that they'll make a difference while i am writing them.

well, maybe first i will share this ted rall cartoon, which may be the funniest/saddest/most truthful poke he's taken at the democrats in about two years.

now i really *am* done. really.

one party politics

2005-10-29T16:16:00.000-06:00

tom delay is under indictment but continues as ad hoc house majority leader, no matter who pretends that roy blunt, not the straightest shooter the senate has ever seen, has the job. bill first is under investigation by the sec, is likely to be charged and continues to serve as senate majority leader. karl rove, mr. bush's deputy chief of staff, was not indicted this week, but is an interesting enough candidate for future charges that the special prosecutor has indicated that he might empanel another grand jury. lewis libby, mr. cheney's chief of staff, was indicted on five counts and will face trial. need we mention "no bid" contracts for halliburton and other bush/cheney insiders, restrictions on press reporting in iraq or the federal response in the days before and after katrina? what happened to the days when even the venal alleged criminals had enough good grace and manners to step aside when they were accused of having hands, right up to their necks, in the public cookie jar?

it is easy to see the common thread of these stories as "republican corruption" but there is something more here. the news from washington is just the latest evidence that having the house, senate, white house and, increasingly, the federal courts run by one party is a bad idea for americans and a really bad idea for the rest of the world. it is really quite simple: when one party institutions believe that they don't have to answer for their actions, they stop doing so. thus, it is no surprise that the federal government no longer works for the people that allegedly put it into power; after all, why should it? we haven't been giving the feds any indication that we care at all. this is not a "republican" problem but a "democracy" problem and we shouldn't kid ourselves that the democrats would any more democratic than their counterparts across the aisle if they had the same opportunity currently enjoyed by delay, first, bush, cheney, et al. we are in this mess because we allowed it to happen and we'll stay in it until we do something different. we: the ninety-nine percent of us who don't qualify as america's wealthiest americans.

one party politics is a prescription for corruption, war and social policy tilted toward the elite in our society. it doesn't matter whether that party is called republican, democratic, socialist or communist, we end up in the same place when any one group ends up with the lion's share of political power. what we have now, that is, politicians catering to special interests, lining their own pockets and those of their close friends with our money, waging war for personal economic gain and indulging whatever power fantasies they have been nursing since their own days of avoiding military service, is a direct result of our willingness to be frightened by their ghost stories of terrorists, illegal immigrants and destroyed family values and lulled by their frankly-awful marketing campaigns. washington is corrupt because we allow corruption. simple as that.

and quite honestly, the only difference between our corruption and the kind that the west likes to rail about in africa is that our guys are better at it and so don't get caught as often. because we allow ourselves to believe that institutions like the sec and fema are there for us, we can pretend that we can't smell the corrupt nature of washington politics. until, of course, something like hurricane katrina, crosses our well-protected coastline.

there is a simple way to bring this to end. throw the bums out. all of them. no matter what you believe congress has done for your district or state, no matter what pork barrel project you've benefited from, no matter that you consider your representative or senator to be a good human being, the answer is simple. vote against him or her in the next election. choose third party candidates, run yourself or elect a beginner. if your current representative is that good, let him or her run again, as an outsider, after they spend a couple of years actually living with the people they represent, especially if they are poor people. and when we get done cleaning out congress, we will be well prepared to clean out the white house.

let us send a message to washington, and by extension, our state governments, that we are tired of the corruption, tired of being bled, tired of sending our sons and daughters to wars so that companies like exxon can make billions of dollars of profits, tired of seeing our environment trashed. let us send a message that, most of all, we are tired of being treated like fools who can't figure out just who is getting rich and fat by living out of checkbooks while the people we care about can't make the rent.

executive privilege, meirs and the next bad news

2005-10-29T16:03:00.000-06:00

it really didn't take a rocket scientist to see that the conservative right would push the one sure-fire eject button - executive privilege - to end ms. miers's bid for a supreme court seat. it didn't even take one to see that the democrats were going to sit back and let the right do their thing. after all, what could be better than seeing the president that has consistently bested them for more than four years have to retreat under friendly fire?

but, unfortunately for the democrats, and more importantly, the rest of us, mr. bush's next choice is going to be male, likely to be white and most assuredly will be a firebrand constitutional conservative of the sort that the right has been panting to see since the disappointments of sutter and o'connor. indeed, some would tell you that this is the only reason they voted for mr. bush. look, in the next week or so, for the administration to put forth a candidate that the conservatives will love because, more than anything, mr. bush needs friends these days. and he'll take them anywhere he can get them; right now that means those that hold to the idea that the return of white, nineteenth century family values (whatever they think that means) is a bedrock social cause.

this, in case you haven't figured it out, isn't great news if you are a woman, a person of color or a member of a sexual minority or prefer social to war spending priorities. the party that supposedly stands for these things may have enjoyed the show of bush squirming, but they are not powerful enough -- or brave enough -- to actually stand up to bush or the republican senate for any of these things. and they will, unfortunately, prove that they aren't by approving bush's next nominee no matter what.

miers, bush, rove and the right

2005-10-13T17:01:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times on October 13th:

"The White House spokesman insisted that Ms. Miers's evangelical Christian faith was "a side issue" and that reporters were trying to make it one. Almost immediately after President Bush said on Wednesday that Ms. Miers's faith was pertinent to her candidacy, his critics accused him of signaling to conservatives that she was one of them, particularly in opposing abortion."

Ms. Miers's two most visible qualifications to be a Justice on the Supreme Court seem to be her unabashed adoration of George Bush and her evangelical Christian faith. On the surface, these qualifications hardly seem adequate substitutes for knowledge of constitutional law, experience arguing before the Court or even a little time as a lawyer on the Circuit Court level. That Ms. Miers is intelligent and accomplished cannot be doubted, but nothing on her resume, seems to qualify her for a seat on the Supreme Court. What are we missing? Why did Bush choose her to fill this seat on the Court?

For Mr. Bush or perhaps more properly, Mr. Rove, it is clear that Ms. Miers's faith is "pertinent to her candidacy" and other than her standing as a loyalist, the only reason for her nomination. For all the thunder coming from the Republican Right, I think that they will be generally supportive of this unknown and unknowable nominee. After all, Ms. Miers may be their best chance to garner the Court's swing vote against the issues that mean so much to them: criminalizing homosexuality and abortion; rolling back civil rights; and further weakening the crumbling wall between government and Christianity. I am betting that most of the "realpolitik" Right knows that it has little chance of getting anyone in the mold of Justice Scalia or the mythic Robert Bork through the nominating process. Given that, Ms. Miers is probably a pretty good choice.

Now, I don't think that Ms. Miers should be a Justice because I don't think that she is qualified for the job. And as tempted as I am to advocate for her candidacy just because it will make for a good show to watch the conservatives cat-fight, I think that our country will be better served if the extreme right forces Bush to choose a candidate more to their liking. Honestly, if the Democrats want the American people to see what is happening to our country, they should stall the start of the hearings and let President Bush's power base force him to withdraw Miers nomination and offer a dyed-in-the-wool "strict constitutionalist" with a track record of supporting the rollback of Roe v. Wade, Civil Rights legislation and all the rest.

My bet is that exactly this is going to happen. In spite of the President's protests that he will stand by Ms. Miers, she will "voluntarily" withdraw her name as a nominee within the week. She will say something like she "is withdrawing her name from consideration to end a divisive debate and allow the President to get on with filling this important position as quickly as possible." Mr. Bush will, shortly afterwards, offer a new nominee that clearly passes the extreme right's litmus tests on abortion, homosexuality and civil rights. And then the real fun will begin.

Why will this happen? Because I am also betting that the only group of people more convinced of their power in this country than Bush, Cheney et al are the hard-core conservatives - mostly Christian, white and monied, that worked so hard to put this administration in office for just this moment. And as far as this group is concerned, it is time for the adimistration to give them what they want more dearly than an amendment "sanctifying marriage" -- a Supreme Court that will vote their way on social issues for the next twenty years. The extreme right thinks it is payback time and they mean to have their way, Karl Rove and realpolitik be damned. If I am corrent, the upcoming Senate hearing will be a rare opportunity for the American public to really understand what some folks want to do to their country and just how they want to do it. For my buck, that's a pretty good thing. Its always easier to confront the bad guys when you can actually see them, you know?

By the way, I don't think that there is a vast conspiracy on the part of "the right wing" to convince the rest of us that Mier isn't really the person they want in office so they can get her in using Democratic votes because she's already agreed to roll back Roe v. Wade. (One the problems with conspiracy theories is that describing them requires long, run-on sentences.) I think that George Bush picked Miers because she is a woman, a Bush loyalist and because Rove told him to do so. I think that Karl Rove picked her because he believed he could convince the extreme right that her "evangelical credentials" were appropriate code for "she passes the test" and get their support in the Senate without a long battle with the Democrats. Why? Because Rove knows that the less the public actually knows what's really going on, the less likely they will slow down the turnback in social, environmental and foreign policy he has been engineering during the Bush administration. Rove is a realist. Better for him a Justice he can get on the bench and is likely to vote as expected than one that he can't no matter how those appropriate those votes might have been.

three threads

2005-10-09T13:35:00.000-06:00

being invisible, manic or controlling are the main melodies in the song of my personality. there are others, but they are more accents or riffs on these three; less frequent and often harder to discern. the nature of my addictions to depression, alchohol and food, and power are expressions of, and supports for, these three personas. when i am invisible, depression supports my identity as the one who doesn't matter. the bad boy loves good booze and food in excess, especially when indulgence of it marks me as different. and power? exercising power is confirmation of my ability to overcome the circumstances created by my invisible and hell-raising selves.

my identity and addiction are partners in a well-orchestrated and robust dance, interacting in the same way that wonderful tango partners guide one another on the dance floor. interestingly, each of my identity-addiction partnerships is comfortable yielding the floor to the others. they find it easy to trade places as first one then another tires reinforcing the idea of my existence. none of them demands the spotlight all the time but all require that the floor be constantly occupied.

at first, i thought that i didn't need to end the dance as i did to find a "healthy" persona to occupy the floor. this thought gave rise to my spiritual identity. as i hoped, the spiritual me hardly leaves the floor and leaves little space in which my invisible, wild or controlling identities can surface. but as i found, my spiritual persona prefers to have dance partners, too. not being too choosy, it hooked up with the dancers already at the ball, my addictions. it is always in the spotlight, dancing day and night, gracefully moving from partner to partner.

my other personas allow my spiritual identity to retain the dance floor most of the time because, in many ways, it is the sum of them. this integration seemed, at first, to be more healthy. invisibility became my meditative aspect. my wild side became devotion and my controlling side, discipline. my addictions don't care much about this re-making of my identity because what matters to them is not who they dance with but that they have a chance to dance. for a while, i thought this to be a reasonable kind of reformation, less useful personas transformed to healthier ones. i considered it a substition of virture for non-virtue and continued to dance.

what i have begun to learn that replacing the old personas with a new, allegedly, "healthier" identity does not solve the basic problem. i am still controlled by who i think i am. whether i am struggling because i am invisible or struggling because i am not spiritual enough in my devotion or discipline, i am still trying to find a solid me. i haven't really addressed the basic issue: that my sense of self is a reflection rather than the real thing. seeing this, i realize that what is required is a willingness to not replace "who i thought i was" with "who i think i am now" and stay in the emptiness that is left. until i develop this willingness, my addictions will always have a dance partner.

gerald may, in addiction and grace, says talks about the effect of this willingness (p. 177):

when these people were empowered to overcome their addictions, they did so with simplicity. they simply did not entertain the next temptation. they saw that temptation coming but neither fought it off nor turned away from it toward something else. simply, briefly, they chose not to hop on board with it. what did they do instead? nothing. they let their spaciousness be.

and this, i believe, applies directly to our identities as well as our addictions. we must be willing to stay in the space of not knowing who are what we are rather than rush to construct a new persona to replace the one we have just surrendered. for me, this means continually facing the temptation of my addictions, and eventually, my identities, and doing nothing at all.

i have only begun to work with my addictions and i am very far away from being willing to give up my personas. i do hope, as my addictions retire from the dance floor and leave me partner-less, that i will find the courage and grace to work with who i think i must be -- unseen, wild, powerful, spiritual -- more directly.

how much

2005-10-01T20:32:00.000-06:00

today's print version of the new york times... lead story is on the administration's "purchase" of favorable news coverage of its stand on education, right column story on judith miller's (a NYT reporter who did jail time rather than reveal her source in a story) testimony regarding an adminstration official's outing of a CIA agent and bottom left hand corner, photographs and story about the soldiers that pick up dead americans from the battlefield of iraq. and this on top of the coverage of tom delay's indictment for criminal conspiracy and republican marilyn brewer's attempt to distance herself from bush in her run for a house seat. one wonders when roy blunt, delay's replacement as majority leader, will join his ex-boss on the list of indicted republican leaders. the corruption, incompetence and utter comtempt with which this adminstration, and the republican party, hold the american people has finally reached the point where not even the new york times can ignore it.

why do the rest of us? we allowed a handful of rich white men to convince us that bill clinton was evil incarnate for having an extramarital affair and yet we continue to sit while the bush administration and its friends drive our country into financial and moral ruin, enrich themselves by looting our treasury and create a permanent underclass of poor, uneducated, unemployed, sick and marginalized people. why? how many indictments do we need, how many "purchases" of favorable news coverage, how many hurricane katrinas, michael browns? how many millions of working people without medical insurance, chapter seven bankruptcies? how many suicide bombers, dead iraqis, americans in body bags?

how much suffering has to happen before we can no longer turn away from it? what has happened to us that we are allowing this to happen in our name, in our country, in our time? what will it take for us to bear witness and, out of that witness, to say that we have had enough, that it is time for things to change, that these things will no longer happen in our name?

how much?

the last thread

2005-09-29T18:50:00.000-06:00

one of my responses to the maddening oscillation between hyper-competence and utter-mediocrity was to call to light a third facet of my personality, a kind of mickey rourke-like persona. this version of me became responsible for spilling off all the backed-up psychic sewage accumulated through an adult life of trying to disappear or be perfect. my rourke-like self took care of acting out all the anger, frustration and fear that i hadn't manifested in other parts of my life along with a seriously repressed need to have fun and not be so fucking productive all the time. this part of me was barely visible until i had "made it" as an entrepreneur. but once it took center stage, things got really interesting.

being a vc, doing charity work, serving on boards and all the rest were mostly my way of seeing my reflection in others. without it, i wasn't anything; i was invisible. i didn't realize that i was just replaying the same story i had been running with since i was a kid. while i may have been good at what i was doing and even helpful to others, it didn't have much meaning to me unless someone recognized it, and by extension, me.

as time went on, my sense of self, so dependent on this kind of reflection, needed ever larger doses of attention. mickey was, in retrospect, the perfect response to the nagging feeling that i was still, for all the success, invisible. when i was acting out the bad-boy routine, visibility manifested in ways that being a venture capitalist and big man on campus no longer seemed to produce. when i was chasing women, being seen in places i shouldn't have been seen in and hanging out with less-than-reputable people i could see my reflection quite clearly. i actually existed.

don't matter

2005-09-27T09:35:00.000-06:00

growing up, i didn't matter much to most of the people i encountered. i was pretty much invisible unless someone wanted something from me or wanted to take something out on me. after a while, the fact that i didn't matter to others became part of me. i was taught that i was invisible because i lacked some fundamental quality, that somehow i wasn't doing something that i needed to be doing. with this as a starting point, my life has been a series of zig-zags between trying to discover this missing quality and cultivating the only thing i seemed to be good at doing, which is not mattering. swinging between hyper-competence and utter-mediocrity, i was an engima to most of the people in my life, including me.

in one sense, the fact of my not-mattering, made complete sense. i lacked many of the attributes that were valued in my community of origin. i was "invisible" because who i was never made it through the filter of what was important to my peers, family or elders. moreover, the qualities i did manifest were overtly suspicious; my peers responded by marginalizing or attacking me, my elders by ignoring me.

at this point, i want to say that i understand that it is probably difficult for anyone who has been marginalized based on the color of their skin, gender or sexuality to imagine that i - a white, heterosexual and currently upper middle-class male - could have any notion of marginalization or oppression. in fact, whatever i know of it might be completely meaningless because of the starting position my gender and skin color afforded even me. i hold both a keen awareness of my own privilege and my history as i write.

until i graduated from college, i spent most of my time cultivating invisibility and confirming the fact that i didn't matter. even when i did make an effort to be in community, i did so with those most like my childhood tormentors or who existed - like me - as marginal people. my strategies for finding community were a stunning example of how we connect with people that reinforce our core ideas about self and ignore any information that might indicate that we aren't so solid as we seem.

i was in my late twenties before i began to understand how profoundly the people i wanted to matter to were suffering in their own right. i was in my thirties before i really had a glimpse at how impossible it was for them to care for me, to let me know that i mattered, given the depth of their own suffering. i was in my forties before i really understood that i didn't matter, not because i lacked something but because i wanted so much of something that they felt incapable of giving. and i have only recently begun to see that not-mattering is, in fact, all that matters.

not just a disaster, not just incompetence

2005-09-10T07:25:00.000-06:00

what happened in new orleans (or more properly, what didn't) is not just a devastating natural disaster, a tragic loss of life and property or a stunning display of governmental incompetence. while it is all of these it is also an unmistakable revelation of the value system of those in power. given what concerns of the powers-that-be, what happened in new orleans was unavoidable. moreover, what happened in new orleans is likely to happen again and again. the cause may be different - an large earthquake, a nuclear power plant accident or terrorist attack - but the aftermath will be much the same for the powers-that-be see the world in a certain way and that way can not accomodate what needed to be done in the aftermath of katrina.

the human disaster of new orleans, biloxi and sulphur port has its roots in a view that discounts the value those who do not have economic power: the poor, the sick, the very old and the very young. this view, held by almost everyone in the bush adminstration, values people in terms of what they produce or own and assumes that lack of economic power is a character flaw. in other words, the poor are poor because they want to be. in this view, "lack of initiative" is why people live in housing projects and ghettos and it is laziness that keeps them from having the "american dream". it is this view that allowed people in the bush adminstration to truly believe that the people left behind in new orleans stayed because they wanted to stay. it is also this thinking that blinded the bush administration to the tragedy and suffering of louisiana and mississippi until the outcry from the public grew too large to ignore. as we have learned from iraq and afghanistan, without this uproar, which president bush understands to be a "public relations disaster" rather than a response to suffering, the poor and disenfranchised are neither seen nor heard. president bush has not, in fact, responded to the tragedy, but to the effect that it is having on his popularity and reputation.

for those of us who wish to change things, this is important to remember. this crisis has revealed what the president and his team values -- and what it does not -- in clear and unmistakable terms. if we want to change things in this country, what the president showed of himself in his response to new orleans, biloxi and sulphur port has to stay on the front page so that it can stay in the american consciousnesss. even now, the press is beginning to remake what happened, that locals stayed because they didn't believe it would be so bad, and people are beginning to buy it. president bush and his allies must not be allowed to "repackage" what has happened or push it into the background. simply enough, as people remember and think about this disaster, they will begin to understand what happened to the poor, sick, the very young and the very old of new orleans could very well happen to them. when they do, president bush's "public relations problem" will not only not disappear, it will provide the means for turning our country away from "wealth at any cost" and toward justice, equality and compassion.

suggestions are not enough

2005-09-05T17:21:00.000-06:00

sunday’s time-picayne includes an open letter to president bush that demands the firing of every single person in a management role at the federal emergency management agency. i could not agree more. if the results of the lack of preparedness for a disaster of this sort, which is why the agency exists, was not enough, and if the quality of the subsequent response was not enough, under secretary michael brown’s incredulous, callous and disconnected statements about the disaster and the agency’s failure to be helpful would be.

but suggesting to your congressperson or senator that mr. brown should be fired is not enough. firing mr. brown will not fix the broken machinery and misplaced priorities of this administration. however important it is to let president know that we actually do care how our government is run, and making sure that mr. brown is fired is an excellent way to let him know, it is more important to let our congress people and senators know that we will not let them remain in office if they do not address the rot in washington. as i noted earlier, mr. bush is our president for three more years. we can’t change that. but we can and should boot out our representatives if they won't help us change the things we can.

simply put, if the people that are currently in congress are not able to challenge president bush for us, we should throw them out and find people who can.

its time to take back our country. now. we can start by letting our representatives and senators, who are supposed to be working for us, know that they are on notice. here is the link to the web page listing of your senator’s contact information:

united states senator addresses

and here is a similar page for the house of representatives:

united state house of representatives addresses

use it. today. follow up with a written letter or a phone call to your representative’s office in washington and give them a very simple message:

if you continue to support president bush's priorites and budget i will not vote for you in the next election.

for too long, most of us have sat by silently while this administration, aided by a pliant congress, has spent our money and, increasingly, the lives of our brother and sisters, in ways that most of us seem to oppose but don’t seem to do anything about. do we need to see anything more of what is happening, right now, in louisiana and mississippi, to understand that we can no longer be silent?

fire the ceo (long post)

2005-09-03T14:15:00.000-06:00

during my career as a venture capitalist, one of my jobs was to hire and fire chief executive officers. if starting technology companies was an uncertain business, figuring out if the person running the company was going to be good at doing so was that much more uncertain. some VCs addressed the challenge by only backing management teams that they knew because they backed them before. but most of us, me included, worked with people that we didn't know before we decided to invest our time and money in them. and, as it turned out in almost every investment, it wasn't the techonology or the market or the competition (and certainly not the VCs involved) that determined how well a company did, it was the management team.

i ended up hiring and firing a fair number of CEOs over the years. firing the CEO was the most unpleasant part of my job. even laying people off or losing all my investors' money in a deal wasn't as bad. when an company was doing poorly and we had hired too agressively, the people we let go were almost always highly educated young adults that found new jobs in days or weeks. and our investors understood that big returns meant taking big risks; writeoffs were part of the game.

but accepting the fact that the CEO had to go was an entirely different matter. first of all, i had a personal investment in this person and a close working relationship. often i had interviewed and hired him or her. i had certainly convinced my partners that this was the man or woman that would get the job done. firing a CEO meant that i had to admit that i had made a bad people choice in a business where "picking the talent" was one of the marks of good VC. firing a CEO meant letting your competitors, suppliers and potential follow-on investors know that things weren't going so well at one of your prize investments. this could be a big problem in a business where image matters alot. on top of all that, firing the CEO meant that you were going to throw the company into turmoil, especially if the person is the "charismatic founder" of an industry darling. worst of all, you were going to have to find a replacement after just admitting that your "people picking" talent might be slightly impaired.

all this translated into a huge headache that most of us tried to avoid. the VC's ability to ignore the blindingly obvious fact that its time to make a management change is legendary. buy any of the guys on Sand Hill Road more than one single-malt scotch and ask him about firing CEOs and you will hear two things:

we always waited too long to do it, and
everyone, including the CEO and staff, knew it needed to be done six months before we did it.

in spite of the fact that we had a board meetings once a month, got reams of information from every level of the company, hired consultants to help us figure out why the company missed its sales, product release or expense plan for the fifth quarter in a row, we hung on. in spite of the fact that we hired the CEO to run the company and it is is his or her plan that didn't get met even when it was revised downward month after month, we waited way too long. we just couldn't face the fact that the person in the corner office was a failure. we wanted a miracle to happen because a miracle meant we wouldn't have to deal with the aftermath of replacing him or her.

but the miracles didn't happen too often (that is, by the way, why they are called miracles) and after burning through too many good employees that we didn't need to lose and too much investor money that didn't need to be burned, after losing market share to our competitors and generally allowing a dysfunctional working environment to become institutionalized, we'd finally come to the conclusion that it was time to fire the CEO and try to clean up the mess that he or she had created.

if the parallels to the last five years with President George Bush are not obvious yet, i can refer you to a number of people far more qualified than me to list them for you. just for starters, try these two recent op-ed pieces from the new york times from maureen dowd or paul krugman or some of the many sources listed at antiwar.com. lest my republican friends say that i present too liberal a view with these choices, read the latest editorial from the economist or pat buchanan's american conservative. i am sure you can find others, too, but here's the point:

george bush, along with the people that he has hired, has done a lousy job running this country for the last five years and a particularly awful job of doing so for the last two. like any CEO and senior management team scrambling to save their jobs, they have offered revised plan after revised plan, more and more fantastic rationales for why their plans haven't worked out and ever expanding lists of enemies out to do them (and us) in. and, for five years, we have been buying it. just as i did as a VC, we (that is the voting american public) have ignored the evidence piling up in front of us while we hoped for a miracle.

the miracle is not going to happen.

its time to admit the blindingly obvious.

if we needed any more evidence, president bush's response to the destruction and suffering that followed katrina's landfall should supply it for you. this is not about politics now, or conservative versus liberal government or democrats versus republicans. this is about a president, and the staff that he team, and the mess that they have made of our country. we are poorer, more dependent on foreign oil, more polluted, less safe and more hated now than we were when president bush took office. it is now also undeniably clear that we are incapable of taking care of our own people, let alone taking on the herculean task of installing democracy in the middle east.

we have lost too many young americans in wars that don't matter, and now, too many in places like new orleans and biloxi to ignore the evidence. we have heard too many revised plans, revised budgets, fantastic excuses, imaginary enemies and new marketing spins. the bottom line (VCs love bottom lines) is that we are allowing a dysfunctional management team to institutionalize dysfunctional government while driving us into moral and financial bankruptcy and it is time for us, the folks that actually own this country, to do something about it. even if we elected president bush believing that he was the best choice to run the country, we can no longer ignore the evidence that says it just ain't so.

when the VCs decided that it was time to fire the CEO , they scheduled a meeting with him or her, delivered the news and the corner office was empty by lunch time. The employees and customers were notified and the search for a replacement began. politics is not so simple. for better or worse (and i betting it will be for the worse) president bush and his management team will be with us for another three years and four months. we can't really do anything about it, whatever those that call for impeachment might think. but we can try to limit the damage they can cause during the remainder of president bush's term. when VCs can't fire the CEO, whatever the reason, they take actions like:

taking control of the budget, right down to paper clip purchases,
approving all hiring and firing decisions, from VP to shipping clerk,
approving all contracts, however small.

the list goes on but you get the idea. when a CEO like president bush can't be fired, VCs limit further damage by making sure that he (and his team) don't continue to have free rein to run things as they see fit.

for the VC, this a really painful, last-resort option. it means months of fighting, months of turmoil, months of weary attention to detail. but when the CEO can't be fired and the company is being ruined, the VC realizes the only other option is writing off the whole company.

and now it is time for us, the citizens of the united states, to take this option. three years and four months of gridlock -- and having something left to rebuild with at the end -- is preferable to letting the current CEO continue down the path he and his team have chosen. simply put, its time to:

tell your congressperson and senators that if they support Bush's budget priorities, you will vote them out of office.
tell the President and his staff that he no longer has your support, especially if you voted for him in the last election,
begin to look for and find ways to support people in congress, or running for office, that will not support the White House's foreign, defense and domestic policies.
put your money where your mouth is. donate to political and social organizations that are working to slow and stall the White House agenda.

there's more you can do but you get the idea. we can't fire President Bush or any of his hires but we can limit the amount of damage that they can do by seeing that he doesn't get the money or resources to pursue his agenda. we can vote people into office that will begin to clean up the mess he's made. but we have to invest our money, votes and time. if we don't, we will assuredly have to live with the resulting chaos and suffering for many years after his retirement.

like any VC, we can be excused for betting on president bush and his business plan. he made a really good pitch and, hell, many of us didn't see any other choice. we gave him plenty of chances when things weren't going as planned because we wanted him to succeed and we didn't want to see the consequences of his failures. but new orleans is a consequence of our decision to back him long after it has become clear that he's not the right person for the job. we need to step up and do what needs to be done to save our country. we need to recognize that all the time in the world isn't going to give us a miracle this time. no one is going to save us but us.