Thursday, September 30, 2010

Be Very Afraid: The Truth(iness) is Out There


The prevailing political winds seem to be blowing nothing but fear. You take it in through your lungs and it goes straight to your brain. Wingnuts are afraid that Obama is a closet Muslim and will lead the country down the road to socialism, while lefties like me are afraid that Republicans are practically pissing themselves for the chance to trash social security and Roe v. Wade. (The difference of course being that liberal fears are totally legitimate.) Everyone’s going ape-shit over fearful speculation, imaginations are running berserk. If there were a stock market for fear futures, that would be where to put your money because it’s going to keep going up. Just the mere concept of Stephen Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” is as close to truthiness as you can get.

About the only good thing you can say about fear is that it doesn’t discriminate. It infects left and right, rich and poor. Is there any American out there who isn’t afraid, who’s truly fearless? Just send them a piece of mail with “Internal Revenue Service” in the return address and see what happens: a puddle. And I’m not talking about around the feet. Because as FDR famously said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself...and the boogeyman. Death, taxes, and now, of course, jihadists.

This invites a tangential thought: are jihadists fearless? Think also of Japan’s kamikaze pilots in WWII; each undertakes a suicide mission seemingly without fear. Why? Because the individuality I talked about last time has been subjugated to a higher cause. So why are we Americans so full of fear? Maybe because as confirmed individualists we have more self at stake. Not to mention more stuff. (That stuff’ll get ya every time...)

In a world fraught with uncertainty, this much is dead certain: if the Republicans retake the government, their agenda will be to restore the (sub)standard operating procedures of the Bush-Cheney era. And just like the WMDs in Iraq, truth and reason will become figments of the imagination. But not fear. Under that regime we’ll always be able to count on the certainty of fear.

Is this what Americans pine for?




Tuesday, September 28, 2010

His Mysterious Ways


The Gallup poll I recently cited revealed the religiosity of various nations, including the fact that less affluent nations are more religious, more affluent less so. One exception to the rule is the United States; another is the Persian Gulf states. Funny thing about that.

Consider that the word Islam itself means “submission to the will of God,” and a popular adage in Christianity is “not my will but Thine be done.” Among the devout, individuality is suppressed – also a hallmark of Buddhism, a significantly less bellicose faith – and rightly so. I’d go so far as to say this is what distinguishes a religious from a secular society, except that the US fiercely defends individualism while brandishing its religiosity like the sword of an avenging angel.

So are Americans hypocrites, or is our particular brand of Calvinist Christianity to blame? Maybe it’s a matter of psychological projection whereby we assign our desires to God and take that as justification for our actions. God wanted us to wipe out the Indians and expand our borders, to destroy [godless] Communism, to take a stand against socialized medicine, to hold fast to our firearms. And now He probably wants us to bomb Iran. In the meantime, we credit Him with our affluence and assume we must be doing His will to have achieved this kind of success.

(And why should it be any surprise that atheists in America are more knowledgeable about religion? To open one’s eyes, one first needs to be able to see.)

We’re not alone, of course, as it would appear that some residents of the similarly affluent oil-rich PG states, birthplace of al Qaeda, feel they have an inside track on the will of Allah. Maybe they see His having put all that crude under their feet as their own justification for translating their will into His and back again.

So in the end, it’s not Thy will but mine be done. That ol’ God sure works in mysterious ways.


Saturday, September 25, 2010

Message at the Bottom of the Cup


In an excellent NYT op-ed piece entitled “The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party,” Ron Chernow lays out a compelling assessment of how teabaggers have glamorized our forebears to the extent of ignoring the contentiousness that prevailed when America was born. Aside from his refresher course in history, what struck me most was this comment:
The Tea Party Movement has further sought to spruce up its historical bona fides by laying claim to the United States Constitution. Many Tea Party members subscribe to a literal reading of the national charter as a way of bolstering their opposition to deficit spending, bank bailouts, and President Obama’s health care plan.
As I began to read this, the first thought that leapt to mind was that they “lay claim to the Constitution” the same way that they wrap themselves in the flag. But when I got to the part about “a literal reading,” I couldn’t help but compare that to the tendency of many (perhaps most?) conservatives to be fundamentalist Christians.

Each of these proclivities reflects the same shortcoming: an unwillingness – or inability – to think things through. Why assess a situation when appealing to patriotism should be enough? Why question anything if it’s there in black and white?

Granted, the U.S. Constitution at only [sic] 200+ years old is a bit more relevant than the Bible. But it still reflects an 18th-century state of affairs that couldn’t have anticipated today’s, any more than early belief in the Bible could have anticipated advances in understanding that blow creation myths and miracles out of the water.
 

Sacred writings are not sacrosanct. And if they’re looking for a reflection of reality, today’s Founders-invoking patriots could just as well be reading tea leaves.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Why do Republicans wear red suspenders?


Imagine your house is burning down and, in a market-driven economy, there are two competing fire companies. You suspect that fire company #1 may even have started the fire, so you call #2 and they come and do their best to put it out. Only it’s still smoldering after months, so you’re a bit miffed. Not to mention choking on the smoke. You’d like #2 to come back and finish the job you called on them to do, except that #1 – the one that may have started it – is blocking the road so that #2’s trucks can’t get through and is insisting they can do the job better. (And they assure you that their crews don’t include any illegal immigrants or gays, either.) And since from your perspective #2 ain’t doin’ squat, why should you throw them your business again?

And so when the Republican leadership held a press conference in their shirtsleeves to present their “Pledge to America,” I couldn’t help but question their choice of costumes. I would have found it a lot more credible if they had come out dressed as firemen.

You know, the kind from Fahrenheit 451: the book-burning, truth-denying, repressive thugs who start the fires to begin with.



Thursday, September 23, 2010

In search of friendly skies...


I’m in the midst of planning some air travel, so if you’ll excuse me I need to rant about how much I hate US Airways.

Nearly all of my travel is to visit family near Philly. And for the 30+ years I’ve lived in Arizona, the hassle-free options have been Southwest and the-airline-formerly-known-as-America West. When I lived in Tucson, I either flew AW to Phoenix or Vegas to connect to a nonstop, or SW to Vegas for same (since SW doesn
t have the Tucson-Phoenix route), or a ground shuttle to Phoenix for either. With either, there was no need for sweating connections halfway across the country (although I had at least one AW plane fail to make it to Phoenix). These days I have to take a ground shuttle from Prescott to Phoenix, but those two airlines still offer the only direct flights.

I came to love America West once I got over hating them. They used to have such a lock on the Tucson market that they didn’t care if they treated their passengers like shit. One of my memorable experiences involved my flight from Philly arriving in Phoenix late and me running to make my Tucson connection only to see it pulling away from the gate and stranding me and half a dozen other people. I had thought there was some kind of rule that if your flight had landed they’d hold a connection, but AW apparently didn’t care. Then came one black day 20 or so years ago when Beth & I flew off for a vacation to the Northwest when it seemed that AW’s entire system crashed, flights canceled willy-nilly, and we ended up rescued by Air Alaska and finally going to bed in Bellingham without clean underwear for the next day.

But after that debacle things bounced back. When I called to book a flight (this being before such action was penalized with a surcharge), a friendly agent was always on the line, sometimes even waiving the fee if I had to change my plans. Whenever I called from back east to confirm a return flight, I enjoyed a brief chat over how the weather was in Arizona. Nine years ago when I had to push an itinerary up due to a family emergency, they bent over backward to accommodate me. The AW staff was uniformly friendly, as opposed to the robotic voices you always got on other airlines. And even though I didn’t fly all that much, one year they rewarded me with elite status anyway, and I admit to having been spoiled by those first-class upgrades. America West had won my allegiance.

Then came the merger with USAir. No more chatty agents based in Tempe or Vegas – instead it was offshore support from people whose first language was not English (this for “US” Airways), and whenever I attempted to trade miles for an upgrade it was like talking to a brick wall. A brick wall that spoke another language and pretended to not understand what it was I wanted. If they were going to take away my reward for flying with them, why should I continue to favor them with my patronage? Even the flight attendants were becoming surly, as borne out by news reports of post-merger labor squabbles, and one who’d come from the AW side and whose jump seat was across from me on a flight admitted that things weren’t what they used to be.

And so I migrated to Southwest with its super-friendly agents and crews. Sure, standing in line for a good shot at a seat got a little old before they revised their boarding system, but at least you had a shot. And today they still hand out snacks and bevvies while US is belt-tightening and selling munchies (at least they were shamed into backing off from selling water). But it’s that lack of assigned seating that I assume gives SW their biggest advantage: if you change your flight, there’s no penalty. Sure, you’ll revert to the prevailing fare, that’s to be expected, but there’s no punitive hundred bucks tacked on.

But hard times have hit the airlines, and while US still offers a number of non-stops between PHX and PHL, SW cut back to one each way. Six months ago I flew back to Philly on SW (with a stop in Pittsburgh but no plane change) and booked a return flight on each airline, preferring US’s schedule but deciding to book the SW one-stop as an alternate – because I knew that if I didn’t use it I could bank the fare for a later flight. And since I also knew I’d lose the money I’d spent on the US flight, I went ahead and took it.

Boy, was that ever a mistake.

Several years ago, AW touted a scientifically designed, more efficient boarding system that let people with window seats on earlier so that people in aisle seats didn’t slow things down by having to constantly get up to let them in. Why hadn’t anybody thought of that before? For my return from Philly I had chosen a window seat with that in mind, but I didn’t know that US had thrown science out the window since I’d flown them last. Turns out I was in the next-to-last group to board, which shouldn’t’ve meant any more than having to get past the guy I was surprised to see in my row’s aisle seat (mercifully the middle hadn’t filled...yet); but because US now charged for every piece of checked luggage, the overheads were already jammed with the steamer trunks that laughingly exceeded the dimensions of the test frame at the gate and to which the agents always seemed to turn a blind eye, and I was lucky to squeeze mine into what appeared to be the last available nook. And the whole luggage situation meant that the boarding process was utter chaos and guaranteed that departure from the gate would be delayed. (Once airborne, they also had the flight attendants hawking airline credit cards and discounts for Sky Mall in addition to food, which I suppose was meant to serve as entertainment since they no longer show movies on domestic flights, the thought of which visual distraction on a five-hour flight had been one of my considerations for flying them again.)

So now I’m planning another trip. The first thing I did was book my return flight on SW using the funds from the old unused ticket in order to lock in a fare and schedule. But when I got around to looking at outbound flights, I was irresistibly drawn to the attractiveness of the schedule and fare for one of US’s non-stops, since SW’s non-stop didn’t get in until late at night and the fare for the one-stop direct flight was surprisingly high (probably due to its being heavily booked by people who wanted to get to Philly without flying on US). And so I proceeded to fill in the blanks for a reservation.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.

I kept thinking about the overstuffed overheads. And the chaotic boarding. And the surly crews. And the now-empty video screens. And the $6 snack box that didn’t have much more in it than SW gave you for free. And the filled-in seating maps that were already relegating me to the back of the plane more than a month ahead of the flight. And the fact that if I had any need to change my plans, I could kiss most of my money goodbye.

So when I reviewed my options again – including a super-cheapo fare on American that involved a connection at O’Hare, on planes that Seat Guru says have been reconfigured by reducing seat pitch in order to squeeze in two more rows, to even consider which shows you how I feel about US – I came to the conclusion that it was worth the extra money and the brief stop in Pittsburgh to fly Southwest’s friendlier skies.

And as soon as I came to that conclusion, my teeth-gnashing anxieties over flying US Airways totally dissipated.

This concludes my airline rant. Cultural-political-religious postings will resume shortly. If my blood pressure has to go up, it ought to at least be over something beyond my control.


Monday, September 20, 2010

[Don't] Picture This



Some Muslims get bent out of shape over depictions of Mohammed, and non-believers make such images at their own peril. Ditto with some Christians when they think their religion is being ridiculed, such as in this ice cream ad from England (albeit without the death threats). And of course let’s not forget the ever-popular depiction of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung. (What, you thought I was going to post cartoons of Mohammed? I’ll risk the papal goon squads instead, thanks.)

Nobody wants to see their beliefs held up to ridicule. When you consider the fracas that results, one would be tempted to include acts of “sacrilege” with knee-jerk advocacy of rights that has no regard for their social impact. People should play nice (as if “should” always prevailed – besides, sez who?). But I think there’s a difference.

Defending the right to bear arms or to publish provocative material against efforts to curtail those rights purports to place the interests of individuals above those of society. Debates over these rights have to do with the regulation of action and the consequences of non-regulation, whether it be nutjobs going postal or kids emulating the violence of video games. It’s up to the people in a democracy to decide which they value more, individual rights or social tranquility.

On the surface, censoring religious (or anti-religious) expression seems to present the same dilemma: defending the right to the action of individual expression vs. promoting social cohesion. The difference is, this issue isn’t really about protecting individual action; it’s about protecting beliefs themselves from disparagement.

Making a declaration of belief or a challenge to that belief is an action that the individual is free to take. But do ideas themselves deserve protection from other ideas? Isn’t what’s going on just a form of natural selection, where only the fittest intellectual constructs survive? It would appear that less fit ideas – religious ones most prominently – are determined to not go down without a fight from their adherents. But do they need to have secular law in their corner, as seems to be the case in Britain? (Ironically, a recent Gallup poll showed that only 27% of Brits say that religion is an important part of their daily lives – as compared to 65% of Americans.)

It’s horrendous that a cartoonist now has to live in fear because she dared to confront an idea – today’s version of bear baiting. One envisions jihadist assassins in hot pursuit, and this scenario is likely to be repeated as long as people cling to beliefs and a rapidly contracting world makes such confrontations unavoidable. But as with the schism within America, never the twain shall meet. And nothing’s going to change until education wipes out ignorance for good.


Friday, September 17, 2010

Predestination Revisited


When I clean out my spam folder in Gmail, just to make sure nothing real has ended up there, I end up, as I’ve noted before, with a link to a recipe for something on the order of spam fajitas or spam veggie pita pockets. But when I re-clicked on Inbox the other day, the link it left me with was for “Online Pastor Degrees.” WTF?

The “About these ads” link informs me that “Gmail can now instantaneously serve ads based on another recent message on the same page of your inbox, helping make the ads more relevant to you.” As it happens, I had recently exchanged some email with my mother’s pastor regarding a problem he’d been helping her with. Nothing in the message had anything to do with the church, and Gmail assures me that “no humans read your email in order to target advertisements or related information.” Nevertheless, it obviously glommed onto his church-based email address and leapt to its own conclusions regarding what might interest me: a whole page devoted to the pursuit of online religion degrees.

Boy, is Gmail ever barking up the wrong tree.

Forty years ago I gave some serious thought to entering the ministry, but I finally had to admit to myself that it was as much a potential draft dodge as anything. Considering how my head changed since then, I can see that it would have been a mistake – unless of course switching sides is acceptable. Do churches make trades like ball clubs? If so, I could have gone from Presbyterian to Unitarian and hidden out there as a Taoist agnostic.

Nowadays I tell people that I was raised in the Presbyterian Church but was predestined to leave it. (Okay, it’s an in-joke.) Only a dyed-in-the-Scottish-wool Calvinist would say my leaving the fold was “preordained”; I prefer to think of it as “awakening.” But what about that link popping up on my Gmail page? A message from God that it’s not too late? A toss of the digital I Ching? A spin of some cyber-prayer wheel? No, it’s all just cause and effect – and a good indication of how predestination works these days.


Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Ho-down!


Billy Joel once put it best: don’t call rap music “music” because it ain’t. It has no melody.

Okay, I’ll confess to hating it. It goes with being an old white guy. But when I was already in my 40s and walking the mile to my university office past student rentals, I would hear Hendrix and Clapton blaring from the windows and smile with the satisfaction that rock would never die and that I had something in common with people twenty years younger than me. That all changed when cars with booming basses, driven by geeky white kids with caps turned around, started pulling up next to me at stop lights.

But this post is not a diatribe against rap, just an observation that occurred to me recently: rap, I believe, is totally analogous to country & western.

Think about it. Each reflects a racial demographic. Performers in each genre dress the part (bling or Stetsons). Each also targets a social demographic (urban vs. rural) as reflected in the content of lyrics (songs about homeboys and ho’s vs. ones about good ol’ boys and their longsuffering women). Each is instantly recognizable through vocal affectation (shout vs. drawl) and instrumentation (scratch vs. pedal steel). Each celebrates dubious activity (street crime vs. alcohol abuse) and under-education. And neither exactly thrives on musical virtuosity (IMHO). The bottom line: each sustains a stereotype. And while I recognize that the same can be said for any number of genres, rap and c&w also have this in common: each annoys the hell out of me.

I’d like to think it safe to say that never the twain shall meet, but I once witnessed a bizarre congruence right here in Prescott (a.k.a. “Everybody’s Hometown”). There was an event on the courthouse square that included square dancing – a live caller with a karaoke machine. And I swear that for at least one number he was doing rap. The dancers didn’t seem to mind. Maybe they thought it was a “ho-down.”

After a brief deer-in-the-headlights moment, I got away from there as fast as I could. Now whenever a booming bass pulls up next to me, I’m afraid to look. Cowboy hats turned around are not a pretty sight.


Friday, September 10, 2010

On not wanting to be a pirate...


The unwanted phone calls I posted about a few days ago are bad enough, but they’re just the tip of the proverbial (and now melting) iceberg. Threats to privacy abound, especially on the Internet. When a financial institution warns me about phishing, how do I know this warning isn’t itself a phishing expedition? Meanwhile, Amazon clutters its home page with what I recently browsed. Google now knows what I’m looking for before I finish typing it in. And from what I understand, Facebook is a minefield all its own.

I haven’t joined, although I admit to lurking on Beth’s page just to see what mutual friends have to say. So when Facebook sent me a message that an old friend wanted to friend me, I was taken aback. Said friend had just signed up and, I guess, supplied to Facebook emails of anyone likely to be interested. So let me say, friend, should you read what I’m now writing, it’s not that I’m disinterested in your postings; I just revert to Jerry Seinfeld’s whiny response when Kramer tried to coax him into wearing the puffy shirt by suggesting it would make him look like a pirate: “But I don’t wanna be a pirate!”

Facebook can also say a lot by what’s not there. While browsing its members I found some people I used to work with 35 years ago who back then were all tight with one another; today none of them are “friends.” Friends come and go, and faces fall out of recognition – so much so that I had to look twice at a couple of those former colleagues to be sure it wasn’t somebody else with the same name.

Part of my reluctance to join up has to do with being a bit leery of public exposure, which is why I recently adopted a more anonymous identity for this blog (which used to show my name as ID). I figured that if I were to post something outrageous enough that a stranger stumbled upon it and took offense and wanted to invade my privacy, I was as vulnerable as the old Beatles song put it: “You know my name, look up the number.” So now I’m nothing more than just another opinionated geezer with a cat on his head.

But if by chance you ended up at this blog after googling on me (which perhaps led you to the blog profile despite its no longer bearing my full name – a testament to the tenacity of cyberspace), you might recognize below the cat (which covers dermal expanse where once was hair) someone that you formerly knew. Who despite everything still doesn’t want to be a pirate.


Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Shoot the messenger


The outrage isn’t that the nutjob in Florida intends to burn copies of the Koran. The outrage is that the press is busily churning out the publicity he wants.

So now that the whole Muslim world knows about his proposed stunt they’re all in a snit, just like we get when foreigners burn American flags. (Are we used to that by now? Or do we only get pissy when our own citizens do it?) It never ceases to amaze me how people can get bent out of shape when their symbols are attacked. Flags, books, effigies, and let’s not forget crucifixes in urine ... they’re only things, for cryin’ out loud. And if you protest “but it’s what the thing represents,” you’re still hung up on the thing. Are we all so stupid? And the answer, of course, is “yes.”

Let’s face it, the guy has the right to do this just like the Nazis did to march through Skokie or the Muslims do to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero or Hollywood producers do to release slasher movies. We can wish that people would behave more responsibly, but in this country that would amount to a helluva lot of horses.

Think how fitting it would be if this asshole got what he really deserved: for everybody to just ignore him. But of course the media are totally incapable of that. If it bleeds, it leads, and if it burns, it churns.

So don’t blame this idiot. He can burn all of the Islamic paraphernalia he wants in the privacy of his own church. Blame the messenger, because we don’t have to pay him any attention.


Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Beliefs @ Face Value


The problem with holy books is that people too often tend to take them at face value. If they want to believe them, they do, no questions asked. This is apparent with fundamentalist schools of any religion, as is seen with some of today’s Christians and Muslims (although I admit to no knowledge of the extent to which Islamic fundamentalists base their actions on a literal reading of the Koran, except maybe when it comes to stoning people to death – or is it even in there?). Then there’s the fundamentalist strain of Buddhism I wrote about a few days ago.

But as the man says, “Wait, there’s more....” Consider the willingness of Krishna freaks to embrace the Hindu pantheon without really sorting folklore from reality. Consider the readiness of modern European-Americans to accept the validity of Native American beliefs, regardless (or perhaps because?) of their own folkloric aspects, just because they strike them as more attuned to nature. And consider also the willingness of some occidental minds to find truth in the oracular sayings of the I Ching (the “Book of Changes”). Here we have an ancient book wherein meaning is ascribed to patterns of lines. Its advice is cryptic and variable. How its meanings were arrived at is shrouded in the mists of antiquity. Yet its judgments are taken as truth centuries later.

My skepticism regarding the I Ching necessarily casts a shadow, albeit faint, on my predilection for the Tao Te Ching. The former predates the latter but both represent the same cultural tradition. But while the I Ching originated as a fortune-telling text, the TTC was a “manual” for a later philosophical school. And over the years I’ve often wondered whether to take it at face value or not.

Unlike the Bible, whose myths and miracles are so outrageous that they’re best taken with a grain of salt, the TTC is a tougher nut to crack. Its metaphors are open to interpretation. Its advice is often blunt or cryptic. And its intended readership is vague – some would say it’s intended for everyman, others for sages or rulers.

The problem with taking it at face value lies in reading things into it that aren’t necessarily there; that’s why so many modern “translations” seem to represent little more than what the translator wants it to say. They’re personal interpretations passing themselves off as accurate renderings. That’s why I’ve tended to rely on editions like Ellen Chen’s that at least explain translation decisions and word choice.

But I learned that face value isn’t enough with the TTC when I came across an edition entitled The Tao of the Tao Te Ching by Michael LaFargue, published by the folks at SUNY Press (who have produced probably the best list of scholarly studies of Taoism I’ve seen). Most serious commentators on the text recognize that the TTC wasn’t the work of a single person; LaFargue takes this a further step by applying hermeneutics in order to show how the text was assembled as a collage of sayings from oral tradition. Some lines are shown to be popular adages, others to be comments on them. It puts the book in a whole new light and clears up a lot of the more cryptic passages.

What I’ve learned from LaFargue is that it’s fine to take the TTC at face value if that’s what you want to do. But doing so poses as many dangers as any other holy book. Religion is enough of a minefield; it would help if the maps were as understandable as scholars like LaFargue make them.


Saturday, September 4, 2010

In Purfuit of Privacy


We usually ignore phone calls when caller ID shows an unfamiliar number. If the caller won’t leave a message, fine. But when the same number calls back night after night it can get a little old.

I’ll generally google on an unknown number and find comments at sites like whocalled.us where posters report on a caller’s identity. And so when I looked up the number  (703) 656-9940, which was showing up repeatedly, I was a little startled to discover it was the NRA.

I make no bones about it: I think the National Rifle Association is scum. A blight on the American political landscape that has taken defense of the 2nd Amendment to new lows and pours money into elections as if theirs was the only issue that mattered.

The 2nd Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Never mind the punctuation (which apparently was corrected in the copies sent to the states for ratification), that’s just a fluke of eighteenth-century penmanship, same as writing a cursive “s” so that it looks to us today like an “f” (resulting in “purfuit of happineff”). It’s become part of the American tradition to second-guess the Framers, but I’ll stick to this interpretation: if they had meant for the right to bear arms to be carte blanche, they wouldn’t have included those first thirteen words. So when the NRA justifies free access to assault rifles and tells us to not worry our silly heads about events like Columbine or people going postal but to instead arm ourselves against nutcases, I clench my teeth. But no matter, I’ve ranted about this before.

A couple of nights ago when the 703 number showed up again, I switched on the phone but said nothing. After about 20 seconds a woman asked for me and I asked who was calling. When she said it was the NRA, I told her I wasn’t interested in the NRA and asked her not to call again. I considered this to be admirable restraint on my part, but I sometimes find it difficult to articulate through clenched teeth.

A few years ago I had to stop calls from the ACLU, a group that I once supported until they started harassing me by phone. Too bad that these organizations that want to protect my rights don’t have any regard for my right to privacy.


Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Dial Tone (or: Pissing with Buddhists)


I’ve long thought of myself as a Taoist (even “Belief-O-Matic” confirmed this!) but in many ways I consider myself a closet Buddhist. The Buddhist perspective on mental processes makes tremendous sense to me; it’s the religious trappings that keep me from fully aligning myself with that system of belief.

Even before I came across Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism without Beliefs, I had pared down the extent to which I accepted many of the tenets – especially reincarnation and karma. Just as Christianity sprang from Judaism and carried forward a lot of its premises, Buddhism emerged from the Indian Brahmanic tradition and carried forward its belief in rebirth. Which does not necessarily make it an accurate portrayal of reality.

All religion boils down to an attempt to second-guess death – to find solace in a belief in what comes after and live one’s life with an eye toward some reward. Gautama took his culture’s view of reincarnation and turned it on its head, promising escape from the cycle. But that doesn’t mean that there is a cycle from which to escape. And I’m not saying there isn’t. But to be a full-fledged Buddhist, one really needs to buy into that belief system, just like being a Christian requires accepting the whole package of sin, atonement, and how your alleged soul is going to spend eternity.

Then there’s the first of the Four Noble Truths: “life is suffering.” This may have been a no-brainer a couple millennia ago, but I think it’s relative. Humanity has the ability to reduce suffering, so the ravages of disease or poverty can be dealt with – today we have the know-how, it’s just a matter of getting it done. (Batchelor prefers to render suffering as “anguish” to better capture the psychological component, but I can’t get away from the back-story that what Siddhartha saw in the world was physical suffering, pure and simple.)

The other aspects of Buddhism that have always made me keep it at arm’s length are its propensity toward trappings, such as prayer wheels and robes, and the fact that it has its own pope in the person of the Dalai Lama. (Okay, so it’s for Tibetan Buddhism like the Pope is for Roman Catholicism, but you get my drift.) He may be an admirable guy in his own right, a swell guest at any party (undoubtedly more so than Benedict XVI), and someone who recognizes the good in all religions. But the whole issue of lineage just doesn’t sit well with me (especially with its reincarnation angle), any more than does the papacy. Taoism doesn’t have any kind of head honcho, and I see no reason why Buddhism really needs one. And finally regarding trappings there’s the tendency of American Buddhists to adopt oriental guises, from shaving heads to taking on new names to eating pickled radishes at retreats. Trappings trap – talk about attachment.

What does appeal to me about Buddhism, though, is its recognition that attachment and desire lie at the root of human angst, and that the mental shutdown process – something that can range from meditation to getting lost in an activity – provides a way of breaking free of these shackles. That for me is the essence of Buddhism, as much as loving one’s neighbor is of Christianity. (And when Buddhists talk about “Buddha nature,” isn’t it really the same as te?) Everything else about either religion is totally superfluous as far as I’m concerned.

And so even though I sometimes think of myself as a “basic Buddhist,” I rarely make that claim if only to avoid getting into pissing contests with full-blown adherents. (And if you don’t think this happens, check out the 1-star comments posted on Amazon for Batchelor’s book.) If anyone objects to my calling myself a kind of Buddhist when what I’m primarily interested in is the bit about mindlessness, maybe I should just call myself a “no-brainer.”

Some people seem more concerned with means than ends, and I can’t help but wonder whether Gautama would think very highly of how his message came down through the ages any more than would Jesus. It’s like religion is just a version of the telephone game on a grander scale. For believers of either faith, it’s time to hang up and wait for another call. Me, I’m content to get lost in the dial tone.