No Tortured Conscience: The Dubious Patriotism of Zero Dark Thirty

In August, 1945, news of the dropping of nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was greeted by Americans with much singing and dancing in the streets. Tens of thousands of innocent people had been obliterated, hundreds of thousands more would have lifetime health complications, and the photos from the home front reflect unrestrained ebullience. In that very summer, my grandfather, having survived the European theater of war, was being redeployed to the Pacific. For him the dropping of the atomic bomb came as a tremendous relief. He warned me not to judge the macabre enthusiasm of celebrants. War was over, obviously at a tremendous physical cost, but the spiritual one, at least to me (born after the fact, true) seemed much harder to qualify.

I thought of that Times Square jubilation when a team of Navy SEALS executed Osama Bin Laden in the spring of 2011. There was the same moral ground compromised-- the US launched a military operation within a sovereign nation, murdering an unarmed man in his pajamas and several others without any kind of due process whatsoever-- leading to a similar burst of spontaneous ecstasy on the streets. Like nearly every American, I loathed Bin Laden, but that didn't mean I didn't think apprehending and trying him in a court of justice was the better tactic, not just on a legal standpoint, but a morally strategic one. And unlike the twin specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his execution did not mean any kind of victory on the war on terror. Fundamentally, so long as our military occupies civilizations hostile to our presence and drone strikes rain death from the skies, there will always be an enemy. Bin Laden had been just a man, a symbolic and very famous one, yes, but not the soul of our boogyman.

For these reasons, I found Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty morally repugnant, not only because it lies to us-- intelligence gleaned from torture did not figure in the locating of Bin Laden's hideout-- but because it seems to condone not only "enhanced interrogation" but American impunity as well. No other country in the world would dream of sending in a special forces unit to assassinate another nation's citizens. Were Pakistani assassins to be airdropped over Dick Cheney's bunker, murdering the old man in his bed with televised masses cheering his execution afterwards, Americans, no matter their low opinion of the former VP would be appropriately disgusted. But this is exactly how US foreign policy manages its agenda-- it can do so because of a crisis of imagination in the American people.

If you read the newspapers not much is needed to describe the plot of Zero Dark Thirty. It begins with distressed audio from 9/11, segueing immediately to a CIA black site where a man is being tortured for information. Immediately then, we know where Bigelow stands on the Hammurabi Code. The scenes are necessarily brutal and any American who believes we should be above such nefarious interrogation methods will feel ashamed. But waterboarding, induced sleeplessness, and sexual humiliation give CIA agent Maya Lambert (Jessica Chastain) a lead. The good news is this leads to bin Laden. The bad news is this a lie: Bigelow prefaces her movie declaring the story is "based on actual events," then goes out of her way to endorse the necessary evil of torture with false claims. Even normally reptilian politicians like Diane Feinstein have taken issue with this fictionalization of reality. Acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, has called bullshit on Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal.

Film critics, whose professions require them to suffer one banal blockbuster after another, have mostly praised the film, particularly its "taut" structure and climatic ending. That we already know what happens and that a crew of trained killers shooting an unarmed man in his bed is not exactly climatic is besides the point. There are moments when art veers dangerously into propaganda so that social critic Naomi Wolf's  comparison of Kathryn Bigelow to Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl is apt: "Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden." Overlooking the politics of a politically motivated film is not just absurd but irresponsible. Alas, Zero Dark Thirty, thrilling and competent as it might be, will not age well in a progressive future.

Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and hundreds, if not thousands of other villains are dead. Not to mention tens of thousands of innocent people as a result of destabilization due to our meddling in the region, to say nothing of our own moral compromises with torture, spying, and murder. It would be a true constitutional crisis if more of us cared-- instead we see the jubilance of the crowd fist-pumping our culture of vigilante politics. Zero Dark Thirty is a work of nationalist polemics beholden to the status quo, a state of affairs far removed from core American values. That it was commercially and critically successful, in spite of the efforts of a vocal minority, is immensely disappointing.

Nevertheless I'm holding out, hoping that the tide will turn, not from without, but from within. Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Bigelow's heroes are Navy SEALS, but there is probably not a few young talented filmmakers who see something noble in the efforts of someone like Edward Snowden, who is the very definition of a patriot, a man that risks everything, his reputation and his life, because he has high standards for his country and seems to understand the language of the Constitution better than our President. We don't know yet the outcome of this story, but hope that this narrative, once told, involves heroism, nary tragedy.

What Pals Do in Their Down Time

Shemp Howard (LARGE)

My friend, Rob, and I have lately got into the habit of addressing and signing various monikers in our correspondence. For instance, I will write an email, beginning "Dear Kevin," and following the body of text, sign off as "Mr. Costner," or something like that. It's rather pointless and there's no existential meaning to these name games, but then there's no reason either to discuss the top musicians of a given name (e.g. "Mick(ey)" in declining significance: Mick Jagger, Mick Jones, Mick Taylor, Mickey Dolenz, Mickey Moonlight), but we do that too.
        Between us, of course, much inner life has been put on the table, tales of love and loss, of best days and worst failures, talking through disasters until perspective is achieved and so is the realization that things will turn out all right in the end. Nevertheless, being friends is not just about sorting through the deeper issues of being alive, but of the smaller ones as well. There are potentially decent banalities, peculiar ones that only certain kindred spirits can parse.
         In this photograph, the scab on his right shoulder is a burn mark. The day before, sometime after midnight, we'd gone block sprinting to see who was fastest, but he'd been smoking a cigarette while high-stepping and paid for it.  It was more than a year ago-- I can't say for sure but I'm pretty sure I won that brief contest. As for Rob, I never asked him specifically, but maybe occasionally glancing in the mirror he recognizes the faint outline of the consequential scar, remembering it had been arguably detrimental sprinting with a lit cigarette, but hell, worth it.      

Channel Surfing with Ganesh

What's On TV?

(the photo, LARGE)

There has been a lot of press regarding India's spectacular growth since economic trade was liberalized in the early 1990s. However, outside certain urban enclaves, much of the country remains extraordinarily undeveloped. Mostly, it is a matter of bureaucratic corruption, rather than a failure of civic resourcefulness. Though in America it is now common for every room in the house to have a flat screen TV (not to mention computer, tablet, and cellular entertainment), a television remains a luxury item for the average Indian. If the traveler should happen upon a festival, a fair, or large trading market, it is not uncommon to see a large TV hooked up to enormous, outdated speakers, blaring Hindustani epics like The Ramayana on pirated DVDs to an audience of farmers and pastoralists, who, living on the land mostly as their ancestors have done for centuries, still regard the television as a magical box.
          TV is seen by many (including myself) as a cultural id, generally reflecting national predilections.   Museums elaborate on a nation's past; television showcases the culture's present infatuations. Mostly, whether you're in Italy, Japan, or wherever, this is not a good sign, since most programming is beyond terrible. No anomaly, Indian TV has its share of faults. There might be a hundred channels on cable, but most of them feature spiritual swamis, religious reenactments, cricket matches or recaps, melodramatic soaps, and sturm und drang news programs regarding Pakistan.
          I don't come to India to watch TV, but in recent years I've appreciated it as an instrument for decompression. Engaging with Indian everyday life, navigating its crowded, polluted streets, maneuvering through conversations with endless strangers, takes its toll on the traveler. Like many who come here, I am seeking betterment-- not exactly enlightenment or even an epiphany, but some kind of transformation-- one cannot visit India without returning home with more human empathy and gratitude for the small, good things in life. Nevertheless, there comes times, really long days, where I can no longer write in my journal or make sense of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The television then allows me a short respite. The average Indian wealthy enough to own a television might be anglophone, but among the dozens of channels, usually only HBO and STAR have English language programming. And so last time out, I ended up watching Rocky III, Commando, and Top Gun, three 1980s movies I loved as a kid. I'm more amused by this than embarrassed. Thus, although when it comes to TV I'm more of a detractor than advocate, for all its many faults, it has helped me through the long night.

Lakeside Dawdling

Pushkar Lake

(the photo LARGE)

Pushkar is a provincial town in central Rajasthan, a half-hour bus ride north of the depot at Ajmer.  As far as inland Indian cities go it is comparatively quiet and beautiful, as the town borders the north shore of a lake and the eastern and western points are crowned by temple hills, dedicated to the Creator God Brahma's wives, Savitri and Gaytri. The lake is holy, and pilgrims, mostly villagers from the Hindu Belt of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar, are daily bused in for worship. A lot of hippies continue to make the journey, young and old, and the tea shops and juice stalls being diminutive and crowded, the traveler often winds up in digressive conversation, in which life story details are divulged.
            Not feeling well when I arrived in India in February earlier this year, I'd come straight to Pushkar to convalesce for a few days. It was my fourth time in the town-- I'd spent a few weeks here on several occasions five years before researching and writing a novel set in India. I was creating a path for my characters, and then spending time on it. A lot of that time found me by the lake, which is not just one of my favorite places in India, but in all the world.
            The first thing one must accomplish, if one wants to spend considerable time by the water, is a session of puja with a priest. Doing so, gets you a "Pushkar passport," a saffron-colored string the priest ties around your wrist to let the others know you're respecting the old ways. When I'd first come to Pushkar, I'd been annoyed by this aggressive stance, for after all, I was not a Hindu, and had no need of the ceremony. But now I've come to appreciate the ritual, and make some effort to find the right priest, one that doesn't care so much about my rupees as much as he might concern himself with my spirit and the well being of my family (the chanting involves naming the members of one's intimates).
           When I leave Pushkar, I don't take the string off my wrist. It reminds me of sitting and wandering by the lake, pigeons figure-eighting in the sky, shrieking children running along the ghats, hippies beating drums at sunset, the smell of ganja wafting in the air, itinerant musicians playing village ballads on heirloom fiddles, thoughtful solitude and improvised companionship, and most of all, the invaluable feeling that while the world might be in the throes of one catastrophe after another, the days in Pushkar have been fine.
           
       

Two Suits

Lately, I've been dealing with the dilemma of identity. What this means is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to work as both a writer and photographer, not because I have a preference for one or the other, but due to the rationing of time. The occasional assignment aside, neither endeavor pays very well and success-- never quite so based on superficial metrics of popularity and earnings-- is usually qualified by my personal satisfaction, that such and such story and photo is perhaps uniquely mine. Nevertheless, I find that lately I have less capacity to devote myself to both disciplines. This means making hard choices and the purging of some indulgences. However, between writing and shooting, I don't know if it will ever be possible to choose one over the other.
            Failing that, and because, lately, taking pictures comes more naturally to me than the complex process of constructing either a story's narrative or an essay's thrust, I'm feeling that the best compromise is to put them together. I've already been doing this for several years with my haiku project, but minimalist poetry is one thing, digressive thoughts inspired by a moment in time, another.
            In March, my wife had a birthday and one of the presents I bought for her was a photobook from Danny Lyon called "Memories of Myself." Lyon is probably most famous for riding with and photographing Midwestern biker gangs in the sixties, but this photobook is a collection of images from different times of his life-- the bikers, of course, but also crossdressers in Galveston, Texas, a lover in Knoxville, revolution in Haiti, and prostitutes in Columbia, among others. The photos, already beautiful, had deeper resonance with some context. Lyon once said, "The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble."
           In the spirit of inspiration, I will try to do the same with my photography here, not exactly saying what a photo is about, but lingering on what the moment meant to me. Not a caption, per se, but a loose elaboration.
           Because most of us don't fit into one suit, but many, or in my case, two.

            

One Plus One is Three

The Snappp Gang (Tom, Ryan, Ariko, & the author)

This past March, my partner, Ariko Inaoka, and I had the honor of returning to Taiwan for a major exhibition of our work. It was held on the top floor of the Shin-kong Mitsukoshi department store in Downtown Taipei, near the famously tall 101 Building. We were the special guests in what might be the largest exhibition in Taiwan annually. The curators at Mitsukoshi liked our photography, as well as our concept, enigmatically coined by Ariko as "One Plus One Is Three." It was left up to me to describe what exactly that meant:

"Reality is not always what we believe it to be. Most of us tend to think that the world can be understood logically through science and mathematics, and it is true that these disciplines have done their part in civilizing man. However, it’s just as true that even the simplest questions don’t always add up properly. Life is a mystery, now and forever, for no matter how much planning we’ve put into them, our present circumstances are as much a result of accidents as they are choices. Between free will and serendipity is some mysterious element, an invisible hand, guiding our fate.

       It is in this spirit we wish to present our photography in this collection. The pictures are a consequence of our going out with our cameras, though none of the photos herein came out exactly as intended. They are the total of an illogical sum. One plus one is three."

The invitation itself, however, was no mystery. In 2011, we had collaborated with Snappp-- a photo magazine outfit based in Taiwan-- on an exhibition to highlight our collaboration on a photo book called “Wanderlust.” We’d gotten on very well with Ryan, the chief editor, and Tom, the art director, who have a passion for quality photography (as well as analog cameras), and whose agenda for showcasing emerging talent led us to stay in touch. I am lucky to count among my friends many talented people, whom I later referred to Ryan and Tom. We’ve known them since nearly the founding of their magazine (my work was featured in their second issue) and it’s nice to see how far they’ve come along. It doesn’t hurt either that Ryan and Tom, as well as their editors and volunteers, are immensely likeable. They presented our work to Mituskoshi, who selected us to be their show’s guest artists.

Taipei, especially around the Downtown City Hall area, has a prosperous atmosphere. Amid the towering hotels, office towers and high-end boutiques, is the sound of construction teams expanding Taipei’s skyline. While Japan is suffering a demographic crisis, Taiwan seems like a young country, and I gathered that the Taiwanese are optimistic, rather than moribund, about personal as well as national prospects. They seem to be moving forward, rather than simply moving.

We were notified of developments in January. When things come together, they usually do so quickly. Because I was scheduled to spend most of February in India, within a ten-day period, we put together the show’s concept, selected photographs to be featured, made darkroom C-prints, and scanned them at high-resolution. There were forty prints in all, twenty from each of us, the exhibition prints produced by Epson and framed by Mitsukoshi (who also sponsored our flights between Taiwan and Japan). A catalog was published and some of our photos were printed on notebook covers, film rolls, and handbags.

For a photographer, it is exhilarating to see your work on the wall. Besides publishing in books or magazines, this is the occupational point of our endeavor. What is so gratifying is knowing that others believe in your vision. It’s not just the financial investment, but the man-hours, legwork, and various considerations that make such an event possible.

One half of our space

On the day of the opening, I donned a rare necktie and put a boutonniere in my suit’s lapel. Ariko and I made a welcoming speech for the press, sponsors, and special guests. There were at least a dozen journalists and a TV crew. Along with the Taiwan CEOs of Mitsukoshi, Pentax, and Epson, we cut the tape with large scissors, officially opening the exhibition. Later on, we did a seminar (on the conception and execution of long-term photo projects).

The seminar with our interpreter and Ryan

Ryan and Tom are gracious hosts. We dined often and thoroughly, and were often sharing drinks. In our prior visit, our big night was karaoke, but this time out we went bowling. I don’t suppose it’s necessary to befriend your collaborators, but it’s all the more worthwhile when camaraderie does indeed develop.

Knocking down literal pins is not a natural talent

Daily feasting

Plenty of toasting

Needless to say, such time spent passes all too quickly and within a week we returned to our “normal” lives in Kyoto. That I would have an audience for my work in Taiwan was not something I expected while developing my aesthetic. That my photographs should be celebrated along with my partner's compounds the pleasure. It’s important to appreciate the strange, unexpected course in which life occasionally moves us.

Fiction Needs to Be Read

Writers are often a masochistic bunch and not always good at saying, "Hey, you have some time? Look at this." But the writer needs the reader, symbiotically, in order that his work mean something beyond the agony of composing a beautiful sentence. That being the case, he has a responsibility to the work, to make it known. Thus, I urge you to take a moment to read two recently published stories of mine.

A short flash fiction piece, That's Some Good Tea was recently published in The Molotov Cocktail. I also placed Our Treasured Future with The Adirondack Review.  It's about parenthood, punks, and a panda. This is my zoo story.

I've just returned from three weeks in India photographing tribes, nomads, and gypsies in the far west frontier of India's Kutch region, near the south Pakistani border. It was a challenging journey but worth it. Still I'm glad to be home...

A Year in Reading

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

--Gustave Flaubert

Bookworm sighting

Years ago, I’d read somewhere that Art Garfunkel kept a record of every book he’d read since the 1960s, a list now going on nearly forty-five years. Though I thought that was a grand idea, it didn’t spur my own compilation lists until just recently. How to explain the lull in executing what seems like a very interesting snapshot of one’s reading habits in a given time? Is there an air of pretentiousness in broadcasting one’s bookishness, especially as the modern individual is expected to lead a kinetic existence? The act of reading, especially the slow perusal of books composed out of pulp, is lately regarded as a luxury. Bibliophilia is a casualty of our contemporary zeitgeist, in which timeliness, rather than timelessness, matters most.  

            But the truth is people have been saying for years, “Reading! Who has the time anymore?” Well, that depends on priorities. This dude might be a product of Southern California and all its guaranteed sunshine, but I never took to surfing. Or rollerblading. Or golf. I haven’t followed professional or collegiate sports since High School, which is about the same time I gave up on video games forever. I haven’t owned a television set for twelve years. When I have any free time, I read. It is one of the things I do well and I do take some pride in being “well-read.”

            A bookworm is not much different from a foodie: an element of snobbery persists in both passions.  They have a high regard for a certain quality of product and thus can be a somewhat disappointed when others don’t share the same levels of expectation. They know what they like— their palates are so developed in well-earned prejudices that when something doesn’t feel right, they know right away what is wrong and why it’s not worth their attention. We do not have so much a democratic society as we do a leisure one, which is where democratic choice is most self-evident. To play with a tired aphorism for our purposes: you are what you read. 

            And like many who truly love the practice of certain rituals, I worry about the future of reading. It’s not so much the proliferation of e-Books (I am yet to read one but this might change that once I pick up an iPad2 later next year) as it is the pattern of publishing houses being picked up by media conglomerates more concerned with profits than prose. I am not one of those literacy enthusiasts who believe the act of reading warrants praise. What matters more is what you read. Publishing has gone the route of the Hollywood blockbuster, hyping certain phenomenons (50 Shades of Grey), B-grade genre superstars (James Patterson), faux-spirituality (anything by Paulo Coelho), self-help books (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and ghostwritten memoirs (Sarah Palin), at the expense of Midlist literature, both today’s and yesteryear’s. I can understand that reading Harry Potter gives someone a sense of fitting in with popular culture. But many of these readers, who might only get through a few books a year (if that) see reading as a way to pass the time rather than an action worthwhile for its own sake.

It’s arguable that mass literacy should have led us to a social utopia—nearly everything beautiful, hopeful, and poetic in life has been imagined and transcribed by geniuses, artists, and prophets. Yet we are still mired in political, economic, and social mediocrity.  You can blame the pedagogues or you can blame the politicians but really, we must take some blame for watching the Kardashian sisters rather than reading The Brothers Karamazov. 

Though counterintuitive by today's championing of utilitarianism, it does a person well to challenge himself with books that have no ostensible impact on his life. There are no useless facts; rather, from reading develops the accumulation of human interestingness. This is an intangible quality, not always there but which flourishes in the right company.

The author giving his eyes a rest from Dostoyevsky (circa 2006)

                                                            

The following list is what I read this year. It reads chronologically. Some notes and observations follow below.

1. Greasy Lake by TC Boyle
2. Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas
3. After Dark by Haruki Murakami
4. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy by Victor Perera
5. Collapse by Jared Diamond
6. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
7. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
8. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
9. Jazz by Toni Morrison
10. Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys by Will Self
11. Dreaming War by Gore Vidal
12. Of Human Bondage by Somersest Maugham
13. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul
14. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
15. Mary by Vladimir Nabhokov
16. Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
17. What Uncle Sam Really Wants by Noam Chomsky
18. Secrets, Lies & Democracy by Noam Chomsky
19. The Science of the Everyday by Jay Ingam
20. Mating by Norman Rush
21. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
22. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
23. Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryu Murakami
24. We the Animals by Justin Torres
25. Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Lawrence Bergreen
26. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
27. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
28. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerborn
29. Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the LA Times Dynasty by Dennis McDougal
30. River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
31. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
32. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation by David R. Goldfield
33. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
34. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose
35. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
36. People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
37. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
38. Dispatches by Michael Herr
39. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
40. The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong
41. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
42. Whites by Norman Rush

Forty-two books might sound like an awful lot but it averages out to a book read every 8.5 days, which doesn’t sound too rushed. Twenty-seven of the books were fiction, three of which were story collections. I am on a quixotic quest to read The Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century (I’ve read about sixty-five of them) and this year read seven (and, no, American Psycho was not on the list— a side note, all three books I abandoned reading after fifty pages of frustration were from the said collection, including Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Henry Green’s Loving). Two of the books were loans from friends, five from the library. The rest I own.

My favorite reading experiences in fiction were Chandler’s Marlowe shamus noir, Ryu Murakami’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Rush’s Mating, Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Fox’s Desperate Characters, and Ninh’s The Sorrow of War.  Through Haruki’s Murakami’s After Dark, Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole, and Naipul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I suffered various moments of mediocrity, boredom and very bad prose. Torres’s We the Animals was so precious and niched (gay Puerto Rican-American) it felt nearly like a satire of calculated and maudlin MFA writing (too many young writers are trying to be Toni Morrison but there is some ethereal quality to Morrison that cannot be apprehended, only imitated).  Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Greene’s A Quiet American were the only rereads.

I have a thing for historical accounts of the lives and adventures of explorers. It was a pleasure then to read in depth on Cortes and Montezuma, Lewis & Clark, Ferdinand Magellan, and Teddy Roosevelt’s charting of Brazil's mysterious Rio da Duvida (River of Doubt). But the best nonfiction I read was David Goldfield’s America Aflame, a fifty-year history of America before, during, and after the Civil War. The sweep, the prose, the presentation lent a well-known history some newfound urgency. Equally pleasurable was Dennis McDougal’s Privileged Son, a biography of the Chandler dynasty, the familial empire that controlled the Los Angeles Times for more than a hundred years and whose story is a metaphor for the city of Los Angeles itself.

            The first book to read in the coming year will be JG Ballard’s High Rise…

Bumming the Dharma

Lately I've been revisiting Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums," a monumental influence in my young adult life. I don't connect with Kerouac as I once did on the cusp of adulthood but his prose has moments of glory and humor and are worth setting down here for some appreciation.

Both passages are excerpted from climbing California's Matterhorn: Kerouac reflecting on the woods in the first, Gary Snyder's (as Japhy Rhyder) metaphor of the Buddha as a mountain quoted in the second. I always try to read his sentences in Jack's peculiar, passionate spoken voice.

"The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.

(Yakushima, Japan)

"Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin."

(Darjeeling, India)

A Political Thing

Reprinted below is my endorsement for Barack Obama, originally published in  Heso Magazine. 

Though we at Heso Magazine are practicing secular-agnostics, we are inclined to believe that Hurricane Sandy making landfall on the U.S. on the eve of the election is hardly coincidence. Not that this tempest is an Act of God, mind you, but a manifestation of a furious Gaia, the Earth goddess howling brimstone at a national farce now almost beyond contempt. Though they have competed for bragging rights on who would be better at exploiting natural resources, neither the incumbent, President Barack Obama, nor his challenger, Mitt Romney, have acknowledged the obvious, urgent crises engendered by global warming (typical for a GOP candidate, glaring for a Democratic one). The most important difference is that one of the candidates (Romney) believes that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is too expensive and should be discontinued, leaving bankrupt states to manage the inevitable environmental catastrophes on their own. That this is emblematic of so much other nonsense espoused by the GOP means that we at the magazine will in fact endorse Barack Obama for President, but with many caveats and some total absence of enthusiasm.

It is hard to imagine an election less engaging for its activists’ bases. The conservatives don’t trust Romney, a flip-flopping hybridized Richie Rich-Gordon Gekko twit representing the worst aspects of modern corporate culture. They don’t like him for his Mormonism and his record as the Governor of Massachusetts, particularly, his health care reform. Besides pimping for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as well as Fortune 500 companies Mitt Romney represents almost no one, but the Republican base will probably vote for him anyway, in total opposition to their self-interest, simply because he’s a white male.

On the other side of the spectrum, progressives are equally disengaged from Obama, who has either ignored or backtracked on nearly every campaign pledge from 2008, including respecting habeas corpus, renegotiating NAFTA, rejecting sweeping claims of “inherent” presidential power, protecting whistle-blowers, expanding labor rights, and diversifying media to name but a few. The propaganda on talk radio and Fox News is as spurious as it comes; a “socialist” Obama is not. On some issues, such as gay rights, he has proven progressive. But unless you’re for same sex marriage or a member of the nation’s financial elite it’s unlikely you have more opportunity or freedom than you did four years ago.

Running a country as multi-faceted, complex and dangerous as the United States requires responsibility not only for present crises but also for the long-term future of the republic and its citizens. With Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate, the two Company Men will work to comprehensively dismantle Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamp and financial aid programs, and any other public “entitlement” that any way at all aids the dispossessed and downtrodden. They will do it in the name of austerity, the hypocrites, all the while, continuing massive defense spending and supporting tax cuts and tax shelters for corporations. As perilous as life is in America today, it would be more capricious, uncertain and altogether hopeless under a Romney administration. For the wealthy elites in the GOP, the Bush tax cuts and TARP are mere Prelude to the Class War they will engage once they have the capacity to direct the national conversation on the economy. Once the purge is on it will make us nearly wistful for the days of ‘compassionate conservatism.

Romney and everything he and the GOP stand for then must be dismissed outright as antithetical to our democratic traditions. Well, what do we have then? Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate was arrested when she tried to gain access to the Town Hall debate. Third Party candidates have almost no momentum this year (mostly due to media blackout and unfair playing rules.) That leaves voters with Obama, who arguably governed as Bush might have had he a third term, but who articulated the abridgements of civil liberties better than the Texan Bumpkin. Otherwise how could one explain how Democrats have gone from condemning waterboarding as torture to condoning executive-ordered drone assassinations? Keep in mind that a vote for Obama is essentially a vote for The Surveillance State of which our president has come to be one of its principle architects. It is important to note that Obama did not bother much with the ‘hope’ thing this time around. He might respect our intelligence, even if he doesn’t honor our privacy.

So what has he promised in this endlessly dull, insipid, uninspired, misanthropic election cycle? Well, so much as we can tell, he’s pledged that he wouldn’t be as bad as Romney and we at Heso agree. Thus, a vote then for Obama is a vote for competence. He probably won’t privatize Social Security and it’s unlikely with him as Commander-in-Chief, we’ll hear dispatches of G.I. Joe from the Gates of Tehran. We’ll get the status quo, which isn’t that great if you’re living day-to-day and paycheck-to-paycheck but it beats the heck out of the Made in the USA dystopian disaster the GOP might engineer should they have their childish hands on The War Machine’s joystick.

Because the GOP is out of touch with Americans (by virtue of its leadership and talking heads demonstrating unhinged sociopathic behavior) we at the magazine don’t much believe in the hype of a close election. The mainstream media has Ford Explorers, Big Macs and Verizon phone plans to sell so they need us turning in to the election cycle, which often feels like it’s 10% content, 90% poll tracking. The President will likely win this election, but that doesn’t mean we can look forward to good times. Though Obama had once been a community organizer and constitutional lawyer, he has really come into his own as a cold-blooded technocrat, legitimizing the worst of Bush’s abuses (illegal detention, runaway defense spending, obsequiousness to Wall Street). It seems that the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United has benefited the President as much as the venture capitalist, the corporations having hedged their bets equally. Nearly a billion dollars has been raised and spent by each candidate.

We at Heso think what Winston Churchill said about democracy, that it “is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried,” is bunk. We can do better. The Scandinavian Model is proof of that. It might not be possible in such a large heterogeneous country with a militaristic background but we have already done better in the recent past, namely the fifty years of relative middle class parity between the elections of FDR and Ronald Reagan.

While we take Churchill’s cynicism with a grain of salt, we take Martin Luther King’s words more seriously, especially, “The arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” We might be wrong but we believe the GOP, with its characteristic racist nativism, hateful misogyny, religious fundamentalism and class war agenda, has no future in the increasingly tolerant, secularized, cultural plurality that is Tomorrow’s America. In spite of the evidence, we are optimists, even if once more, the lesser of two evils is still, well, somewhat evil.

‘Change’ is gonna come, but we don’t believe it will necessarily come from D.C. It’s gonna be us, grass roots, after the tempest, one community at a time. Even the worst storms are temporary. And in the afterglow amid tomorrow’s beautiful light, some rebuilding will begin.