The Giant Buddhas of Bamiyan … A Plea On Buddha’s Behalf

Like the rest of the world, I was upset when The Taliban blew up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.  I was upset that a prominent piece of history – over 1,600 years old – and an amazing work of art were destroyed.  But the thing about very old art is that it absorbs history.  It shows the wear the elements of nature have had on it, and it shows at times, the way that humanity has regarded it.  As time changes, so does art, and as humanity goes through its phases of destruction, art is often a casualty.  Napoleon’s army blasted off the nose of The Sphinx in Egypt.  Countless Native American works of art have been destroyed in the past two centuries.  And thousands of beautiful shrines, churches, mosques, temples and synagogues have been destroyed by hatred and bigotry throughout history.   

What currently remains of the giant Buddhas are simply the cavernous areas in the mountain that housed them.  It’s emptiness.  From a distance when the sun is at a certain angle, they look like darkened shadows painted on the face of the cliff.  I happen to think they’re beautiful.  For the first several hundred years after Buddha lived, there were no images made of him, save for one that only showed his face in a reflection of water.  The Zen phrase “do not mistake the finger for the moon” is a perfect analogy of Buddha’s wish not to be a figure of worship.  Like the finger pointing at the moon, Buddha is the figure that guides us to the truth, but … Buddha himself is not the truth.  I do love and respect art, including numerous images of Buddha.  The image on my blog heading is an example of the wisdom, compassion and gentleness of Buddha Nature.  To look at it is to recognize these aspects of divinity in one own’s self, and yet at the end of the day, it is just an image.  The image is the illusion; the experience of Buddha Nature is not. 

As a Zen Buddhist, I do not meditate facing an image of Buddha, although I do have one in my little Zendo (it’s in a walk-in closet; it’s very quiet there!).  I meditate eyes half-closed facing a blank wall.  There, is emptiness; nothingness.  When I look up at the right-hand image in the picture above this post, what I see is an honest and very moving image of Buddha Nature.  It is both form and emptiness.  It is seemingly as solid and permanent as a mountain, yet the fact of its destruction is a sign of how fragile and impermanent life is. 

The image on the left is an image of Buddhism.  The image on the right is Buddhism.

I’m disappointed that the statues are being rebuilt.  One cannot rebuild history or pretend that the events throughout it didn’t happen.  200 years from now, people will not see a remnant of 5th century art, but of 21st century art.  Life is impermanent.  The destruction of the sand mandalas in Tibetan Buddhism are a perfect example of that.  I’m not saying that it’s okay that there are people who destroy art, or that destroy people, or nature for that matter.  But the act of destruction has a repercussion of its own that can be turned into a positive thing.  The Taliban are ruthless, histrionic children who took their anger out on the rest of the world by destroying the only thing in their country that had any significance to the rest of the world.  But they destroyed an image.  They didn’t destroy Buddha.  Their country is a mess; that’s mostly their fault, but our sanctions and hypocrisy have irritated the problem greatly.  On the surface, we try to get them to destroy their opium, which to them is not only not evil, it provides a prosperous income for their country.  But clandestinely, the West helps them to continue to grow and process the opium, since it is prosperous for us.  So they took their anger out like little children kicking a sand castle down when they didn’t get their way.  The question is … how can we turn this act into something other than a well-meaning but ultimately selfish act? 

The cost of reconstructing the Buddhas is expected to be between $30-$50 million.  In a country like Afghanistan, that can help a lot of people.  In the documentary I recently saw (The Giant Buddhas), they showed that those little caves all around the Buddhas, have been housing people for thousands of years.  That is, up until a couple of years ago when they were forced out of their homes because of all the reconstruction and archaeological digging that’s going on [There is a huge project in that area that will ultimately excavate what is supposed to be the largest statue in the world (of a reclining Buddha) as well as at least one Buddhist monastery]  The people that have been forced out of their homes in the cliff, are now living in tiny houses, but there is no protection from the cold there, and they are extremely far from water and places to buy food and necessities.  The people who are running the Giant Buddhas project say that the money being raised for the Buddhas will not come out of any humanitarian funds, but why not just raise that money for humanitarian causes outright instead of building the monuments?  Where is the compassion in constructing a monument in an area where you’ve just forced people out of their homes?  Where is the compassion in raising that much money in an area where people are starving and have absolutely no medical care?  I’m all for raising money for art, but to do it so blatantly in the shadow of so much suffering is the antithesis of compassion.  It isn’t wise, it isn’t compassionate, and it isn’t decent. 

At this point, I don’t know which is the greater evil; the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas, or this act of reconstructing an image of humanity that in the process, is being terribly inhumane.  Once they finish their project, I hope those involved take a good long, deep look into the eyes they created and find some humanity there.

How Did We Get This Way?

Julenka asked me this question in a response to one of my posts [#1 is a Bullet] … “…how the hell has it all managed to turn upside-down like this? I mean, fascism, psychopathy, weakening the people through distracting them and cultivating the ignorance.. all of that is kinda obvious now, right? But how did we get here?”

Given my age (45) I guess I can have some perspective on how we got to the pathological state that our society is in now.  Someone older than myself probably has an even clearer perspective, but just in the past thirty years I have seen enormous changes in our society in terms of our attitudes and of course our political and social climate.  I can make out several of the ‘culprits’ that deserve most of the blame for the decline of our civilization.

 

Things were hardly perfect thirty years ago but we were probably at our best in the early-mid seventies. The seventies culture was about expanding one’s mind and relating to nature and the environment.  I remember seeing used bookstores everywhere.  In some neighborhoods, there were two or three of them on every block.  The oil shortage and the discovery of the Greenhouse Effect made people turn in their big gas-guzzling cars for tiny, fuel-efficient cars.  People began jogging (and streaking, which is a whole other story!).  Folks became less interested in dark, cavernous steakhouses with big leather booths and four-Martini lunches.  Restaurants began selling healthy foods and even (gasp!) ethnic foods.  Movies were at their very best in the early-mid seventies.  They were about real people with flaws, and they were adults (ironically, during that period when I was a teen, there were practically no movies featuring teenagers, which I consider a wonderful thing).  Even the genres of legend such as Westerns were completely deconstructed; the line between the good guys and the bad guys became extremely blurred.   We no longer relied on the fantasy of pure good and pure evil; we accepted that humans are more complex (which in IMO why those movies were so exciting and challenging!).   It was also a time when movies and TV began to finally acknowledge people of ’other’ races, and pay attention to the poor and working class.  Because shows like “All in the Family” ridiculed ignoramuses and racists, bigots had to go into the closet (yay!).  We stepped out of the fantasy that everyone in this country was white, middle-class and fully functional.  We fessed up to our dysfunctional families and dysfunctional society and dysfunctional selves.  Things probably got a little too far what with all the self-help books and self-improvement seminars, but at least we weren’t living in an illusion anymore. We at least were searching for something tangible and meaningful instead of scavenging malls in our free time or vegging out in front of the TV.

Back then, there were only eight channels on TV, and there was no broadcasting between 1:30 AM and 7:00 AM.  With ’so few’ channels, people had to either spend their time doing other things, or picking from programming that offered at least some sophisticated or challenging shows.  Up until the early eighties, PBS offered excellent programming.  They actually had numerous adult discussion programs on issues both topical and philosophical, and every viewpoint no matter how radical was allowed to be expressed.   They showed foreign films weekly, as well as great plays staged for television.  As for the music culture; if people wanted to see musicians, they went to concerts.  They didn’t really get to see the performers unless they were very close to the stage because back then there were no giant viewing screens  -but that was okay; the vibe from being there with other maniacal fans was what really mattered!   The news broadcasting on TV began its decline in the early seventies but compared to today, there was still some journalism and – as we know from Watergate – a press that wasn’t afraid of asking hard questions to politicians and digging wherever it needed to dig in order to find the answers.  The Vietnam war made us shy away from all forms of militarism.  It seemed as though no one would ever consider war to be glorious or adventurous again!  Religious fundamentalism didn’t exist in the media save for radio and TV stations in the ‘bible belt’ part of the country, and it was almost never brought up by politicians in a national forum.  I suppose I needn’t add that the seventies was also when abortion and homosexuality became legal, and the possession of small amounts of marijuana went from being a felony to a misdemeanor.

 

Then – sigh! – came the eighties and Reaganitis set in.  His was a culture that embraced good ol’ fashioned meat-and-potatoes Ozzie and Harriet family values.  He fully embraced the Christo-fascists, which is how the wheels started turning there.  I also think he used Orwell’s “1984″ as a primer as he turned doublespeak into an art form, and he created new lows in logic reform (remember his remark about how trees cause pollution?).  Cable turned television into a one-hundred-channel fairyland complete with home shopping and 24-hour news and sports.  Not that one could tell the difference between the news and sports; they both used the same glitzy graphics and music, the same kinds of announcers, and the same length of soundbites.  Since each administration picks the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS began to replace their cutting edge intellectual fare with constant reruns of classic movies like “It’s A Wonderful Life” and shows featuring great places to eat and shop.  Music turned into a totally visual medium (MTV).  Movies went back to being mythic and bigger-than-life, with clear villains and good guys.  Rib joints, ’surf ‘n’ turf’ and retro-diners replaced healthy restaurants (ironically, ‘real’ old fashioned diners were replaced by franchises like ‘McBurgerCluckBucks’… bleh bleh bleh…).  Independent stores were replaced by malls.  Supermarkets were replaced by megamarkets like Walmart.  High-priced, hi-tech gyms replaced jogging.   Cars and houses became bigger.  While blue-collar jobs began to be outsourced by the millions and family farms were bought out by huge corporations, social programs and college tuition were seriously sliced in budget cuts. Almost every program in Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ was either decimated or destroyed.  Crack cocaine was introduced to the ghettos.  The nuclear arms race with the Soviets heated up,  we went to war wherever we could get away with it (Grenada, Panama, & ultimately Kuwait), and funded wars whether we could get away with it or not (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among others).  It was a shitty decade; bookended metaphorically with great irony by the assassination of John Lennon in 1980 to the suicide of Abbie Hoffman in 1989.

I don’t know why the population as a whole allowed all of those events to happen, but I think the media is mostly to blame.  They were bought up by corporations more and more, thus they created the climate of ‘don’t worry be happy’ and ’shop til you drop’.  The only reason all the movements in the sixties were able to make so many positive changes was because we had a free media then, and protest movements were far more romantic and photogenic than every other tepid thing that was being broadcast.  Also of course, the news actually showed us what war really looks like!   But after the war, TV viewers didn’t get as worked up over issues like the environment, education and ‘no nukes’.  Those protests weren’t considered as dramatic or ’sexy’ as war, so they weren’t considered ‘good television’.  It gets me extremely mad when I hear younger people say that all the hippies sold out after the sixties.  They only disappeared from TV screens.  Most everyone that was dedicated to social change remained – and still remain to this day – dedicated to ‘the cause’.  Gil Scott Heron said ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ but in our society today, if it ain’t on TV, it’s not real.

Fantasy has replaced reality and that is why the nation (well, most of the nation) mourned Raygun for over a week when he died a couple of years ago.  He delivered us from reality and structured the world once more to fit into that comfortable myth of ‘good and evil’.  He made us proud even though we had very little to be proud of.  He gave us permission to be selfish instead of selfless.  He made it okay to use poor people and women as scapegoats again.  And most of all, he found a way to get millions of people to vote against their best interests and love him for it; by saying that he - and they – were on the side of God.  So fantasy is also to blame for our downfall.

Anyway, what free press we had has either been replaced by corporate-press, or it’s drowning in the ocean of static made by something like 400 TV channels.  And man, this corporate press knows how to spin!   Yesterday while we were driving around, I saw 2 giant billboards that said “Say ‘No’ to Monopoly! Boycott Time Warner! Order Your Direct TV Satellite Today!”.  Now it’s true; Time Warner has taken over all of the cable companies in LA.  But Direct TV is owned by Rupert Murdoch for christsake!!   The guy owns half the media in the world!  Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration.  I’m too lazy to count what he owns, but those who are interested can look here.  Of course, most idiots in this city don’t even know who Rupert Murdoch is, so his PR people have done a ‘Karl Rove’ on the population of our fair city, making them believe that they are actually doing something to combat the big bad corporate guys by … unknowingly supporting the big bad corporate guys.  I hear poor George Orwell rolling in his grave.

 

So ’spin’ is also to blame.

 

And the culture wars are to blame.  Most people are too lazy to pick up a book or a newspaper, so they can’t tell you in any detail about the complexities of war or the economy or any of the dozens of pertinent problems this country is facing.  But they do know how they feel about people who eat Brie, or people who wear tattoos or – on the other end of the spectrum – how they feel about people who eat Velveeta or who go to church regularly.  I remember Jesse Jackson’s speech at the 2004 convention being about how Democrats are the ones who are helping the folks who live on Kool-Aid and peanut butter sandwiches.  And John Edwards went on forever about taking his wife to Wendy’s for their anniversary.  This stuff is what wins them votes; not what they have to say about the war or the economy.  It didn’t used to be like that.  Conventions are highly organized circuses now.  They used to at least be a cross between organized circuses and real political discourse!   But the media has helped spin the issues away from politics to lifestyle, making those who live a certain way, love a certain way, look a certain way, and even eat a certain way the cause for society’s ills – it has nothing to do with politicians or the corporations and the lobbyists that own them.  These spin-masters are smart.  They know we’re always in competition with each other and watching to see who’s better or worse off than ourselves.  This can be clearly seen in the mid-eighties when the great Phil Donahue Show, which daily discussed important issues with studio audiences, got run over by shows like Oprah or Geraldo, which focused on our personal problems and ultimately, our dirtiest laundry.  The message became clear; ‘don’t concern yourself with what your government is doing. Just pay attention to what your neighbor is doing’.

Government secrecy is another big issue.  Secrecy in the name of security has always been good to keep ‘we the people’ at bay.  Nixon was the first big culprit at that when he created a ‘press room’ for the press at the White House (previous to that they were allowed to hang out in the lobby where they could view and even approach any person who passed through).  The lobby to the WH has gotten smaller and smaller over the years.  The last nail in the coffin of our ‘free press’ was when the Bush administration delegated Helen Thomas to the back row during press conferences.  That was not only a ploy to stop the one reporter left who was asking hard questions, but a signal to any other reporter that they’d better ‘behave’ or be pushed to the back of the room themselves.  And of course, we have censorship of every kind, including a war with no dead civilians, no dead soldiers, and no coffins or graves.  The press has colluded in this hypocrisy.  They’re afraid that they will be charged with exploiting the war if they ever actually covered it.  So the press is also strongly to blame.

Ultimately we have to take our fair share the blame as well – all of us as a society.  In the late seventies – early eighties for example, there were two fantastic free weekly newspapers here in LA that had some of the best journalism in the country.  But a free newspaper can’t afford to stay free without giving in to advertisers, and by the mid-eighties, The LA Weekly basically became a magazine featuring ads with a few good op-ed pages scattered through, and the LA Reader was eventually bought up by conservatives and then died.  Lifestyle replaced life.  Advertising is everywhere, in schools, in cinemas… I’ve heard that they even have ads over the urinals in men’s restrooms!   And these ads are designed to sell us ‘feelings’ not products.  For some reason, we eat it up.  Well I don’t, but most folks do and certainly this commercial bombardment in every facet of our lives dictates what we value.  We no longer value trying to understand ourselves as individuals or as a society.  We only value what we can purchase.  I’ve heard countless numbers of people who have said that they don’t like museums (which BTW, were free up until the mid-eighties!) except for the gift shops because it’s no fun to just look at stuff.  We have to show people how cool or rich we are by showing it all off.

But … even though we are in deep shit, I’m not totally pessimistic.  There are more activists in America today than there were ten or even twenty years ago (and in other countries they seem to really be flourishing!).  People in this country are now (finally!) paying serious attention to environmental issues.  Hollywood is still mostly run by social liberals (when the Christo-fascists take over Hollywood, we can kiss America goodbye forever).  And… it is sometimes the paradox of life that when things become so horrible and miserable and hopeless, people rise up and say ‘no’.  In a way, this administration is helping the world get better, simply by doing so much to destroy it.  One of my favorite quotes is from the series “I Claudius” when old Claudius who has seen the empire sinking into a virtual snake pit, says over and over, “let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out”.   He had to let the imperial dynasty destroy Rome in order to bring back the republic.  I only hope we won’t have to watch the world burn the way Rome did in the years that began its downfall!

The one thing that always keeps me going is a line in one of my favorite movies “My Dinner With Andre” (a ‘must see’!), when Andre talks about how throughout the centuries – even in the Dark Ages – there have been little pockets in every society that preserved the light; that kept us connected with nature and creativity and human kindness.  Perhaps just writing in these silly little blogs, we are keeping that light alive.  We may not be saving the world, but we’re keeping that light alive in some minuscule way, like Winston Smith, scribbling away in his diary just out of the eye-view of Big Brother.

Old Joy [USA, 2006]

To say this film is minimalist is an exaggeration. The plot is simple: two male friends who have sort of drifted apart over the years get together for an overnight camping trip. They hike, they visit a hot-spring site, and then they drive home. That’s it.

The film will drive away people in hoards if they ever actually see the movie (there were three other people in the theater besides us). The film is slowwww, and the amount of dialogue would maybe fill two pages. But the silences speak in volumes. Every silence is a statement that each character is unable to make, either out of fear of facing what has been lost between them, or out of pure lack of articulation for feelings that are too deep to be draped in words.

So there’s no plot, very little dialogue and an ambiguous ending; the antithesis of every movie out there, either Hollywood or independent. People who think that filmmakers like David Lynch or David Croenberg are cutting edge haven’t got a clue. Style cannot take an audience deep into themselves. Films like “Old Joy” would drive most audiences crazy because how many people want to stop – and I mean really stop – and reflect on who they are? How many people can meditate? It’s the most difficult thing in the world to do. The majority of people who try usually give up within days or weeks. Most people prefer analysis or drugs, but analysis isn’t reflection; it’s… analysis, and drugs only reflect surfaces. They only reveal the threads of the great tapestry that is all of what we don’t know about ourselves, and will never know about others.

Most of what little dialogue there is in this film is in one scene, about an hour into it (the film is only 76 minutes long!). I won’t give anything away other than to say that is a gift, from one friend to another. It’s one man’s Zen-like story with a subtly transcendental humanity to it that softly penetrates the other man’s brittle wall of nerves. It is also a human touch, which to most men in particular, is something ordinarily to be guarded from, but here… simply means surrender. It is after all, the only way that enlightenment can reach us.

Only a handful of people will like this film, but I’m one of them. I’ll admit that I also was won over because I never see the kinds of people like these two guys in movies (with the possible exceptions of “The Return of the Secaucus Seven” and “Stone Reader”). These kinds of people I’m talking about are the sort of working class, literate, salt-of-the-earth, Buddhist-minded, grassroots liberal-activist types living non-glamorous yet quietly joyous and fulfilling lives. You know; the kind of people who live in Oregon. As much as I adore movies, I’m fully aware that over 99% of the people I usually see on the screen live lives completely different from my own. I know I’m a minority, so it is especially exciting to see people like myself and my friends, living the same kind of life that we do even down to the same kind of liberal talk radio (although I hate Air America. I prefer the more grounded and intelligent Pacifica Radio/NPR). The movie embraces me in two ways; from its gentle gift of ’satori’ to its gift of connecting me to like-minded others in a beautifully cinematic way.

I should also state that the Oregon mountain scenery is beautiful, it’s rustic and somber yet pastoral (no spacious skies, dreamy sunsets, or dazzling steadicam shots of spectacular scenery). In fact, the whole film is shot from the eye-view level of the characters (or in a few cases of the dog that accompanies them, whom I might add steals many a scene!). The men never seem to look above the trees or gaze at the stars. They can only see what is right in front of them ["...we meet it and do not see its front, we follow it and do not see its back" ~Lao-tze]. My only comparison for what this film feels like is the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy, “Rivers and Tides”.

All of this sounds very cliche-ridden and disjointed, but whether audiences like it or not, I’m sure at the very least that they’ve never seen any film like this. It’s quite possible that if they prefer life in the slow, detailed, savoury lane; they just might like this very, very small, extremely independent film.
My grade: 9
 

The L.A. Riot Spectacular [USA, 2005]

I don’t know why, but it seems to me the best films about race are always comedies. “CSA: Confederate States of America”, “A Day in Black and White”, “A Day Without a Mexican” and now this extremely edgy comedy, all tell the truth. Not a surface truth like glossy crap such as “Crash” that makes it look like every member of the cast (no matter what their ethnic background) lunches at Pinot regularly. There’s an intrinsic truth here that looks at racism for what it is, which is madness and power, whether it’s cops or gangs or any fearful citizen trying to balance that power with a gun. When it comes to stuff like that, there’s really no better way than to reveal it than with humor. It’s like taking Rambo and revealing the fact that his true soul is a tiny monomaniacal ‘Mini Me’ jumping up and down to get attention. The tough guy must be revealed! We all know all bigotry stems from insecurity, so what better way than to reveal it through humor? If we try to reveal it with sober deliberation or maudlin sentimentality, people just get cynical. If the cynicism is already there though, we have no choice but to laugh at ourselves. We are ridiculous; all of us.

I lived through the riots and it was not – in any way – funny. Three years earlier I’d lived at a Buddhist center in Koreatown and I watched in horror that night on April 30, 1992 while the entire block next to it went up in flames. I knew those people; I visited their shops and ate in their restaurants. When I say ‘those people’ I mean around 45% Hispanic, 40% Korean, 8% Thai, 5% black and 2% White. We had all always lived in perfect harmony. But that night I sat and watched the workers at the Korean supermarket two blocks away lying behind sandbags on the roof of their store armed to the teeth. They were taking pot shots at black kids who tried to run beyond the orange cones that they had set up in their parking lot in order to stop looters and arsonists. I saw the produce guy I used to talk to all the time taking pot shots at black kids! I saw my friends at the Buddhist Center in the back yards of each house helping the firemen hose down the fire that was creeping toward their fence. There was an enormous gong in the backyard of that center that had survived 500 years of wars in Vietnam, but because of the fires that had raged just a few yards away, it became permanently charred on one side.

The effects of the riots were not funny, and the film doesn’t laugh at that. But it does laugh at our human nature, which is always dispensable, and at the one target that can never be lampooned enough; the media. One of my favorite lines in the film: 

TV Announcer (as arson fires are breaking out all over the city): Mayor Bradley praises gang members for offering free heating to the homeless.

It’s that kind of humor. If the Abrahms/Zucker team that made “Airplane” had an edge, this would be the film they would make. The film was shot in DV, but that was a wise choice because it makes it actually difficult at times to separate their footage from the real news footage. The film sports a surprisingly big-name cast; Snoop Dog, Emilio Estevez, Ronny Cox, Charles Dutton, Christopher McDonald, TK Carter, Ted Levine, Ron Jeremy (!), and the guy with possibly the funniest lines in the film; George Hamilton. The fact that the film never saw a wide release and practically went straight to DVD I think is a sign of a fearsome political incorrectness that has the Hollywood community writhing in discomfort. Their films like “Crash” perpetuate all the stereotypes and myths that those ’limosine liberals’ who live in the hills want to believe are true. This film shows the reality, and the reality is insane. I forget who said it but a quote that gets a lot of mileage is: “if we don’t laugh we go insane”. I’m all for a lot more movies like this! My grade: 9

Inspiring, #2

Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” (describing Ardana, but that planet seems to have a lot in common with another planet we all know and love): “This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those that receive the rewards are totally separate from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (discussing the trials of owning your own Gulfstream jet, after deciding to lease instead.): “You have the pilots at your throat about vacation, that their wife is pregnant, why can’t they have New Years Eve off? It’s on and on and on.”

These People

This story slipped through my radar last February but it’s worth posting:

“On February 23rd, a fire ravaged the KTS Textile factory in Chittagong, with 61 dead and hundreds hospitalized. Reports from the BBC, Bangladesh’s The New Nation and The Independent, claim the incident as the worst factory fire in the garment district’s history. 90% of Bangladesh’s textile and garment industry is employed by young women and several of the dead and missing are believed to be girls as young as 12 according to the National Labor Committee.  The NLC and The Independent reported that a main emergency exit at KTS was illegally locked. One worker, recovering at a near by hospital said, “there was no fire alarm, no bells, just screams, people running for exits… complete darkness”.  There was only one available exit cluttered by boxes, as over 500 panicked workers made for a narrow escape. Several workers jumped from the building’s 3rd and 4th floor windows.

The KTS Factory is now also charged with exploiting child labor in a work force of 12-14 years girls being paid between 7 and 14 cents (U.S) per hour. Although there are efforts in International Child Labor regulations in Bangladesh, an ILO survey showed 4.7 million child workers under the age of 14.”

This was not a rare incident.  There are dozens of factory fires in sweatshops every year. 

Whenever I argue the Globalization issue with people, they insist that the US is helping ‘these people’ by giving them jobs.  “The wages have to be low”, they say “otherwise the companies can’t compete on the market.  It’s good for everybody”.

At which point I mention the sweatshops here in the US a hundred years ago.  I mention the insanely low pay, the child labor, the horrid working conditions, and the lack of safety (often bringing up the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, which was chillingly similar to this KTS fire).  I basically ask them if they think that we should go back to that kind of labor in the US, and of course they say no.  My big reply to them is “if you don’t think that ‘these people’ are inferior to us, then you have to agree that they deserve the same rights as we have to a living wage, a safe and clean environment to work in, and no child labor.”  Their response tells all.  Are ‘these people’ equal to us or inferior?  It’s that simple.

Please give generously to the NLC and to the Global March Against Child Labor.

#1 Is A Bullet

The Southern Poverty Law Center has reviewed Pat Buchanan’s new book, and it’s shocking even for Buchanan.  Not what he says, but the fact that he is so blatant about his racism.  The book is called, ‘State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America” (too bad I didn’t get to read it on Columbus Day!).  Alexander Zaitchik of the SLPC writes…

“…the book reflects racial views that have now veered to the extreme. White America is changing color, Buchanan argues — “one of the greatest tragedies in human history.” The Mexican government is involved in a plot to take over the Southwestern United States, and parts of this country already look like the “Third World.” The segregated South wasn’t all bad “culturally” — blacks and whites were united, after all. America, despite what its founders wrote, was a nation formed not on the basis of creed but rather a homogenous ethnic culture. To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: “We gotta get into race and ethnic questions.”

State of Emergency unapologetically reflects Buchanan’s insistence on the centrality of race to the United States and its culture. “This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by ‘blood or birth or soil’ but by ‘ideals’ that must be taught and learned … is demonstrably false,” Buchanan writes in the book.

Simply put, America is not a nation of ideas. It is a nation of people — white people. Buchanan is especially overt in making this case when he endorses the view of his late mentor and editor Sam Francis, that American and European civilizations could never have been created without the “genetic endowments” of whites. He goes on to describe discussions of race as “the Great Taboo”; to ignore the role of race, he adds, is “like not telling one’s doctor of a recurring pain that could kill you.”

…………………

The article mentioned that the book was #3 on the Best Seller list (it didn’t mention that it was the political Best Seller list, but still…).  I guess it was #3 for a while but unfortunately it was in the #1 spot long enough for it to be the permanent claim by the RW press.  Currently it’s #8, so at least it’s slipping.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that in the current #1 spot is Bill O’Reilly’s “The Culture Warrior”. 

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell… Lies

Congressman Christopher Shays has been allying with conservative talk show terrorists by stating that ”the Abu Ghraib abuses weren’t torture but instead involved a sex ring of troops”.

“Now I’ve seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture,” Shays said at a debate Wednesday.

“It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops from (Maryland) who were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked,” added Shays. “And they did other things that were just outrageous. But it wasn’t torture.”

Ah-HUH!  Just how difficult is it for Rep(rehensible) Shays and those talk show fascists to do an image search at Google?   It’s all there;  pages and pages and pages of it.  I don’t know what Shays and his buddies are into sexually, but if this is their idea of sex… Well, I can only suggest that maybe from now on they don’t insinuate that they’re into that stuff; their party has enough to deal with with Foley.   I suggest they stick their butt plugs in their mouths from now on.

God: The Prickless Wonder?

I’m sure this thought has occurred to me before at some point in my life but last night I became obsessed with it.  The bible says that man was made in God’s image and likeness.  God modeled man after himself.  The thing is… why does God have a penis?  It serves only two purposes.  Given the vast emptiness of the universe, there’s nothing for God to eat or drink, so he doesn’t need to urinate (and where would he pee anyway?).  And there sure isn’t anyone out there he can fuck – unless perhaps some Goddess in some other galaxy (?).  The phallus is rather lovely but the testicles… you would think they would be a little more decorative, like perhaps Christmas tree ornaments.  Perhaps a red one and a green one, with those little lights inside that flash on and off.  But what does God need balls for?  Nothing!   He created Adam out of… I don’t know, Play Dough.  So… the next obvious question is; if God has no use for a penis and balls, then of course he wouldn’t have them, and if he doesn’t have them then how do we know that he’s a He?  Eh?  Ehhh??? 

My husband Benny says because God has a beard.  I almost let him get away with that one but umm… does the bible actually say that God has a beard?  I can’t remember and I’m too lazy to look it up.  I don’t recall anything descriptive about him really.  I believe that Moses was the only one who saw him and that was as a burning bush, and Jobe only heard God’s voice.  Apparently, the voice was male but when one considers the repression of women at that time, would anyone had believed Moses if he came down from the mountain and said that God’s voice sounded like Golda Meir (I imagine if God was a woman, she’d look and sound like Golda Meir).  It would make sense that God was something of a shapeshifter who could change his gender and appearance at will.  After all, if man was made in God’s image, how come there are so many different races?  What was that all about?

And now that I’m really thinking of it, why would God need a nose?  There’s no oxygen in the universe.  And since there’s really nothing for him to walk on, he’d probably just be floating around like Casper the Friendly Ghost, so he wouldn’t need legs.  And what does he shampoo his hair with?  I’m starting to get a mental picture here of a really big guy with a beard, no nose, no legs, no prick, and really dirty hair.  Adam must have been pretty weird-looking if he was made in that image!

I don’t know; I’d like to corner a bunch of theologians and make them answer this stuff.  And while they’re at it, explain why God let people for thousands of years believe in all sorts of other Gods, and why he waited all those years for Moses to come along before making his big introductory announcement.  Talk about procrastination!  If anyone ran a business the way he has been running the world…  Cheeesh!  I say it’s time we hired a new God.  Someone androgynous-looking like Sinead O’Connor would be perfect.

When The Mountains Tremble [USA, 1983]

In 1981, I went to a screening of a documentary called “El Salvador: Another Vietnam”.  It was one of the biggest turning points in my life because even though I was somewhat political, I wasn’t nearly as informed as I thought I was and up until then, I’d never been involved in any activism.  After the screening, I joined CISPES (Committee in Solidarity of the People of El Salvador), and thus began my rich and often painful journey of being connected to the world.  Despite my work with CISPES and protests against the US-Contra movement to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, I knew very little about Guatemala.  I thought it was basically similar to El Salvador’s problems, only on a small scale but as this film clearly shows; the scales were pretty even.

I knew about the CIA-backed overthrow of the progressive government of Guatemala in 1954 (all in the name of keeping United Fruit Co. in business, and trying to intimidate people in any other ’banana republics’ from trying to rebel).  Since then, the government of Guatemala – in the form of one military dictatorship after another – has consistently been taking away what little land the indigent people lived on (some 450 villages in the early 1980s), as well as repressing them, violently suppressing them, and murdering them in great numbers. 

Technically, I can’t say that this was a very well-made documentary.  I was rather turned off in the beginning when they had actors reenacting key conversations from 1954 between President Arbenz and a CIA agent (taken from real transcripts of their recorded conversations).  But after the first fifteen minutes or so, the film settled down in showing one amazing scene after another of blatant examples of the role the military was playing in the 1980s.  I will admit; I got a whole lot more out of the film from listening to the commentary.  Apparently, no foreign journalists were allowed into the country until the ‘elections’ in 1982 (it was obvious that the military was in control of all of the balloting).  The filmmakers, Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel (who as it turns out had just worked on “El Salvador, Another Vietnam”), managed to join the journalists who were let into the country for that occasion, and miraculously they managed to stay in the country.  The military assumed that since Yates and Sigel were American, they must be supportive of the Reagan administration, so they were given carte blanche to follow the military around everywhere.  Yates and Sigel also won over the hearts and minds of the indigenous people, so they were able to follow them as they lived as refugees hiding in the mountains from the military, and ultimately, as guerillas fighting the military.

I can’t help but totally empathize with people in documentaries.  I wonder, would I a pacifist pick up a gun and fight an army that is a million times stronger?  As the film shows; people really didn’t have much choice.  There’s an incredible scene where all the people in a village are rounded up by the army; men and women separate.  The men are told that they will be forced to go into the mountains and fight the guerillas.  If they refuse to go, they get torture and death.  I’ve no doubt that if any of them decided to join the guerillas and fight the army instead, all the women and children in the village would be killed (probably by fire, which seemed to be a popular method).  It’s a most horrendous idea; to make people who hate the army go out and kill the people who are trying to liberate them, not to mention; what do the guerillas do?  Shoot at innocent civilians?  The film doesn’t say.  Unfortunately, the film doesn’t say many other things of importance such as; where the guerillas got their arms, ammunition and uniforms.  On the commentary, the director said that they stole much of their arms or used hunting rifles, but there was an actual revolutionary movement with certain communist leanings.  It was stupid of them to leave that information out.  It’s not like it’s a big deal.  No matter what Reagan said, the ragged countries of Latin America were not – in a million years! – ever going to even consider invading the US!  The only threat any communist government could have to the US is to corporate executives and shareholders. 

One of things that really sickened me was the fact that since liberal priests were speaking out against the government, the government welcomed the evangelical movement to come and convert people.  El Presidente himself (Efrain Rios Montt) had left the Catholic church in the seventies and became a minister of sorts.  I’d like to assume that there are some evangelical missionaries out there who have good intentions but I think these evangelical movements are too closely related to politics for them to be innocent.  In one poor Catholic country after another, they have been coming in and converting people and teaching them to pray for their leaders to be good leaders.

Anyway, today unfortunately not a lot has changed in Guatemala, with the exception that at least the rural people are somewhat self-governing.  Life is only a little better though.  This film certainly has parallels to Vietnam and Iraq, even though in Guatemala, Americans were kept out of the equation ‘officially’.  We did see one American military trainer who was supposed to just be working as an interpreter, but who obviously wasn’t.  On the commentary, the director mentioned that there were about 20 Israeli journalists there, but they didn’t seem to be reporting anything.  As it turns out; Israel helped arm the Guatemalan army and train them (after all, they probably know more about counterinsurgency than we Yanks do!). 

Overall, I highly recommend this for  the enormous work the filmmakers did in bringing the world’s attention to the situation there.  Also, for some incredibly harrowing images I will never forget.  One; a pan over drawings that children had made of some of the horrors that they’d witnessed, making Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ look like Disneyland.  The other is a scene that will go into my pantheon of most memorable movie scenes.  It’s very difficult to describe, other than a large group of people digging through a huge landfill for food and scrap material.  The camera finds its way to one woman in particular with her baby slung on her back.  As the women is looking around, a large truck begins dumping debris very close to her, and we can see a huge amount of it falling on her baby.  But the woman pays it no mind; to her it’s just another day.

My Grade: 9