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 24 Aug 2007 @ 07:29
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
---Franz Kafka
To learn the way it is important to be sharp and inconspicuous. When you are sharp, you are not confused by people. When you are inconspicuous, you do not contend with people. Not being confused by people, you are empty and spiritual. Not contending with people, you are serene and subtle.
---Liao-An
The best things in life are nearest. Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.
---Robert Louis Stevenson
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Portrait of Napoléon on the Imperial Throne. 1806.
Oil on canvas. Musée de l'Armée, Paris, France.
In the past few years, many of us on the American Left have found ourselves looking for understanding to the writings of historian Juan Cole. Born in Albuquerque in 1952, John "Juan" Ricardo I. Cole is professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. Not only does he have a new book entitled Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, but he also translates works in both Arabic and Persian, and maintains a popular weblog called Informed Comment [link] .
The other day Juan Cole posted an entry in which he offered notions of historical comparison that he couldn't help thinking about the Bush involvements in the Middle East, given what he'd learned about Napoleon. While I strongly believe the species' survival depends on learning at least something from history, I also think historical comparisons are a tricky business. Nevertheless the current Bush asked for it in his big speech the other day when he invoked Viet Nam as his latest scare tactic. If he wants comparisons, then let us hear Professor Cole's.
Yesterday Tom Englehardt posted the essay at his site, and Juan Cole is requesting any citation of it be linked to TomGram, so I'll do that. He'll be discussing his perspective this afternoon at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. Supposedly C-Span will be televising it live at 12:15 PM, and giving it an hour and a half. More >
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 22 May 2007 @ 10:08
Do not attempt to become Buddha.
---Dogen
Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
---Matthew Arnold
The more deeply we are our true selves, the less self is in us.
---Meister Eckhart
Photo of Nigerian Anglican Gay activist Davis Mac-Iyalla in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the Anglican Primates' Meeting February 17, 2007. He was there to confront Peter Akinola, the Anglican Primate of All Nigeria, who has pressed for the world's most sweeping anti-Gay law. (The Rev. Scott Gunn)
The simple answer to the question is he has made his first visit to the United States from Togo, where he is in exile, to tell his story. It is the story of a young man born in the south of Nigeria (an important geographic distinction following civil war there some 40 years ago) who happened to get asked to run a church school and accepted. He did so with some fear because at age 14, he realized his sexual desires were for other males. In Nigeria you could go to jail if you acted on such impulses. His work at the school was so successful that it came to the attention of the Anglican bishop of the area at the time, who invited him into his administration. In 2003 Bishop Ugede died suddenly of tuberculosis. The new administration, appointed by Archbishop Peter Akinola, fired Davis and removed any priests who supported him. Within 2 years, Davis had become the center of a growing movement of gays and lesbians in Nigeria demanding rights for their way of life. Archbishop Akinola responded with support for legislation, currently pending, that will make it a crime for any citizen to associate in any way with someone identified as homosexual. The term of imprisonment will be 5 years.
That story is the simple answer. At the same time, the American branch of the Anglican Church, known as the Episcopal, consecrated a bishop in New Hampshire who is openly gay and has a partner. Within hours, Peter Akinola in Nigeria declared the overwhelming majority of archbishops and primates in the area known as the Global South would not recognize Gene Robinson as a bishop. He said the church now was in a "state of impaired communion" and declared he refused ever to be in the same room with a homosexual person. Conservative Episcopal churches in the United States have moved to support Akinola financially and even explore ways to join his diocese in Nigeria. It is possible the entire Anglican church, numbering millions of members worldwide, will divide over this issue. The Archbishop of Canterbury will make his first visit to the States since all this blew open at the end of the summer...around the time Davis will conclude his tour in California. Can this one man have any impact on the situation? More >
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 12 Mar 2007 @ 09:48
You are never too old to be what you might have been.
---George Eliot
Talk does not cook rice.
---Chinese proverb
My religion is to live---and die---without regret.
---Milarepa
The caption for the photo, taken by Eric Case, reads, "I had a ~6 hour layover in Dubai today, so I decided to go snowboarding with Jehane." [link]
You all know where Dubai is. Tiger Woods goes there to play golf. Port city in the United Arab Emirates...over in this part of the world...
[link]
Home of the Mall of the Emirates...where you can do a little skiing while you shop. What better location for Halliburton to move its offices?
[link] More >
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 27 Jan 2007 @ 05:57
On a grass leaf, awaiting the morning sun,
The dew is melting.
Do not stir the field so soon, wind of winter!
---Dogen
Tozan asked Sozan: "Where are you going?"
"To an unchanging place," Sozan said.
"If it's unchanging, how could there be any going?" asked Tozan.
Sozan said: "Going, too, is unchanging."
---Zen mondo
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace with words and ideas and abstractions---such as merit, such as past, present and future---our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
---Peter Matthiessen
The painting is called Regaling the Commander, and was created by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville in 1875.
I understand an element of basic military training stays with you forever. I work with a guy who saw action as a Marine Corps sergeant in Viet Nam some 35 years go. He likes to snap me a salute in the school hallway, partly out of respect I guess but also to show off his machismo. The whole military thing is such a definition of manhood that a guy actually can feel discomfort for having gone through adolescence in relative Peacetime, as my generation did. I made it all the way through with a 1-A classification, but never was drafted---although the Cuban Missile Crisis came close.
No such problems of Peacetime nowdays though...or in the forseeable future, with eternal war declared on any opposition to Yankee globalization. Even our army supposedly has a private army of contracted protectors...although they don't seem as efficient at doing that job as they do guarding scouts for various corporations. Reagan was not a real soldier but he played one in the movies. Nixon got off on splendid uniforms. Bush and Cheney ducked duty but work ceaselessly to convince the world they're true commanders of democracy. They so love their armed contractors in Iraq and New Orleans (was NO or Katrina mentioned in the State of the Union?) that we now are hearing proposals for a new private army in the US to do all those pesky menial chores that so plague the luxury class.
As Bush looks for more people to command, which of course is the mark of a Real Man, I'm relieved to get a history lesson from Garry Wills today in the NY Times. He reviews for us what Commander in Chief really means in historical and Constitutional context. This White House seems to care little for either history or the Constitution, but the rest of us can benefit from a little review. Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of “What Paul Meant.” More >
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 5 Nov 2006 @ 12:11
and only 3---but if you're too sick of politics to read them this eve of Election Eve, consider that power often is gained or lost in the final days with a mood of such exhaustion.
The revealing photographs of our nation's leaders are by none other than Annie Leibovitz.
Let's start as usual with a few intriguing thoughts~~~
I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
---David Frum
Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.
---Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar
The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.
---Kenneth Adelman, lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider
These comments and many more, inspired by an intense interview with a major architect of the Iraq invasion named Richard Perle, turned up the other day at Vanity Fair's website. So far as I can tell these current opinions by the major neoconservatives shaping United States destiny the past half dozen years are not in the magazine's current issue...with George Clooney on the cover again. (I have a pet peeve about trying to find a table of contents in fashion magazines; this one's on page 40 and continues on page 56...with no pages numbered in between!) The man compiling these startling revelations is David Rose, an investigative journalist whose work also appears in the Observer. Among his books are A Climate of Fear (1992) and In the Name of the Law (Vintage, 1996). [link] More >
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