Sic Transit America, Schizoid and Free

Pardon the triple entendres, but those who know about these things say we triple Geminis are like that, chewing up and spitting out words the way others eat chips and dips. While the rest of you are slicing and dicing cucumbers with your HSN miracle chopper, we toss and mix metaphors into alphabet soups and salads that are sometimes hard to digest. I myself know little of astrological apocrypha, except that the Thai system and the European system are essentially the same, except with dates offset about three weeks. This would seem to undermine the credibility of the whole system since dates are supposedly the crucial determinant of the astrologically inherited traits. This is not to be confused with the Buddhist Triple Gem/Three Jewels of sangha (religious community), dharma, and Buddha, which I know a little bit about but again not much. Jainism, the other religion evolved in India from the native Hinduism, also has Three Jewels, but they’re different, right knowledge, right faith, and right action. I know that because I researched some Jainism after I picked up an interesting book in the Atlanta airport a few days ago called ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’ by Sam Harris, whose qualifications I’m not certain of. I literally picked it up, at no cost, off the seat, where someone had left it, probably a Christian expecting further vindication of his faith. He didn’t get it. In it Mr. Harris does exactly what he accuses “Christians like yourself” of doing, “cherry-picking the Bible… to justify every impulse...”.

In the book, which I doubt I’ll finish, he proceeds to excoriate the three-thousand-year-old Old Testament for not being modern and politically correct, specifically in its defense of slavery. Should it have also correctly predicted the rise and fall of cigarette smoking and the increased tolerance of homosexuality? But those are still controversial issues, aren’t they? He makes no mention of the fact that the Jews themselves were long enslaved, hence opinion-worthy, nor that classical Athens was the original slave society, dyed in the wool, lofty notions of freedom and democracy developed in the leisure time allowed by double-digit slavery. Rome was founded on the same principles, only gradually supplanted by the slightly more modern notion of colonialism. I don’t mean to shift the blame, either to Greece or Harris, only to make the point that slavery really wasn’t such a big deal back then, more like the answer to the question, “So now what do we do with the prisoners?” The system only became morally repugnant when slaving became an end in itself and better options became available. In Asia not that long ago people sold themselves into slavery to pay off their debts. Variations on this theme still exist. Are Judeo-Christian motives suspect because they didn’t correctly predict the tides of history? But he goes even further, labeling America, and America alone, a ‘lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.’ However true that may be, I hope he doesn’t exempt himself from the criticism. He probably does, since the whole treatise is directed ‘in-your-face’ style at ‘you Christians,’ only slightly mitigated by the fact that the occasional reference equally castigates Muslims, while allowing that we should know better since we’re a developed nation. Maybe we should and maybe we shouldn’t.

While laughing in Christians’ faces for wanting to believe in ‘intelligent design’, he makes no mention of the fact that all the most prominent physicists of our era not only believe(d) in God but anxiously scour the heavens looking for radio signals that would be proof of what? Intelligent what? A good Darwinist wouldn’t, nor would I frankly. The chances are about one in… how many planets are there out there? There may not be creationism in Evolution, but there may very well be some creativity. Can you really explain the difference between humans and chimps with only a two percent difference of some thirty thousand genes? I was taught that a good theory could be used for prediction. Tautologies like ‘survival of the fittest to survive’ may explain much of history beautifully, but predict little or nothing. Genetic drift and generalized neoteny may predict much, however incrementally, but that’s not Darwinism. He further attempts to diminish Christianity by comparing it to the superior doctrine of Jainism, a minor if articulate Hindu reform movement that today numbers some four million. That’s like comparing Buddhism to Sufism, or Islam to Unitarianism. Harris allows no feathering of edges- if Jesus was not divine, then Christianity is bunk. Is this enlightening? If someone can read the Sermon on the Mount and feel nothing resembling inspiration at some of the finest words and ideas ever written or spoken, as original as they are universal, as valid today as they were two thousand years ago, then I truly feel sorry for that person.

‘Conspiracy people’ go much farther than Harris in their indictment of America, but their arguments tend to more circular and un-provable. That’s the beauty of it. While indicting George and Prescott Bush and the entire Bush Brothers Band and every bird in every Bush going back to the Crusades for every evil from the hypothetical but invisible New World Order to the price of gas in Flagstaff, then they proclaimed in 2004 without the slightest trace of self-consciousness that, “we need four more years of Bush.” You need it, bro’; you need it more than me. I sense rising unemployment in conspiracy circles with a Democratic victory. So the whole world hates us and now we even hate ourselves. America is sick, very sick, mentally ill, to be exact. The fact that others may also be is little or no consolation. The fact that there seems to be no concern about it is even less so. Where is the clamor and outrage at the copy-cat mass murders of college students by college students? When Charles Whitman climbed the tower at UT Austin and proceeded with his slaughter some decades ago (immortalized in Kinky Friedman’s ‘Rumor of a Tumor’) it was a big deal. It should be a big deal! Mass murder is not normal! Ignoring high gas prices is one thing. Mass murder is another. Remember the first time gas prices jumped up over fifty cents a gallon in 1973 and laws were passed reducing speed limits to 55mph? Those laws persisted into the 90’s if I remember correctly. Nobody talks about that now with gas over three bucks a gallon, and it’s more than twice that in Europe. It’s the same with gun laws. Gun control used to at least be discussed, for God’s sake! But that was back when ‘liberal’ was not a dirty word, even though the same word used to apply to those same name-calling Republicans back when the freedom in question was free enterprise.

When those planes hit those towers, they must’ve been aiming straight for our psyche. Starting before that but given new impetus, we have truly lost our way as a nation. America is being ripped apart at the seams, not the divisions between states or regions, races or genders, but the divisions within each and every one of us. America’s future is uncertain. That’s not uncommon for a teenager in the throes and throws of growing pains, used to being the bully on the playing field, now reduced to threatening to take its ball and go home, and hearing the other kids cheer. The only defense of our militarism is that we’re naively trying to make things better in Iraq and Afghanistan, however misguided. It’s only a coincidence that we most frequently stick our big noses in where oil is at stake. So we lose ourselves in music and movies, bored with our lives and our wives, dreaming of fame and wilder sex. Hip-hop artists are among the richest entertainers in the world, while singing about their life on the streets. Our precious freedoms and way of life are reduced to the freedom to pursue wealth and conspicuous consumption. We have the finest health care system that money can buy and a level of obesity that would make a fry-bread-eater blush. There are no easy answers in a consumer society, because it’s not likely to be found in a box or a capsule. It’s more likely to be found in a book or a long walk or a long talk with your spouse, or maybe even a little religion, either ol’ time or New Age will do. You gotta’ believe in something, something else.

Bhutto Assassination: Jihad for Dummies

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not about politics. It’s all about suppression of women. There I’ve said it, the nasty mean ugly truth. Religion, especially Islam, is about suppression of women, part and parcel. It’s no accident that most religions, especially the Semitic ones, have prominent father-figures, even when they have no face, as in Islam. Apparently this replaced the old dominant Alpha-male in animal societies as we made the transition from proto-human scavengers to a human society in which cooperation and sharing are essential to a successful hunt. Otherwise we would be very poor hunters, slow weak and defenseless as we are. Hence we experience the birth of collective ‘artificial’ intelligence, culture, belief systems, and ultimately, religion. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have the same God and the same histories, up to a point, that point being the branch of cultural evolution that each followed independently, the Christians branching off approximately the first century C.E., Muslims the seventh, Jews being the common stock that remains closest to the ancestral roots. Muslims knelt and prayed to Jerusalem, after all, long before they had any Mecca to turn to. Jews still do. Sibling rivalries are always the nastiest. In their zeal to ‘reform’ the original core beliefs, feelings are easily hurt. Jesus turned the old slash-and-bash war god into one of love. Muhammad accepted this while limiting it to the nuclear religious family and returning to YHWH’s annihilation of his enemies, sparing only Christians and Jews, ‘people of the book’, while subjecting them to higher taxes. He appealed to tribal instincts by denying individuality and stressing Islam, surrender, to God and to tradition. At the same time he expanded the belief system to include the state as well as the individual soul, and expanded the concept of society to include taking care of the poor. This included the obligation to take many wives, since war created many widows. Thus women were quickly put in their place, in spirit if not in the letter. Even Ibn Battutah, the ‘Islamic Marco Polo’ complained in the fourteenth century, that Muslims in the Maldives allowed their women too much freedom, and Ibn was no homie.

If you allow women total freedom, what would result, after all? If that was a problem in ancient societies, imagine how it might be made manifest in the modern world. Women would soon be selling themselves and their services on the Internet, wouldn’t they? Yes, they would. Peasant girls from remote locations, linked to the ‘real world’ only by power lines and air waves, would soon be chatting up he-males around the world, giving them false flattery, a flash of a thigh, and the urge to merge in real time in virtual space. Then she lures him into her virtual ‘private room’, where she proceeds to take off her clothes and whip him into a virtual frenzy, all for the small donation of a dollar a minute. It shouldn’t take long. What was worshipped before the male war gods anyway? The female principle, exhibited in birth, is certainly the original miracle and its recognition as such is possibly the first conscious achievement of human thought. Whereas the Alpha-male in animal societies hoarded the harem, as some humans still do, the concept was made abstract for the new whiter brighter ‘naked apes’ on the scene, killing like lions and reproducing like rabbits. They had fertility rites and carved Venus figurines. As agriculture ensued and religions evolved, so did female worship. Prostitutes had prominent roles in temple rites, best exemplified in the Lady of Kadesh, representing the fertility God Astarte, seated naked on a lion, arrows in hand. As hunters became herders and warriors, these agricultural rites of weak sedentary people were seen as repulsive. All Semites, whether Jew, Christian, or Muslim, idolized the herding hunting fighting and killing way of life. They needed a God fit for the task, and this embrace of an abstract monotheism occupies much of the Old Testament, especially in the Jews’ contacts with the culturally superior, but sedentary, Canaanites, founder of the alphabet which has been adapted and adopted almost worldwide. Sacred prostitutes wouldn’t be of much use on the battlefield, and are best left in the temple, where they remain to this day in some parts of southern India. Elsewhere they are rarely considered sacred, more often scared. They’re safer under cover of the Internet.

Hinduism and Buddhism have always been more sympathetic to the female principle, while progressing conceptually from the act of birth to a broader concept of ‘enlightenment’, as opposed to commandments, passive acknowledgement of the human condition as opposed to the active changing of it, conciliatory mediation between extremes rather than conquest and annihilation. This didn’t mean that no battles were fought, of course, only that the enemies were usually well known and the results fairly predictable. That was usually enough to satisfy the machismo cravings of a people with very little herding and hunting tradition. That is rice country, of course, densely populated and long settled, where conformity is prized above individuality, and the past and the family are co-equal with religion. The Buddhist reform of Hinduism was more a codification for export and a repudiation of its caste system than a repudiation of its essential feminine passivity. Though men may call the political shots in modern Buddhist SE Asia, women are the moral force that holds families and societies together. Not infrequently they handle the purse-strings also, deftly tucking bills away in nooks and crannies for future consumption. Control of the means of reproduction has always been the female’s original endowment and empowerment. It only runs into fierce opposition from the leaders of those religions who want to kill it by hiding it behind a veil of deceit. That’s not how evolution works. Evolution may be the survival of the fittest men, but it’s the survival of the prettiest women. I’d become a suicide bomber myself if I had to sleep with some of those Muslim women. Bring me a bigger veil, and a bottle of absinthe.

This blog post is dedicated to Benazir Bhutto, may she accomplish in death what she never accomplished in life. She was never a widely popular leader, and certainly never wildly successful. Muslim machismo would ensure that. Any corruption on her watch was probably no worse than the corruption on anyone else’s. She was lambasted for her ‘secularity’ even though her father was the one to institute Islamic law into the modern government, though certainly Islam ‘lite’ by today’s standards. Her problems were Pakistan’s, Islam’s, and increasingly, the world’s, problems: cultures in collision, intolerance, religious fanaticism, and ignorance. I personally thought she was a pretty hot babe until she went overseas and ate all that fatty food, becoming increasingly, uh… Muslim. The fact that she was G.W. Bush’s choice for Pakistan is a red herring. Given Bush’s scarce mental acuity and his oily politics, it’d be nice to think that the opposition must be the ‘good guys.’ They’re not. Islamic jihadis are a perversion of their religion and to humanity in general, trying to accomplish with religion what they are unable to accomplish with their lives and societies. This is the last gasp of an Islam that can only catch up by dragging everyone else down. Sound like someone you know? This is the last gasp of an Islam that has oil and not much else. Terrorism? Global warming? It seems like we could kill two birds with one stone if we could get that needle full of oil out of our arm. But that would take a big psychological adjustment now wouldn’t it? Change is possible, but religious sensitivities need to be taken into careful account. When Europe finally threw off the yoke of the Church a few years ago, they threw out the baby with the bath water. They are the Godless West of Islamic hatred, only recently emerged from the threat of Godless communists. Religion is better than that, better than politics. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are the head, heart, and solar plexus of our collective soul. Only by balancing them can we advance as a people, as a person.

Thailand's not-so-Urban Legends

Thailand is a superstitious place. You might assume that would be in direct proportion to its percentage of rural populace, but that’s not necessarily so. ‘Thai Town’ in LA, CA, has seen posters sneaking up precipitously over the last few years, advertising the services of ‘seers’, people skilled in the art of charting your life by charting the stars, telling your future by telling your past. My wife’s father is one here in Chiang Rai. I believe he uses a system derived from the Burmese. That of central Thailand may be closer to the Cambodian system, reflecting historical influences. The first time he read my stars before his daughter and I got married, he warned me not to mess with Thai women. He may have had a point, but then, so did I. Nevertheless, many Thais will make no major movements in their lives without first consulting the ‘seer’. Thus Thai Buddhism deviates greatly from the central dogma, which I doubt that most Thais are even aware of, though the monks are, of course. Thai Buddhism is actually more of a combined Buddhist/animism, best exemplified by the jow tee, ‘spirit of the place’, who is usually provided a very auspicious place on the property and in the house of every Thai, a well-lighted corner usually. I’ve seen Thai friends rebuild their carport roofs at great expense in order to accommodate the ratsammee/halo space of the spirit. ‘The Buddhist Middle Path?’ That’s the short cut up the hill here to Wat Mengrai. BTW, the reverence with which the locals pay respect to Mengrai the Great’s statue at the five-way intersection is little different from that accorded monks and the finest graven images. Think eclectic. Think hybrid vigor. Think Thailand.

Thai Buddhism’s hybrid character thus takes on some unique characteristics. Of course any good Buddhist will ‘wai’ any Buddha image in his path, but sometimes that’s not convenient. So when a Thai drives his car past a temple, he’ll honk his horn instead. That pretty much accomplishes the same thing, I hear. These things are not done frivolously, though, mind you. If I playfully wave instead of respectfully wai, it’ll probably be a long cold night in the sack. The spirits must be fed, of course, so they get the same food as anyone else, which can be pretty elaborate on feast days. On normal days, they may have to make do with a little handful of oranges to last them for a week. As my father used to say about ants in the sugar bowl, “they don’t eat much.” Recycle before the bacteria take over. As some of you late-risers here may or may not know, real monks operate on pretty much the same system, making the morning rounds for their one full meal of the day. Other than that it’s pretty much just fruit or the like. Many stores and stalls specialize in providing pre-packaged CARE packages for monks, gift-wrapped and ready for consumption, almost always containing canned and packaged foods. If you go to the temple, then you should take prepared dishes. Yes, they eat just like everyone else, hot and spicy, pork optional. If you want a quickie marriage, just show up at daybreak with plenty of food, and then wait your turn to get your rights read to you. It worked for me. Our monk actually told my wife to obey me, a fact which I continue to remind her of on select occasions, to little effect. If you need it quicker than that, then you might want to re-consider the whole thing anyway.

A hybrid religion such as this is subject to many misconceptions and anomalies of course, one of the most obvious being the troupes of dancing girls that show up in most stage shows making the rounds on holidays, temples being no exception. Sometimes the shows go too far and the village people protest at their temples being used in such ways, though usually the priests and monks are complacent about it. Who knows what sort of financial arrangements are at stake? And if priests are in accord about the human body’s lowly status as a ‘mere vessel’, as the screenplay to ‘Tsunami: the Aftermath’ indicated, the local village populace certainly begs to differ. In the movie, the controversy was over the premature burning of victims before positive identification was made. In reality, funerals typically last a week, limited only by the victim’s family’s ability to pay for the festivities, and are heavily attended. The climax of the show, of course, is the burning of the corpse, and in the final minute, the casket is opened for viewing, probably a good idea given the potential for fraud. Well, the crowd goes wild and anybody who can, will rush the oven for one last view of the corpse, trading opinions on the curious positions a body can twist itself into and maybe the color of the paint of the car that was crashed into.

Other than the official superstitions of folk religion, there are dozens of little idiosyncrasies that Thais swear by, some serious, some silly. This includes a serious over-dependency on ‘magic pills’, little one-hit wonders that cure anything and everything that ails you, usually dispensed from well-handled old boxes with expiration dates conveniently smudged. Yah jeen, Chinese herbs, are also held in high esteem, though with little knowledge of which particular plant has what effect on what symptoms. If you buy in, apparently, then they work. Graven images can be portable and still do their juju, apparently. The Jatukam Ramatep craze currently sweeping the nation, amulets featuring a character from Hindu mythology, illustrates the phenomenon perfectly, though not exclusively. When Cambodians stormed the Thai Embassy in Phnom Penh a few years ago, the interviewee claimed he got out with help from all the magic amulets he was wearing, famous priests plasticized into immortality. Thais believe in magic. Thais believe in ghosts. That’s what ‘animism’ is all about, and is still embraced whole-heartedly by many hill tribes, with or without the mediating influence of Buddhism. A ‘mystic’ or ‘holy man’ is thus a maw pee, a ghost doctor, or ‘witch doctor’ if you prefer. Christianity has also made inroads in the hills, pun intended, though maybe in proportion to their development aid. Many tribal people in Thailand have no citizenship, and the government is not especially sympathetic, unless they’re tribal Tai. Then there are the silly superstitions of a jilted lover chopping off all her hair in some act of sympathetic magic casting off the evil-doer. This is much healthier than the related phenomenon of chopping off the bad guy’s most prominent appendage, presumably the devil itself and the source of all the evil. Urban legends have these forlorn members being sent aloft on hot air balloons to prevent any hope of ever being re-attached.

Northern Thais think all southerners are ‘black-hearted’ even though Thais, and only Thais, are ‘good-hearted.’ Thais think all hill tribes are stupid, in direct proportion to the degree to which they’ve maintained their traditions, Thai traditions not on the table for discussion. Isan people are suspected Communists because of their Lao connections, and Laos themselves are the subject of much ridicule, mostly because they don’t speak proper Thai. They’re Lao, of course, so why should they? Still, much comedy is made simply by speaking Lao so that it can be understood, and laughed at, by Thais. Cambodians are held in even less esteem, though their ancestors are the progenitors of much, if not most, Thai culture. Farangs even get into the act with their belief in a ‘get-out-of-jail-free card, some sort of business card or letter of introduction that will scare the pants off any policeman and promptly accord status to the presenter. Whether there is any truth to any of this is irrelevant to me and the fact that fellow Farangs buy into such nonsense is ridiculous. This is NOT necessary to a successful stay in Thailand. Being respectful to your hosts is, even when they generalize you as unable eat chilies, unable to speak anything other than English, and being hung like a horse.

I used to think that unplugging appliances, especially during a rainstorm, was superstitious, but maybe not. All the TV public service ads tell you to do it, after all, and my mother-in-law assures me that TV’s blow up regularly during thunderstorms. I try to suggest that this is not likely without an outside antenna, but to no avail. But considering that electricity here is not grounded and much home-made jury-rigging goes on, she may be right. My clock gained an hour a day in one house where we lived, and I’m sure I lost a laptop to the power fairies. What else would explain the sensation of ants crawling up my legs while using my laptop in my lap, where it belongs. Rabbit-ear antennas can shock you and turning on the lights in the bedroom can send a shower of electrons across the TV screen in the other room. The healthy fear of electricity is probably a reasonable superstition.