BUDDHOO ECONOMICS
According to news that leaked from Beliefnet onto the wheels of dharma that roll across the internet, Barack Obama took the oath of office with a khata blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his pocket. It was reportedly a last minute offering from Richard Blum, founder of the American Himalayan Foundation and husband of the Inauguration’s emcee, Senator Diane Feinstein, and in a distinct break with political tradition, the almost President was reportedly very happy to pocket His Holiness’ blessing. I bet he knew it would go perfectly with the little bit of the Buddha he already had up his sleeve.
Obama took the khata minutes before he took over a nation neglected and decayed into more shambles than the south side of Chicago. In America 2009, people live on sidewalks, bridges collapse, libraries close, airports smother, trains don’t run on time or at all, water and sewer piping corrode, soup kitchens run out and it’s almost twenty years since people started calling New York Calcutta on the Hudson. As he did again in his speech last week to Congress, on Inauguration Day the President nailed the cause of the decline as neatly as the Buddha. It’s the autonomy stupid (no comma intended). Everybody flaunting their own declaration of independence, L’eclat, c’est moi!, marching to the beat of their own I-tunes has left we the people in tatters (sometimes hyped as niches). As they declare in divorce court: so much for a more perfect union when there's nothing in common.
It was a no-brainer to imply why the state of the union is wrong. “If anything characterizes the 21st century,” a Rutgers professor of Mobile Communications Studies (how’s that for a major!), recently told the New York Times, “it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people.” Everybody who has not done a gap decade on Mars has experienced cell phone blabbermouths bogarting their space. Last week I met the foul mouthed brute who likes to park his massive SUV across the loading driveway of the building I work in, because when the building manager, a 5’6”, 76-year-old with a heart condition, finally went out to ask him to please move, the guy physically attacked. But then, almost everyday I drive in San Francisco, I nearly meet the websi generation whose expensive cars and cell phones entitle them to run the four-way STOPS with the same arrogant impunity that Northern Trust Bank took my taxpayer bailout money, didn’t stop and blew millions last week on a lavish Los Angeles golfing gala with Sheryl Crowe.
The wealth obsessed wonders who wake up in August in their multimillion dollar cottages on the coast of Maine demanding the native lobstermen and boat builders move elsewhere to get their “junk” out of a gorgeous view are me too dittos of the thirty-something Sausalito swell who didn’t care if he bankrupted his elderly neighbors on Social Security by forcing each to pay $60,000 to bury a power line that was ruining his bay view. All sense of neighborliness has been washed away by the dam that burst on Wall Street’s primitive instinct: “eat what you kill”, investment banker code for Get out of the way, it’s all mine. I don’t have to share. Go get your own credit default swap.
We do have to hand it, the trophy please, to these egomaniacs. The WMDS weren’t in Iraq but right here in the bank! The Mayans said the world as we know it would end on December 21, 2012, but these me first folks blew it up by December 2008, record time. Of course, the Buddha did say the I deal is a first class ticket on the bullet train to the teeming slum of suffering known as Samsara. And because every crisis is an opportunity and it’s not over until everyone is over it, someone will likely turn this into a cheery drink-up vodka ad something like: Absolute power! Disrupts absolutely! Try it, you’ll like it. Hurry, call now for your free offer! Operators are standing by.
After the second speech, a TV news host wistfully asked a guest from the thick of things if there was a way to shame the money men into doing the right thing. The answer was sadly obvious. Habits die hard, (just ask a Buddhist), and anyway, shame has been politically incorrect since the ‘60s ended in the re-election of Richard Nixon. In real unnoticed climate change, America went green after that. Take the money and run became the national pastime, and the million dollar book contract to brag how some lobbyist or secret agent showed you the money was a bases loaded home run. During the infamous OJ Simpson trial, day laborers told the press, Juice couldn’t have done anything wrong because he had so much money. Worked for Bernie Madoff too.
This is the rot Obama was referring to: no fifteen minutes of shame, no sense of other. I think that’s why he specifically singled out the banker who happily shared his boggling bonus with co-workers who helped him over the years, and the pilot who endlessly practiced safety techniques and thus in real time seconds saved lives. These people look like Bodhisattvas, putting others before self knowing self is really others. Obama can’t organize the community around here until everybody gets that.
Pontificating with a grand unifying theory about what’s made selfishness all the rage is a pratfall. I learned that when my grandfather, an otherwise canny master of the corporate universe, insisted the whole hairy hippie 60s phenomenon was merely the result of an increase in barbershop prices. Yet there may have been a tad of unexamined truth in my father swearing our Vietnam misadventure was simply the result of the powerful Catholic archbishops of New York and Boston pressuring the Catholic President Kennedy not to lose the faithful. Formerly French Vietnam was chockablock with collection plate Catholics threatened by godless—and Popeless-- Communism.
So I won’t say Armageddon came courtesy of cheap cameras that created a smile! and look at me! civilization which is all show biz, a culture that happily crops darkness out of every picture with one simple I am feeling lucky button. No worries. I won’t even say, Americans like to keep moving to what they imagine will be a “better” place, preferring flight to fight, and since we’ve run out of physical territory to invade, the well documented white flight to shiny new and seemingly safe suburbs, the most popular way to “get away from it all”, was followed by flight from equally crowded, risky and rundown Reality, the most popular way to “have it all.” I think Wall-E did that.
But it is tempting to posit that the demise of the Draft jumpstarted the current culture that does not ask any more what you can do for your country, which is to say, for others. The cashiering of conscription came like a metaphorical mop up after Republican Richard Nixon unhinged the country from the gold standard to do its own thing. And the shrinking of the popular Peace Corps came next, victim of Reaganomics preference for smart bombs over smartening people. So maybe the free fall began when everybody became a free agent free of any restraint, any compelling civil or civic responsibility, any real risk of sacrifice, and America became a duty free country, happy to not tax anyone in any way. The great unleashing of so much inner Alfred E. Neuman, What, me worry?, built up to to the apotheosis in Draft dodger W who, it was recently revealed, never bothered to scoop Barney’s poop off the White House lawn any more than he bothered to clean up the ca-ca of derivatives or the defense contractors cleaning up in Iraq.
Unfortunately it also turned our power centers into frat parties that giddily hazed an entire nation. Graduates who never had to serve a cause larger than themselves flocked to K Street and Wall Street, changing the tenor of business and politics as usual by boiling everything down to one question: what’s in it for me? A whole world of private planes, private equity, private schools, private security, private communities, private banking, private hospitals that added up to one big private joke on the public.
Even medical school graduates started to step on each other to get residencies in formerly shunned fields like dermatology, because they only want to do elective, thus lucrative and conveniently scheduled procedures like cosmetic surgery, although these have nothing to do with healing. That takes so much effort and personal contact, so much caring for needy others, there’s a shortage of hands-on doctors and probably will be for a while. A few months ago, my brilliant young cousin, about to graduate with honors with her MD plus PhD all at once, told me she had decided to go into nuclear medicine “for the lifestyle.” Yesterday my childhood friend told me her son, after a decade of training in cancer surgery, would probably go to work for a pharmaceutical company because of the money. That’s the whealth care crisis.
During last November’s startling protests in normally placid Bangkok, my Thai friend wrote upper crust Thais were shocked by the divisive tenacity of ousted leader Taksin Shinawatra. The tradition that’s kept Thais free and strong, she said, is that elected leaders put aside personal considerations to do what’s best to protect the country. By selfishly holding onto power, he wrenched the country in half, setting Thai against Thai for the first time in history. Maybe he got to do that because the Thais had by then surrendered another tradition. Upon graduation, Thai men are no longer required to shave their heads, abandon their possessions and spend a gap year as a monk in a Buddhist monastery, learning not only meditation, but heartfelt consideration of others and humility at being just one atom that functions dependently in a large body.
The whole premise of Buddhism, of the Buddha, is that men need to be taught how to connect protectively to others the way mothers instinctively bond to a child. I want to think national or charitable service are equal opportunity. But serving others went the way of regulation, trampled in the mad rush for the absolute disconnect of absolute freedom. The free market the private jet set so staunchly defends is the mirror of this belief an individual has no allegiance, no attachment to what founding New Englanders called the common good, anything that supplies community. That’s why sometimes the staunch exhortations for free markets free of countervailing power looks like infantile male individuation from mother, raised to its highest exponential "don't tread on me" power, sort of a whole bunch of guys trying lock Mom out of the room because they don't want to hear: "Eat your spinach!"
The huge ha ha here is that the right wing Christians who have made free markets and individual liberty so sanctimonious they’ve been incited to violent Obama opposition, are the very people thumping and swearing on a book whose story begins with the perils of not being your brother’s keeper. In our story these perils have turned out to be potholes, falling bridges, lethal pollution, poison peanuts and adults so stupid, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor just told Jon Stewart that 68% of Americans can't name the three branches of government but they can name one judge on American Idol.
Obama talked about taxes because even in a free market where ketchup can be a vegetable, there is no free lunch. Taxes are the way we make an offering to the mandala of which we are an inextricable part, the way we restrain ourselves for the benefit of others. This is because we are supposed to pay taxes because taxes are supposed to pay for what we need but can’t obtain alone: air traffic control to save our life, disease control, highway patrol, fire fighting, ports and parks--all that stuff of the common good. I know people who deliberately moved to and gladly pay taxes to the town of Scarsdale because they get back something they really want: great schools and a town swimming pool. I also know what was once the bright, shining California college system is now shriveled and sere because some state residents adamantly objected to paying for it, so the state now gets to produce huge crops of uneducated, unemployable adults whose incarceration or Medicaid has burst the budget.
Obama provided stimulus for smart people over smart bombs, compassionately pushing people to push themselves toward more education because knowledge creates skillful means and America needs every single American to be fit enough to join the team that’s to reboot and rebuild. He told those who quit highschool, they are quitting on their country to skillfully frame these lives in larger context, give them grander meaning, showing them they are needed. “This is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue,” he said, crossing the artifical continental divide. “It is an American issue.” Trying to re-knit a tangled web of interdependence, all for one, one for all, Obama spoke truth to power: I after we except before see.
The next day people were practically euphoric at this reminder that virtuous always ends in us. Nobody felt left out. I could see a lot of smiles and hear a lot of relief. Even my stalwart Republican friends, normally panicked about capital gains tax, were extolling the call to community, the notion we’re all on the same Team America, sailing on the same proverbial ship of state. Perhaps their newly ignited hope for the better, this new joyous sense of rightful togetherness pure and perfect, was the out of pocket blessing of His Holiness' khata at work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Obama took the khata minutes before he took over a nation neglected and decayed into more shambles than the south side of Chicago. In America 2009, people live on sidewalks, bridges collapse, libraries close, airports smother, trains don’t run on time or at all, water and sewer piping corrode, soup kitchens run out and it’s almost twenty years since people started calling New York Calcutta on the Hudson. As he did again in his speech last week to Congress, on Inauguration Day the President nailed the cause of the decline as neatly as the Buddha. It’s the autonomy stupid (no comma intended). Everybody flaunting their own declaration of independence, L’eclat, c’est moi!, marching to the beat of their own I-tunes has left we the people in tatters (sometimes hyped as niches). As they declare in divorce court: so much for a more perfect union when there's nothing in common.
It was a no-brainer to imply why the state of the union is wrong. “If anything characterizes the 21st century,” a Rutgers professor of Mobile Communications Studies (how’s that for a major!), recently told the New York Times, “it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people.” Everybody who has not done a gap decade on Mars has experienced cell phone blabbermouths bogarting their space. Last week I met the foul mouthed brute who likes to park his massive SUV across the loading driveway of the building I work in, because when the building manager, a 5’6”, 76-year-old with a heart condition, finally went out to ask him to please move, the guy physically attacked. But then, almost everyday I drive in San Francisco, I nearly meet the websi generation whose expensive cars and cell phones entitle them to run the four-way STOPS with the same arrogant impunity that Northern Trust Bank took my taxpayer bailout money, didn’t stop and blew millions last week on a lavish Los Angeles golfing gala with Sheryl Crowe.
The wealth obsessed wonders who wake up in August in their multimillion dollar cottages on the coast of Maine demanding the native lobstermen and boat builders move elsewhere to get their “junk” out of a gorgeous view are me too dittos of the thirty-something Sausalito swell who didn’t care if he bankrupted his elderly neighbors on Social Security by forcing each to pay $60,000 to bury a power line that was ruining his bay view. All sense of neighborliness has been washed away by the dam that burst on Wall Street’s primitive instinct: “eat what you kill”, investment banker code for Get out of the way, it’s all mine. I don’t have to share. Go get your own credit default swap.
We do have to hand it, the trophy please, to these egomaniacs. The WMDS weren’t in Iraq but right here in the bank! The Mayans said the world as we know it would end on December 21, 2012, but these me first folks blew it up by December 2008, record time. Of course, the Buddha did say the I deal is a first class ticket on the bullet train to the teeming slum of suffering known as Samsara. And because every crisis is an opportunity and it’s not over until everyone is over it, someone will likely turn this into a cheery drink-up vodka ad something like: Absolute power! Disrupts absolutely! Try it, you’ll like it. Hurry, call now for your free offer! Operators are standing by.
After the second speech, a TV news host wistfully asked a guest from the thick of things if there was a way to shame the money men into doing the right thing. The answer was sadly obvious. Habits die hard, (just ask a Buddhist), and anyway, shame has been politically incorrect since the ‘60s ended in the re-election of Richard Nixon. In real unnoticed climate change, America went green after that. Take the money and run became the national pastime, and the million dollar book contract to brag how some lobbyist or secret agent showed you the money was a bases loaded home run. During the infamous OJ Simpson trial, day laborers told the press, Juice couldn’t have done anything wrong because he had so much money. Worked for Bernie Madoff too.
This is the rot Obama was referring to: no fifteen minutes of shame, no sense of other. I think that’s why he specifically singled out the banker who happily shared his boggling bonus with co-workers who helped him over the years, and the pilot who endlessly practiced safety techniques and thus in real time seconds saved lives. These people look like Bodhisattvas, putting others before self knowing self is really others. Obama can’t organize the community around here until everybody gets that.
Pontificating with a grand unifying theory about what’s made selfishness all the rage is a pratfall. I learned that when my grandfather, an otherwise canny master of the corporate universe, insisted the whole hairy hippie 60s phenomenon was merely the result of an increase in barbershop prices. Yet there may have been a tad of unexamined truth in my father swearing our Vietnam misadventure was simply the result of the powerful Catholic archbishops of New York and Boston pressuring the Catholic President Kennedy not to lose the faithful. Formerly French Vietnam was chockablock with collection plate Catholics threatened by godless—and Popeless-- Communism.
So I won’t say Armageddon came courtesy of cheap cameras that created a smile! and look at me! civilization which is all show biz, a culture that happily crops darkness out of every picture with one simple I am feeling lucky button. No worries. I won’t even say, Americans like to keep moving to what they imagine will be a “better” place, preferring flight to fight, and since we’ve run out of physical territory to invade, the well documented white flight to shiny new and seemingly safe suburbs, the most popular way to “get away from it all”, was followed by flight from equally crowded, risky and rundown Reality, the most popular way to “have it all.” I think Wall-E did that.
But it is tempting to posit that the demise of the Draft jumpstarted the current culture that does not ask any more what you can do for your country, which is to say, for others. The cashiering of conscription came like a metaphorical mop up after Republican Richard Nixon unhinged the country from the gold standard to do its own thing. And the shrinking of the popular Peace Corps came next, victim of Reaganomics preference for smart bombs over smartening people. So maybe the free fall began when everybody became a free agent free of any restraint, any compelling civil or civic responsibility, any real risk of sacrifice, and America became a duty free country, happy to not tax anyone in any way. The great unleashing of so much inner Alfred E. Neuman, What, me worry?, built up to to the apotheosis in Draft dodger W who, it was recently revealed, never bothered to scoop Barney’s poop off the White House lawn any more than he bothered to clean up the ca-ca of derivatives or the defense contractors cleaning up in Iraq.
Unfortunately it also turned our power centers into frat parties that giddily hazed an entire nation. Graduates who never had to serve a cause larger than themselves flocked to K Street and Wall Street, changing the tenor of business and politics as usual by boiling everything down to one question: what’s in it for me? A whole world of private planes, private equity, private schools, private security, private communities, private banking, private hospitals that added up to one big private joke on the public.
Even medical school graduates started to step on each other to get residencies in formerly shunned fields like dermatology, because they only want to do elective, thus lucrative and conveniently scheduled procedures like cosmetic surgery, although these have nothing to do with healing. That takes so much effort and personal contact, so much caring for needy others, there’s a shortage of hands-on doctors and probably will be for a while. A few months ago, my brilliant young cousin, about to graduate with honors with her MD plus PhD all at once, told me she had decided to go into nuclear medicine “for the lifestyle.” Yesterday my childhood friend told me her son, after a decade of training in cancer surgery, would probably go to work for a pharmaceutical company because of the money. That’s the whealth care crisis.
During last November’s startling protests in normally placid Bangkok, my Thai friend wrote upper crust Thais were shocked by the divisive tenacity of ousted leader Taksin Shinawatra. The tradition that’s kept Thais free and strong, she said, is that elected leaders put aside personal considerations to do what’s best to protect the country. By selfishly holding onto power, he wrenched the country in half, setting Thai against Thai for the first time in history. Maybe he got to do that because the Thais had by then surrendered another tradition. Upon graduation, Thai men are no longer required to shave their heads, abandon their possessions and spend a gap year as a monk in a Buddhist monastery, learning not only meditation, but heartfelt consideration of others and humility at being just one atom that functions dependently in a large body.
The whole premise of Buddhism, of the Buddha, is that men need to be taught how to connect protectively to others the way mothers instinctively bond to a child. I want to think national or charitable service are equal opportunity. But serving others went the way of regulation, trampled in the mad rush for the absolute disconnect of absolute freedom. The free market the private jet set so staunchly defends is the mirror of this belief an individual has no allegiance, no attachment to what founding New Englanders called the common good, anything that supplies community. That’s why sometimes the staunch exhortations for free markets free of countervailing power looks like infantile male individuation from mother, raised to its highest exponential "don't tread on me" power, sort of a whole bunch of guys trying lock Mom out of the room because they don't want to hear: "Eat your spinach!"
The huge ha ha here is that the right wing Christians who have made free markets and individual liberty so sanctimonious they’ve been incited to violent Obama opposition, are the very people thumping and swearing on a book whose story begins with the perils of not being your brother’s keeper. In our story these perils have turned out to be potholes, falling bridges, lethal pollution, poison peanuts and adults so stupid, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor just told Jon Stewart that 68% of Americans can't name the three branches of government but they can name one judge on American Idol.
Obama talked about taxes because even in a free market where ketchup can be a vegetable, there is no free lunch. Taxes are the way we make an offering to the mandala of which we are an inextricable part, the way we restrain ourselves for the benefit of others. This is because we are supposed to pay taxes because taxes are supposed to pay for what we need but can’t obtain alone: air traffic control to save our life, disease control, highway patrol, fire fighting, ports and parks--all that stuff of the common good. I know people who deliberately moved to and gladly pay taxes to the town of Scarsdale because they get back something they really want: great schools and a town swimming pool. I also know what was once the bright, shining California college system is now shriveled and sere because some state residents adamantly objected to paying for it, so the state now gets to produce huge crops of uneducated, unemployable adults whose incarceration or Medicaid has burst the budget.
Obama provided stimulus for smart people over smart bombs, compassionately pushing people to push themselves toward more education because knowledge creates skillful means and America needs every single American to be fit enough to join the team that’s to reboot and rebuild. He told those who quit highschool, they are quitting on their country to skillfully frame these lives in larger context, give them grander meaning, showing them they are needed. “This is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue,” he said, crossing the artifical continental divide. “It is an American issue.” Trying to re-knit a tangled web of interdependence, all for one, one for all, Obama spoke truth to power: I after we except before see.
The next day people were practically euphoric at this reminder that virtuous always ends in us. Nobody felt left out. I could see a lot of smiles and hear a lot of relief. Even my stalwart Republican friends, normally panicked about capital gains tax, were extolling the call to community, the notion we’re all on the same Team America, sailing on the same proverbial ship of state. Perhaps their newly ignited hope for the better, this new joyous sense of rightful togetherness pure and perfect, was the out of pocket blessing of His Holiness' khata at work.
~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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