BUTTERING UP

Tibetan Losar was the last chance to celebrate a New Year until Jewish Rosh Hashonah in the fall, making for a long stretch with no fresh start. So I accepted the invitation to my fourth annual new year’s eve celebration, a very traditional family dinner that revolves around a special soup named after the little dough dumplings, tentuk, bobbing in its broth.

On this particular night, one flat disk of dough is added to every bowl of tentuk, each one containing a tiny slip of paper bearing the karmic trait that will control the upcoming destiny of its picker. On past eves, I found coal, chili and salt in my soup, but no one ever seemed to know why any of them were in there. I had to live a whole year to find out how things would work out, and by the time I did, I had long forgotten and little remembered the warning in the broth. This year, worried that suspense could kill me at my advancing age, I made noise about not showing up unless somebody actually knew what these fortunes meant. “Come anyway,” they said.

To my surprise, when soup was ladled out, everybody assured me they knew the answers to the meanings of life in it. One by one as we bit open the pasta, I learned coal means black hearted, chili angry or out of control, cotton soft hearted, salt lazy because it makes things sluggish and heavy. When I, the only non-Tibetan, got butter, I wildly waved my tiny scrap of paper. “It means I’m the high calorie one full of fat, an American.” “Actually,” somebody rushed to say, “it means smooth talking, smooth sailing… a year of richness.”

After years of being black hearted, lazy and out of control, what relief it was to have such good fortune. To be butter is to be loved, at least by Tibetans. They not only gorge on it for warmth and protein. They famously make tea of it, and lamp light, prayer offerings and religious sculpture. At the launch of anything, it is poured into rice as their champagne, turning the dish into desi. It even flows through their language. The common Khampa way of describing something clean, quick and skillful—such as the way to end a bad relationship-- is “like a knife through butter.” The perfection or Buddha nature inherent in everyone is alluded to as the golden butter that comes from churning milk. Churned milk is omnipresent in Tibetan culture, because butter’s gold color and ridiculous fat content make it a potent symbol for wealth, and that makes it also a symbol for joy, since wealth of any kind can reduce suffering.


I drove home thinking I would not have been so fortunate in other cultures, ones that see butter as the cause of suffering. How they would have preferred coal. I wasn’t thinking so much of the folks in weight watcher world who can’t believe it’s not butter, but rather those who put on the planet probably the most echoed sound byte of all time: guns or butter. It is still alive and well, brought forth like a stewardess, once the seatbelt light has been turned off, asking for your drink preference: coffee, tea or milk? The implication is: pick only one, and often it comes with the suspicion it’s really Hobson’s choice.

As it happens, the first time I heard guns or butter in the 1960s was no different from the first time I got one of those karmic fortunes in my soup: nobody really knew what it meant. The phrase was there in the opening of the classic and best selling Economics: an Introductory Analysis everybody slogging through Economics 101 in the Ivy League had to digest. We all somehow knew the author, renowned MIT professor and subsequent Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, put out a new edition every time his wife had a new baby, but nobody knew much of anything about why Samuelson consistently presented economic decision making as a political tug of war between two evidently polar opposites. The phrase guns or butter was inculcated in us as the supposedly inevitable zero sum political game every community must play, since every dollar spent on one necessarily reduces its chance to have the other. Maybe because I was the only female in the class, I thought it made economics look like a football game with lots of tackling between those goal posts.

Also, I found the paradigm odd. I was baffled by what seemed weird choices, especially when a civilized society should aspire to much that seemed to have been omitted for mysterious reasons. Granted, I was young enough to think you could have it all, and certainly a romantic young woman who found food far more compelling —and vital, than Howitzers. Yet, definitely, like everybody else forced to swallow that text, I had no idea Samuelson had salvaged a picturesque phrase from the sunken economic theory of the late Adolph Hitler. Guns or butter was actually the jingoistic battle cry created in the 1930s by ace spinmeister Joseph Goebbels to justify the Nazi agenda— although those three words are its abbreviated sound byte. The full propaganda slogan went something like Guns will make us fit while butter will only make us fat. In other words, goose stepping over goose feeding any day.

That’s how the Nazis whipped their country into its feeding frenzy on Poland, Czechoslovakia, France et al, making violence their bread and butter. I discovered this during the Moral Majority 1980s doing research on German women who risked their lives in resistance to Nazism. I learned Goebbels propagated the slogan to knock women down from the workplace heights they had achieved during World War I, and to prevent their sons, husbands and fathers from standing by them, becoming what the Austrian-born governor of California calls “girly men.” Guns or butter was a deadly potshot at women and by extension the arts and craft of sustaining life. Butter was snide shorthand for the homefront, the homefires, for three German words the Nazi schemers linked to the female realm: children, kitchen and church. The either or symbolized the eternal seesaw between masculine and feminine, hard and soft, death giving and life giving—with or emphasizing one correct choice.

The battle cry guns or butter conveniently allowed the Nazis to co-opt all resources for armies and armaments, and we know how the story ended. The Soviet Union was the next to try, bombastically banking on an enormous military and nuclear arsenal while its people stood in breadlines in thread bare coats. It could have been the stuff of comedy but it wasn’t funny. Besides, even though the empire eventually imploded, what remains of Russia seems to be trying it again. It is still the rage of North Korea. Perhaps that's why it is not the popular tourist destination a buttery country like Italy is. People with their druthers have the damnedest habit of sticking to the humanity stuff.

Anybody who thinks guns or butter wasn’t lifted out of the economic textbook into America’s political reality must have been on the moon during the Reagan years when social services were eliminated, suffocated or strangled to free up welfare money for the defense contractors who supported the actor's candidacy. Reaganomics is guns or butter. So too was the high testosterone Cheney government, for which the election of 2000 was hijacked. Don't just look at how that man spent his spare time shooting living creatures. Look at the spending record. Gazillions of dollars paid for war machines and whatnot in Iraq while the homefront—schools, a safe food supply, bridges—fell apart from lack of attention. Conscientious objectors were spied upon or persecuted, women’s rights eroded. The governor of California pompously called those not in favor of his spending priorities “girly men.” Remember all the emphasis on “lean and mean” as opposed to “fat and happy?”

Now here comes Barack Obama trying to butter up the nation with his stimulus to build schools, roads, solar panels and organic food—enriching the country as we go, and Republican congressmen, especially from southern California, go on television to rebuff him. And what's the problem? They complain money allocated for the arts and pre-school education is an egregious waste of money when what America really needs to be strong again is more missile systems and stealth bombers. So there it is: guns or butter? I guess some Americans want their karmic fate this earth ox year to be coal, salt or chili. They would have found a year of butter misfortune in the soup.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
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