Topic: Culture & Society

"Not only is it a flagrant violation of international law, it's a slap in the face of the UN," I vented to a friend about the US's recent imperious shenanigans abroad.

His response was chilling.

"Like most of the wars that have occurred since more than five people on a side could heft a club," he posited quite matter-of-factly, "People aren't likely to ask permission to have them."

To those of us concerned with such niceties as civil liberties, it's beginning to look like the terrorists have won. Since the falling of the twin towers we've seen Congress pass the Patriot Act, which should be deemed unconstitutional but so far hasn't, with the specter of an even harsher Patriot Act II on the horizon. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of immigrants, both legal and illegal, rounded-up and held without due process. Prisoners of war are being held in Cuba without regard to the Geneva convention, even while President Bush was demanding that American POWs in Iraq be treated in accordance to the Geneva accords.

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If you were born after about 1963, the announcement of the passing on August 16th of one-time Ugandan dictator Idi Amin probably held little meaning. To those of us who were at least in our teens or twenties during the decade of the 70s, however, just hearing this name again in the news was like being visited by a ghost from a long forgotten past.

With presidential elections still more than a year away, we're already being inundated with presidential electoral politics. If that sounds like a redundancy, it is, and it's only the first of many yet to come. The Democratic hopefuls are all lining-up on the center/left, singing differing versions of the same song, at this point a pop-country ditty about cheating and lying. Bush, still basically unchallenged by any overreaching Republicans, is busy raising a campaign fund huge enough to pay off the national deficit if put to good use.

Old people have become a burden and we don't know what to do with them. They need so much tending, which interferes with our own sacred lifestyles, so we shunt our grandparents and great-grandparents away to retirement homes where they can become someone else's problem. We assuage our guilt by dutifully visiting with them for an hour or so every Sunday after church, while turning a blind ear to their complaints of being ignored or mistreated by the home's overworked and underpaid staff. "That's just grandma," we say, knowingly, to ourselves. "She always did expect too much."

To the Buddhists of Tibet, reincarnation is not just a belief, but is considered to be a fact. All of the high lamas, the spiritual leaders, are actually chosen by reincarnation. When a lama gets old or is nearing death, he leaves clues as to where and when he'll reincarnate. A search is then undertaken to find the reincarnated lama, to restore him to his station in life.

It's been this way since Buddhism was first introduced to Tibet. The current Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, is thought to be fourteenth in a string of reincarnations that began with Dalai Lama number one, who died in 1474. He's also believed to be a manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, whose name is Chenrezig in Tibetan and Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many people suspected that whomever was elected president in 1980 would not live through a full term of office. This belief was based on the occurrence of a string of coincidences that began during the first half of the nineteenth century. Since 1840, when William Harrison was elected, through the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, every president who was elected in a year that ended in a zero, an occurrence that happens every twenty years, died while in office. Although the presidents in question died from a variety of causes, more than half died from an assassins bullet.

When Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada for sixteen and a half years, died on September 28th of last year, I was more disappointed than surprised that his passing received scant attention from the American media. After all, it'd been more than sixteen years since he'd left the stage of international politics and very few of his policies had directly affected the United States. But having lived under Trudeau's government for nearly five years, I know that we have lost one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century.

The Canada that Trudeau inherited was deeply divided over the issue of language and culture. The French speaking people of Canada had long complained that the country's English speaking majority was slowly destroying their heritage, and a movement was afoot to split Quebec from the rest of Canada. When Trudeau, a French-Canadian, took office in 1968, one of his first accomplishments was the passing of the Official Languages Act, which made Canada a bilingual country. The law was unpopular in English speaking Canada and did little to appease the French, who saw it as a Band-Aid approach.

The other night as I watched Anna and the King on TV, I remembered that the movie had received horrible reviews in 1999, the year of its release. I wondered about that, because I was enjoying the film. Certainly, it was no masterpiece, but it wasn't worthy of the scathing reviews I remembered. After the film ended, I went online and looked-up Roger Ebert's original review, since I usually agree with him.

Back in 1970, I sold my first news story. A Bible thumping and violent loony had invaded an Eastern Orthodox church that served the gay and lesbian community in Hollywood, California. As he spouted a sermon of hellfire and the hate of God, he destroyed an altar and assaulted the priest before making a getaway. As luck would have it, I was next door at the time. I called the Los Angeles Free Press, introduced myself to editor Chris Van Ness and told him what had happened before asking if I could write the story. He gave me the go-ahead, and the following Tuesday my byline appeared in 100,000 copies in newsstands throughout the LA basin. The following week, I picked-up a check for twenty-five dollars. I had finally made it. I was a paid writer.