WhirledView

Blind Buddhas and Incendiary Cartoons

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Santa Fe is full of Buddhists, but no one has erupted with religious rage since this image (a sculpture by David Kimble Anderson) was placed on display in the atrium of a building that housed an art gallery and other business enterprises.  As anyone with the least facility in reading symbols will immediately have grasped,  there are innumerable ways of interpreting this work of art.  Since many possible interpretations are decidedly negative, I found my recalling the violent  reactions to the now infamous Danish cartoons, which were condemned by many believers as an affront to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.  The result?  Riots in several countries.  Some people unfortunately died.

Multiple Interpretations

Let’s consider some ways in which the Anderson piece might be understood.  The gold surface could be an indictment of materialism on the part of traditional Buddhist temple builders or on the part of current practitioners whose lives verge, hypocritically perhaps, on the sumptuous.  Of course, many traditional images of the Buddha are also flamboyantly gilt, to symbolize the transcendent value of the teachings and to honor the one who enunciated them.

In this case, however, the figure appears to be bandaged.  It is, evidently, blind and essentially quadriplegic.  Unable to see.  Unable to act.  Impotent.  Useless.  Is this a statement about the futility and irrelevance of Buddhism? On the other hand, meditative insights are available to those who sit without moving,  looking inward.  Sometimes these insights have effects that are far more powerful than actions that are not guided by wisdom. 

Which, one wonders, did the sculptor have in mind?

Mummies, Too

I simply don’t know.  When I first saw this image, I was and still am totally ignorant of the sculptor’s intention, as ignorant as many of those who rioted over the Danish cartoons surely were.  Nor would many of those angry Muslims have cared in the least whether the cartoonists’ intentions were pure or not.  The cartoons, taken at face value, appear to insult the prophet.  Enough.

This past weekend I had an opportunity to show a photo of the blind Buddha to a very knowledgeable Buddhist teacher/scholar.  “Give me your first reaction,” I asked.  “How do you feel?  What are your unconsidered thoughts?”  I should have known better.  I did not get any unconsidered thoughts. 

But I did get some interesting information.  This scholar said that the image reminds him of the mummy of Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Cha’an (or Zen) Buddhism, who was born in AD 638 and is known for enunciating the revered Diamond Jewel Platform Sutra.  Evidently it was the custom to mummify great teachers back then in China.  The proper term, I just learned courtesy of Google, is “whole body relics.”  Mummies!  This seemed strange to me.  Buddhism supposedly teaches impermanence, while mummies are intended to make the physical remains last forever or as long as possible.  My bewildered personal reaction to Buddhist mummies notwithstanding, could Anderson’s work be an homage to Hui Neng?

And so the inquiry widens, opening my horizons, giving me pause to think.

Thoughts on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel and Palestine

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was mostly on retreat last week, which is why I wasn’t posting, but only as a commuter, so I was able to sneak a look at two PBS programs that turned out to be entirely consistent with what I was doing during the daytime.  I saw the Masterpiece Contemporary presentation of Endgame, an utterly compelling docu-drama about the secret negotiations that preceded the  official negotiations for the end of apartheid in South Africa and a Bill Moyers interview with South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led the UN commission of inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel and by Hamas last year.  These are the thoughts that emerged.   They begin with Zimbabwe.... 

Banes of Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe, I suspect, calculated that a power-sharing agreement with Morgan Tsvangirai would placate the West and bring in the big bucks he needs to provide food and rudimentary survival services to a population he has ravaged and terrorized.  Dutifully, his new prime minister set out on a begging trip, hoping to convince prospective donors that the shotgun marriage was cozy and legit.  When the would-be saviors, U.S. and European, saw through the ruse and refused to cough up enough to suit the white-baiting octogenarian president, Mugabe seems to have lost interest in the PR value of minimal cooperation with Tsvangirai, who is now more or less on strike.  So Mugabe has resumed his well-honed harangue: all of Zimbabwe’s current miseries can be traced to colonialism, even if Zimbabwe was in terrific economic shape when the British left in 1980.

Meanwhile, starving, sick, miserable and thoroughly desperate refugees finally began streaming into South Africa from neighboring Zimbabwe.  The result: murderous local mobs pushing back from South African townships whose residents have not prospered as they had hoped in the years since apartheid gave way to majority rule.  Their cry: how can we share when we have so little?  Although South African police managed to quell the worst of the violence, South Africa has continued its policy of not seriously pressuring Mugabe to reverse course or to resign, despite urging by the U.S. and others.  African nations, for obvious reasons, are very touchy about sovereignty. 

The good news is that South Africa itself has not been destabilized by spillover from disarray next door.  Nor has the post-Mandela leadership adopted the poisonous anti-White propaganda and policies of the Mugabe regime.  Whites continue to be a relatively prosperous minority in South Africa where they have a significant presence in urban and rural economies.  Whites also continue to be personally safe, as far as anyone is safe in South Africa’s crime-ridden cities.  This accord didn’t happen by chance.  Unlike Zimbabwe, where Mugabe is the black mirror image of the implacable white racist Ian Smith, South Africa has produced some remarkable leaders, men who saw that retribution, deserved or not, was no way to achieve stability and prosperity in a post-apartheid country.

South African Treasures

South Africa was blessed with Nelson Mandela, who became the reincarnated country’s first president, with Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu who served as conscience for the reborn country, and with a Boer realist  F.W. de Klerk who knew when the game of white monoply on power was over.  South Africa was also blessed with a nationalist party whose millitant wing  was willing to lay down arms without preconditions and let the party leaders join in the process of writing a new constitution.   Long jailed lawyer and African National Congress leader  Nelson Mandela would have as Vice Presidents ANC activist Tabo Mbeki, who would succeed Mandela as president, and—yes!—that very same F.W. de Klerk.  Finally, instead of setting up a war crimes court, the new government chose to conduct a truth and reconciliation process: tell the world exactly what you did, however horrible, and you’ll be free to build a new South Africa with us. 

Confessing is hard.  Letting go of vengeance is equally hard.  By and large, the process seems to have worked. The new South Africa was made possible by realism and idealism, by mediation, negotiation and diplomacy, plus a willingness to live and work together and a disposition to try and trust one another.  The economics, however, have been a little disappointing. South Africa may be the most prosperous sub-Saharan country, but not all share equally in that GNP.  Some Blacks have become very very rich.  Others are hardly better off than they were under the Boers, which makes for anger.

WhirledView is Taking a Very Short Vacation

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

We thought about putting up a bunch of posts to keep the animals (sorry!) fed every day, but that would violate our credo: no blither.  When you open WhirledView, you get substance—even if it’s light, it’s got an angle.  But we aren’t a newsroom with a hundred plus go-getters.  We’re just the two Pats, and our needs for fresh new experience resulted in a week in which we are both very productively occupied but unable to post.  Reports will ensue.  Meanwhile, from today, Sunday, October 25, until Friday, October 30, we’ll be posting nothing new.  We invite you to take a look at the archives or check out the categories for issues of interest.  We haven’t the slightest idea, right now, of what will engage our interest toward the end of the week.  We aren’t seers, believe it or not.  But something will.  It always does.  As for the image, it's a mask used by Chhau dancers in West Bengal.   It seems to us like a the right response when bosses (internal or external) say one can never have a day off.  

First Snow

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It began raining on Tuesday night. Wednesday morning it was still raining—but wait!  Was that rain?  No, it was very fine snow, but falling thickly.  Less than an hour later, the real flakes came down—and stayed.  For a while.  

So I snapped, as evidence, a few pictures, most of which were as bad and beyond salvaging as the worst captures an amateur can be guilty of.  Blurry from a wet lens or from a wobbled camera or just plain out of focus.  I was chilly and in a hurry, after all.  I hadn’t planned on photography  before I had coffee, and time was of the essence. Mid-October snow doesn’t last long at 7000 feet or even a bit higher.  I just wanted to supply a little proof of our sustained and encouraging first snowfall—crystals on catmint, clumped flakes on ornamental grass, plus a view of the stuff coming down behind a coyote fence. 

As far as the latter goes, the vaguely industrial item in the center of the picture is an electric meter some 75 feet away, across a road.  I was so gosh-durned eager to get a picture of snow coming down, I didn’t notice it.  But then,  in all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never noticed it.   My—um—ambiance is not a manicured and gated community. A mere meter wasn't worth a glance or a frown or a complaint to the zoning board in a neighborhood that also features an abandoned truck or two.  Real life, I call it. 

Back to photography.  At times I manage to take more than a few acceptable photos, even some really good ones. This time I didn’t do so well, but hey!  It’s the first snow of the season and here in Santa Fe we relish our winters, the briskness, the swhirling snow storms. We especially yearn for snow in the mountains, but this week  it was two days before the clouds began to lift and the ceiling was high enough to let me see, with my own eyes,  if there had been some  accumulation on the mountains that provide a backdrop to the city.  Sure enough.  White peaks and snow-dusted forest.  

The view from my living room windows is annoyingly obstructed, so I grabbed my camera and rushed up the street for a better angle.  These shots turned out less contemptible than the miserable closeups. (Confession: sometimes I forget when the macro is on and stuff like that.)  So here’s the most atmospherish of this batch. The highest, mostly unobscured peak is Tesuque.  It reaches over 12,000 feet, and its gently rounded summit bristles with communications towers and dishes. (Not that my cel phone reception is all that good, but the dirt track that's really a service road for all that equipment makes for an easy way to the top.)

According to snow gauges, the mountains accumulated about seven inches of snow this week, which turns out to be about an inch of precipitation, but snow that blesses us this early in the season isn’t likely to remain, especially if we get too many days as clear and sunny as it is at this very moment.  (Yes, I could run up the street right now and take another picture, but I don't feel like it.  Besides I like the brooding look of the shot I'm showing.)  Still, winter has served notice, and the usual expectation is that, snow or no snow, the temperature will fall sufficiently to allow the snow makers to get to work at the Santa Fe ski basin so that the slopes will be open for Thanksgiving or (so the operators fervently pray) not too much later. 

As for any snow cover down here in the city, it never stays for long, though we often have a white Christmas, and some little mounds of white stuff in my yard may linger until spring.  As far as that goes, the ice on the road in front of my house tends to be especially persistent.  Even so, here’s hoping for a lot more snow—and soon.  I finally invested in some snowshoes last year, and just a few weeks ago I ordered a good set of crampons for tromping along icy hiking trails.  I’m ready.

Let it snow! Let it snow!  Let it snow!

Alaskans: Beware of the Shell Game

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A letter to the NYT editor by the President of the Shell Oil Company complains that Shell's plans for Alaska are being “held up by unnecessary litigation and unreasonable federal permitting delays.”

Marvin Odum claims that Shell "is a leader in environmentally superior operations" and asserts that his company  has "prepared one of the most environmentally sensitive and responsible exploration plans ever for offshore Alaska."  Considering the highly insensitive operations of many oil companies, that's not saying much, but Shell's own record suggests that extreme caution is in order.

As one who worked in Nigeria, where Shell’s record is as deplorable as it gets, environmentally and from the point of view of human rights, I urge Alaskans and the federal regulators involved to be extremely careful about working with this company.  Get everything in writing, in detail.  Inspect operations rigorously.  Watch everything and everyone every minute.   Your land could be in danger.  Your water could be in danger.  Your wildlife could be in danger.  And anyone who protests a spill would do well to think twice.

Prominent Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa led his Ogoni people in protest against Shell’s ruin of their Niger delta homeland.  Operations were sloppy, and there was at best laughable reparation made to people whose lives were being changed forever.  Instead of taking Shell to task, an oil-corrupted government in Lagos found a way to silence Saro-wiwa and fellow environmental leaders.  They were hanged in Port Harcourt on November 5, 1995.  Finally, in June of this year, and only because a high visibility trial was about to open, the Shell Oil company paid a settlement of $15.5 million to the heirs of those victims, claiming in the process that the company was shelling out purely from the goodness of its corporate heart.  This article gives an idea of the sorts of damning documents that would have got wide circulation had the case actually gone to trial.  Conviction was not unlikely.

As for Nigeria today, militant pirates spawned by oil companies’ corporate greed and negligence continue to plague remaining oil pumping operations in the Niger delta and vast areas of Ogoni land remain infertile due to seepage from supposedly capped oil wells.  

The solution to the “hypocrisy of relying on other countries’ resources” for fuel and energy isn’t to ravage Alaska  and keep on pumping the pet.  The solution is to promote major reductions in energy consumption and to replace as much petroleum-based energy as quickly as possible with clean and renewable energy. 

Meanwhile, should there be excruciatingly careful scrutiny of Shell's plans for Alaska?  Absolutely.

The Dangerous Business of Female Education

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I mentioned the International Islamic University in Islamabad yesterday.  That’s where the latest suicide bombings in Pakistan took place.  Six not five persons were killed.  Three were girls and not by coincidence.  This was not one of those "senseless" incidents.  Here's an interesting Pakistani take on the bombings.

The best way to get an idea of the ambiance at the IIU is to take a look at the university’s website.  Women attend, but it's not really a co-educational institution.  It’s a highly segregated place.  Do a little browsing on the site, and soon you will realize that you are being bombarded with references to “the female wing”  of the IIU.  Naturally there are no references to the “male wing.”  If you find this as irritating as I do, think of similar practices in our own society. For instance, it is quite “normal” for  female high school athletes to be called by the hideous term of, say, the “Elkettes,” while the real teams, the male teams, are always the “Elks,” the nickname that would  apply to the school taken as a whole.

In pictures of classes and activities at IIU, you will note that most of the female students are very heavily veiled, even with no male present (unless the eye of the camera counts).  Only at the highest administrative level is an occasional female faculty member or dean represented with face fully revealed, often in the context of receiving foreign visitors, eg. pandering to the outside world.  

Otherwise the IIU world is male male male.  Male students.  Male teachers.  Male administrators.  Not so different from the way it used to be, not so many decades ago, in  many contexts in the West, for that matter.  Only recently have female faces turned up regularly in leadership roles or even as a good percentage of street crowds.  Re this, I’m going to see that both my sons get copies of the new book by Gail Collins: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.  Being a woman was pretty horrible when I was a kid—and lots of us vowed we’d change things or die trying.  Fortunately, the latter wasn’t needed in our case, but Pakistani girls who want an education and a professional life may be targeted by those who fear social change.    And their schools certainly aren't safe, not even the schools for primary students.

All the above notwithstanding, there is much to be said for the IIU as a way to provide a higher education for girls who would never otherwise be able to obtain a college degree.  As the website photos prove,  there's nothing like equality between the sexes here and the curriculum certainly does not offer anything close to a liberal education, but IIU does signify a step in the right direction.   Above all, the young women who graduate will be able to read the Koran for themselves and do some thinking of their own, which is unlikely to please the village mullahs who accustomed to quoting convenient

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Good: Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off election now that an examination of contested ballots has produced so many rejects he no longer has the 50.1% he needed to win re-election on the first round.  The whole world knows he didn’t want all those bad ballots invalidated, but evidently Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was able to talk convincingly, politician-to-politician, about the necessity, sometimes, of putting national welfare above personal ambition. The key here is credibility.  The odds on ending up with a credible government in Kabul increased dramatically at the press conference Tuesday evening.  Which isn’t to say that running  a re-vote is going to be easy.

The Bad: As usual when heads of state hold forth to reporters there were flags in evidence during Karzai’s press conference.  However, there were at least two flags visible and only one president.  One of the flags was the Afghan flag.  The other was the American flag.  Now arcane protocol rules may have permitted an American flag on stage,  in honor of an American senator, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea.  It gave the impression that the elections would be held under U.S. auspices and, worse, that the Afghan president is an American puppet.  This is something that Karzai’s enemies say all the time.  Why reinforce that impression?

The Ugly:   Now the Taliban are planting bombs in universities in Pakistan, in this case not the secular University of Karachi or the secular Punjab University, but a Muslim university in Islamabad.  So far five people are dead.  Clearly the Pakistani Taliban are making a statement: we can hit anyone anywhere anytime—at least for now.  But this performance wasn’t a friend-maker.  Until recently religiously conservative Pakistanis found it hard to criticize the holy warriers.  No longer.  

Looks Like We’ve Given Up

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For decades now the US has been closing its cultural centers and trying to whip up enthusiasiam for cheap substitutes which surveys have shown to be ineffectual.  The rationale for the cost cutting jag?  That old end of history canard.  Once the Cold War was over, there’d be no need to promote the American brand.  We’d won.  The future was us—the U.S.

The Greeks were so right about the need for self-knowledge and the dangers of hubris.  Our joy and relief when the Berlin Wall came down were so extreme that we thought the U.S. would be on top for ever—well, there were some level headed sorts who considered such thinking to be absurd, but they were pooh-poohed.  We cut back on our public diplomacy programs, and within ten years our public diplomacy agency went poof!  Gone.  In all fairness, I need to add that the Brits were cutting back on British Council expenditures, the French were less generous to their Alliance Française operations and the Germans were closing Goethe Centers, too.  The West, in general, was pretty smug about winning the Cold War and was determined to reap financial dividends.

But history, as it will, moved on.  Islam exploded, Russia refused to play the role of deferential poor provincial cousin, and if the 20st century was the American century, the competition for which country will dominate the 21st century seems to be constrained only by the never properly appreciated or understood efforts of India to deny the honor to the Chinese.  However, the Chinese are looking so good that the Russians, evidently, have decided to follow the Sino one-party-capitalism model to prosperity.