Speed Bumps

Whereas international agreements generally come to nothing, the effect of same as propaganda footholds for the ground troops should not be underestimated. When Kyoto failed, it did not die and pass into the dust bin of the 'never-again-mentioned'. On the contrary, it became a the rallying cry of the defeated - a wound that would never be allowed to heal; a sore, repeatedly scratched open to bleed its puss into the body politic - now culminating in Hopenhagen (sic) with even higher stakes. For the first time, a U.S. president and a U.S. Congress is fully aboard. It's show time! They will press ahead! If not now, when?

The focal point of Serb history was the battle for Kosovo in 1389 which Serbia lost. Six hundred years later, Slobodan Milosevic addressed a crowd of a million Serbs at the monument commemorating the defeat (6 miles outside of Pristina) and stripped the local Albanian majority of their civil rights and autonomy.

‘Warmers' are a patient lot. It took them many years to construct their house of cards. "Climate gate" is but a speed bump for them. They won't slow down. The wheels may come off. But then again, they might not. In any case, they're betting that, if and when they go down, they'll take America along with them - like suicide bombers crashing the gate. So far, amazingly, they're still very much on track to accomplish what they set out to do. What does that say about us who are watching and know exactly what's going on?

A Child With a Pink Ball...

A child with a pink ball is running and laughing out loud. A few steps behind, her parents are locked in a muted but bitter dispute. All three are heading down the steep, narrow path leading to the Japanese stone garden. Upon reaching it, the child bounces her ball across the meticulously raked sand.

Her father shouts and runs to catch up with her. He grabs her roughly from behind and spins her around to face him. Then, he slaps her hard with his open hand. The child staggers and falls.

She is stunned and silent now, whimpering softly to herself at the edge of the garden; while her mother retrieves the ball, leaving the imprint of her footsteps in the sand.
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Kyoto, Japan (1976)
There is one garden in particular which struck my eye and imagination. It is the 500 year old rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. It was constructed by a landscape artist in accordance with the principles of Zen Buddhism.

The scene, briefly, is this: a rectangular sea of small white pebbles in which 15 rocks of varying sizes are arranged in groups. One is supposed to sit quietly and meditate. The mind struggles for comparisons. Depending on the vividness of one's imagination, anything is possible. Given that one sits there long enough, the mind will at some point cease its struggle and see the garden simply for what it is: a semi-random arrangement of stone.

This final stage is difficult to achieve, even under the best of circumstances. And here at Ryoanji, conditions are far from perfect. Loudspeakers drone on intermittently. Hordes of tourists are continually either arriving or leaving. Their faces are infinitely more arresting than this simple study in serenity. And the eye and heart are so easily nudged away from the disciplines required to...
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In the mid to late ‘70’s, I discovered an exact replica of the garden referenced above at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York City. The following is an excerpt from my notes:

I sit down at a point just to the left of center near the front edge of the platform. The two young people behind me glance up from their pamphlets. The boy returns to his reading presently, but the girl's eyes continue to linger over the somber shades of the garden.

I am startled when I realize that it is precisely from this same perspective that I had viewed the original garden in Japan. As then, my eye glides naturally to the open area of crushed rock directly in front of me. (None of the major configurations of stone interest me for the moment.)

The bright bed of finely fractured stone blinds me to detail at first. But soon, the parallel patterns - drag marks left by the points of a rake - begin to emerge throughout my field of focused vision. The patterns appear to be shifting under my steady gaze, almost as if something were about to materialize in this vast illuminated field.

If light is energy, and energy is indeed merely a manifestation of mass, then there might almost be enough of the stuff here to create something from light alone. Perhaps this explains the five islands of rock and moss which are only now beginning to intrude into my consciousness. Perhaps someone long ago - or was it I, myself, even - had stared long and hard at the brightness and had organized it into stone; from there creating the rest: moss and ants and men with rakes...

The people behind me are stirring. They get up and head for the exit. The girl looks back at me before rounding the corner. A pale smile flickers across her painted lips.

Finally, just two and a half minutes before closing, I do manage to attain some sense of unity when a slight movement distracts me. The static perfection of the garden becomes momentarily unhinged and I recognize my opportunity. My senses respond to a single sound: that of a dry leaf scratching across the white surface of raked stone, propelled by a hesitant breeze. Its brittle points leave no mark on the stone (the way the rake did). Soon it will have reached the wall where, in time, it will disintegrate to become the stuff from which new living shapes are spawned.

The guard has entered the garden. He walks silently across the platform. His size twelve shoes leave odd-shaped patterns of moisture and mud on the wooden surface. I remain unaware of his approach. The guard puts his gnarled hand heavily on the younger man's shoulder. I start, and turn to look up into the old man's tired eyes.

"I must lock up now, son," he says. "Do come back tomorrow."

Eid-Ul-Adha

None of us speak eloquently - or with heart - about that which frightens us. Barack Obama is in a fix. On one hand, he needs to satisfy those who brought him to the wedding; while on the other, he needs to satisfy the bride. We, the American people, are Barack Obama's bride. If she should begin to suspect that he's playing around, she might grab his golf clubs and beat the crap out of his SUV. If those who brought him should leave him stranded... Well, you know the rest. (By the way, I think it’s a disgrace the way the media is hounding Woods. For once, it doesn't seem to be political.)

By the way, last week I saw something I have never seen in these parts before. My son and I usually take a walk uptown after dinner. We live in a bedroom community twenty miles from New York City along the commuter rail line. The commercial district consists of banks, upscale stores and eateries. We noted a man walking a dog, which is not unusual in itself, except this dog seemed mighty strange. It looked and walked funny. As we got closer, we noticed it wasn't a dog; it was a goat. (I've never seen anyone walking a goat, even in India.)

I'd been led to understand that it was illegal to keep farm animals inside our city limits. But, then, things do change. When I got home I checked the net and found that we were only a couple of days away from Eid-Ul-Adha, the Muslim 'Festival of Sacrifice' marking the day after Arafat.

Infinite Buzz Saws

The first thing to note is that this was a political CYA (cover your ass) speech. Any war continues to be deeply unpopular with Obama's base. Hence, he needed to make the point that an escalation of the war effort in Afghanistan must be seen as an exit strategy. It's actually a tactical mistake (and I am not the first to say this) to tell the enemy when we’ll be leaving. That's much is obvious. The WH spin will be that it will force Karzai's hand into cooperating more fully with us. This should have been discussed with Karzai privately.

Now, all this is sure to signal the Taliban that they have already won; that our sole concern is that they hold off their murderous celebrations till after we've had our next presidential elections. It also ensures that, from now on, no one in Afghanistan will cooperate with us, knowing full well that after we're gone, they will be murdered if they’ve had anything to do with us.

Back in Pol Pot's day (in Cambodia), all those found wearing glasses and all those found with books in their houses were summarily shot. In our inner cities, all those with good school grades are bullied and ostracized by their peers. In the Palestinian Territories, everyone knows that anyone harboring ideas of peace with Israel and being vocal about it or having in any way participated in any U.S. or Israeli attempt to bring peace to the region will result in their families being threatened with extreme violence. In our Universities, anyone not viewing the world through a leftist prism automatically fails. The same principle applies to Afghanistan: all those who are found as having had anything at all to do with U.S. sponsored 'nation building' are guaranteed to meet their end.

Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistan strongman, actually wrote a good editorial in this morning’s WSJ. He said that for a nation to change, it must do so from within. This notion opened my eyes to some extent. Too often, we equate strategic advantage on the battlefield – winning, if you wish – with ancillary matters such as human or women’s rights. We abhor Sharia law; we abhor their proclivity to slaughter animals in the most brutal ways. We swoon at their beheading and disemboweling their enemies. Often we tend to define victory also in terms of their changing their ways to conform to our own sensibilities. Yet this is the precisely the part that they can’t stomach about us. It is why they will fight to the death against us.

The last war we fought for all the right reasons was for Kuwait. One country had invaded another in a blatant display of aggression. We drove the aggressor back and left the aggrieved parties to clean up the mess, each in its own way. Since then, we’ve become involved in nation-building and we’ve failed miserably on all counts. Unless we accept the concept that Paul Harvey repeated so often and so eloquently, that "it is not one world”, we will run into infinite buzz saws of never ending trouble. …the very same trouble, by the way, that Obama and his ilk are likely to face in trying to re-make America into something it is not.

Change (you can believe in)

Barrack Hussein Obama went into the 'enemy camp' last night and laid down the law. He basically said that he will be sending 30,000 of our finest into that hellhole, also known as Afghanistan - to do what? Unknown. And then, almost immediately, he’ll pull them out again. You can just imagine what happens next.

Then, after everything falls apart over there, after he’s been safely elected to the second of his interminable terms, he'll declare victory – not over the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but - over the American military, that last remaining rancid remnant of the previous Bush administrations, that will now find itself utterly disgraced and humiliated, proving the point that any demonstration of military might will never again work in Obama’s vision of the new world order that is happily promoted by leftists, progressives, warmers, vegetarians, eco-anarchists, lap-dancers, etc. the world over.

It’s the same predictable MO that was used to bring down our economy, health care, the automobile industry, etc. Break it, and sweep it out with the refuse. Thank you Mister President for giving us yet another piece of the puzzle to the enigma you have labeled so artfully “change” (you can believe in).

Blame-Shifting

I propose that ‘blame-shifting’ be included as a legitimate sport in the next Olympic Games. It has been endlessly practiced for decades by the Arabs who have sought to excuse their own failed leaderships and blame Israel and the United States for any and all their problems. In addition, it has been routinely used by South American dictatorships to justify their corruption and brutality.

‘Blame-shifting’ did not become popular in U.S. politics until the Clinton-Gore Administration. Before that, it had generally been understood that “the buck stops here” (meaning, ‘at the President’s desk’), along with now such quaint and outdated notions like “politics stops at the water’s edge”.

Clinton was the first to introduce the sport to the political leagues. Every former president and every founding father was smeared in order to show that what Bubba did wasn’t so bad. Then, during the George W. Bush administration every human failing was dropped on the White House. To his credit, Bush seldom responded. In fact, I cannot remember a single time Bush bothered to deflect or counter a single criticism or accusation.

The Obama administration brought ‘blame-shifting’ back into vogue big time. Nothing is this president’s fault. Most domestic and foreign policy failings still remain the previous administration’s fault, while the balance can be blamed on America and its racist Constitution in general.

Maybe the Olympic committee, in its infinite wisdom can take a cue from the Nobel committee and award Barrack Hussein Obama the gold medal in ‘blame-shifting’ before the fact. It’s difficult to imagine anyone who has ever lived or is yet to be born being more adept at negotiating the intricacies of this particular exercise.

'Being There"

At this point I'm almost breathlessly looking forward to the sit-com. We're taking it all too seriously. Where are the belly laughs? All I hear is cynicism and outrage. Where is the updated version of "Being There"? "Life is a like a box of chocolates", after all. What's the sense of crashing if we can't get that blessed adrenaline rush? Unless we've lost confidence in the air bag (with the Chinese union label attached).

From what I've read, Groucho and his brothers never used a script or teleprompter. They made it up as they went along. They were hugely successful in their day. Obama, the Ballerina and all the Marxist czars have all the makings of a hilarious circus act. How come we're not splitting our sides laughing?

Maybe we've outgrown slapstick. Maybe, we're looking for thrills and chills - seeing our hero dangling off the hands of a clock some thirty stories up, à la Harold Lloyd? And I'll never forget that scene in "Limelight" in which Chaplin and Keaton played music together. And Laurel and Hardy's "The Music Box". They all flirted with disaster - and we simply loved it.