Global Depression, is there a bright side?

(Short answer - maybe)

A recession is defined as two subsequent quarters of negative growth, and a depression as a recession where the drop in GDP exceeds ten percent. These working definitions, rough as they are, are worth bearing in mind in the months to come. Our political and media elites will try very hard not to use the d-word at all. Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, already is reluctant to use the r-word, grudgingly admitting we are in a "technical recession."

A real depression seems very likely next year. This is more than a blip in the stock market, this is structural crows coming home to roost. North America has out-sourced almost it's entire manufacturing base, and the last big blue-collar industry, automobiles, is on life-support. It is now abundantly clear that the long boom starting in the nineties was a fever-dream of speculation, a bubble over-due for bursting. The levels of debt, both public and private, are staggering. The US government debt is so enormous that it beggars the imagination as to how it could ever be paid off. Maybe Obama can work a miracle, but it would almost have to be that.

So, let's assume the very likely worst case; a depression next year. What would that mean, beyond the obvious material deprivation? How will a depression affect us politically, culturally, socially, morally, spiritually?

It might be worthwhile to look at past examples; there have been at least three major depressions since the industrial revolution - the 1840's, the 1870's and the 1930's.

The first thing that is obvious is that economic depression fosters political instability both internally and internationally. 1848 was a year of revolution throughout Europe. We are already seeing this happen again in Greece, which might turn out to be the first spark in a general conflagration. The other, and even uglier, form it may take is political extremism and the emergence of charismatic leaders like Hitler. His political movement was a minor nuisance in the 20's and only took off during the depression. The political sphere will require vigilance if sanity and democracy is to be preserved. This is not a bright side, at all, at all.

Cultural and social trends are harder to pin-point, but it would be interesting to research this area. There seemed to be a lot of great writers working in the 30's; Steinbeck, Hemingway, Huxley, Orwell - but was this more than at other times? Tentatively, I would suggest that hard times forces writers to confront the gritty realities of life. There is a hard edge to the writing of the 30's, none of the self-indulgent ennui evident during good times. It might be revealing to make a study of who was writing in the 1840's and 70's as well.

My parent's generation lived through the 1930's and to those of us who grew up in the 60's that older generation seemed hopelessly stuffy and narrow-minded. But in retrospect, and with the advantage of age, one begins to see the wisdom in their cultural norms of peaceful sedate family life. The culture that came out of my generation was at times colourful, to be sure, but was marked by self-indulgence and wasteful hedonism.

My parent's generation had an instinctive horror of debt. They knew where that could lead. If you couldn't afford something, you saved up for it. Nobody "bought on time" which was considered slightly immoral. The 60's kids were too impatient to "save up" and the generations that followed us where even worse in this regard. The huge amount of credit card debt out there is one of the economic time-bombs waiting to go off.

If there is an up-side to depression, this may be it. We may be forced to rediscover old values. The excess of 80's and 90's was already beginning to wear thin, but now we may have no choice but to learn the precious virtue of "contentment-with-little." The insane consumer culture was always unsustainable and spiritually bankrupt, but now it may become impossible very quickly. Instead of diverting the five senses with expensive gadgets, people may have to rediscover the joys of friendship and family, and re-connect with the earth and their own bodies and minds. This is not a bad thing, if it happens.

And there may be a return to reality. The last quarter-century was like a global fever-dream. I imagine the mood was much the same in the last period of big-head building on Easter Island. Deep down, we all knew it couldn't go on forever. We could not keep consuming the Earth's resources to fuel a mad economy based on consumer spending. The stock market could not continue to go up forever, based on nothing but tulip-bulb speculation. But as long as times were good, we could pretend these were tomorrow's problems. Well, wake up and smell the coffee, tomorrow's here already, I can hear the cock crowing.

Yes They Did!

Damn, it feels good. Who can remember an election result which unleashed such a surge of joy? Looking at the video clips of ordinary Americans, in cities across that fair land, cheering and laughing and dancing in the streets is enough to melt the heart of the crustiest old cynic. The slogan on everyone's lips, "Yes We Can!" is quintessential Yankee can-do optimism at its very best. And it's damned good to see after the dark, fear-ridden years of Bush and Cheney, when America showed its ugly side to the world. It feels like sunshine peeking out of dark clouds, like seeing an old and dear friend get up off his sick bed and dance.




It's good to see the Stars and Stripes waved in joy and pride by happy crowds of all ages, races and genders, instead of being used as a badge of exclusion and xenophobia. It's good to feel a whiff of positive change in the air.

I know, I know. There's plenty of reasons to be cynical about Obama; his militaristic stance on Iran, his backing of the Wall Street bailout, his silence on the Patriot Act. Maybe tomorrow or the day after that stuff will matter again, but today it just feels too damned good. Even just by getting elected, given his race and his name, he has let America cast off some old ghosts. Barack Hussein Obama took Indiana! He took Virginia!

Last night was very healing for America. And that country needs healing. President-Elect Obama is inheriting what someone called "the in-box from hell." Two unwinnable wars, a ruined international reputation, a looming ecological crisis, a deep financial crisis, a monster national debt.

But, if he has the will and the vision, he has some incredible assets as well. Last night we saw that he has the enthusiastic good-will of a large part of the American public. He has a democratic Congress to work with. And he has a big reservoir of international good-will as well. The rest of the world was rooting for him. Not only Americans have reason to celebrate.

Let's wish him, and America, all the best. Maybe they really can!

Brother can you spare $700 billion?

The financial markets reflect the cumulative result of millions of individual decisions. Regarding decisions, The Buddha said that they should never be made on the basis of greed, anger, fear or delusion. It is obvious how greed and fear have poisoned the well, but I would like to focus on something a little deeper, how delusion has worked in creating the present financial collapse.

Specifically, the whole scenario demonstrates the truly amazing power of mental formations in human history. Money itself is an abstraction. At some point in the distant past people agreed to believe that this shiny rock was worth two cows, even though the real, utilitarian value of a cow is considerably more than the real, utilitarian value of a shiny rock. Paper money is an even more refined level of abstraction. This piece of paper with the queen's face, or a spooky eye-in-the-pyramid design or whatever, is said to represent so many shiny rocks, which are worth so many cows. Eventually, they dropped the bit about the shiny rocks.

Having gone off the "gold standard", such currency is sometimes called "fiat money," meaning that the value is purely by government fiat. This is not really accurate. A dollar bill doesn't have value because the government or the central bank says so. It has value because the people believe it does. It is faith-based currency. It is not surprising that paper money was first used in China, a civilization deeply affected by Buddhism and Taoism, and used to philosophical subtlety.

Consider what is happening here; material goods and hours of labour are freely traded for an agreed convention. Something on the material plane of reality is being surrendered for something on the purely abstract plane of mental formation, which is void and without substance. Maybe that eye-in-the-pyramid is telling us something.

Fast forward to the dawn of modern capitalism in post-reformation Europe. The "real economy" of goods and services was becoming complicated, involving more, and more kinds of goods, some of which were being shipped literally across the planet. To facilitate all this action on the plane of material reality, various new kinds of mental abstraction were invented, usually represented by fancy bits of paper. Insurance, promissory notes, bonds and company stocks all came into being, each representing a contract between parties to fulfill certain obligations.

The stock market, in it's original manifestation was not very far removed from material reality. If you bought a ten percent share in the East India Company it represented something close to ten percent of the ships and goods of the Company and entitled you to ten percent of the profits made. The value of the stock would, in theory, go up only if the Company acquired more ships and trade goods.

Of course mental formations, although void of substance, have a powerful energy when millions agree to believe in them. From the earliest days of capitalism the phenomena of "speculative bubbles" made themselves felt. As company shares traded hands, the value become divorced from the underlying reality it was supposed to represent. The value of a share was no longer based on how many ships the company had, it was now based on what the buyer and seller mutually believed it to be. If the buyer believed he could later resell it for more to somebody else, he didn't care about the underlying value.

This is sometimes called the "Greater Fool Principle." If the value of a company share in terms of the real goods it represents is, say one hundred dollars, a person would be a fool to pay one hundred and fifty unless there is a greater fool out there to whom he can sell it for two hundred. The value of the share becomes a pure abstraction. You might as well be trading tulip bulbs. Or "credit-default swaps."

The problem, of course, is that inevitably you run out of fools. Then the whole bubble bursts with frightening rapidity. The whole thing would be comical if the abstract world of imaginary numbers on bits of paper or computer disks didn't rebound back on the real world. Many 17th century Dutch burghers had sold real assets like land or ships to "invest" in tulip bulbs. Many, many people today have put the earnings of their labour into the stock market or other financial instruments that were pure bubble. Real goods thrown into an imaginary realm.

Now, after several centuries of elaboration, we are into a fantastic realm of abstractions of abstractions. Fractional reserve banking creates money which is based on nothing at all, not even bits of paper. And understanding the levels of abstraction involved in derivatives is a special science. The "value" of the derivatives out there is said to be ten or fifteen times the combined GDP of the whole planet. Tulip bulbs.

The imaginary nature of the financial world is very clearly illustrated when you hear, after a market downturn, that so many billion or trillion dollars of wealth have disappeared. That "wealth" was never there in the first place. What has disappeared is the agreed upon mass delusion that such wealth existed.

It will be interesting to see what happens next. So far the world leaders seem to be reacting out of panic and fear. Huge sums of borrowed money are being pumped into the bubble in a mad attempt to keep it inflated. The Stadtholder is buying all the tulip bulbs with money borrowed from Venice.
The state, really the community as a whole, has now become the greatest fool, the fool of last resort. The question is, what effect will all this movement of imaginary numbers have on the real world of work, clothes, food and housing? Real goods will probably become scarcer for most people either through higher taxes to repay the stupendous debt load or through hyper-inflation of the currency to eliminate the debt that way. There will be pain, material existence will become bleaker and harder and all because of the shifting fantasies of purely imaginary conventions.

In the various schemes to restart the big ponzi scheme, you keep hearing the phrase, "restore investor confidence." That gives the game away; the goal right now is to get people believing once again in the magic money tree. Eventually, we will have to face the need to get the real economy of goods and services working. It may have to wait until the bubble economy collapses back to it's natural state. Then there may be a general realization that you can't get something for nothing, no matter how inflated the imaginary numbers are.

If the collapse is as complete as it looks like being at the moment, there will inevitably be a restructuring of the world economy. What shape will it take? What shape should it take? I don't have the slightest idea. I've long ago stopped believing in political utopias; this is samsara, after all, it's supposed to be broken.

It might be worthwhile, though, to consider some basic values. Capitalism, at least before it switched from managing production to flim-flam schemes, worked pretty good in some respects. It did keep a very complex economy moving on a global scale, and that is no mean feat. However, it was not so good at other things, very important things. It has no built-in mechanism to conserve the natural environment, and that is starting to become critical. It was never very good at distributing goods to those who needed them most, and in recent decades the gap between the richest and the poorest has been growing.

When thinking about an economic order, we should remember what an economy is for; human comfort and health primarily and the satisfaction of lawful sense pleasures secondarily. The first priority should be to make sure that every person gets the sufficiency of a decent life, i.e. the four requisites of food, shelter, clothing and medicine. After that, the surplus should be rewarded to those who are most energetic and creative in producing wealth for the general community, certainly not to those who are most clever at manipulating mental abstractions like derivatives and futures. In other words, reward production and creation, not speculation.

In any case, we are in for some changes, but that's always been the case.

LINKS-

What's all this about tulip bulbs then?
Image is Hogarth's "South Sea Bubble." Full size version.

Faint Glimmers

The world scene looks pretty grim. Let's face it, this millenium hasn't exactly got off to a good start. We were supposed to get monoliths on Jupiter, not planes crashing into skyscrapers. Wars, rumours of more wars, creeping police-state fascism ("war against terra"), not to mention failing ecologies and crashed economies. And the political leadership, and even the opposition, in most countries right now seems pretty dreadful.

But there are a few brave souls out there.

No more comment, but three links.

CANADA - petition to re-open the 9/11 investigation read into the parliamentary record.
USA - Cindy Sheehan running against Nancy Pelosi in San Fran.
BRITAIN - Senior Tory MP resigns to force by-election on civil liberties issue. (They really need it there, bad.)

Good on you to these three.

Strange Doings in Lhasa

This picture has been making the round. Something fishy is going on here. Of course, agentes provocateurs are a time honoured dirty cop trick.

Tibet

For a long time Tibetan civilization has had a powerful grip on the Western imagination. Alternately, it has been romanticized as a spiritual paradise, a Shangri-La or vilified as a last redoubt of superstitious obscurantism and feudalism. The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. While there is no denying that some of the social aspects of Old Tibet left somewhat to be desired, there is also no denying that the religious and cultural aspects were an astonishing human accomplishment.

Tibetan culture was unique. The religious background was an amalgam of several late forms of Buddhism coming from India just at the time when the Dharma there was sliding from brilliant cultural peak into the early stages of decadence. The various strands of classical Buddhist thought, together with brilliant philosophy (Nagarjuna), logic and epistemology (Dharmakirti), metaphysical speculation (the Cittamitra, "Mind-Only") and the quasi-magical practices of Tantra all these and more found there way across the Himalayas. Much of late classical Buddhist thought would be lost to us today if it had not been preserved in Tibet. And all these intellectual currents were stirred in with one of the most mature forms of Central Asian shamanism, the old Bon religion.

The result was something brand new, one of humankind's great achievements, Tibetan culture. While other societies put their physical and mental resources into conquest, industrialism and physical science Tibet put hers into spiritual exploration. The result was that although Tibet remained materially backward well into the twentieth century, she had developed spiritual "technologies" well beyond anything accomplished anywhere else. While Europe was busily sailing caravels across the oceans, conquering the world, Tibet set out on a much more important and difficult exploration, that of inner space.

Whatever else may be said about Tibet, the charge that it was a stagnant and backward culture is false. It is based on the myopic idea that the only progress that counts is the inventing of more and better machines to indulge more and better sense pleasures. Tibetans took little interest in that. There was very little material progress in Tibet for the millennium after the introduction of Buddhism. But the spiritual and religious texts and practices show a continual fruitful exploration and development. This is not surprising, in a way. The best and the brightest in Tibet didn't go into business or science but into the monasteries.

But the history of the rest of the world moved in other channels, driven by other forces. In the middle of that cruellest of all centuries, the terrible twentieth, Tibet was invaded and annexed by the rising power of the Chinese People's Republic. Tragically, the thousand year experiment was at an end.

Regarding the current situation, it is hard to see how any good will come of the riots in Lhasa and elsewhere. China will crack down with even greater ruthlessness. Nothing of consequence will come out of the rest of the world by way of help for the Tibetans. Nor could it, in practical terms. An Olympic boycott would end up dashing the hopes of young athletes, momentarily embarrassing China but do nothing for Tibet. An economic boycott of China might, just possibly, have some effect in forcing their hand. But that is not going to happen. China's huge pool of miserable labour provides all the worthless consumer crap that fills western economies. China uses the resulting cash to buy, among other things, U.S. Treasury Bills. The U.S. couldn't fund it's government for one week without China.

It's hard to take, but the situation of Tibet is nearly hopeless. In the short term, there will be a wave of arrests and executions and further restrictions on Tibetan culture. In the long term, the Tibetans will be swamped by demography as China moves in more and more Han Chinese settlers, reducing the Tibetans to a colourful minority in one province.

However, Tibetan culture survives with some vigour in the diaspora and much of it is now available to non-Tibetans in translation and through direct teaching. It may be that this cultural spread is a silver lining to the tragedy of the Chinese conquest.

A little earlier I said that Tibet's situation was "nearly hopeless." I put in the nearly because I can envisage one scenario that might yet save Tibet, although it is a long-shot. It may yet happen that the cultural spread of Tibetan Buddhism may wash over into China itself, infecting the youth of that land with ideas of harmlessness, contentment and transcendence.

It is not impossible. China is an ancient, sophisticated civilization; the oldest continual civilization on this planet. In previous times it went through phases of deep spirituality and cultural brilliance; one thinks principally of the Han Dynasty. Buddhism has deep roots there, although at present they are rather withered. China has been through some very rough times, the terrible twentieth wasn't kind to them either. Their traditional civilization had been seriously undermined by European colonialism in the nineteenth century, and their early attempts to modernize after the 1911 revolution ended badly, in anarchy and warlordism. Then there was the massive catastrophe of the Japanese invasion, with all it's attendant horrors.

The Chinese pulled themselves out of the abyss only by uniting under a tyrannical ideology. Mao's version of Communism was in reality a new and fanatical religion; secular humanism with bayonets. Like any fanatical reforming religion, they brooked no rivals and in the Cultural Revolution of the 'sixties much of China's remaining ties to their brilliant past were destroyed. Then the flame of the new religion, fed as it was on such tawdry fuel, sputtered and died. Now the Chinese don't believe even in their ersatz secular humanist religion anymore. Now the whole country is devoted only to the even more hollow capitalist enterprise of making money. China is now in a phase of deep spiritual winter.

But human beings need spiritual sustenance. The religious void in China cannot last forever, something will have to fill it. We can see the first fitful signs of the people's seeking in the rapid rise of the Falun Gong which so terrified the ruling technocrats. Maybe something that would help Tibet most would be for every tourist and journalist who goes to the games to carry along books about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese and pass them out to strangers or leave them in public places.

Compassionate Homicide?

Recently the Robert Latimer case has gotten back in the news. Canadian readers will be well aware of the basic fact, but for others here is the bare-bones; On 24th Oct. of 1993 Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer killed his severely handicapped daughter Tracy, 12, by carbon-monoxide, running the exhaust of his truck into the cab. Tracy had cerebral palsy, was mentally retarded and paralyzed. She was also in a great deal of pain, although how severe and how constant it was seems to be in some dispute. Mr. Latimer was sentenced to life imprisonment for second-degree murder. In Dec. 2007, a parole board denied him early release because he "had failed to show proper remorse." Indeed, he has always held that he did the right thing, acting out of compassion for Tracy's suffering. Shortly after this, a review board over-turned the decision and Mr. Latimer is now on day-release parole in Ottawa.

(If you want more back-ground to the story;
A good neutral summary from the CBC web-site
A review of the court evidence with a pro-life slant
The official Robert Latimer support site.)

This case raises a number of important ethical and legal issues. On the legal side, it brings into question the wisdom of the policy of "mandatory minimum" sentencing, the rights of the disabled, euthanasia and probably several more.

On the ethical side, this case raises once again the whole problem of beginning and end of life problems that seem to be at the crux of what is called bio-ethics. Many people support Mr. Latimer's decision; they cite what they call "quality of life" as a criterion. Tracy could never have expected anything close to a normal life, and probably would have endured a lot of physical pain before dying naturally at a relatively young age. They argue that the motive of this killing was "compassion" and it should have been treated differently.

But is it really ever possible to kill with compassion? As a monk friend of mine pointed out, when someone "puts down" a sick dog, they say "I just couldn't stand to see that poor dog suffer." According to Buddhist abhidhamma, an act of destruction of life must involve a mind of hate, and is incompatible with compassion. This is not to say that Mr. Latimer hated his daughter, I am sure he loved her in his own way, but the suffering he was trying to end in that pick-up truck was really his own.

And that is worth thinking about too. The suffering endured by parents of a child like Tracy is no small thing. Another issue raised here is how the broader society could and should take up more of the care of the severely disabled and not leave the whole burden on the unfortunate parents. But this said, it doesn't make what Latimer did in any way acceptable.

The idea of giving anyone, doctors, bureaucrats or parents included, the right to make life-and-death decisions for someone else based on perceived "quality of life" is a scary one. The slippery slope could go down a long way.

These right-to-life versus right-to-choice (although in this case, not Tracy's) bring out a fundamental ethical divide between those who have some kind of religious or spiritual perspective and those who base their ethical thinking on purely secular or humanist grounds. I know some will call me a crank, but I am more and more convince that so-called secular humanism is fundamentally inhuman. The basis of the materialist view is that we are just meat-machines and the implication is that when the machine malfunctions to the point where it no longer provides pleasure (the only possible good in the materialist view) then it can, indeed, ought to be destroyed. A spiritual perspective that recognizes, in some way or other, that this life here and now is not all there is, is capable of accepting a higher dimension and granting an intrinsic dignity and worth to human beings far beyond anything the materialist can imagine.

All this said, and my bias is clear, I am not upset that Mr. Latimer is more or less free. I am no fan of the penal system (maybe a post for another day) and I have no desire to see him punished. My concern is only for the precedent set, and I would think it appalling if the legal system and society at large started to view parental or medical termination of the mentally and physically disabled as somehow acceptable.

What Is Wrong With Us?

The tragic incident at Vancouver International airport, caught on video, highlights so much of how our society has gone wrong.

Readers outside of Canada may not be aware of this situation, so here is a brief recap of the facts. Mr.Dziekanski, a Polish citizen in the process of immigrating to Canada, was killed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mr. Dziekanski had never flown internationally before, was unused to procedures and spoke no English or French and had been wandering around the secure area prior to clearing customs for ten hours. He had grown increasingly agitated and at the end began to freak out and smash property, at one point tossing a computer monitor on the floor. There is no indication that he threatened violence against other people at any point. The airport security called for the RCMP. Four constables arrived and immediately used the taser on him, without any prior attempt to defuse the situation. As he lay writhing in the agony of the electric shock, the constables jumped on him, and one can be seen clearly forcing his knee into Mr. Dziekanski's throat. His breathing stopped almost immediately, but no attempt at resuscitation appears to have been made.

The reaction from the public has been outrage, but from the officials involved only the usual sad scurry to cover their rear ends. (Also, the company making the Taser is quick to scream "Ain't our fault!") The incident also has an international aspect, with the Polish ambassador publicly criticizing Canadian police procedure. This is also not an isolated incident, seventeen people in Canada have been killed by police taser. The difference this time is that the episode was caught on video, and posted on YouTube for all to see.

Truly our society has gone down a wrong path, a dark path. First, there is the evident lack of compassion towards a being in a state of suffering. The police and the airport officials clearly did not see this a person who desperately needed help. They saw this as an incident that needed to be resolved quickly, whatever the cost to Mr. Dziekanski. I once watched a truckload of cattle being driven into the slaughterhouse, and was shocked by the lack of compassion evidenced by the men wielding their vicious prods. We have fallen so low that we now use those prods on troublesome humans.

Second, we can also see how fearful we have become. Four constables against one distraught individual, and their first response is to use a potentially lethal jolt of electricity to incapacitate the man. I'm sorry but this is a cowardly response, and a sad falling away from the heroic history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force. We can see this whingeing fearfulness everywhere these days. We have become very risk adverse; just look at how our children are being raised. When I was a lad, back when rocks were soft, we played outside unsupervised until our mothers called us to dinner. Nowadays, you don't see kids playing in the street. They are kept locked indoors against unlikely dangers. Face it, folks, samsara is a dangerous place and no one gets out of here alive.

Third, and this relates to the last point, there is the theatre of the absurd atmosphere of high security especially at airports and border-crossings. There is a plethora of stories about security madness; from baby's sippy cup confiscated as a potential terrorist threat to panics over someone finding some marginal notes written in Farsi in an airline magazine. Just recently, there was an incident at the Windsor-Detroit crossing. A Windsor patient having a heart attack and needing immediate surgery was sent by ambulance to the nearest hospital equipped for the procedure, which happened to be on the US side. Everything was cleared by phone ahead of time, but the border guards still insisted on hauling the ambulance over for "secondary inspection" because it had the unlucky number for their daily quota of harassment. National Security, you know.

Fourth, the inhuman tyranny of bureaucratic procedure stifling all human initiative and even common sense and decency. The ambulance story also illustrates this point. Getting back to the Vancouver airport incident; how could Mr. Dziekanski have been allowed to wander around in a confused state for ten hours? Could not someone have tried to help him? I am guessing that any Canadian Customs staff who saw him felt it was not their responsibility. There were no guidelines for dealing with the situation, so it was ignored until it became "an incident" requiring police intervention.

On the positive side the reaction of the public has so far been healthy. Hopefully some good will come of this; some check will be made on the police's power to use this nasty thing with impunity and some shake up will happen at the airport authority and the customs. My fear is that one result will be a ban on video-taping police actions.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

The Brits have an odd sense of fun. Someone tried to blow up Parliament four hundred years ago and it's still an occasion for merriment, bonfires and old-fashioned vandalism. And oh yes, religious bigotry;

Remember, remember, the 5th of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot ;
I know of no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
'Twas his intent.
To blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below.
Poor old England to overthrow.
By God's providence he was catch'd,
With a dark lantern and burning match

Holloa boys, Holloa boys, let the bells ring
Holloa boys, Holloa boys, God save the King!

Hip hip Hoorah !
Hip hip Hoorah !

A penny loaf to feed ol'Pope,
A farthing cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down,
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar,'
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head,
Then we'll say: ol'Pope is dead.

traditional British Guy Fawkes Day rhyme

And now the whole thing has been given a new cachet because of the movie, V for Vendetta, which was based on a chillingly prophetic graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Wright published in 1989. Here's a relevant page from the text;

Click on the image to see a full-sized version.

Then there's this angle; there has long been the suspicion that the Gunpowder Plot was an inside job, orchestrated by Chief Minister Lord Cecil to discredit the Catholics. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Anyway, happy 5th Brits.

Does Capitalism Have No Shame?

Apparently not. Check out this column by SF Gate's Mark Morford, "Lets Get Drunk and Meditate." By the way, if you haven't discovered Morford's quirky writing yet, you are in for a treat.

"No, no, no!"

"...compassion for all beings most certainly includes evil-doers!"

Any Hope for Burma?

The mass protests in Burma, supported and led by the sangha, failed to topple the military regime. But for a brief moment they turned the attention of the world to the plight of that unhappy country. Given it's abundance of natural resources, Burma should be another Asian tiger, instead of an economic basket-case, near the bottom of all the UN rankings.

Burma is a beautiful country, and it has a rich tradition of Dhamma. Burmese bhikkhus have specialized in the two complementary fields of abhidhamma and vipassana. Some of the many insight meditation techniques developed in Burma are now practiced around the world. The modern western Buddhist tradition has strong roots there, particularly in the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw.

Many western Buddhists have been to Burma to meditate in the large practice monasteries. This in itself requires an ethical decision that I know many Dhamma travellers have agonized over. Does traveling there on a meditation visa (yes, they have such a thing) constitute support of the regime? Certainly the traveler has to pay visa fees and so forth which gives the government much needed hard currency. But spending money inside the country also helps the people, who are very hard done by.

World opinion has been appalled at the sight of repression of peaceful protestors, especially the monks. There is an understandable urge to do something to help. But what can the outside world do?

The obvious answer is sanctions. We need to think carefully, however, about measures that could impose even more hardship on the Burmese. Sanctions as an international measure have a very spotty history. Certainly they helped a lot to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa, but on the other hand we should recall the ugly story of the starvation sanctions imposed on Iraq which took hundreds of thousands of innocent lives through lack of medicine, hygiene and food. We would not want to do that to Burma.

Nor is the international system governed by humanitarian principles. Statesmen in America and Europe may make noises about sanctions, but what they come up with will most likely be cosmetic. They will not want to touch the quite significant corporate interests which are profiting from resource extraction in Burma. Nor will China, India or Thailand agree to any real measures.

Furthermore, petitions and appeals from the UN, protests outside Burmese embassies and speeches by European leaders are all certain to fall on deaf ears. The generals just don't give a tinker's damn about any of that.

The fact is that the salvation of Burma must come from inside Burma. It is difficult to see how this can happen when the junta has such an overwhelming monopoly of force and no scruples against using it.

It seems to me that the one factor which may tip the scale in the peoples favour is a revolt in the lower ranks of the army. There were a few indications of this starting to happen back at the end of September. It appears that the regime managed to put a lid on it, but with the press blacked out, we don't really know how widespread it was.

The common soldiers come from the common people. They must have brothers and cousins in the democracy movement, and in the sangha. Political conditioning of the ranks only goes so deep. And the regime has destroyed the basis of it's own legitimacy. By cracking down on the monks, it can no longer use Buddhist themes in its propaganda with even minimal credibility. The Burmese people, and that includes the common soldiers, are devout.

Maybe next time....

-------------------------------

On sanctions;

Here are two articles to read, pro and con.

Saffron Revolution

Everyone reading this is probably aware of the events in Burma. There is a massive uprising against the military junta. The sangha is playing a prominent, and even a leading role, in the massive, mostly peaceful protests.

Some of you may wonder how proper it is for bhikkhus to be engaged in political actions of this kind. When making your judgment, here are some things to bear in mind;

- The bhikkhus in Theravada countries are not isolated hermits but integral members of the society. They are the sons and brothers of the common people who are suffering under this horrid regime.
- The bhikkhus also have a natural leadership role, and are expected by the laity to give them guidance and moral support.
- There is a scriptural precedent, if not for political marches, at least for the monks to express strong disapproval of immoral laity. This is the Patam Nikkujana Kamma, the over-turned almsbowl. Sometimes called "buddhist excommunication" it is the symbolical cutting of a lay person by refusing to accept alms from him, physically manifested by turning the bowl upside-down. This has been done by the monks in Burma against the military rulers.
- The regime in Burma is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the world. Besides having all the marks of nasty regimes everywhere, brutal, corrupt, venal, oppressive it is also strikingly incompetent. Besides having abundant natural resources and a literate population, Burma languishes in poverty, near the bottom of the UN rankings.
- If all that wasn't enough, the leaders are quite mad, and have been for a long while. As far back as 1970, the then dictator Ne Win ordered the country to switch to driving on the right-hand side because of a dream he had. More recently, the capital was moved from Yangoon to a remote town in the jungle on the advice of an astrologer.
- Any reports in the media of bhikkhus being involved in violence should be taken with a grain of salt. It is not impossible that some monks may act improperly, of course, but it is much more likely that these incidents are perpetrated by government agents disguised as monks. (If even the Canadian police resort to these kind of tactics, why not the Burmese junta?)

The situation has the potential of turning very ugly. The long-suffering Burmese people have nothing left to lose, and the junta is not likely to show restraint. International pressure can do little, the regime is already very isolated and doesn't really care what outsiders say. Let us all hope this beautiful country, an important focus of the Dhamma, is able to come through the fire to peace, prosperity and freedom.

Some links -

Buddhist Channel - a source for Buddhist related news has very good ongoing coverage of the crisis.
Rule of Lords - an excellent blog of Burmese and Thai politics.
Info Please - their page with background on modern Burmese history.
Human Development Statistics - for Burma, if you like your data raw.