"You Are Not Here": Book Review

Compared to its predecessor, "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree," this 2006 anthology blends little-known with established names in the Buddhist realm in the West. Its editor, Keith Kachtick, provided his strong opening chapter from his novel, "Hungry Ghost" to the collection of "Nixon" edited by Kate Wheeler, and Kachtick returns the favor with room for her long story, "Ringworm." It's not the only one among the twenty entries to feel semi-autobiographical (at least), but it works as one of the best, as it evokes Burma through a Western nun's eyes---feeding a sick kitten--before one of many military crackdowns.

Other promising tales skirt Buddhist themes rather than, as the weaker ones do, take them literally or ploddingly. The stories which touch on the ideas and concepts instead of placing characters into obviously Buddhist settings appear to better capture the spirit of exploration and an open-ended approach suiting the uncertainty of many seekers. For instance, Dan Sigmond's "Humans" in the first Zen Mission to the Apes, Jake Lorfing's spare natural parable "Distant Mountains," and arguably (I remain uncertain) Pico Iyer's "Abandon" which does not mention any dharma explicitly somehow may belong.

Some names in this collection obviously were shoo-ins for their marquee draw, but they tended to disappoint. I liked Anne Donovan's "Buddha Da" for its outsider's view, and her subsequent novel (as with Kachtick's) developed the initial premise effectively. Andrew Foster Altschul's "You Are Not Here" in San Francisco, Jess Row's "For You" in Hong Kong, and Anh Chi Pham's "Mandala" in wartime Saigon capture their edgy, jittery places effectively, to give moods and perspectives that suit their restless themes. A sense of unease, fittingly for a Buddhist collection, succeeds more than the stories that come from the insiders already established from within the Buddhist community, I hazard.

Sean Hoade's "Samsara Suite" more literally applies this condition, but its sadness and scope encompasses its theme poignantly. The best line out of the whole book comes from another unsettled narrator, Samantha Shoech's "The Good People of Lake George." The narrator, at the end of an affair, challenges wearily the previous generation of complacent, purportedly practicing boomers who all think they live the way of the Eightfold Path. Celeste asks her hosts at their vacation rental: "How are you supposed to be good if nothing is bad?" "'Your problem is vocabulary,' her father says. 'Good and bad are not particularly helpful words.'" (67)

Words here may help to solve such predicaments, at least for careful readers. This is a fitting counterpart to "Hungry Ghost" and "Buddha Da," and while the MFA-small magazine tone of the anthology dominates for better or not depending on your predilection for such character studies and set pieces, it's a sensible follow-up to "Nixon." If a third volume appears, all the same, I hope it shakes up sensibilities more than soothes them, as many of these inclusions do too well. (Amazon US 6-15-12)

Paul Scott's "The Towers of Silence": Book Review

In this third installment of the "Raj Quartet," we witness through the perspective largely of Barbie Batchelor the reaction to the incidents which comprised the core of "The Jewel in the Crown." Daphne Manners has died and her mother and her child are off-stage for all but a glimpse or two here; Susan Layton marries Teddie Bingham and we learn more about their courtship and brief marriage. Similarly, we find her sister Sarah becoming friends with Barbie when she moves in Rose Cottage with the Layton step-grandmother-in-law Mabel, in the hill station of Pankot, sister encampment to Ranpur where the unrest over the trial of Hari Kumar and his compatriots accused of raping Daphne had not spread to Pankot.

Instead, we get the slow transfer of rumors and gossip, along with Barbie's prominence in relating what she knows from her fellow missionary, Edwina Crane. Her fate will parallel that of Barbie, perhaps, a decline from confidence in the mission and its evangelical rationale to an encounter with a less comforting, existential resignation to the loneliness of the British who choose to defend the spiritual campaign in India alongside the military and civil functionaries who populate Pankot. Scott gradually draws Barbie's situation parallel to that of the Second World War, and the struggles felt from the battle zone, while they do not reach the hills, echo with the fate of Robert Merrick, who had persecuted Hari and his comrades so relentlessly.

After his tragic attempt to rescue Teddie during the fighting in Burma, Merrick confides in Barbie. His role here is gentler, tempered by his own gallantry, and Scott excels in their conversation as it reveals the unease at the heart of the British civilizing enterprise. The book moves slowly. I think Scott for once overtipped his hand at the coda, in linking too tightly world events to Barbie's decline, but he may have done this to forge an imperial analogy of one Englishwoman's fall to that of the empire and its crown jewel. Most of the narrative stays subtler. Much of it takes place at Rose Cottage, with an almost Jane Austen-like attention to conversational shifts and character revelations barely perceived without intense scrutiny to tone and intent and what's said or unsaid.

Teddie's reaction to Merrick's talk about the Indian National Army which allies against the British with the Japanese reminds me of the book's structure. "Formless, almost shapeless, the beauty consisted in the subtle cohesion of what seemed like disparate parts and in the extraordinary flexibility of each arrangement made to bring them together." (Everyman's Library ed. 2007, p. 126) Scott features no high drama as in "Jewel" or especially its sequel which delved into Captain Merrick's interrogation of Hari, "The Day of the Scorpion," but we learn how both titular symbols endure here. The picture of Queen Victoria receiving homage of the world's peoples lacks, Barbie notes, an unknown Indian. The scorpion bites itself when surrounded by fire only due to its sensitivity to the heat, the sun, the light.

This book will unsettle you. Four hundred pages show Scott's narrative control, but it's grim much more than droll. It's to be read after the first two, naturally. It advances their timeline forward through the war, but those events remain dim and distant. While Scott characteristically filters the disintegrating coherence of Barbie powerfully, it's not pleasant: "the vision was shut off again by barriers of fleshy faces, arms, bosoms, chins and epaulettes, the bark and chirrup of the human voice manufacturing the words which created the illusion of intelligent existence." (195) Barbie looks at a swain for Sarah and sees "the enthusiastic expression of mediocrity which Barbie had learned to recognize from years of looking in a mirror." Unsparing in its glances at sex, birth, marriage, faith, and death, Scott provides in Barbie a disturbing depiction of the breakdown of belief and of order. (P.S. I also briefly reviewed the Everyman's Library ed. of vols. 1-2 combined. This review above was under a listing for "Towers" itself on Amazon US 6-29-12)

Michael Aris' "Views of Medieval Bhutan": Book Review

The adjective's elastic here, as this Himalayan scholar (who died of cancer in 1999 in Britain while his wife, Aung San Suu Kyi, was under control of the junta in Burma for many years) admits. Still, most Westerners further comparisons to "feudal" dzongs and "medieval" customs such as archery or monarchic and monastic devotion when they encounter Bhutan firsthand, or via photos or books. This handsome 1982 edition features an introduction by Tibetan expert Aris, who tutored the Bhutanese royal family for six years when the nation was opening up to modernization, and in less dense form than his other academic publications, he sets out the careful contexts that Samuel Davis, (1760-1819), captured in his journal and by his skilled drawings. A surveyor and draftsman for the Bengal Army, he accompanied Warren Hastings on the second British embassy, in 1783, to the kingdom.

These elegant depictions attest to the only foreign artist "of distinction" to show Bhutan, and the first outsider to paint scenes from these mountains. Aris notes that his fellow Englishman's "legacy played no part in the development of those imaginary utopias which the west continues to locate in the trans-Himalayan region." (11) Aris annotates and excerpts Davis' journal, and nods to its secular, and largely un-Romantic tone, also a part of the naturalistic art he brings to the plates reproduced here. "If sublime and romantic qualities are sometimes found expressed in his art this is surely because Davis, like most of us, was constitutionally incapable of reacting otherwise to certain combinations of mountains, light, fortresses and forests." 

It's intriguing to see how, at Punakha Dzong, Davis includes in his study of "one of the most ancient and considerable of the Rajah's castles" an analysis of its weak point. However formidably walled, its single entrance, he reasons, weakens it: "The best way of forcing admission might be by breaking open the gate with a petard." (50) He sees the subjection of the lower classes (and all women) to the rulers secular and religious, and wishes to free the peasants from the restrictions which a "monk tax" and fealty to a celibate, corrupt regime force in a manner he compares to Rome. He evinces a sympathy for the poor, and he scrutinizes the rituals of their bickering rulers closely. Certainly the considerable exoticism of this remote and then-nearly unknown realm in Davis' steady hand and pen balances with a cool appraisal of its strategic and military value to the Raj and his employer, the Crown. 

His companion and supervisor, Samuel Turner, suggested that after four months waiting in Bhutan, the Tibetan refusal of Davis to continue to that nation with the expedition that Tibetan suspicion of the pen and ink skills of Davis led to his exclusion from the mission. For more on this and the earlier venture into this region, see (reviewed by me Nov. 2012) The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet by Kate Teltscher. Davis returned to India, to collaborate with Sir William Jones, who made the breakthrough connection between Sanskrit and Indo-European languages, and Davis became a Director of the East India Company and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He kept up his draftsmanship, and the fifty-nine examples Aris presents commemorate the considerable talent this West Indies-born Briton brought, at 23, to Bhutan. (1-6-13 to Amazon US)

U Dhammaloka: the first Irish Buddhist monk?

I drove out to UC Riverside yesterday to hear a professor in from Cork talk about perhaps the first Irish Buddhist monk. At least the first one we know of--who took the robes in Burma-- fighting Christian incursions, and defending dharma after his ordination appointing himself "the Bishop of Rangoon." His real name may or not be known. His birth and death, to date, remain speculative. He's a predecessor, combative if genuine, of more refined and less cantankerous Western converts. His appearance, suddenly in 1900, and his fading out by 1914, makes up a rather Zelig-like hobo boho character in Asia, where he covered considerable territory. He garnered fervent press-- some generated by alter ego/ nom de plume "Captain Daylight." He's a character worth getting to know, if we can know him.

The 2011 issue of Contemporary Buddhism featured Brian Bocking's article alongside scholars Thomas Tweed, Alicia Turner, and Laurence Cox(see an earlier version of his initial research)  See a YouTube video by Prof. Bocking; he and his colleagues hosted a UC Cork Dhammaloka Day conference Feb. 19th 2011.] It highlights their research on U Dhammaloka (?1856 - ?1914).

"A migrant worker from Dublin, Dhammaloka was an autodidact, atheist and temperance campaigner who became known throughout colonial Asia as an implacable critic of Christian missionaries and a tireless transnational organiser of Asian Buddhists from Burma to Japan and from Singapore to Siam."

Pursuing rumors of Hibernians on the prototypical hippie trail a century before the Beatles and the Maharishi, independently Turner in Canada and Cox at Maynooth learned of this Irish emigre who in late Victorian times changed his name, having "gone native" in whatever passed as a predecessor for Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac's "dharma bums" fifty years later, roaming Goa, Kathmandu, or Benares as third-gen hippies today. Bocking caught a reference to UD, contacted the other two scholars, and the result became their founding of "Dhammaloka Studies."

I've been interested in this Irish-global spin too, by my own investigation into "the invention of the concept of 'Celtic Buddhism'" in the new edition of New Religious Movements in Ireland co-edited by Laurence Cox. He and Maria Griffin contributed a fine essay on the history of Irish Buddhism, which will blossom into his book; another on Dhammaloka (his name means "Light of the World") is also in the works by the trio. This late-Victorian/Edwardian anti-colonial, freethinking counterculture leaves long traces in what Thomas Tweed, expert on American Buddhism, calls "vernacular intellectualism" which leaves fewer books behind but echoes so many chats and campfires simmering from a vibrant oral culture, a streetwise autodidactic tradition, and maybe a bit of Irish anticlerical, anti-nomian, rabble-rousing.

The talk by Prof. Bocking proved worthwhile for my sixty-mile excursion (one way, at least). It also proved remarkably entertaining, for both professor and his elusive if emphatic (he used the powers of persuasion personally and in the press well as a predecessor of today's pundits on book tours and Twitter--I imagine him on Comedy Central) raconteur told tale tales enduring a hundred years on. PowerPoint danced as this scholar shared the joy and fascination of their pursuit of this globally slippery figure, who left behind a lot of press and a lot of mystery. That poster shows what may be the only photo-- so far-- of the man who may or not be Larry O'Rourke, William Colvin, or Lawrence Carroll, born maybe in Booterstown, Blackrock, Dublin.

Much more in terms of fact and still some possible fiction can be found in the CB journal, but suffice it to say even since its November 2010 appearance, data continue to be unearthed, or surmised, about this elusive, enigmatic, but formidable and somehow perhaps rather admirable, atheist, yet sincere and determined (if by any means necessary, bending the truth of who authored some of his many pamphlets from his Buddhist Tract Society-- attributed to him was a poetic hymn sung by Japanese Buddhists in San Francisco!) contrarian.

Sitting there on the third floor of the UCR Humanities building, overlooking a track field and biscuit-brown rocky hills out of a Western stage set, just before summer melts this Inland Empire outpost into searing smog, I welcomed the chance to be among a dozen intellectual types, however briefly. My 120-mile drive kept me "driven" to hear the results of Prof. Bocking and his colleagues. It reminded me of what I was trained for at another UC campus eighty-odd miles nearer the Pacific (if still not on it, damn it), and what inspires me to continue my own small steps in researching other aspects of Buddhism and the West, including Ireland but not excluding, say, punk rock and sobriety programs and other efflorecences as novel now as UD back then.


He claimed to work on a fruit-boat on the Sacramento River, the Acme, about the time of a great invention in the southern part of the Golden State. The naval orange was born in Riverside, a bit earlier than UD's appearance as "The Missionary (for Buddhism, against Christianity) of Burma"; the seedless fruit's cheerful appearance, so orange, I wonder might have been replicated in this monk's robes. The English came to Riverside and praised its salubrious climate as a resort. A century later, it's shorthand for once exurban, now suburban sprawl and dreary weather. I welcomed the glimpse from the freeway east of San Antonio winery, the last of its kind too (founded three years after UD's disappearance from the historical record), if under the powerpoles (I've been told by my parents upon sighting these that this was the first word I ever said) next to the freeway junction. I'll make my way out of the way to patronize it the next rare time out there; I pass their downtown L.A. branch, which survived Prohibition, a few miles away from my home on my commute.


Crossing UCR for another, less familiar commute as I had to then head off to work, I found a windfall. Still, despite the sprawling postwar campus, its agricultural origins as a study station for horticulture remains as experimental groves surround the southern edge of UCR., the last remnant of what once was the world's center for this sweet orb. Near the Barn, an old theatre converted that reminded me of my beloved childhood Claremont's final days as a citrus producer, a few handsome trees flourished among cement paths. On the ground, a perfect globe in color, two leaves still attached, fresh. I picked it up and carried it back to my florescent-lit cubby at my far more humble campus, before I had to teach nights, sixty miles away the other direction in rush-hour traffic. There, I enjoyed the best orange I ever tasted.

Emma Larkin's "Everything is Broken": Book Review

Viewers of "Burma VJ," and readers of her "Finding George Orwell in Burma," (see my review) will learn about what's happened in Burma under the twin forces of military suppression of the 2007 demonstrations and Cyclone Nargis of 2008. Half a million (official toll's 138,000) may have been swept or battered to death during a 10-12 hour storm. Larkin compares a before-after aerial view of the Irrawaddy delta: "as if a bucket of water has been sloshed across an ink drawing; the carefully-marked lines had been erased and the paper beneath was buckled and distorted." (7)

Later, talking to survivors, she sees a ID-sized photo, all that a husband has of his dead wife. "A water stain had spread across his wife's broad cheekbones and the black-and-white image was already beginning to fade." (163) Memories and rumors, legends of surviving by hanging onto a python or clutching a crocodile spread. Under the total censorship, where complaining can land you life in prison, where the leaders of a police state fear their people and often meet violent ends while in power, the absence of comfort permeates this narrative.

It's in three parts: the storm, when Larkin sneaked in on a tourist visa for a month but, like all foreigners and aid workers and journalists and even many Rangoon folks wanting to help the survivors, she was limited in what she could learn. The second part investigates the regime, its xenophobic reaction to foreign intrusion, its crushing of the 2007 protests led by monks and students (see "Burma VJ"), and its strategic if extravagant relocation of its capital to a remote plot in the center of the country, far from a port or outside contamination as it were. Obscene profiteering, black magic-haunted dictators, astrology as domestic policy: these rule this corrupt satrap.

Finally, she returns a year after the storm to find some relief getting to perhaps half the survivors, but under a cruel regime, little progress as model camps for the press are dismantled, refugees are forced back to their vanished homes, and trauma, as over and over the people rise up and look for help only to be crushed as history is rewritten and memories are all these impoverished citizens of a vast open-air prison state have to endure, or be driven mad by.

What do you do when liberation keeps failing? Larkin often juxtaposes the propaganda of "New Light of Myanmar," the only sanctioned press mouthpiece, with the facts she witnesses and records. "In this Never-Never Land of the regime's imagination, survivors of the storm suffered no trauma and felt no grief at having lost family members, jobs, and livelihoods. Relieved to be so warmly looked after by their benevolent leaders, they sat smiling obediently amid mountains of mama noodles and brightly-colored plastic buckets." (72)

It's frustrating to read this book, and I closed it sadly. It feels incomplete, but this cannot be faulted on the author, who labors to evade the military, bureaucracy, and undercover police and who writes under an assumed name. There's a haunted quality to this tale, and even more when even the experts she cites often go nameless. One thinks of an ancient land where nothing but panic, rumors and fear stalk the dark fields where Death walks.

Larkin despite her clandestine investigations in a nation she knows well even fails to uncover as much as she or we'd wish, given the oppressive situation. But it's as close as Westerners will come, given the failure (as in Tibet, I thought) of the "moral high ground" to overthrow the "guns and brute force" of "the other side." (121) We are taught that goodness and morality will win, but when the junta prevents ships from delivering supplies or doctors from entering for fear that the natives will learn that the outside world is more generous than their own tyrants, one does despair for the Myanmar nightmare that had replaced free Burma. (Posted to Amazon US 5-9-10 & PopMatters 5-11-10)

"Burma VJ" & May Day

I’m sure everyone agrees that we need to overcome violence, but first we need to analyze whether it has any value. From a strictly practical perspective, we find that on certain occasions violence appears useful: one can solve a problem quickly with force. But this success is often at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. Although one problem has been solved, the seed of another has been planted.

The day after I read this quote from the Dalai Lama, I watched "Burma VJ," a documentary by Anders Ostergaard. Foreign reporters are banned; a free press is illegal. So, Ostergaard assembled handicam footage taken by video journalists from the Democratic Voice of Burma during the protests in September 2007 that started when fuel prices skyrocketed. Soon the monks led marches against the junta. As before in the dictatorship, hopes rose for victory.

But, when marchers took to Rangoon in earlier outrage, in 1988, three thousand were slain by the army. Aung San Suu Kyi, back then, looked like her election would propel her into a takeover of the regime and as in other regimes at that time, that it would lead to freedom from totalitarianism. The clandestine cameramen defiantly tried to document the demands made by unarmed, peaceful demonstrators even as (see the image above), plainclothes police sought to arrest the handicam holders. As you might expect, filming is illegal. They try to upload their footage to the Net or to smuggle it out, but the net, as in the PRC, can be suppressed and dissidents can be whisked off to prison and after that, who knows?

Still, buoyed by the hope the whole world was again watching, they decided to speak up. The silence of the past nine years under the cruel regime ended. For a few days, urged by the monks, people dared to come out and join the marches for reform.

Yet, as at Tiananmen Square a year after the earlier Burmese protests, glasnost and detente failed as power obliterated democracy. And in both cases, allies of the U.S. and foreign powers not to mention corporate energy providers (that is, oil barons), decided to ignore the demands for justice. Chanting monks bravely led early street demonstrations. They were arrested, beaten, and then they disappeared. The red robes that comprised the center of early marches dwindle and then, one day as seen on cameras, are no more.

Then the military crushed the students. One of the last scenes in the documentary takes place in a stairwell. The young men and women are trapped. The stairwell is being shot into. A voice rises. "Let us pray to conquer our fear of death."

Now, the DVB is scattered, its thirty secret filmmakers silenced. I will soon read the second book by Emma Larkin on Burma. Her first, "Finding George Orwell in Burma," chillingly retraced similarly secret events in this grim Big Brother society.

If we ignore human rights in little outposts such as East Timor, let alone the nearly seven million estimated to have died in the Congo, or the prisoners in China or the resistance among the Uighirs or Tibetans against the Communists, it seems that compared to the oil rich barons profiting off of "Myanmar," that the Burmese matter very very little except to provoke momentary discomfort. I posted the end of March on the U.S. Campaign for Burma and their publicity campaign "Arrest Yourself to Free Burma", all the same.

Power or money- which drives us more? This was my wife's question the morning after we watched this film. Later that day, we went off to see spring's wildflowers in the Antelope Valley and to let my older son practice on that rare open road for his test.

The afternoon my friend spoke to Radio Free Eireann at WBAI NYC, I was sitting in the passenger seat as my teenaged son drove the straight line of Highway 138 through what's left, for now, of rural Los Angeles County. The Antelope Valley stretched ahead into rolling orange and purple, poppy and lupine, filling a few slopes. Among them, Joshua trees stood, gradually reclaiming meadows and dales.

U2 came to America, once, in the midst of the Troubles, to speak out for peace. Their LP arguably made the Joshua Tree, heightened by Anton Corbijn's iconic photos, world famous more than either prophet or flora had. While the peace treaty did come to Ireland a decade and more later, the decade and more since the tellingly named Good Friday Agreement of '98 left many Irish republicans unhappy with, as my friend put it in her radio interview, not the peace itself but the way the peace was sold.

That is, the cause for which so many had sacrificed their youth, the safety of their families, the lives of their comrades and those of their foes, had been given up in a stroke of a pen and a photo op to the political necessity to broker a face-saving deal worse than the one proposed in 1975 to settle the Irish conflict. The armed struggle, at the hands of those feted on White House lawns and before Stormont's chambers, long before the second and final ceasefires had been proven a farce. Many had been sent out to kill or had been killed in the name of a strategy already years before determined to have been a failure. The leaders postured and assured their rank and file that the Republican Movement continued its commitment to the "physical-force tradition" while behind the scenes, the IRA volunteers had been already consigned to the past-date bin, the rummage sale, the leftovers of history.

This betrayal sparked the former Belfast Brigade and Long Kesh prison commander, Brendan "The Dark" Hughes to speak out against his friends, under whom and among whom he loyally served so long, to speak out. As with a few others at the online project run by my friends,"The Blanket," in the dozen years following the "peace process," for his dissension he was pilloried by those among whom he had fought and worked all of his life. Censorship and death threats came.

For his honesty, Brendan was blackballed from the building trades now controlled, post-GFA, by pro-Sinn Féin elements eager to undermine any opposition to the grant money, the gladhanding, and the corruption endemic to those who in the North went along with the leadership's acquiescence to the power and wealth that flowed towards those willing to compromise, to shut up, and to give in to the messages that a cowed and duplicitous leadership now in control of West Belfast transmitted to their party followers and fellow recipients of largess from the EEC and British and Irish-funded schemes awarded to the faithful. The party machine ruled as had the "lads": the same people, this being Ireland where everyone knows everyone, doing backroom business.

"The Dark" spoke to my friend's husband as part of interviews archived at Boston College; after Hughes' premature death two years ago the embargo was lifted on using his testimony and Ed Maloney then compiled the work that the interviewer had done. It has been published last month as part of a new book, "Voices Beyond the Grave." Because Brendan's accounts of IRA activity and his critiques of their current mindthink clash with conventional Sinn Féin-controlled versions of events, the interviewer, his wife tells the radio station, has received death threats.

All this leaves me despondent. The violence instigated by Irish republicans determined to lash out against injustice carries a bitter legacy that rankles their divided ranks today, forty years after the latest series of uprisings in the name of a democratic, secular, socialist Ireland that fails to be any of these three qualities.

My wife finished and now I've started a novel by an American who lived in Belfast to write about it longer than most did during the Troubles. Lionel Shriver's brief Wikipedia bio notes: "(she plans to will whatever assets remain at her death to the Belfast Library Board, out of whose libraries she checked so many books when she lived in Northern Ireland)." From her fifteen or so years, her 1990 "The Bleeding Heart" (published as "Ordinary Decent Criminals" in Britain) acerbically tells what transpired. She finds as does her protagonist, an Philly ex-pat in West Belfast, a state of "arrested adolescence" among both minorities, an insular groupthink that glorifies aspiration while delaying arrival. Begrudgers never want success to come.

It ends with a "Glossary of Troublesome Words" and that in turn concludes with "United Ireland:

a hypothetical nation in which there are no more problems and all the citizens thrive in peace and tranquillity. Metaphorically: happiness. Historically: what has never happened. Mythologically: at the end of the day, a phrase Northerners use compulsively, a time and a place where all conflict will be resolved and there will be no more armies, and therefore an eventuality that every faction in Northern Ireland has a vested interest in preventing at all costs. (426-7)

Like a lot of those involved in the Irish cause, I've evolved. In my younger days I backed the "physical force tradition." As I have noted here before, a few years ago I learned how my own great-grandfather, a Land League activist from Co. Roscommon, had died, "drowned in mysterious circumstances" in the Thames to where in 1898 he had been summoned for a meeting with the British. (He also had the same first nick/name as me, although given the marked lack of imagination inherent in my family tree as to nomenclature, this is not much of a coincidence.)

Certainly a telling legacy and an eerie lesson in the persistence, unbeknownst, of somehow nature as well as nurture. Now, I find myself giving up meat. I'm tender towards puppies. I don't enjoy war movies as I did as a kid. My younger son watches "The Pacific" about the brutal Marine landings in '44; I remind him as I pause (before leaving the room) of my uncle I'm named after who died on the shore of Saipan that "island hopping" campaign. I gave up long ago joining the Navy; my first year of college I filed as a "selective C.O.," not that it'd have stopped (if severely myopic?) me from being drafted as the first year to have to sign up for Selective Service under the new Persian Gulf Doctrine of '79. I take no comfort that many of my students undergo rehab at the V.A. Hospital after being wounded in Iraq.

Yet, I bristle at Islamic intolerance. I wonder how pacifists would have fared in the Shoah. I nod as Shriver compares the conflict in the North to some stale entrenched slump in the Great War. But I get as angry as the next guy at injustice, I root for underdogs, and I suspect in a previous life I was an anarchist malcontent somewhere in 1914 Europe. (Reading Thomas Pynchon's endless "Against the Day" can be blamed for that surmise.)

Today downtown L.A.'s jammed as protesters rally against Arizona's law to enforce immigration laws that apparently nobody enforces. I pass giant black pickups with large Mexican flags draped on their rear doors. The freeway's packed going downtown. An MSNBC headline this week:

"Arizona Law 'Makes it Crime to be Illegal Immigrant'."

A progressive's oxymoron. Those who wave flags in my hometown enjoy the protection of laws that enable them to protest the imposition of other laws. I wonder why May Day signals distress rather than some proletariat triumph. Still, the fact that my state allows millions to live here illegally says something about American tolerance and Angeleno attitudes. Or more than one thing.

Meanwhile, peaceful protests by monks in Tibet as in Burma have been wiped out. Those in the North of Ireland turned, the narrative has it, to violence only after the civil rights marchers of '67 & '68 were beaten. Their political demands ignored by police and politicians and militia all to eager to stomp out sit-downs. Much as the media lament crackdowns by law enforcement here, their impact certainly diminishes next to most other places.

The Dalai Lama's own nation and people seem nearly extinguished. Buddhists claim that aggression sows its own horrible harvest, karmic revenge as it were bearing poisonous fruit. Radicals assert that concerted guerrilla warfare can bring about structural change for the better of the working men and women in whose name the struggles are fought against imperialism and capitalism. Compromisers after these battles conclude that giving in and working it out makes better sense and that within the corporate, imperial, capitalist system one can slowly bring about a more lasting, if more subtle, degree of progress and a satisfying change. Power and money, intimidation and threats continue.

Do those who once urged violence upon others bring, in the Dalai Lama's calculus, an equivalent reaction upon themselves? The "Gaelic Irish" and their "Ulster British" foes in their paramilitary guises both identified not as conscripts or career soldiers but as Volunteers. The concept was that nobody forced you into the militia and no one stopped you from getting out. But just as my city's local gangs jump you in and jump you out, the impact of brutality hammers away at anyone trying to free him or herself from the crazy life. A pub-stool dissenter in Shriver's story reasons how regarding the I.R.A. "as an institution it is not in the long-term interests of the organization to meet its own goals: the lot would be out of a job." Two decades later, a dozen years after the GFA, the intimidation by those once socialist idealists continues, channeled into thuggery, blackmail, smuggling, and beatings.

Consider this excerpt under the subheading "Moral Questions" from Sarah Kershaw's "The Terrorist Mind: An Update" (NY Times, 1-10-10):

David C. Rapoport, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime expert on terrorism and morality, said that the final common pathway is a moral calculus, driven by the conclusion that the terrorists’ enemies have “done something so bad, so terrible that they can’t get away with it.” Moral quandaries have often splintered groups, or caused them to disband.

If your objective is to create a world in which innocents (the members of your persecuted group) prevail, but you have to kill innocents to get there, you are in essence destroying your own dream, Dr. Rapoport said. Nevertheless, he said, many terrorists believe “the pathway to paradise is straight through hell." And to kill or in any way violate their own personal moral codes, many terrorists must believe they will achieve a higher moral condition for the group or society as a whole.

Faced with the predicament faced by my friends in Ireland I mull over my own discontent. I sympathize with the message of the Dalai Lama. Do we create a cycle of violence that consumes us? Can the veteran ever rest in peace once home? I teach vets who come back shattered physically and mentally. They sign up out of desperation to pay for college, to leave home, to follow a familial tradition, to get a fast track to citizenship. They come back well-honed to do well in college, but what a cost to pay-- to pay for their education. Trauma, stress, injury: other debts outweigh perhaps interest rates and government loans.

I still bridle against what seems to me the Dalai Lama's resignation for Tibet's impermanence. The genocide of an ancient tradition and a cultural patrimony continues, worse than ever after forty years. As in Ireland, committed by former idealists for a progressive and ameliorative cause, now hardened into thugs.

I bristle at the same old story of republicans in Ireland intimidated and stalked by their former allies willing now to do in those who stand up and assert their convictions. The obliterated Burmese protests discourage me. I lack the insight of a Tibetan lama. I wish I had more wisdom than I do, hearing the shouts of power drummed as always by the clout of money.

(The RFE radio show above on WBAI 4-24-2010 can be heard at that URL with my friend whose husband's life has been threatened. s It starts at 1:11 and her interview, interspersed with host Sandy Boyer, and activist Geraldine Taylor of RSF, ends around 1:24 on the download. Still image from "Burma VJ.")

"Arrest Yourself" to free Burma

You can "Arrest Yourself" on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi. She will turn 65 under house arrest, which this Nobel Peace Prize winner has endured, when not in prison itself, since 1988. Although she won the prize in '91, her plight appears to have been largely ignored in the shadow of other human rights violations in the two sad decades since the dictatorship incarcerated her.

Not much is known by most of us about Burma. A documentary I have yet to see, "Burma VJ," compiled from smuggled handycam footage, has been acclaimed (and nominated for an Oscar) as one document of this struggle for freedom against the military junta. It covers the protests led by Buddhist monks in the fall of 2007. Anders Østergaard directed this and uses the "lens" of a young journalist through whom we learn of the protests, the repression, and the crackdowns.

"Arrest Yourself" is a novel way to share solidarity. You stay at home 24 hours and invite others to visit you to learn about the Burmese situation and to donate funds to assist the U.S. Campaign for Burma. At their website, a simple video can show you in 2 1/2 minutes easy steps to follow in how to set up your own house arrest, as it were, to raise both awareness and assistance.

I talked about this at my family's seder last night. I figured it neatly fit with my wife's efforts on behalf of three Jewish prisoners whom we support and spreads the Passover message of liberation in a practical, tangible way. Instead of paying lip service to freedom, or sighing over the headlines, why not visit this site? Faraway as we are from this country, we can do our share to ease the pain others suffer in a nation turned into a giant land of captivity, where 90,000 children are forced to be soldiers, thousands of women are raped, and 3.500 villages razed. 600,000 natives have been displaced, while another million have fled their homeland.

For background, I recommend this book. On Amazon US, Feb. 13, 2006, I reviewed Emma Larkin's "Finding George Orwell in Burma". This harrowing account of this American journalist's clandestine stint in the police state of Myanmar resembled a captive's tale, "and I alone escaped to tell." The whole country looms as a concentration camp, an open-air workhouse, a tropical penitentiary.