TIBETSPACE

CHRYSLER & HUMAN RIGHTS? WE'RE KIDDING, SURELY?

 I saw the commercial the other day, but having just returned home from the hospital with a newborn, I was blind with exhaustion, and didn't pay it much mind.  A bunch of big, black Chryslers carrying Nobel Laureates to a recent meeting in Berlin.  And then a white one pulls up, it's empty, and the narrator, with real gravitas, informs us that "this film is dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, still prisoner in Burma."  And the parting shot: "Chrysler:  For a World Without Walls."  

Really?  Chrysler?  A world without walls?  Why now this stream of visual rhetoric about human rights coming from a greedily managed American multi-national corporation?

You can, of course, slap the Marxist template on this little film and have a blast.  As long as Chrysler had a solvent, money-making operation that thrived on extracting maximum profit from the buying public while, for years, delivering a product vastly inferior, for example, to its Asian counterparts in the auto industry, then the only "rights" that concerned Chrysler were the ones that the unions forced them to acknowledge.  Human rights, on the other hand, is based on altruism, on the understanding that no one's rights are less important than your own, whether you are defining those rights as individual, communal, or corporate.  

Altruism, then, is the first outward sign of an inward and invisible commitment to human rights.  

And altruism has very little to do with the core principles of capitalism.  So altruism has very little to do with Chrysler.  You can say this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm content simply to call it, for now, a thing.  It is what it is.

But let's look at it another way.  While I don't for a minute believe that Chrysler's ad people are driven by a consuming passion for "a world without walls," I do feel that they are trying to save their company by advertising; because a successful ad campaign attempts to uncover a popular cultural practice or a deeply held and not quite articulated opinion and align it with a product, it might be logical to assume that the advertising people at Chrysler recently had one of those light-bulb moments.  

I can hear it now.

"It's come to our attention," one exec begins, "that this human rights thing is hot.  Not only that, but over there in Burma, they've got this woman, like, imprisoned, and she's getting tons of attention in Europe and Asia, and so we can play the HR card and the gender card at the same time.  And don't forget two more things:  we supplied the cars for those Laureates recently in Berlin, and Obama himself, we hope, will soon be stepping out of one of our cars, 'cause he's a Laureate, and you know how big he is in Europe.  So this is a no-brainer.  Let's get on the HR bandwagon and put more people in our cars."

So human rights has shown up on Chrysler's radar.  Let's call this a good thing, not because we suspect that Chrysler is about to become a massive non-profit for human rights, but because human rights workers have infiltrated a way of thinking that, while still fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of altruism, has been forced to acknowledge, in the only way it can, that those who fight for a world without walls are worth paying attention to just now.

That the Chrysler people are endorsing a way of life that, if fully realized, would dismantle their operation either hasn't occurred to them yet or would seem to them to present little threat to their confidence in human greed and materialism.

JON STEWART AND THE DALAI LAMA

Maybe, just maybe, there's one other person on the planet, aside from myself, who missed Stewart's take on Obama deciding not to meet with His Holiness.  

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Hell No, Dalai
www.thedailyshow.com
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WELCOME TO TIBETSPACE

Welcome to TIBETSPACE, a blog in the process of changing. Begun as a site for all things Tibetan, all things Tibetan has dramatically expanded as His Holiness has created conversations that continually transcend traditional cultural boundaries.  So I will try to chart some of those conversations here, always keeping His Holiness's views in mind, but also trying to show how long those views are.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION

The Charter for Compassion is one of the organizations that is trying to respond productively to the widespread human suffering that has become part of the daily experience of the citizens of developed countries.  Never before has the middle class, normally insulated from such suffering, had access to the fundamental images of deprivation, torture, homelessness, starvation, and environmental catastrophe that our online capabilities serve up nowadays on a continual basis.  The point is that when exposed to atrocity, most people want to do something about it.  And with such massive exposure now in play, Charter for Compassion is trying to provide people with ways of facilitatingthat response.  So have a look at the video below, visit the website, and figure out your own response.  There are lots of implications to projects like this one, and I'll be looking at some of them in the future.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

JEWISH-AMERICANS LEAD THE CHARGE AGAINST SUPERSTITION; BUDDHISTS TAKE SECOND PLACE!

With Halloween and its attendant spirits having passed us by, and with superstition still a plague on many serious discussions, The Pew Research Center wondered which religious groups in American were the least and most likely to believe that angels and demons wander among us.  The results were not altogether surprising.  Among traditional religious groups, Mormons and Evangelical Christians were the most likely to believe in such spirits.

But leading the pack of rationalists, by a wide margin, were American Jews whose talent for casting the cold eye of analysis on the world around us seems an inalienable element of their long and distinguished tradition--a muscular 73% disagreed with the proposition.  Buddhists came in a distant second at 56%.

So Buddhists and Jews . . . . I'd like to know more about what they share.

ONE PICTURE = 1000 WORDS

The picture to the left, of Dalha Agitysang (in red), a Tibetan activist, and Rebiya Kadeer, leader of the Uighur Muslim freedom movement in Xinjiang, was taken recently at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany.

Remember it well.  The future of any significant resistance toward Chinese oppression in Tibet and East Turkistan clearly lies in the kind of concerted and combined efforts that this photograph so eloquently captures.

AMERICANS & GLOBAL WARMING: WE DON'T BELIEVE IT!

In light of the story I posted here yesterday concerning the melting of the glaciers around Mt. Everest--including stark photographic evidence--I was surprised to find that a new poll released by the Pew Research Center reveals that fewer and fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming.  In April 2008, 44% of Americans saw climate change as an important issue; that number dropped to 35% by October 1, 2009.  This is an alarming development for three reasons.

1. First of all, we've become such a media-driven society that if the story isn't on our corporate-controlled news sources, we lose focus, and the topic fades from view.  Media-generated ADD.  Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released in January, 2006, at the Sundance Film Festival, and later picked up 2 Oscars.  In October, 2007, Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Peace Prize, partly due to the success of the film. That's called buzz, and because we're buzz-addicted, Americans were still concerned in 2008 about those belching smokestacks that kept showing up in their nightmares--and they had a film that dramatized their concern, and the Pew figures reflected the fact that global warming was on our radar.  But that's yesterday's news.  And the Pew figures now reflect that as well.
2. Second, it means the bad guys are currently winning, or manipulating the media more effectively than the good guys. Accepting the facts of global warming involves accepting a methodology--empiricism--that if applied to other hot-button topics like, say, the age of the earth or the beginning of the universe, would embarrass a large segment of the conservative power base in this country. As long as conservatives can divert attention from the results of honest scientific research, they gain ground.
3. That climate change is causing the glaciers in Tibet to dry up will directly impact human rights both in Tibet and in India.  When water supplies are endangered, particularly in population centers like India, administrative policies regarding the distribution of water become politically charged and water becomes a bargaining tool.  The UN currently does not recognize in its definition of refugees an "environmental refugee," but it will eventually have to address this issue, particularly in the light of this latest poll finding.  (China is already deeply aware of hydro-politics, as I pointed out in an earlier post.  One of my Tibetan friends whose family lives in eastern Tibet has been told that within several years the village where he grew up and where his family still lives will be under water due to the dams that are currently being built by the Chinese.  No provisions are being made to relocate these Tibetans; they will be, in effect, environmental refugees.)

Awareness is the first step toward speaking truth to power . . . it's a cliche, I know, but one that has truth behind it.

FIVE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ABOUT OBAMA, HIS HOLINESS & THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The recent decision by the White House not to receive His Holiness the Dalai Lama--exacerbated by the fact that it now involves one Nobel Peace Prize winner turning his back on another one because of pressure from China, a country on intimate terms with oppression--presents an opportune moment to have a look at the two men, side by side, in five areas, and to see that they don't really have a lot in common.  And that both men's work continues apace, on decidedly different tracks.

1. Human Rights--Over the past fifty years, the Dalai Lama's role has expanded from serving as a political representative of the Tibetan people--both in Tibet and in exile--to being a spokesperson for human rights in general and standing as an advocate for the relief of human suffering wherever it might exist. Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have agreed with His Holiness. King's own career, broadening from a focus on African-Americans to include, finally, the American poor, whatever their race, bears ample testimony to this. Now in 2009, fifty years after Mark Charles Parker was taken from his jail cell in Poplarville, Mississippi and lynched, the American political scene does not have a national figure whose ideas are marching logically and inexorably toward the cause of human rights. Remember, you can't get elected to national office in America by running on a platform of human rights.  And remember this too: the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr. did not run for public office.
2. Chicago Olympics--If Obama wants to be re-elected, he has to campaign; and, by some accounts, his re-election bid for 2012 has already started.  The Chicago Olympics would have been a real boost to his campaign and a fine send-off in 2016, when the Olympics arrived and his term, if he is re-elected, would end. In the twentieth century, however, either the Summer or the Winter Olympics visited our shores eight times.  That's enough.  Sure, there are those who thought that Obama's failure to get the Games for Chicago signaled dire and ominous things about America's reputation abroad (of course, Obama hadn't won the Nobel Prize for Peace at that time--more on that later), but they were wrong. Rio simply needed it more than we did.  And they purportedly made a much better case.  But King didn't care, and His Holiness doesn't care, about these things because they don't have to care about these things.  They don't have to win votes. Obama's attention to the Olympics wasn't a distraction from the health-care issue; it was an attempt to get re-elected.  
3. Non-Violence--Now that the civil-rights workers who rose to prominence in the 50's and 60's are aging, non-violence as a cogent and indispensable tool for social reform has vanished from the national stage.  The Dalai Lama's recent pilgrimage to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis should remind us of what unites Reverend King and His Holiness.  I am thinking, of course, of Mahatma Gandhi. Both King and the Dalai Lama drew a great deal from Gandhi's fundamental notions of non-violence. His Holiness, Mahatma Gandhi, and Reverend King realized a central truth that extends from a subtle understanding of non-violence:  that the acquisition of material wealth carries with it ethical obligations that extend beyond personal gratification and security.  And this is a truth that doesn't fare well in America. Greed, in fact, is a form of internal violence that has far-reaching implications.  But you can't get elected in America by running on a platform of human rights and by pointing to the essential violence associated with gaining great wealth.  After all, Obama is a very wealthy man.  King wasn't; His Holiness isn't.
4. The Global Village--The global village is a sexy idea.  As a phrase, it's become ubiquitous.  But it's not complicated.  The global village comes into being when we begin to perceive that our neighbor's suffering has a direct impact on our own suffering; and that the best way to alleviate our own suffering is first to alleviate our neighbor's suffering.  Of course, if you translate this into political action, nationalism, domestic economies, defense systems, all of these things come under scrutiny, and elected officials cannot, if they wish to be elected, indulge such a powerful idea and scrutinize such sacred cows.  The American electorate will not return to office someone who becomes overly concerned with what is happening in Rwanda, Sudan, Darfur, Tibet, Cambodia, Burma, or Bosnia--even if that person believes that these humanitarian actions will have a direct impact on the quality of American life.   This, however, was precisely Gandhi's platform, it is His Holiness's platform, and Reverend King was moving gradually toward such an idea as well.
5. The Nobel Peace Prize--Even Obama, in his honest and eloquent remarks upon learning that he had received this prestigious award, admitted that he didn't deserve it.  When the committee, citing his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," stated that Obama had committed himself and his country "to a world without nuclear weapons" (read the full text here), it became clear that this was an award granted more to an imagined future than an accomplished past.  And it was granted, I believe, in deep gratitude by a European community happy to be rid of the Bush family. But the Nobel Peace Prize won by Reverend King, Mother Theresa, Sakharov, Walesa, Tutu, Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, and Suu Kyi is not the Prize won by Al Gore and Barack Obama.  They were granted for different reasons and serve different purposes.  As Jody Williams--who won the Prize in 1997--remarked, "he [Obama] is going to be sending 40,000 new American troops into Afghanistan just as he received the Nobel Peace Prize?  I think that is a contradiction that needs to be seriously looked at."  And Obama's fierce, conservative critics will do just that.  The point is that the Nobel Committee might have inadvertently given our very young and very inexperienced President an award that, in reality, points to his youth and emphasizes his lack of experience in dealing with the kinds of problems that have often occupied the prize winners that I mentioned above.  And they might have unintentionally given ammunition to his critics.  (For a brief round-up of the various angles to this story, start with The Daily Beast.)

So, President Obama decides not to welcome His Holiness to D.C..  It's a political decision made by a savvy politician, and it's one that I suspect His Holiness wouldn't have made if the tables were turned and our President showed up in Dharamsala.  He wouldn't have made such a decision because it would have never been necessary for His Holiness to make such a decision.  The two men are driven by different necessities. You can take your pick.  

Or you can hope and pray that somehow they are complimentary.

THE DEATH OF BUDDHISM, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT

You might want to have a look at this essay by Waylon Lewis--I don't know if it has been published elsewhere and in a more recent form--because it addresses a question that lies behind Buddhism's migration to the West:  Has Buddhism's journey westward been fatal to its message, to its core teachings, and how can it be adapted to the current problems that confront us? 

Or have a look at this piece, which speaks of "the obtuse and rarified philosophical backwaters of Tibetan-Buddhism," the very ones, according to the author, that have caused Samdhong Rinpoche, the PM of the Tibetan Government in Exile, to deny Tibetans their right to self-determination. 

Or to ask the larger question:  When spiritual teachings leave their original and informing environment, do they change and transform themselves beyond recognition? 

And who gets to describe the various supports and principal players in that original and informing environment?  You?  Me?  Endowed chairs?  Light-beaming teachers?  Who gets to pronounce a current practice no longer in the tradition? 

One of the central concerns here is that many of the Tibetans who are well schooled in the philosophical tradition do not have a modern political sensibility, and those who do have such a sensibility aren't familiar with the tradition.  Something has to give. 

And it will.  There is a younger generation of Tibetans, born in India largely, who will determine Tibet's future, both within Tibet and in exile, and we should be listening closely to them.  They are variously educated, variously aligned, and variously participating in their philosophical traditions.  Many of them are aware of the responsibilities they bear.

But back to Lewis's piece.  The other advantage to having a look at it is that it will also introduce you to Elephantjournal.com, an engaging online journal whose mission, by its own admission, is "dedicated to bringing together those working (and playing) to create enlightened society."  Here, you can get a good sense of how contemporary Buddhist thought is being introduced to America and amalgamated within its culture.  Waylon Lewis is its founder and editor-in-chief.  Bookmark it, have a look at it for a couple of weeks, and see what you think.

VIDEO: DESMOND TUTU ACCEPTS AWARD, PRAISES HIS HOLINESS

 We are occasionally--very occasionally--treated in the media to commanding displays of authentic spirituality, and clearly when Desmond Tutu recently accepted the Spiritual Leadership Award from Humanity's Team, he provided us with one of these moments.  While the Dalai Lama was unable to attend the presentation, he sent his representative, Sonam Tenzin from the Office of Tibet , who presented Tutu with a kata.  Tutu's remarks concerning the Dalai Lama are reminiscent of the kinds of things that, well, His Holiness would say about Tutu in such a situation.  These two gentlemen, coming from very different religious traditions, share a common spirituality that seems to grow in importance every day as our national borders begin to blur.  The introduction in the video--heartfelt, sincere--goes for approximately five minutes, and then Tutu arrives, followed by His Holiness's representative.  What Tutu has to say about the Dalai Lama is pure spiritual poetry.