TIBETSPACE

AND SO THE SPEECH IS DONE . . .

2009-12-13T10:31:52-06:00

Thank God, it’s over.

I’d dreaded Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech because I figured it couldn’t go well. And it didn’t. The essential ingredients here didn’t promise much: a talented young man who’d been given an award that he and legions of others said he didn’t deserve; a commander-in-chief on the brink of continuing America’s policy of waging perpetual war for an illusive peace by committing 30,000 troops to Afghanistan with no real way of determining when and how we might declare an old-fashioned military victory in the new-fangled post-9/11 world and so bring the troops home; the ghost of MLK, Jr., peering down, who’d publicly and dramatically refused to support war which, as Obama was about to announce, he felt compelled to support; an adoring and slightly condescending European public that our President had recently angered by turning down the traditional invitations extended Nobel Laureates—put all of these together, and you’ve got a recipe for bad prose, empty abstractions, and heart-felt posturing.

Obama's assignment in Oslo amounted to a rhetorical exercise that the most fiendish instructor of basic composition couldn’t devise: send your country to war, defend that decision, and do this while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

So I don’t blame Obama for his speech; I believe that Obama is a decent, honest, and intelligent man. (Who else would've spent much of the past two months repeatedly reminding us that he didn’t really deserve to stand with most of the previous winners?) But even a President as studious as Obama certainly is couldn’t bring in high marks for this one.

Oddly, I wanted to blame someone for Obama’s speech, so I blamed the Nobel Committee for putting Obama in this untenable position--asking him to write an essay that no human being could write. I think they did this because Obama has been—to appropriate Edward Said’s term—‘orientalized’ by the Europeans. It turns out, as he showed the committee in Oslo, that his passport doesn’t say ‘Shangri-La.’ He’s a talented and able politician who is also black. Another problem: Obama fell into the category of what William Jelani Cobb and others have called “Negro Firsts:”

In the cavalcade of heroes that we trot out each Black History Month, there is a special VIP section reserved for Negro Firsts. The belief is that each one is a barometer charting the falling pressures of racism in America . . . The job is not enviable: the First is generally required to perform a high-wire act in hurricane winds (Cobb, “The Tragedy of Colin Powell”).

And so the hurricane winds in Oslo were set in motion by the likes of Mandela, King, the Dalai Lama, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, and a host of other humanitarians who’d given their careers to fighting human oppression and war, and many of whom had suffered greatly during their struggle. Obama wilted under that comparison, as all of us would, and it’s not his fault. The Nobel Peace Arena is simply not his arena. Not yet. He doesn’t have the chops to thrive and represent himself credibly among that kind of company.

But Obama did what he could, while continually—painfully, at times—reminding us that there wasn’t much he could do, credibly, in this company. He was humble in the face of those who had gone before him, and he tried honestly to claim that his job description as Commander-in-Chief of the United States held him to a different standard than those articulated by King and Gandhi (who never won the award—does Obama know this?) and the followers of non-violence. This much is clear: American Presidents are going to be intimately involved with war and violence on many fronts, and that would seem to hamper their efforts to win the Prize. Obama might realistically have won it when he brokered a deal to end the war he starts—that’s an American’s best shot at winning it nowadays in our role of Big Stick Carrier. (I know what you’re thinking: but to imply that Americans didn’t play a role in creating the problems that Jimmy Carter helped to solve is naïve.)

So Obama talked about the notion of the just war, which in some ways, has become, philosophically, the last refuge of war-makers. And if you believe it’s a bit incongruous that a Nobel Peace Laureate would find himself in his acceptance speech defending war, you’d be right. It hadn’t happened before, and it must have been difficult to do it. Ever since Constantine took Christianity, an essentially non-violent religion, and made it the state religion of the Roman empire, Christian apologists—Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas most famously among them—have been struggling to justify the wholesale slaughter of our fellow human beings. It’s probably best to keep religion out of war, and see it for what I’ve always thought war was: the business end of politics.

But Obama couldn’t do that because he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, and that’s not the place for political expediency, and so he wound up with idealistic phrases like, “cultural leveling of modernity,” and “the continued expansion of our moral imagination,” and Bushisms like “evil does exist in the world,” and fifty-cent phrases that wouldn’t survive a freshman essay like, “the intractability of depravation.” And several split infinitives, which his political career will survive. And an uncharacteristically hazy notion of the subject he was addressing—just war—and an even more uncharacteristic inability to focus on his theme. His speech wandered from abstraction to abstraction, and never developed an argument that would seem appropriate to the occasion.

He was given a homework assignment that no one could complete.

Note to Obama and his writers: “just war” has been heavily scrutinized since 9/11, particularly that part about how you know you’ve won because you’re not fighting conventional forces who think of defeat in conventional terms. The kind of forces that await our troops in Afghanistan are always “down” in those same traditional terms, but they’re never “out.” Which has profound implications for how we decide when it’s time for us to get out. Obama never mentioned this complexity because this wasn’t an address to the Joint Chiefs; this was a Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech.

Again, his difficulty here was rhetorical.

I don’t know who Obama’s speech writers are, but this one seemed to have been the labor of a long night flight to Oslo.

And when he finally turned to give his advice for achieving a “just and lasting peace,” he had three things on his mind: 1) developing alternatives to violence; 2) achieving a peace based on “the inherent rights and dignity of every individual;” 3) insuring that such a peace secures economic rights for all.

But all I could think of, all I could hear, as the plan unfolded was Obama’s commitment to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Which makes his peace rhetoric a bit more rhetorical than it ought to have been.

The speech was interrupted by applause only once, and the audience seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable with what was unfolding before them. Maybe they were beginning to understand that an American president is commander-in-chief of an aggressive nation traditionally and perennially committed to war, and that even though many things have changed in this country to elect such a man as Barack Obama, the essential international mission of our country—that we must police the world—has not changed, and that the spirit of this singular and talented man would be unable to represent the spirit of the Nobel Peace Prize in any speech that aimed for honesty.

So Obama did what he had to do. No one can envy him his task here. He separated himself from the marquee peace-makers that came before him—the Dalai Lama’s absence from his remarks was glaring, but Obama was in a difficult position again, having earlier bowed to China’s demands to postpone meeting His Holiness when he traveled to Washington in the Fall—and reminded his audience that he is, in fact, a war-maker, like practically every President before him.

It was a sobering message, I am sure, for the Nobel people to hear, but someone had to tell them.

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

2009-12-06T11:36:33-06:00

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

2009-11-12T14:45:11-06:00

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

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

ROBERT THURMAN, ONCE AGAIN, ON TIBET, CHINA, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

2009-11-07T09:55:44-06:00

The indefatigable Robert Thurman on Tibet, China, and the simple question, 'Why the Dalai Lama matters.' And atheism, and the political right, and anything else that crosses his mind and fall within the wide arena of Tibet and His Holiness.

WELCOME TO TIBETSPACE

2009-11-07T09:46:10-06:00

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

2009-11-03T11:25:34-06:00

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!

2009-11-01T15:26:56-06:00

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

2009-10-31T12:14:23-05:00

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.

GOING GREEN: CHINA AT THE FOREFRONT

2009-10-30T12:24:06-05:00

China has emerged recently as one of the leaders of the Green Revolution, and while none of these innovations are showing up on the Tibetan plateau, they do point to the fact that financial incentives to protect and repair the environment, wisely conceived, will command more attention than ideological ones. With just over a month to go before the climate change conference in Copenhagen, it's well to remind ourselves that behavioral changes--how we live our daily lives--must find creative ways to partner with the larger corporate structures that have been loathe to accept innovations that effect their profit margin.

Climate change, of course, directly impacts human rights, which is why the UN on March 28, 2008, issued a resolution stating as much (7/23). The resolution declares unequivocally that the world's poor have "limited adaptation capacities" when faced with catastrophic climate change, and that specific areas of the world are particularly vulnerable. The UN recognizes further that "low-lying and other small island countries, countries with low-lying coastal, arid and semi-arid areas or areas liable to floods, drought and desertification, and developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change."

In other words, countries in Asia and Africa, and places like Tibet, would be at special risk, not only because of the geographical conditions of these regions, but more importantly because of the population's limited ability to respond effectively to the changing conditions.

We have reached a critical period now when workers in the human rights vineyard must partner with those in the fields of climate change. Their goal is the same: to protect human life and to insure that the human community enjoys the fundamental set of rights and liberties that free societies have historically claimed as their birthright. The notion of social responsibility now includes insuring a viable and life-sustaining ecosystem--that's also part of our birthright, and it's a relatively new amendment to it, but it's one that is currently having an impact on all of our endeavors.

To learn more about these matters, consult the website maintained by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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

2009-10-28T10:46:59-05:00

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.

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.
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.
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.