Historic Find on Prime Video

In the spring of 1969, John Frankenheimer, a director known for technical and artistic innovation, a mastery of action sequences, and an enduring interest in stories of self-transformation through extreme pressure, and a first-rate cast and crew, carrying a script by Dalton Trumbo, arrived in Afghanistan to begin shooting a 31/2 hour epic called, The Horsemen.

Due to studio resistance, the epic film envisioned by Frankenheimer was not to be. Instead, a 2-hour version was created and opened in U.S. cinemas in June of 1971. The Horsemen generated little interest in America and it was rapidly pushed out for more reliable summertime movies. It was better received overseas, winning a Triomphe award for best director in France.

The movie is based on the book, Les Cavaliers, by Joseph Kessel, published in 1967. It was a bestseller in France. Columbia bought the movie rights for $150,000 – real money in the late 1960s.

Jack Palance and Omar Sharif have the primary roles, with Palance playing Sharif’s father and a tribal chief. Leigh Taylor-Young, an emerging star, has an important role that reflects the position of women in Afghan society.

The Horsemen is now available on Amazon Prime Video. It is gorgeous visually. It was shot on real analog film by masters of their craft. Claude Renoir is credited as the cinematographer, but some Afghan footage was reputedly shot by James Wong Howe. Although the credits state that the movie was shot with Panavision cameras, there is some evidence that Super Panavision was used.

The film opens with breathtaking aerial views of the Afghan landscape. Soon after the camera wanders the streets filming the unscripted activities of real people living real life. It seems the Afghan people would bet on anything. We are treated to a fight to the death between two camels with heavy wagering by the surrounding crowd. The actors and the story are seamlessly integrated with the action on the street.

The entire film is an exercise in filmmaking mastery. It was a favorite of John Frankenheimer. His intent was to bring together his strengths in a single film. He had one group of films known for their action – like The Manchurian Candidate – and another group known for their intimacy – like The Birdman of Alcatraz.

In that way, The Horsemen succeeds. The action sequences make the big screen spectacle we’ve come to expect from Hollywood, but the story deepens from there.

Human flaws and virtues, and the possibility, but not the certainty, of transformation, are at the heart of the story. These are powerfully revealed by the performances of Palance, Sharif, and Taylor-Young.

Spectacle and intimacy in one film: The Horsemen.

The Horsemen plot revolves around a brutal game that is of great importance in Afghan society – buzkashi. This game involves men on horseback and the headless carcass of a calf. To win, the carcass must be carried past a goal.

By the way, a headless calf carcass is an awkward, heavy thing. Hard to handle standing still, much less while riding a horse as other riders are doing their best to take the carcass, dismount you, and generally harass you with extreme prejudice.

The game sometimes lasts weeks. They beat one another and their horses mercilessly. Buzkashi often produces severe injuries and even death.

Because of its uniqueness and the bloody primitive nature of it, buzkashi was one of the few things that people might know about Afghanistan.

Jack Palance’s character had been a legendary player in his youth. Sharif’s character, his son, desperately desires to demonstrate his own prowess by winning the game at the center of the story.

I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say that the outcome of the game is what drives the rest of the story.

Omar Sharif’s horsemanship is truly impressive. He does most of the riding himself. As a viewer should, you get caught up in watching the game and its turns, its ups and downs. Yet even being emotionally invested in the action, it’s hard not to be impressed by the obvious challenges of filming.

The result on screen conveys the speed, challenge, merciless brutality, and incredible skill of the riders and their mounts. It is an impressive demonstration of action sequence mastery.

John Frankenheimer complained of the difficulties of filming in Afghanistan: the heat, the lack of infrastructure, the threat of military action, and the language barrier. The crew organized a raffle for a car to attract 5,000 extras for a scene. 300,000 showed up. The army had to be summoned to dispel the crowd.

The Afghanistan shoot lasted only a few months. Production of The Horsemen paused for work on other projects. Production resumed later in Spain.

The Afghan footage in The Horsemen is very likely the highest quality film shot in the country before the Soviets invaded just ten years later. Much of the film could have been shot 500 years in the past. Early in the film there’s a single shot of Palance’s character looking up in the sky at a jet. It’s enough to suggest that the traditional tribal life in Afghanistan – which is medieval in many respects - is coming up against contemporary reality.

For viewers today, The Horseman offers a full-color, high fidelity window into a way of life that had existed for many generations. For that reason alone, the film has historic value.

It also tells an engaging human story with universal relevance in an exotic and unfamiliar world where family honor is the highest value.

I would love to see the 31/2 hour epic John Frankenheimer wanted to make. Alas, that is not to be.

But I’m grateful for The Horsemen he did create and that you can watch today, as crisp and bright as it was in 1971, on Amazon Prime Video.

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B6SD49HL/ref=atv_hm_D4dtpS_1_55

https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/54301

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horsemen_(1971_film)

The Dogs of Vlora

The Dogs of Vlora

Are not the dogs of war

The Dogs of Vlora

are the dogs

of peace and tranquility

Mostly they are Buddhist

but some claim

no creed or sect

The Dogs of Vlora

do not beg, whine or whimper

They humbly accept

the refuse of the world

for sustenance

By day they rest

in silent meditation

for all to see

By night they sing

the sacred names

for all to hear

The Dogs of Vlora

are not the dogs of war

That Boy Looked At Me!

It was a bright sunny day in February so I drove to my favorite spot on the beach. There were only a few vehicles in the small lot. I parked between two SUVs near the entrance to the wooden walkway built above the dunes. The wide sandy beach was almost empty. I sat on a bench in front of the dunes and read my book.

After a half-hour the wind came up suddenly, as if a switch had been turned. The sun was warm. The water was cold and the wind blowing in from the sea made it too chilly for me, so I went to a small square deck built on the side of the walkway and sat in the back corner of the bench protected from the wind.

I put my book aside and leaned my head back soaking in the clear winter sunlight. Soon I heard the sounds of walking from the beach A small girl, maybe 4 years old, was running and skipping across the planks of the walkway, as small girls do.

She saw me over in the corner and stopped. We looked at one another. She was wide open in heart, mind and body. Simply delighted to be alive, experiencing herself and whatever she encountered. At that moment, I was in exactly the same state.

She skipped/ran a short distance toward the parking lot, and then turned around as a man and a woman came into view, presumably her parents. They were both tall and broad. Large humans. The woman might have been pregnant. They didn’t linger but kept right on towards the parking lot. My impression was that they were preoccupied in some way.

As the little girl approached them she said, with joy, “That boy looked at me!” I heard in her words a sense of accomplishment.

The grown-ups didn’t say anything, didn’t change stride, and they all continued on their way.

It seemed to me that what the little girl was really saying was, “that boy saw me!”, and maybe she wasn’t being fully seen so much lately.

Now maybe for her, at her age, anyone not a girl or a woman, is ‘a boy’. I don’t know. Anyone else would likely describe me as ‘a man’ or ‘an older man’.

But what she saw in me was that same innocent openness in her. She saw a boy. And that boy saw her, too.

Germany and Ukraine

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/27/europe-germany-defense-russia-ukraine/

What Germany is doing is important and this article explains why. Just a few comments.

Getting more modern small arms and ammo into Ukraine can be done easily and rapidly. The beauty of most modern arms overall is that you don't have to be a genius or highly trained to use them effectively. Stinger missiles: point and fire. Heat seeker does the rest.

There's a great scene in Charlie Wilson's War when barefoot Afghans take down the first Soviet helicopter with a Stinger. Soon after, dozens were brought down, and the Soviets withdrew in defeat. (A lesson the US should have taken more seriously before the protracted and costly debacle there.)

Less happily, we saw the same dynamic in Blackhawk Down, as the Somalis deployed Stingers to deadly effect against US helicopters.

***

There are two contradictory yet complimentary sides to the German character. First and foremost they are an eminently practical and organized people. Even after the Red Army brutalized the Germans in WWII, and the Soviet system and secret police oppressed East Germany for decades, the Germans traded with the Russians because it was good for Germany.

But the transgressions, brutality and oppression the Russians inflicted on the Germans have not been erased from memory. Russia's invasion of Ukraine revives these wounds. The stories and horrors of grandparents and parents live on. Until provoked, Germany was happy to forgive and forget.

This brings out the other big element in Germany's character. There is a deep and ancient vein of romanticism, of mysticism, of harmony with nature. Germans are enthusiastic nudists and sun worshippers. And a part of that German character is a fierce warlike nature. A paradox of harmony with nature is harmony with nature's unemotional but ferocious lethality. 'Nature, red in tooth and claw.'

Putin may well have awakened a sleeping dragon and all of her sisters.

The World of Peaky Blinders Addendum

In my highly compressed account of early 20th century history, I would be remiss to fail to note the increasing power of women in social, economic and political change. The shortage of men during and after WWI meant that women had to take on roles formerly dominated by men. When women banded together so that their voices were heard in the temperance movement and the struggle for voting rights, things changed. And they continue to change.

In addition to the expanded power of women in collective life, there were numerous and momentous developments in the arts and sciences. I'll mention just a few.

In art, there was Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, the surrealists including Salvador Dali, and many others. In writing there was Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jean Paul Sartre, Fredrick Nietze, Albert Camus, and many more.

In music, Igor Stravinsky, George Gerwhin, Claude Debussy, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Jean Sibelius, Scott Joplin, and many more.

Many influential musicians appeared in these years. In American music, and popular music worldwide, few were more influential than Louis Armstrong in Jazz, Robert Johnson in Blues, and Hank Williams in Country music.

In the sciences, it was one breakthrough after another. It is perhaps impossible to overstate the importance of Marie Curie or the price she paid for her accomplishments. The list is long. Her efforts to get radiography equipment to wounded soldiers in WWI saved lives and limbs. Her experiments and breakthroughs with radiation helped to lay the foundation for later work in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in different fields, physics and chemistry, an achievement only matched by one other person, Linus Pauling.

Most likely her exposure to radiation led to later illness and early death. Even during her life there was reluctance to recognize her efforts. She was pilloried for her personal life in ways that no man would ever be.

Many more women have also contributed to scientific advancement but they have been chronically under-recognized. Only very recently has this begun to change.

No scientist was more famous or influential than Albert Einstein whose groundbreaking paper on special relativity was published in 1905 along with three other papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the equivalence of mass and energy.

Einstein contributed to quantum mechanics (the most accurately predictive scientific theory so far) along with Wernet Heisenberg, Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli, Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, John von Neumann, Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman and many others.

As everyone knows, these scientific developments led to the atomic bomb and the harnessing of atomic power for the generation of electricity.

There is a similarly long list of innovations and breakthroughs in the life sciences. Among the most significant are the developments of vaccines and antibiotics. Before flu vaccines were available, the so-called Spanish flu spread worldwide during the WWI years and killed many more people than combat did. Smallpox, measles and mumps were constant threats. Bacterial infections meant that even a minor wound could be fatal. Penicillin, the first widely available antibiotic, saved many lives and limbs during WWII.

***

The economic and political world I surveyed in the earlier email mattered then and matters now. Yet the artistic, scientific, and technological changes which have accelerated and multiplied exponentially throughout the entire 20th Century have arguably been the most powerful factors improving human life.

The World of Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders is an acclaimed BBC television series. Netflix has the first five seasons of it. Episode 1 of Season 6 has just premiered on BBC. My good friend Norman and I are watching it on Netflix. Today he said he didn’t understand the historical context of the show and how such a gang could have arisen.

So I sent him this email.

Norm, I'm going to try to give a brief rundown of history that may give you a better context for understanding Peaky Blinders. It will be good practice for me.

1850-1910 was the peak of the Industrial Revolution which changed the world. It was powered by coal, oil, steel and the railroads. It led to the creation of the first huge modern fortunes, like Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Their first product was kerosene in standardized cans. This replaced whale oil to light people's homes and businesses. Rockefeller also bought and controlled the railroads that transported the kerosene.

Andrew Carnegie, a Scot, made US Steel which allowed construction of railroads, bridges, locomotives, and tall buildings. Both he and Rockefeller bought up competitors or eliminated them by whatever means were necessary. They also ruthlessly exploited workers with 6 and 7 day weeks, 12 hour work days, child labor, and low pay.

A similar thing happened with coal mining. Parallel developments were happening in England. The coal mining there was centered in Wales. You can drive through Wales today and the land is covered with huge piles and mountains of slag leftover from mining.

Huge fortunes were created which endure to this day, millions of people were exploited, and improved living conditions did not filter down to the masses. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the works which established the principles of socialism and communism. There were other important thinkers and activists, too, including Eugene Debs in America.

These ideas were enormously attractive and compelling throughout the world, but especially in England, Europe, including Russia, and America. They were influential in the creation of labor unions. There were huge violent and deadly battles between union members and the private armies of the capitalists and owners in the early 1900s.

In those early years of the 20th century, automobiles were invented and the names of Henry Ford, Daimler Benz, and Ferdnand Porsche were etched into history. Porsche's very first car was electric! A huge monstrous thing. Ford revolutionized the world with mass production. (Henry Ford was a big time racist and supported the Nazis along with an important preacher to crowds and on radio named Father Coughlin.)

Teddy Roosevelt started the trust busting in America which broke up the Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly and others. Automobiles were welcomed as an antidote to the streets of big cities which were knee deep rivers of mud and horse shit. Millions of dead horses were a real problem. Automobiles were welcomed as a cleaner and more sanitary solution.

The innovations of Tesla and Edison electrified the world and ended the mass slaughter of whales. Dangerous open flames powered by kerosene were replaced by smokeless electric lights while the automobile industry, diesel locomotives and ships, and skyscrapers consumed mass quantities of steel, oil, granite, and concrete.

The crowded northern cities of Birmingham and Manchester were seen as the prime examples of the evils of predatory capitalism. They were hotbeds of labor unions and socialist/communist sympathies. The towns were ugly, noisy, dirty and crowded. Living conditions were awful. It was even worse in the smaller Welsh mining towns, Work days were long and dangerous in the short and long term. The entire north and west of England was polluted.

The police everywhere were on the side of the owners and in their pockets. The police were seen as mortal enemies of ordinary people for good reason.

Various organized criminal gangs were already established in European and American cities. The Sicilian mafia came over from Italy and became templates for the formation and operation of other gangs from different countries and societies. Gypsies (the name comes from 'Egyptian' - the gypsies, or Romanians, liked to imply they had ancient and mystical roots) were established throughout the civilized and industrialized world. Their strong internal family traditions and loyalties endure to this day. Gambling, fortune telling, pickpocketing, prostitution, small scale theft and cons - all were profitable crimes preying on universal human weaknesses. The other gangs operated similarly.

Then in 1914, following an assassination in Serbia, the completely unnecessary WWI is in full swing. That's a whole other story, but it was due to the hubris and wounded pride of the Great European powers, including Russia. It was the first industrialized war and the toll in deaths and maimed fighters was in the many millions.

Meanwhile the circumstances of a weakened czar, awful conditions for regular Russians, a defanged Russian military and the organizing ability of Lenin and others, the Bolsheviks prevailed, and Russia became the first Communist state. There were conflicts and it took a few years for Lenin's contingent to consolidate power. England covertly supported forces challenging Lenin, but they were unsuccessful.

Many in Europe and America supported the Russian Revolution and the ideals and aims of Communism and socialism. Thinkers, artists, and labor union leaders were swept up in the vision of a worldwide Revolution, the triumph of the people over the capitalists.

The brutalities of the Bolsheviks, the mass slaughter and purges of Stalin, and the overall failure of Communism to live up to ideals and objectives, led many, if not most, of these early supporters to renounce their support. Many of these artists later became the targets of Senator Joe McCarthy's efforts and were prohibited from earning a living for many years until McCarthy was denounced and his government backed witch hunt was ended.

The time after the war was called the Lost Generation. This was the millions of young European men killed and lost forever.. There were few young men remaining in good health.The consequences of this lost generation were tremendous.

It is in this environment that the Peaky Blinders and similar gangs flourished in England. WWI produced few surviving heroes. This is why Tommy Shelby's character enjoyed high esteem in that society, even with the police and politicians.

It was in this time that spiritualism enjoyed an expanded popularity and practice throughout Europe. Mothers and sweethearts wanted to contact the dead boys and men. Charlatans (and gypsies) took advantage of these tragic yearnings. Religious and mystical interest soared in Europe

There was an abundance of young fertile women and a shortage of young men. The results were predictable.

America was resented due to the fact that it escaped the ravages of WWI as well as the massive casualties. Yet it was entirely the entrance of American men and resources that ended the slaughter in Europe.

In the aftermath of the war and massive relentless death, people wanted life and pleasure. Prohibition in America generated another round of huge fortunes from smuggled liquor - including that of Joseph Kennedy, the origins of Kennedy wealth.

It also generated the allure of the stock market as a way for regular people to enjoy the possibility of wealth. And, of course, there were those who took advantage of the rush to buy stocks and made their own fortunes on the dreams and greed of millions.

We have then the Roaring Twenties. And they were roaring. This is the time of the Great Gatsby, of big luxurious and fast motorcars, jazz music, flappers abandoning long hair and long dresses, smoking cigarettes and drinking in public, excess in all regards.

Although WWI had created a horror of war and a universal desire to avoid such suffering at all costs, the forces were almost unavoidably building toward WWII, first and foremost the draconian war reparation costs that the allies had imposed on Germany.

The Twenties Roared. German suffering and resentment grew.

Then came the great crash of 1929. Fortunes quickly made vanished overnight. The whole world tumbled into Depression.

While FDR conceived and implemented the New Deal, Hitler's Nazi Party took over Germany, Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria, Mao Tse Tung was growing the Communist Party in China, and in short order, the path to WWII emerged from the turbulence.

Malcolm X

I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was a freshman in high school. It wasn’t an assignment. I can’t recall exactly what motivated me to read it. I’d been an insatiable reader since I’d learned how to read and that curiosity might have been enough.

I admired Mohammed Ali and might have wanted to learn more about Islam because of that, or my interest might have been a consequence of my interest in all religious traditions. Besides that, the civil rights movement was a constant feature of my childhood. But that movement was something I experienced mostly in the news, on TV, or in the papers. Race relations never had much visibility or heat in the small coastal town in North Carolina where I grew up.

My mother worked mornings, half days, so until I entered kindergarten a black woman took care of me during those hours. I remember her vividly (her name I’ll withhold in respect of her privacy) as a warm and kind woman. I was small, of course, and can recall her washing me in the stainless steel double sink (that my mother was very proud of) until I was too big for that and had to use the tub.

Her husband came around and helped my Dad with yard work and other things sometimes. They seemed like members of the extended family. Beyond the times when they were working we didn’t socialize or share any other activities.

The town was obviously segregated but I don’t remember any separate public facilities. Public schools were integrated by the time I entered first grade. It seems to me that blacks and whites shopped and ate in the same places. There just was no big tension about it in the local area.

The white people in the town, the adults and the kids, threw around the word, ‘nigger’, and similar words without much restraint or caution. If my younger brother or I used such words it was a guaranteed spanking, or even worse, stinging swipes with a switch torn from a weeping willow tree in the yard, punishment that left marks on the legs, the mind, and the heart..

My father and his father were believers and practitioners of corporal punishment. Fortunately, for my brother and me, that kind of punishment was rare and reserved for the worst offenses.

Nearby, further inland in tobacco and cotton country, it was a different story. When we drove to Raleigh for shopping we passed through Smithfield on the way. Entering that town there was a big billboard with a white robed Klansman on his white robed horse. The horse reared up and the Klansman held a lance extending above the billboard edge.

The billboard read, ‘Welcome to Ku Klux Klan Country’.

It made me ashamed and angry to see such things, to see the violence and discrimination on TV, and feel the prejudice and bigotry around me. I really didn’t understand that ignorance, that strength of emotion, and the senseless violence that people could inflict on one another.

When riots broke out in cities around the country, when the Black Panthers and others raised their voices, when Martin Luther King, Jr. marched and asked people to look in the mirror and ask themselves if it was right to treat people badly because of the color of their skin, and when there was resistance to the movements toward greater equality, fairness and justice, I wanted to understand it all better.

So maybe that was part of my motivation to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His story helped me to understand the culture and society he grew up in, so much different from my own. I grew to admire him for the commitment and discipline he exerted to turn his life around and to resist the dysfunctional society that surrounded him and eventually sent him to prison.

His story led me to further investigate and appreciate the religion of Islam. I was impressed with the way that Malcolm X resisted blind acceptance of the Nation of Islam. He saw the faults. He was willing to change his mind, and his heart, in the light of new information. The hajj changed him. No longer did he see all whites as devils. No longer did he believe that the only way that the races could flourish was by living separately.

In time, through life experience and focused study, he rose from a low and painful life with little prospect for a better future, and became an impressive, thoughtful, and courageous man.

In much the same way as Gordon Parks serves as a role model, as a person to aspire toward, so does Malcolm X.

The legacy of both of these men will endure and inspire positive change for a long time to come.

Consciousness and Morality

A friend sent me this link.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220216-the-man-rethinking-the-definition-of-reality

It's a very good summary of David Chalmers' life and thought. Throughout, the parallels with ancient mystical insight are nontrivial. For example, there is the contention that the world - external reality - is an illusion. The flat out recognition of this fact, this truth, is the first important step toward enlightenment, toward liberation from the shackles of this illusion we call 'the world'.

This precisely corresponds to Neo's awakening in The Matrix. Most people are more than happy to be immersed in the illusion, to experience and behave as if it's all real and meaningful, money, success, failure, the entire material world and external reality. But when you awaken, when you see that it's all really hollow, a series of nested veils like Russian dolls, then you're freed from the suffering and anxiety, freed from the 'golden chains' of attachment to what seems like such a concrete and compelling reality: 'the world'.

It is directly from this kind of awakening that a person grasps the deeper truth beyond and behind the illusion (or simulation - same thing, different words) that the meaning and significance of life is all internal, it's inside you, and you do control that. Your experience can be hollow, shallow, an intoxicating roller coaster ride chained to external events, or your experience can be solid and powerful, anchored to your stable and calm consciousness, undisturbed by the ups, downs, and sideways movements of the world around you, like an endlessly entertaining performance.

Then comes the second liberation, the second awakening. You see that - the illusion is the reality after all! Because for most people, most of the time, it is. And their experiences, their attachments, their joys and sorrows, their fears and desires, are completely real to them. That's no illusion!

Instead, that is their internal, subjective real experience, not some distant or abstract fantasy, but rock solid reality, invoking pain and pleasure as the case may be.

And I should note that the yogis, the sages of all flavors, recognized all this long ago, these buddhas and bodhisattvas. They developed a highly nuanced science of consciousness with an understanding of the different stages and degrees of realization and liberation, an index of samadhi and moksha, and a knowledge of how to navigate these various stages and modes of being.

Along with the millennia of accumulated wisdom is a profound awareness of the dangers and pitfalls along the path. Perhaps one reason that most people never take 'the red pill' is some intuitive awareness that there is danger that way. Having your whole understanding of life and the world shattered can be disorienting and disturbing. Some people are not ready for unguided psychedelic experience, whether induced by drugs or some other means.

To employ another contemporary and popular mythology, the Force has a dark side, and it's very seductive. If you see beyond the illusion, you also gain the power to manipulate and exploit people, like Jim Jones or Amrit Desai (Kripalu) - or Facebook!

You have many others - perhaps most - like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation, with a mixed legacy. That influence had a positive effect on many people, including George Harrison, David Lynch, and Ray Daliio. (This discussion makes me think of George's composition on Sgt. Pepper's, which I love, 'Within You and Without You'.)

There is one other important element. You alluded to it in your writing about the sangha, the community, or in Muslim terms, the uma. This is the political ramification of spiritual awakening. Referring now to the Matrix myth, there is nothing more threatening to the status quo, to those in power, than a spiritually awakening person. Even more than someone who is merely 'woke' in social justice terms. (I so very dislike the term, 'woke'. It is grammatically incorrect and inelegant. It is also inaccurate and sonorously discordant to my ears.)

Most threatening of all is a group, a community, of awakened and morally committed people. Spiritual awakening does necessarily include a powerful moral component.

There are three images, actual real photographs, that led directly to the end of the American involvement in the Viet Nam war.

The first is the South Vietnamese general who summarily executed a man with a shot to the side of his head with his revolver on the street in Saigon.

The second is the young suffering girl stumbling along the road in agony, with her clothes burned off her body, her entire naked body scorched by Napalm.

The third is the Buddhist monk, one of many who did the same thing, who had doused his body in kerosene, and sat calmly as he set himself on fire. A self-induced Napalm experience.

How do you understand a person who does that? What is the emotion, the commitment, the discipline that can induce a person to do that? IMO, it was that powerful and perplexing question that had even more impact than the other two images. You just couldn't wrap your mind around that degree of passion for peace and an end to suffering. It was Christ in real time, in real life, right in front of your eyes, on the TV in your living room, an unforgettable example of a single human's power and possibility rising to the level of the divine, above and beyond all limits. This was the embodiment of nonviolent protest at its most extreme, and perhaps its most effectiveness. There was more than a single monk who did this. I don't know how many. But imagine a small army, or an entire sangha or uma, so willing to employ self-sacrifice for the cause of peace and social justice. This was the strategy of Mahatma Gandhi, later mimicked by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, too.

There was a powerful historical resonance in this act as well. In Europe some humans burned other humans 'at the stake' for 'practising witchcraft' or for expressing heresy in defiance of the Holy Roman Church's orthodoxy. The Inquisition really happened. This kind of brutal and tortuous response to people who deviate from the norm, who challenge the status quo, who expand the possibilities of human potential, have often been the subjects of shunning, isolation, oppression, imprisonment, torture and death. This fearful and violent response to deviation is one reality that is integral to the imagined worlds of the Matrix films and the Sense8 series. These imagined worlds are not so far removed from the real world as they might first appear.

Unfortunately, and exactly opposite to such principled self-sacrifice, today we have suicide bombers expressing their politics through violence against others. We overestimate their threat. Suicide bombing or suicidal attacks by other means (like 9/11) are self-limiting with little possibility of widespread popularity or practise. Instead of inspiring self-sacrifice for the greater good, they inspire revulsion and condemnation.

Today in the United States the tendency toward violence to serve political and/or cultural purposes is most pronounced and most visible on the far Right. People can say one thing in a poll yet never seriously consider taking action. Still, a disturbing cross section of the population demonstrated an all too eager willingness to cross the lines of peaceful expression on January 6th, 2021. How far will the most extreme go and what responses might they trigger? Don't forget Oklahoma City. Could we see a group of committed Christian MAGA suicide bombers? Could we see more politically motivated killings of civilians?

There is no equivalence between the January 6th insurrectionists and Black Life Matters protesters. The first group sought to overturn the most legitimate election in US history and do physical, even fatal, harm to our elected representatives. They attacked the police without restraint or mercy.

BLM protestors did a lamentable amount of property damage but almost no damage to people. They were defensibly protesting uncalled for violence by the police against black and brown people, violence that included torture and murder. They had no intention to harm. Their intention was to reduce unnecessary harm.

Those who attempt to describe equivalence between BLM protests and January 6th rebellion are insincere. Any such equivalence is false. They are not the same in any way. except perhaps that both involved upset people. One set was upset by long standing patterns of injustice. The other set was upset by not getting their way in a free and fair election.

Making such distinctions is the obligation of spiritually awakened people committed to the truth.

If one takes the expanded view that the true sangha, the entire uma, is all people, all sentient, feeling beings, all plants, animals, rocks, oceans and galaxies, all of creation, past, present and forevermore, then political and moral activism become an integral requirement of the spiritual path. There is no middle, no halfway, no permanent escape to a mountaintop, a cave in the Himalayas, or an island in the tropics. Like the Buddhist monks who went up in flames, the marchers with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. a spiritual life, a moral life, an inner realization, is expressed in action.

It is all maya, illusion, simulation.

Yet it is all Truth, as well.

One can realize both

We are either all in this together or we're not.

One way leads to a world of enlightened interdependence reducing suffering and increasing fulfillment for all.

Another way leads to a world of ignorance, selfishness, pain, and deprivation for most with riches and power for a few.

Which world do you choose?

Gordon Parks

One of the great creative forces of our times has recently passed from our world. Gordon Parks has long been a hero of mine, a role model whose many accomplishments continue to humble and inspire me. I’ve just begun reading the first of several autobiographies he wrote A Choice of Weapons.

The more I learn of his early life the more his later success impresses me.

I really can’t do the man justice. I can only say that if you don’t know about him, take a moment and google Gordon Parks. Look at some of the powerful photography he produced. Consider his breakthrough films. And respect his lifelong struggle for justice, understanding and beauty.

Democracy

I wrote the following in response to the NYT essay about secession:

'It continues to grate upon my sense of democracy, of the idea that 'we the people' are really in charge, real time, right now, of our reality and our destiny. Are we instead permanently shackled by some genuinely half-baked ideas from the 18th century? By badly written and poorly thought out laws?

Isn't the principle that we can create the societies and institutions we really want the governing principle? Besides the idea of secessions, why the heck can we not eliminate the absurd electoral college along with the supremely undemocratic filibuster? Rather than promote and champion the underlying and guiding principles and values that led to the creation of the United States it seems that instead we refuse to modify or eliminate those characteristics that are in direct opposition to those principles and values.'

This law professor has the same questions, objections and ideas about what needs fixing in our system. It seems so damn obvious if you accept the idea that democracy means self-governance by the majority. Anything that disempowers that majority power is anti-democratic.

It's only a small part of this essay, but the professor, by quoting Madison, raises the fundamental flaw in the Constitution that I identified in my comment on the secession essay:

'I'm no scholar, but this tension between states rights and federal power seems to endure, never to have been resolved in any conclusive way. It has never, never made the least bit of sense to me that what is legal in California is illegal in Texas. That's no way to run a country, is it?

I don't want to be a citizen of North Carolina or New York first and a citizen of the United States second. I have a US passport, not a NC passport.

It just looks to me like this tension, this relationship, between state and nation screws things up at many levels. I don't see how it helps anything or anyone.

If the structure of things is such that Texas is allowed, even encouraged, to make laws that deviate from US law - what's the point? Everything is fuzzy, vague, ambiguous, unsatisfying, inconclusive.'

'Even Madison conceded that if we thought of the Constitution as a national charter rather than a federal arrangement among sovereign states, “the supreme and ultimate authority” would reside with the majority, which had the power to “alter or abolish its established government.”

Canvas Prints

I love canvas prints! As a test, recently I had quite a few of the images on this website printed on canvas. Some are 12 x 18, some are 11 x 14, some are 16 x 20, and a few are 24 x 36.

They are sharp and clear. The colors are true. I’m especially pleased by the accurate reproductions of subtler, less saturated colors. The canvas enhances the painterly qualities I’m aiming for in some of the images.

I like the fact that canvas prints are a complete object, ready to hang. They require no frame and no glass. They’re economical and unpretentious.

The images in the Surfaces gallery I visualize as very large prints presenting as abstract paintings, appropriate for the walls of contemporary homes and offices with large open spaces.

I - we - have become so conditioned to seeing images on screen and it’s necessary for work and pleasure. But converting the image from a digital file to a physical object makes a difference. I like to see my images on screen, but I love seeing them on canvas