The limits of eloquence

By Michael Kinsley

America’s proper role in promoting democracy and freedom in the world was a big issue in the 2000 presidential election. One of the candidates was a Wilsonian idealist, arguing that the prestige and even the military strength of the United States should be used to remake other governments in our image. The other candidate was contemptuous of this woolly-minded notion, saying that U.S. blood and treasure should be spent only in humanitarian emergencies or to protect our own narrowly defined self-interest.

The idealist won the election, in the opinion of many. But the skeptic took office. And then, guess what? The skeptic became a woolly-minded idealist. Democracy’s a funny thing.

President Bush’s recent speech committing the United States to a “forward strategy of freedom,” declaring that “the advance of freedom is ... the calling of our country,” and that “freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for” (an odd anticlimax, by the way) is being heralded as eloquent. Which it is. Some of the finest eloquence that money can buy. A beautiful endorsement of an activist foreign policy that goes beyond protecting our interests to advancing our values.

The eloquence would be more impressive if there were reason to suppose that Bush thinks the words have meaning. One test of meaning is the future: what the words lead to. As even some admirers of the speech point out, the details of this “forward strategy of freedom” are missing, except for pursuing our current military adventure in Iraq—which was sold to the country on totally non-Wilsonian grounds. But meaning can also be tested by looking at the past. Eloquence is just a hooker if it will serve as a short-term, no-commitments release for any idea that comes along.

In 2000 Bush said that the Clinton-Gore administration had been reckless in overcommitting the United States, and the military in particular, to exercises in “nation building.” By that he meant trying to establish institutions of democratic government and civil society. The intervention in Somalia, for example, begun by Bush’s father, “started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission and that’s where the mission went wrong.” Just as with his current, nearly opposite philosophy, Bush stated the principle in the categorical terms of someone who has adopted it and checked it off his list without diving for subtleties. Preventing starvation: good. Overthrowing the occasional dictator: well, okay. Nation-building: bad. ‘‘Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be. I think the United States must be humble ... in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” One way to show your respect for democracy is to state your beliefs when running for office and then apply those same beliefs when you’re elected. Nevertheless, it can be quite noble for a politician to change his or her mind. It can demonstrate courage, integrity, open-mindedness. Has Bush changed his mind on America’s role in the world? Or is it all just words—was there no mind to change?

One simple test of a change of mind is whether it is acknowledged and explained. In his eloquent speech this month, Bush made a gutsy reference to “sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East.” This was taken as a near-explicit criticism of his own father, among others. But there is every reason to suppose that our current Bush also supported this approach for most of those 60 years, including his entire adult life until a few months ago when Iraq started going bad. What caused the scales to fall from his eyes?

A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.

If you’ve really been thinking about a Big Question recently, you ought to be taking recent evidence into account. But Bush’s eloquent speech is stuck in 1989. In Europe and Asia and “every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace,” he declared. We used to think like that, before Bosnia and Kosovo. These episodes taught us that free people will sometimes vote for bloodshed that the previous government was able to suppress. This doesn’t undo the case for democracy and freedom, but it complicates that case. Acknowledging and addressing such complications is another way to demonstrate that your change of mind is sincere.

And what should you do if you are a supporter of a politician who changes his mind on one of the fundamental questions of democratic government? George W. Bush’s powers of persuasion are apparently so spectacular, at least to some, that almost all the pro-Bush voices in Washington and the media have remained pro-Bush even when “pro-Bush” means the opposite of what it did five minutes ago. The Comintern at the height of its powers, in the 1930s, couldn’t have engineered a more impressive U-turn. If places like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had been as enthusiastic about nation-building back in 2000 as they are now, Al Gore might be president today. Wait a minute. Maybe he is.

Courtesy : LA Times-Washington Post

Lake Fewa’s mighty machine

By Yuyutsu R D Sharma

Sitting on the edge of the Lake Fewa, I re- alized the sacred link has been disconnected. That’s why recently I had to face such an emotional turmoil. In the cities I have suffered alone, and that there exists life beyond the daily drudge comes like a forgotten mantra.

A view of the green hills and flowery fields makes me wonder— How much of my precious self have I lost, suffering like a slave in the cities of the famous fiery dragons?

But at the Lakeside on the Halanchowk Crossroads the first sight that confronted my unease was that of the soldiers patrolling with their mighty guns. I also happen to see in a bookstore my lost Israeli friends, a couple that I had met on the train recently in India. They have just finished a -round-Annapurna-trek. They tell me. “Yes, we met them,” referring to the Maoists in the Gorepani. “But they were just two ordinary looking young Nepali boys. They did ask some money from us but we refused, telling them we didn’t have left much. But from others they took some money. Before you enter Ghorepani you see their Gate, saying, “Welcome to Annapurna, Poon Hill” etc. And moments you come down the Poon Hill, you find them standing there with their receipts….”

Gidi Hubbert is the long-haired handsome man in his mid thirties, and his girlfriend Sarit Yosef is a ravishing gazelle-eyed girl in her late twenties. Gidi has been living in Beneras for the last one year and learning classic Indian music under the guidance of an Indian teacher.

We meet like long-lost friends and they invite me to the Kimchi House on the lakeside to enjoy a hot and spicy Korean dinner on the rooftop overlooking the shimmering waters of the Lake Fewa. Gidi had met Sarit during a trek in Israel and at the Kimchi House the girl asked if they were husband and wife, Sarit had replied with the giggle—‘almost married.’

“Here I am the centre of all attention. All this” he points to the Bazaar on the edge of Lake Fewa. “All this is happening because of me or people like me, but in India it’s different. I am no one there. India is so big that it refuses to accept an influence so easily. It’s in fact a kind of cultural superpower. I mean there is so much happening there that a sprawling chaos sucks you in.”

In the morning I look at the Lake Fewa as I cycle on the road by its side. A military van keeps its regular patrol. On the crossroads at Hallanchowk I had seen soldiers check all the vehicles including the cycle riders. I reached towards Sedi Danda and face with my naked eyes the naked face of the lake. I look at it suspiciously. Is it a foreign object? Do I belong to it? It seems as if I am looking at it like a wolf would have looked at a human being in a dense forest.

There is so much distrust in the air. On an electric poll I read a public notice describing the caution one must take in the Annapurnas on encountering the Maoists. I guess a tourist must have put up the notice. “Don’t get annoyed,” it said. “Bargain instead, just don’t seek a confrontation, it’ll be all right if you can manage to strike a reasonable deal.” I wonder what a new fancy but formidable job a tourist has got now. To bargain with a Maoist. I look at Lake Fewa, like a soldier back at the Crossroads had looked at a civilian, full of distrust, searching the polythene bags and other belongings.

The fuse that links me to the Lake has been blown off. On the blue water of the Lake I see a motorboat moving frantically, as if angry with its quiet, celestial spirit. It seems as if the motorboat will crash itself against the waters of the Lake. Then all of a sudden in the middle of the Lake, the boat comes to an abrupt halt. As if its frantic engine has broken down. Refusing to carry the ongoing struggle with the lake waters.

Helplessly the motorboat wavers in the heart of the watery expanse, appalled at the sudden stop of its mighty engine.

(This writer can be reached at yuyutsurd@yahoo.com )

A different kind of mission

By Susan Campbell

You could see him squirming a little,over at his corner of the head table. Public speaking may not be Bo Ryan’s forte, but as Hartford’s teacher of the year, he’s getting accustomed to standing behind a microphone.

Still. This was Hartford’s sixth prayer breakfast, and Ryan wasn’t offering up a prayer. He planned to talk about love. Other people at the head table in Hartford’s cavernous Expo Center offered prayers or songs. People of Goodwill did their musical part. Love is not a topic completely removed from prayer, but Ryan, a young gym teacher at Clark Elementary School, was with the graceful and heavy hitters of Greater Hartford’s religious world, including Rabbi Philip Lazowski, who for nearly a half-century led Bloomfield’s Beth Hillel Synagogue, and Imam Qasim Sharief, of Muhammad Islamic Center of Hartford, Conn., who with other Muslims is celebrating the fast of Ramadan this month.

For the sixth time in as many years, Hartford’s faithful came together to offer up prayers in turbulent times. Are there any other kind? The one just after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 was particularly poignant, when Gov. John G. Rowland talked about the phone calls he made to the Connecticut families who’d lost someone in the attacks.

Many of Tuesday’s prayers were for the man who delivered the welcome, Hartford’s recently re-elected mayor, Eddie Perez. Tuesday being Veterans Day, the 85th anniversary of the war to end all wars, Linda Mead, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, first thanked the veterans, and then she said: “What a better world we would have if we never had to ask an 18-year-old or a young mother or father to leave the comfort of their homes. What a better world it would be if the steady state was one of peace.” By the time Ryan’s turn came, after prayers from Nirmal Singh and Dr. Amarjeet K. Dargan, and before soprano Jolie Rocke Brown sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” Ryan blew out both cheeks, strode to the microphone and grabbed the hand of William Farley, a longtime Hartford businessman who’s chairman of the committee that organized the breakfast. Ryan bent over the lectern that rather quickly became a pulpit. This could have been painful — these other folks were polished speakers — but in a secular world, Ryan is used to addressing nonbelievers. As a teacher, he’s credited with reaching the toughest kids. Ryan doesn’t write them off; he once was one of those kids.

Despite his recent success, Ryan was kicked out of kindergarten, suspended multiple times from middle school, and moved to attend a prep school after high school because his bad grades made college an unreachable dream. For his turnaround, Ryan thanked his father, a teacher and coach, and his mother, an emergency room nurse, who once dropped him off at a police station so he could get some religion, himself. “She should be here,” he said, as the audience laughed along. “She did a lot of praying when I was growing up.”

Along the way, there were teachers who took an interest, including a pre-calculus instructor who met with a struggling Ryan every day after school. It was, he said, his first A. “I feel I am on some type of mission every single day I go in,” Ryan said. “Twelve of the kids I grew up with, right on my block, ended up in jail. Two got shot. Somebody said, about me, ‘I am going to love this kid.’ We need to look upon ourselves. Are we loving people?” He sat down to as loud applause as any. “Now, if we only had some enthusiasm,” quipped Farley.

Courtesy : LA Times-Washington Post

Look, prove your worth in gold

By DAMARU LAL BHANDARI

Turbulence, of course, is here to stay.

Which means there are too many questions in the mass psyche, with not many knowing the answers. In fact, much the similar questions crowd one’s mind when watching the endless soap operas served by dazzle of television channels. Like politics, which has gained a conspiratorial ring about it and thus takes the breath away, many of them leave you breathless at times.

Widely asked questions off the small screen, of course, are as follows: How long will Prime Minister (Surya Bahadur) Thapa occupy the top chair? Consider this: How long will the regression last? Here’s a plain one: How long will the foreign forces continue disrupting the political process? Last question, of course, is: When is he (Thapa) resigning?

For all practical purposes, anyone who has sympathy towards the current dispensation will certainly not ask: How long will regression last? Neither can you expect him to even ask: How long will the foreign forces continue disrupting the political process? He will certainly never ask: When is he (it’s Thapa, again) resigning?

By the same token, anyone who considers the ascendancy of Thapa to the top post as the unfortunate development will certainly not ask: How long will Prime Minister Thapa occupy the Prime Ministerial chair? You can’t expect him to ask: How long will regression last? He can’t even ask: How long will the foreign forces continue to disrupt the political process? Again he will never ask: When is he (well, it’s Thapa, once again) resigning?

Well the answers to the above set of questions, too, vary according to the person who is doing the asking. Well if you are asked the last question which, of course, is when is Thapa resigning by someone who does not consider him as legitimate Prime Minister at all in the first place, then you are likely to run out not only words but also ideas. That is because the people who have been time and again predicting the fall of Prime Minister Thapa have been found eating their words. He has simply refused to resign out of office. Your answer could be he has been retained by his masters for the time being and will be in place as long as the current constitution does not loose its further relevance.

Adding twist to the tale, Thapa has expressed determination to fight out the rebels and hold elections. There are times when one forgets that he is the same person who presided over the referendum in 1979 the way he expresses unflinching verbal commitment to democracy. I for one will not be surprised if someone declares him Saviour of Democracy some day.

The penultimate question was: How long will the foreign forces continue to disrupt the political process? Here again while an apologist of Thapa may not buy your argument that the current dispensation was the baby born out of foreign intervention in domestic affairs, the detractors may, of course, aver that the scenario might continue as long as the purpose of the intervention is not met.

The purpose can be having a say on anything from water, fire, earth and air. Anyone who knows the value of water and earth and also knows when air and fire are most in demand may not need any further explanation. If anyone needs elaboration, think of future when Nepal may evolve as a base with aircraft taking off with carpet bombers to bomb a, say, Red enemy. Water and earth should not be mysterious elements for us.

The question before the penultimate one was: How long will the regression last? Certainly, since the question cannot be expected to come from anyone who may be apologist of Thapa, one is left to answer a democrat to boot who, in turn, could be expected to ask a couple of questions to anyone who may attribute regression to ambitious constitutional monarch.

It must be conceded here that regression is the culmination of years of misrule. Well, the question is certainly a million dollar one, with far less clues dangling in the air. Whatever one grabs at for possible clues, too, do not lead one to anywhere. Whoever is weaving all this should surely be a genius. Meanwhile, what can be said with complete confidence is even Thapa, too, does not have the answer. He can, however, be expected to tell something about it for inspiration. What is regression for some is revolution for others and herein perhaps lies the answer.

Yet another question was :How long will Thapa occupy the Prime Ministerial chair? This question can come from fence sitters, who do not think they have much stake in politics. In fact, these types of questions come from housewives, who do not have much knowledge about politics yet ask the question to please their hubbies at times. However, this is one of such questions, which has answers implied in it. Thapa will be on that chair as long as someone wants him on it. Plain and simple.

However, it is not as plain and simple as it appears. Thapa did not drive to the Singha Durbar complex on his own. Someone had planned his appointment and demarche long before he dreamt about it in the first place. Hence the unfolding soap opera of election today and talks tomorrow cannot be expected to come to an early end until the one who calls it a day.

Conversely, if it was someone else who planned his arrival, what goes without saying is those who planned his arrival can forecast his departure with precision. If wishes were horses he could be told to pack off by those who are having a hot pot shot at him. They will have to wait for simply a large number of stars to cross the heavens in a brilliant streak of light.

However, there is a way to get rid of him, though and that, of course, will require those rooting for his head to work in a more or less unconventional way as politics goes. One does not extend resignation on silver platter, neither does one even think of it through fair weather. Which means those who identify themselves with rule of law, as the leaders of the political parties avowedly claim, will have to prove their worth in gold.

Spiritual, not religious

By Stuti Basnyet

My God is some power greater than myself who doesn’t judge me,doesn’t test me, does not taunt me, does not tease me, knows what I am, knows where I came from, knows where I am going, and says, ‘’you’re doing fine, kid.’’ -Father Mychal Judge A common assertion of faith you hear or read about at least in the western societies is the amiable but ostensibly simple ‘spiritual, not religious.’’ It’s amazing how often it is expressed in that one verbal formulation. The first time I heard that statement was in an interview featuring Monica Lewinsky, in which when asked if she considered herself a sinner, she replied “I am spiritual, not religious.’’ That’s nice, but what does it mean?

Does it mean, that I believe in God and am seeking spiritual nourishment, but not by the traditional means of going to a synagogue, and certainly not through the synagogue by itself?

What is spirituality in this sense - set up, as it is, opposed to religion? It may appear that there is a clear distinction between religion and spirituality but, substantively, it gets a little harder to identify. One reason why I see being spiritual has become a fad is because for most people (note: I am not referring to people in our part of the globe in this case) spirituality has an unconstrained, open, liberating and democratic “feel” to it, while religion feels rigid, constricting and authoritarian.

The other, more plausible reason why people are likely to say ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’ is because by doing so they instantaneously avoid association with any particular religion. Most of us instantly stereotype and judge other people when they say they are religious, or if they state their religion…Muslim…Christian… Hindu… whatever it may be. ‘Spiritual,’ on the other hand is a term that comes along without any pre-attachment, chiefly because it crosses all religions. So it’s obviously easier to say spiritual, instead of religious.

When people speak of religion or call themselves religious I often wonder what they are implying. For me it is very important to make a distinction between religion in its inner and outer framework. The traditional definition of religion sums it up as a complex of three C’s, Code stands for the law governing human conduct, Creed—the things they believe in, and Cult—what or how they actually worship. Subconsciously, most people attach themselves to the outer form of religion, with its practices, customs, and traditions. This external form may be called the material culture of religion. Conversely, the inner content of religion embodies qualities such as respect for life, compassion, contentment, forgiveness, and peace. This is what I think is the spiritual culture of religion.

The television blasts us with images of war, of destruction and vengeance from virtually all corners of the world, all being waged in the name of God. When the believers, or rather the followers, of religion place more importance on the external or the material aspect of religion, conflicts are bound to surface. As such, the inner content loses its spirit, and religion becomes just another factor playing a role in dividing human beings into opposing groups. People all over claim to be religious yet cannot seem to exercise the basic commandments of religion. Whether it be Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or any other religion, all believe in similar teachings (although they may be worded differently) and give out similar commandments. And yet there is so much hatred all in the name of God.

I am a Hindu, come from a family with strong religious foundations, and as any individual from another form of religion might state, I do think my God is the greatest. Yet I could easily walk into a church, monastery, or any place of worship, fold my hands, and slip into a prayer. Above all reasons, that’s why I call myself spiritual, not religious.