Bush dark and the hippie king.
Looking back over the past year there are two men who have been made into myths by the general public and I thought I would take a moment and talk about them. The first is the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Now I have met this man at a cathedral in Ottawa some years ago and perhaps more importantly I studied this style of meditation for years with some really good teachers and have done retreats with some masters of this kind of discipline. So you can imagine my gorge rising when I was stuck on a bus for two and a half hours with a bunch of idiots clogging traffic to get to see him at Ottawa’s Civic Center on Bank street having remade him into their image. The Hippie King.
If you actually read his stuff or listen to what the man says, he does not diverge wildly from the pope on the usual issues of greatest concern to the western post hippie bureaucrat class. He is anti homosexuality, not for free love of any kind, socially conservative and believes in self sacrifice and discipline. But to these bozo’s he was the hippie king. A kind of socialist guru. As usual, they confused their religion or lack thereof, with his. That day I was over an hour late for work and the bus moved so slowly down bank street clogged with people anxious to get a look at the god they created that a couple of times, I got off the bus and had a liesurly smoke as I walked to the next bus stop and got back on the same one. Good thing I kept my transfer. I suppose whats consistent about these two cases and so many more is the aspect of projection. People just want to imbue their own beliefs on someone else and worship them. This if for no other reason might be a good reason to appreciate Jesus. He must have been so damn annoyed on that cross.
The second is Barry Obama. Now understand that for eight years when the irrational left would foam rabidly about Bush I would patiently argue the points and try and talk people down from the overdose of sanctimony they had taken. Usually this would be after hours days or weeks of research on the issues on the table to see if there was any merit to them at all. I had to become a relative expert on a number of subjects of little to no interest to me but they had become rallying points for angry hate filled people who, like the ones worshiping the Dalai Lama for things he is not, loathed G.W. Bush for things he never did or said. It was anoying on so many levels. One of the more trivial ones is that I never got the chance to actually make any attacks of my own to US policy or GWB because I had to spend my time defending both the US and Bush for things they where being accused of which had no basis in reality at all. I suppose my favorote memory of this is when i was having lunch with a couple I know and some of their friends. A women I had never met before was accross from me on a patio on a magnificent summer day and out of the blue she said “Everyone hates George Bush” and all I said was, “I don’t hate him” and she blew a freaking gasket at me. She was furious with me for failing to hate someone she hated. This is the kinder gentler left and she was a doctor for the Canadian military for Thor’s sake. This brings me to Obama who I call ‘Bush Dark’. Now understand that I worked as hard as I could to advise my American friends to vote GOP to the extent a Canadian can without being a complete toadstool. But shortly after Obama won the election I noticed a few things. Even before taking office he was dealing with reality. He has identical positions on important foreign policies as Bush does, he did not take the bait from Iran, most of his pre election leftist noise was just that (so far) He is talking tough with Pakistan and seems to be a good friend of Israel. So far, he is Bush dark and I think he may be even more effective than Bush by the Vulcan principle. You know the idea, to quote the Venerable Spock “It takes a Nixon to go to China” it takes someone perceived as a soft touch to be able to send the thunder down without Code Pink having collective apoplexy. I do recall a certain Bill Clinton managing to bomb the snot out of Belgrade without accusations of ‘Bill lied people died’ and other such hyperbole. There are still troops there in the Balkans I believe. No protests though to bring them home. So maybe Bush dark is the guy to get the job done without so much domestic interference.
What was interesting is the exact same people who used to love me as their mouthpiece when it came to dealing with what we have lovingly called those with “Bush derangement syndrome” loath me now when I point out actual facts about Obama that seem to show a man who is dealing with reality (so far) and perhaps more discouragingly, the same people who enjoyed it when I took apart irrational and untrue accusations against Bush now make similar irrational accusations against Barry.
I guess people really don’t care about the player so much as the jersey he is wearing. Even when he is on your team.
James Cohen
[As an aside, one day I got so frustrated with Bush critics that I decided I was going to send George a gift. So I mailed him a copy of my newest CD and a nice letter complimenting him on how he had IMO done a good job in what was likely the most difficult administration since Abe Lincoln. The white house was thoughtful enough to send me back this letter which I framed and mounted on the wall.]
So much of politics is now just a game, and there are far too many followers and so few leaders. IMO one of the best things that Bush did wasn’t any policy or such, it was a practice. A practice that so very few politicians follow nowadays. He went with is convictions instead of what was expedient. He followed no poll. He did what he thought right. He wasn’t always right. But even so, those that knew him knew that his motives were pure. Self image and political popularity didn’t figure much into the equasion. Funny thing though, he was so often accused of having those very motivations for what he did. Another funny thing, what people seem to decry the loudest we can find he more often than not was right about. He was failed by people around him more than he ever failed us. He stood by America. I wish America would have stood by him. Things would have been so very different.
Comment by Big Al — December 25, 2008 @ 12:40 am
Big al beautifully said and thank you.
Comment by James Cohen — December 25, 2008 @ 1:09 am
The Dalai Lama radiates compassion and is, in my opinion, a genuinely good man, perhaps even an enlightened one. The hippie-projectors simply cannot square this with the DL’s clearly stated opposition to masturbation, oral sex, sodomy, homosexuality, gay marriage, and his support of clerical celibacy. So they ignore all of that. Even more dangerous to their world-view: what if there’s a connection between the DL’s views on these issues and the spiritual qualities the hippie-projectors sense in him? That is just too shattering a possibility even to contemplate.
Funny how nobody thinks that celibacy in Buddhist monks causes them to become pedophiles. Wonder why they get off the hook, and Catholic priests get impaled on it? Could it be that the DL and Buddhism are really just another stick with which to beat to death our own traditions? I say this as an open admirer of His Holiness, a title I grant to him with complete sincerity, and as a practitioner of Buddhist meditation techniques. It annoys me enormously to see a man of such goodness have his philosophy and ethics amputated procrustes-style to fit the soiled bed of Western progressivism.
Thank you for the insightful post.
Comment by PatrickH — December 26, 2008 @ 10:02 am
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