Buddha in the Valley

Middle of winter, the State of the Union address is tonight. I thought I’d take a field trip through the street of the San Fernando Valley to document the state of the union. It was a warm winter day with harsh, unromantic light. The noon sun screamed into my eyes. There’s rumor the vice president might need to resign. I turn off the news and put in an alt-country CD and tug on my sunglasses.

Crossing over the Porcuincula River, known today as the LA River, you enter a gritty, more industrial part of town. The Valley is flat but with a slight slant towards the middle, like the middle of a bathtub, where all the dirt and grease collects.

The hills fade in the background, the streets narrow, and you begin to see more cement mixers around. I headed north from Sherman Oaks to the industrial towns of Van Nuys, Sunland, Burbank. Fences wrap around lumber yards and graffiti stretches for blocks along the same wall.

North Valley is a region dotted with studio equipment rental companies, construction supply companies, and clandestine strip clubs. It’s an area where dreams go to die. Or get their checks cashed, or eat at a pupuseria.

A land strung end to end with power lines and sewer pipes. An abused stepchild cowering in Hollywood’s shadow. There are more machines in the area than people. It’s a part of the city where when the apocalypse comes, it doesn’t need to bring a note.

Cross railroad tracks you venture even further into the industrial abyss. Up by the 5 freeway you come upon a bloody knuckle neighborhood, divinely uninspired. Smog collects against the San Gabriel Mountains and creates a Mad Max atmosphere, a Total Recall landscape, the sky the color of butter.

But just when you get to the edge of civilization, when you begin peeling off the scab of humanity, a gilded temple catches your eye and magnetically pulls your car over to the curb.

You get out, stare in slack-jaw awe.

What is this temple doing out here? Where are the monks?

You look inside a glass cage, sitting just steps from the sidewalk, and wonder if you’re looking at the real thing, a statue, or an hallucination?

Does Buddha walk in the San Fernando Valley?

I get back in the car and head south again, towards the hills. Stumbling upon the statue I’m stirred to thought. If there can be a sacred Buddhist temple in this hard-put part of town, then beauty has a chance in this world. Once more, though, I’m reminded that when the Buddha breaths, we all exhale.

And this quote by Bankei.

When Someone tosses you a
tea bowl
– Catch it!
Catch it nimbly with soft cotton
With the cotton of your skillful
mind!

I drove home forgetting to take any more pictures. I was thinking about George Bush. What the hell he could possibly tell us tonight to change a thing? And how can he get up there once more and lie to his country through that manacled grin of a smile? This country’s got a shitload of negative karma on our hands now. It’s going to take more than a fancy speech. More than 20,000 more troops.

It’s going to take more than a Buddha in a glass cage to make things right again.

It’s Okay, They Were Nazis

New photographs were uncovered by the Guardian Newspaper revealing long suspected torture of nazi prisoners after World War 2. The British government had kept these pictures under lock and key for over 60 years. Andfor those 60 years they denied widespread mistreatment of Nazis. They allowed the history books to be written incorrectly.

As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners “in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps”.

Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.

Part of the fruits of war, if you’re the winner, is you become the author of the narrative. In this way, actions like these, like the bombing of Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and Japanese Internement Camps were whitewashed, were protrayed as reasonable reactions to Germany’s and Japan’s evil. The victors decide the justice, thus these war crimes, weren’t.

Which brings up the whole logic defying notion of a War Crime in the first place. Isn’t war itself a crime, the mass premeditated killing of hundreds of people? Thousands? Millions? What kind of morality distinguishes between the severity, and manner, of killing? This is not to excuse the Nazi Genocide. Or to imply that World War 2 wasn’t necessary and moral, it was. It only serves to remind us that War creates it’s own morality, and that to open up the gates of hell you’re going to release some demons into the world, and they don’t pick sides. War lower us all. That’s why it should be avoided at all costs.

It also brings up a strange idea to me: Torture is in the eye of the beholder.

George Bush has his own opinions. Rush Limbaugh thinks this is just like a frat prank.

I hereby invite Rush to join my frat. I’ve got some hazing rituals he will love.

Stupid statements like his can only be grumbled by a bitter, heartless man that never experienced the horrors of war, nor, even, the minior intrusion of boot camp.  His popularity is another logic-defying notion, that people chose to pack such sludge into their ears and have it warp their minds with hate.

So here we are, all the way in the year 2007. World War Two has been over for a long time. The ghosts of that war have been buried by the progress of the EU, the transgressions of America, the buffoons on the airwaves spreading hate and fear. You can make the argument that we’ve forgotten about the damage of that war. Unlearned the lessons.  These pictures coming out are a good reminder, though, of why we shouldn’t engage in emperial warfare.

Lest we wish to become Nazis.