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[ by Charles Cameron — Pat Robertson, the Taliban, Bamiyan, Buddha statues, a Zen tale, Petraeus and Pastor Jones ]
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credits: (a) wikipedia under cc license, (b) dharmashop
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Here, by way of context, is a story posted on the Treeleaf Zendo site, and widely discussed in the Catholic blogosphere:

On a cold winter night, a big snow storm hit the city and the temple where Dan Xia served as a Monk got snowed in. Cut off from outside traffic, the coal delivery man could not get to the Zen Monastery. Soon it ran out of heating fuel after a few days and everybody was shivering in the cold. The monks could not even cook their meals.

Dan Xia began to remove the wooden Buddha Statues from the display and put them into the fireplace.

“What are you doing?” the monks were shocked to see that the holy Buddha Statues were being burnt inside the fire place. “You are burning our holy religious artifacts! You are insulting the Buddha!”

“Are these statues alive and do they have any Buddha nature?” asked Master Dan Xia.

“Of course not,” replied the monks. “They are made of wood. They cannot have Buddha Nature.”

“OK. Then they are just pieces of firewood and therefore can be used as heating fuel,” said Master Dan Xia. “Can you pass me another piece of firewood please? I need some warmth.”

The next day, the snow storm had gone and Dan Xia went into town and brought back some replacement Buddha Statues. After putting them on the displays, he began to kneel down and burn incense sticks to them.

“Are you worshiping firewood?” ask the monks who are confused for what he was doing.

“No. I am treating these statues as holy artifacts and am honouring the Buddha.” replied Dan Xia.

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In light of that, compare and contrast this recent video of Pat Robertson:

with this video (I don’t think you need to see all of it, just a taste perhaps?) titled The Beheading of the Buddha, posted on YouTube and “presented” by Al-Muhaajiroun:

and both of those with this third video, of Pastor Jones, discussing both his own burning of the Qur’an and GEN Petraeus‘ powerful and intelligent response…

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I think we should discuss these matters in an open and respectful way, and hope that this post will provide an appropriately respectful and open-minded framing for such a discussion.

As to my own view – I see a consideration that whatever opens us up to compassion and clarity is an icon and a grace, and another consideration that whatever closes us off from clarity and compassion is an idol or a poison…

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For those of a scholarly bent, here’s a downloadable fatwa on the Taliban’s destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan — from which the screen-grab below is taken:

‘Cause Zen is dead tired.

Top Billing! Bruce Kesler –The Renewed American Revolution: The 9th Amendment 

….But constitutional scholars do agree on a basic point: the 9th Amendment was intended to be a guiding construct to interpretation of the rest of the Constitution, although specifics may be either lacking or in contention. After all, the 9th Amendment was considered necessary to be part of our Bill Of Rights without which the Constitution would not have been ratified.

Today, there are new factors requiring more attention to the 9th Amendment: the cumulative and continuing expansion of federal legislation into territories formerly outside its enumerated reserve, the almost unchecked latitude claimed by federal regulatory rules, and technologies’ facilitation of increased central controls and uniformity. The runaway employment of the federal purse and tax to compel obedience is, simply, out of control at the same time that it is evident that the economic security of the nation is imperiled by it.

Kudos to Andrew Exum for bringing rising star scholar-blogfriends Adam Elkus and Dan Trombly aboard Abu Muqawama. A classy gesture by Ex.  Wasting little time, Adam is already posting! (C’mon Dan, don’t fall behind):

The Political Economy of Operational Art  and Limiting Terminological Escalation

Infinity Journal– (LTC Ron Tira) Yes They Can: The US Can Prevent Iran from Acquiring the A-Bomb 

I am going to blog on this one in a day or two – a tightly argued and provocative piece.

Gunpowder&Lead – Gimme Shelter 

….Forty years later, Owen West, a Marine reserve major and Bing’s son, has published his own gripping saga of a modern day variant of the Combined Action Platoon – the Military Transition Team (MiTT) – fighting a similarly brutal counterinsurgency in Iraq. The Snake Eaters follows the 3^rd Battalion, 3^rd Brigade, 1^st Division (3/3-1) of the Iraqi Army and their American military advisors – known by their all-too-appropriate radio call sign, Outcast – during the dark days of 2005-07 as they attempt to defeat an insurgency and win the allegiance of Khalidiya, a village halfway between Fallujah and Ramadi. It’s a raw account of a motley crew of reservists called up for duty to fight a war for which they were ill prepared, ill equipped, and ill supported. Through force of bravery and grit, Outcast and their Iraqi brothers-in-arms overcome the enemy and, sometimes, their own chain-of-command.

SWJ Blog –Clausewitz and the Non-State Actor: A Contemporary Application of the Paradoxical Trinity to Countering Terrorism

S. Anthony Iannarino – Driving the Wedge Between Your Dream Client and Your Competitor 

Anthony deals with business situations, specifically, making sales. Why am I linking? Because he regularly  blogs about business in terms of strategy and tactics, lining up ends, ways and means.

That’s it.

[ by Charles Cameron — a meander from the symbolism of the Greek neo-Nazi party to the complex flow of the great Mississippi River ]
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As every red (or blue) blooded conspiracist knows, there’s a swastika-shaped building on the US Naval Amphibious Base Coronado near San Diego, CA.

That might of course mean the US Navy is under the spell of Hinduism or Buddhism, each of which makes use of the swastika for reasons that have nothing to do with the Nazis and more perhaps to do with simple geometric shapes and their near-universal use in rituals:

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I mention this, because symbolism is important, because the Greek right-wing party that did well in the recent elections has a flag that has been compared with the Nazi swastika, and because conspiracy theories, though informative markers of shifts in the collective unconscious in their own right, are also useful tools in the shame and blame game.

The Greek party concerned (Chryssi Avghi or Golden Dawn) points out that the central symbol of its flag (left) is taken from an ancient Greek “meander” (note similarities in the various common designs, middle) and not from the Nazi flag (right) – even though it’s curious that they choose the same black on white on red colors, isn’t it?

In my view the flag is suggestive, not conclusive: it’s their holocaust denial that proves the point.

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Anyway, it’s likely that none of that would have been interesting enough for me to post it, had my quirky researches not also pointed me to a far more interesting graphic.

Regular readers here will remember that I have an interest in graphical representations of complexity, and posted a piece titled Of railroad tracks and polyphonic thinking a while ago, in which I took the metaphor of trains of thought far too literally, and used railroad imagery to suggest a few ideas about complexity…

My researches into the Greek “meander” patterns were intriguing — but it was stumbling across this image from a post at the Ontario-based Onsite Review that decided me (and I think that’s the right usage, we are decided, we don’t decide) that I really did need to make this post.

Consider: it’s the mighty Mississippi, seen as it meanders across time:

The Onsite Review’s attribution is to Harold N. Fisk, Ancient Courses. Mississippi River Meander Belt, 1944. Their comment for this image reads:

The greek key pattern is sometimes called the meander, after the Maeander River, now called the Büyük Menderes River that flows from central Turkey to the Aegean. It winds through the Maeandrian plain in the manner of most prairie rivers, cutting into soft banks and creating oxbows.

We know a certain amount scientifically about river meanders, just as we know quite a bit about perturbations in the flow of liquids — but not enough, never quite enough to know where the river of time will take us next.

The map above illustrates the flows of a fairly simple complexity: take a good look at it. The thought-flows of a human are liable to be far more complex.

Was the COIN  Manual conference at Fort Leavenworth last week a success or a failure?

I have heard backchannel that the focus of the rewrite of FM 3-24 was going to be on “tactics” and but that a “light footprint option” had to be included to appease policy makers. Some good suggestions were made at SWJ by Colonel Robert C. Jones, but not much has been said yet online that I have seen. USACAC blog seriously could use some updating on a more frequent basis.

I’m curious where they went with this. Opinions and comments solicited.

[ by Charles Cameron — in memory of Carlos Fuentes, requiescat in pace ]
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Carlos Fuentes‘ great novel, Terra Nostra, opens with these words:

Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.

It’s a sentence to stop you in your tracks, a sentence to give pause to time itself, circling back on itself like the serpent that eats its own tail, a dream of a sentence, a dream sentence.

Fuentes continues:

Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.

How does a mind move so agilely among these many and diverse firsts — the sleeping, the archeo-anthropological, the technical, the musical, the shameful or sinful or perhaps decorative, even erotic? In a single paragraph — the first in a book that will run 890 pages and not tire?

And Fuentes continues:

About four o’clock in the morning one fourteenth of July, Pollo Phoibee, asleep in his high garret room, door and windows flung wide, dreamed these things, and prepared to answer them himself.

Pollo Phoibee dreamed these things, Carlos Fuentes dreamed Pollo Phoibee…

And we are in Paris, Paris of the artists, of the garret, and yet a Paris where the Seine is boiling, where the Louvre has become crystalline, the black eyes of the gargoyles of Notre Dame see “a much vaster panorama”…

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Carlos Fuentes died today, and I am saddened — remembering him signing my short, fat British Penguin paperback of Terra Nostra (its fondly remembered cover image above) and commenting that it was his preferred English edition, since one could slip it into one’s pocket…

And Terra Nostra was special to me, both as a great and tumultuous fiction, and as a fiction that quoted Norman Cohn‘s In Pursuit of the Millenniun, the book that back in my Oxford days introduced me to the history of apocalyptic thought… a fiction also familiar with Frances Yates, another scholar I greatly admire, and her writings on the Memory Theater…

Carlos Fuentes, the imagination that conceived Terra Nostra, is no longer with us.

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He had been a diplomat, this great imagination. Born into a diplo family, he had served as Mexican ambassador to Paris — Paris of the diplomatic banquets, but also of the artist’s garret, of this New World imagination spanning continents and centuries as though they were a playground, the playground of a single, multiple, cosmopolitan and erudite mind.

The poet Paul Claudel, French ambassador to Japan, was reproved by the Surrealists in 1925 with the words:

One cannot be both ambassador for France and poet!

The poet Saint-John Perse was secretary to the French Embassy in Peking, and later General Secretary of the French Foreign Office. The poet Giorgos Seferis was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The poet Pablo Neruda was Chilean ambassador to France… The poet Octavio Paz, Mexico’s ambassador to India.

Among novelists, it was Lawrence Durrell — an Englishman born in India with what he described as “a Tibetan mentality” — one who found life in England itself “like an autopsy … so, so dreary” — who was British press attaché in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War II, where as they say:

Ostensibly working, Durrell was in reality closely observing the assortment of sights, sensations, and people that wartime Alexandria, a crossroads of the East and West, had to offer.

The result was his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet.

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Fuentes is heir to many lineages: of Mexico, of the world, of literature, of diplomacy, of the imagination.

In honoring him today, my researches turned up this apposite quote from Aldo Matteucci at the Reflections on Diplomacy blog:

To survive, a diplomat needs poetry. Filed amidst the many layers of the brief, the short poem will refresh the bleary mind. Poetry brings distance – hence perspective and insight. Poetry reminds the diplomat that the best professional is the amateur.

Most deeply – poetry is truth.

Carlos Fuentes survives us all.