Tea Party Convention

[darter]

Here's a sampling from the rhetoric from tonight's Tea Party Convention.

God Bless America, Jesus, the Pledge of Allegiance (belatedly), Karl Marx, Obama's birth certificate, Hollywood, schools, the Constitution, Adam and Eve, Rush, Clinton, Bush, New York welfare parasites, Gerald Ford, the Messiah, ACORN, voter fraud, waging a culture war, idolatry, Moses, the apocalypse, a nazi joke, etc...

Here's the video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/291955-1

I had thought that there would have been an actual strategy to de-crazify the proceedings because Fox and CNN are broadcasting it. Not so - just the opposite. Speakers are hawking books, conspiracies and wild hallucinations. Palin's up tomorrow. Her take is hundred grand.


http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01 ... r-disaster

[darter]

And here's a link to how Tea Party patriots are being trained.

http://leadershipteaparty.com/pages/agenda/

[eumaas]

"Zen Conservatism"?

[eumaas]

"Zen Conservatism"?

Isn't that just Japanese Imperialism?

[Wolter]

"Zen Conservatism"?

Isn't that just Japanese Imperialism?

But...yes.

[eumaas]

"Zen Conservatism"?

Isn't that just Japanese Imperialism?

But...yes.

I can't wait for that lecture.

"You live for the Emperor. YOU DIE FOR THE EMPEROR! For he is a god."

[darter]

Here's the product, er, book:

[eumaas]

Here's the product, er, book:

Seems to be based on the commercial marketing sense of "Zen" than anything to do with Zen as a religious philosophy.

Zen itself is an somewhat antinomian teaching that doesn't really focus on ethics and politics. Since it is so focused on technique over doctrine, it's perhaps overly open and accommodating to all sorts of views, despite possessing implicitly the genial humanism of Taoism and Buddhism.

"Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy with a set of concepts and intellectual formulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death and this by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore, extremely flexible to adapt itself almost to any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. It may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, or a political or economic dogmatism."
- D. T. Suzuki

Zen just ensures that, whatever politics and ethics you may have, you take an authentic stance on it and commit. That's not to say Zen actually promotes an amoral view. In its historical context most Zen Buddhists were good Confucians in terms of morality. One can go back to the Buddha and wed his moral philosophy to Zen just fine, or even that of Stoics like Marcus Aurelius or Epicureans like Lucretius. In the context of post-Meiji Restoration Japan, of course, this open quality led to Zen becoming closely bound to Japanese Imperialism, as covered in Brian Victoria's Zen at War. In the same period, however, Zen monks such as Uchiyama Gudō embraced anarchism, socialism, and pacifism:

"As a propagator of Buddhism I teach that 'all sentient beings have the Buddha nature' and that 'within the Dharma there is equality, with neither superior nor inferior.' Furthermore, I teach that 'all sentient beings are my children.' Having taken these golden words as the basis of my faith, I discovered that they are in complete agreement with the principles of socialism. It was thus that I became a believer in socialism."

Of course, owing to the Anarchist/Red Scare tenor of the times in all nations, Gudō was executed along with twelve other anarchists in Japan's equivalent of the Haymarket and Sacco and Vanzetti trials. After WWII Zen priests have generally committed to rediscovering its humanist roots, and now one is less likely to find much rabid pro-war/right-wing sentiment among Zen clergy, especially in the West where Zen generally spread among the left as part of the influence of the Beats. Prominent American Zennist Robert Aitken Roshi is an avowed anarchist, and and co-founded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, an organized network of Buddhists (of any stripe) who are engaged in pacifist and environmental activism.

In light of all that, I'd be interested to see an actual Zen Conservatism, but this book doesn't seem to fill that void.

[Wolter]

No joke eummie: I would hella read a book you wrote on Zen.

[eumaas]

No joke eummie: I would hella read a book you wrote on Zen.

Thanks, buddy. I did start some notes on dharma/tao as part of the natural law tradition, but I dunno what I did with them.

[eumaas]

If we are a tax-exempt organization, we are not in a place where we can speak
out. We are constantly on guard to protect our status, and therefore we don’t say or do
what we mean, and after a while we actually do say and do what we mean, and it is
something benighted the evil conspirators in charge can live with. Anarchist base
communities become centers to train people to be volunteers in tax-exempt organizations,
for example. What to do?
In preparing this talk, I asked myself, what would Emma Goldman do? What
would Dorothy Day do? What would Kathy Kelly do? What would Baizhang Huaihai
do? That’s easy. I can’t conjecture about Baizhang, of course, but the others wouldn’t be
tax exempt to start with. But if they were tax exempt (as we are), what then? I devised a
scheme in my head of subdividing the Alcatraz Avenue property in Berkeley and a bunch
of us chipping in and buying a little piece. Then we would rent our lot to folks who don’t
want tax exemption anyway.
No, that would be pretty devious and contrived, probably subject to question at
tax time. It is better for a bunch of us within the Fellowship to call ourselves the Buddhist
Anarchist Caucus or something like that and just meet for coffee around somebody’s
kitchen table somewhere. Why “anarchist?” Because we’re Buddhist.
Buddhism is anarchism, after all, for anarchism is love, trust, selflessness and all
those good Buddhist virtues including a total lack of imposition on another. During the
19th and even early 20th century, European and then American anarchists occupied
respected podiums on lecture circuits from Boston and New York and across the
continent to Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles At length that roster of distinguished
speakers included the anarchist Har Dayal, author of The Bodhisattva Doctrine in
Sanskrit Literature, an important text that belongs in all our libraries, who came to the
American lecture circuits from India by way of London to edify our grandparents and
their parents.
Today we’re up against the iron face of carefully crafted public opinion. From the
Haymarket tragedy in 1886 to the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1921, there was in the
United States almost half century of concerted, bloody minded, and ultimately successful
endeavor to erase anarchism and its devotees from civilized discourse. To this day, even
in a gathering like our own, the very word “anarchist” evokes an unkempt foreigner with
a bomb about to go off in his back pocket. It might seem better to keep the two words in
separate little boxes.
That doesn’t work. Go to Google, type in the words “Buddhist Anarchism,” and
stand back. The number of hits will surprise you. Moreover, except for references to Gary
Snyder’s article by that name in the first Journal for the Protection of All Beings back in
1962, all the hits will be in Classical Buddhism, in the Buddha’s own words. Gary’s piece
referred to the Huayan Sutra—well taken, but there is a world of other possible
Mahayana references. The “Three Bodies of the Buddha,” for example. Everything really
is empty, personally interconnected, and precious in itself. We don’t need some guy in
saffron robes to tell us so. Apart from Google hits and from any kind of Buddhism, our
ordinary common sense tells us so. Anarchism makes sense, for all the iron faces, for all
the nooses of the Haymarket tragedy and all the subsequent ruthless persecutions and
prosecutions and executions. The lonely, quavering voice of Lucy Parsons puts us to
shame.

http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/ ... bility.pdf

[Flex]

Naomi Wolf's (excellent third wave feminist) defense of the Tea Party movement: http://www.truthout.org/naomi-wolf-tea- ... scism58127

[Kory]

Here's a sampling from the rhetoric from tonight's Tea Party Convention.

God Bless America, Jesus, the Pledge of Allegiance (belatedly), Karl Marx, Obama's birth certificate, Hollywood, schools, the Constitution, Adam and Eve, Rush, Clinton, Bush, New York welfare parasites, Gerald Ford, the Messiah, ACORN, voter fraud, waging a culture war, idolatry, Moses, the apocalypse, a nazi joke, etc...

God bless Karl Marx?

[Flex]

I've (sort of) defended the Tea Party in the past - at least insofar as saying we shouldn't throw out some of their appropriated ideologies with the idiot bathwater, and folks who protest probably aren't guilty of sedition even if they're being really mean - but I can't help but be fairly amused by this:

The charts contained herein show the disparity between whites who strongly approve and disapprove of the tea party movement. In a few cases -- attitudes toward Latinos, for instance -- the differences were small. But only in a few cases: tea party sympathizers believe blacks are less intelligent, hardworking and trustworthy. They appear to be particularly wary of immigrants. And they don't much care for gays, either. (Although note that two-thirds of them support gays in the military, an issue on which policy has long lagged public sentiment.)

Again, this is a comparison of white attitudes, not differences between whites and non-whites. Which means that avid white tea party sympathizers do not even hold mainstream attitudes among whites. If we included the attitudes of non-whites, the views of white tea party sympathizers would be even more aberrant.

Read more: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/ ... izers.html

[eumaas]

http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/artic ... icle=28780

But, Chomsky, the firebrand liberal who spent most of his life critiquing and attacking US hegemony and foreign policy, said the left is failing the country by not reaching out to those in the Tea Party movement, who are frustrated and fed up with American government.

“They shouldn’t be laughed at. It’s not a joke,” Chomsky told the packed theater. “Ridiculing the Tea Party shenanigans is a terrible mistake. Why are those voices of discontent being mobilized by the extreme Right?”