Burnin' the Buddha

I suppose that my view of Buddhists is directly related to my high school's attempt to teach us multiculturalism by giving us Hesse's Sidhartha. There's nothing something about reading about the Buddha from a German source. I mean, you realize that no matter how into it he is, he's still German. We don't read any crazy shit about Buddha from people living in Tibet or anything. No, Herman "the German" Hesse.

This is the beginning of my feelings about "Buddhists"--their religion is only deep because they were born in a Christian country. If you're actually born in Tibet, you don't feel the need to go around telling people about Nirvana and mucking up every conversation with your beliefs about how the damn universe works. There's this Buddhist guy in one of my classes who keeps trying to tell us about the four forces of happiness. We start talking about Einstein's theory of relativity and he wants us to give equal weight to some crackpot that he read who has some theory about fire's place in universal peace, and then, I shit you not, without missing a beat, he tells us that he won't be in class for Passover. Evidently, like Madonna, he's bi-religious.

what I'm reading

I said earlier that I was planning on using this blog to record the things I was reading so that later I could tally it all up. This, I have discovered, is an impossability. How many books do we half read, and what counts as having read. Okay, so I read Flowers of Evil--that was new. Half of which I put into an audio file. I read the essay Circles by Emerson--I think I'd read that before. I listen-read The Great Gatsby, which is one of those things you really feel you should have read before, and well...I hadn't. I don't even think I've seen the whole movie. I read a long essay by Sokal which was supposed to be the introduction to some book--like most of the other books he writes--but I couldn't tell you what it was called because it was sent to me as a link and I read it on line and then got rid of it. I re-read the introduction to the History of Sexuality V. 1, and a really good book about "the environment poem" (actually I half read that). Lastly, I read The Man With the Blue Guitar, and the Gospel of Mark.

Okay, so what am I reading. I'm reading this book The Nick of Time, which will offer no surprises to anyone who's read Nietzsche, and is even remotely familiar with Darwin. I can't get myself to finish The Red Badge of Courage or this book I have on the Rough Riders, and whenever I get bored I attempt to listen to The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth. It's interesting in some ways, but I can't say I'm leaping with excitement over it. The book that I'm really chugging through at the moment is Native Son, which is incredibly weird in that if it were written by a white guy it would have been literature for the KKK.

Some say...

I really can't do a better job than this. It's a really good analysis of Bush's rhetoric.

Our stance on terrorists before 9/11

What do you want to bet that Condoleezza Rice has Samit's superiors on speed dial? "Terrorists you say? Well, for God's sake don't stop them. We need to go to war with Iraq." You know that scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 where Bush has heard about the World Trade Center and he just sits there not reacting. Well, Michael Moore uses it to point out the president's stupidity. I posit that it just really wasn't a surprise, and besides, among all those children, he couldn't very well rub his hands together and say, "Hot Damn! I'm gonna get me some oil!"

In other news, a Bush supporter asked Bush if he believed, and I'm not making this up, that the terrorist attack on 9/11 and the ensuing war in Iraq were signs of the apocalypse as detailed in The Revelation of Jesus Christ--the last book of the Bible.

Folks, these are the Bush supporters: fricking wizards and warlocks who have it in their heads that Bush is going to bring on the apocalypse and that they are going to live in a magic kingdom with angels and unicorns. And I'll tell you what's worse, these crazy fuckers looking for a redux in Middle Earth represent the Majority in America. Is there something wrong here? When I was a kid, I found it hard to find people who wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons with me. Evidently, I just needed to move to Kansas where every one thinks they're a fucking Paladin.

And of course this explains it all. They think they're being attacked by the forces of Mordor so, of course, they want Gandalf or that other guy...Strider (can't think of his other name), and Bush believes he's in Middle Earth too so... vote for Bush. The problem is that this administration isn't The Lord of the Rings--even though, I do feel its gone on too long and just as in the TLOR, the wizard doesn't seem to know any spells--no, the Bush administration is more like The Office.

And introducing the chairperson of the board

See, what you must realize is that every president has a legacy. When Clinton was in office, we all have to worry about our country becoming aisle 8 at the great world-wide Walmart. And we're still worrying. Then Bush takes office and, of course, he uses his power to sell America at the gas stations. We aren't choosing presidents, we're choosing where we will be sold, which business we would like to give all our money to, and which stores are going to destroy our environment.

My suggestion is that we find a president who represents a business that we're already willing to give all our money to. So, we need to find a president of some real estate firm. Now, I'm not saying that they won't overdevelop or anything, but they can't outsource housing (A), they won't make us try to buy some thing that we weren't already trying to buy (B), and I can think of no reason to go to war with any country other than Mexico or Canada to help the real estate business (C). Of course, houses will cost sixty million dollars a piece, but that's okay. We'll all be homeless and then the next president will be forced to fix the problem and we'll finally have all those social programs that have worked so well in every other country in the world.