James Rotondi

Ian Astbury: The Cult's "Smash-and-Grab Buddhist"

2012-04-11T17:40:00-04:00

Ian Astbury doesn't need to look very far for a reminder of his Buddhist beliefs. Tattooed to his wrist is the final line from the Tibetan Heart Sutra: "Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. O what an awakening, all hail!" Yet the 49-year-old singer of veteran English rock band The Cult -- and collaborator with members of The Doors, Black Sabbath, Guns N' Roses and other rock titans -- has also traveled far afield in search of spiritual and cultural insights, from Dharamsala to Kathmandu to Puna.

In turn, he has become an eloquent, impassioned defender of Eastern traditions, once suggesting, in an essay in the pages of Spin Magazine, that the Tibetan flag be adopted as "the international banner of free speech, free thought, religious and racial tolerance for all." Tibet, he suggested, "is symbolic of our spiritual crisis [in the West], a need to turn inwards for a solution."

A restless autodidact who routinely references Joseph Campbell, Terence McKenna, Pema Chödrön, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and other teachers, Astbury leads what he calls "a very nomadic existence." In the last few years, he's relocated from New York City to Los Angeles, and performed in locales as far flung as Belgium, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, and Austin, Texas, where The Cult recently debuted material from their first new album in five years, the richly textured and lyrically compelling Choice of Weapon.

"This record is about going through a dark, self-destructive period of my life, where I definitely lost my way," Astbury noted in a recent interview. "I lost the vision of where I was going, and I had no idea where I was anymore. It's about coming out of that." It might be argued that the visceral whack of The Cult's brand of heavy, dharma-conscious rock is just the kind of Zen stick a sleepy pop culture needs administered to its backside.

What was it about Tibet that impacted you so strongly?

You get the sense with Tibetans that they've given human life and human experience great consideration, and maybe that's partly due to how the dharma teachings came up from India. But there's also something about the terrain of Tibet, which can be quite unforgiving. Things are enhanced -- it's a kind of super-nature. It's almost like it amplifies the dharma. My sense of Tibet is that they're putting the brakes on this constant need we seem to have to build more, move further ahead in science, continually define ourselves by conjuring up the new fad, entertain, escape from the finite. The Tibetans seem to understand that we need to get in front of this stampeding herd. I felt that the people I met there were so connected to being alive, to the Great Mystery, and even to death.

There was a life force in their eyes that I just don't experience in the West, apart from very young people, who are still very full of vigor. With the Hunger Games coming out this week, there are a lot of teenagers out there with sparkle in their eyes. What is it they're looking for in these films? What are they looking for in Twilight or Harry Potter? What is it in these myths that resonate with these young spirits? The big existential questions are at least being acknowledged, if not answered, on some level, by these films.

In Tibet, that magic is everywhere; in fact, they live in that modality. Those questions are not separate. You wonder what might happen if only we were to apply that to the Western way of doing things. With Tibetans, you get the feeling that they already know all this about the West. They see how the West is in this neurotic, fucked-up state, and they don't think they're missing out on anything.

In Tibet you meet these former monks who become guides, and while most of them are quite wary of the Chinese regime, I met this one former monk who was just completely outspoken about the Chinese, even a bit of a loose cannon, and quite a colorful guy, in his mid-30s. One night he said to me, "You are the incarnation of a protector deity." I said, "So, not an enlightened lama or monk?" And he said, "No, no; just a protector deity. You have to guard the Dharma, to hold the space." I'm thinking, "Oh, shit, more of a Bodhisattva gig. You mean I have to give up my seat on the bus?" Yep. [Laughs.] That was such a drag to find that out! But it was also a reminder that there's work to be done, and not to get caught up in the ego of it. Okay, so I'm being of service.

Do you follow a particular Buddhist way, perhaps the Tibetan school or the Zen approach?

I'm a smash-and-grab Buddhist, I guess. I do what I can when I can, and I use what I can when I can. I try to be mindful as much as possible. I certainly lapse into states of complete unconsciousness. I'm living a human life. I'm not trying to "perfect" myself. I try to be of service when I can, and be mindful. Whatever's going on, the dharma tells us that it's all just business as usual. It reminds us to confirm yourself not by what's going on externally, but to accept where you're at, wherever that is, and simply to sit and expand your awareness.

On Choice of Weapon, you sing about being "consumed by the trials." Your early life was pretty challenging, too, wasn't it?

I watched my mother die of cancer, a very slow, painful death, and I watched my family just disintegrate. [Astbury's mother, Marion Lindsay, died in Glasgow, Scotland on May 14. 1979, Astbury's 17th birthday.] When my mother died, there was no obituary on the newswire; society didn't stop and mourn my mother passing. It was just a simple death. We didn't have much. We had lost everything we had, and were pretty much living in squalor. My father was working two jobs.

It's very archetypal, the struggling artist coming out of this kind of background, but it was my reality. Some people talk about coming out of the ghetto like it's a badge of honor, but for us it wasn't. I never even considered coming out and saying I'd come from a broken home. I only say it now because maybe it gives context to my art, and dispels some preconceived myths of who I am, that just because I was an MTV star back in the '80s, I come from some sort of privileged position.

I've struggled for everything I have materially in my life, and everything in terms of awareness, too; none of it came easy. It all had to be experienced first-hand, and even with that, the application of those awarenesses hasn't been easy either. There have been a lot of moments where I felt like throwing in the towel. But I'm compelled to keep going. In fact, the real teaching moments for me have been in times of personal crisis, times when the rudder has come right off the ship, and I've had no idea where I'm going.

Being in the music business, being an entertainer or an artist, you can be raised up or you can be completely forgotten. When that door closes, all of a sudden you're in a world of hurt. And where do you turn? You can turn to the path of self-destruction, or turn inwards. Luckily, in the '80s, I came across Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. That was like dynamite in my hands, the idea that the dharma is fresh and it's happening in this instant. It's accessible, right now. Wow.

My ex-wife said to me, "You definitely take the hard lessons in life." There are many ways to be hit with the stick before you get the message. It's as though you're a kid and you keep sticking your finger in the flame, and then you ask, "What's this 'getting burnt'"? There's a message every time you get burnt, but we don't always retain it. We forget, and we do it again. But hopefully, there's a hunger in the spirit to really understand the lesson. In the incarnation of this life I'm going through, I think my ultimate intention is to find out, "What is the lesson in this?" And the message is, "Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention."

Sex, Sin & Zen: Brad Warner and the Lust for Enlightenment

2011-06-09T18:38:51-04:00

With bare-knuckle book titles like Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up, author Brad Warner is not your hippie Aunt's idea of a tranquil, exotic spiritual master. With a pedigree in punk rock and garage-psychedelia, and a two-decade stint in the trenches of Japanese monster movie marketing, the 47-year-old native of Ohio is nevertheless a certifiable Zen master, part of a tightly-held Soto lineage that stretches back to Master Dogen Zenji in the 13th-century. In fact, Warner's teacher, the well-known Gudo Nishijima, with whom he studied for 12 years in Japan, is one of the chief translators and curators of Dogen's writings. Nishijima not only transmitted his lineage to Warner, but appointed him President of the organization Dogen Sangha International, which he founded, in 2007.

Warner's latest book, with the provocative title Sex, Sin & Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between, attempts to bridge the divergent terrain of contemporary sexuality and Zen's often misunderstood -- and perhaps equally unpredictable -- approaches to morality and sexual relationships. That Warner succeeds in creating a funny, generally balanced, and nevertheless potentially controversial work should be no surprise: Warner has already come to be known as the "Porno Buddhist" by some of his detractors, largely by virtue of his plain-spoken column on the indie-goth porn site Suicide Girls. Sex, Sin and Zen, which includes an interview with surprisingly Zen-versed porn star Nina Hartley, will do nothing to tamp down Warner's reputation for pushing the envelope. (Nor will his brand new eBook, Death To All Monsters!, a digital-only pulp novel whose Godzilla-esque plot sounds eerily similar to Warner's own life, as refracted through the fantastical lens of a Robert Anton Wilson or a young Thomas Pynchon.)

Nevertheless, Warner remains in many ways a strict adherent to Zen morays and maxims. Despite his forays into psychedelic music, for example, Warner is decidedly unimpressed by the spiritual claims of medicine workers and ethno-botanical seekers, likening the shamanic drug experience to a kind of "controlled trauma." A relentlessly independent thinker who still retains an edgy punk rock bite in many of his pronouncements, Warner remains a renegade both in the Buddhist circles within which he travels, and the cutting-edge culture to which he aims his books. Sitting in the crossfire of post-millennial sexuality and ages-old religious tradition was never going to be easy, but judging from the effortless way Warner drops into an otherwise painful-looking Full Lotus position, the easy path doesn't seem to be part of his Dharma.

True to its sub-title, Sex, Sin & Zen discusses polyamory, as well as celibacy, in light of Zen teachings on "misuse of sexuality." This could be touchy stuff; what kind of reactions are you getting?

A certain number of the polyamory people have gotten on my case about it. I don't hear from them directly, but I made the huge mistake of reading my Amazon customer reviews recently, and there was someone there who complained that I'd completely misconstrued the philosophy of polyamory -- so there's that contingent. Then you've got a certain number of the more traditional Buddhist crowd, who've never even heard of polyamory, who think I take a much too positive view of it. I feel that if I'm somewhere in the middle of those two sets of opinions, I must be doing something right.

And look, my feelings about polyamory are not entirely negative by any means -- I've met some people who seem to be able to make it work. But I first heard of polyamory because people had written to me in some distress asking, essentially, "How can I find calmness and centeredness in my polyamorous lifestyle?" My response to them was that perhaps the lifestyle itself was contributing to their mental distress. Now, I'm not even saying that they need to give up polyamory, but at least acknowledge that they've chosen a lifestyle that is going to be inherently stressful for certain kinds of people. Okay, it doesn't seem to be inherently stressful for everyone who practices it, but it causes a great many people a great deal of stress trying to juggle multiple lovers, which is not easy even if everyone, in theory, agrees to it.

I think what they're trying to do is take away that stigma of "sneaking around" and so forth; they think that the problem isn't the fact that "I have multiple lovers" -- the problem is that "I'm sneaking around" or pretending to only have one lover. If we were just to open that up and everyone was "okay" with it, then all the problems would go away, right? I just think that's a fairly simplistic view of things. There may be deeper issues at work. I mean, you've been culturally programmed to respond to things a certain way, and you can't expect to simply override your cultural programming. That's one thing Zen has shown me, on so many levels. It's not something that works on an intellectual level; yes, you can work on your cultural programming, and eventually even successfully overcome it, but it's very deeply ingrained, and you don't simply override it just by deciding that you will.

I speak from a certain degree of experience here, though I decided to leave my personal life largely out of Sex, Sin and Zen, since I'd already discussed that quite a bit in my previous book, Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. Honestly, that has been my experience with attempting anything like a polyamorous relationship. I was perfectly ready to justify it intellectually, but I was not okay with it. So you have to accept, I'm not okay, so what do I do about it? You can work on being okay with it, but it's a serious thing; you can't just will yourself to be okay with it. That's something I try to bring out in general in the book, regarding any kind of sexual relationship -- you have to acknowledge what your real feelings are in a situation. It's very easy to deny them and stomp them down and intellectualize them away. In principal, I could very easily go along with the "whatever makes you happy" approach; if my girlfriend wants to see some other guy, and she still loves me, why shouldn't I just let her? But if you're home absolutely steaming when she's out with that other guy, you have to acknowledge that. I don't know ... clearly, this is not my area of expertise!

Some people might be surprised to learn that Japanese Zen monks do not take a vow of celibacy.

Well, during the Meiji Restoration, when there was a huge push in Japan to Westernize, the Japanese Buddhists got rid of the rules of celibacy for the Buddhist clergy. Up until then, these types of rules had been matters of law; it was literally a crime to have sex if you were a Buddhist monk, or to eat meat. I'm simplifying here, of course, but that's the idea. So, after the restoration, the clergy had a choice: Did they want to uphold these old rules even though they were no longer legal matters, or did they want to abandon them? What they did was abandon them. So these days, the Japanese Buddhist clergy doesn't have a vow of celibacy, and this makes them unusual among other Buddhists throughout Asia, who generally have a strong belief that monastics should be celibate.

Complicating that matter further is the fact that the Japanese style of Buddhism has been perhaps the most successful in the West, perhaps because it does not require a vow of celibacy. Honestly, I don't think I would have taken the vows if there had been a celibacy inclusion in there. Look, the basic way to not misuse sexuality is to be honest in your sex life, and balanced, and sure, a monogamous relationship is perhaps the best way to do that. Although, I have to say that since being divorced, I have been neither monogamous nor celibate, so I have had to figure out a way to make that work, with varying degrees of success and failure!

The use of psychedelics and other drugs to access so-called spiritual realms has had a resurgence of late. Your books suggest that you're unimpressed by that idea.

Well, the problem with that for me goes directly to the heart of what Zen is about, and what makes the Zen approach different from almost every other spiritual approach. Most approaches to spirituality posit that the normal, everyday state of mind -- what you experience at the grocery store or at work--is somehow inadequate, and that what we want to do is alter our state of mind towards something better, purer, more profound; that's the approach a lot of spiritual paths take, and not just drug-related spirituality. Zen takes a completely different approach.

I was talking to my first teacher the other day, Tim McCarthy, and he gave a perfect example. He was talking to someone about forms of Indian mysticism apart from Buddhism, and they used the analogy that the mind is like water, and that you have all these waves on top of the water, and the goal of the practice is to calm those waves down so that you have calm, serene water. Zen takes the approach that the waves are also a manifestation of water, so there's no real need to force them to calm down; you're trying instead to experience the real nature of those waves. So, sort of ironically what happens during Zen practice, is that by trying to truly and deeply experience the nature of that sort of wavy, turbulent mind, the mind has a tendency to settle itself anyway. But it's not that the goal is to settle the mind; the goal is to fully experience whatever mind it is that you have at this moment.

I certainly don't think that everyone who uses drugs for a spiritual reason is insincere and just wants to get stoned. I think there are people who are very sincere, although I think they are in the vast minority, and that there is a majority who simply pretend to be serious about it, but really just want to get fucked up. The other problem with anything that alters the consciousness is this: Sure, a lot of people have had very profound spiritual experiences because of a car accident or a traumatic blow to the head. There's a well-known story about an Englishman during WWII who was walking down the street when a German bomb fell next to him and he realized he was going to die -- except the German bomb doesn't blow up. And that experience so shatters his mindset that it changes his life.

There are all sorts of traumatic experiences that can give you some kind of deep insight. For me, drugs seem like a way to introduce a kind of controlled trauma, safer than a car accident, but which nonetheless knocks your head around in a fairly violent way. And because you've been violently knocked sideways, everything looks different. Personally, I don't want to knock my brain around like that; I feel that it's kind of dangerous and I don't want to take those kinds of risks.

What's the most frequent question you get as a Zen teacher?

Probably the most frequently asked question I get is, "I've been meditating for a while, but my mind is still jumpy and crazy -- what am I doing wrong?" And the answer is, you're not doing anything wrong. And it's a myth to think that there are people out there for whom it's not like that. There's this kind of myth out there that the ancient Indians and Chinese were able to calm their minds much easier, and we're at such a huge disadvantage compared to them, so we need to find an easier way to practice. Which is just nonsense, because if you look at the ancient literature, it's full of people describing how difficult the meditation practice is for them, and they're not saying it's difficult because of getting your legs into a particular position. They're having the very same difficulties anyone today is having, which is that your mind is going all over the place. I've been doing this for over 20 years, but I still have days like that, where it's just a huge, huge struggle just to sit still for five lousy minutes. Those days become less frequent as you continue the practice, but they still come up sometimes, and I'm sure they have for everybody who's ever done this.

Why do people approach you to teach them? What do you think brings people to Zen?

Look, It's not an easy practice, so you have to have a certain degree of -- I don't want to say desperation, because that sounds too bleak -- but a recognition that something is really wrong, and needs to be fixed. Nobody comes to Zen who is a sort of a happy-go-lucky person who thinks everything is beautiful. A lot of people progress through Zen and become more like that, which I think is interesting, but generally, you have to have a kind of sense that something is wrong and needs to be done. Usually when someone comes to me and is interested in studying, I ask them where they came from and why they're there. It's hard to find a pattern to it. But there's a general sense that society as it exists today is not doing its job of making people happy, either on the global level, or on the individual level. So people have the sense that they've been misled by society and want to find something truer and more direct.

You are a proponent of studying Zen with a teacher, at least at some point in your development.

It's fine to keep your independence, and not join an organization. But the reason for having a teacher comes up later in the practice. There are a lot of problems with people who claim to have what they call "enlightenment experiences," without having a teacher to bounce those experiences off or discuss them with. Those people have turned out to be uniformly dangerous. The best example being Shoko Asahara, the guy who poisoned the Tokyo subway system with Sarin gas in March of 1995. There are all kinds of examples like that. So I feel like at some point in your practice, you need someone who's been doing the practice a little longer, and can talk you through certain aspects of it. It's not like I think you should never do Zazen without a teacher; it's just that, at some point, you have to be a little bit careful. Y'know, you can bullshit yourself on a very, very deep level, and you can bullshit yourself so thoroughly you can think you've become enlightened. And that can be dangerous.

This piece was originally published at RealitySandwich.com.

"Rain" On Their Parade: Why the NY Times review of "Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles On Broadway" is All Wet

2010-10-29T12:43:22-04:00

In his hugely condescending review of the newly opened show, Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway, ("Another Long and Winding Detour," Oct. 26, 2010) New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood--who, though he freely admits that he "can't claim to be an expert in the intricacies of [Beatles] music," was nevertheless given the assignment to be one--likens the experience of Rain to "enhanced Karaoke, like a collective night in front of a giant television, playing the new Beatles video game. . ."

Mr. Isherwood, formerly theatre critic for Variety, has proven himself a perceptive, if generally stingy critical voice on the theatre, but he likely knows even less about video games than he does about The Beatles' music. Despite the presence of side-stage video screens beaming era-specific footage, precisely what makes Rain such an exuberant, wistful, and engaging show is that it is decidedly not a mass-produced digital simulacrum of the Beatles recordings, nor a 2D cartoon depiction of their likenesses, but a carefully studied, deeply felt, ambitiously staged, and obviously reverently rehearsed live performance encompassing the entire breadth of the Beatles career; what amounts to the great popular classical music of our time.

Unlike the Philharmonic, however, who can simply deliver a more or less correct, if nuanced interpretation of Mozart or Mahler's compositions, the members of Rain need to recreate far more than just the notes, sounds and structures of these pieces, indeed adopting, as best they can, the physical, visual and vocal signifiers that will translate the Beatles work and personalities in a total context--such is the multi-tiered appeal of pop music, at least since, well, The Beatles. At this the members of Rain, though varying in their resemblances to the twenty-something Liverpudlians they portray on stage under their mop-top wigs, succeed to a impressive degree.

Mr. Isherwood however, in preferring to use his coveted editorial pulpit for snarky, unfunny asides--"I invited a Beatles devotee to join me, but she reacted as if I'd asked her to come along to two weeks of jury duty"--casually damns Rain with faint, and mostly fudged, praise. The Rain band, serious craftsmen and talents who have mastered both the Beatles' music and onstage physics, is made up simply of "fine musicians" and "capable vocal impersonators." The show's Paul McCartney, Brooklyn-born Joey Curatolo, Mr. Isherwood admits, has a voice that is "admirably precise in its mimicry," but "wags his head ferociously" like a "McCartney bobble-head doll."

Did Mr. Isherwood, who must never have seen a film of the head-wagging early Beatles, miss Mr. Curatolo's engaging, effective banter with the crowd, or his deft and deeply musical bass playing, which virtually any musician can tell you is half the battle when performing Beatles material? What's more, Mr. Curatolo's voice is not merely "admirably precise"--it is quite gorgeous, actually, and thoroughly at home within the minute timbral variations of vintage McCartney. His look, speaking voice and mannerisms are likewise both totally on-point and appealing in themselves. It must be said: Mr. Curatolo carries the show brilliantly.

When Mr. Curatolo, strumming an acoustic guitar, began to sing the opening phrases of "Yesterday," the underlying emotional impact of the world's most covered (and perhaps most overplayed) song was immediately palpable to everyone else in the Neil Simon Theatre, as if it were being performed--and more importantly heard--fresh and new. That Rain helped these, admittedly, largely middle-aged people reconnect to the rich emotional and joyful core of so much Beatles music--a quality sadly missed in the stance of much of the current musical generation--is hardly the stuff of what Isherwood snidely dismisses as a "boomer theme park ride," and it certainly has nothing to do with karaoke or video games.

What Rain create with their meticulous and often quite beautiful Beatles arrangements, and their balance of singing/acting and--for lack of a better phrase--simply rocking, is an invitation to shared cultural associations and triggered personal memories that nevertheless contribute mightily to the real lives of at least two generations--perhaps not real lives which took place within whichever temporal boundaries Mr. Isherwood judges to be acceptably cool (or, lacking that, at least kitschy cool) but real lives nonetheless. (It's worth noting that the Eighties arena-rock Broadway show, "Rock of Ages," earned a grade of "guilty pleasure" from the brittle Mr. Isherwood; the Eighties revival still evidently enjoying a free kitsch-appeal pass from the cultural gatekeepers.)

But just as unfortunate as his condescension to boomer-era culture and experience, is Mr. Isherwood's careless underestimation of the craft and artistry involved in performing Beatles music at the highest level. Ringo drummer Ralph Castelli, for instance, simply "thwacks away in the background, looking appropriately laid-back." Does Mr. Isherwood have even the first inkling of how much study, work and artfulness go into recreating the sound, technique and feel of Ringo Starr's idiosyncratic beats and fills? One might try asking a producer or drummer (if that's not beneath you); this is a multi-leveled science in itself. Still, Mr. Isherwood is quite comfortable telling the world blithely that Rain is utterly devoid of "authenticity." In fact, the musicians strove for, and generally attained, a stunning level of musical authenticity--the subtlest of bass guitar gestures in "Hello, Goodbye"; using towels to muffle the drums on 'Come Together"; finding the exact vocal distortion for "I Am the Walrus"; spreading the vocal harmonies perfectly, even on difficult vehicles like "This Boy."

In every case--lead guitarist Joe Bithorn's incendiary take on the Eric Clapton solo from "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" comes to mind, during which Mr. Isherwood was evidently only focused on Mr. Bithorn's costume mustache--the members of Rain approached their personas and their playing with equal seriousness and evident background. While Steve Landes' Lennon occasionally struck me as lacking some of John's overt toughness, he certainly sang with all of Lennon's throaty resonance and dipping articulations, and was equally at home on both keyboards and the Rickenbacker and Epiphone guitars that Lennon favored. Bithorn not only played George Harrison's guitar parts with knowing tone and phrasing, but he used an adroitly placed guitar synth on his otherwise stock instruments to contribute (along with keyboardist Mark Beyer) many of the later Beatles' harp, string and horn parts. Noone in the theatre, presumably, with the possible exception of this "expert on the intricacies of the music," likely noticed anything but how rich and complete each song sounded.

As Mr. Isherwood correctly points out, Rain, and all of its members, certainly owe a debt to the original Broadway Beatles show, Beatlemania, in which they all at some point participated. (The lovely Mr. Isherwood even mocks the band's bio blurbs from the show program.) For Mr. Isherwood, this should move us to "reflect grimly" on the idea of Beatlemania being accounted some kind of "aesthetic pioneer." And why such a grim prospect, exactly? Is there an occult value system in musical theatre salons that precludes the public performance--even the period recreation--of especially important and by all accounts unimpeachably great work, such as the Beatles catalog?

Perhaps Mr. Isherwood should take the Metropolitan Opera to task for their creepy, too literal retreads of those tired old-folks' favorites like Carmen, La Boheme, and Boris Gudonov. (Not that dusty old stuff again--boring!) Tough call: perhaps it does require life-long study and devotion to perform some of the world's greatest music at a high-level of artistry and consistency, and to stage it in a creative way that pays tribute to its original composers while keeping alive a tradition and a legacy of expression that transcends the tawdry vicissitudes of fashion and pop shelf life. Still . . . I'm no expert on these things.

The Revolution Will Be Televised: Oscar-pick Burma VJ Airs on HBO

2010-04-26T14:02:58-04:00

If the totalitarian nightmare portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 strikes you as an implausible portrait of state control and repression, a single viewing of the Oscar-nominated documentary Burma VJ; Reporting From A Closed Country will quickly jerk you into reality. Using raw, eyewitness footage captured by underground, internet-equipped video journalists--members of Burma's gutsy Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB)--the film's Danish director, Anders Ostergaard, has crafted a compelling and vivid account of Myanmar/Burma's 2007 citizen's uprising, which saw the emergence of the country's highly revered Buddhist monks as pivotal political activists, and it chronicles the violent, heartbreaking finality with which the country's military dictatorship clamped down on the peaceful, democratic movement now known as the "Saffron Revolution."

Burma VJ follows DVB video journalist "Joshua" from the days just before the explosive events of September 2007 through the chaos, courage, violence and heroism that followed. It is hardly casual viewing. As Joshua, who suspects he's being watched, flees to Thailand to oversee DVB's operations remotely, thousands take to the streets of Rangoon, in support of arrested opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, producing scenes of civil disobedience that are as uplifting (and fraught with tension) as the footage that was broadcast to the West during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China. In fact, Burma VJ offers arguably a far more intimate and visceral portrait of these events because of the raw immediacy of the hand-held camera, and its clearly taboo status. There is virtually no scene in which the viewer does not recognize that the filming itself is a revolutionary act.

In one particularly urgent moment of the film, a DVB reporter interviews a huddled group of monks whose monastery had been attacked the night before by government thugs, who destroyed the building's interior and beat and kidnapped most of the over 200 monks in residence there. As the camera captures the fear, desperation--and yes, quiet dignity--of these young monks, another gang of government thugs appears again in the near distance, brandishing bats and clubs; later, the lifeless, saffron-robed body of a badly beaten monk is seen floating down a nearby river. Just as shockingly, at one of the uprising's penultimate demonstrations, a Japanese journalist is shot to death in the street and hauled off by military police. Elsewhere, in an initially quiet, poignant vignette, we watch as a government ban on assemblies of more than five people is defied by one, two, three, then four and five young Burmese, until the streets begin to teem with clapping, cheering marchers.

Like the previous Burmese uprising of 1988, the 2007 revolution was swiftly crushed--and with it another Burmese generation's hopes for a democratic society--but the DVB was able to reconstitute itself, and remains dedicated to funneling the truth out of Burma and countering the military junta's tightly scripted propaganda machine. As for the possibilities of a successful uprising in the future, the DVB's Executive Director, Aye Chan Niang, is pragmatic. "We don't believe that what we are doing right now will finally bring about democratic change in Burma," he confesses, "but we play an important role for people inside Burma and the international community. Millions of people inside Burma depend on us for reliable and uncensored news and information, and we are building the democratic foundation in Burma where differing opinions and beliefs can be argued freely and mutually respected. Hope for change in Burma is just a matter of time."

A film that blurs the lines between filmmaking and activism in a brave, uncompromising way that calls to mind recent documentaries like its fellow Oscar nominee (and eventual winner) The Cove, Burma VJ succeeds as both political message and cogent storytelling, which is perhaps why its effect is so chilling, and the sympathy it encourages so profound. "I have been truly inspired," says director Ostergaard, already a two-time recipient of Denmark's Bodil film award, "to see how a film can be so functional that people jump right off their seats after viewing, and ask what they can do to help. Nevertheless, in making the film I have been keen to keep my identity as a filmmaker rather than an activist. This is ultimately the best way to communicate with the audience."

Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country airs on HBO on April 27 (1:00 PM), April 30 (4:00 PM), May 2 (11:00 AM, 5:25 AM), May 6 (10:00 AM) and May 12 (12:30 AM). HBO2 will air the film on April 28 (8:00 PM) and May 8 (12:00 Noon). For more information, visit the Burma VJ website, and the Burma Campaign UK.

Vinyl Is Forever: In Praise of Indie Record Stores

2010-04-20T17:02:06-04:00

This piece was originally posted at the MTV Music Blog

For those who only buy their music on iTunes, Amazon.com, or other online digital music services and retailers, the idea of walking into a "brick-and-mortar" record store and plunking down cash for a physical, mechanical reproduction of a recording (also known, for you youngsters, as a "CD" or "LP record") might seem like a royal pain in the ass. Or perhaps the record shop simply seems like a relic from a bygone era of original Star Trek episodes and 8-track tapes, the province of nerdy, still-goateed Dads who huff and puff that "there are no good bands anymore" (um, not true) and insist that a McIntosh tube amplifier is way better than anything solid-state (um, basically true).

Still, in respect to this month's Third Annual Record Store Day (April 17, 2010), before you dismiss the independent vinyl and CD shop as hopelessly outmoded, ask yourself when was the last time you had an stimulating chat about rare '60s garage-psych bands or the hippest new British electro with one of the sellers at iTunes or Amazon. Right: trick question--they don't have actual people selling records at those sites, of course. Instead, you get the "Genius Sidebar" and "Recommendations," non-humanoid taste-bots that spit out preferences based on your buying habits, all lovingly thought through by a giant server somewhere. Is that really how you want to be turned on to cutting-edge new music and under-the-radar classics? ("Yeah, dude, I got hipped to the awesome new MGMT record by a Hewlett-Packard BladeSystem Matrix.") Sweet.

Okay; those taste-bots are a handy part of the home computer mix, I'll confess, but they're no replacement for wandering the aisles and bins of a proper record shop, checking out the featured albums that the store displays to pique your interest, talking turkey with the guys and gals at the counter, and knowing that the money you spend not only buys you a superior product sonically (vinyl and CD quality, of course, literally crushes the tinny sound of MP3s) but helps to support a small business that genuinely cares about putting great music into the world. Do we really want our music consumption controlled entirely by corporate fat-cats who themselves listen mainly to mid-Nineties Phil Collins? Thought not. And while the dudes and dudesses at your local indie record store may not always answer your questions without a certain whiff of hipster snobbery, it's a good bet that your journey of discovery will take turns that you'd never have traveled while surfing the web.

What's more, a good record store acts as a kind of brain trust and cultural meeting place for the music scene that surrounds it. "Hanging out in record shops" is a time-honored way to connect with like-minded (and like-eared) enthusiasts, find out what cool gigs are happening in town, and even meet other musicians who may also be looking for a band influenced by "My Bloody Valentine, Kid Creole, and the Fugs." Getting to know the people behind the indie record racks is a great way to stay plugged-in to the local music scene; without them, you're arguably just another isolated post-modern punter trolling the internet in your Crocs. Whether you're picking up "rare groove" sides by Donald Byrd and Mongo Santamaria and sampling them into Ableton Live, or buffing out your collection of Dick Dale and Ventures singles to brag about in the pages of Goldmine, you're likely to bump into someone who shares your passion.

As vinyl records continue their remarkable comeback as a viable, even premium form of music enjoyment, the indie record store becomes even more indispensable, a place of vinyl worship where devotees of the LP congregate to buy, sell and celebrate the sheer pleasure of the polyvinyl chloride-based spiral platter. While the wonderfully visceral thrill of watching the needle on a turntable make contact with the grooves of an LP--and hearing those first comforting crackles and snaps--is easy to rave about, so is the visual force of pulling a full-size LP jacket out of a bin and absorbing the cover art in the open air. Those postage stamp-sized JPEGs on the internet will simply never replace the optic bong-hit of a great jazz, psychedelic or new wave LP album cover (or a luscious prog-rock double-album gatefold!), and there's only one place to have that experience in a way that helps you bring home both the LP and the righteous memory of the first time you held it in your hands: the independent record store, to which we can only say, in the words Mr. Spock used on those original Star Trek episodes: "Live long and prosper."

Read even more, including a list of rock band The Cringe's favorite record stores, at the MTV Music Blog. The author wishes to thank the folks at Criminal Records in Atlanta, GA.

Buddhist Backlash: Stephen Batchelor Braves The Storm

2010-04-01T11:43:08-04:00

Stephen Batchelor does not look like a man at the center of a storm. But the calm, bespectacled 57-year-old Englishman is in the eye of a hurricane of controversy taking place in the global community of Buddhism.

Batchelor is a former monk in both the Tibetan Geluk and Korean Zen traditions, and a noted scholar and translator of canonical texts. His original writing first began making serious cultural waves with 1998's Buddhism Without Beliefs, which posited a radical new "existential, therapeutic and liberating agnosticism"--one which rejected the belief in reincarnation and karma, and proposed a secular approach grounded in meditation and mindfulness, along with a historical understanding of the Buddha, achieved through a modern lens.

The book quickly became a key read for non-denominational Buddhists. For this "educated laity," Batchelor writes, "the traditional practices of Buddhism appeared uncritically devout, simplistic and superstitious. Instead, they were looking for a coherent and rigorous philosophy of life, coupled with a meditative practice that made an actual difference in their lives here and now, not a set of consoling beliefs and aspirations that promised rewards in a hypothetical future existence."

The book caught fire with liberal thinkers, but it produced a firestorm of denunciation from many monks and lay practitioners who sniffed that Batchelor was an "angry materialist," "dishonest and arrogant," who was guilty of "misleading" the masses with his "watered-down," "tampered-with" theories and "nihilistic dogma and fluff."

Since then, Batchelor--who lives in the south of France with his wife Martine, whom he met while both were monks in Korea--has hardly backed down. Indeed, his latest work, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, trades in the mere agnosticism of its predecessor for a nuanced atheism--it even boasts a back cover blurb from atheist champion Christopher "God Is Not Great" Hitchens. The book decries what Batchelor perceives as the supernatural clutter in Tibetan Buddhism, and it possesses an anti-authoritarian streak that Batchelor argues is wholly in line with the Buddha's teachings on self-reliance. But there's little in Confession's rich combination of personal memoir, historical exegesis and Buddhist primer that seems to warrant the degree of negative reactions it has inspired--among the most heated of which is that he has "tampered" with scripture for his own ends.

"I am aware that I'm interpreting and, perhaps in that sense, 'tampering' with the materials," he shrugs, "but I would argue that that's always been the case. Every Buddhist tradition has emerged on the basis of a relatively small selection of the overall canon, on which the entire edifice of that tradition has been built. I'm doing much the same; I don't believe you can account for the entire vast range of canonical materials. You select those passages that speak to you; that's nothing new. That's how Buddhism has developed all these extraordinary forms."

Batchelor's book traces his own development from backpacking teenage Pink Floyd and hash enthusiast in 1970, to his ordination a few years later in Dharamsala, India under the auspices of the Dalai Lama, to his decade of retreat, meditation and study, his eventual disrobing, and his transformation back to the life of a layman, albeit one dedicated to writing about and teaching Buddhist practice.

Throughout, he offers an emotionally detailed and compelling account of his inner life and his public struggles. He couples this memoir--his "confession"-- with a scholarly, sensitive and even revelatory account of the Buddha's life (guess what, folks? The Buddha's father wasn't a king) rooted in the economic, geographic and political realities of the Buddha's time. The book's through-line is Batchelor's exposition of the path toward living a life "that embodies Buddhist values within the context of secularism and modernity." The successful integration of these narratives makes Confession perhaps an even more essential read than its predecessor--at least for the open-minded.

Ironically, while the title certainly titillates, it's hardly radical. Indeed, there's little in Buddhist philosophy that suggests the existence of a personal God in the way it's understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Perhaps more worrying to Buddhists is Batchelor's outing of some of the supernatural squabbles taking place within the ranks of Tibetan Buddhism, along with his rejection of reincarnation and karma--at least the codified ways in which they're understood by Buddhist orthodoxy. Batchelor is likewise unapologetic about his inclusion of ideas drawn from European thinkers and theologians, from Heidegger and Husserl to Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, whose approach to "demythologizing" Christianity helped inspire Batchelor's own search for the historical Buddha and his metaphysical weeding-out of the teachings.

In this attempt at "demythologizing" Buddhism, Batchelor effectively critiques the West's habit of indulging in the "exotic" aspects of Asian culture, even of its religions--a fetishizing of the East that Edward Said famously termed "Orientalism." Batchelor could well be attempting to liberate Asian Buddhism from the patchouli-scented misperceptions that have defined it in the Western mind since the 1960s. By explaining the myths and dogmas of Asian Buddhism as cultural trappings relevant only to their own traditions--and not to a modern, secular practice--Batchelor challenges modernity to finally strip away the psychedelic veneer and say goodbye to pie-in-the-sky transcendentalism. Instead, he elegantly reiterates Buddhism's core principles (based around the Four Noble Truths), takes us on a revealing investigation of the historical Buddha, and taps his committed 38-year personal Buddhist practice to inform the book's sense of wisdom, clarity and insight.

All of which makes the accusation that Batchelor is somehow promoting a "watered-down" or "bubble-gum" version of Buddhism both lazy and inaccurate. "I can't be dismissed as someone who knows nothing about it," Batchelor notes. "The same people who would call me a 'bubblegum Buddhist' also use my translations of Buddhist texts in their classes. Look, as an author, I am claiming an authority; the words are connected. This is the root of the conflict between my detractors and myself: I'm claiming some authority and they're saying, basically, you don't have that authority. Only we have the authority."

Buddhism is not a property to be held or inherited in exclusivity, Batchelor argues, nor was it ever meant to be a fixed, static set of beliefs. "Buddhism, which teaches impermanence, contingency, dukkha (suffering) and unreliability, is itself also impermanent, selfless or inessential," he suggests. "With historical consciousness, we can now recognize that the Dhamma is a very fluid tradition, which is precisely what's allowed it to flourish in so many vastly different cultures and circumstances. So, it's all very well to say that I am popularizing or banalizing Buddhism, but basically what I'm doing is responding to my understanding of Buddhism as an evolving, adapting organism, rather than as a fixed body of truths that is passed down, uncorrupted, from one generation to the next."

Like the traditional Buddhists who criticize him, Batchelor's avowed mission is simply to keep Buddhist values and practices alive. "In the end," he says, "we just have very different ideas about what that means."

Pretend It Like Beckham, Pt 2: The LA Galaxy Soccer Fantasy Camp Gets Real

2009-12-14T14:56:10-05:00

This is the second installment of a piece that begins here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rotondi/pretend-it-like-beckham-i_b_389880.html

Making sure that this motley crew of small business owners, actors, financial types, musicians, students, graphic artists and blue-collar workers begin to gel into an actual soccer team is the job of Coach Ralph Perez. With his spiky salt-and-pepper hair and distinctive Bronx-born accent, Perez commands the locker room and the practice field with a relaxed gravitas that remains gruff while still being gracious. Head coach at University of Redlands for the last few years, Perez boasts an impressive pedigree that includes the U.S. National Team, the New York Metrostars, the Galaxy, and extensive collegiate coaching. When he brings over genuine pros like Galaxy keeper Kevin Hartman to say hello to the fantasy campers, they're quick to credit his guidance, mentorship and influence on their game, and the plaudits are clearly genuine.

In scrimmages and games, it's easy to see why: Screw-ups are met with good-natured ribbing ("That's like missing a lay-up in basketball!") and successful moves by feel-good approbation ("Hey Brooklyn, the general manager of the Red Bulls wants to talk to you!"). Whether during demanding drills or casual chats, it's the kind of coaching that adults can relate to, a smart balance between the athletic handholding that kids require, the straight talk and motivation that pros demand, and the peer-to-peer friendliness and respect that grown-ups are accustomed to.

Into the second and third day of training, Perez's approach--seconded by assistant coach Paul Broome, a former Galaxy regular, and towering British goalkeeping coach Chris Howe--shifts toward the rigorous, in preparation for the camps's final event, a full 11v11 match on grass that represents the culmination of the week, and bestows bragging rights on the victors. Extra incentive: like the rest of the week's activities, the final match will be videotaped by the Galaxy's Troy Bardy (a dead ringer for Jack White of the White Stripes), which means that moments of glory--and dread instants of shame--will all survive for fantasy camp posterity.

As game-day approaches, we're all simultaneously more warmed-up and more brittle. Sure, days of stretching and activating muscles using "plyometrics" along with more traditional calisthenics and old-school soccer exercises has strengthened our "pillars" and "cores," and the amount of sheer scrimmage time has expanded our ability to run for serious lengths of time. But it's taken its toll, too. One player leaves the field with a grapefruit-sized swelling on his ankle from muffing an ambitious bicycle-kick; another begins taking ice-baths (yup, just like it sounds) to deal with an aggravated hamstring pull; and everywhere players are lining up at the trainer's room to get taped up, iced down and stretched out.

While generally healthy, I can't seem to get my hamstrings to really loosen up, despite hot epsom salt baths and plenty of stretching. Plus, like most of the campers, after two full training sessions and scrimmages each day, I'm ready to call it a night by 9PM, and I'm hitting lights out no later than 11. As for hydrating, water suddenly seems like manna from heaven; I can't get enough of it. (Good thing the urinals in the Galaxy bathroom have little "pee meters" posted that allow you to gauge your level of hydration based on the color of your, uh, stream...)

The day before the big game, rain hits Los Angeles hard, so by Sunday morning, despite ample sunshine in the sky, the fields are drenched, which means the grass field we're scheduled to play on is slick, thick and a bit muddy. Pros, like Beckham himself, generally deride artificial turf surfaces as sub-standard, wicked on the knees and hips, and unnatural in terms of ball movement and response. But the difference between practicing on the FieldTurf (that's a brand name) and running out onto a wet grass field is a bit like jogging from a parking lot onto the beach; the ball moves slower, your feet move slower, and that $220 pair of Adidas Predators are suddenly unceremoniously splattered with mud. (Sigh. Clearly, there are sacrifices to be made in sport.)

On the other hand, a grass field is the real deal, and that dirt and dew translates to sweat and blood on the pitch, pulling the game out of the air-brushed realm of televised matches and Sony Playstation and literally grounding it in reality. Ironically, this is precisely where the "fantasy" aspect of the camp ends. A game, after all, is a game.

We're used to seeing big players trundling into the locker room for important matches with headphones on, getting into the "zone" and keeping distractions out, and it's no different on Sunday morning as the campers get dressed (White jerseys with Coach Broome, Blue Shirts with Perez) and undertake their pregame rituals. For me, getting pumped includes dosing up on a medley of heavy metal on my iPhone: Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage," Deep Purple's "Highway Star" and Opeth's "Ghosts of Perdition" provide my soundtrack of empowerment. The line for trainer Pablo's taping services is extensive, so I just opt for a little tape around my ankles, on the outside of the sock, to keep those shinguards in place. Wrapping my ankles, I get a friendly challenge from Dennis, an upbeat guy and fine player, who's playing for the White team today: "Okay man," he says, "loser has to buy the pizza when I come to New York." Agreed.

In the pre-game meeting, Perez outlines our strategy, formation and player positions. I'm to start upfront as a striker with one of the shockingly in-shape 45-year olds who have already amazed me, though our team is a good mix of young legs and old souls, including two of our stocky, blondish youngsters who'll be holding down the backline. What's more, each team will have a special "designated player"; our team gets the mighty Cienfuegos, driving the attack in midfield, while the Whites get U.S. great--in fact, "legend" is not too strong a word--Caligiuri, still a serious force to be reckoned with at 45.

The sun shining, and a handful of family members and friends in the bleachers, the game is as scrappy, exuberant and mildly chaotic as you might expect, though there's an awful lot of good soccer as well; confident "knocking-it-around" in the defense, good holding and build-up play in the midfield, and solid running off the ball from the forwards. Ten minutes in, I get a chance to score the games's first goal, put our team ahead, and deposit that golden moment in my memory banks: on a counter-attack, Cienfuegos spreads out left, I take the middle channel, and he threads a masterful through-ball to me inside the box. Here it is: the dream realized, adolescent fantasy squarely met. But miraculously, my foot does not even connect with the ball, somehow skipping over my over-priced cleats just as I go to strike it, bundling into a defender, and getting cleared out of danger.

Did I lose focus? Take my eye off the ball? Was it the slick surface? Either way, I'm faced with the athlete's greatest psychological dilemma: I choked, man. Gotta deal with that. Fortunately, I'm not the only one: mistakes are as abundant as grass stains in this match, and I'll get a few chances to redeem myself and lift the curse before the day is out. In the second half, driving through the middle, Cienfuegos hits a crisp pass on the ground to me from my left, but I'm aware enough to sense he has something else in mind; I let the ball go past me to where he's almost certainly intended, our star attacker, who controls the ball under pressure, lifts it up and knocks it forward into my path. It's a difficult ball, curling in from behind me, but I'm able to get a head on it, bring it down and get a solid left foot strike on the ball, only to watch it angle just feet from the goal's upper right corner.

The White team does get it right, building out of a stout defense, scoring twice on scrappy but well-earned goals before we narrow the deficit by one thanks in part to the efforts of our French #10. In the end, it's not enough to stave off defeat, though Perez scrambles the formation toward the end, taking off defenders and adding forwards, in a last-ditch attempt to get the equalizer. It doesn't come. White 2, Blue 1.

Marching back to the locker room, where we'll say our goodbyes and give hearty thanks all around, I'm almost stunned by the silence; just the clicking of my studs on the concrete, and a light breeze that carries the midday sunlight to my shoulders. Narrow defeat, whether in major competition or a weekend skirmish, is a haunting feeling, and I find myself mentally recreating scenes from the match in my head, doctoring them, of course, in a futile attempt to metaphysically correct the outcome. And I wonder: how long did John Terry of Chelsea try to mentally "fix" his missed penalty kick at the Champions League final a few years ago? Has Zinedine Zidane visualized the moments just before that notorious 2006 headbutt countless times, and soothed his soul by playing out a more measured, restrained response? How often did Bill Buckner of the Red Sox replay his grand kerfuffle in the 1986 World Series, and imagine himself picking up the ball in an endless loop?

Sports fantasies comes in many forms, and as we say our goodbyes, offer props for tough work on the pitch, and shake hands in solidarity, it's evident that the camp's "fantasy" aspects--taking the field with big-name players, decked out in full Galaxy strips--has ironically offered us genuine insight into the decidedly earthbound reality of professional sports: the day-to-day challenges, the self-inflicted mind games, tests of stamina and resolve, and the nagging physical knocks and pings that you simply can't feel when sitting on your couch in front of a 52" HD Plasma set. Nor can you easily come by the camaraderie you get when you and your compatriots are all putting your pride on the line in real competition, that mixture of concern, mutual motivation, and acerbic, purposeful teasing that defines locker room fraternity. My challenger Dennis, for instance, has only one parting thing to say to me as he slaps his hand on my shoulder, and flashes a wicked grin.

"I'll take pepperoni."

Pretend It Like Beckham: Inside the LA Galaxy Adult Soccer Fantasy Camp, Pt 1

2009-12-12T13:53:13-05:00

"The dream is still there," says the Frenchman, pulling on his official LA Galaxy game jersey, emblazoned on the back with his name and his favorite number--in his case, #10, the number associated with soccer greats like Zinedine Zidane and Diego Maradona. We're sitting in the LA Galaxy locker room at the sprawling Home Depot Center--the same locker room in which David Beckham and Landon Donovan don their cleats--where along with close to 40 other amateur players ranging in age from their early 20s to early 60s, we're taking part in the LA Galaxy Adult Soccer Fantasy Camp.

Sure, call it a prescription for a midlife crisis, if you like; a chance to rub shoulders with both pros and the milieu they inhabit; a vacation for grown-up dudes (and a few dudesses) for whom the game of soccer is a far better use of free time than golfing, fishing, hunting or skeet shooting. With five days of training by top coaching pros like Ralph Perez, state-of-the-art fitness instruction by Athlete's Performance, and guest appearances by past greats like Paul Caligiuri and Mauricio Cienfuegos, and upstarts like Omar Gonzalez, the camp is part fan geek-out and part soccer boot camp; part adolescent dream fulfillment and bucket list check-off, and certainly, several parts round-ball nirvana for the hardcore soccer enthusiast.

There are 18 million active soccer players in the United States, more than any other country in the world (so much for the argument that soccer "is not popular" in the US), though, to be fair, some 78% of those are under the age of 18. Still, the numbers of adult players are staggering, and recreational leagues have been a mainstay of both urban and suburban communities for decades. What's more, the advent of Fox Soccer Channel a decade ago, coupled with the increasing profile of Major League Soccer, the success of US Women's Soccer and the return of the professional women's league, as well as the huge appeal of the English Premiership and European leagues, has helped make soccer the kind of sports obsession for American men and women that it's always been for the rest of the world's bearer's of both X and Y chromosomes.

All of which suggests a need; an outlet for these players to reinforce their love, understanding, fitness level and skill set in the kind of environment most of them haven't enjoyed since college, or even high school. Other adult soccer camps exist: notably, the Soccer Academy's five-day summer program in Maryland, and sure, the United States Adult Soccer Association hosts excellent tournaments for several age groups. But, what the hell: Why not give the whole thing a splash of real fantasy fulfillment? Here at Galaxy headquarters, we're dressed head to toe in Galaxy uniforms, which are neatly draped over our chairs when we arrive in the morning, and we're out on the field running drills on the same practice quad with legends like Tony Meola and Claudio Reyna. When we troop into the locker room, we get a "what's up" from Galaxy players like Dema Kovalenko and Edson Buddle, and we eat lunch while grilling Rookies of the Year like Sean Franklin and Omar Gonzalez about subjects like mental conditioning and playing for the US National Team.

Moreover, the campers themselves have stories every bit as interesting as the pros they've come to break bread with. My French friend explains how he began his career as a promising schoolboy midfielder, but was jerked out of the game and stuffed in a tennis program when his family moved and his mother chose not to join the ranks of shuttling soccer moms. Like many here, it's that gnawing "I coulda been a contender!" impulse that makes the simulation so satisfying. Others played passionately in high school, bowed out in college, and returned to the game in their Thirties, becoming active members of their local recreational leagues. They still put in a few games a week, despite pulled hamstrings, Turf Toe, and the myriad niggling injuries that can hamper the middle-aged player and even make him wonder if perhaps it's completely, absurdly silly to be out there chasing a soccer ball past the age of 40 at all. (It's not.)

All of which makes it even more inspiring to see players nearing or over 50 displaying levels of technical acuity and raw fitness that utterly belie their middle-aged midsections and receding hairlines. Evidently, noone told these guys that, at their age, they'd be better off going fly fishing in British Columbia than scoring a header off a cross from Mauricio Cienfuegos in Carson, CA. Not that all the players at Camp Galaxy are aging baby boomers: in fact, there's a raft of younger guns, including a crew of Latino hotshots with extremely fine-tuned ball skills and noses for goal, and gutsy American players cut from the stocky, no-nonsense cloth of national figures like Jay Demerit and Taylor Twellman. Throw in a baby-faced Polish kid--we call him the "Polish Predator"--a tough German defender from Stuttgart who frequently yells "Turn! Turn!"; a smoky-voiced Southern Californian lady who suffers no fools on or off the pitch; and a lanky, verbose Italian American with expensive shoes and a cheap hair band (that would be me). Imagine if the Bad News Bears had all grown up and sprouted shin-guards. . .

To Be Continued.
Part 2 of "Pretend It Like Beckham" can be found here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rotondi/pretend-it-like-beckham-p_b_391491.html

Same-Sex Marriage: "A Basic Civil Right"

2009-12-08T11:28:37-05:00

Last Wednesday, as the New York State Senate voted down a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New York, they were, in essence, voting to require discrimination in the State of New York. That they did it, in part, with the guiding hand of the Catholic Church--who called the defeat, incredibly, "a victory for the basic building block of our society"--only serves to outline both the violation of principle that constitutes religious meddling in U.S. law, and the wider question the measure raises: Why on earth is something as basic to our democracy as full civil rights coming up for a vote at all?

Much like the ham-fisted revision of California's constitution that took place earlier this year, in which some 52% of voters, via Proposition 8 (call it "Prop Hate") were able to gut the Golden State's constitutional protection of equal rights by disallowing legal marriage for its gay and lesbian citizens, the New York ruling throws the greater movement for civil rights in this country back by some forty years, certainly at least to 1967, when it was still illegal in most states for inter-racial couples to marry, because of so-called "anti-miscegenation" laws. This Wednesday's vote made a very similar kind of legal discrimination mandatory in the State of New York.

In their landmark 1967 ruling striking down long-held prohibitions on inter-racial marriage, the Supreme Court said plainly, "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival." What part of "basic civil rights of man" did the 38 New York Senators who voted against that measure not understand? Sure, those who oppose same-sex marriage--like the rank and file of the scandal-free and sexually-transparent Catholic Church--will tell you that somehow this is different, that this is about "protecting marriage." Perhaps then, it is heterosexual marriage that needs to be banned; until the divorce rate for first-time marriages drops from its current rate of around 50% (it's closer to 74% for third-timers) to closer to, say, 10%, why not put a ban on all opposite sex marriages; after all, we really do want to protect the institution of marriage, don't we?

The real and terrible irony to these latest rulings is that they have ever come up for a vote at all. Since when do Americans vote on stripping certain citizens of their basic civil rights, rights protected under the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and every single state Constitution, and reinforced by the Supreme Court as recently as 1967? The right to marry who we choose is clearly a basic freedom in our democracy, so much so that opposite sex couples are allowed to marry each other within five minutes of meeting one another, if the fancy strikes them. There is, in fact, no controversy here at all; we all agree on the fundamental premise behind these freedoms. As Staten Island senator Diane Savino noted after Wednesday's vote, "We in government don't determine the quality or worthiness of people's relationships. If we did, we would not issue three-quarters of the marriage licenses we do."

Is it is really acceptable to start putting human rights up for a vote, either on the Senate floor or the public voting booth? Civil rights simply are, guaranteed not only under law, but under the entire political philosophy that underpins our democracy. We don't vote on whether certain citizens should be denied the right to cast a ballot--the fact that we once had to vote on giving women and African-Americans the vote only illustrates the ways we should strive to make our founding documents--and the principles they espouse--stand up to the test of a living democracy. If anything, the purpose of amendments and clarifications to our laws and constitutions dealing with civil rights should always--as with women's suffrage, racial desegregation and inter-racial marriage rights--lead to a more emancipated citizenry and a more equitable bestowal of the freedoms the majority enjoy, not a clampdown on a vulnerable minority.

Proposition 8, much like the banning of same-sex marriage in Maine and now New York, is a huge movement backwards, a betrayal of the most basic tenets of human rights and the social contract, which any junior high kid with a dog-eared copy of Locke or Hobbes can quite easily explain to you. Denying gay Americans the right to marry is--it must be admitted--a kind of fascism, a form of oppression and control by which individuals blinded by ideology and fear push their repressive agenda onto our otherwise sound political system and demand that the system bend its principles to accommodate their own ignorance. With the right mixture of fear-mongering, religious saber-rattling and conservative funding, you could probably get a referendum passed in this country on denying people who watch public television the right to marry. Shall we bring that up for a vote?

As the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic 1958 treatise on anti-miscegenation laws, Reflections on Little Rock, "Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs." Danke schon, Hannah. If our Constitution, and those of the States we live in, cannot provide true equal rights for all our citizens, including those who live in committed same-sex relationships, simply because enough ideologically rigid people choose to "bring it up for a vote," then what do our civil rights really mean?

Until same-sex marriage is a reality in this country, we will remain in the dark ages of civil rights, as repressed and provincial a nation as any of those we rightly condemn for their destructive integration of politics and archaic religious law, which is a far more "abominable" marriage than anything the gay community can possibly dish out.

Obama's Catholic Baptism By Fire

2009-05-19T17:10:25-04:00

"The Day the Dome Was Tarnished Forever."

So read the backs of T-shirts worn by some number of anti-choice protesters during President's Obama's visit to the Catholic University of Notre Dame over the weekend to deliver a commencement address, one which took a typically civil, sensitive and conciliatory stance in discussing an issue that is deeply polarizing for many; and has become the somehow holy inspiration for others to engage in crass sloganeering and even violent action.

The irony is that, by selecting Obama to speak at its commencement ceremonies, Notre Dame was clearly honoring the school's Catholic tradition, which, at its best, celebrates the power of the intellect and the spirit to overcome obstacles and bring social justice to the community. The overwhelming majority of the school clearly understood this. Meanwhile, the small number of strident pro-lifers clogging the campus with their placards of mangled fetuses and "baby killer" signs were exercising their right to assemble with loads of gruesome imagery and quite a bit of tasteless insult, all of which are generally outside the temperament and the tone of Catholic discourse. Even the members of ND Response, a student group organized to oppose the President's visit, were offended: "That's not Notre Dame," said a group spokesman. "You teach through winning over the mind. We don't feel that those images will do anything constructive."

Damn -- er, "darn" -- straight. So what's taking place here, exactly? Has some chunk of the academic Catholic community, people generally devoted to "winning over the mind," now been corrupted by the intolerance and anti-intellectualism that are the hallmarks of so many factions of the Fundamentalist Christian movement? Will American Catholics soon be terrorizing 10-year-olds with plastic fetus dolls (see film, Jesus Camp)? Consider the conceptual leap required for a 25-year-old Notre Dame student to boycott his own graduation because Obama's policies "are opposed to the culture of life and therefore our Catholic values."

Are all other Catholic values -- helping the poor, developing the mind, caring for the sick, practicing social justice, all that old, unglamorous stuff -- to be demoted to second-tier virtues? As with any political persuasion or religious orientation, being Catholic does not automatically mean that you agree with the official line on every issue: it means that you are engaged -- civilly and soulfully -- in the debate. If you think the Church's stated positions are wrong on abortion, gay rights and stem-cell research, that is your right, as a conscientious member of the community. It does not disqualify you. The Catholic Church, it should be remembered, stands entirely opposed to the death penalty. Why isn't that the dividing line?

Look, Catholics may be religious, but they're generally not stupid. (After all, tens of millions of them voted for Obama.) The idea of even a minority of students and priests at a Jesuit-leaning university -- a tradition that has always encouraged consensus-builders and cultural ambassadors -- protesting the appearance of the brightest and most socially conscious President that we've had in a generation should strike most of us as beyond contradictory. To even further imagine that Obama's policies "are opposed to the culture of life" is an unimaginable sort of self-delusion. Or else, it's the manifestation of eight years of Bush-era incivility and shrinking of the mind, the Fundamentalist-championed "You're with us or against us" brain-freeze in public discourse that Obama has made clear is perhaps his most problematic inheritance from the Bush 43 years.

Consider Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele actually having the nerve to say that Notre Dame should not have given Obama an honorary degree; that it was somehow "inappropriate." Really? That's not an appropriate honorarium for someone who overcame racial and financial barriers to attend -- and excel at -- Columbia and Harvard Law School and become the first black President of the United States, while setting an example of Christian faith in action by his good works, exemplary family and his tireless efforts to raise the level of public conversation in these "In-Your-Face" United States? No? Not appropriate?

But, surely, such a degree would have been perfectly appropriate -- and, in fact, an invitation was once extended -- for a noble anti-choice, pro-death penalty activist like Dubya, a man with an avowed, documented distrust of academics and intellectuals, a man who never once attempted to find common ground on the issues of race, abortion or gay rights -- not that he had the emotional IQ to do so -- who floated through his college years with barely a scintilla of intellectual passion, who executed an illegal war in Iraq against the wishes of the Church, and who, as part and parcel of an inarticulateness that still amazes, repeatedly called the natives of the country where the modern church was built "Eye-talians"! Would that have been more "appropriate," more in keeping with "Catholic values"?

Obama's address, far from tarnishing that dome, burnished it with the high-mindedness and promotion of understanding -- including on the issue of abortion -- that he has made his mission and his mandate. As the majority of Notre Dame graduates recognized, they were lucky to have him. So are we.

We're in a "Repression": The Economics of Shame

2008-12-08T12:38:16-05:00

If the current recession started last December, as the latest findings from the National Bureau of Economic Research clearly indicate, then it stands to reason that, considering things have gotten a lot worse since then, we're a lot closer to a depression than anyone has realized. Perhaps we're not quite there yet -- by some definitions we'd need a few more years of blight and an even higher drop in GDP and a bigger rise in unemployment to start seeing bread lines around the block and the return of fedoras and clarinet music.

But taking into account the generally sour and sexless state of the economy -- along with our present political limbo, which is a bit like waiting to finalize a divorce so you can swap a staid, dull-witted partner for a young, spunky new one -- and considering the chastened, even prudish mood of both consumers and businesses, perhaps we're better off thinking of our current state of economic ennui not as a recession or a depression, but as a "repression."

Certainly, over the last two decades, whether shedding our inhibitions at E-Trade, Best Buy or Balthazar, we've all been rather profligate in our lust to exchange liquidity, whatever the moral cost, eventually turning credit tricks when we had utterly spent ourselves in random acts of impulsive and ultimately shallow purchase. As if waking up in someone else's bed, as the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once described, to discover that "she has bad teeth and really hates poetry," there's an unmistakable whiff of shame and sleaze shadowing the corridors of power and the aisles of Circuit City alike (if not, indeed, true humility, which one suspects won't kick in until everyone realizes that the economy, as Paul Krugman has noted, is truly "falling off a cliff").

The horned bull studs of high-finance -- inspired by the libertine exploits of those two burly mortgage predators, Fannie Mae and the aptly-named Freddie Mack (sic) -- have spent their peak years engaging in the most dangerous kind of unprotected financial intercourse with a revolving-door of easily seduced consumers, in particular the impressionable new class of incoming freshman home-owners, screwing them repeatedly without the slightest concern that the mortgage industry's own potentially fatal and unchecked fiscal viruses would infect these naive and needy ingenues of the American body politic, and place their literal "family jewels" in jeopardy.

Like callous upper-classmen caught taking advantage of the local high-schoolers, even the once-cocksure titans of Wall Street and Detroit are now routinely sighted on cold D.C. mornings making the ignominious "walk of shame" across the Capital quad, scratching themselves silly while sheepishly begging their increasingly ambiguous Washington fraternity brothers to pump even more gobs of pirated tax revenue into their hoary bottom line -- anything to stay in the game until the next frenzied night of freewheeling, free-market debauchery.

It's telling that during their latest attempt to extract adequate pity from Dr. Paulson's economic health clinic -- along with enough hard cash to get them through the next term of ignoring the screams of the environment and making victims of the debutantes who buy their giant, nozzle-sucking vehicles on credit -- the Big Three automakers wisely left their steely, king-sized private jets at home, and arrived somewhat chastened -- if still prideful -- to the same tawdry tables where they once proudly drank the fortifying elixir of Republican deregulation, and dragged cowed and submissive legislators around by the hair.

Those bestial nights are not likely to replay themselves anytime soon. Double-digit unemployment is now a very real possibility, and even the best efforts to jack up the wilting tower of American capitalism -- through infrastructure spending and tax rebates -- will likely take far longer to have an effect than those embarrassingly-titled herbal "stimulants" that those fading fat cats, no longer able to afford Viagra, are now forced to ingest in the hopes of regaining their lost potency. No, there's no magic pep pill this time, and no quick dose of Penicillin to "get you back out there"; what's more, everyone in that little black book is staying home tonight anyway, wearing sweatpants and cooking lentils and spinach greens. Purse-string promiscuity is so last year; checkbook chastity is the new hedonism.

In fact, read between the lines of our president-elect's sage exhortations to a new era of "sacrifice" and "responsibility," and the words "prudence" and -- oh, the horror! -- "restraint" can not be far behind. How dull it all sounds, how provincial, how utterly repressive, to give up the swinging life of expense-account orgies and hedge-fund bacchanals, fuel-engorged SUVs, feel-good credit extensions and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am mortgages. Does the downturn ultimately demand that we all -- gulp -- settle down? It just might, even for you dollared denizens of the night. As for that wad of cash that you used to describe as "burning a hole in your pocket," perhaps now is a good time -- as even those meathead frat boys sometimes recognized -- to "keep it in your pants."

Bush and Obama: What Really (Might Have) Happened

2008-11-11T11:56:07-05:00

"Yo, Barackulator -- you want a brew?"

President-Elect Barack Obama looked up at George W. Bush, the lame-duck 43rd President of the United States, who'd just ushered him into a private meeting in the Oval Office while their wives continued a tour of the White House. On this, his first visit since the election, Obama wasn't expecting quite this level of familiarity, and wasn't sure how best to respond. "Be one of the guys, but be your own man," he thought to himself. "Don't be an elitist."

"Thank you...ah, Mr. President, but I have, ah...just totally pounded...a...pretty badass double tall organic soy chai latte sweetened with agave nectar."

"Have it your way, Hussein-in-the-membrane, but shee-it, I just might have a little hair of the dog," Bush mumbled, fishing out a cold Shiner Bock from a mini-fridge under his desk that had a "Don't Mess with Texas" sticker on it.

"Man-oh-man-alive," Bush said, wiping his lips after taking a huge slug that emptied half the bottle. "I couldn't believe my ears when I heard you were gonna make that Axl Rose fella your senior advisor. I mean, don't get me wrong, B-man. 'Appetite for Destruction' and 'Use Your Illusion' are words I live by--even got 'em tattooed on my backside in Tijuana--but that dang Rose boy thinks they have democracy in China!"

"Ah, I believe you're confusing Axl Rose with Axel-ROD, sir," Obama rejoined politely, tapping his knuckles impatiently on the arm of a chair with striped upholstery. "David Axel-ROD; he's been my chief strategist since I ran for the Senate. As you are apparently aware, Axl Rose is the singer of Guns N' Roses. Ah...a rockin' band nevertheless, Mr. President."

"Gotcha, gotcha" interrupted Bush fuzzily, stuffing the remains of a frozen burrito in his mouth. "Now, A-Rod--that there's a good call, Bam-a-lam. The country respects a ball player. They know strategery, and this A-Rod fella's a damn good third baseman."

"With all due respect, Mr. President," Obama continued, trying to stay loose, "if I was going to hire a third baseman for my administration, I'd have to go with Joe Crede of the Chicago White Sox." A quick flash of his trademark smile, and Obama was quickly back to business. "But look...my senior advisor is David Axelrod; not Axl Rose and not A-Rod."

"OK, don't get yer cows runnin.' It's all good, Bamster," said Bush teasingly. "No need to get yer Harvard-insignia boxers in a bunch. Just having a little jaw here and tryin' to, y'know, break the iceberg with ya. You wanna pinch o' tobacco between yer cheek and gums?"

"Mr...President," intoned Obama slowly, still remarkably cool and collected, "With respect, I do not care for chewing tobacco or a beer; I'm here to talk about the economic crisis and the situation in Iraq and making a smooth, peaceful transition to the next Presidency; my Presidency. It's time we got beyond the partisan politics of the past."

W. shifted in his chair, sighed heavily, and suddenly looked resigned. "O-man, I'm damn near snake-bit with ya. But you've been blasting me out there on the campaign trail for two long years, and here I am, on my way out, offering you a little Texas hospitrality and you ain't bitin'. Well, since you're a smart guy, and since we're both gettin' the same intelligence briefs now, I'm gonna let you in on a little more top, top secret information," said Bush, leaning forward, and clearing his throat deliberately.

"In actual fact," said Bush, almost in a whisper, his voice suddenly, naturally that of a smarmy, East Coast effete intellectual, "this good ol' boy routine was all a clever ruse cooked up by Rove and Cheney to get me elected. Truth be told, I can barely stomach Texas, and my ranch in Crawford is simply a front. Without exception, my favorite political thinkers are Noam Chomsky and Marx, and I read Jean Baudrillard before bed. I hate baseball--in fact, I follow the English soccer league; I'm an Arsenal fan. And to be preternaturally sincere, I prefer a well-aired bottle of Chateauneuf-de-Pape and a nice Saumon-au-Beurre over beer and barbecue any day. Oh, and my Mercedes runs on bio-diesel."

Obama stared at W. in disbelief, and, for the first time in his adult life, stammered.

"So... all the pratfalls and, and...'misunderestimated' and 'decider' and 'yo, Blair' and 'smoke 'em out of their holes'.... and even the backrub for Angela Merkel...all an act?"

"Precisely, my good man," said Bush, arching his eyebrow pretentiously while lighting a Dunhill with a diamond Caran D'Ache, and deftly producing two glasses of 1947 Petrus from a hidden panel in his desk. Handing one to Obama, Bush raised his glass in a playful toast to the new President-Elect: "Welcome to the jungle, baby."

The Tears Were Real; Palin Was A Pawn

2008-11-06T12:57:32-05:00

Maybe I'm just a sucker, or perhaps some misplaced machismo makes me want to defend damsels in distress (even ones who can take down a moose), but watching Sarah Palin tear up during John McCain's concession speech Tuesday night, I actually felt a twinge of sympathy. "Nonsense," my tough, liberal-fighter side sneered back. "Get over it; this is the same barracuda beauty queen who invites poachers to take down wolves from Cessnas, opposes abortion in all cases, and has witches exorcised from her up-do!" The whole slew of anti-Palin talking points blew up in my face.

Still, so did an even more alarming realization: Sarah Palin wasn't a power broker; she was a pawn. Her selection as VP, a move brokered by campaign manager Steve "The Bullet" Schmidt and allowed through by McCain's flimsy hold on his own campaign, was far worse than a mere cynical "political stunt." It was an act of cultural abuse; an exploitation of Palin's own novice aspirations, and an insult not only to the women whose votes the McCain campaign had hoped to sway, but to the millions of "real" Americans to whom the politically and socially naive Palin was expected to be an object of identification.

The later abject tokenism of Joe the Plumber took this gross manipulation of the working-class to new heights, but the real Freedom Fry fake-out starts with Palin. The GOP leadership plucks from obscurity an ambitious but woefully uninformed, inexperienced small-town mayor and small-state governor, whose narrow-minded, backward views are likely less deliberately sinister than just sadly symptomatic of her insulated upbringing, and splashes her out onto the battlefield of presidential politics with little more than an overpriced Neiman-Marcus wardrobe and a gaggle of shopworn, Salvation Army talking-points. Naturally, she got shot down. (Even if she did finally learn to pronounce "Ahmadinejad.")

But her public excoriation couldn't have been in the least surprising to those same shrewd political operatives who used her down-to-earth "you betcha" persona as both working-class fetish and human shield. Surely, they factored in the possibility of collateral damage. Evidently, whether it's sending powerless, politically naive and less-worldly Americans into military conflict, or, as in the case of Palin, throwing them as chum into shark-infested political waters, the neo-conservative wing of the GOP, in their Machiavellian, real-life version of the computer game God of War, rarely hesitates to use small-town Americans as game pieces and pawns.

As for her heinous proclamations on the stump, including accusations of Marxism, terrorist affiliations and general "otherness"; be real. Do you think Sarah Palin has the slightest idea what Socialism is? Do you think "surplus value" means any more to her than a special on Chunky Soup at the local Safeway? And do we need to contemplate what the various permutations of the term "Weathermen" might have meant to her before she was rush-tutored at the Republican convention? C'mon: These absurd arguments were shoved in her face; read 'em or weep, kid. That she is woefully inarticulate and misinformed about public policy, history, social issues and global affairs is a given; but, to be fair, so are many, many people around the world who nevertheless figure that running for Vice-President should probably not be on their To-Do list. Sarah Palin flew much too close to the sun, and she got burned; the smoke still hangs in the air.

And yet, perhaps the most pungent aromas still lingering from this election are the squalid vapors of alleged grown-ups like Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham and Sam Brownback bogusly cheerleading Palin's selection as if it were the thoughtful, circumspect decision of elder statesmen. "She's got more experience than Barack Obama!" crowed Giuliani, grinning like a pop-up doll at the Republican convention. Like McCain and many in the GOP, Rudy saw no ethical conflict in shamming the confused religious and moral melting-pot that is the disintegrating American heartland. He detected no hypocrisy in selling to economically downtrodden rural America an attractive if empty symbol of their own unrecognized ambitions, even as his own party--through reprehensible tax cuts for the rich and imperial ambitions abroad -- has made it increasingly impossible for them to reach for the same stars.

Sure, Palin may have courted the VP slot, and may even -- if reports are accurate--have had eventual designs on the Presidency. But on stage in Arizona on Tuesday night, her disappointment palpable behind foggy faux-designer glasses, she appeared less the ambitious political pitbull-with-lipstick and more the kind of human animal we've seen time and time again: a sacrificial lamb lying ruined in the wreckage brought about by a Bush administration and McCain-led GOP who preaches allegiance to so-called Christian values and the virtues of "good, hardworking" blue-collar citizens, but has made their disdain and disregard for--and their eventual disavowal of--those same people abundantly and repeatedly manifest.

Thanks for the Warning GOP; We'll Keep That in Mind!

2008-11-02T13:44:47-05:00

You've got to give real credit to these sensible, noble Republicans,
who, forced to watch their presidential candidate's campaign begin an
ignoble nose-dive, have been gracious enough to warn American voters against
the dangers of letting the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress
as well. Just this past weekend, the RNC, campaign co-chair Tom Ridge,
pundits like David Frum, and even ol' John McCain himself, lined up to
wisely and generously counsel us to "balance" the increasingly likely
Presidency of Barack Obama with a solid crop of pragmatic conservatives in
Congress, and avoid the potential nightmare of "one-party rule."

Well, I just wanna say, thanks fellas. That sure is admirable of
you -- real "Country First" stuff. After all, just imagine the cataclysmic
consequences if both the White House and Congress were controlled by
Democrats. Things could really get bad in this great land of ours: why, we
might even see a steep, historic plunge in housing prices, a precipitous
drop in consumer confidence and a plummeting, out-of-control stock market.
Without the all-important "checks and balances" provided by sturdy,
real-world Republican senators and congressmen, we might even find ourselves
overstretched in a couple of ill-advised wars around the globe, with a
trigger-happy and arrogant foreign policy, which could do irreparable damage
to our image globally. Gosh, we can't let that happen. Things are going so
swimmingly!

And just imagine the devastation to our environment should there not be
enough eco-friendly Republicans around to provide forward-thinking
leadership on renewable energy and protection of our wildlife and
coastlines. Jeez Louise, let's not be forced to dodge a bullet here, people;
are you really going to let Harry "Class Struggle" Reid and Nancy "The
Bolshevik" Pelosi run wild in the legislative streets for the next two
years? Think of the dangers: Without a strong Republican counterweight,
Congress might well get constantly bogged down by obstruction, in-fighting
and filibustering, and that would surely begin to deteriorate the sterling
national identity and public confidence that Congress has thoughtfully
crafted for the last eight years.

Most of all, imagine the terrible toll on all the poor Joe the Plumbers
out there should Barack Obama's neo-Marxist tax code get passed by a
Leninist-leaning, "tax-and-spend" Congress. Mr. Wurzelbrachelbacher would be
forced by these "redistributionistas" to accept a significant break on his
taxes, plus receive tax credits for every new job his (admittedly
fictitious) plumbing firm creates; and I'm sure you know where that road
leads: making sure that every American profits when the country does well,
not just the already fabulously rich. Yep; you heard it: "spreading the
wealth around." Who ever heard of a progressive tax structure (besides
McCain's hero Teddy Roosevelt)? Menshevik madness! Talk about a Red Scare;
where's Michelle Bachman when we need a "real," "pro-American" hero?

So rather than rail against these sober, well-meaning
Republicans -- especially those world-weary conservative pundits who are
beginning to admit probable defeat, even as they "warn" against the dangers
of a Dem-deluge -- let's be sure to thank them in advance for looking out for
us and saving us from driving ourselves over a Trotskyite cliff. These
buttoned-downed truth agents, from Bill Kristol to Charles Krauthammer, have
clearly done their historic homework, and they simply wouldn't want the
country to get off of the excellent track that we've been on since St.
George so convincingly slew the Dragon Gore back in 2000. Look; after all
the great, unselfish advice they've given us over the years -- on free-market
economics, unilateral foreign policy, the response to Hurricane Katrina,
caring for the environment, and the urgency of maintaining America's
"essential" Christian values -- we'd be doggone crazy not to heed their sage
counsel this time around.