Inside the Minds of Gotham City's 'Crazy' Serial Killers
- By Guest Blogger
- July 21, 2011 |
- 11:10 am |
- Categories: Books and Comics, events
Just how realistic are the nasty characters that shoot, stab and strangle Gotham's uneasy residents?
(Images courtesy DC Comics)
(Images courtesy DC Comics)
By Praveen R. Kambam, Vasilis K. Pozios and H. Eric Bender of Broadcast Thought
Serial killers simultaneously frighten and fascinate. Whether following media coverage of the Long Island Serial Killer or watching Dexter, the public possesses a seemingly insatiable appetite for the macabre.
Comic book fans are no strangers to stranglers and other killers. Batman's notorious rogues' gallery boasts multiple serial murderers among its members. While some of these fictional characters reflect real-life aspects of serial murder, others perpetuate long-standing misconceptions.
The FBI defines serial murder as "the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events." Specific motives for murder are commonly seen in the offender: sexual gratification, anger, thrill, attention and the alleviation of anxious urges, among others. Serial killers may also demonstrate a modus operandi, ritualized behaviors or signature aspects; for example, a killer may manipulate or mutilate the body after a murder.
Sometimes comics characters mimic the hideous acts of real-world serial killers. In the story arc "The Last Arkham," by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle (from Batman: Shadow of the Bat, issues 1-4), Mr. Zsasz positions his victims' bodies in lifelike poses. In real life, one victim of Gary Leon Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, was found fully clothed, with two fish placed on her chest, a wine bottle on her stomach and sausages in her hands.
Some serial murderers keep trophies of their kills. In Batman: Cacophony, by Kevin Smith and Walt Flanagan, Onomatopoeia displays in his "man cave" masks of the heroes he has killed. Real-life serial killer Ed Gein fashioned trophies from the remains of his victims; a mounted human head was discovered in Gein's possession, ready to be hung.
Broadcast Thought's comics-dissecting doctors (left to right): Praveen R. Kambam, M.D.; Vasilis K. Pozios, M.D.; H. Eric Bender, M.D.
(Photo: Lauren Randolph)
(Photo: Lauren Randolph)
Scientific and legal jargon can contribute to confusion about serial murderers, their methods and their motives. By analyzing fictional characters, we at Broadcast Thought passionately educate audiences about mental health topics and excite them to learn more about mental illness. We'll be discussing these ideas Thursday during "Detecting Deviants in the Dark Night: Profiling Gotham City's Serial Killers," our panel at Comic-Con International.
How do we fit into the entertainment world? With our expertise as physicians specializing in forensic psychiatry, we offer a unique opportunity for collaboration with writers and other creators to add nuance and realism to characters and storylines that can make them even more compelling. This is our attempt to cast these fascinating characters in a new light, reinvigorate them, and help keep these beloved characters fresh to both old fans and new readers alike.
Real Life Versus Gotham City
In real life, serial killers ― who commit fewer than 1 percent of murders in any given year ― commonly exhibit characteristics of psychopathy, a collection of behaviors and personality traits that often reflect a callous, uncaring nature. However, Batman villains depicted as psychopathic serial murderers are often incorrectly referred to as "psychotic" rather than "psychopathic."
"Psychosis," or experiencing a "psychotic" disorder, refers to a break from reality and is often characterized by disorganized thinking and behavior, hallucinations and/or delusions. Such psychotic symptoms are not commonly seen in the majority of real-life serial murderers and are also not typically depicted in the Batman comics.
An exception is the depiction of the villain Mr. Zsasz in Smith's Batman: Cacophony. Here, Mr. Zsasz experiences symptoms consistent with psychosis, such as racing, jumbled thoughts and the apparent delusion that he is able to both "free" his victims from their current life of misery and send them to a better existence by murdering them. Although such a depiction of a psychotically derived motive is plausible, it is not representative of the majority of serial murderers in the real world.
In fact, many assume that if someone commits murder serially or in a particularly bizarre or gruesome manner, then the perpetrator must be "crazy" or "insane." While it is not considered normal ― or acceptable ― human behavior to engage in acts of serial murder, this behavior, in itself, does not mean that mental disorders, such as mood disorders or psychotic disorders, either directly cause serial murders or contribute considerably to the development of serial murderers.
So, if serial murderers are not, by and large, mentally ill, then why are they so frequently labeled "insane" in the Batman comic books? Many people use "insane" colloquially, but "insanity" is not a psychiatric diagnosis. Rather, "insanity" is a legal term of art, whose specific definition is determined by federal and state statutes.
Generally, criminal defendants found not guilty by reason of insanity did not know or understand, because of mental illness, the nature and quality of their acts or that their acts were wrong. The majority of serial murderers, both in the real world and the Batman universe, would not qualify for a not guilty by reason of insanity defense because they do not have a mental disorder that causes them not to know or understand the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of their acts at the time those acts were committed.
While it is extremely rare for a real-life serial murderer to be found insane ― an estimated 4 percent of serial killers attempted to plead insanity as their legal defense; of that group, only 1 percent was actually found to be not guilty by reason of insanity ― serial murderers in Gotham City seem almost by default to be (inaccurately) labeled as "insane."
The Joker has been called both "psychotic" and "insane" but would in real life be considered neither.
This may be due, in part, to a misunderstanding of the legal definition of insanity. For example, the Joker, who in numerous depictions has been called both "psychotic" and "insane," would in real life be considered neither. His psychopathic traits would likely lead him to a prison cell and not a forensic hospital bed.
For individuals who are found legally insane, psychiatric medication is often prescribed to treat the underlying mental disorder. For example, Maxie Zeus might be prescribed medication to treat his psychotic belief that he is a direct descendant of the Greek god Zeus. Other medications or psychotherapies may also be helpful for "noninsane" characters. The Mad Hatter might be prescribed anti-androgen treatment for his pedophilic tendencies, while Harley Quinn might benefit from dialectical behavior therapy. However, medications are not generally prescribed for psychopathic traits; therefore, psychiatric medications would likely not be indicated for the Joker.
And what about the Batman? Well, that's another story for another time….
The forensic psychiatrists of Broadcast Thought ― H. Eric Bender, M.D., Praveen R. Kambam, M.D. and Vasilis K. Pozios, M.D. ― will present the panel "Detecting Deviants in the Dark Night: Profiling Gotham City's Serial Killers" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday during Comic-Con International. Special guest Mark E. Safarik, a retired FBI agent and former profiler with the bureau's famed Behavioral Analysis Unit will join them for the panel in Room 8 of the San Diego Convention Center.
The Bomb That Didn't Go Off
Since September 11, 2001, we have finely honed our fear of the other. But the truth is, the overwhelming majority of our terrorism has always been homegrown. And it is times like these ― times of anger and disaffection ― when we turn on ourselves, and kill.
By Charles P. Pierce
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In 2009, in the city of Spokane, Washington, the Public Facilities District bought a bench. It was metal. It was aluminum, its powder coat a bronze that ran toward brown. It sat three people. The city bought the bench from a company called Landscape Forms in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The bench cost $2,679.46, delivered.
The city placed the bench in the corner of a downtown parking lot at the intersection of Washington Street and Main Avenue, near the Performing Arts Center and tucked between two low brick walls that formed an L shape behind it. The bench faced up Main Avenue, toward City Hall and the roar of Spokane Falls beyond. The bench faced a couple of pawnshops, including Millman Jewelers, which indeed did sell jeweled items, but which, unlike, say, Tiffany's, also had a rack of guitars for sale in its front windows. The bench was directly across the street from Auntie's Bookstore, which takes up most of the bottom two stories of an old brick pile that is still called the Liberty Building.
On Monday, January 17, 2011, Spokane's annual Martin Luther King Day celebration was scheduled to begin in the PAC at ten o'clock in the morning. There would be
Speeches and there would be singing. The Reverend Happy Watkins of the New Hope Baptist Church was going to deliver his famous reenactment of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. When Rev. Watkins was finished, there would be a march, up Bernard Avenue and turning down Main Avenue not far from Auntie's. Several thousand people marched every year, many of them children carrying balloons they'd bought from the vendors along the route. Everyone would end up in River Park Square, where there would be more speeches and more singing, and the event would wind itself down in an afternoon of amiable milling about near the grounds of Expo '74, a vestige of a time when the world had turned its eyes on Spokane. The bench was located close to the midpoint of the march, a perfect spot for a footsore elderly person who needed a rest, or a cranky, bored child in need of a time-out.
Ever since 1986, all over this part of the northwest, from Spokane to Sandpoint in Idaho, Rev. Happy Watkins has delivered that speech at occasions like this one. He does not recite the speech. Truth be told, to say that he "delivers" the speech is not entirely accurate, either. He performs the speech. He works without notes. He gestures with his hands. He rides the words with his body, and he rides their spirit with his soul. The crowd always goes with him. By the time he gets to the peroration, to the "Free at last" portion, Happy Watkins always has them "slingin' snot," as his indelicate old church saying puts it.
Happy was up at four that morning, getting himself ready, finding his muse, and doing TV and radio interviews, too. He got to the PAC by nine. By the time the sun went down, he was to have performed the speech three times. The last performance would be in Lewiston, Idaho, at the end of the afternoon.
Captain Frank Scalise of the Spokane Police Department was looking forward to an easy day. So was Ozzie Knezovich, the sheriff of Spokane County. The annual march was always a low-key event, and the crowd was usually in a pleasant mood. There were always a lot of children. Scalise was in charge of the Spokane PD's presence at the march. Knezovich would attend the program at the PAC and then walk along with the marchers. Later, he would hear Happy Watkins perform the speech again at a midday program at Holy Family Hospital.
At about nine o'clock in the morning, just as Watkins was arriving downtown, three maintenance workers were sprucing up the perimeter of the parking lot at Washington and Main, shining up the route of the march. They were picking trash out of the little, low bushes. They were sweeping off the sidewalks. They came up Main and turned the corner across the street from the Liberty Building. To their surprise, there was a bag on the bench, a black Swiss Army backpack. There were two T-shirts inside it. One of the T-shirts was black and bore the logo TREASURE ISLAND ― SPRING 2009. The other was from a local charity race to fight cancer. There were also wires sticking out of the bag. The maintenance workers followed instincts that had been heightened since September 11, 2001. They called 911. It was 9:26 A.M.
On his way to the PAC, Kevin Twohig, the director of the Public Facilities District, took a call. Twohig had worked in some capacity running Spokane's public entertainments since he took a job with the Expo back in 1974. He rushed to the corner of Washington and Main. By then, Frank Scalise's officers had established a perimeter, blocking off the streets in every direction, isolating the intersection where the bag sat on the bench. A dispatcher contacted the local bomb-disposal unit, a force made up of both Spokane police officers and members of the county sheriff's department. That day, the unit was under the command of Lieutenant Matt Lyons of the sheriff's department. Across town, Lyons heard his pager go off.
As the police presence grew in the area around the bench, the holiday program went on as usual inside the PAC. However, outside, the march's organizers huddled with a Spokane police sergeant, Jason Hartman. The officer told them about the bag on the bench. They all decided that the parade would not go through downtown, but instead it would go down Centennial Trail, a path that runs along the banks of the Spokane River. Inside the hall, Mark Richard, a Spokane county commissioner, delivered his prepared remarks. He then listened as Rev. Happy Watkins got the house to slingin' snot, the way he always did. When Watkins finished up, Richard got ready to march. At the last minute, he was told that there would be a change in the route. They would be marching along the river. Richard didn't know why the route had been changed. Maybe, he thought, somebody had decided it was a nicer walk. Richard and the rest of the marchers left the PAC and walked along the river. There were children everywhere, balloons dancing above their heads.
Police fanned out through the neighborhood around the bench. They went into Auntie's and told Melissa Opel and the rest of the employees to remain in the store but to stay away from the big windows that faced the bench where the bag was. They went up the street to Millman's and told Jim Johnson, who was working the back counter, the same thing. Stay where you are. Do not evacuate. Stay away from the windows. They also asked Johnson if anyone lived upstairs from the store, and whether or not Millman's had any surveillance cameras that might have been aimed at the corner of Washington and Main that morning. Johnson told them no, to both questions. Not long after that, he looked out the windows and he saw an odd-looking vehicle come trundling down Main.
Matt Lyons had gathered his team and set up a command post three hundred yards up the street from the bag on the bench. From there, he operated the robot vehicle that Jim Johnson had seen rolling up the street. There were cameras on the vehicle, and Lyons first looked at the wires in the bag that had caught the attention of the maintenance crew. These aren't the kind of wires you see on an iPod, Lyons thought. He ordered the robot to open the backpack. It was a long, painstaking process. Melissa Opel watched the robot work from her spot in Auntie's, standing as far back from the windows as she could. From the corner of Washington and Main, you could hear the happy sounds of the march as it wound steadily down the path along the river. At his command post, Matt Lyons did not like what he was seeing.
Certain devices have certain components. Matt Lyons learned that during the time the county had sent him to a hazardous-device training facility in Huntsville, Alabama. A device might have a power switch, or it might have some sort of electrical initiator that could be activated remotely, giving the person who planted the device time to drop it and walk away. As he worked through his procedures and the seconds began to crawl, Matt Lyons knew what he was looking at on a city bench at the corner of Washington and Main in Spokane, Washington. He was looking at an IED.
His team could use the robot to disarm the device, or somebody was going to have to suit up and do it by hand. Lyons decided to use the robot. The bomb was small, and it was sophisticated. It was designed to be detonated from a distance. It was built to throw shrapnel, to kill and to wound as many people as possible. Because it was a fragmentation bomb, it was meant to confound forensics, to camouflage the source of its destruction by becoming part of that destruction itself. The bench was the perfect spot for it. The two low brick walls behind the bench would focus the blast and the shrapnel outward into the street. It would blow the front out of the Liberty Building, flinging the glass from the windows into Auntie's, shredding Westerns and Cowboy Poetry, sending chunks of Mystery into the cashier's counter and, very likely, into the cashier as well. Pieces of the bomb and pieces of the bench would be indistinguishable at this point, flying up Main, shattering the windows in Millman's, splintering the guitars as they hung there. In between the bomb and the stores would be the marchers, and all those children, with all those balloons dancing above their heads, until, in a sudden moment, the balloons would float free of the fingers of the children, drifting on the breezes up and away from the dead and dying in what would become a very famous scene.
Word had been spreading all afternoon. Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich had gotten a full briefing at 4:30. He began thinking about all the trouble they'd had in the region when it had become a magnet for white-supremacist groups in the previous two decades. After he left the park, Mark Richard, the county commissioner who'd spoken as part of the morning program, finally heard why it was that they'd all had to walk along the river that day. Richard began to put things together in his mind: the bomb they'd found outside the federal courthouse last spring; the Aryan Nation compound over in Hayden Lake in Idaho that had been bankrupted by a lawsuit a decade earlier; and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people in Tucson not a month earlier. And Richard remembered his nephew's bachelor party, when his nephew had invited a black friend. At the end of the night, as the guests were leaving, they discovered that someone had drawn a swastika on the driveway. Spending the night in Lewiston, Rev. Happy Watkins didn't find out what had happened until the next morning, when a reporter from The New York Times called him. His first thought was, My God, this is 2011.
Matt Lyons and his team worked for nearly eight hours. At one point, near the end of his work, Lyons did have to suit somebody up and send him down to work on the device by hand. Lyons still didn't like doing it, even though, as far as he could tell, he and the robot had rendered the device harmless already. By nine o'clock that night, Matt Lyons and his team had finished with the black Swiss Army backpack on the bench at the corner of Washington and Main. The device was whisked away to a laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, by the FBI, which had assumed jurisdiction over the investigation. Night deepened. The corner went quiet as all the stores closed and downtown grew deserted, and there was nobody left to sit down on what might otherwise have become the most famous bench in the world.
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We are political animals. It is a truth as old as Aristotle, who attributed our political nature to the fact that, unlike any of the other animals that travel in herds, we are able to speak. We can ignore the politics central to all our various interactions, or we can pretend that actions, good and bad, are apolitical, but politics is there, binding us up, regardless of how fervently we deny it, which we do, and take refuge then in fragmentation rather than confront what we may have in common with other people ― strange people, crazy people, violent people ― who share with us the politics of our common humanity. And we have chosen fragmentation as our comfortable, counterfeit heritage.
Our culture is fragmented. Our politics is fragmented, and so is our understanding of our own history. In our niche-marketed national consciousness, who really owns the Founders, or the Civil War, or the civil-rights movement? Two, three, many Jeffersons. Several Lincolns. Hundreds of personal Martin Luther Kings. We speak in the language of fragments now because that's the language that seems safest. We tell ourselves our stories in fragments, disconnected one from the other, and each of them easily dismissed piecemeal. Leave causation to the cable-TV hucksters and their patent-medicine tears. Leave any attempt at coherence to those easily dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Take up the reality of the country only in fragments, the anodyne vocabulary and anesthetized syntax of the age.
At the beginning of this year, not long after they'd found the bomb on the bench in Spokane, a journalist named David Neiwert put together a list of nearly thirty acts of right-wing political violence that had taken place, or had been foiled, in the United States since the summer of 2008 ― or roughly since Barack Obama's presidency began to be seen as a genuine possibility. The list began with Jim David Adkisson, who killed two people in a Unitarian church in Tennessee because he was angry at how "liberals" were "destroying America." It included two episodes in April 2009, one in Pittsburgh and one in Florida, in which men who were sure that Barack Obama's government was coming for their guns opened fire on law-enforcement officers who had come to investigate them on other matters.
Some of the crimes on the list were briefly sensational ― Scott Roeder's murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, or Joseph Andrew Stack's flying his small plane into a building in Austin in protest of the Internal Revenue Service, or the incoherent array of violent crimes committed by the "Sovereign Citizens Movement." But most of them barely made the national radar at all. In December 2008, a woman in Belfast, Maine, named Amber Cummings shot to death her sleeping husband, James, who'd been savagely abusing her. Upon arriving at the Cummings home, investigators found Nazi paraphernalia and a stash of chemicals indicating that James Cummings was preparing to make a "dirty bomb" that he planned to detonate at Obama's inauguration. Except in the local media, that aspect of the case disappeared completely. James Cummings and his bomb had nothing to do with Scott Roeder's handgun or Joe Stack's airplane.
It is a fertile time for such things. The country elected a black president with an exotic name. The economy, wrecked by a rigged game at the highest levels, continued to grind through a jobless recovery. The national dialogue grows coarser and wilder, and does so at a pace accelerated by technology. People sense the fragmentation ― things are falling apart ― even while they take refuge in those fragments of life that seem safest and most familiar.
But there is something about fragments that nobody talks about. It is a property first harnessed in 1784 by an officer of the artillery in the British army. He surmised that if you filled an artillery shell with fragments, you could wreak havoc far in excess of what would occur if the shell simply exploded. The destruction would breed upon itself. Propelled with sufficient force, the fragments would make new fragments of whatever they hit ― a cart, a tree, a human femur ― and, in turn, these new fragments would fly off to do their own damage. The officer's name was Henry Shrapnel.
The bomb in the bag on the bench in Spokane was a shrapnel bomb, a direct descendant of Henry Shrapnel's original brainchild. It was specifically designed and carefully placed to create an expanding killing zone, a sideways rain of lethal fragments. A child could have been killed by the blast itself, or by a piece of the bench, or by a chunk of the child's own father. After all, shrapnel is nothing more than undifferentiated fragments with sufficient force applied.
That the bomb did not do what it was designed to do was a combination of luck and human agency. (It was a triumph for public employees, to put it in the context of our current political argument.) That the events of January 17 largely have faded from the news has nothing to do with luck at all. That is all human agency ― how a fragmented country gathers the pieces of an event like this and tries to construct from them, not necessarily the truth of what happened, but a story that the country can live with, one more fragment among dozens of others that the country has remembered to forget.
Don't talk, then, about the wildness in our rhetoric today, and its undeniable roots in that deep strain of political violence that runs through our national DNA, on a gene that is not always recessive. Don't relate Centennial Park in Atlanta in 1996 to Oklahoma City to murdered doctors to Columbine, and then to Tucson and to the bag on the bench in Spokane. Ignore the patterns, deep and wide, that connect each event to the other like a slow-burning fuse to a charge. That there are among us rage-hardened, powerless people who resort to the gun and the bomb. That there are powerful people who deplore the gun and the bomb, but who do not hesitate to profit from their use. And when the gun goes off or the bomb explodes, the powerful will deplore the actions of the powerless, and they will reassure the rest of us that We are not like Them, who are violent and crazy and whose acts have no reason beyond unfathomable madness. But above all, they will say, Ignore the fact that there is still a horrible utility in political violence, the way there was during Reconstruction, or during the labor wars of the early twentieth century. If there were not, it wouldn't be so hard to get an abortion in Kansas, and assault weapons would not have been accessories of choice at recent rallies purportedly held to discuss changes in the way the country organizes its health-care system.
And so Centennial Park gets stuck in amber, and Oklahoma City does, too. Just as did the actions of Andrew Kehoe, who blew up a school and killed forty-three people in Bath, Michigan, in 1927 because, he said, his property taxes were too high. Kehoe largely vanished from history for seventy-two years, until Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School. Two fragments, similar to each other in lethality and in their choice of targets, but, of course, utterly unrelated. Except that, somewhere in the mix, there was politics ― the politics of small-town government and the vicious personal politics of high school ― that are common to who we are as a species, and therefore to who we are as a country, the political impulses that we share but that most of us do not act upon. In February 2010, Joseph Andrew Stack left behind a note that was a cri de coeur of someone whose world was being submerged by political and economic forces beyond his control and whose government seemed to have abandoned him to those forces to fend for himself.
"Here we have a system," Stack wrote, "that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet it mercilessly 'holds accountable' its victims, claiming they're responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand."
And then he flew his airplane into a building.
The act was deemed an act of madness and shuffled out of the news. We are good and decent people who do not fly our airplanes into buildings. Nobody remembers his note, the sentiments of which would not have been out of place at any Tea Party rally. "The radical Right," cautions Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, "is a response to real things that are happening to real people in the real world." A political act of madness is still a political act. We use the madness to separate the events so that we don't have to recognize the politics they have in common. The madness of each individual act enables us to distance ourselves from the politics that burn under the polite society we've created like a fuse looking for tinder, like a bag in search of a bench.
What is left is a kind of mosaic, but a mosaic in reverse perspective, whereby the people who are closest to it see the entire picture most clearly. So tell the story in fragments, because it's safer that way and the language is more soothing, but tell it in the voices of the people who have spent the time since January 17 discussing those properties of force and fragments that nobody likes to talk about. For what is a mosaic but disciplined fragments? What is a mosaic but domesticated shrapnel, waiting?
The New Hope Baptist Church is a beige, low-slung place tucked into a neighborhood east and a little south of downtown Spokane. The neighborhood was residential once but surrendered to manufacturing, which since has surrendered itself to big-box stores and chain restaurants, exchanging the industrial manufacture of actual goods for the industrial consumerism that is what passes for a national economy these days. However, none of these changes in the neighborhood ever truly completed itself, so the place is a Schumpeter's hash, a mutant economic half-breed. There are battered one-story houses next to flat, blank-staring empty factories next to giant new superstores. And there's New Hope Baptist, early on a Super Bowl Sunday, and, inside, the Reverend Happy Watkins has got 'em slingin' snot again.
First thing you need to know is that Happy is not his given name. It's actually his middle name. Percy Happy Watkins grew up on 167th Street in the Bronx, not far from the neighborhood that produced Colin Powell. When he was nineteen, he joined the Air Force and was sent to Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio for basic training. In the fall of 1961, he was told he was being sent to Spokane in Washington. Happy was overjoyed. He was going to D. C. "I was giving everyone high-fives and low-fours," he recalls. "Then some guy told me where I was going had cowboys and grizzly bears, Indians and stagecoaches. I was nineteen. I started crying. I thought I was going to the end of the world."
Once there, he joined the Morningstar Baptist Church and he met the woman he would marry. (Their first date did not begin well. Happy brought her to a Chinese restaurant and spilled the soup in her lap.) They married in 1963 and Happy promptly was transferred to Okinawa. "They sent me there without her," he says. "That was my Gethsemane." He spent his time in Okinawa reading the Bible and praying. Once he got back to Spokane, he studied for the ministry and was ordained. He became pastor of New Hope Baptist and was active in the black community, such as it was, in and around Spokane. In 1986, the local head of the NAACP asked Happy if he'd read the "I Have a Dream" speech at a luncheon the group was holding for the governor of Washington.
"Sunday afternoon, after church was over, I locked myself in the basement from two in the afternoon until three the next morning, until I had it memorized," he says. "The next day, the surprise was that they said, 'Happy Watkins is going to read it,' and I got up there without notes. I used my hands freely. I was stomping. I let it sink in. That luncheon crowd turned into a church crowd. People were crying, hugging each other. I'll never forget that." Ever since, Happy Watkins's performance of Dr. King's address has been in demand throughout the region, especially on the day set aside to honor Dr. King's memory.
Not long after the events of January 17, the unity of response to them in Spokane began to fray. The sheriff got in a wrangle with the Spokesman-Review because the paper quoted him as saying that rat poison may have been mixed in with the shrapnel in the bomb so as to make the shrapnel more lethal. In the black community, there was some anger that white policemen had been made out to be the heroes of the day, and that the role of the black organizers in rerouting the march away from the bag on the bench had been minimized. The three cleanup workers who found the bomb in the first place were all fired by the company they worked for, ostensibly for touching the bomb when they first found the backpack. Things began to go to pieces, to disintegrate into fragments, in that old familiar way.
"We just forget about it, that's what we always do," says Happy Watkins. "Somehow, we have to keep the light burning. I hate ― hate with all my passion ― that word tolerance. We should 'tolerate' each other. That drives me nuts. What if we could respect each other? We just got to band together and find how we can help each other when these incidents come. We don't need sympathy. We just need to band together ― the CEO and the washroom attendant got to come together and help each other." And he doesn't even notice that his voice is raised again, an accidental prayer that has come upon him long after formal church is over and everyone's gone out into the world again.
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The fuse is buried. It's buried in denial and obfuscation and euphemism. It's buried in the questions we don't ask and in the answers we don't want to hear. It's buried, but it still burns and, occasionally, it finds its tinder ― in a bureaucrat in Michigan or in an abusive husband in Maine, in a deranged man with a gun in Pittsburgh or in a pilot at the end of his rope in Texas. It burns to the tinder and the tinder explodes, and the fuse burns on, buried again. It's buried under the questions of Who and What and How, but it burns most fiercely in the question Why, which is a question we don't ask because it might yield an answer we don't want to hear.
The past two years have seen not only an unprecedented spike in these kinds of events but also a curious tolerance for the kind of
unhinged rhetoric that used to be found only among our more exotic political fauna. Years ago, when the John Birch Society accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a "conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," it was laughed out of conservative politics and into the political wilderness. Today, while the unfounded speculation about the place of Barack Obama's birth may well have been interred with the bones of the Trump for President campaign, it is still perfectly respectable within conservative politics to infer that the president is somehow less of an American by his very nature, which must be different from "our" own.
It began almost immediately with his election, despite the fact that, ironically, he spends more time telling his fellow Americans how great they are than any four of his predecessors combined. By his fifth month in office, the major television networks were carrying scenes of people at political gatherings, sobbing that they "want their country back." From whom was never really explored.
There was something visceral to the anger. As daffy as many of them were, most of the attacks on Bill Clinton were recognizably political. His attempts to reform health care were criticized merely as bad policy. The attacks on Obama have been different. It is not merely that he is black, although that is undeniably part of what's going on. The attacks on Obama are attempting to affix to him the blame for a genuine feeling of economic and social dislocation that arose when the economic system nearly collapsed entirely before the 2008 elections.
When Michele Bachmann, a member of Congress, states publicly that she is running for president "to take our country back," she is not talking about clawing back the money and jobs and basic security that were sluiced away into the investment banks. She's focusing those fears and that insecurity on one person and on what she believes he represents. Politicians used to say that they would bring America back, or that they would restore America to its former greatness, or wrap their policies in some such fluffy rhetorical excelsior. Today, though, it is perfectly acceptable to intimate, as Bachmann does, and as those hundreds of people at the congressional town meetings said outright, that America is not here anymore. That someone has stolen it away. America is no longer a political commonwealth of shared ideas that its citizens can restore. It is objectified, something tangible, something that a stranger has broken in and stolen. And if that's the case, why be surprised when someone tries to take "our country back" the way you might confront a midnight prowler in the living room?
This moment was decades in coming. For thirty years, we have been told by our leaders to estrange ourselves from our political natures, to ignore what Aristotle said, and to pretend that we are not political in our daily lives, in our daily work, or even in how we choose (or choose not) to govern ourselves. If we still recognized our essential political nature, we would recognize the inherent absurdity of people who spend millions of dollars to campaign for a political office on the grounds that they are "not a politician."
Of course they are, because we all are. That nature was what the Founders were counting on when they set up a system of self-government. But, having convinced us that "politics" was something outside ourselves, it was easy for those same people to convince us that "government" was something even more alien and (very likely) predatory, instead of being the vehicle through which we could exercise our political natures without necessarily killing one another. Having been convinced to deny who we really are, we then allowed those same people to arrange things so that politics actually became nothing but a show, and government actually became the private preserve of a consolidating oligarchy. If it all is dumbshow, what does it matter if some of the principals start talking about watering the tree of liberty and so on?
We ignore the fuse and we make all the wrong connections, or we allow people to make them for us. We have become so inured to the habits of fragmentation that we have no instinct with which to detect the genuine connections anymore, not between one another, and not between the events that occur around us. We farm that job out ― to radio hucksters and to television grifters and to cheap politicians on the make. They create the connections for us. They tell us who is to blame. They identify the Other. They make their money and their fame out of the fact that the only connections we accept these days are the ones that drive us further apart. And the fuse burns under it all, until it strikes tinder again.
On March 9, 2011, the FBI raided a home in the unincorporated district of Addy, Washington. They arrested a thirty-six-year-old Army veteran named Kevin Harpham and charged him with one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and one count of possessing an unregistered explosive. Harpham, they say, is the person who left the bag on the bench.
As the months went by, Harpham's alleged involvement with the white-supremacist political Right came increasingly to light. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which had him on its radar since before the events of January 17, reported that Harpham had been a member of the National Alliance, the organization founded by the late William Pierce, whose novel, The Turner Diaries, which depicts the final race war in the United States, has been credited with inspiring, among other people, Timothy McVeigh. In April, Harpham was charged under a federal hate-crimes statute. He pleaded not guilty and faces a minimum of thirty years in jail. The country spent a day or so contemplating the Who, What, Where, and When of Kevin Harpham and then moved along. The Why stays buried, because it raises questions we don't want to ask and it demands answers that we don't want to hear.
In that sense, what happened in Spokane is the perfect window into our strange and angry time specifically because the bomb didn't explode. Because they found the bomb in time, the event is not laden with horror and sorrow. It denies us the spectacle of Kabuki mourning and vicarious grief. There will not be a president, head bowed at the memorial service, reassuring us that we are a great people and a great nation. There will be no statue at which people can stare and wonder how it could have possibly come to this. In Spokane, there is just the stark reality of the bomb on the bench. There are no soft emotions and convenient befuddlement. There is just the bomb and the bench, and what might have happened.
There's a spot by the Spokane River where they would have built the memorial, and what would it have looked like, the memorial to the victims of the bag on the bench? Would it be lovely and muted, the way the grounds of what used to be the Murrah Building are today in Oklahoma City, with their bronze chairs and the water gently lapping at the sides of the reflecting pool? Maybe they'd buy one of the pawnshops downtown for the museum. Maybe there would be an exhibit of children's shoes there, like the display case in the Oklahoma City museum that's full of watches frozen at 9:02, the time at which the bomb they didn't find went off.
Here, by the river, is where they would want you to come. So, maybe, a bas-relief of balloons, suddenly freed from the fingers that had clutched them oh-so-tight. Balloons, sailing upward above the famous scene and above whatever was left of the most famous bench in the world. And people's eyes would follow the monument of the balloons into the sky, and people would wonder how it came to this, the way people always wonder how it comes to this, because we are a good people and a great nation, and it should never come to this. And, as their eyes followed the balloons, marble balloons into an iron sky, their grief would hide the truth from them.
That we are, all of us, political animals, whether we want to be or not, that all our actions are political and that it is in our basic political natures that we are connected to all political acts, even political acts of madness. We commit them, or we cheer them, or, through our fears and anger, or even through simple civic lassitude, we allow them to happen. We are connected in this whether we want to be or not.
That, fundamentally, we are the fuse.
And then the people would wander off, confused and uncertain, unmoored in their grief, asking "Why?" over and over again, as though there were not a real answer to that question, walking away hunched against the weeping winter rain.
A Conversation with the Dalai Lama
His Holiness on his reincarnation and his decision to step down as head of the Tibetan government
by: Melissa Mathison
Protector of the People: The Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C., on July 8th, 2011.
Photograph by Mark Seliger for RollingStone.com
The sun is shining on Tsuglakhang temple, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, and hundreds of Tibetans have gathered in the courtyard for a feast. As Buddhist monks ladle out white rice and stewed vegetables, horns blow and cymbals crash. Such celebrations are common here ― the monks often feed local villagers as an act of service to earn karmic merit ― but the festive air seems to capture the mood of the man who lives next to the temple. The Dalai Lama, despite many heartfelt petitions by his constituents, has finally been granted his wish for official retirement from government duties.
The Tibetan Parliament had twice urged His Holiness to reconsider, but he had declined even to read a message from them or meet with legislators. His mind was made up. On May 29th, the papers were signed and the Tibetan charter amended. The act marks a remarkable and voluntary separation of church and state: For the first time in more than 350 years, the Dalai Lama is no longer the secular as well as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.
Although the Tibetan government-in-exile has been largely democratic for decades, the Dalai Lama still had the final say in every major political decision within the diaspora. He appointed foreign envoys, determined the scope and timing of negotiations with China, had the power to sign or veto bills and could even dismiss Parliament. Now, with his signature, his formal title has changed from "Head of Nation" to "Protector and Symbol of Tibet and Tibetan People." Many of his political responsibilities will rest on the shoulders of Lobsang Sangay, a 43-year-old Harvard legal scholar who was elected in April to the post of prime minister.
China, dismissing the transfer of power as a "trick," has refused to meet with Sangay. The Communist government believes that the struggle for Tibetan autonomy will die with the Dalai Lama; all they have to do is wait him out. But by turning the reins of government over to the governed, His Holiness is banking on democracy's ability to serve as an effective bulwark against Chinese oppression. At 76, he knows he won't be around to steer the ship of state forever. Tibetans, he believes, must learn to steer it for themselves.
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was born in 1935, the son of a farmer in a small Tibetan village. In accordance with ancient tradition, the dreams and visions of high lamas and oracles eventually led a search party to the boy. At age two, he successfully identified people and possessions from his past life and was officially recognized as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. At four, he entered the capital of Lhasa and was named the spiritual leader of his people. At 15, he became head of state. In 1959, as tensions with the Chinese army reached a flash point, he fled to India, where he has led the Tibetan diaspora ever since.
Looking back over his 60 years of leadership, he has much to be proud of. He has established a successful and stable government in exile and stood firm against a brutal regime. As the first Dalai Lama to travel to the West, he has also extolled the virtues of nonviolence to millions, a lifelong effort that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. As the spiritual leader of Tibet, he remains the personification of his nation's struggle.
I have known His Holiness since 1990, when I wrote Kundun, a movie about his childhood directed by Martin Scorsese. Since then, we have developed a lasting friendship. I continue to work as an activist for Tibetan autonomy and serve on the board of the International Campaign for Tibet. Every day I pray for Tenzin Gyatso's long life.
When we meet on June 2nd in his reception area behind the busy main temple in the dusty Indian hill town of McLeod Ganj, he asks if he still looks as healthy as the last time we met. Yes, I tell him ― even younger, if possible. But, I add, his eyes look older. "That's right," he says. He wishes to inform me, however, that he hasn't needed to increase his eyeglass prescription ― in part because he doesn't use a computer. "I never even tried," he says, breaking into his distinct, ebullient laugh. "I don't know how!"
Let's start by talking about the day, in 1950, when you became head of government in Tibet. You were only 15 and the Chinese had invaded your country.
It was a very, very difficult situation. When people asked me to take the responsibility, my reaction is, I am one who wants to follow the Dalai Lama traditions, which was to be enthroned at age 18. Age 15 is too early. Then they again asked me. Chamdo [a mountainous region in eastern Tibet] had already been taken over by the Chinese. There was a good deal of anxiety. So I took responsibility. When the Communist Liberation Army reached Lhasa, my first act was to escape from Lhasa to the Indian border. So I think, bad omen or good omen? Almost my first act after I took responsibility is to escape from Lhasa! [Laughs]
It was a very, very difficult situation. When people asked me to take the responsibility, my reaction is, I am one who wants to follow the Dalai Lama traditions, which was to be enthroned at age 18. Age 15 is too early. Then they again asked me. Chamdo [a mountainous region in eastern Tibet] had already been taken over by the Chinese. There was a good deal of anxiety. So I took responsibility. When the Communist Liberation Army reached Lhasa, my first act was to escape from Lhasa to the Indian border. So I think, bad omen or good omen? Almost my first act after I took responsibility is to escape from Lhasa! [Laughs]
So here we are 61 years later, and you've just retired as head of government. You have, in a real way, been preparing for this retirement ― a separation of church and state ― since you were a child. How was the seed first planted?
As a teenager, around 13 or 14, living in Lhasa, I had very intimate sort of contact with ordinary people. Mainly, the sweepers at the Potala Palace as well as at Norbulingka [the Dalai Lama's summer residence in Lhasa]. I always played with them and sometimes dined with them. I got the information from the servants as to what was really going on in Lhasa. I often heard of the injustices the people experienced. So I began to understand that our system ― the power in the hands of a few people ― that's wrong.
As a teenager, around 13 or 14, living in Lhasa, I had very intimate sort of contact with ordinary people. Mainly, the sweepers at the Potala Palace as well as at Norbulingka [the Dalai Lama's summer residence in Lhasa]. I always played with them and sometimes dined with them. I got the information from the servants as to what was really going on in Lhasa. I often heard of the injustices the people experienced. So I began to understand that our system ― the power in the hands of a few people ― that's wrong.
So soon after you took power, you decided you wanted to implement reform to the old system?
In 1952, I think, I set up a reform committee. I wanted to start some kind of change. But I faced a major reform obstacle ― the Chinese officials wanted reform according to their own pattern, their own way, which they had already implemented in China proper. The Chinese felt that if Tibetan reform was initiated by Tibetans themselves, it might be a hindrance to their own way of reform. So it became difficult.
In 1952, I think, I set up a reform committee. I wanted to start some kind of change. But I faced a major reform obstacle ― the Chinese officials wanted reform according to their own pattern, their own way, which they had already implemented in China proper. The Chinese felt that if Tibetan reform was initiated by Tibetans themselves, it might be a hindrance to their own way of reform. So it became difficult.
You traveled to China in 1954 and saw firsthand what Communist reform looked like. Was it what you had envisioned for Tibet?
I went to China as one of the members of the Tibetan delegation at the Congress of the People's Republic of China. The parliament in Peking was very disciplined! I noticed that all the members barely dared make a suggestion. They would make a point, but only little corrections in wording [laughs]. Nobody really discussed meaning.
I went to China as one of the members of the Tibetan delegation at the Congress of the People's Republic of China. The parliament in Peking was very disciplined! I noticed that all the members barely dared make a suggestion. They would make a point, but only little corrections in wording [laughs]. Nobody really discussed meaning.
Then, in 1956, I had the opportunity to come to India. And here, too, I had the opportunity to visit Indian Parliament. I found big contrast. In Indian Parliament, lots of noise. No discipline. This was a clear sign of complete freedom of expression. Indian parliamentarians, they love to criticize their government. So I realized, this is the meaning of democracy ― freedom of speech. I was so impressed with the democratic system.
You liked the messiness and noise of democracy?
In 1959, when we decided to raise the Tibetan issue at the U.N., I asked Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru if he would sponsor our cause. He declined. He felt there was no use to raise Tibetan issue. He told me that America will not carry out war with China over Tibet. Later, I met with Nehru again, and I was a little bit anxious [laughs]. But when I met him, he was completely normal! I learned, yes ― this is a leader practicing democracy. Disagreement is something normal.
In 1959, when we decided to raise the Tibetan issue at the U.N., I asked Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru if he would sponsor our cause. He declined. He felt there was no use to raise Tibetan issue. He told me that America will not carry out war with China over Tibet. Later, I met with Nehru again, and I was a little bit anxious [laughs]. But when I met him, he was completely normal! I learned, yes ― this is a leader practicing democracy. Disagreement is something normal.
In 1960, after I reached India, many Tibetans came to Bodh Gaya for my teaching. It was there we decided on a representative government ― the first step for democratization. Since then, as refugees, we go step by step toward full democratization. In the past 10 years, I have continued acting like a senior adviser. I called mine a semiretired position. Since 2009, on many occasions, I expressed, "Now I'm looking forward to complete retirement." This year, on March 10th, I officially stated that now the time has come for me to retire; I'm going to hand over all my political authority to the Tibetan administration.
Most people around the world are anxious to get rid of their leaders. But the Tibetans have been very reluctant to let you retire. Why?
Emotionally, spiritually, still they look up to me. After I announced my retirement, they requested that I should carry responsibilities as I have, continuously. I declined. Then they asked if I would consider at least carrying a title, like a ceremonial sort of head.
Emotionally, spiritually, still they look up to me. After I announced my retirement, they requested that I should carry responsibilities as I have, continuously. I declined. Then they asked if I would consider at least carrying a title, like a ceremonial sort of head.
A ceremonial role? I don't like it. To be like the British sort of queen. Of course, I personally very much admire her. Wonderful. But the system? [Laughs] If you carry some sort of ceremonial head, then you should do something! Otherwise, I would just be a figurehead. A statement is written by someone, then I just read? I know the word ― a puppet.
Only since the fifth Dalai Lama, 350 years ago, has the institution taken on real political responsibility. The early incarnations were only spiritual leaders. I always believe the rule by king or official leader is outdated. Now we must catch up with the modern world.
So now I have handed over my political authority to an elected government. I feel happy. They carry full responsibility. I want to be just a pure spiritual leader. But in case my services are needed, I am still available.
Do you also have personal reasons for retirement?
I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I'm telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy! [Laughs] So what I am telling others I must implement for myself.
I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I'm telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy! [Laughs] So what I am telling others I must implement for myself.
Also, a more selfish reason. Before the Dalai Lama became a political figure, there was almost no controversy. Since the fifth Dalai Lama, some controversy ― because of the political aspect, not spiritual. Now, after my retirement, the institution of the Dalai Lama is more pure, more stable. I felt we must separate political responsibility. The Dalai Lama should not carry that burden. So that is my selfish reason ― to protect the old Dalai Lama tradition. It is safer without political involvement.
I have full conviction that Tibetans can carry all their work. Therefore I voluntarily, proudly decide this four-century-old tradition should end.
That does not mean the Dalai Lama ends. The institution remains, as a spiritual role. And not only for my generation. If the Tibetan people want the institution to remain, it will remain continuously.
Does your retirement mean your long-term goals have changed?
The rest of my life, I am fully committed to these things: Promotion of religious harmony. Promotion of human values. Human happiness. Like that.
The rest of my life, I am fully committed to these things: Promotion of religious harmony. Promotion of human values. Human happiness. Like that.
So you will keep up with your daily routines? I know that every morning you say a prayer for all sentient beings. When you pray for us, what is it that you want for us?
I often tell people that this century should be century of dialogue. Peace will not come from thought or from Buddha. Peace must be built by humans, through action. So that means, whenever we face problem ― dialogue. That's the only way. For that, we need inner disarmament. So our work should make a little contribution to materialize a peaceful, compassionate world later this century. That's my wish. It will not come immediately. But we have to make the effort. This moment, it looks only like an idea. But every corner must make the effort. Then there is possibility. Then, if we fail in spite of that effort, no regret.
I often tell people that this century should be century of dialogue. Peace will not come from thought or from Buddha. Peace must be built by humans, through action. So that means, whenever we face problem ― dialogue. That's the only way. For that, we need inner disarmament. So our work should make a little contribution to materialize a peaceful, compassionate world later this century. That's my wish. It will not come immediately. But we have to make the effort. This moment, it looks only like an idea. But every corner must make the effort. Then there is possibility. Then, if we fail in spite of that effort, no regret.
It might surprise people to know that you really are what you say: a simple monk.
A few days ago, in this very room, the Tibetan political leadership came together to see me. They brought all the amendments to the charter [regarding his retirement]. They explained what was written, and then they asked me please to read it. I responded, "Oh, even if I read it all, I will not understand fully. So, it doesn't matter." I just asked them, "Where I should sign?" [Laughs]
A few days ago, in this very room, the Tibetan political leadership came together to see me. They brought all the amendments to the charter [regarding his retirement]. They explained what was written, and then they asked me please to read it. I responded, "Oh, even if I read it all, I will not understand fully. So, it doesn't matter." I just asked them, "Where I should sign?" [Laughs]
That's very dangerous!
That's a sign of a simple Buddhist monk!
That's a sign of a simple Buddhist monk!
Do you worry that some people think your decision to retire is wrong?
Well, some Tibetans, particularly young Tibetans, are very critical.
Well, some Tibetans, particularly young Tibetans, are very critical.
Is that just fear? Or is it based on a legitimate concern for Tibet?
Some people think that these decisions are taken somewhat in a hurry. They don't know, you see, that I take these ideas step by step over the last few decades.
Some people think that these decisions are taken somewhat in a hurry. They don't know, you see, that I take these ideas step by step over the last few decades.
The Dalai Lamas have long relied on the state oracles for advice. Did you ask the oracles to go into their prophetic trance and advise on your retirement?
I did. They fully support my decision. I know these oracles. I ask them as a sort of adviser. They have observed the last four or five centuries of the Dalai Lama's experiences, so logically, as human beings, I felt they might feel a little bit uncomfortable with the decision. But they said it's very timely. The right decision.
I did. They fully support my decision. I know these oracles. I ask them as a sort of adviser. They have observed the last four or five centuries of the Dalai Lama's experiences, so logically, as human beings, I felt they might feel a little bit uncomfortable with the decision. But they said it's very timely. The right decision.
So you feel good about your decision?
Oh, yes. The 19th of March, after I offered a more detailed explanation to the public about my retirement ― that night, my sleep was extraordinarily sound. So it seems some relief.
Oh, yes. The 19th of March, after I offered a more detailed explanation to the public about my retirement ― that night, my sleep was extraordinarily sound. So it seems some relief.
Now we are completely changed from the theocracy of the past. Also, our decision is a real answer to the Chinese Communist accusation that the whole aim of our struggle is the restoration of the old system [in feudal Tibet]. Now they can't make that accusation. I am often saying that the Chinese Communist Party should retire. Now I can tell them, "Do like me. Retire with grace."
Why do the Chinese demonize you by calling you things like a "devil" or a "wolf in monk's robes"? Is there a reason they speak about you in such archaic language?
Generally speaking, such sort of expressions are childish. Those officials who use those words, I think they want to show the Chinese government that the Dalai Lama is so bad. And I think also that they are hoping to reach the Tibetans. They want 100 percent negative. So they use these words. They actually disgrace themselves. I mean, childish! Very foolish! Nobody believes them.
Generally speaking, such sort of expressions are childish. Those officials who use those words, I think they want to show the Chinese government that the Dalai Lama is so bad. And I think also that they are hoping to reach the Tibetans. They want 100 percent negative. So they use these words. They actually disgrace themselves. I mean, childish! Very foolish! Nobody believes them.
Usually, with human beings, one part of the brain develops common sense. But with those Chinese leaders, particularly the hard-liners, that part of their brain is missing. When I met with President Obama last year, I told him, "You should make a little surgery. Put that part of brain into the Chinese." [Laughs]
What do you think Tibet would be like today if you had been its leader for all these years? Some change, some reforms would have happened. But it would not be easy. There would be opposition from within Tibet. Some officials are more modern in their thinking. But there are also some who have an old way of thinking. And then with the Chinese "liberators," of course, there is no freedom at all [laughs].
I really feel that the last 52 years is very sad. Refugees. And the worst thing is the destruction inside Tibet. Despite some construction, some economic progress, the whole picture is very, very sad.
But I have no regret. The last 52 years, because of India's freedom, I really feel that I found the best opportunity to make my life meaningful, to make a contribution. If I had remained in Lhasa, even without the Chinese occupation, I would probably have carried the ceremonial role in some orthodox way.
When you were still a young man, the Nechung Oracle prophesied about you that "the wish-fulfilling jewel will shine in the West." Was the oracle right?
I think it seems that there is some truth. We escaped in 1959 and reached India. To Tibetans, that itself was the West. Then from India, mainly Europe and also America is our West. I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don't think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest. As far as inner sciences [science of the mind] are concerned, modern science very young. In the meantime, science in external matters is highly developed. So we Buddhists should learn from that as well.
I think it seems that there is some truth. We escaped in 1959 and reached India. To Tibetans, that itself was the West. Then from India, mainly Europe and also America is our West. I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don't think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest. As far as inner sciences [science of the mind] are concerned, modern science very young. In the meantime, science in external matters is highly developed. So we Buddhists should learn from that as well.
You have said that Tibet's survival will depend on China changing from within. Are you optimistic that will happen?
When President Hu Jintao expresses that his main interest is the promotion of harmony, I fully support that. I express on many occasions that real harmony should come from the heart. For that, trust, respect and friendship are all essential. To create a more harmonious society, using force is wrong. After almost 10 years of Hu Jintao's presidency, his aim is very good. But the method ― relying more and more on force ― is counterproductive.
When President Hu Jintao expresses that his main interest is the promotion of harmony, I fully support that. I express on many occasions that real harmony should come from the heart. For that, trust, respect and friendship are all essential. To create a more harmonious society, using force is wrong. After almost 10 years of Hu Jintao's presidency, his aim is very good. But the method ― relying more and more on force ― is counterproductive.
The first important thing is transparency. I am saying that 1.3 billion Chinese people have the right to know the reality. Then 1.3 billion Chinese people also have the ability to judge what is right or what is wrong.
On several occasions, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has expressed that China needs political change. On some occasions, he even mentioned democracy. And around Chinese intellectuals and artists, more and more say they want political change, more freedom. So therefore, it is bound to change. How long it will take, nobody knows. Five years, 10 years, 15 years. It's been now 52 years. In the next 50 years, I think it is almost certain things will change. Whether I live the next 50 years, or whether I don't.
If you had President Hu Jintao's ear and could suggest how to deal with Tibet, what would you ask him to do?
I don't know. I think it's not much use to discuss such things [laughs].
I don't know. I think it's not much use to discuss such things [laughs].
Has there been any moment since 1959 when you thought the Chinese would leave Tibet? Oh, yes. The 10th of March, 1959 ― the very day of the Tibetan uprising. I remember very clearly, there were a lot of Lhasa people who came to Norbulingka and blocked all the doors. They were shouting, "You should not go to the Chinese military camp!"
So Tibetans were afraid that an invitation from the Chinese at this tense time was a trick to imprison or assassinate you?
Yes. That day, the sun was very bright. I expressed to Mr. Phala, the Tibetan Lord Chamberlain, "Maybe this day, maybe this is a turning point in history."
Yes. That day, the sun was very bright. I expressed to Mr. Phala, the Tibetan Lord Chamberlain, "Maybe this day, maybe this is a turning point in history."
"Turning" does not mean "hopeless." In spite of some difficulties, you see a long tunnel ― at the end there is light. That feeling has sustained our determination.
I understand you're going to meet with a group of Tibetan spiritual leaders in November to discuss your succession. What issues will be on the table?
On the last few occasions when we get religious leaders together, I raised this issue. Chinese Communists are very much concerned about my reincarnation! [Laughs] So we need to discuss.
On the last few occasions when we get religious leaders together, I raised this issue. Chinese Communists are very much concerned about my reincarnation! [Laughs] So we need to discuss.
The concrete decisions are not yet finalized. One thing is quite sure. After all, the Dalai Lama reincarnation means my reincarnation, my rebirth. So logically, this is a matter of my decision. No one else ― even spiritual leaders. My next life is entirely up to me.
But the Chinese government says they get to decide on all reincarnations, including yours. This is quite controversial. The Communists are not only nonbelievers, but they also consider Tibetan Buddhism poisonous. So they deliberately try to minimize Tibetan Buddhism. Should people who try to minimize or eliminate Tibetan Buddhism interfere about rebirth? It's quite strange, really. Quite funny. They are only thinking about political power in Lhasa. That's silly. I think it is better for them to remain completely neutral. Or it would be more logical for the Chinese to say, "There should not be any reincarnation."
Does it bother you that people speak so much about your death?
No, not at all. In Newark last month, a French journalist raised the issue. I took off my glasses and ask him, "According to your judgment of my face, the reincarnation question is rather a hurry or not?" And he said, "No hurry!" [Laughs]
No, not at all. In Newark last month, a French journalist raised the issue. I took off my glasses and ask him, "According to your judgment of my face, the reincarnation question is rather a hurry or not?" And he said, "No hurry!" [Laughs]
Do you find yourself leaning toward a more traditional method of selecting the next Dalai Lama ― your reincarnation ― similar to the way you were discovered?
At this moment, I feel I can wait another 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. Then we'll see the situation. If the Tibetan people still want to keep this institution, and want to follow the traditional way, then they will use past experience: a search for a young boy who has some special significance.
At this moment, I feel I can wait another 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. Then we'll see the situation. If the Tibetan people still want to keep this institution, and want to follow the traditional way, then they will use past experience: a search for a young boy who has some special significance.
As far as where the boy is born, that I have made clear. If I die as a refugee, one still carrying the Tibetan struggle, then the reincarnation logically must be found outside of Tibet. The very purpose of reincarnation is to carry on the work started in the previous life. So logically, if the previous person dies outside of Tibet as a refugee, the reincarnation must be found that way. Otherwise, it creates more trouble.
Can you foresee the challenges your successor, the 15th Dalai Lama, might face?
By my resignation, I already made the role separate from the political world. So it will be much safer for the next Dalai Lama. Now, if the 15th Dalai Lama is not fit to be head of government, no problem. Whatever he can do as a spiritual leader, he can do. Not very smart? OK! [Laughs]
By my resignation, I already made the role separate from the political world. So it will be much safer for the next Dalai Lama. Now, if the 15th Dalai Lama is not fit to be head of government, no problem. Whatever he can do as a spiritual leader, he can do. Not very smart? OK! [Laughs]
Some traditions of Tibetan Buddhism suggest that a boy born before the death of a high lama could actually be his reincarnation. Do you believe that the 15th Dalai Lama could already be alive today?
It is possible. At least two modern lamas before their death said, "This boy who already is alive is my reincarnation." If it fits, after some investigation, then it is possible.
It is possible. At least two modern lamas before their death said, "This boy who already is alive is my reincarnation." If it fits, after some investigation, then it is possible.
If in fact this boy is alive today, would you take part in his training?
If I'm too old, then I don't know! [Laughs]
If I'm too old, then I don't know! [Laughs]
You've been keeping a close watch on the uprisings in the Middle East. Do you think that the Arab Spring movement could have implications for Tibet?
That's difficult to say. Authoritarian systems are the same around the world. But in China, economic development really brings some benefit to large number of Chinese people. That is the difference.
That's difficult to say. Authoritarian systems are the same around the world. But in China, economic development really brings some benefit to large number of Chinese people. That is the difference.
Immediately after the crisis in Tunisia and Egypt, there was some sort of impact in the minds of young Chinese intellectuals. So the Chinese government has become very, very nervous. They see danger from within. But the Chinese authoritarian system is quite tight. Their domestic-security budget is more than their budget for national defense.
Many people believe that the coming generation of leadership in China ― because of their young age, because of the Internet, because of large number of Chinese students studying abroad ― that their knowledge about the outside world is much better. I think definitely things will change. Definitely. That is our view. And also many Chinese have that view.
Many people believe that the coming generation of leadership in China ― because of their young age, because of the Internet, because of large number of Chinese students studying abroad ― that their knowledge about the outside world is much better. I think definitely things will change. Definitely. That is our view. And also many Chinese have that view.
Do you remember where you were the moment you heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed? What was your reaction?
Long Beach, California. I felt, of course, sad. Then, not that simple. Very complex.
Long Beach, California. I felt, of course, sad. Then, not that simple. Very complex.
Since my childhood, I feel very bad about the death sentence. In 1945 or 1946, when I was 10 years old, they hanged German leaders at the Nuremberg war-crime trials. I saw pictures in Life magazine. I felt very sad. Then some Japanese leaders also. These people were already defeated. Killing them was not as a sort of a precaution, but simply revenge.
Then when Saddam Hussein hanged, I saw the picture. Very sad. No longer a threat. Old, defeated person. Give mercy rather than kill, I really think.
So the same thinking with bin Laden, also a defeated person. Since the tragedy of September 11th, I express that if handling this problem goes wrong, then today one bin Laden, after some time, 10 bin Ladens, then 100 bin Ladens could be possible. On September 12th, I wrote a letter to President Bush, since I had developed close friendship with him. I expressed my condolences, sadness. Meantime, I also express that handling this problem, I hope nonviolent.
Of course, I know thousands of Americans were killed. Unexpected, in peaceful times. Really, very bad. I know. I can feel what they are feeling. So ordinary person, in the name of justice and also some kind of feeling of revenge, they feel very happy to some extent [about bin Laden]. Another way to look at it, a defeated person has been killed.
The best way to solve these problems is in the spirit of reconciliation. Talk. Listen. And discuss. That's the only way.
Does evil exist in the world?
The seed of evil, from my viewpoint, is hate. On that level, we can say that everyone has that seed. As far as sort of potential of murder is concerned, every person has that potential. Hatred. Anger. Suspicion. These are the potentials of negative acts.
The seed of evil, from my viewpoint, is hate. On that level, we can say that everyone has that seed. As far as sort of potential of murder is concerned, every person has that potential. Hatred. Anger. Suspicion. These are the potentials of negative acts.
There is also the potential for mercy. Forgiveness. Tolerance. These also, everyone has this potential.
Evil means that the negative potential has become manifest. The positive remains dormant. Those people who actually love hatred, who deliberately always practice anger, hatred ― that's evil.
Have you ever felt betrayed personally?
In 1954 and 1955, for at least six months, I lived in Peking. During that period, I met on a number of occasions with Chairman Mao. At first, I was very much nervous. Then ― after the second time, third time, fourth time, I can't remember how many times ― I develop real admiration for him. I really found him as a great revolutionary. No question. Very straightforward. And his personal behavior ― very gentle, like an old farmer's father. Like that. Very simple.
In 1954 and 1955, for at least six months, I lived in Peking. During that period, I met on a number of occasions with Chairman Mao. At first, I was very much nervous. Then ― after the second time, third time, fourth time, I can't remember how many times ― I develop real admiration for him. I really found him as a great revolutionary. No question. Very straightforward. And his personal behavior ― very gentle, like an old farmer's father. Like that. Very simple.
He promised many things. On one occasion, Chairman Mao pointed to two generals who were stationed in Lhasa. Mao said, "I send these generals in order to help you. So if these generals not listen to your wish, then let me know. I will withdraw them."
Then, at my last meeting, at the last moment, he mentioned, "Religion is poison."
At that time, he advised me how to listen, how to collect different views, different suggestions, and then how to lead. Really wonderful sort of advice. He asked me to send telegrams on a personal level, direct to him.
So I return to Tibet full of conviction. On the road, I meet a Chinese general coming from Lhasa. I told him, "Last year, when I traveled this road, I was full of anxiety, suspicion. Now I'm returning, full of confidence and hope." That was the summer of 1955.
Then, in 1956, there were problems in the eastern part of Tibet under Chinese jurisdiction. So I come to India. Month by month, things become more serious. More trouble. So after I return from India, I wrote at least two letters to Chairman Mao about the situation. No reply. No response. Then I felt, "Oh, his promise is just words."
There are murals in the Potala that depict important moments and people in the lives of past Dalai Lamas. Your life has been so different from the previous Dalai Lamas. Who and what do you imagine might be depicted in a mural of your life?
Ahh, I don't know. Of course, my mother at a young age. Then, my tutor. I never thought about this. That's up to other people.
Ahh, I don't know. Of course, my mother at a young age. Then, my tutor. I never thought about this. That's up to other people.
The important thing is that my daily life should be something useful to others. As soon as I wake up in the morning, I shape my mind. The rest of the day, my body, speech, mind are dedicated to others. That is compulsory as a practitioner, and also that way I gain some kind of inner strength. If I am concerned about my own sort of legacy, a genuine Buddhist practitioner should not think that. If you're concerned much about your legacy, then your work will not become sincere. You are mainly thinking of your own good name. Selfish. Not good. Spoiled.
Do you believe the day will come when you will be allowed to return to Tibet?
The Tibet issue is not an issue about the Dalai Lama. It is about six million Tibetans and their culture. So unless the Chinese government addresses the real issues, talks about my return to Tibet are irrelevant. This is an issue of six million Tibetan people. I am one of them. So naturally, like every Tibetan, I also have the responsibility to serve.
The Tibet issue is not an issue about the Dalai Lama. It is about six million Tibetans and their culture. So unless the Chinese government addresses the real issues, talks about my return to Tibet are irrelevant. This is an issue of six million Tibetan people. I am one of them. So naturally, like every Tibetan, I also have the responsibility to serve.
When your time comes, will you be buried at the Potala?
Most probably, if change comes and it is time to return to Tibet, my body will be preserved there. But it doesn't matter. If the airplane I'm on crashes, then finished! Follow bin Laden! [Laughs]
Most probably, if change comes and it is time to return to Tibet, my body will be preserved there. But it doesn't matter. If the airplane I'm on crashes, then finished! Follow bin Laden! [Laughs]
You have said that Chenrezig ― the Buddha of Compassion, of whom all Dalai Lamas are reincarnations ― had a master plan for the first and fifth Dalai Lamas. Do you think that the past 50 years of Tibetan history is also part of his master plan?
That I don't know. In the early Sixties, before the Cultural Revolution, I met Chenrezig in one of my dreams at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. There is a very famous statue of Chenrezig there. In the dream, I enter that room and the statue of Chenrezig is winking and asking me to come closer. And I am very moved. I go and embrace him. Then he starts one sentence, one verse. The meaning is: Keep persevering. The continuation of effort in spite of any obstacle. You should carry all your work in spite of difficulties and obstacles.
That I don't know. In the early Sixties, before the Cultural Revolution, I met Chenrezig in one of my dreams at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. There is a very famous statue of Chenrezig there. In the dream, I enter that room and the statue of Chenrezig is winking and asking me to come closer. And I am very moved. I go and embrace him. Then he starts one sentence, one verse. The meaning is: Keep persevering. The continuation of effort in spite of any obstacle. You should carry all your work in spite of difficulties and obstacles.
At that time, I feel happy. But now, when I think of that, I think that was advice from Chenrezig: "Your life will not be easy. Some difficulties. Quite long period. But no reason to feel discouraged."
This is from the August 4, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?
- 7/18/11 at 3:40 PM
- 40Comments
I do not enjoy Facebook ― I find it cloying and impossible ― but I am there every day. Last year I watched a friend struggle through breast cancer treatment in front of hundreds of friends. She broadcast her news with caution, training her crowd in how to react: no drama, please; good vibes; videos with puppies or kittens welcomed. I watched two men grieve for lost children ― one man I've only met online, whose daughter choked to death; one an old friend, whose infant son and daughter, and his wife and mother-in-law, died in an auto accident.
I watched in real time as these people reconstructed themselves in the wake of events ― altering their avatars, committing to new causes, liking and linking, boiling over in anger at dumb comments, eventually posting jokes again, or uploading new photos. Learning to take the measure of the world with new eyes. No other medium has shown me this in the same way. Even the most personal literary memoir has more distance, more compression, than these status updates.
In the world of social media, it can feel bizarre that potent evidence of grieving from one friend is followed so quickly by pictures of oven-fresh cookies from another. But Facebook is generated by algorithms without feelings. It's not a narrative: The breast cancer went into remission, but the stories of the radiation treatment continue; the lost children remain as photos, woven into the threads of hundreds of lives. The details of everyday life begin to fill in around those threads. The tide brings in status updates; the tide takes them out.
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.
At the end of every magazine article, before the "■," is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There's the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic.
To defend its realm, this machine sends its finest knights to crusade against this kraken rising from a sea of status updates. Zadie Smith, in The New York Review of Books: "When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced ... Our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned."
"I have a lot of opinions on social media that make me sound like a grumpy old man sitting on the porch yelling at kids," said Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin recently. "There's no depth. Life is complicated. You need to be able to explain complexity."
The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg's device displaced remembering.
"Real rapport," "real conversation," "complexity," and "depth," could be code words for "an appropriate level of respect." Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci disputed Keller's claim that time spent on social networking comes at the expense of "in person," backed it up with links to research ― and did it on Twitter.
The Epiphanator's most recent broadside appeared on a recent Sunday when the Times published Jonathan Franzen's commencement speech at Kenyon College. The title, damning in itself, was "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts" ― a variation on Keller's theme of genuineness. But far, far more likely to induce rage.
There should be a word for that feeling you get when an older person ― and not much older, so quickly are things changing ― shames him or herself by telling young people how to live. I'd vote for Bedeutungslosigkeitschmach, or "irrelevance shame," (made up with the help of Google translate) or perhaps Rünschmerz, the horrifying gut pain one experiences watching Andy Rooney. Whatever it's called, Franzen brought it in buckets.
He took us to task for "liking" but not loving. He questioned all the devices that command our affection. "Good people of Kenyon and the Sunday Times," he cried, "Return to your woodsy cottages and take pleasure in honest things: The bark of a fox; the nose of unspiced wine; the honest friendship of Alice Sebold; and a gristly, capital-L-Love-LOVE, honest and true with a great deal of hair and stink."
That's my version. What he actually wrote was: "To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes ― a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance ― with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self."
He tells the Kenyon 21-year-olds, who were likely texting throughout the ceremony, that they need more love. If the sub-30-year-olds with whom I've worked are typical, these young men and women love ― each other, or bands, or ideas ― too much, they love too often, with a feral intensity and with the constant assistance of mobile devices. Maybe what he was telling them is that they should be more old.
Franzen's speech recalls another, very different commencement speech, by Apple CEO Steven Jobs to the 2005 class of Stanford. Jobs is the embodiment of California, all gold rush, less city-on-hill. At Stanford he invoked the Whole Earth Catalog as "one of the bibles of my generation" ― its cut-and-paste aesthetic, hippie cheer, and promise of access to information a balm for his late-adolescent soul. The Whole Earth Catalog was a DIY-bible assembled by former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, far from the clanking Epiphanator. "We are as gods," reads the preface, "and we might as well get good at it."
The Whole Earth Catalog's descendants include, in strange but real ways, the entire computer and Internet industries. Creating tools to give regular people godlike powers is exactly what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of others have done, starting with cheap computer hardware and shrink-wrapped software, then via the web and on social networks. We've reached a point where anyone with an SMS card or access to an Internet café can potentially be heard by billions of people. What could be more godlike ― or more foreign to the Epiphinator ― than that?
And how do the Whole Earth heirs of Silicon Valley stand today compared to their financially bereft Epiphonatorian counterparts? Apple couldn't get much bigger without selling oil, while the media industry has been reduced to dime-size buttons that show up on iPhone screens. Google regularly announces initiatives to "save" the newspaper and book industries ― like a modern-day hunter who proclaims himself a conservationist. And Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after "Likes" as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat's cage.
So it would be easy to think that the Whole Earthers are winning and the Epiphinators are losing. But this isn't a war as much as a trade dispute. Most people never chose a side; they just chose to participate. No one joined Facebook in the hope of destroying the publishing industry.
As someone with Franzendentalist roots and Epiphinator tendencies, who consumes too many hours of social media, I keep sensing some serious hurt feelings from the older-media side ― "Why would you love that thing instead of me?" They act like my wife would if I brought home a RealDoll. But it's not like that. I don't think people love Twitter or Facebook in the same way they might love Parks and Recreation or Twilight. Rather, we like the beer and tolerate the bottle. And even if we have those other browser tabs open, we're still hungry for endings.
Obviously, the Epiphinator will need to slim down in order to thrive, but a careful study of history shows how impossible it is to determine whether it can return to both power and glory, or whether its demise is imminent.
The phonograph killed the player piano; radio, newspapers, and TV happily co-existed for generations. When did you last think fondly on the DuMont television network, or smile in recall of Friendster? This moment of anxiety and fear will pass; future generations (there's now one every three or four years) will have no idea what they missed, and yet they will go on, marry, divorce, and own pets.
They may even work in journalism, not in the old dusty career paths, but in the new jobs and niches carved out by some of the people New York has selected for its New Media Innovators list. Viral meme tracker, slideshow specialist, headline optimizer ― these are jobs that didn't exist a few years ago, and while they may seem a million miles from journalism as we know it, they will be components of the future Epiphinator.
We'll still need professionals to organize the events of the world into narratives, and our story-craving brains will still need the narrative hooks, the cold opens, the dramatic climaxes, and that all-important "■" to help us make sense of the great glut of recent history that is dumped over us every morning. No matter what comes along streams, feeds, and walls, we will still have need of an ending.
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