Darkness behind the guru-bubble

Mike Carlton
June 18, 2011

After careful thought, I have decided, like the Prime Minister, that I have no time in my busy schedule to meet Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, aka His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

This may be my loss. When Tony Abbott saw the bouncy bonze on Tuesday he announced that their meeting had been “good and constructive”. He had gained “an added consciousness of the importance of the spiritual dimension to life”, he said, without a hint of irony.

Makes you feel all warm and runny inside, that does. Perhaps they discussed homosexuality, where their views happily coincide, one mad monk to another. His Holiness regards gay or lesbian sex as a sin, and even masturbation – or “use of the hand”, as he coyly puts it – is “sexual misconduct”. And oral sex, too. And gay marriage. Also bad.

The starry-eyed idealists who believe the Dalai Lama to be goodness incarnate must be unaware of this puritan streak. His Holiness swans around the world on a cloud of adulation, much of it generated by an uncritical Western media.

Journalists who would not hesitate to take a stick to the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury for their failings report the Dalai Lama’s giggly banalities with all the fawning solemnity of truth revealed. There is a curious notion in the West that Asian religions in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular, have reached an ethereal plane of spiritual perfection beyond the reach of the rest of us.

Yet some of his stuff is just plain barmy. Reincarnation is as silly as it gets. After the Hollywood tough guy Steven Seagal forked out a whopping donation, the Dalai Lama discovered that he had once been a 17th-century Buddhist master named Chungdrag Dorje. The actor, famed for his on-screen violence, was therefore a “tulku”, or sacred vessel. Hollywood loves guru-babble. Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and Goldie Hawn are also devotees.

Silliness is one thing. Nastiness is another. The so-called apostle of kindness has been ruthless in crushing a rival Tibetan Buddhist sect known as Dorje Shugden, expelling its monks from monasteries and ostracising or exiling its adherents.

And it is almost forgotten now, but about 20 years ago he accepted more than $2 million in donations from the Japanese terrorist Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum doomsday cult, who thereafter murdered 11 people and poisoned thousands more by releasing sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway.

So I don’t think Julia Gillard missed a lot of spiritual uplift. Until corrected at a press conference, the old nutter thought that she was a he.

ADVERTISING, said George Orwell, is “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket”. I don’t actually agree with that. The modern world couldn’t function without advertising, and some of it we actually enjoy. Plus, to be honest, it’s kept me going for most of my working life.

But then along comes a real stinker of an ad campaign, something so truly vile that you begin to see Orwell’s point. Big Tobacco’s frenzied attempts to prevent plain packaging for cigarettes plumb new depths of dishonesty.

“Do you really like living in a Nanny State?” is the latest spiel from Imperial Tobacco, with a shot of a cranky shrew scowling over her glasses. “Now the government wants to remove all branding …” it goes on.

There’s the first lie. Brand names would still be printed on cigarette packets. They’d still say Winfield or Dunhill or whatever. Just smaller, and not in glowing colours. But here the tobacco companies want you to believe that the government is pinching their intellectual property, a case they would eventually take to the High Court in the hope of billions of dollars in compensation.

The rest of the campaign is just as devious, with wild claims about damage to Australia’s international trade reputation and the supposed dangers of fuelling a global cigarette-smuggling racket. It seems there is nothing they won’t stoop to.

A better quote comes from the huckster known in his day as the King of Madison Avenue, the late British advertising executive David Ogilvy: “Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things, ” he once said.

LAST week’s column on the lethal folly of our war in Afghanistan prompted an extraordinary response, mostly agreeing that we should get out. Several emails were from Vietnam veterans, one of them a bloke who’d been in 5RAR, the Fifth Battalion, in 1969. I thought it worth a run here:

“I am a Vietnam veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. My condition has been getting much worse over the past years with the usual nightmares and flashbacks that I am told are typical of blokes like me. I also suffer from a deep abiding guilt and self-loathing for the things that I did and saw while there. As a national serviceman I was really unprepared both for the reality of war and for the abuse I received upon my return home. As a result, most of my colleagues and a large number of my friends have no idea I was ever in the army. That is why I have asked that my name be kept confidential.

“I am telling you this because I believe my condition has been made much worse by what is happening in Afghanistan and previously Iraq. It brings me undone to see on TV the repatriation of [the bodies of] young men and brings back the horror. It disgusts me to see politicians, of both parties, almost fawning over grieving relatives. I wish they would just stay away and not make a political event of funerals. I do not understand why our country keeps making the same mistake of fighting other people’s wars.

“I also worry for the well-being of the guys who do come home. What will their mental condition be like in, say, 10, 20 or 30 years from now? Will the government be as mean-spirited in giving them all the support they need, the support they denied to us?

“Sending boys off to war is like throwing a pebble into a pond. The emotional ripples just keep going, not just for the individual involved but for his children and his family for years and years.”

Says it all, really.
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(Source : http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/politics/darkness-behind-the-gurububble-20110617-1g7si.html)