Voices From Tibet

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The Book of the Week is “Voices From Tibet, Selected Essays and Reportage” by Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, edited and translated by Violet S. Law, published in 2014.

In 1910, Great Britain mandated that Tibet become part of China. The territory consisted of yak and sheep herders and barley farmers. Fighting in Tibet ensued until October 1950, when China got its way. Mao Tse-Tung directed his People’s Liberation Army to take it over, except for the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). That bit of land was led by a Buddhist leader called the Dalai Lama. In 1959, he was forced to assume a government-in-exile in India.

More recently, Tibet, with a population of approximately six million, is a mountainous region that is twelve thousand feet above sea level and three and a half times the size of the state of Texas. It has seen decades of violence from protesters agitating for independence. In July 1994, the Chinese government launched a smear campaign against the Dalai Lama. Dissidents who had any connections to Buddhism, even tenuous ones, were imprisoned or killed.

Two political dissidents– a married couple– whom the Chinese government has oppressed due to their stance on freedoms in Tibet include: Tsering Woeser (a Chinese army officer’s daughter, a poet, born in 1966) and Wang Lixiong (a novelist born in 1953).

In 1998, Wang’s writings didn’t advocate subversion, but rather, sought to educate people to effect political change, proposing a gradual approach toward Tibetan democracy. In 2001, he resigned his membership in the Chinese Writers’ Association because its actions offended his sensibilities. The Chinese government expelled him from Friends of Nature, an environmental organization he co-founded.

In 2003, Tsering was fired from a job with a publisher because she praised the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa (a Buddhist leader), and encouraged belief in religion. She moved from Tibet to Beijing and became an unofficial spokesperson for Tibetan dissidents in China. Beijing allowed a little more free speech than Tibet. She posted writings on a foreign website rather than through print-media so it was harder for the Chinese government to harass her.

In 2008, more kinds of people agitated against China’s control of Tibet. Nuns, monks, local vendors, students, farmers and nomads demanded that the Dalai Lama be allowed to return to Tibet. In 2011, almost two dozen of the religious ones set themselves on fire in protest. In 2012, about eighty of them did.

In 2006, China opened the Qinghai-Tibet rail line.”What is unfolding in Tibet is pseudo-modernization, essentially a kind of invasion, a sugar-coated act of violence.” That sounds like colonialism, but in 2008, in the Tibetan city of Lhasa, the political environment was like that of Nazism. Chinese law enforcement officers detained and rounded up about seven hundred monks from monasteries, and took them to the last rail-line stop in Tibet.

The train cars smacked of Holocaust cattle-cars. The monks ended up in either political re-education camps or prison. Armed Chinese soldiers in the streets harassed monks and youths.

Tibet caught capitalistic fever from China. There was a “gold rush” in minerals and caterpillar fungi. Strangely, “The Buddha teaches us that all living beings are equal.” But the Buddhist monasteries in Tibet became hypocrites– were persuaded by an enterprising Chinese tour company to provide Mandarin and English-language translators to fill an (extremely lucrative) niche in the tourism industry. The Chinese controlled the business, which involved swindling tourists in various ways.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more biographical info on the two aforementioned dissidents, and the many additional ways that Tibetans are losing their culture (hint: by the turn of the twenty-first century, Tibet was becoming a regular Dubai) at the hands of the Chinese.

The Waiting – BONUS POST

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Here’s a little ditty about America’s current political situation.

THE WAITING

sung to the tune of “The Waiting” (Official Music Video) with apologies to the Estate of Tom Petty, and the Heartbreakers.

Seems-LIKE we’re in a holding-pattern right now.
Candidates are assembling their teams.
Yeah, 2024 is not to missed.
But, America will be kind a-gain.

Yet lots of politicians are trying to pretend.
America will survive this conTENtiousness.

Clean-house, clean-house, clean-house, clean-house.

The waiting is the hardest part.
We-are eager for trials to start.
We enjoy-a good debate.
Integrity would-be smart.
The waiting is the hardest part.

Well, most pundits chase tabloid-topics around.
All it does is bring us down.
We need leaders who’ll make us feel good.
But it takes time to reverse right now.
The presidential race will show us how,
to move the nation forward.
We need to move forward.

Clean-house, clean-house, clean-house, clean-house.

The waiting is the hardest part.
We-are eager for trials to start.
We enjoy-a good debate.
Integrity would-be smart.
The waiting is the hardest part.

No more shenanigans, elect a better prez.
No more shenanigans, elect a better prez.
You know right from wrong.
You know you’re nobody’s fool.
This has got to turn around. No more shenanigans.

Clean-house, clean-house, clean-house, clean-house.

The waiting is the hardest part.
We-are eager for trials to start.
We enjoy-a good debate.
Integrity would-be smart.
The waiting is the hardest part.

Yeah, the waiting is the hardest part.
Shape-UP-or-ship-out.
It’s the hardest part…
Shape-UP-or-ship-out.

Life in the Trash Lane

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The Book of the Week is “Life in the Trash Lane, A Sports Agent’s True Story” by Mel Levine, published in 1993. This sloppily edited volume described a bygone era in terms of the financial aspects of “amateur” sports in America. Only “professional” athletes could receive compensation in the form of money or gifts from work-related people and entities. College players were considered amateurs.

The author began a career as a tax attorney and business investor, but also became an agent for college football players on their way to the pros. He offered his services as an agent, CPA, lawyer, and financial planner. Initially, representing big-name athletes boosted his ego. The author hired various scouts called “bird dogs” who would help him acquire clients who had barely started college but were perceived as talented players. On the surface, sports agency looked lucrative, but it was actually a cutthroat, sleazy business.

The convention in the late 1980’s was for agents to advance expenses to the professional hopefuls, and then, if the players made the pros, the agent was paid about 5% of the athlete’s earnings. The author paid for their cars, insurance, housing, gifts for their significant others, legal fees, etc. (a clear NCAA rule violation). The author continued to run afoul of the strict NCAA rules, but he rationalized that all of the other agents were doing so, too, and he needed to stay competitive. Many times, he was almost busted.

The author was suckered into paying big bucks to numerous players he represented, but they never paid him even in cases when they made the pros. The players owed him thousands and thousands of dollars, but he developed a version of Stockholm syndrome– acting as a father figure to a few of them, and remained fiercely loyal because he felt an escalation of commitment.

In May 1986, one of the author’s clients had an accident in the expensive car paid for by the author. Two major Miami newspapers’ stories on this prompted the question of how the athlete could afford such a car. The car was likely provided by his agent, or his college– the University of Miami. If so, the NCAA violation would end the player’s career before it started, and the scandal would ruin the reputations of the agent, the school, and many others.

The author cooked up a scheme to get a slew of parties out of trouble. He shredded all the paper contracts of his rule-violating clients, and claimed he was running a car-leasing operation; the athletes’ parents were leasing the cars for them [like everyone really believed that (!)].

The author told of another client who was nothing but a boondoggle, but the author stuck by him for years, anyway. By 1987, “He was damaged goods for a [National Football League] team to expend a valuable draft choice on a kid with a bad ankle, drug problems, legal problems, and a dishonorable discharge from BYU was more than any of them would bear.”

As can be imagined, the sports agency business will keep commercial litigators in business forever, as its seamy underbelly consists of an orgy of litigation. The author dismissed yet another client’s transgressions: “At worst, he blew up a Porsche (quite by accident), got arrested in New Jersey for carrying a concealed weapon and unfortunately got into a fight or two. No big deal.”

Read the book to learn about a slew of other details of the conduct of sports agents and their clients of the late 1980’s.

Oh What A Fight – BONUS POST

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Oh What A Fight

sung to the tune of “December, 1963 (Oh What A Night)” with apologies to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

Oh what a fight.
Criminals STILL walk free in ’23.
What a noisy prez-race we’ll see.
Thug po-LI-tics.
What a fight.

Oh what a fight.

All the candidates, we know their names.
‘Stead of brains-and-maturity, we’ll see false claims.
Where’s the fact-checking?
What a fight.

Oh they, inCITE hostile-feelings in male viewers, of the news.
And oh, fren-em-ies’ll call in favors in-secret soo-oon.

Oh what a fight.
Frus-trating AND infuriating me.
Prah-paganda and lack of substance we’ll see.
Sour surrender, what a fight.

Some viewers, WISH they could roll with the elites,
reveling in opponents’ scandals and electoral defeats.
Oh what a fight.

Oh they, inCITE hostile-feelings in male viewers, of the news.
And oh, fren-em-ies’ll call in favors in-secret soo-oon.

Oh what a fight.

The whole campaign IS a scripted charade.
CLAshing egos, now it’s donor-made.
Hypocrisy-and-attorneys.
What a fight.

Some viewers, WISH they could roll with the elites,
reveling in opponents’ scandals and electoral defeats.
Oh what a fight.

Dough-dough-dough-dough-dough, dough-dough-dough.
Oh what a fight.
Dough-dough-dough-dough-dough, dough-dough-dough.
Oh what a fight…

John Reed: Witness to Revolution

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The Book of the Week is “John Reed: Witness to Revolution, A Biography” by Tamara Hovey, published in 1975.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, and Bibliography), Reed was born in October 1887 in Portland, Oregon. The beneficiary of white male privilege, he graduated from Harvard, then bummed around Europe, and wrote stories and articles that were published in the magazines of the day; among them: American, Saturday Evening Post, Century, Smart Set, Colliers, and Trend. But he rebelled against the bourgeois values of his social class. The Masses did not pay its contributing writers, but featured short stories that realistically portrayed the struggling masses in America of the 1910’s. Many publications generously compensated their contributing writers, so Reed was able to scratch out a living.

Reed was given a press pass through the years by different publications to cover a few major historical events. In 1913, he wrote human-interest stories through immigrant workers’ eyes after witnessing violent labor trouble at the silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey.

Reed rubbed shoulders with the famous social activists of his generation. Showing their white-savior-complex– in June 1913, he, along with the independently wealthy Mabel Dodge (who owned a stately home on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) and Robert Edmond Jones, staged a pageant whose performers consisted of downtrodden laborers at the old Madison Square Garden. The three served as planner and director, funder and arranger, and set designer, respectively. Their goal was to improve working conditions for the poor. After the pageant, Reed, Dodge and Jones sailed to Europe.

Reed spent four days in New Jersey’s Passaic County jail (whose conditions were very disgusting) in order to write articles that publicized the plight of striking workers who were denied due process. He was unlike journalists at most newspapers, who were puppets of: management (rather than labor), government officials, and law enforcement. Reed physically climbed into the trenches with German soldiers during WWI to get their stories. He then turned into a pacifist.

Read the book to learn what transpired when Reed developed a reputation as a radical (hint: he acquired a press credential from the American Socialist press in August 1917 in order to cover the Russian Revolution).