Darkness and Zen

"Reasonable--that is, human--men will always be capable of compromise, bur men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshippers of an ideal or an idea are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."

-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

Sort of a dark patch on a sunny morning. I really ought to stay away from the newspaper, but we all know that to be so during this annus horribilus.

In this morning's offerings, one legal observer documented that the trial courts, many stocked with Trump-appointed judges, have ruled roughly 94% against him, while the U.S. Courts of Appeal have gone roughly two-thirds/one-third against. The SCOTUS has ruled 94% in his favor, mostly using the cowardly shadow docket so they don't have to explain their treason or violation of their oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

Texas is calling a special session, five years early, to redraw the electoral maps in an effort to deliver that atrocious state's congressional delegation to the Rs in a ratio that bears zero resemblance to the actual electoral makeup of the state. There are significantly more registered Dems there than Rs, but the map will skew roughly 75-25% in favor of the latter with the redraw. Never much of an original thinker, the Wee Guv in Tallahassee threatens to do the same. The Dem delegation in the Texas house has apparently fled the state to deny Abbott a quorum, and he's threatening to have them arrested. For her part, Governor Hochul of New York has declared, "This is war", and says she'll redraw the map there although the rules are such that it likely can't be accomplished before the midterms.

Meanwhile, a top official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been fired for compiling employment data that casts Dear Leader in a negative light. One of the Smithsonian museum exhibits in D.C., on impeachment, has been rewritten to say that Presidents Johnson and Clinton were the only two presidents ever seriously in jeopardy of being impeached. Our news is carefully sifted to avoid DJT using either DOJ or other peoples' money to file suit against news outlets painting him in an empirically accurate but unfavorable light.

Alligator Alley is going so well there are now plans to build similar concentration camps all over the U.S., pretty much exclusively in Red states. More work for my knucklehead neighbors as camp guards, or maybe they can find employment building these places, given that the immigrant labor has fled.

Grand juries are being convened in an attempt to arrest officials of the Obama Administration over the "Russia hoax" that was, in fact, real. There's even talk of going after Hillary; I'm sure Obama would find himself in legal jeopardy but for the ridiculous SCOTUS ruling that says effectively the King can do no wrong. A more recent bad actor, Jack Smith, is also facing a grand jury for violation of the Hatch Act, supposedly based on his actions doing his job as a prosecutor to bring charges against the Orange One before the coup.

So all three branches of government have, well, collapsed. The economy teeters on the brink, which is going to hit those at the bottom the most because they don't have much play in the joints financially.

As Thomas Friedman observed in this morning's NYT, we're watching the end of the country in which we all grew up.

https://www.allsides.com/news/2025-08-05-0522/politics-america-we-knew-rapidly-slipping-away

So what to do? Peg's checked out, done her best imitation of Montaigne retreating to his tower when the Catholics started murdering the Huguenots. I could bury myself in work, but the world of my profession is about as awful as the political realm these days. All those folks who voted for this are ubiquitous in our legal system, especially in the South.

A few days ago I started on another ride, working my way through Alan Watts's The Way of Zen.

Watts was a former Episcopal priest who ended up on the path of Zen Buddhism, finding it a useful guide to experiencing life in a meaningful way. He wrote twenty-six books on the subject and subtopics ranging from meditation to sex. He wasn't a perfect guy or some cross-legged philosopher on a mountaintop--he was married, apparently had a ribald sense of humor, and was what we'd now call a highly-functioning alcoholic.

I've brushed against Zen Buddhism a few times in my life, from reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school to grappling with it in my Chinese History course at USC. But I never really got it, to the extent it's possible to "get" something as seemingly inscrutable as Zen. But as I watch the Christian tradition in which I was raised serve as the foundation for this act of vandalism against what was once a good society, it feels like time to immerse myself in something different. Maybe better, maybe not. But at least different.

And I find myself making a new friend whose been dead now for over fifty years. A fabulous writer and thinker, Watts brings a shared intellectual framework as an Anglican (although more of the mystical variety than I ever was) to search out metaphors for Eastern concepts described in their original form in ways for which we lack the basic language.

This will be fun. Something to do until the rap on my door and the masked goons there to take me away.