The International Campaign for Tibet reports: “News has reached ICT from Kirti monks in exile in India of the self-immolation today [Feb. 11] of an 18-year-old Tibetan nun, at around 6 p.m. in Ngaba. This is the third Tibetan nun to set fire to herself since the wave of self-immolations began inside Tibet in February 2009, and the second from her nunnery.”
It brings heartfelt response from Gyalwang Karmapa, Ogyen Frinley Dorje, known to Tibetan Buddhists as the 17th Karmapa. Karmapa is a sublime young man who is said by some to fill the shoes of the Dalai Lama when he passes on. As Xi Jinping expects to soon become China’s top leader, these two go together. His comments from the International Campaign for Tibet:
Santorum’s contraception boom — “We’re all Catholics now,” said Mike Huckabee — won’t hold up. Because we’re not. This race could well go to a brokered convention. If Jeb Bush is proposed, so Sarah Palin should be minutes later. She is now and always has been the singular Jacksonian voice in the original Tea Party phenomenon; the only one who can bring it to the mainstream. Her absence from the primary race has left a vacuum and no substitute has been found. Every other possible or potential leadership hopeful has risen and receded in this long Republican primary season.
But as The Hill’s Josh Lederman reports from the CPAC conference, the former Alaska governor received far and away the most spirited and enthusiastic reception at the convention of about 10,000 conservative activists. She drew the audience to its feet more than a dozen times during her keynote address on Saturday.
In hindsight it might be seen that the most treacherous moment, well described in David and Julie Eisenhower’s Going Home to Glory, was when Eisenhower tentatively handed over the keys to John F. Kennedy. Fifty years later the Kennedy legacy continues to descend. But what I found most revealing in Mimi Alford’s memoir of our most auspicious beginning at war’s end was in The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. The part about the partying at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, where JFK urged her to try amyl nitrate (“I was his guinea pig”). It brought to mind the food testers in barbarian regimes hundreds, thousands of years back.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin takes up the cri de coeur of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who, despite his conspicuous displays for Romney, which materialized virtually the day after the Bush-family coup to displace Romney with Christie fell apart, is really running for president himself in 2016. It is dispiriting that none of the GOP presidential candidates can hold a room like Christie, she says: “But perhaps the winner will go to him at the end of a long, bloody campaign and say, ‘I need you. The party needs you. The country needs you.’ And if he accepts, then whatever the outcome of the presidential race, Republicans would have something to cheer and an extraordinary politician to watch.”
The most important thing that has happened in the last two years is that the states have discovered that they don’t have to do what the federal government tells them to do, I said to a small group of New Hampshire mountaineers one year ago this month. It is one thing to say this in school basements before a few handfuls of New Hampshire’s hill people, where “live free or die” can be seen tattooed on forearms. It is expected of us. But when the same sentiments are presented at the button-down CPAC 2012 convention in Washington, D.C., as they will be tomorrow, something different is happening here. Liberal commentator Pat Goddell has suggested that the Tea Party these past two years has brought us to a “pre-revolutionary” state. For the last two years libertarian Ron Paul has been the overwhelming favorite of conservatives’ rising generation at CPAC. This year CPAC features a film produced and directed by Jason Rink exploring the history of state nullification, its constitutional legitimacy and how states can use nullification to push back against the encroachment of federal power.
How many visitors to Louisville, Ky., on a quick tour would look to the tallest buildings and among them see the Empire State Building but with a Dome of the Rock oddly placed on top? Or booking through Harrisonburg, Va., on I-81 in the James Madison University vicinity, rush past a knockoff of the Potola? Just coincidence, I expect. But I brought it up to one good-natured architect who has been considered among the top five these past 50 years when he was designing a law school for a college I worked at and his building seemed a ringer for a specific Italian monastery of the 12th century. It brought a mischievous smile and a quick aside to his wife, rapid fast whisperings behind the hand in Italian that I wasn’t intended to understand.
“One size does not fit all" was the catch phrase I used in my early complaints, and Romney first used the phrase publicly. He was clearly suggesting a change in format and a historic change of outlook. Truth is, it was only after the Tea Party event at the Alamo that state and regional autonomy became a real and advancing possibility. So when Gov. Romney suggested early on that his Massachusetts healthcare plan go national, he was merely advancing it from the “initiative state” of Massachusetts to the vast generic, continent-wide model of governance, the only way ideas had come to practice in the United States since 1865. But after the nationwide, grassroots Tea Party uprisings of April 2009, a more practical and efficient system tailored to regions and states became a real possibility. Nixon had tried earlier to regionalize, but the model he used was ineffective as it did not follow the natural cultural contours of America and the timing was all wrong. But Romney could see now that the times had at last changed enough to mobilize a more creative and efficient management model. Provided that leadership had the prodigious management skills that he has.
Read this morning with interest an interview with Harvard’s Steven Pinker in “Global Briefs” titled “On the State and Future of Violence,” in which questions were asked like “How violent is the today’s world?” Not much, the answer. For which we are all grateful. And as much as I have appreciated Pinker’s outlook for what it does, his interview brought to mind Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay with the fairly astonishing title: “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992. Which, if I recall correctly, was extended by Charles Krauthammer to an essay titled “The End of Time.”
Mark Zuckerberg presses himself into the public eye. It was his insistence and demanding countenance that first brought to my mind those ancient socialist realist statues of Lenin pressing forward against the wind, oversized, waving a bronzed document, almost a hundred years ago in the century’s first great wave — worldwide wave — of “new man” generational politics. It came then from the realization that they simply had the numbers. Capital had already fled Russia. Russian gentry were now waiters in Paris and all was left were peasants; comrades then, millions upon millions of them. And the document: the three-page, single-spaced letter that Zuckerberg had prepared; a letter to potential investors for a $5 billion initial public offering of Facebook. It was a manifesto:
President Obama’s invitation to Bush family members to the White House makes him seem an Everyman, all things to all people, and Caroline Kennedy’s open letter to vote for Obama a second time because her name is Kennedy — both mark the turning of the times, and suggest that Obama, like the Kennedys and the Bushes, is no longer a rising part of the times.
We have left the age of two-family politics, honoring Northeastern gentry who bask in Kennebunkport or Hyannis, and have entered instead into a full-bore Jacksonian heartland awakening. Tea Party has taken the mantle these past two years. But Jacksonian populism, channeled today by Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Ron and Rand Paul, all started in Virginia with Mudcat Saunders.
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