Where is the Panchen Lama? Letter to Jim Leach, R-Iowa and Tom Lantos, D- California

Reps. Leach and Lantos: The hearings on the collaboration of high-tech American companies with the repressive Chinese government move in the direction of responsible corporate management and fair trade and are a welcome step in the right direction. The fate of journalist Shi Tao and his family is particularly important. The fate of the Panchen Lama should be considered as well. FYI, my essay from The Free Market News Network calling for an investigation into the fate of the Panchen Lama. All trade and commerce should be put in limbo until these issues are cleared up.

Send the Panchen Lama to My House

In November, my son and I had the opportunity to hear an address by the Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C. I was pleased at that time that President Bush greeted him warmly and welcomed him in the Yellow Oval Room. Religious freedom in China and Tibet should be key to our good relations with China, and the President showed backbone in not backing down to secondary pressures, as more timid incumbents have usually done in the past. There is, however, a grave issue which remains unresolved and all trade and all relationships moving forward with China should pend on this issue. Is the fate of the Panchen Lama, the boy monk who in the Tibetan tradition is seen to be a highly regarded religious leader, just lower in status than the Dalai Lama.

This child has disappeared. But you will not see his picture posted on the side of milk cartons. Nor do headlines pour forth from the excitable TV press as they should. Instead there is a small web site (freepanchenlama.org) put together by Tibetan Buddhists sent to exile by the Chinese and a few of their new friends in the West. It tells the story in brief: Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was recognized at age six by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as one of Tibet's most important religious leaders. Determined to control religion in Tibet, the Chinese authorities kidnapped this young boy and his family on May 17, 1995 just days after he was recognized as the 11th Panchen Lama.

Despite repeated appeals to gain access to him, no international agency or human rights organization has been granted contact with the young Panchen Lama or his family. To date, their well-being and whereabouts remain unconfirmed.

This is a tragic situation, not only to Tibetan Buddhists, but to all freedom-loving people who wish fair play and good business and commerce practices to advance between East and West.

The International Campaign for Tibet says that on September 30, 2005, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called upon the Chinese authorities to allow an independent body to verify the well-being of the Panchen Lama, who is now 16 years old. It did receive some information from the Chinese but was not able to have this information confirmed by an independent expert. The Committee then asked that the Chinese authority “allow an independent expert to visit and confirm the well-being of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima while respecting his right to privacy, and that of his parents.”

It is good that the UN is looking into this case, but I don’t have my hopes up. There are other strategies. The fate of the Panchen Lama should be a key element in the platform of both major political parties and foremost in the Libertarian Party’s, and all trade issues should be linked to the successful and happy conclusion of this dilemma. Paste the Panchen Lama’s face on every piece of sewed cloth that enters port from China. Place with it a warning label like those which appear on cigarettes: “Warning: The Purchase of This Product is Dangerous to the Health of Child Monks and Detrimental to the Practice of Religious Freedom and Contrary to Every Notion of a Fair and Free Society.

If the Chinese don’t want the Panchen Lama he can stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room up here in our old house in New Hampshire. I’m sure he would get along with our kids. Most likely he’s a well-behaved little boy like every Tibetan child I’ve ever encountered, full of life and natural joy. I expect the harsh climate wouldn’t bother him.

But maybe he’d like North Carolina better. I know he’d like Cold Mountain, where the Blue Ridge meets the Smokies at the corner of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. (Photo by Cowan Stark.) We were lucky enough to rear our kids thereabouts. Like the Cold Mountain in China, where Buddhist mystics have lived for more than a millennia, these North Carolina mountains by the same name carry some mystery. Brown Mountain nearby has been the source of endless speculation because of its mysterious lights, which every new generation of scientist has a new explanation for. The Indians thereabouts consider the Cherokee mountains to be sacred and so do a lot of others. Sleep does seem to come more easily there and bring with it magical dreams.

The best-selling novel, Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier a few years back made a connection between the sacred mountains in China and those in North Carolina. It is about my favorite book since Willa Cather, and Frazier’s skill and vision successfully turns the story of a wounded old Confederate into an ancient Taoist tale. At the beginning of the book he quotes Han-shan, the 8^th Century Taoist monk from China’s Cold Mountain: Men ask the way to Cold Mountain: Cold Mountain – there’s no through trail.

Surely that marks the travail of the Panchen Lama and the brave Tibetans who lived in silence in the Himalayas for over a millennium when suddenly they were dispersed by Communist China. Just as their founder’s prophecy claimed: when the iron bird flies the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth.

Would the United States continue economic ties with Italy if a Socialist president kidnapped and imprisoned Pope Benedict and substituted their own Marxist-Leninist as Pope? I think not. But a weak and corrupt Congress turns aside, so as not to jeopardize their trade deals with the ascending world power.

I grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, which had 150 cotton mills shortly before I was born. My father worked in the last one to close. He was the electrician. He turned the lights out. The mills all went South to the Carolinas. Now they are all going to China. But the truth is, we didn’t really care where they went. When the mills left Fall River we found other things to do.

But we do care about freedom, and that is the distinction between now and then. Our mills came from Manchester, England to Manchester, New Hampshire, and on to the South in a journey of free and fair trade. But this is different. China is a dictatorship. It is a totalitarian country. And the boy monk who has gone missing should be the symbol of that critical distinction.

Give China the factories. And send the Panchen Lama to the Land of the Free.

The Rise of Sustainable Incompetence

The picture of Muhammad with a bomb for a turban (which took less than 10 seconds to find this morning in a Google search) is unlikely now to send the Danish cartoonist up for a Pulitzer.

I heard the Danish king or prince or something on BBC trying to put the situation into perspective. In a free society, he said, the king or the government has no control over the press. Nice of the royals to join the discussion. Thanks for sharing. But I kept being reminded of an old Monty Python skit in which John Cleese put antlers on his head saying that when the antlers were on his head he was speaking for Herne, the Wood Spirit, otherwise he was just talking regular. The antlers kept going on and coming off and in Python fashion, the discussion kept switching from the Wood Spirit’s cosmic visions to cheese and parrots. Most writers, artists and musicians know that they do what they do to territorialize the world and find their place in it, and they do what they do because they can’t do the math and are poor sword fighters. A point made by the very down-to-earth poet Kurt Cobain, in fact. And the best of them know as Kurt did, that everything is connected, from the king’s work to the clown’s. Nevermind.

Last week when I posted an essay here on Wesley Clark and included part of his “State of the Union” speech I received over 150 visits to my blog in the next two days. Usually I receive only four or five visits a day. And they are still coming. I’ve never gotten so many responses to an article. It shows what a need there is for a new direction.

It is The George W. Bush Political Phenomenon which has brought this out, misguided from the very first and intentionally deceiving a free people. In a vast federation like ours, people have few anchors and are easily deceived – sometimes, like recently, willfully deceived. I’d been watching General Clark for a long time - since before Kosovo, as his relationship with the Army very much reflected what was happening in our country as a whole. Historical periods start at the end of a war – ours started in 1946 – and then they stabilize and develop patterns of power until they reach a plateau and a condition which I call Sustainable Incompetence.

They then begin to form management patterns which always affirm the prevailing wisdom. To do so they must then dispense with all the honor, strength, creativity and intelligence which built them in the first place as it destabilizes the prevailing orthodoxy. William James has written about this in religious organizations but it is the same in politics.

Sustainable Incompetence eventually pervades every culture of management, be it academic, journalism, business or otherwise. The United States Army was a Petri dish for this model. In Sustainable Incompetence, the man or woman of the highest integrity and greatest ability is always the first purged when the management culture starts to descend. Post-war character began to enter its full arc of ascending creativity around 1982, the time of the publication of In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters, a book heavily influenced by an almost mythical fighter pilot, Colonel John Boyd. Around 1994 or 1995 management started promoting incompetence and purging excellence and character.

According to this theory, around the 60^th post-war year the culture will elect as President its most incompetent agent, but it has already long been spiraling in a downward trajectory. (Eisenhower thought Nixon too lightweight a character for VP; Nixon thought the same of Bob Dole – we are descending the stairs.) That would be President Bush the Second. I remember his father, who should have known better, when he said at the election of his son to the Presidency that it reminded him of John and John Quincy Adams, the second and sixth Presidents. There was a subtle and probably unconscious presumptuousness to it which instead brought to my mind Louis XIV and Louis the Last.

This current President could conceivable be remembered in history much along the lines of Wilhelm II, pseudo-German and pesky grandson of Victoria, who hated his own English people (as George hates New England, but he is not a real Texan or Southerner, no?) and longed for the glory of Teutonic manliness, with plumes and sword in hand on horseback (“Real men hunt with swords,” my kids say today.) Nobility takes on caricature when honor dies.

When Bush brought up his strategy of “preemptive foreign policy” it echoed Wilhelm II’s language, which so distressed the Germans, that it changed the course of their national election the following week. Wilhelm’s net result was to coalesce latent hostilities of old Christendom into alliances which brought complete disaster to the world for 30 years and brought on a destruction of Europe so great in scale that the Europeans are just now finally crawling out of the wreckage. Any number of advisors from both ends of the political spectrum could have and did predict the results of Bush’s first actions in Iraq – including Wes Clark, Brent Scowcroft and Gary Hart.

The steps ahead were predictable – guerilla warfare, civil war, a pan-Islamic, global anti-Americanism. Now they are even surpassing predictions. Issues took a seismic jump with the election of Revolutionary leadership in Iran and again recently with the democratic election of Hamas in Palestine.

In his late writing, Leo Tolstoy pointed out that if you travel south in Russia you will find that Orthodox Christianity blends and becomes Islam in the South. There is no place of real distinction. (Ancient sacred music shows this as well). These two forces are related much as Catholic and Protestant Europe are related. (And thus, in Europe’s Old Soul - before Peter the Great moved to Westernize Russia and went to war on Islam, they were cultural relatives).

That Russia will team with Iran in opposition to the West is now a distinct possibility. This week President Vladimir Putin has sent a clear warning to the West. This possibility is heightened now by Western incursion into Russia's near frontier since 1997, which some of the greatest foreign policy minds, such as George Kennan’s, called “ . . . a mistake of historical proportions.” It is not all George Bush’s fault. Susan Eisenhower led a movement against this, but 90 Senators voted for it and Vice President Al Gore – who speaks out now in opposition to Bush - led the fight to expand America’s reach into Russia’s back yard. But by 1997 Sustainable Incompetence was reaching its apogee. We would no longer listen to our most distinguished statesmen or our great generals or their daughters.

John Eisenhower, son of our greatest general since Lee and Grant, has also spoken out. A life-long conservative, he switched parties in this last election to vote in opposition to Bush and the apparent neocon agenda. But for Sustainable Incompetence to reach its objective, it is absolutely necessary for honor and excellence to be purged. And three of our greatest and most honorable military heroes today have been systematically spurned and discarded in the rise to incompetence.

The first was Wesley Clark, purged by a populist army intent on a war with Islam long before 9/11. The second was John McCain, who after sustaining years of torture in enemy POW camps, was called a coward by Christian Right politicians who never fired a shot in anger and never wore the uniform of their country. And third, the man who in our time perhaps best represents America in its brightest light and with its truest instincts, Colin Powell.

Bush’s first problem today is that he never served in warfare although he apparently supports warfare as a tool of enterprise and policy. I think we should consider real military service a requirement for anyone who seeks high office. There is nothing like the quiet of a 10-year old hootch girl who was selling you rancid ice cream just ten minutes before; now with a still chest so flat to the ground & her head blown off by an unseen assailant trying to kill you or somebody else. It stays with you. It quickens the intellect and the moral initiative and matures them together throughout adulthood. Such an experience would bring perspective in a political leader seeking war a second time.

Had Bush served when he was young and was expected too he would have learned at an early age what kind of a man he was.

This is the problem today with all of the President’s Men, Rumsfeld in particular. (Don’t lets hear now how brave he was flying T3s around New Jersey or wherever as a ROTC officer twix and between Korea and Vietnam.)

These men had every opportunity to serve in war and every opportunity to avoid it. We know what Bush was doing. He was drunk. And this should not be allowed to be turned into pop-culture and revival-tent salvation: “I was drunk, but now I got Jesus!” It is time to talk straight and leave salvation to the Oprah show. There should be instead psychological testing for anyone who wants to be President. I’m glad the President has sobered up, but psychologists and Alcoholics Anonymous tell us that alcoholics often switch one obsession for another, quite often a religious obsession. Perhaps he missed some of the 12 steps.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who told Washington Post reporter George C. Wilson in 1999, “I had other priorities in the ’60 than military service,” probably set the record for deferment. He showed real promise as a Wichita lineman. Promotions of men like Cheney to such high office are the classic symptoms of Sustainable Incompetence.

I think history will go back and look at two men together, Cheney and Powell, who worked together early in their careers and who both have long service in government. And we will see America’s destiny following in the path of these two lives. But which path will it take? The path of honor or the path of expediency? Powell was shamefully and publicly purged by Cheney, but I believe he will be back.

In a large federation like our own, the will of the people is hard to change. It is like a big Destroyer trying to turn around – but when it does turn it is fierce, as we are a fierce people because we are a new people. And when it does turn it turns again to the people first spurned; the men and women of the highest character and keenest intelligence.

My instinct is that our country is not yet ready to fail and the best will not be left behind. Wesley Clark, John McCain and Colin Powell will yet have important roles to play in our American destiny. These are men of honor and authenticity, not fancy, dress up, caricature and wish fulfillment.

When we turn we will turn to them. We are almost there.

Letter to a friend

Carol – I wanted to let you know that since I published that Clark essay at the Free Market News Network two days ago I have received over 25 emails from readers on my blog and at the Free Market News Network & they are continuing this morning. I don’t ever remember that publication getting so many responses. And it is not a venue that is necessarily particularly friendly to General Clark. I usually only get one or two responses, usually none. It shows what a need there is for a new direction. I sent the essay to Charlie Rangel’s office – perhaps he can use it. I usually don’t write about politics. I am a Buddhist and write generally about art and Tibetan Buddhism (Quigley in Exile) and long-term patterns of history. Was only Boy George what brought this out, misguided from the first and intentionally deceiving a free people. I write about history as shapes and packages over long terms and kinds of governments – federalism, regionalism, monarchy – as distinct kinds of psychological packaging, each with their own consequences for people. In a vast federation like ours, people have few anchors and are easily deceived – sometimes, like recently, willfully deceived. I’ve been watching General Clark for a long time - since before Kosovo, as his relationship with the Army very much reflected what was happening in our country as a whole. Historical periods start at the end of a war – ours started in 1946 – and after they stabilize and develop their patterns of power, they reach a point of what I call sustainable incompetence – they form management patterns which always affirm the prevailing wisdom. To do so they then must dispense with all the honor, strength, creativity and intelligence which built them in the first place as it destabilizes the prevailing orthodoxy – William James writes about this in religions but it is the same in politics – the army was a Petri dish for this model – and the man or woman of the highest integrity is always the first spurned by the “descending” management strategy. Industry, college administration, car culture, politics, etc. all take the same direction – they began around 1992-3 promoting incompetence and purging excellence and character. Around the 60^th post-war year the culture will elect as President its most incompetent agent, but it has already long been on a downward trajectory (Eisenhower thought Nixon too lightweight a character for VP; Nixon thought the same of Bob Dole – we are descending the stairs). That would be Boy George. George could conceivable be remembered in history much along the lines of Wilhelm II, pseudo-German and pesky grandson of Victoria, who hated his own English people [as George hates New England, but he is not a real Texan or Southerner, no?) and longed for the glory of Teutonic manliness, with sword in hand on horseback (“Real men hunt with swords,” my kids say now.) Nobility takes on caricature when honor dies. When George brought up his policy of “preemptive foreign policy” it echoed Wilhelm II’s policy; Wilhelm’s net result was to coalesce latent hostilities of Christendom into alliances which brought complete disaster to the world for 30 years and brought the destruction of Europe. Any number of advisors could have and did predict the results of Boy George’s first actions in Iraq – including Wes Clark, Brent Scowcroft and Gary Hart. The steps ahead were predictable; now they are even surpassing predictions: issues took a seismic jump with the election of Revolutionary leadership in Iran and again in Palestine. Tolstoy pointed out that if you travel south in Russia you will find that Orthodox Christianity blends and becomes Islam in the South; there is no place of real distinction (ancient music shows this as well) – these two forces are related much as Catholic and Protestant Europe are related (and thus, in Old Soul - before Peter the great wnated to Westernize and went to war on Isalm, they were cultural relatives). That Russia will team with Iran is now a possibility – heightened by Western incursion into Russia's near frontier since 1992. Bush’s first problem today is that he never served in warfare although he apparently supports warfare as a tool of enterprise and policy (there is nothing like the quiet of a 10-year old hootch girl who was selling you rancid ice cream just ten minutes before; now with a still chest so flat to the ground & her head blown off by an unseen assailant trying to kill somebody else - it quickens the intellect and the moral initiative and matures them together throughout adulthood). Had Bush served when he was young and was expected to he would have learned at an early age what kind of a man he was. This is the problem today with all of the President’s Men, Rumsfeld in particular (alors, don’t lets hear how brave he was flying T3s around New Jersey or wherever as a ROTC officer twix and between Korea and Vietnam.) These men had every opportunity to serve in war and every opportunity to avoid it. Cheney – who showed real promise as a Wichita lineman – I believe set the record for deferment . . . anyway, what I was getting at before distracted from my sheep and simple Buddhist practises by these creeps and their poisonous Dark Dwarves who have now found there way daily to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the LA Times – (how could so few with such poisonous and poor character commandeer the will of a free people?) . . . was that in a large federation like our own, the will of the people is hard to change – as it is like a big Destroyer trying to turn around – but when it does turn it is fierce, as we are a fierce people because we are a new people. And when it does turn – and it usually turns in the 60^th year (see William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning) it turns again to the man first spurned; the man of the highest character and keenest intelligence. A man of honor and authenticity, not fancy, dress up, caricature and wish fulfillment. We are almost there. I think this year we will flip. And when we do we will turn to Wes Clark. I appreciate what you all do. Glad I can occasionally help. – Cheers, Bernie (photo by Barr Ashcraft, Vietnam, 1973 threabouts)

Wes Clark’s World and Bush’s

I had a small epiphany a few years back when Ryutaro Hashimoto, Prime Minister of Japan, was forced out of office in a political scandal and he used these words on television. “I take complete responsibility. I resign.”

Wow. I gathered my children in front of the TV. We have heard that phrase many times before and since, but only the first part of it: “I take full responsibility.”

When we hear it now it means nothing. The last two Presidents have used it and many before. Usually today it means that none of the accomplices in the dastardly deed are going to get fired or go to jail. Even cowardly acts like those of the current President’s Men who publicly revealed the name and cover of a covert American agent and endangered the lives of others – a treasonous act for which they would have been taken out and shot a shot in the Korean War - have virtually no consequences.

Listen to this I told my kids. The Japanese Prime Minister takes full responsibility for his failure. He resigns.

Of course, a hundred years earlier, Hashimoto would have been given the option to throw himself on his sword, to save himself form the disgrace of living in the society he had betrayed. But the code of honor was stronger then and even Japan has pretty much relinquished the Way of the Sword.

Today corruption is an everyday part of life. Sin happens. But in an honorable society a leader takes responsibility for his actions. He acknowledges his failure to himself, to his family, to deity and country. He relinquishes the reins of power.

We are no longer a society which honor’s honor. Recently, I had a conversation with a very decent, intelligent and thoughtful young man who said he didn’t have any idea what I meant by honor. We live in a nation of laws, he pointed out. Honor has nothing to do with it. I think he explains it precisely. It is an American dilemma. Can a country live by laws alone? Our country does, but in each segment of our history laws have ultimately failed us and we have had to call upon men of honor at the hour of desperation: Washington, Lincoln, Eisenhower, George Marshall. Very often they were military men.

The high Victorians lived by a code of honor, well expressed in its prelude by Lord Nelson, who said, “England expects that every man will do his duty.” This is the utter essence of honor. The Empress of India’s man of honor, like Japan’s, did not live by a battery of laws. He lived by an ineffable principle embodied more deeply in human nature and perhaps in divine nature; embedded in the notion of the Queen herself. British law reflects it. In the earliest transactions, like those of the Glorious Revolution, the Queen is referred to as “the Body of the Queen.” As a person, she has no rights or being whatsoever. She is honor incarnate and the sacred tradition of England. We have traded that for a body of laws. But listening to the President’s comments last night on this State of the Union address, a question still remains whether we have traded up or down.

The President tells us, “Americans are addicted to oil.” I think we have been telling him that for the last five years, since he hired oil men and car guys from Detroit to run his Cabinet and tell him what to do. But there is an accusatory attitude here, as there often seems to be with this President. It is somehow a weakness on our part. Do I have this right? Was it not Prescott Bush, the President’s grandfather, who brought these people from New England to Texas in the endless search for oil and new wealth? For a minute I thought I had accidentally switched the clicker to the aggi channel and was listening to Willy Nelson at Farm Aid or Neil Young, tooling around Los Angeles in his biodiesel Hummer.

"In a complex and challenging time, the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline," he said.

How did we become so isolated? As I recall, six years ago we had more friends than we desired, sneaking into our country in tunnels and crashing ashore at Far Rockaway in leaky boats. Now we have new anti-American states again to our South and Russia is again rattling its nukes and cozying alliance with Iran.

Most confusing was the phrase about Iran being captive by a small group of fanatics. They seem rather like endless hordes, no? With more newly hatched in Palestine and democratically elected. To Bush democracy is a talisman. Like a shaman’s turtle shell. Rattle and shake it and you get rich, build good government and go to heaven.

The tenor and tone of the entire speech was to turn away. He seems one foot in Crawford, cutting brush, waiting for the next three years to end. As do so many others.

I turned by contrast to Wesley Clark. Two days before President Bush was to give his annual State of the Union speech, Wesley Clark was invited to deliver a speech at The New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. It was a great speech. And what pervades it is that to which I was drawn to him early on.

General Clark is old school. He lives by the rules, but he also lives by a code of honor. It pervades every utterance and every act. I heard him speak a number of times in the New Hampshire primary and I think it frightened people. And what I thought that meant was this: We admire men like that. But we are not yet ready to turn to a man of honor. Our failure is not yet great enough.

This is some of what Wes Clark said in his State of the World:

“Today, billions of people abroad believe that America's beacon is fading, our star is dimming, and that America's time is passing. Why?

“Because four years after 9/11, Osama Bin Laden remains on the loose in the fastness of western Pakistan, and Al Qaeda remains a potent force among millions of Muslims.

“Because the threat of terrorism has actually increased, partly as a result of the unnecessary invasion of Iraq, where after almost three years, we find ourselves enmeshed in an intensifying sectarian struggle that is drawing in jihadi terrorists like a magnet and creating a new cadre of hardened opponents to America and our friends.

“Because, despite our tough talk, Iran is discarding its international obligations in the apparent pursuit of nuclear weaponry, while simultaneously questioning Israel's existence and raising the specter of wider conflict in the Mideast.

“Because, North Korea, with a standing army of more than 1 million men, armed with chemical and biological weapons as well as long-range missiles, is defying US efforts to contain its threat of nuclear proliferation.

“Because, in the process of this struggle against insurgents and terrorists and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we are in danger of losing the very principles we are fighting for as revelations of torture and degrading treatment of those detained confound our long standing commitment to human rights and undercut our moral strength and leadership.

“Because America's long-standing commitment to assisting democracy abroad was recklessly transformed into hot rhetoric and direct action in Iraq— and it has not only offended cultural and national sensitivities in the Middle East, but it is also contributing to the anger and violence in the region.

“Because while we are distracted by the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, rising global competitors like China are taking advantage of the security umbrella we have created to lock in their own access to the resources needed to fuel their stupendous growth.

“Because the United States has stood silently while the historic opportunity of a democratic Russia is systematically crushed and other new democracies threatened by the same power ministries and entrenched authorities that enslaved hundreds of millions during Communism's long reign.

“Because our oldest friends and Allies, in Europe and Asia, are questioning America's commitment to the dialogue, institutions, and principles that kept us safe throughout the Cold War and even helped end ethnic cleansing in Europe during the 1990's.

“The plain truth is, in America's rhetoric and conduct since 9/11, we've made more enemies than friends in the world - and that's no way to protect the American people!”

As our nation opened, New England’s greatest visionary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, made the auspicious observation that we saw ourselves ascending a stairs. We have to ask ourselves now if we are descending that same set of stairs.

How deep must we descend? How great must our failure be until we turn in panic and disgrace to a Man of Honor?