Finding myself, the Iyengar way

For Dipika magazine

By Daniel Simpson
  
My first ever yoga class was disappointing. I didn’t spontaneously levitate; nor were we asked to try, let alone fail, to wrap our knees behind our heads and lie down flat.
 
Instead, we lined up on strips of what felt like carpet underlay, in a room that resembled the assembly hall of my junior school. The only hints of The East were wafts of incense, and a couple of magical realist statues of deities.
 
Shiva and Ganesh I recognised from India, along with some photos on the walls. These showcased dozens of poses of varying implausibility, performed by a semi-naked man with slicked-back hair. I’d seen them in a book I bought off a street-seller in Delhi years before. It remained in my rucksack throughout my travels, and had since stood unread on my shelves. Though it promised to shed “Light on Yoga”, I’d have to decipher it first. And since the text was disarmingly dense, I’d filed it away for a time when I had sufficient patience, and got on with enjoying my holiday.
 
By 2004, I had more time than I knew what to do with. I was unemployed and depressed, achieving little more most days than smoking cannabis, which kept me happily unemployed, and depressed. Then someone suggested joining his yoga class. That it was Iyengar yoga meant nothing to me, until the photographic déjà vu. Had I found Mr Iyengar’s teachings at last, I wondered, or had he found me despite myself?
 

On Media Lens, lying and the Balkans

This is a long story.

Since 2003, I have been a reader of Media Lens, whose work I’ve written about here and here. It’s a media criticism website, run by David Edwards and David Cromwell, who argue that journalists aren’t swordsmen of truth, but hostage to the powerful.

I support their stated aim, to “democratise the setting and content of news agendas, which traditionally reflect establishment interests”, and have outlined my views on how this might be pursued here, and in this essay in the British Journalism Review, which explored how to change how news is framed. At present:

[most] reporters see their role as relaying what influential people say and do. This means they tend to foghorn received wisdom, while narratives that contradict it are rarely aired. Even when they are, they’re barely heard, because they don’t get recycled even as background, unlike the assumptions of big business and government, which routinely reappear to help put comments from officialdom “into context”.

However, I think Media Lens overstates this, arguing dogmatically that because others set the limits to what journalists write, the corporate mass media are neither free, nor redeemable (despite reporting many of the facts on which their critiques are structured). They say that radical journalists who publish their work in mainstream newspapers are “fig leaves” for corrupting corporate power, because they don’t devote their writings to criticising the media that print them. When pressed on this, and confronted with evidence that it’s both irrelevant and hypocritical (since they didn’t do it themselves when they had a New Statesman column), Media Lens say this isn’t what they’re suggesting at all, although it is.

When responding to critics, which they rarely do except to restate dogma, they like to use the word “smear”, because it sidesteps the question of accuracy, and allows them to suggest that they, or those they support, are being unfairly victimised by agents of “state-corporate power”, and its propaganda organs. These are by definition Bad, whereas unsalaried Internet pundits are Good, especially if “motivated” by compassion. Buddhism and other spiritual influences are a guiding star for the work of Media Lens, along with their deference to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who co-authored a book called Manufacturing Consent.

Obama Nobel Lecture draft leaked

TOP SECRET: The speech Barack Obama won’t deliver
As dictated to Daniel Simpson

EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 10, 2009

(Check against delivery)

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Dear Friends around the world, My fellow Americans.

I stand here today humbled, more than ever, by the task before us, grateful for the honour you’ve bestowed, and mindful of the sacrifices we must make to do it justice.

Twenty Americans before me have lent their names to this most eminent of prizes, among them three presidents, two sitting. Though challenged by the upheavals of fractious eras, their skill and vision hewed faithfully to the spirit of our forebears, who travelled across an ocean to seek sanctuary, and declared all who made their home there to have been created equal. Where possible, they worked to stem those tides in humankind that would drown us in the storms of violent conflict. And so we recall these efforts, and their fruits, praising Theodore Roosevelt for brokering peace, not chiding him for wielding his trademark stick to subjugate Cuba and the Philippines.

Others were inspired by a higher calling, rising above themselves to speak truths we shirk from hearing. Of these transformative figures, none was more righteous, more perspicacious, than Dr Martin Luther King, who accepted this award 45 years ago. I was surprised to be asked to follow him, and shared with you my doubts that I deserved to be doing so. But I’ve come here on the understanding that this ceremony is a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century, and for America to lead.

Putting America first should not require us to put the lives of other peoples second. When our nation became mired in Vietnam, sacrificing millions to its quest to contain Communism, Dr King called us “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. A year to the day after speaking those words, he was murdered.

Only following orders…

Sent this morning

To: The Ditchley Foundation
Subject: FAO Jeremy Greenstock

Dear Mr Greenstock,

I note that your review of the new Satow’s Diplomatic Practice claims that separating “duty from stupidity” and “finding the right words when the sword might be the alternative, are all part of the practice of diplomacy at its finest.”

As you concede, with a winsome reference to your part in “anticipating the facts” which weren’t factual about Iraq’s weapons of mass non-existence, this is not always easy.

So, were you just being stupid or doing your duty? The former stretches credulity, since there were no “facts” to be “fixed around the policy” of pushing for war.

Either way, your words served the sword, and neither defence would have saved you at Nuremberg.

Diplomacy at its finest? We’ve been framed.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Simpson

–

Thanks to Steven Poole for alerting me to Greenstock’s article.

War Is Peace

Sent to Reuters journalists and editors this morning

To: Wojciech Moskwa, Mark Trevelyan
Cc: Sean Maguire, Matt Spetalnick
Subject: Obama and disarmament

Dear Mark and Wojciech,

I hope future coverage of Barack Obama’s Nobel prize award won’t just source scepticism to Islamic Jihad:

“Why should Obama be given a peace prize while his country owns the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth and his soldiers continue to shed innocent blood in Iraq and Afghanistan?” [asked Khaled Al-Batsh in Gaza, before being edited out of later updates.]

Perhaps Reuters could note high up in the story that for all his talk about disarmament (and media hype about “defence” cuts) Obama has increased American military spending (by four percent for 2010).

To quote a recent commentary, “it is wise to attend to deeds, not rhetoric and pleasant demeanor.”

In which case, how about asking the White House if Obama plans to spend his prize money on buying back some of America’s vast military exports?

It would make a nice kicker.

Best regards,

Daniel

–

UPDATE: For more on the American militarist future, see here:

Eventually, American decline will cut defence spending, but even those who want to see it yesterday can’t picture it happening inside a decade. Instead, the more things “change” under Obama, the more change it seems likely to cost. Some day, surely, those who finance the Empire will pull the plug. Obama seems powerless to do more than steady the ship as it sinks. Turning it round, or evacuating, would take radical shifts in priorities, of which there’ve been few signs. Instead of burning out in End Times, or fading away into autarky, he’s trudging a lonely path towards managed decline. History suggests it’s probably the least worst option, unless America’s suicide pact with militarism beats him to it. “We should take nothing for granted,” President Eisenhower warned in his farewell speech to the nation. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper.” Instead, warns Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, the U.S. remains racked by “a constant struggle between capitalism and democracy,” and “the fundamental reality is that most of the government’s decisions today are substantially dictated by powerful corporate interests.”

As we were then.