Deluders In Chief

Sent to the New York Times last week

To the Editor:

“The Deluder in Chief” (Editorial, December 7) notes in hindsight that: “Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been chafing to attack Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001”.

You blame “pressure from the White House and a highly politicized Pentagon” for blinding people to “the counter-evidence” against “hyped claims of weapons of mass destruction.”

Why do you ignore the Times’ own failure to challenge the administration, while printing some of its most egregious falsehoods? As your foreign editor wrote to reporters on Sept. 11, 2002: “To judge by the President’s plans, the first half of next year may be busy.”

Without fear or favour indeed.

Daniel Simpson
London, December 8, 2008

The writer was a reporter for the Times in the Balkans during 2002 and 2003

Fear and Yoga in the United States

From Dipika magazine

[The following article was written while researching this one.]

By Daniel Simpson

As arrivals go, it didn’t seem particularly auspicious. America’s way of life was imploding, apparently serious physicists claimed the world could end on Wednesday, and the founder of the yoga centre I’d come to visit had just died.

I landed in New York on the day last September when a panic-stricken government started buying up Wall Street. Although I’d gone to learn about what this meltdown might entail, I decided the news could wait until Monday morning. Instead, I’d stave off jetlag with some asana practice. So I hopped on the subway to Chelsea.

The Iyengar Institute’s studios there are more like Manhattan lofts. Eleven floors up, they boast panoramic views across the neighbourhood, and beyond to the skyscrapers downtown. With 70 classes a week, and space for dozens to attend, there’s everything a student might ask for, except the woman who taught most of the teachers.

Mary Dunn was one of the earliest in America to study with B.K.S. Iyengar. She first went to see him the year I was born. A third of a century later she contracted stomach cancer, and in barely 14 months, her life was over, at 66. “My outer world is shrinking as my strength goes down,” she’d said the weekend before I arrived. But her passing wasn’t cause for self-pity. Surveying the flowers by her window, and the bark on the oak trees outside, she said: “I am again in an inner world that expands and satisfies.”

That world she strove to share lives on. Over the following weeks I learned to savour it, and all the more so as financial turmoil swirled. In the bipolar way of market mood swings, fear was trumping greed wherever I went. As the campaign for president unfolded, it wasn’t so much “the economy, stupid” as desperately seeking shelter from the storm. All across the country, talk of change and the need for hope were ever-present. They seemed to mirror my search for teachers on the road.

Yoga, as Mary Dunn taught it, is about “extending until freedom comes in the nervous system as well as the joints.” We’re training our minds, she said, “to expand to accommodate an ever-increasing number of facets of awareness at the same time,” and shine that intelligence through the body like a light.