"I want to send the right symbolic gesture that the city is open to everyone and there’s no room for hate. And if there is a float or a person in the parade that is promoting hate, they should not."

Said NYC Mayor Eric Adams, quoted in "Float Planned for N.Y.C. India Day Parade Is Condemned as Anti-Muslim/The float, slated for inclusion in Sunday’s parade, depicts a Hindu temple in India that was built on the site of a mosque torn down by religious extremists" (NYT).

When asked at a news conference on Tuesday if he was sufficiently attuned to the concerns of Muslim New Yorkers.... “I’m not going to be judged by man,” the mayor said. “God judges me.”...

The inclusion of the float has been advertised in fliers on and offline by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, an offshoot of India’s Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a right-wing nationalist organization. An image posted online by the group showed a sketch of the float, surrounded by people dancing and celebrating. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.....

"The document’s first paragraph, addressing Mr. Ramaswamy’s past support for inheritance taxes, draws a link between that policy position and his Hindu upbringing..."

"... as the son of Indian immigrants. 'Ramaswamy — a Hindu who grew up visiting relatives in India and was very much ingrained in India’s caste system — supports this as a mechanism to preserve a meritocracy in America and ensure everyone starts on a level playing field,' the document states...."

From "Ramaswamy’s Faith Singled Out in DeSantis Super PAC Memo/An opposition research memo suggests that Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been gaining on Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some polls, 'was very much ingrained in India’s caste system'" (NYT).

Asked to comment on the reason for highlighting Mr. Ramaswamy’s religion and background, the super PAC’S chief executive, Chris Jankowski, said in a statement: “We are highlighting that his philosophy of government is a direct reflection of his life experience. When his parents moved here from India, they had an 85 percent inheritance tax. In fact, his support of the inheritance tax is connected to the argument he makes in his book against meritocracy.”

"The couple first prepared a fire altar before putting their heads under a guillotine-like mechanism held by a rope."

"As soon as they released the rope, an iron blade fell on them, severing their heads, which rolled into the fire."

Said a police inspector in an Indian village, quoted in "Couple beheaded themselves with homemade guillotine as a sacrifice" (NY Post).

The couple had been worshiping the god Shiva — one of the main deities of Hinduism — at an improvised temple they had set up on their property every day for the past year.

Sacred cow.

Working on the previous post, I briefly contemplated using the phrase "sacred cow." It's a metaphor, possibly useful in the context of discussing the things we feel we shouldn't say. But then I thought, isn't "sacred cow" one of those things we shouldn't say? It's culturally insensitive — isn't it? — implicitly mocking Hinduism. 

People don't say "sacred cow" anymore, do they? I checked, using my usual test of the usage of words, the New York Times archive. I was surprised to see "sacred cow" in active use. Just to list things in the past year:

"In Agra in Uttar Pradesh, members of right wing Hindu groups burned effigies of Santa Claus outside missionary-led schools...."

"'As December comes, the Christian missionaries become active in the name of Christmas, Santa Claus and New Year. They lure children by making Santa Claus distribute gifts to them and attract them towards Christianity,' said Ajju Chauhan regional general secretary of Bajrang Dal, one of the right wing Hindu outfits leading the protest.... 'Let only Christian celebrate Christmas,' said one of the men, in a video filmed during the disruption. 'We are against Hindu boys and girls participating in Christmas function … it hurts our sentiments. They dress up in church and everyone sings Merry Christmas. How will our religion survive?'...  A Christmas event that is held every year at Matridham Ashram in Uttar Pradesh was also targeted by a Hindu vigilante group who stood outside shouting slogans such as 'stop conversions' and 'missionary murdabad,' meaning 'death to missionaries.'"

From "Jesus statue smashed in spate of attacks on India’s Christian community/Amid growing intolerance to India’s Christian minority, several Christmas events were targeted by Hindu right wing groups" (The Guardian).

A "Reddit moment" occurs in r/whatisthisthing.

I follow the subreddit "What Is This Thing?" — where people post photographs of objects they don't understand. Today, somebody posted this photograph of "soft metal objects [found] while metal detecting under a pier at low tide":

Almost immediately, these were identified as inexpensive Hindu charms that are deliberately thrown in the water in pursuit of good fortune.

One user asks: "Should he return these to where he found them in your opinion?"

A second one says: "No, as soon as the offering is made it is spent so its okay [t]o remove them"

A third: "Not like they’ll find out their magic squares got moved anyways ¯_(ツ)_/¯ 

A fourth: "Its good to pick up the religious littering."

The third person sees that his "magic squares" comment is getting downvoted says: "I wonder if the people downvoting would feel the same way about Christian trinkets. All religions suck pretty equally"

At that, a fifth person declares: "Reddit moment"

"For the first time in nearly three decades, Alabama will allow yoga to be taught in its public schools, but..."

"... Teachers will be barred from saying the traditional salutation 'namaste' and using Sanskrit names for poses. Chanting is forbidden.... Some conservative groups had called for the prohibition to be preserved, contending that the practice of yoga is inseparable from Hinduism and Buddhism and amounted to a religious activity.... [Amendments added to the bill] require parents to sign a permission slip for students to practice yoga. They also bar school personnel from using 'hypnosis, the induction of a dissociative mental state, guided imagery, meditation or any aspect of Eastern philosophy.'... The [1993] ban was enacted after parents in the state raised concerns not only about yoga, but also about hypnotism and 'psychotherapeutic techniques.'... [O]ne mother in Birmingham said her child had brought a relaxation tape home from school that made a boy 'visibly high'...."

The NYT reports.

I've told you my opinion before. Back in 2016, I had a post, "WaPo seems surprised that people regard yoga in school as an Establishment Clause problem":

The headline is: "Ga. parents, offended by the ‘Far East religion’ of yoga, get ‘Namaste’ banned from school."

In my opinion, it's cultural appropriation and otherizing not to perceive that this is religion.

Commenters [at WaPo] pick up the cue and say things like "Georgia hicks object to 'mindfulness.' Why am I not surprised?"/"They opt for 'mindlessness.'"

Wow. Double otherizing.

"[T]here is a lot of demand for me to address the situation at Vox in detail or to assimilate my personal story into a larger narrative about 'wokeness' or the culture wars."

"Personally I’m not a huge fan of navel-gazing. So I’ll just say that my personal interest in reclaiming my status as an independent, blog-like voice transcends any particular issues with any particular publication. I wanted to do this, not go find a different job, and I thank those of you who’ve joined me on this journey."

Matt Yglesias has a thing called "What's wrong with the media" at Slow Boring, his new place.

Are you a fan of navel-gazing? 

Navel-gazing or omphaloskepsis is the contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation. The word derives from the Ancient Greek words ὀμφᾰλός (omphalós, lit. 'navel') and σκέψῐς (sképsis, lit. 'viewing, examination, speculation'). Actual use of the practice as an aid to contemplation of basic principles of the cosmos and human nature is found in the practice of yoga or Hinduism and sometimes in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In yoga, the navel is the site of the manipura (also called nabhi) chakra, which yogis consider "a powerful chakra of the body".The monks of Mount Athos, Greece, were described as Omphalopsychians by J.G. Minningen, writing in the 1830s, who says they "...pretended or fancied that they experienced celestial joys when gazing on their umbilical region, in converse with the Deity". 

However, phrases such as "contemplating one's navel" or "navel-gazing" are frequently used, usually in jocular fashion, to refer to self-absorbed pursuits.

As long as Yglesias brought up wokeness, I just want to say that the jocular use of "navel-gazing" is a micro-aggression. You've got an unexamined premise that there is something backward about Hinduism (or the Greek Orthodox Church).

"In the words of the popular American yoga teacher Shiva Rea, namaste is 'the consummate Indian greeting,' a 'sacred hello' that means 'I bow to the divinity within you from the divinity within me.'"

"Deepak Chopra... says namaste means 'the spirit in me honors the spirit in you' and 'the divine in me honors the divine in you.'... When you bow to another, you are honoring something sacred in them. You are acknowledging that they are worthy of respect and dignity.... Some claim that the greeting has been infused with a religious meaning that doesn’t exist in Indian culture....  Most Indian religions agree that there is something divine in all individuals.... Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, the influential philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, in dialogue with a number of other thinkers, invented a form of spiritual practice that encouraged Americans to actively address the divine soul in others every time they spoke.... One need not be a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a yoga teacher, to say namaste.... What matters most [is]... Do you truly recognize them as a fellow human being worthy of dignity, bonded in shared suffering and capacity for transcendence?"

From "Why 'namaste' is the perfect greeting during the pandemic/An ancient Indian contactless 'hello' is replacing the handshake. It's not just safer but it affirms our inter-connectedness with one another" by Jeremy David Engels (The World).

I thought the recommendation was going to hinge on the social distancing of bowing as opposed to a handshake or a hug, but it was about spiritual connection. That took me by surprise, and of course, I am delighted that it fits the "divinity" theme established on the blog (and the podcast) today.

Trump-o-nunciation.

All the words Trump mispronounced (and how to say them correctly):
- Suuchin Tendulkar (Sachin Tendulkar)
- Cheewallah (Chaiwallah)
- Shojay (Sholay)
- The 'Vestas' (The Vedas)
- Swami Vivekamanan (Swami Vivekananda) #TrumpInIndia
Sbsa Mazadar cheewallah h😁😁 pic.twitter.com/Xt7l8A28hT

— jamia boy@ (@Rj_Jamia1) February 24, 2020

I noticed "the Vestas"...



... and after looking up "vesta" to see if it might be something Indian — as opposed to Roman...



... and figured he must have meant Vedas.

Who really knows?
Who can here proclaim it?
Whence, whence this creation sprang?
Gods came later, after the creation of this universe.

Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whether God's will created it, or whether He was mute;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,

He only knows, or perhaps He does not know.

"The moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him, that moment, I am free."

Said Donald Trump, quoting "the great religious teacher Swami Vivekananda," in his biggest-ever speech— to a crowd of over 100,00 — in a cricket stadium in India.

The speech begins around 1:27:00, and it begins with extolling the greatness of India, but let me pinpoint 18 seconds, when he deals with religion. He's just said that Indians and Americans believe that "every person is endowed with a sacred soul" and this belief unites our 2 countries:



Vivekananda connected the idea of seeing God in every person to one's own individual experience of freedom, and Trump continues the leaps of reasoning in a quick sequence, and the last thing on this list gets a massive cheer from the crowd:

1. Seeing God in everyone.

2. Freedom!

3. We're all here to strive for greatness.

4. Bollywood! 

ADDED: I had to look up the name Vivekananda, if only to spell it right (Trump carefully pronounces: Vee-vay-kuh-mun-nuum).  From the Wikipedia article "Swami Vivekanda":

"New York Times columnist accused of eugenics over piece on Jewish intelligence/Bret Stephens faces backlash after suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people."

Yikes, the heat on Bret Stephens has zoomed up since I blogged about his genius-of-Jews column at 5 a.m. yesterday morning.

The Guardian says:

The rightwing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens...

Eh. I don't think the right wing deserves responsibility for whatever it is Bret Stephens is.

... has sparked furious controversy online for a column praising Ashkenazi Jews for their scientific accomplishments, which critics say amounts to embracing eugenics.

In a column titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius and using a picture of Albert Einstein, Stephens stepped in the eugenics minefield by claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other people and think differently.... [There were] furious accusations that Stephens was using the same genetics arguments that informed Nazism and white supremacist thinking.

The Guardian is simply collecting tweets. An editorial director at Vice says, "It’s hard to read this column as expressing anything other than a belief in the genetic and cultural inferiority of non-Ashkenazi Jews"; a NYT contributor says, "I don’t think eugenicists should be op-ed columnists"; a "journalist" says, "A Jew endorsing the idea that certain races are inherently superior to other, lesser races, what could possibly go wrong?"; a writer called it "eugenics propaganda" and urged subscribers to cancel.

This is what you get on Twitter: hot takes. There, Stephens is a eugenicist. I do see this mild-mannered correction:

"Ram Dass was the master of the one-liner, the two-liner, the ocean-liner."

Said Wavy Gravy, quoted in "Baba Ram Dass, Proponent of LSD and New Age Enlightenment, Dies at 88/Born Richard Alpert, he returned from a trip to India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru and wrote more than a dozen inspirational books" (NYT).

Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui. He was 88....

He was particularly interested in the dying. He started a foundation to help people use death as a journey of spiritual awakening and spoke of establishing a self-help line, “Dial-a-Death,” for this purpose.

When Mr. Leary was dying in 1996 — and wishing to do it “actively and creatively,” as he put it — he called for Ram Dass. Over the years, Ram Dass had alternately been Mr. Leary’s disciple, enemy and, at the end, friend. In a film clip of the two men preparing for Mr. Leary’s death, Ram Dass turns to Leary, hugs him and says, “It’s been a hell of a dance, hasn’t it?”...

The 37-year-old Tulsi Gabbard is running for President.

Politico reports.

Within her party, the three-term congresswoman is viewed as a maverick with a penchant for bucking party orthodoxy. During the 2016 presidential election, Gabbard stepped down from her post as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee so she could endorse Sanders....

During the presidential transition period in 2016, the Hawaii Democrat met with then-President-elect Donald Trump, drawing condemnation from fellow Democrats. She also received widespread criticism in 2017 for meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad....

37 seems way too young to be President, but there's also the problem of candidates who are too old. Biden and Sanders are more than twice her age (and Elizabeth Warren isn't much younger).

I haven't followed Tulsi Gabbard. This is the first time her name appears on my blog. I have to go to Wikipedia to get some background. She was born in Samoa, a she represents Hawaii's 2nd congressional district. Another Democratic President from far out in the Pacific Ocean?!

Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in a combat zone in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was later deployed to Kuwait...  She supports abortion rights, opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has called for a restoration of the Glass–Steagall Act and changed her stance to support same-sex marriage in 2012. She is critical of aspects of U.S. foreign policy regarding Iraq, Libya and Syria. She opposes removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power....

Gabbard has spoken about growing up as a mixed-race girl in a multicultural and multireligious household: her father is of Samoan and European ancestry and an active lector at his Catholic church, but also enjoys practicing mantra meditation, including kirtan. Her mother [born in Decatur, Indiana] is of European descent and a practicing Hindu. Tulsi chose Hinduism as her religion while she was a teenager.

Gabbard was home-schooled through high school except for two years at a girls-only missionary academy in the Philippines.....

Home school, Hinduism, Samoa... what an interesting candidate!

Trump's racial rhetoric flares up again.

He tweets: "It was my great honor to host a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, in the Roosevelt Room at the @WhiteHouse this afternoon. Very, very special people!"

We are all equal, Mr. Trump. There are no very, very special people.

"Some of the most conservative Hindus in India believe that a woman whose husband has died should no longer live because she failed to retain his soul."

"Rejected by their communities and abandoned by their loved ones, thousands of destitute women make their way to Vrindavan, a pilgrimage city about 100km south of Delhi that is home to more than 20,000 widows. These women have no choice but to live in a vidhwa ashram (ashrams for widows) run by the government, private enterprises and NGOs. Clad in white, they know they will never return home and that this is where they’ll end their days. According to Hindu tradition, a widow cannot remarry. She has to hide in the house, remove her jewellery and wear the colour of mourning. She becomes a source of shame for her family, loses the right to participate in religious life and becomes socially isolated...."

A BBC photo essay (from last September).

"Many people do not realize that yoga... is intended to be more than a series of exercises coupled with deliberative breathing and meditation."

"It is a mind and body practice developed under Hinduism, the goal of which is spiritual purification that will lead to a higher level of understanding and eventually union with the divine. Although the Catholic Church teaches that much good can be found in other religions, Catholics believe it is only brought to fullness in Christ... It is for these reasons that Catholics are alerted to the dangers of the practice of yoga and are encouraged to look for other exercise alternatives that do not incorporate a spiritual dimension."

Said Rev. John Riley, chancellor of Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas, explaining the new policy removing the word "yoga" from the names of classes that teach yoga or I guess one should say yoga-based exercises. The term "lifestyle fitness" is the replacement.

This makes me wonder where a Catholic analysis of the idea "lifestyle" would go. I actually agree with Riley that "yoga" is a Hindu practice that someone who wants to be strictly Christian ought to think carefully about, and I would add that there is a problem of cultural appropriation, especially when you take the part you like and strip away the deeper part. What if nonChristians wanted to use some of the mannerisms of communion in serving wine and bread?

But the new term "lifestyle" is a word I avoid using. I asked out loud to Meade "What do you think of the word 'lifestyle'?" and he said "I try to avoid it."

Some elitists look down on those who use it. It's one of those words that those who eschew them claim are not a word. But the OED has it, dating back to 1915. The definition is: "A style or way of living (associated with an individual person, a society, etc.); esp. the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life." (I'd like to hear a Catholic analysis of whether a Catholic college should be teaching an individual style or way of living other than a Catholic way.)

The OED's 1915 example of "lifestyle" is "This spirit of expediency..excludes any possibility of peace or rest in unity with the universe. The author applies to it, as the ‘life-style’ of our age, the term Impressionism." Those quotes give a sense that people were saying "life-style" back then.

I searched the NYT archive and saw that the word really took off in 1968 and 1969, which corresponds to my perception that it's a Baby-Boomer/ counterculture/ hippie word. Here's Ada Louise Huxtable writing about architecture in 1969 in "The Case for Chaos":

I don't think I've ever used the word "lifestyle" on this blog except in a quote. (And I'm not using the word in this post (if you observe the use/mention distinction). Oh, no, wait. I did use it once. I'm checking again with a hyphen, and found this from 2008:

Can singlehood be portrayed as good but only good enough to reduce the number of bad marriages and not good enough to attract the kind of staunch adherents who advocate marriage as a way of life? Is DePaulo's book a nice, reassuring middle-of-the road sort of a thing, designed to take the edge off the predicament of not having a spouse? Or is she really promoting singlehood at the expense of marriage? If she is, you see the problem. That's the basis of my punchline: "The pleasures of singlehood must be kept hush-hush. It's not a legitimate life style, you hear?" I want to be single, and maybe so does DePaulo, but we might live to regret promoting this simple, free, self-indulgent life-style.

Whoa! That's really funny, considering the absolutely direct connection between Bella DePaulo's book and my marriage to Meade in the following year.

So funny the things that crash and connect when you're living the blogging lifestyle.

ADDED: In the blog archive,  I see that "lifestyle" is a word for which Dan Quayle and Valerie Jarrett caught grief.

Quayle:

Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong... Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.

Jarrett:

"These are good people. They were aware that their son was gay; they embraced him, they loved him, they supported his lifestyle choice. But when he left the home and went to school, he was tortured by his classmates."

"A Muslim man has died after he was attacked by hundreds of vigilantes while transporting cows in India..."

"... police said they had registered a murder case over 55-year-old Pehlu Khan's death in hospital on Monday, two days after a mob attacked his cattle truck on a highway in Alwar in the western state of Rajasthan."

But police also said they were preparing a case against the survivors of the attack, whom they suspect of trying to smuggle the cattle across state borders.

Cows are considered sacred in Hindu-majority India, where squads of vigilantes roam highways inspecting livestock trucks for any trace of the animal....

"It is illegal to transport cows, but people ignore it and cow protectors are trying to stop such people from trafficking them," [Rajasthan home minister Gulab Chand Kataria] told reporters.

At least 10 Muslim men have been killed in similar incidents across the country by Hindu mobs on suspicion of eating beef or smuggling cows in the last two years.

"We love the Hindus! We love India!"

Trump's pro-India ad is so weird.

"We’re really happy that UW-Madison is hosting an event like this to celebrate cultural differences."

Holi.