“Behave or else,” say leaders of the world’s most powerful countries—and Vladimir Putin continues to choose “else.” He does it in ways that strengthen his hold on a nation increasingly under stress. The Russian President is significant in any year, because no one in the world has amassed greater political authority in a country so important to international politics and the global economy. Putin’s place on this year’s list comes thanks to his gravity-defying ability to confront the West in ways that boost his popularity in a country suffering through an economic meltdown for which his own policies are largely responsible. No leader arouses more fascination around the world, because his actions speak a language of defiance that so many of his people want to hear, lifting him to levels of popularity that other leaders can only envy. How long can he remain aloft? Don’t bet against him quite yet.
Bremmer, TIME’s foreign-affairs columnist, is the president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy
Hillary Clinton is not familiar. She is revolutionary. Not radical, but revolutionary: the distinction is crucial. She is one of America’s greatest modern creations. Her decades in our public life must not blind us to the fact that she represents new realities and possibilities. Indeed, those same decades have conferred upon her what newness usually lacks: judgment, and even wisdom.
Women who advocate for other women are often pigeonholed and pushed to the margins. That hasn’t happened to Hillary, because when she’s standing up for the rights of women and girls, she is speaking not only of gender but also of justice and liberty.
As Hillary has always made clear, these values are universal, and fulfilling them is a practical and moral pursuit. She is a realist with a conscience and an idealist who is comfortable with the exercise of power.
This helps explain why she has been so effective, even in this golden age of polarization. Hillary knows how to draw opponents out of their fighting corners and forge solutions on common ground. She practices the politics of reconciliation and reason. Which, not coincidentally, is also the politics of progress.
It matters, of course, that Hillary is a woman. But what matters more is what kind of woman she is.
Powell Jobs is the founder and chair of Emerson Collective
Just under a year ago, France’s Marine Le Pen told TIME her far-right National Front Party would be in power within a decade. That’s a nightmarish prospect for millions who regard her France-for-the-French message as mere jingoism—and it seemed like a stretch.
nightmarish：悪夢のような
jingoism：盲目的な愛国主義
Her prediction, however, no longer seems preposterous. Le Pen has spun gold from voter exasperation, mixing charm and ambition to rack up wins in European Parliament and local elections with an anti-Europe, anti-immigration campaign. That’s made her Europe’s leading right-winger, giving like-minded politicians across the continent a dose of electability. And this month she finally split from her father, National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, over his noxious anti-Semitism.
preposterous：ばかげた、非常識な
exasperation：憎悪、怒り
rack up ：得点、利益などをあげる
like-minded ：同じ意見の、同志の
dose ：服用量
electability：
Le Pen has strong allure for many French, who have hit the wall with asphyxiating political elitism and near zero growth. To stop her race for the Élysée Palace in its tracks, France’s lackluster leaders will need to overhaul their ineffectual, gutless style and mount a more appealing revolution of their own.
AMID the cacophony of protest against current U.S. foreign policy, it may be hard to believe that Nathan Hale ever cried: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." For many Americans, who through the years thought that a rather wonderful thing to say, it is even harder to believe that today so many young men chant a new anthem: "Hell, no, we won't go!" Indeed, the phenomenon of bitter antiwar protest reflects profound changes in U.S. attitudes toward patriotism—an emotion once proudly shouted from the rooftops but now seldom even discussed. Is patriotism dead? Outdated? Should it still enter the discussion of grave national issues?
Patriotism is just as important as ever. The problem is in defining it—and few definitions are so elusive. It consists of three distinct but interrelated emotions—love of country, pride in it, and desire to serve its best interests. The love is easily traced to man's natural affection for his particular home, language and customs. The word patriotism comes from pater, Greek for father, and means love for a fatherland. From the love flows pride: the firm belief that one's country is good and perhaps superior to all others—a pride not only in the country's objective worth but because that worth enhances one's own.
Adlai Stevenson's definition was expectedly eloquent. "When an American says that he loves his country," he declared, "he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect." Eric Hoffer, the philosopher-longshoreman has a more prosaic but very pragmatic description: "The day-to-day competence of the workingman." He adds: "If I said I was loading ships for Mother America, even during a war, I would be laughed off the docks. In Russia, they can't build an outhouse without having a parade and long speeches. This is the strength of America."
Few people seem to be willing to proclaim their patriotism these days, and Fourth of July oratory has gone out of fashion. But John F. Kennedy's inaugural address was squarely in the old spine-tingling tradition. "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." And more: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." There was an affirmation in the best spirit of patriotic oratory, and it forced the blood up into the temples of people who never really expected to feel that way.
Right & Wrong
For centuries, countless thinkers have denounced patriotic pride for one of its unhappiest effects: the irrational hatred that one people aims at a "lesser" people. Arnold Toynbee attributes the death of Greco-Roman civilization to patriotic wars between city states—and failure to establish international law. Early Christians rejected patriotism on the ground that man's obligations are to God, and after that to all of humanity. A Jesuit general once called patriotism "the most certain death of Christian love." There is no question that chauvinism—hyperpatriotism—can be induced in any country, including a democracy, where truth may be a poor competitor in the marketplace of ideas. A tragic example is Germany, where Nazi excesses in the name of the fatherland left such scars that today patriotism is for Germans an embarrassing idea.
At its root, patriotism bore no such scar. In 1578, during the Dutch-Flemish revolt against Spanish rule, the word patriot was. first used to mean one who represents people and country against the king. By the 18th century, patriotism denoted love of a free country, devotion to human rights as well as nationalism. To Stephen Decatur's famous toast "Our country may she always be right; but our country right or wrong" Carl Schurz later replied: "When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." Who decides what is right and what is wrong? The Schurz position suggests that the only valid answer to that question is the free individual conscience—indeed, that true love of country involves criticism as well as praise, for mere acquiescence may be mindless indifference.
The Essence of Americanism
Chaotic—or even anarchic—as that answer may seem, it is the base of U.S. patriotism. At the end of the 18th century, nothing was more quixotic than trying to nationalize 13 hostile colonies, assorted religious sects, and 2,500,000 individualists. The colonists were so unimpressed by the Revolution that one-third of them sided with Britain. At Valley Forge, George Washington wrote that patriotic idealism could not inspire his ragged, ill-trained army, that it must be toughened by "a prospect of interest or some reward." He meant cash. Only well after victory did the shaky American nation burst forth with an optimistic self-image based on the idea that the humane spirit of 18th century enlightenment could be fully realized for the first time anywhere. General Washington called himself "a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large," and countless divines proclaimed Americans to be God's chosen people. "We are acting for all mankind," said Thomas Jefferson. Beneficent fate "imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members."
The very fact that the U.S. was a nation only in name produced a fervent drive to create national symbols that sometimes obscured Jefferson's aspirations. The drive was fueled by waves of immigrants rushing to a virgin continent that offered fabulous opportunities for self-advancement. The gold-rush spirit animated Americanism, the country's unestablished religion. The whole public-school system was aimed at Americanization. Noah Webster's spelling book taught American English to Germans, Poles, Swedes, Italians—and declared that "Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny." Geography was American, and America was bigger than the universe, the finest, happiest and soon to be the strongest nation on earth. Parson Weems's biography beatified Washington; Fourth of July speeches were gravely heeded. Even arithmetic books instilled patriotism. Symbols burgeoned—Old Glory, the Liberty Bell, the bald eagle, Uncle Sam. Everyone memorized militant songs, such as Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean ("Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue"). And McGuffey readers—hardly a child alive could not recite Longfellow's verse:
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
The symbolism, the national heroes, the sacred founding documents, the optimistic faith in progress—all these unified and inspired millions of uprooted immigrants in an often frighteningly free society. The mood filled a basic human need: never do men so long to belong as when they give up one fatherland for another. Conversely, the U.S. proposition was freedom from orthodoxy. There was not—and is not—any one perfect Americanism. Not in a country that cherishes diversity as a national virtue.
But if diversity is a condition of freedom, it is also a recipe for self-interest—and a patriotism that sometimes reaches no deeper than symbols. Over the years, peacetime patriotism in the U.S. was expressed as a wealth of other emotions; how Americans feel about America is clearly linked to how they feel about themselves functioning in America. Thus in the 19th century every imaginable interest group claimed superior nativity. Businessmen denounced unionists as alien anarchists; each generation of naturalized immigrants scorned each later wave of "foreigners," notably Roman Catholics, victims of outrageous persecution by the nativist Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just before the Civil War, slavery apologists attributed to themselves the one true Americanism; some Southerners wanted to claim the Stars and Stripes as their own flag.
And now crests the Tibetan wave, building roughly since the Dalai Lama's 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. Richard Gere pioneered the full religiopolitical embrace years ago, but he may have found a successor in Adam Yauch, 33, singer for the punk-rap group the Beastie Boys. Not only has Yauch guided his famously irreverent band into songs like Bodhisattva Oath; he is also primary architect of two Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits that became instant touchstones for a Gen X phenomenon quickly dubbed Tibet Chic. Like the new movies, the concerts' first concern was political but they too opened with that signature chanting, and Yauch, a convert, made sure spiritual seekers could find low-key "monastery tents" on the concert grounds.
Then there are celebrities whose exact commitment to the faith is a guessing game. Oliver Stone publicly conscripts Tibetan "wrathful deities" to fend off his detractors; Courtney Love is said to be a practitioner, while Harrison Ford simply supports Tibetan freedom (his wife Melissa Mathison wrote Kundun's script). Composer Philip Glass, yes. REM singer Michael Stipe, maybe. And in one of the more peculiar occurrences along the Hollywood-Lhasa axis, action-film star and all-around surly guy Steven Seagal was recognized by the head of the venerable Nyingma Tibetan lineage as the reincarnation of a 15th century lama.
conscript：徴兵に取る
wrathful ：激怒した
fend off ：避ける、回避する
detractor：中傷する人
axis：軸、枢軸
surly ：無愛想な
lineage：血統、系統、家柄
Pulled down raw out of the ether, the new Buddhist vibe can seem surrealistically jumbled, as a poem in a recent New Yorker acknowledged: "The huge head of Richard Gere, a tsonga blossom/ in his hair, comes floating like a Macy's/ Parade balloon above the snowcapped summit/ of sacred Kailas." But in fact intrigued Americans need not remain perplexed: they can investigate a vibrant, if small, U.S. community of believers. This does not mean the hundreds of thousands of Buddhist immigrants, who have yet to have an impact on mainstream culture. Rather, it refers to some 100,000 American-born Buddhists, many of whom have been practicing for decades and have, as sociologist Don Morreale puts it, "gone mainstream." While the Dalai Lama bestrides the globe, Zen Buddhists in San Francisco run two of the better-respected AIDS hospices, and their philosophy infuses the entire "good death" movement. In New York City and elsewhere, fans flock to talks by Thich Nhat Hanh, a French-based, socially engaged Vietnamese monk whose book Living Buddha, Living Christ sold 100,000 hardcover copies. In cyberspace the Manhattan-based Asian Classics Institute has transferred 100,000 deteriorating pages of scripture from Tibetan block prints onto the Internet. Mirabai Bush, a devotee of the non-Tibetan Vipassana school, teaches Monsanto executives nonreligious meditation techniques out of Williamsburg, Mass. Since 1988, reports Morreale, the number of English-language Buddhist teaching centers has jumped from 429 to more than 1,062.
The faith's attraction differs for different Americans. At a recent public appearance by the Dalai Lama, a woman named Ellen White said it helped her "to make sense out of life" without the fear and guilt she associated with her earlier Roman Catholicism; converts also mention American Buddhism's relative lack of hierarchy. Meditation strikes some as a daily, direct experience of the sacred absent from Sundays-only religion; others hope to use it merely to tune out the late 20th century's frenzied multicasting or, as someone once advised, Be Here Now. Baby boomers embraced Buddhism as a means of protesting a war or widening their minds. To jaded, postmodern twentysomethings who suspect that institutions such as family, government or even reality are insubstantial, it offers assent--and a richer philosophical response than Kurt Cobain's nihilistic Nevermind. (Remember his band's name?) Others agree with Scorsese that "anything infused into our world today about nonviolence can only help."
Back in 1938, a Japanese monk, noting that it took China three centuries to adopt Buddhism from India, said introducing it in America would be like holding a lotus to a rock and waiting for it to take root. It has been only 60 years, and at least one authority, Columbia professor Robert Thurman, states grimly that as far as he is concerned, a true, indigenous Buddhism doesn't yet exist here. But others are convinced that for the first time, American Buddhism may be strong enough not only to withstand the distortions of celebrity but also to attract and hold a significant number of serious searchers. And short of a full transplanting, who would have imagined that the lotus would have offered up such a wild and confusing profusion of blooms?
In the beginning the Buddha found enlightenment underneath the bodhi tree, near what is now Nepal. A pampered prince born around 563 B.C., he frustrated his father's efforts to shield him from the sights of suffering and death, became a wandering holy man and eventually formulated the Four Noble Truths that unite all Buddhists today: that life is full of suffering; that most of that suffering, including the fear of death, can be traced to "desire," the mind's habit of seeing everything through the prism of the self and its well-being; that this craving can be transcended, leading to peace and eventually to an exalted state of full enlightenment called Nirvana; and that the means to do that lies in the Eightfold Path of proper views, resolve, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.
The Truths dovetailed with the Hindu scheme of reincarnation: we are reborn again and again, in an endless and wearying cycle called samsara, each life affected by the good and bad deeds performed in previous existences, according to a system called karma. The attainment of Nirvana allows us finally to step away from what one writer called "the squirrel cage of birth and rebirth" and enter into oneness with the cosmos. From the beginning, a practice of meditation was the chief mechanism to gain the awareness necessary for enlightenment.
The Buddha posited no creator God; no Jehovah, Jesus or Allah. His Truths are so distinct from the primary concerns of other faiths that some Western observers see Buddhism as a philosophy or even a psychology. By the same logic, employed optimistically by Jewish, Protestant and Catholic Buddhists of the late 20th century, Buddhist practice can be maintained without leaving one's faith of birth.
Eradicated from India through the efforts of successive invaders by the 13th century, Buddhism--or, as its practitioners knew it, the dharma--had already expanded outward in three main variations. Theravada, which came to dominate Southeast Asia, was probably closest to the original, concentrating on meditation-aided awareness. Its monastic practitioners regarded the Buddha as a great sage but no deity.
Mahayana Buddhism, which caught on in China, Japan and Korea, sustained the Four Noble Truths and the practice of meditation. But Mahayanans saw the Buddha as a divinity to whom prayers could be addressed. They also revered--and hoped to become--bodhisattvas, fully enlightened, Buddha-like beings who had won the right to enter Nirvana but chose to be reborn on earth to enlighten others. A cornucopia of Mahayana offshoots sprang up over the centuries. Zen, which was adopted by the Japanese samurai class, combined chanting and teacher-student dialogue with an extremely strict sitting meditation practice, often enforced with whacks from a ceremonial wand. As a tool toward faster enlightenment, Zen's Rinzai school had its students wrestle conundrums, or koans, such as the famous query "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The late-blooming Soka Gakkai practice, favored by Tina Turner, is also nominally a Japanese Mahayana offshoot, although rather atypical in its teaching that the repetition of a four-word phrase, translatable as "Devotion to the mystic law of the Lotus Sutra [scripture]," can gain adherents happiness and material amenities in this world.
By far the most colorful of the three major Buddhist branches, however, was Vajrayana, the "Diamond Vehicle" adopted in Tibet in the 7th century. Instead of attaining complete enlightenment gradually, Tibetan monks claimed to do so in a single lifetime, an approach compared by Rick Fields, author of the American Buddhist history How the Swans Came to the Lake, to climbing the sheerest face of a Himalayan cliff: demanding and perilous. Unwilling to limit themselves to the standard tools--chanting and meditative breath-control techniques--the Vajrayana Buddhists employ an eclectic mix that includes religious visualizations, philosophical debate, ritual, yoga and the energies of tantric sex. Buddhism typically took on some of the color of local faiths, but Vajrayana's incorporation of Tibet's gods and demons was especially dramatic, resulting in what Fields describes as "a baroque exuberance [of] priestcraft, rituals, mantras, magic, monasteries, mystics and hermits." Another singularity was the succession process for a ranking monk: upon his death, associates used dreams and portents to locate the child deemed his next incarnation, whom they then groomed to "resume" his "old" duties. The search took on political ramifications in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama, the head of the largest Vajrayana lineage, was also head of state.
"There has been not enough time to ferment and intoxicate the culture in America," says Richard Gere. "But our approach, because we're so new at it, has a certain eagerness and excitement that you sometimes don't see in the Tibetans. Westerners ask questions. They take notes."
Gere gets most of his questions answered these days by his primary teacher, the Dalai Lama. The actor has probably done more than any other individual to propel the current wave of Buddhist interest, with its distinctly Tibetan flavor, and he may spend more time these days in Dharamsala, the Indian town where the Dalai Lama lives in exile, than on Hollywood sets. But his Buddhist fascination, like that of many his age, began during his college years with Zen, as idiosyncratically presented by Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. America had shown some interest in Buddhism before the 1950s: Henry David Thoreau wrote, "some will have bad thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha." But the Beats' incorporation of koans into the phenomenon of "hip" made them de facto recruiters for a hardy group of Japanese Zen masters who had begun arriving on both coasts in the 1930s.
What drew the Beats to this very different creed? Not everyone would go so far as spiritual explorer Alan Watts, who once credited Buddhism with enabling him to "get out from under the monstrously oppressive God the Father." But the absence of that ultimate authority figure--and the corresponding decoupling of the notion of compassion from a terror of hell or guilt before an Almighty--was attractive. Likewise, although it contradicted the Christian notion of an individual soul, Buddhism's idea of universal interconnectedness--that, as Kerouac wrote, "there is no separation in any of it"--appealed to the Beats, as it would in a few years to the flower children.
By the time the Beats and a lively (but very superficial) national "Zen fad" began to fade from national prominence, two more groups of Buddhists had converged with two more groups of seekers. Helen Tworkov, editor of the influential Buddhist quarterly Tricycle, says a generation explored Buddhism "out of an enormous sense of shame" over the Vietnam War and its images of monks setting themselves afire in protest. Others were in search of enlightenment that lasted longer than a tab of acid. Their quests seemed to end in Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a brilliant apostle of Vajrayana and part of the Tibetan diaspora. Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Denver, an eclectic colloquium of Eastern spiritual and Western intellectual cultures, constituted one of the great spiritual bazaars of the 1970s. One of its most popular courses, after Trungpa's dialogues with such people as Timothy Leary, was a seminar offered by Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, two former Peace Corps volunteers who returned from Southern Asia as adepts in the Theravadan practice's Vipassana meditation. Suddenly all three branches of Buddhism were teaching on American soil. It must be noted, however, that they did not necessarily teach here the way they taught anywhere else.
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