Sandals and scandals in Washington
Difference between presidents of old, new republics hard to define
WASHINGTON — The monk sat on the concrete curb, a banana in his hand. Closecropped hair, beneficent smile, flowing robes of thick maroon: the whole nine Buddhist yards.
But there also was a black trench coat, a bottle of pop, and blue jeans underneath the holy threads.
“My friend told me that if I don’t wear any pants in America, I will freeze and be dead,” the monk explained.
The monk was a wise guy, age 25, from exotic Rangoon by way of the low-fare Chinatown bus from Manhattan. He had come to Washington from a six-month New York English-learning sojourn to join a couple of dozen other Burmese in protesting a visit to the White House by that bedraggled country’s ex-military exstrongman — and now its reasonably-democratically-elected president — Thein Sein.
The monk wouldn’t tell me his name.
“You can call me ‘the monk,’” he instructed. “Maybe tomorrow I will not be a monk. We never promise we will be a monk for the rest of our lives. I can’t see tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I die. Maybe tomorrow I want to have a woman. You can have that, but then you have to stop being a monk.”
Banners unfurled by the demonstrators, most of whom were members of Burma’s myriad religious and tribal minorities, screamed “stop rohingya genocide” and “Obama don’t reward ethnic cleansing.” One fellow handed me a flyer that noted that the government of the country that now preferred to be called Myanmar spends only $7 a year, per capita, on health care. But Barack Obama was welcoming President Sein anyway and congratulating him for, in Obama’s words, “credible elections and a legislature that is continuing to make strides in the direction of more inclusivity and greater representation.”
“Is Thein Sein a good Buddhist?” I asked the monk.
“If you plant a banana tree,” he shrugged, “you never get mangoes.
“One person cannot control a country,” he went on. “The country belongs to its people. He is just a name. If no people, no president.”
The monk told me that he wanted to become a public speaker and emissary of love and peace, “like the Dalai Lama.”
“Maybe you will BE the Dalai Lama in your next life,” I suggested, but this was an ignorant crack.
“The Tibetans believe in reincarnation, but we don’t believe that the same soul from this life goes into a new body,” the monk explained. “Only the consequences remain. You do good, you get good. You do bad, you get bad.”
I told him I was on my way to the daily White House media briefing.
“If you could meet just one famous American, who would it be?” I wondered, assuming he would invoke the Nobel Peace Prize-winner who lives across the street.
“That guy who played Rambo in Rambo 2008,” the monk said. “He killed many Burmese soldiers just with one gun.”
Above our heads, vultures were circling the Oval Office, lured by the aroma of rotting trust and rolling heads. From the driveway of the West Wing, as President Sein — whose own father became a Buddhist monk late in life — emerged from his limousine, we could hear the plangent chants and implorations of the Burmese across the road. But this was nothing compared to the blood lust welling in the press room.
It was Day 10 of the Internal Revenue-Tea Party scandal, not to mention the possibly-illegal surveillance of journalists’ movements and phone calls by Obama’s Department of Justice.
Repor ters t reed the president’s press secretary and attempted to strangle the truth out of him like one of those Burmese pythons that are slithering around south Florida.
It was the same grenade that had been tossed in this room a thousand times since Watergate, and before: What did the president know, and when did he know it?
The spokesman replied that it would not have been appropriate for underlings to inform the president because, well, that would not have been appropriate.
“Are you going to ask me about Myanmar?” the attache begged.
This went on for nearly an hour. When I emerged from the White House, a Burmese with a bullhorn still was lobbing imprecations toward the whitewashed mansion where the rulers of republics old and new were trading vows of comity.
“He only pretends to be a real democrat, he wants to stay in the power at any cost!” the protester was hollering, but it was hard to tell which of the two sitting presidents he meant, while, on the curb, that monk in maroon finished his fruit and sipped his 12-ounce soda.
“Buddha said, ‘Look at the situation of the people around you, and be with them,’ ” the monk preached. “Man CAN change.
“Look at me. I am a human being. But this is a Pepsi forever.”