"At a peace rally in Philadelphia in 1966, a reporter asked me, 'Are you from North or South Vietnam?'
"If I had said I was from the north, he would have thought I was pro-communist, and if I had said I was from the south, he would have thought I was pro-American.
"So I told him, 'I am from the Center.'"
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching.
(Photo courtesy of Luke van Zyl and Unsplash.com.)
In Auntie's War: The BBC during the Second World War, Edward Stourton drops a bombshell.
He's talking about how radio – the original electronic medium – transformed Prime Minister Winston Churchill from a simple politician to a national fetish by bringing him into the sitting room of every British family. Hence all who are old enough can tell you exactly where they were when they heard him transmit these timeless words:
…we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
So indelible was this rallying cry that in Way Back Home – his 2015 anthem to his wartime childhood – Rod Stewart included a clip of this gravelly, defiant BBC broadcast.
That never happened.
It's not unusual for people to remember things wrong. "Play it again, Sam", "I am your father, Luke", "Elementary, my dear Watson!" "Beam me up, Scotty," and enough ersatz Mark Twain quotations to double his shelf, have all entered our collective knowledge. Or properly spoke, belief.
But this case isn't just a few transposed words. An entire nation has literally hallucinated a seminal event, complete with deep affective context and a whole range of sensory cues.
I'm not old enough to remember (or misremember) this broadcast, but reading Stourton's documentation of its nonexistence, I was absolutely floored. I grew up hearing that speech! Old people wouldn't shut up about it! I've entertained/annoyed others with my impression of that Churchill broadcast since high school!
But as it happens, Churchill only ever read out this text in Commons. It was reprinted in the papers next day, and doubtless some BBC presenters quoted it in their segments. But the PM, yea though he frequently addressed his people over the national service, only spoke these particular words into a microphone in 1949, when he was asked to cut the recording we incessantly hear in historical documentaries.
This is just the latest – if most dramatic – instance of the Winston Churchill Effect that I've encountered. Another is the pretty hippy girls who spat on returning Vietnam vets in the 60s and 70s. Many of us remember reading about this in the papers, or seeing it on TV. And in his excellent, highly-recommended autobiography, hermit monk Claude AnShin Thomas relates in some detail the time it happened to him personally.
Except it didn't.
This urban legend is a little easier to bust, given the logistics such an assault would demand. The attacker would have to gain access to a military airbase; loiter around the terminal unnoticed for hours; divine who in the crowd was a returning combat veteran; then approach very near said young man without attracting any attention, even from the target.
All while harbouring jarringly unhippy convictions.
These inconsistencies have bothered me since I was a kid, but I was still dumbfounded to learn no such event has ever been confirmed. Ever. Anywhere.
To be clear, I don't believe AnShin is lying. Rather, he's as certain of this memory as I am that at age 11 I read a front-page story in the local newspaper about a kid – named Richard, wearing a striped collared shirt in the photo – dying from heroin-injected Hallowe'en candy. He gobbed a treat upon returning home, then fell sick. His parents sent him to bed, but when he got worse they rushed him to the hospital, where doctors, little suspecting the cause of his condition, were unable to save him. Later, the candy wrapper was found to be pierced by a hypodermic needle.
You're probably already there. No such crime has ever been reported.
Ever.
Anywhere.
This disturbing bug in our OS has serious implications for our survival. It also vindicates the fundamental tenet of Zen: "don't-know mind". This is the state Zenners cultivate, to the best of our ability, because those opinions we call "facts" are very contingent, and much – perhaps most – of what we remember is inconsistent and imprecise.
And every so often, complete rubbish.
In the state of don't-know mind, we remain open to further data. In this position we stop sorting input into yes, no, and maybe, and just catalogue it. Because the need to respond ethically to external stimuli arises far less often than we think. And "making up your mind" about the rest amounts to shutting off your intelligence.
By not becoming attached to discrete data, we avoid the hysterical blindness it engenders. And, with a little luck and continuing sincere practice, the insanity that leads to.
As for Churchill, he'd get another shot at posterity, as the peroration of his famous Battle of Britain speech would soon be cast in bronze:
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
And this time he really did broadcast it, having first received tremendous acclaim in Parliament. Prevailed upon that evening, he re-read his masterful "finest hour" speech, against his will, pouting and mumbling, from the BBC desk.
At 10PM.
To very few listeners.
And critics who universally panned the whole transmission as lacklustre and forgettable in the next day's papers.
Nevertheless, a great majority of British subjects would forever recall how their hearts quickened and their spines stiffened to Churchill's electric performance, as they listened to him that afternoon.
Or after dinner.
There's some disagreement on that point.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
I'm not sure he'd appreciate the label, but Claude AnShin Thomas is the most prominent hermit of our generation. Though an ordained priest in Bernie Glassman's Zen Peacemaker lineage, his practice is in the tradition of Bashō. In his own words:
"I made the decision to take the vows of a mendicant monk primarily because I wanted to live more directly as the Buddha had. […] Also, in witnessing the evolution of Zen Buddhist orders in the United States, I wanted to evoke the more ancient traditions of those who embarked on this spiritual path and to live my commitment more visibly."
AnShin specialises in walking ango – long voyages on foot, without money, living off the Dharma and the compassion of others. He calls them peace pilgrimages, and to date he's walked from Auschwitz to Vietnam; across the US and Europe; in Latin America; and even the Middle East. He also leads street retreats, a unique Peacemaker practice wherein Zen students take the Buddha at his word and become Homeless Brothers in the urban core of a large city for a specified period of time.
Where, you wonder, does a guy get gravel like that? Well…
In At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, AnShin describes his military service in Vietnam, where he clocked 625 combat hours in US Army helicopters, many behind an M60 machine gun. By his own recollection, he was in combat virtually every day from September 1966 to November 1967. He was, in short, the classic "badass American fighting man" so beloved of Hollywood.
Except it wasn't as fun.
He came home, like all war veterans, to a society desperate never to hear about those not-fun parts, or to pay for the care he now required for life. The tale that ensues has been told a hundred times, and each time is the first.
Re-reading At Hell's Gate (one of my all-time favourite Zen books) I was struck again by the sense that the author would rather not be writing it at all. There's a reticence in AnShin's prose, a tone of compelled confession, that suggests modesty, circumspection, and discomfort with the writer's art, at which he clearly doesn't feel proficient. Which is exactly why he is. You're not reading a writer; you're reading a veteran, in much more than just the military sense.
Interspersed among terse, almost telegraphic accounts of his past is some of the best how-to on practical meditation I've found. His themes are universally relevant: depression and despair; atonement and redemption; suffering and transcendence. All from a guy who speaks with thunderous authority.
His eremitical bona fides are equally evident. He writes:
"Anyone can come with me on a pilgrimage. It's not necessary for a person to become a student of mine or to spend time with me to learn this practice. It is open."
In these angos – which he defines as "just walking" – he's revived a practice largely abandoned in the era of institutional Zen:
"There is no escape from the nature of your suffering in this practice. When you walk, you are constantly confronted with your self, your attachments, your resistance. You are confronted with what you cling to for the illusion of security."
Should anyone require more evidence of AnShin's hermitude, his Further Reading section includes Zen at War, The Cloud of Unknowing (a classic of Christian contemplation), and the Gnostic Gospels, though none of them are cited in the text.
My lone criticism of At Hell's Gate is its light treatment of those incredible pilgrimages. In fact, I wish AnShin would write a whole 'nother book just about them. I appreciate his desire to avoid the odour of self-glorification; first-person journalism is a hard beat for a non-narcissist. And as a mendicant, he likely doesn't have time or space to sit down and write. But it's badly needed. I hope AnShin's sangha convince him someday to transmit and preserve these vital experiences, for the benefit of future generations. After all, where would we be if Bashō had remained silent?
Nevertheless, the book we already have is all by itself a repository of rare and hard-earned wisdom, a chronicle of unusual violence and damage, leading to unusual insight. The man himself puts it best:
"Everyone has their Vietnam. Everyone has their war. May we embark together on a pilgrimage of ending these wars and truly live in peace."
If you're suffering – whether firearms were involved or just plain-old heartbreak – read this book.
