Train Tracks (19 page)

FORTY-ONE

The Time Shelter

I
was recently on the streets of North Beach, the once-Italian district of San Francisco. Now it's the home to bums and Chinese, with a remnant of Little Italy left—the Little Italy amusement park, North Beach. But forty years ago when I came to San Francisco, there used to be women dressed in black—old, lean Italian women. They used to gossip with each other on the street, whispering. I loved it. Being the kind of guy I am, I would once in a while go up and talk to them. (Wherever I've been in the world, I've had the capacity to go up to strangers. I always get into good conversations for some reason.) I don't know how the conversation arose. I was talking to one of the old women—she must have been a good ninety-five, probably Sicilian. I said to her, “Mama, what do you do for health?”

She says to me, “There's hardly anything wrong with a person that a little coffee, a little wine, and a little garlic can't cure.”

I agree with her 100 percent. Of course, I must add a few things to that mixture: Like, it's not a
little
wine; it's more than a little wine. It's not a
little
garlic; it's a lot more than a little garlic. And there are other things that I like to do, but for her, it worked. They were beautiful old women. They're gone—you don't see them anymore.

FORTY-TWO

Being Decent Is Not Love

I
f you are decent to others, then you're decent to yourself. You feel better. I don't want to say if you love others, you love yourself, because I think the word
love
is overused—and it's not the right verb anyway. In Latin there are sixteen verbs for love. We have one verb for love and we get mixed up: I love my girlfriend, I love my mother, I love my pizza, I love my bike, I love my car, and I love my dog. In the Latin there are sixteen different verbs for these emotions.

Here, we're so limited by the choice of the one verb
love
that we mix up a pizza with our mother and our girlfriend and our bicycle! That's why I avoid the word
love
altogether—I don't like it. It makes me uncomfortable. You love me? You love me, honey? Everything in America is “love.”

I'm an Old World kind of guy. I was raised with it. My father never believed in the word
love
. He got mad if you said “love” around him. He knew it was b.s. “I love everybody.” You can't love strangers that you don't know, but you can be nice to them. You don't have to go out of your way to be a fool.

My line is: If you are decent to other people, you're decent to yourself. You feel better. Try it for a day. Look, let's say you're a typical, mean S.O.B. You cut people off, you give them the finger, you're an obnoxious, cheap, hateful human being—the average man in other words. Try one day to be decent to strangers. See the power of human kindness.

FORTY-THREE

Man Is a Creature of
Reason

I
was
reading the teachings of Buddha, called
The Way of
Practical Attainment.
Here's one; tell me whether this applies to
you. It doesn't matter what your religion is.

A man who chases after
fame and wealth and love affairs is like a child who licks honey from the
blade of a knife: while he is tasting the sweetness of honey he has to risk
hurting his tongue. He is like a man who carries a torch against the strong
wind: the flame will surely burn his hands and face. People love their
egoistic comfort, which is a love of fame and praise, but fame and praise
are like incense that consumes itself and soon disappears. If people chase
after honors and public acclaim and leave the way of truth, they're in
serious danger and will soon have cause for regret.
*

It's beautiful poetry, I've got to tell you that.
It's universal in the sense that it crosses over to whatever your religion might
be. Even if you're an atheist, you can find these rules somewhat reasonable to
live by, unless you don't believe in any rules at all because you're so wild and
free. Oh, we understand that—we understand that people who aren't religious are
just “wild and free” and they're so progressive in their freedom and their
liberation. As George Orwell said, “The more people chant about their freedom
and how free they are, the more loudly I hear their chains rattling.”

“A scripture that is not read with sincerity soon
becomes covered with dust.” Who does that sound like? You remember the staged
Bibles of the Clintons? Remember that overly large Bible they used to carry on
Sundays, that was made for them in Hollywood, on a Hollywood set? It was
one-and-a-half to two-and-one-half times the size of an ordinary Bible. The
cross was so big you couldn't miss it from a hundred yards away! “A scripture
that is not read with sincerity soon becomes covered with dust.” “A house that
is not fixed when it needs repairing becomes filthy; so an idle man soon becomes
defiled.”

Why do you think each nation, each people, and each
religion has these writings? What is the purpose of any of this? If you were
just left to your wants and to your needs and what you're moaning about—“Oh, I
don't have this, I don't have that. I don't have an airplane. Oh, I don't have a
girlfriend. Oh, I don't have ten girlfriends. Oh, I don't have a house in Aspen
next to Dianne Feinstein, the war profiteer. Oh, I'm not him. Oh, I'm not
invited there”—you're going to just moan and groan through your whole life!

You have to understand that there are millions,
tens of millions, of people like you on the earth, going through exactly the
same moanings and groanings and that you have to find your way out of it without
taking a pill, or using drugs. There's nothing wrong with taking a pill if you
need it, or taking a bicycle ride—trust me on that one—but that's not the point.
That shouldn't be your only way out of a problem. If man is anything, he is a
creature of reason. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? How do you define
man? Man is an animal who reasons.

Let's say you don't believe in God, our Creator, so
you're into mechanism. You say, “Well, we're only animals.” We have animal
bodies, but you have to admit that we are animals who reason. So, therefore, if
a man reasons—or a man
can
reason—then he can think
his way out of almost any problem that he puts himself in. All these problems,
by the way, are temporal—small problems, these wants and these needs. If you
thought yourself into them, you should be able to think your way out of most of
them.

But, you can't do it all on your own. Some of them
you could try on your own, but you're probably not going to be able to succeed.
See, that's when people start to turn to the scriptures or to the teachings of
Buddha or to another religion—Zen Buddhism, or yoga.

To me it all looks like a burlesque when I look
into a yoga studio: I feel like I'm from another planet. If you're doing yoga,
why do you have to wear a costume that shows your private parts to everyone in
the room? Can't you do yoga wearing something that's a little more dignified, I
ask myself? I mean, if it's purely for the spirit, to get control of the spirit,
why are they wearing a show-all pair of tights and they're on their hands and
knees?

See, you have to find the answer somewhere else
than in your own head. In other words, we are creatures, we are animals that
reason, so we can use reason to get out of any hole that we find ourselves in.
But, we don't have to write the scriptures to get us out of that hole. Let's go
to the people who thought this through ten thousand years ago, five thousand
years ago, a thousand years ago. We don't need some “author” who was on TV to
get us out of it! He probably stole it from one of these books anyway and
repackaged it! You may as well go back to the original guys who wrote the
stuff.

This is another from the teaching of Buddha, and
the reason I'm quoting it is not because I'm a Buddhist but because it makes
sense. And so, here's another one of the practical guides: “The duty of a ruler
is to protect his people.” How's that for a starter, Mr. Obama? “The duty of a
ruler is to protect his people,” and many of us would say he is. OK. “He is the
parent of his people and he protects them by his laws.” Well, when Obama uses
drones to kill, we start to wonder what kind of parent he might be.

The Buddhist teaching goes on:

He must raise his people
like parents raise their children, giving a dry cloth to replace a wet one
without waiting for the child to cry. In like manner, the ruler must remove
suffering and bestow happiness without waiting for people to complain.
Indeed, his ruling is not perfect until his people abide in peace. They are
his country's treasure.

I love that one: The people are a nation's
treasure. You hear what I'm saying to you? We are the treasure of America! You
and I are the treasure of America: not the senators, not the congressmen, not
the media. We are the treasure of America!

“Therefore a wise ruler is always thinking of his
people and does not forget them even for a moment.” Wouldn't you like to believe
that? Wouldn't you like to wake up or go to sleep knowing that your wise rulers
are always thinking of you and don't forget you for a moment other than to
deceive you and to fleece you?

He thinks of their
hardships and plans for their prosperity. To rule wisely, he must be advised
about everything: about water, about drought, about storms, about rain. He
must know about crops, the chances for a good harvest, people's comforts and
their sorrows. To be in a position to rightly award, punish, or praise, he
must be thoroughly informed as to the guilt of bad men and the merits of
good men.

I think you've got the picture. That's why I've
included various religious writings. When you hear people say they're the wrong
gender trapped in a body, for example—the current psychosis among the
transgender crowd—he's a woman trapped in a man's body so he's going to go to a
surgeon to cut off his penis. To me, that's total insanity! The doctor should be
arrested for malpractice, and the person who thinks that about himself should be
given antipsychotic medication or put into a mental ward.

Never before in history has a man awakened and
said, “I'm a woman in a man's body.” Never! This is propaganda. There may have
been homosexuals on earth from the beginning of time and there may be
homosexuals on earth till the end of time—we understand that—but to say you're a
woman in a man's body—can't you just be a man who likes men? Why must you say
you're a woman in a man's body? Where'd that come from? That comes from the
psychosis of the psychiatric movement that has convinced thousands of marginally
sane people that they're men born in women's bodies!

But just as I can read Buddhist scripture and I
don't have to be a Buddhist, I don't have to say I'm a Buddhist trapped in an
American's body. I don't have to become a Buddhist to read the Buddhist tracts.
You don't have to shift religions just to read the other religion's books. You
don't have to say, “Now I'm trapped in the wrong religion.” You were born in a
religion. That's the religion that's right for you. It's genetic! It's part of
your genetic code. Your parents were that religion. Going back many generations.
It's in your genetic code. It's encoded within your mind and your psyche—and
you're never going to find peace in another religion! You're always going to be
confused. You may find temporary peace by saying, “Oh, I'm a Buddhist.” Stop
trying to change religions, jumping from one to another like you'd jump between
hobbies.

Have you ever seen these liberal American
“Buddhists” walking around? They don't even know what Buddhism means! They use
it as a form of ego pride. They're trying to show they're different than you,
better than you—that they've evolved from, let's say, Catholicism into
Buddhism.

Now, the first teaching of Buddhism will tell you
that you can't use a religion as a matter of pride, as the Iranian Hitler did.
He used his religion as a matter of pride. He was misusing his own religion by
bashing us over the head with it and saying, “The world will not be peaceful
until you all accept my religion.” To me, that's the mark of a person who
doesn't even understand his own religion. You can't misuse your religious book
and say, “You must be like
me
, you must follow
my
religion, or there will be no peace on earth!”
You're abusing your religious teachings! It's the opposite of your religion to
do that!

But nobody said that to Iran's Hitler. Obama had
the chance to do that in the United Nations. He's our leader; he could have
gotten up there and said ten things we would have remembered. He could have had
somebody write a speech for him that said, “We have a visitor to America today
who is using his religion in a prideful manner, trying to tell us that unless we
convert to his religion, there will be no peace on earth. This is the act of a
lowly man who is hostile to the rest of the world, and it has no place in the
United Nations, where humanism and humanitarianism should prevail—not threats.”
He could have said that. The world would have stood up and cheered, and said,
“What got into him? Who wrote that speech for him?”

And that's part of the problem. It goes back to
this core statement: that national pride has never been this low in my lifetime.
I've never seen national pride at this low point. We are at the lowest point of
national pride that I can ever remember. Tell me if I'm wrong: Can you remember
a day that national pride was lower than it is today? On September 12, 2001, it
was higher than it is today! The day after the Islamic murderers hit us, the
nation was very proud because we knew we were going to fight back and we were
going to beat them—but we haven't beaten them for all the cowardly reasons that
we know to be in play.

But, we were proud to be Americans that day. We all
came together. We were prouder the day
after
we were
hit than we are today.