If it was good enough for Vincent Sirabella, a man of uncommon alliances but more uncommon grace, maybe it’s good enough for presidential politics and the mess in Bosnia.
Sirabella was a jewel in the rough of the labor movement. A tough but high-minded honcho in the ethically challenged hotel and restaurant workers union, he labored and socialized with equal vigor–at times with men known to law enforcers, given to loud neckwear and fit for portrayal by Joe Pesci or Robert DeNiro.
After one 20-hour bargaining session, I met him at a Chicago hotel for a cocktail and remarked at the impressive, unceasing vitality of this man in his late 60s then. What was the secret?
“TM,” he said.
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Helping me back onto my stool, he recalled his most valiant effort: organizing clericals at Yale University amid great management resistance. There, a man at ease with Damon Runyon types at any casino encountered students who turned him on to transcendental meditation.
“Doesn’t matter how many hours I’ve been up,” said Sirabella, an erudite former racetrack waiter and bartender who routinely traveled coast-to-coast twice a week. “If I’m in a hotel room, just go to the bathroom, close the door and meditate for 20, 30 minutes. After that, fresh as a daisy.”
I was recalling Sirabella last week upon joining an august group–well, a lady from a paper in New Delhi and a CNN producer and crew–who were the only journalists to show up to meet John Hagelin and his unconventional peace plan for Bosnia.
How could one spurn this news conference?
“Excellent Photo Ops: Group Meditation Demonstration, B-Roll of Large International TM Peace-Keeping Groups,” assured the fax.
(If you are media-deficient, a “photo op” is short for a photo opportunity or chance for a picture, while “b-roll” is a television news term for background video for a story.)
Hagelin, 41, is a once-promising quantum physicist with degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth who teaches at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, and is running as presidential candidate of the Natural Law Party.
The party, which is not-so-accidentally based in Fairfield, made it onto the ballot in 32 states for the 1992 election. It fielded 128 candidates, raised $4 million and received 37,137 votes, many fewer than Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ross Perot and the Libertarian and U.S. Taxpayer Parties, among others.
This time, a party that is testament to the richness of the American fringe has made it onto ballots in California, Ohio and North Dakota as it seeks to make al 50 and field 1,000 candidates. In California, it has registered a far-from-unimpressive 137,000 voters, right up there with Perot’s party.
It stresses “conflict-free politics,” relying heavily on prevention-oriented health care and a Ross Perot-like chagrin with taxes (preferring a 10 percent flat tax) and campaign finance reform. It favors block grants to the states, work requirements for welfare recipients, a modest cut in the defense budget, organic farming, energy conservation and preventing crime, partly through reducing stress.
Ah, yes, reducing stress.
At the center of its hopes is TM. It’s not a religion nor a philosophical practice, Hagelin reiterates but a state of deep physiological rest he learned after a teenage motorcycle accident.
He takes out several charts that claim a direct correlation between use of TM in a geographical area and reduction in crime. In the summer of 1993, for example, hundreds practiced TM at a gathering here and, Hagelin says, crime dropped sharply. The police didn’t confirm such a cause-and-effect.
“America and the world are suffering from a dangerous epidemic of social stress,” he declares. “Group practice of the Transcendental Meditation program is a proven social-stress reducing technique. It can do what nothing else has been able to do–reduce violence and conflict and promote coherence and harmony in society.”
Hagelin urges that the U.S., UN and NATO employ 2,000 TM experts in Bosnia to form a “coherence-creating group” to “ensure our success and bring the troops home quickly.”
“We would see an immediate easing of tensions,” he said. “Otherwise, it is difficult to expect any conventional peacekeeping measures to succeed.”
Given the questions raised about the U.S. Bosnian involvement, why not give TM a try? It would be cheaper than, say, massages for the disgruntled Bosnian Serb army.
When Hagelin finished up, I left with him, having declined an invitation to observe an associate lead a room of party loyalists in meditation. I asked a classic Washington insider question:
Would a Hagelin victory bring a Cabinet position for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who survived rejection by the Beatles and went on to found TM centers worldwide and inspire the accredited Fairfield college?
Hagelin’s response was akin, though more delicately phrased, to one many years back of Vincent Sirabella. It happened at a fancy Italian restaurant in Miami after I ordered several bottles of a $28 Pinot Grigio for him and two dese-dems-dose colleagues, each with files at the New York State Crime Commission.
“Mouthwash!” Vincent declared, taking the wine list from my hand and ordering bottles of some exquisite $60 Italian Chardonnay.
“No, I think not,” Hagelin said about the prospect of Mr. Yogi as, perhaps, treasury secretary.
“He is not a U.S. resident. His interest is not really U.S. politics.”
Ethics I
Ruth Shalit, a young journalistic Unabomber, whose plagiarism tendencies have been disclosed here, does not suffer lack of support from her employer.
A Chicago subscriber to the New Republic, which includes her among its head count, passes along a letter from publisher Joan Stapleton in response to a cancellation request. The subscriber was chagrined by “the cavalier treatment of ethics by your editors” in buying Shalit’s contorted, the-computer-made-me-do-it excuses for others’ words appearing in her work.
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“Just in case you didn’t hear the actual explanation,” Stapleton writes, “I wanted you to know that Ruth Shalit explained, in painstaking detail, that the lifted lines occurred in error when she mistook notes from pieces she was reseaching (sic) through Nexis, with her own notes.”
Ethics II
“Save The Date . . . Save The Date . . . Save The Date . . . Thursday, January 11-Friday, January 12,” declares the letter sent to a lobbyist from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Eastern Shore Hunt With The Honorable John D. Dingell in Dorchester County, Maryland.”
Ah, wonderful, on a week in which the Democrats badmouth Newt Gingrich after he was whacked by the House ethics committee, we have this image:
Fat-cat lobbyists attired in their baggy Abercrombie & Fitch gear stuffing cash into the pockets of the Michigan Democrat and autocratic former chairman of the House Commerce Committee.
“Mark your calendar for the Annual DCCC Eastern Shore Hunt. The Eastern Shore provides some of the finest duck hunting in the United States, so clear your calendar for January 11-12.”
Coincidentally, the December issue of Outdoor Life brings the uplifting news that “Seven of the most popular duck species stand at their highest population levels since the 1970s.”
The Republican revolution aside, the migration here of money-grubbing pols seems unceasing too.