“Have A Heart, Dick Cheney”

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” —Longfellow

“One scientist calculated that if we take a deep breath today, in ninety-nine times out of a hundred it will contain a molecule from Julius Caesar’s [Dick Cheney’s?] dying breath.” —from Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—7/19/10—The cardiologist interviewed by Rachel Maddow recently, just following Dick Cheney’s extraordinary battery-operated-heart-pump-worn-outside-his body surgery, must have been chosen by MSNBC for his ability to keep a straight face whilst delivering (surely) one of the most unintentionally hysterical lines in modern history: “Dick Cheney literally has no pulse.”

He elaborated. “If you place a couple of fingers on his wrist, you will feel nothing.”

Rachel, herself, held in (I am certain) vast quantities of snarkiness during this exchange. I was heard to mutter to my husband, also glued to the TV screen: “NOW they discover he has no pulse?! Don’t they realize that the man is truly the Magister of the Kingdom of DC?” [I refer anyone confused by this reference to the web site discussing characters on HBO’s “True Blood”: the Magister of DC would be not only pulseless, but a vampire.]

But my dark mirth—and I have a right to it: I’ve just survived $180,000.-spinal-fusion-surgery, myself—was quickly followed by other ruminations.

Cheney ranks very, very high on my “S**t List of Living Monsters.” Right up there with Kim Jong Il, Rush Limbaugh, everyone who voted down The Public Option (Universal US Health Care, you idiots!), Osama Bin Laden, George W. Bush, The Tea Party-ers, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, everyone-in-the-know at BP, most of the US Senate, everyone in power in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran (etc., etc., etc., etc.) . . . and, yet, I pray for him. I pray for Dick Cheney.

May SOMEONE give him a heart! May—POOF!—the Wizard of Oz appear to him as to the Cowardly Lion (for Cheney is the Ur-Coward), and install in his empty, pulseless thorax . . . the heart of Mother Theresa, of the Buddha, of Martin Luther King, of Gandhi. After all, those folks no longer need their hearts. They’re through with them.

I pray for Cheney as I prayed for those innocent Iraqis he helped “cleanse” from Iraq during the course of his and Bush’s Iraq War; those non-combatants murdered in Afghanistan. I pray for the soldiers as well—on both sides. For the “Northern Alliance,” and the Taliban. For the Sunni, and the Shiite. For the Zionist and the displaced Palestinian. For the clear-cut evil-doer, and the equally clear-cut victim of evil.

I did NOT want this gig. In the words of one of those fellows I follow, I, too, keep asking, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.”

But the answer I keep getting—through the static—goes something like this: “If you’re going to pray for the Dalai Lama, and his eventual and triumphant return to Tibet, then you’re going to have to pray, as well, for Dick Cheney, and his eventual enlightenment, even if it happens a thousand thousand thousand lifetimes from now, when you, yourself, are simply stardust and former-breath-molecules.

Practicing Yoga, practicing the Dharma, following the Sufi path, imitating Christ truly, truly sucks sometimes.

I re-read Jack Kornfield’s writings pretty much on a daily basis. I really must move on to some of the other writers he recommends and, at some point, I will. But, over the course of my surgery and miserable recuperative process (which I now realize has only just begun, two months out from the knives), I have needed Kornfield.

Losing my body, my grace, my strength, my sanity (due to the narcotics prescribed for me), my Yoga practice, my students, my status, my work, my vocation—yada-yada-yada—well, I have not gone quietly into this anything-but-good-night. I have ranted and screamed and cried and chewed on my pillow like Job, surrounded by Job’s counselors, too, one and all, and falling apart at my fragile little seams.

Unable to sleep, I take up Jack Kornfield’s A Path With Heart: The Classic Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life, and there he is, saying: “Forgiveness is simply an act of the heart, a movement to let go of the pain, the resentment, the outrage you have carried as a burden for so long. It is an easing of your own heart and an acknowledgment that, no matter how strongly you may condemn and have suffered from the evil deeds of another, you will not put another human being out of your heart.”

He adds, in a “Meditation on Forgiveness”: “There are many ways I have been wounded and hurt, abused and abandoned, by others in thought, word, or deed, knowingly or unknowingly. Let yourself picture them, remember them, visualize these many ways. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this past and sense that you can release yourself from this burden by extending forgiveness if your heart is ready . . . .

Let yourself repeat these . . . directions for forgiveness until you feel a release in your heart. Perhaps for some great pains [Iraq? Afghanistan? Tibet? Srebenica?] you may not feel a release, but only the burden and the anguish or anger you have held. Touch this softly. Be forgiving of yourself in this as well. Forgiveness cannot be forced; it cannot be artificial. Simply continue the practice, and let the words and images work gradually in their own way. . . .”

So, Mr. Cheney, though I still hold out the vain hope that you (and George W. Bush, et al) will one day be charged with and tried for crimes against humanity for tricking a gullible nation into a senseless war, and bringing genocide to Iraq, I also pray for you.

That you will be given a transplant heart. That that heart bear within it the goodness and sanity of its former “incarnate.” That, having been given this gift of extended life, you will, somehow, like so many before you (the thieves on the crosses to Christ’s left and right spring to mind, just for example) experience an epiphany that turns you towards the light. I pray this with all my heart.

(I also pray that I will, once again, be able to do and teach Downward-Facing Dog, Closed-Ear Pose, and Reclining Hero. But, hey . . . thy will be done; not mine. I get it, Mr. Kornfield. I get it.)