Ugyen is a unique character in the saga of Tibetan oppression because he was acknowledged as the 17th incarnation of the Karmapa by both the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama. Chinese officials billed him as the poster child of a new cultural freedom in Tibet, while the Buddhist hierarchy declared him the true incarnation of the bodhisatva after his coming was predicted by the 16th Karmapa shortly before his death in a Chicago hospital in 1981. He was found eleven years later at the age of seven in southeastern Tibet and was subsequently sequestered in his monastery north of Lhasa by Chinese officials who denied him all travel visas.

The first sticky strand of hypocrisy was woven by the little red spiders in China's state run media who downplayed the Lama's departure by stating that he had simply gone to India to seek the artifacts of his religious order: a black hat and some musical instruments (hey, the song's getting better: "he wore a black hat and played the Lama blues"). Meanwhile, officials in Beijing warned India that granting asylum to the enlightened one would severely strain relations.

Doubtless, the spin-masters that crawl around Capitol Hill and the White House will zip deftly back and forth, bouncing rhetorical threats off of the media that China must do something about the issue of human rights "or else," while they wait for the ink to dry on the freshly signed agreement that will grant China full membership in the World Trade Organization.

Of course, the flashiest and most venomous of arachnids are crawling around the movie sets of Hollywood. As I write this, Richard Gere is probably already aboard a plane on his way back to Dharamsala eager to meet the divine Karmapa and hopefully land movie rights for "Escape of the Lama."

Caught in this web, however, are the unfortunate and floundering bugs of reality. One of these doomed squirming little flies buzzes with the fact that, barring a conflagration the magnitude of a Third World War, Tibet is now, and always will be, the southern most state of China. An endless parade of multi-million dollar cinematic spectacles like Kundun, Red Square, and Seven Years in Tibet won't do a bit to change that, though it might net Brad Pitt another $10 million.

The suggestion that China should return Tibet to the Tibetans is akin to asking the US to give California back to the indigenous people it once strove so hard to obliterate. Was the military invasion of Tibet in 1959 any more ruthless than the US Army's decimation of Native Americans in 1859, when volunteers were promised "the horses, and all other plunder acquired" in exchange for their assistance in quashing the native inhabitants of California?

And, if by some unfathomable miracle, the US did decide to give back the golden state, in the interest of "human rights," would Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, and the other Hollywood luminaries who have been so outspoken about liberating Tibet jump up and hand the keys to their Malibu mansions over to the few shamans who survived the most complete genocide in recent history? Somehow, I doubt it.

The other beleaguered fly groaning in this web of pointless rhetoric is that the outcome was an all too predictable one considering that Tibet, the only pacifist spiritual theocracy on the planet, was camped out next to the earth's biggest totalitarian regime. The Buddhist precept of pacifism, while admirable and honorable, makes for a poor defense strategy.

The only perceivable justice in this tragic outcome is that, if the exalted one is right, immeasurable karma will be visited upon the Chinese in ways that cannot be discerned by the human mind. Maybe the whole country will come back in another life as New Jersey. Regardless, in the here and now, we are faced with the reality that, while pacifism was successfully managed by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., sometimes its proponents end up in exile or – like the 300 unarmed men, women, and children who stood helplessly around a white flag at Wounded Knee – shot to death and buried in a shallow grave.

The survival of Tibet's theocratic society depended, sometime ago, on outside intervention, before the Chinese burned their monasteries and sacred scripts. This time came and went in the 1950s, before God dealt a nuclear hand to all major players at the table, and the US did little to save the people we now so admire for their chaste perseverance.

The other repulsive insect long eaten by the spiders of modern civilization is the truism that human rights have always been secondary to capitalism and industrial progress. In the scope of time, the concept of human rights is a relatively new idea, while capital gain through the domination of neighboring civilizations is as old as Rome. It goes on around the world continually, and the primary reason we are so acutely aware of the heaping plate of injustice served to the Tibetans is because the vastly resourceful Hollywood image machine has turned it into a "cause."

Not surprisingly, the two-headed schizophrenic giant of Clinton-era foreign policy reprimands Jiang Zemin from one mouth and arranges unprecedented trade deals with the other. Clinton makes no secret of the fact that he is waging another cold war of economics against the lone red giant. His plan is clear: bring China into the fold of capitalism and consumerism. His motives are multi-layered, like most well-made webs. Yes, the resulting "Perestroika of China" is likely to keep the peace through a growing Chinese dependence on the world market, but US corporations will make out like bandits having secured rights to the biggest market and labor pool in the world. The voices demanding China do anything with Tibet other than place some assembly plants there will slowly drone out like the sound of dying flies. Once they stop buzzing, the annoying little truisms of the past will be gobbled up by the hyper-productive spiders of the future.

At least the Karmapa got out before the Chinese-image spiders could spin him into a suffocating cocoon. Now, maybe, he can look forward to regular visits from movie stars, a book deal or two, and the western-style stardom that comes from wearing a saffron robe on the world stage. Likely, China will continue to pay close attention to the America's highly successful methods of cultural assimilation and, though the Karmapa dealt them a deep symbolic blow, they'll surely recover. Who knows, in a few more years the World Series may see the Atlanta Braves playing the Beijing Lamas.

January 2000