Aqua Buddha
Rand Paul, Libertarian candidate for Kentucky’s seat in the US Senate and son of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, is set to take office January 2011 to replace Jim Bunning. During the election campaign, an article in GQ magazine “revealed” that while an undergraduate at Baylor (the world’s largest Baptist university) he was a member of a “secret society” called the “NoZe Brotherhood.”
A fellow member of this “society,” John Green, said the group “aspired to blasphemy” in response to the schools dogmatic Baptist religiosity. The president of the school at the time described them as “lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious.” According to one informant, a female student who was Paul’s teammate on the swim team Paul and a fellow NoZe Brotherhood member kidnapped her:
“He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.”
Paul and his friend then drove her into the country and stopped near a stream and forced her to engage in taboo religious acts.
“They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him . . . they blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”
Jack Conway‘s campaign took a literalist interpretation of parts of this story (at least for the purposes of the election), using the following image in advertising against Paul:
And during a debate, Conway attacked Paul saying:
“When is it ever a good idea to tie up a woman and ask her to kneel before a false idol, your god, which you call Aqua Buddha?”
Aside from the fascinating political questions (among them: does conway believe that? Is he calling him on his hypocrisy or calling him a ‘bad Christian’?), my first question was: what exactly is an Aqua Buddha? Paul, now senator-elect, hasn’t said much more than a statement from his campaign:
“During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas.”
So, we’re left to try and piece together this “ritual,” and ask: was it a practical joke? a stunt? an act of violence or intimidation? or religious activity? While it’s easy to dismiss it as a stunt, a discordian game in the face of the pervasive Baptist dogma of their school, the choice of words, actions and the way they’ve constructed this “idol” speaks to their religious experiences and beliefs in a way worth noting.
So what is an Aqua Buddha? According to Conway’s ad above, it appears to be very literally, an aqua colored Buddha. But the informant’s interpretation of their motivation suggests it was a stand-in for the “golden calf,” an idol constructed in the minds of these two young men to represent precisely what they were forbidden to worship: Nature, in the form of water, and a figure from a non-christian religion, the Buddha. Read as such, and depending on the victims beliefs and the field of cultural and social factors involved, an act like this could be religious torture. Imagine the story from a different angle: a young Buddhist woman kidnapped and dragged to a creek by two young men and then forced to proclaim her faith in Christ.
In this instance however, the victim (now a clinical psychologist) doesn’t make that claim saying instead: ”They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke . . I never saw Randy after that—for understandable reasons, I think.”
Fierce OS
The interpretation of symbolic structures is forced into an infinity of symbolic contextual meanings.
M. M. Bakhtin
Historically, Lions have been symbols of power from the Persian to the British Empires, from Hinduism (Narasimha) to Judaism, Islam and Christianity (see Kings, Judges, Proverbs, Samuel, Isaiah, Daniel, Numbers, Revelations, etc. and of course The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). In Meso and South American traditions Jaguars are associated with creation stories and shamanism. From Mesopotamia to the Americas, cats and the divine have enjoyed an intimate relationship for at least 10,000 years. Big cats (genus Panthera) have been deployed as markers for power, virility, nobility, the numinous, and more recently as mascots for Apple’s operating systems.
Apple Inc. has been naming (and code-naming) their operating systems after big cats since the release of OS X 10.0 (Cheeta) in 2001. Their newest release, scheduled for Summer 2011 is called “Lion.” It turns out they’ve chosen a stock photo of a Lion for their marketing materials that was also used by a Belgian anti-immigration nationalist party (Vlaams Belang) in 2007 along with the slogan “Flemish Force.” Gizmodo reports that the photo, previously available from stock agencies Shutterstock and Fotolia, is called “The King” – though it’s now been removed.
Vlaams Belang’s Lion (2007)
And, as ZDnet’s Apple Core blog points out, this isn’t the first unusual encounter Apple has had with stock imagery of big cats. For the current release of OS X, 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, they chose to remove blood from the predators mouth.
Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard, cleaned up
The message with Snow Leopard? OS X is fierce, but not too fierce. Now Apple may be asking: how do you remove the ‘stain’ of an anti-immigration nationalist party from your cat?
Google’s Autocomplete Algorithm
A friend shared this series of Google autocomplete search results on a social network, it contains screen captures of Google’s autocomplete feature along with a venn diagram produced from the resulting terms:
I was curious if I would get the same terms, so I tried it. As soon as I found that my results for “Why are Buddhists” were different in than the screen capture in the image above I decided to take more of my own samples. I tried out a few religions that came to mind off the top of my head. Here are the results of my autocomplete searches, taken today between 11:11 and 11:15:
Google autocomplete is described as an “algorithm” that “offers searches that might be similar to the one you’re typing.” Based on the description below of how they are produced, you may have different results when you search:
As you type, Google’s algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users’ search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past.
