Meditating in Silence as the Fire Draws Near

PHOENIX — Those living in the path of a huge wildfire typically express all sorts of emotions, but in one remote community in southeastern Arizona, the reaction has been muted.

The 39 Buddhists living at the Diamond Mound Retreat Center near Bowie, Ariz., are about six months into a three-year solitary retreat that includes a vow of silence. Ranging in age from their mid-20s to their late 60s, participants spend their days in intense meditation, living in basic huts that are separated from one another, in a spiritual exercise aimed at promoting world peace one person at a time.

Those administering the program are in regular contact with firefighters on the front lines of the Horseshoe 2 Fire, which has burned in excess of 200,000 acres in the Chiricahua Mountains since May 8, and say they are awaiting word from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department on whether an evacuation will be necessary.

“They can see the smoke coming over the hill,” said Scott Vacek, one of the caretakers on the property and also a practicing Buddhist. “It looks startlingly close. But we haven’t told them that we may be coming in to evacuate them. We didn’t see any upside to that, because their meditations will immediately be over. They wouldn’t be able to concentrate.”

The fire is now believed to be about four miles from the retreat, which sits on just over 1,000 acres and has been a learning center for Buddhist studies since 2003. “It’s scrub desert with some brush and juniper trees,” Mr. Vacek said. “It’s beautiful landscape with some tall peaks behind us.”

The people participating in the retreat live in 29 cabins, ranging from mud huts to basic wood-frame dwellings, powered by solar panels or propane. Mr. Vacek and a team of volunteers deliver supplies every Monday and make a conscious effort to steer clear of the participants. Mr. Vacek’s wife is the program’s nurse, and she treats participants using written notes and gestures.

Among those in the retreat are Christie McNally, who is the director and is one of the first women to be recognized as a lama in the Tibetan tradition; Lisette Garcia, a former college professor from New York who grew up in El Paso; Dvora and Ari Tzvieli, from Israel, who are seeking an end to the conflict in the Middle East; and Bill McMichael, a former American Airlines pilot.

The authorities say an evacuation is not yet necessary.

“We know they are there and how to get in touch with them, but there is no need for them to be evacuated at this time,” Alexis West, a spokeswoman for the interagency group fighting the fire, said Friday.

If an evacuation is eventually ordered, organizers say they will try to keep the retreat going by taking participants in silence in two vans to a nearby town and housing them in quiet surroundings until they can return. But if the fire ends up damaging the dwellings, there is a chance the exercise could end.

“It would be a terrible shame,” Mr. Vacek said. “These people have gone through an incredible amount of physical work and a huge amount of emotional work. It’s a life-changing experience, and it would be tragic if it ended.”

The Horseshoe 2 Fire is one of several huge fires burning across Arizona. The Wallow Fire, in the eastern part of the state, now covers more than 495,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire in the state’s history.

Another blaze, the Monument Fire, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents of Hereford, a community south of Sierra Vista, Ariz., on Thursday. First reported on June 12, it covers about 19,000 acres in the Coronado National Forest, spans the Mexican border and is growing quickly, officials said.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Obama Draws the Line

 

The president got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Perhaps those words will cost him some of those votes — although sentiment toward Israel among American Jews is slowly shifting. But true friends are critical friends. And the American and Israeli national interest do not lie in the poisonous Israeli-Palestinian status quo.

Netanyahu, who will address the U.S. Congress next week, will certainly attempt in response to go over the president’s head to those restive donors and fund-raisers. He’s Israel’s leader, but knows that a core constituency lies in the United States. He will try to outlast Obama, noting that Republican hopefuls like Mitt Romney are already talking of the president throwing “Israel under the bus.” He will try to kick the can down the road. Process without end favors Israel.

Therein lurks the political fight of the next several months. The best Obama and Netanyahu will ever be able to do is position a fig-leaf of decorum over their differences. The worst poison is distrust. These two men have it aplenty for each other.

Obama, in a first for an American president, has now said the border between Israel and Palestine should be “based on the 1967 lines.” Yes, it should. Netanyahu still talks of “Judea and Samaria,” a lexicon that, true to his Likud party’s platform, does not acknowledge those lines but sees one land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Each leader believes Israel’s long-term security depends on his view prevailing.

A Republican-dominated Congress awaits Netanyahu with open arms. So does the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Aipac. Netanyahu is no less susceptible to adulation than the average man. These are not backdrops that encourage tough choices. But he must make them or watch Israel’s isolation and instability grow.

Does Netanyahu, with democratic change and movement coursing through the region, have it in him to move beyond short-term tactics to a strategy for his nation that ushers it from its siege mentality? I doubt it. I do know he will be judged a failure if he refuses, now, to make a good-faith effort to see if Israel’s security can be squared with Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. That involves revealing Israel’s hand on borders with the same frankness the president has just shown.

As Obama noted, occupation is “humiliation.” It was humiliation as experienced by a young Tunisian fruit vendor that sparked the unfurling of the Arab Spring. There is no reason to believe this quest for dignity and self-governance will stop at Palestine’s door or that Israel’s quest for security can be sustained by walls alone.

Arabs by the tens of millions have been overcoming the paralysis of fear. It is past time for Israel to do the same. A specter — Iran, Hamas, delegitimization campaigns — can always be summoned to dismiss peace. These threats exist. But I believe the most corrosive is Israeli dominion over another people. That’s the low road.

Obama got it right. The essential trade-off is Israeli security for Palestinian sovereignty. Each side must convince the other that peace will provide it.

Israeli security begins with a reconciled Fatah and Hamas committing irrevocably to nonviolence, with Palestinian acquiescence to a nonmilitarized state, and with Palestinian acceptance that a two-state peace ends all territorial claims. Palestinian sovereignty begins with what Obama called “the full and phased withdrawal of Israeli security forces” — including from the Jordan River border area — and with the removal of all settlements not on land covered by “mutually agreed swaps.”

This is difficult but doable. The 1967 lines are not “indefensible,” as Netanyahu declared in his immediate response to Obama’s speech. What is “indefensible” over time for Israel is colonizing another people. That process has continued with settlements expanding in defiance of Obama’s urging. The president was therefore right to pull back from President George W. Bush’s acceptance of “already existing major Israeli population centers” beyond the 1967 lines.

Palestinians have been making ominous wrong moves. The unilateralist temptation embodied in the quest for recognition of statehood at the United Nations in September must be resisted: It represents a return to useless symbolism and the narrative of victimhood. Such recognition — and of course the United States would not give it — would not change a single fact on the ground or improve the lot of Palestinians.

What has improved their lot is the patient institution-building of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on the West Bank, his embrace of nonviolence, and his refusal to allow the grievances of the past to halt the building of a future. To all of this Netanyahu has offered only the old refrain: Israel has no partner with which to build peace.

It does — if it would only see and reinforce that partner. Beyond siege lies someone.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen .

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Advertising: A Line of Brews Draws a Star Endorser, and Critics

In a promotional video on YouTube, Snoop Dogg, a white fur coat over his shoulders and surrounded by models in skimpy dresses, poses for the photographer Estevan Oriol while holding cans of Blast and the original Colt 45. The photos will be used for promotional purposes, like making 7-foot cardboard cutouts featuring the rapper for in-store displays, and for delivery truck decals.

Blast initially is focusing on “viral campaigns with Twitter, Facebook and blogs,” said Evan Metropoulos, who with his brother, Daren, runs Colt 45 as an owner of the Pabst Brewing Company, the brand’s parent company. Pabst was bought in 2010 by Metropoulos & Company, an investment firm started by their father, Dean.

Snoop Dogg has mentioned Blast repeatedly on Facebook, where he has more than eight million followers, and on Twitter, where he has more than 3.1 million. In “Boom,” a single on his new album, “Doggumentary,” he mentions Colt 45 in the lyrics.

“That’s just him being a true partner and saying I’m not just an endorser,” said Daren Metropoulos. “Whether he’s putting it in his songs or having his posse drinking it, it’s part of his lifestyle.”

Available in four flavors — grape, raspberry watermelon, blueberry pomegranate and strawberry lemonade — Blast joins the rapidly growing category of sweetened alcoholic beverages that go by many names, including flavored malt beverages and progressive adult beverages.

But critics, who believe the soda-like flavors and colorful labels appeal to underage drinkers, have their own term: alcopops.

“We have always considered them cocktails on training wheels,” said Michael J. Scippa, public affairs director of the Marin Institute, an alcohol industry watchdog. “It’s a way to bridge young consumers’ fondness for juices and sodas to alcohol.”

The group, which had criticized caffeinated alcoholic brands including Four Loko before they were required by the Food and Drug Administration to remove caffeine from their formulas recently, started an online petition opposing Blast, which in two weeks has been signed by about 1,000 people.

Like Four Loko, Blast is 12 percent alcohol by volume, more than twice most major beer brands, and is sold in 23.5-ounce cans, meaning drinking one (suggested retail price: $2.49) is the equivalent alcohol intake of more than four 12-ounce bottles of beer.

While most alcohol brands follow industry guidelines to advertise only in media outlets where no more than 30 percent of their audience is under 21, Mr. Scippa said that social networks like Facebook and Twitter “are for the most part unrestricted.” As for Snoop Dogg promoting Blast through those networks, and on YouTube, Mr. Scippa said that a “huge segment” of his fans were underage.

Tom Burrell, a former advertising executive and author of “Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority,” faulted the company for introducing Blast under the umbrella of Colt 45 and hiring the rapper.

“What is happening here is an obvious attempt to foist this stuff on young African-American men,” Mr. Burrell said. “Colt 45 has invested in the black consumer market for years, and if they weren’t looking for an African-American audience they wouldn’t be using Snoop Dogg.”

In a survey of malt liquor drinkers by Mintel, the market research firm, Colt 45 was the most popular over all, with 25 percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks drinking it. The second and third most popular brands found more favor among whites, with 25 percent drinking Mickey’s compared with 16 percent of blacks, and 22 percent drinking Olde English 800 compared with 17 percent of blacks.

Robert Jackson, a member of the New York City Council, wrote a letter in March to the state liquor board requesting that restrictions be imposed on Blast.

“Blast comes in very colorful cans and bottles and clearly is marketed to kids, just like Four Loko,” said Martin Collins, an aide to Mr. Jackson.

The flavored malt beverage category totaled $967.7 million for the 52 weeks that ended March 20, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the prior year, according to the SymphonyIRI Group, the market data firm whose totals do not include Wal-Mart or liquor stores. (Like beer, the beverages are sold largely in supermarkets and convenience stores.)

The Mike’s Hard Lemonade Company, with other flavors including limeade, leads the category with a 37.1 percent share, followed by Smirnoff Ice varieties, with a 22.7 percent share.

Fruit-flavored alcohol finds more favor with female drinkers, with 62 percent liking it compared with 48 percent of men, according to Mintel. As for age preferences, Mintel polled only legal imbibers, finding the drinks to be most popular among those 21 to 24, with 73 percent approving, and popularity waning steadily with age: 39 percent of those 55 to 64 liked the beverages, and 26 percent of those over 65.

According to American Medical Association findings, 82 percent of teenage girls who have tried the beverages prefer them to beer or other alcoholic drinks, while one-third incorrectly believe they contain less alcohol than beer.

Evan Metropoulos said Blast was formulated partly to appeal to the palates of women, who “wanted an alternative to lager and beer flavors,” and that seven-ounce bottles, sold in six-packs for about $7, will appeal to women more than 23.5-ounce cans, and reflects a commitment to provide smaller sizes to encourage moderation.

The company expects Blast to appeal primarily to consumers in their late 20s or early 30s, he said.

“All we were doing was putting together flavors that were appealing to people that definitely are over the legal age,” said Evan Metropoulos, responding to criticism of Blast. “We’re going to do our very best to hammer home the message of responsible drinking.”

“It’s not like our distributors are putting it in the soda section, and these are clearly designated as an alcoholic product,” added Daren Metropoulos. “We’re not going to be showing up and selling this at schools or anything like that.”