you folks might enjoy this:

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi


Ah, Zen. Sweet little name. Delightful and austere and hugely, strangely, wildly overexposed subset of lovely Buddhist philosophy and also of course the pseudo-slogan/catchword of a thousand products and attitudes and cliches strewn all over American pop culture, T-shirts to coffee mugs to wall calendars, pretty much the epitome and the poster child of the excessive and slightly annoying hyper-Westernization of Eastern spirituality. Well, except for maybe Tantra.

And now, a swell kicker: Zen is also the name of a new booze product, a liqueur, something allegedly flavored to taste like green tea and ready to mix with your fave vodka or sake or whatever the hell you can think of because nothing says "deeply calming ancient spiritual practice" like, you know, knocking back shots of artificially sweetened moss-green liquid containing 20 percent alcohol by volume. Mmm, nurturing.

Actually, I sort of love the silly audacity of it. You almost have to. I mean, isn't it just the cutest thing, the warped and shameless co-opting of all things divine and succor-iffic to a crazed populace starved for meaning and sustenance in every purchase and in every desire and in every vice, and never really finding it? It so absolutely is.

Seems the Zen people (the booze company, not the monks) bought some ad space all over SFGate recently, and hence I couldn't help but notice their ad campaign, part of which is apparently a photo contest wherein you send them Zen-inspired pix in an effort to win a coach-class trip to Japan, the birthplace of Zen (except for China, ahem), and the shots are presumably not supposed to be of you getting completely hammered on their product and then stripping naked and molesting a cat and crashing your BMW into your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's Saab and then getting arrested for peeing on the smooth and handsome stones in the minimalist garden of the local Zen center where she goes to meditate. Right.

But the simple brazenness of the ads, all modern Japanese scenery and green tea history and hipster electronica and faux-brushstroke kanji lettering, seem to beg the obvious question: Should you be offended by the notion of this ridiculous but probably quite delicious product? Is there still any room to be even moderately appalled at the swiping of a lovely practice and muddling it with some mint leaves and blending it with some rum and calling it a Zen Mojito? What's next, Christ's Blood Cherry-Flavored Vodka? Allah's Curry-Infused Rum? Muhammad's Manhattan? Mmm, blasphemy.

But wait, before you answer, let us note another modern classic of fantastic, ultra-warped spiritual misappropriation, a perfect example of sheer capitalist opportunism meeting alt-lifestyle absurdity in the sticky back alley of Hypocrisy Lane, a product otherwise known as ... the Enlightenment Visa card.

Oh yes. It's a beauty, really, a very special kind of duplicitous marketing that's been advertised in all the yoga and health and alt-lifestyle magazines for months now, if not longer.

Yes, it's a just a plain Visa card. But here's the "enlightenment" part: Every dollar you spend earns you "points" which, when you finally gather enough, you get to spend on all sorts of "free" happy hippie feel-good stuff, like spa treatments and yoga classes and carbon offsets and organic lube (!), which is all cute and lovely and good until you discover the fact that one point equals one dollar, and to get your "free" yoga class you need to earn something like 20,000 points, which means you just put 20 grand worth of 15-percent APR debt on your happy little card. Now that's enlightening.

(There is some good news: a single pair of tiny little "yoga socks" only requires 1,000 points/dollars. Organic lube? About two grand. So, you know, bargain).

Best of all, these Visas are emblazoned with various ancient symbols and spirituality icons, from Buddha statuary to praying hands to the classic OM symbol, representing absolute consciousness and manifesting as the great universal sound of creation itself, which is rather astonishing indeed, given how that's precisely the sound I hear when I drop $300 on a pair of Diesel Zathans and a leather iPod case and some digital videotapes to make more homemade porn. Yay, eternal divine creation! So satisfying.

Oh, I know, it's nothing new. The marketing cretins of Madison Avenue long ago caught onto the not-exactly-innovative scheme of sucking all joy from a given cultural phenomenon or movement or honest spiritual practice, from yoga to skater culture to surf life to rap, and then co-opting it and rebranding it and injecting it with sugar and corn syrup and caffeine and sex and 5,000 silly Swarovski crystals then selling it right back to you as a gold-flaked diamond-studded $25 energy drink. Yawn.

Perhaps I should be more offended. Perhaps Zen liqueur and the Enlightenment Visa really are insulting and wrong. After all, I've been meditating and teaching yoga for many years and practicing for at least a decade, and hence maybe I should look at products that would seem to maul and malign and molest the ancient wisdoms and traditions I look to for inspiration as some sort of dangerous attack, much like I see organized religion harming gays or Dick Cheney stabbing at the very heart of the life force itself.

But somehow, I don't. Somehow, in this case anyway, it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Because somehow I fully — though perhaps idealistically — believe all these timeless wisdoms and practices, most of which pre-date Christ and most of which have been though every sort of torment and abuse and insult and cute cocktail the culture can hurl at them, they will all merely see these modern mutations and shrug and flutter their karmic eyelashes and go back to slow-dancing with the cosmos. In other words, it's a bit like tossing pebbles at a mountain. I think they'll be just fine.

But it makes me wonder: Is there really a point you can reach with your perspective and your attitude and your spiritual health where you can, in fact, go out and buy a case of Zen liqueur with your Enlightenment Visa after your sweaty Americanized yoga class where they played Led Zeppelin and Brazilian Girls and talked to you about the importance of breathing through your spine, and still smile at the irony of it all while not being controlled by any of it? I am here to suggest: absodamnlutely.

Maybe you just need to widen into it. Maybe it's about sitting back and expanding your inner eye to encompass a little bit more, to see trifles like Zen liqueur and enlightenment Visas and even Dick Cheney as merely cute little distractions you can enjoy at will, safe in the knowledge that, no matter how hard they try, they can't come anywhere near the real meaning of that stone in the Zen garden. You think? Shall we raise a glass of "Holy Hell" Jesus-Flavored Tequila in agreement? Salud!

Mark Morford