Fraud by David Rakoff Page A

aikido class in Japanese and speaking fluently. So this recent and precariously trendy embrace of Tibet comes as something of a surprise. According to the Omega catalog, Seagal, a.k.a. Terton Rinpoche, has been formally recognized as a
tulku
(incarnate lama from a past life) by H. H. Penor Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. There is perplexity within the American intelligentsia devoted to the Tibetan cause as to how Seagal earned the title so effortlessly. “I haven’t looked into this, but I’m curious as to under what conditions or terms he was accorded this status,” says Ganden Thurman, director of special projects at Tibet House in New York. “I’m afraid it troubles me,” Thurman adds. “I always wondered at the action heroes he played. He always seems to be the only one who tortures his enemies.”
    For his part, Seagal frames his involvement with Tibet in much the same way he has described his past possible involvements with things like the CIA and sundry international cloak-and-dagger operations: semishrouded, covert, and intrinsically unreliable. “I was in a monastery in Kyoto and met some monks from Tibet who had been tortured by the Chinese. As I was the only one who had studied herbology, bone manipulation, and acupuncture, I treated them, and there was an immediate connection.”
    It’s a familiar trajectory. One day you’re a simple bone manipulator, the next you’re teaching torture victims how to get centered. You almost can’t swing a reincarnated cat without hitting someone who’s followed just this path. The audience, completely unbothered by the essential unverifiability of Seagal’s explanation, nods with appreciative understanding; some people close their eyes and smile, credulously savoring the moment like a divine chocolate.
     
    “Mealtimes are signaled by three blows on a conch shell,” says the Omega welcome booklet. It’s a fairly impressive display of lung capacity, and the people lying here and there about the hill outside the dining hall applaud. Can I really be the only one for whom blowing a conch shell resonates with associations to
Lord of the Flies
and the grisly, horrible death of Piggy? But blithe decontextualization seems to be the name of the game here (Inner Voyage cruise, anyone?).
    Just as at freshman orientation in college, where the first person you eat lunch with ends up being the person with whom you take all your meals for the rest of the week, whether you like it or not, I am forcibly bonded with Meg, a woman in her late thirties from Massachusetts. She is the first person to speak to me at breakfast on Saturday. I ask her what she thinks of Seagal.
    “He’s interesting,” she says.
    “Yes. Counterintuitively so,” I reply.
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s counter to my intuition. I’m surprised. He’s quite smart and funny. It’s not what I was expecting.”
    She rolls her tongue around inside her cheek with a smile. “That’s not intuition. That’s judgment.” She is very pleased with herself. This is what passes for a New Age zinger.
    Despite his CIA-Buddhist puffery, the biggest surprise about Steven Seagal is that he is not an idiot—far from it. More often than not, he is, in fact, smart, funny, and eminently entertaining. He is far and away the very best thing about the weekend, and he displays near saintly patience and equanimity in answering three days’ worth of frequently whacked-out questions with respect and great good humor.
    But he is also chemically, tragically late. As our pedagogical leader, his duties are light, having only to lead us in a morning session from nine to twelve and an afternoon class from two-thirty to five-thirty. Seagal tends to arrive at least an hour into each and stays for only an hour. As the seminar continues, the attrition rate mounts. People switch to other workshops, others simply leave. Those who remain are led through a twice daily stretching routine led by Larry Reynosa,