From the Baton Rouge Advocate:
Zen Headline Writing
17 Responses to Zen Headline Writing
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Nothing at all. You know the lazy convention: take something that doesn’t actually mean anything, but that sounds mysteriously profound, and call it “Zen.”
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And if other things don’t work, then…
“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…”Was Yeats foreseeing 21st century Louisiana politics? Hmmm…
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Ted Fulmer says:
And people wonder why newspaper readership is down.
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Zach says:
Yeah, you right, you right.
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Sean says:
“And people wonder why newspaper readership is down.”
Agreed, broadly, but I’d probably be more likely to buy a paper if I saw a headline as inscrutable as that!
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Niall says:
To be fair, it does sound like an aphorism. Maybe Taoist rather than Zen.
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Dave D. says:
Franklin, you never use koans? When someone says something like this is zen, they mean it has the absurd yet profound feeling of a koan. Birds fly in the sea, Fish swim in the trees. Does a dog have Buddha nature? Though they stretch the definition horribly in most cases-a koan is supposed to be pointless because words can’t transmit zen teachings.
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Dave D, yes, I know about koans, and they are very serious, demanding tools in Zen study. (There is a recent compendium, “The Book of Mu”, about the most famous koans, which is really quite good.) Just to be clear: I’m not outraged or anything by “pop” references and understandings of Zen, but I also personally do not regularly joke about virgin births or the Trinity or other ideas that are also fodder for comedians.
BTW, “things work only if other things work” is true, and in many cases a deep truth that is not always obvious. For example, I work as a software developer, and a computer program does not work unless all its dependencies also work. There is a graph of causality not only in nature (whether in a physical or moral sense) but also in our own creations.
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The headline that can be read is not the true headline….
In all seriousness, when Thich Nhat Hanh explains the Buddhist concept of pratītyasamutpāda (“dependent origination”), he uses very similar terms: “This becomes that, and that becomes this.” In a tape of his I once listened to, he came even closer: “This is so because that is so.” So maybe it is a Zen headline.
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Lord Karth says:
“To know what you know, and to know what you don’t know, is the characteristic of one who knows.”
–Kung Fu’Tze.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
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MH - Secular Misanthropist says:
“Wherever you go, there you are” – Buckaroo Banzai
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TWylite says:
I’d like to hear what the Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things has to say about this controversy.
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EHH says:
I have to agree with Franklin at 8:41 on this one. This is one of those obvious truths that we usually never see until we trip over it. Especially in a milieu that thinks in atomistic individualist terms it is easy to forget that everything is in a web of mutual dependency.
I’m a software developer as well. The error cases usually overlooked are those in which the other things didn’t work. In fact, one crosses my desk (or screen) today…
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Brian says:
The very bestest headline ever was one from a geophysics journal from about a decade ago:
Study yields results.
(I always assumed it was a standard journal placeholder that never got replaced in the publication process, but maybe the authors were just brilliant beyond the capacity of normal human comprehension.)
Tony D. 
What does this have to do with Zen? Seriously (as one who does Zen meditation every day).