"Freedom's" Just Another Word, Just Something Else To Use - Letter In Response To A Callow Poet

I have every reason to believe I've read more of Allen Ginsberg's later poetry and more of his prose than you have.   His later poetry is the most ridiculous crap all about his one and only theme after his stupid and useless "America"  Allen and his fellow boy friends.  I don't mean just the many who he screwed around with - including the one from who he probably caught the Hep-C that eventually killed him and which he, irresponsibly, exposed others to.  I mean his fellow "Beats" including the ones he was not fuck-buddies with. 

The "beat [huh] school" is a bunch of post-war guys who figured out that they could act like 12-year-old boys whose goal is to get kicks from shocking their elders who mostly skivved off of putting any effort into learning and who got old enough to be able to drive and screw around and latched onto the post-war phenomeon of getting critics and, so, lazy university profs who wanted to be kewel too to praise any old crap they'd put down on paper and get into print.  It was really a triumph of marketing and PR, not thought or art.  It certainly wasn't a triumph of superior moral values.

Lots of Ginsberg's poetry is trivial, just about every line of it.  I wish I could call it "navel gazing" but he preferred to meditate on other body parts, functions and products.

His involvement with the sleaziest Western corruption of what is generally here called "Buddhism" as can be fairly personified in the alcoholic, sex pervert, crook,  "holy man" Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche* and in dozens of other such cult leaders (Sogyal Rinpoche), in that field of degeneracy could certainly be gone into in regard to celebrity.  I think there is a little bit of rethinking that on the part of real Buddhists who have come to regret their involvement with Western celebrities and Western methods of marketing, wealth accumulation and fame.  They're learing the lessons that Western religion is always having to learn and relearn about how those very things that sustain wealth and fame and celebrity inevitably corrupt everything.  Ginsberg and his like was part of what they need to recover from.  Maybe if they'd read the Bible more closely they might have seen that most of the Old Testament after Exodus deals with such matters in incredible detail and with incredible insight.  But being Jewish wasn't fashionable and all those commandments cramped their style.  Not to mention Christianity. 

The triviality and stupidity of so much of post-war art and lit was the most obvious pitch into amoral decadence in the history of Western art, it was the flowering of early 20th century "modernism" of the kind which was purposefully amoral and which created around the sensations of violence and sex and, unsurprisngly, really, always seemed to be playing footsie with such things as fascism and Nazism and various Marxisms, based on one mass murdering gangster strongman despot or another.   

In its post-war manifestation, it is intimately tied to modern mass media  and its basis, commercial advertising that promotes celebrity and sensation instead of truth.  It is intimately tied to the very systems that Allen Ginsberg pretended to rail against in America and in Howl.  As I pointed out, Ginsberg and the rest of the Beats are every much a part of what they were allegedly opposed to, they are thoroughly middle-class icons of ersatz respectability even by those who never, ever read anything they wrote but who might watch a movie that uses them as a reference. 

*  Ginsberg's guru, just one aspect of his celebrity shtick, no doubt someone who was as eager to use Ginsberg's celebrity as Ginsberg was his, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was widely known for sexually assaulting and sexually and otherwise manipulating members of his cult, something which was publicly known and excused as a legitimate tactic in achieving "elightenment" shows how dangerous the more sensational schools like Zen and Tantric Buddhism can be. 

If you want to see what the nature of his "spiritual" leadership is you should check out the antics of his hand chosen successor, Ösel Tendzin, a western merchant of such "Buddhism" who CTR chose as his successor and who, even after he learned he'd been infected with HIV through his screwing around with "students" and others knowingly had un-safe sex with "students" one of whom he's known to have infected and who died of AIDS.  Apparently CTR was about as discerning as the ones who decided he had what it took to spread the message of this ersatz form of Buddhism.  Oh, and CTR's son, Ösel Tendzin's successor,  Mipham Rinpoche is currently on leave after being investigated for sexual assault and abuse. Oddly, I don't hear calls for the Shambala corporation to be shut down. 

Oddly, you hardly ever hear such matters discussed and made into major Hollywood movies of the kind that get Oscars.  Odd because so many Hollywood types go in for just such schools of "Buddhism".  I'll give some, and I have to emphisize that it is only SOME Buddhists this, they're talking about it among themselves and, unsurprisingly, they're finding a lot of the same bases of the problem that are behind the Catholic sexusal abuse crisis, patriarchal rule, concentration of power, insufficient preventative and punitive inhibitions to this happening.   One of the things in this Tricycle article that jumped out at me was how the Zen claims of "freedom" for the "enlightened" masters was used as a means of the perverts to manipulate people into letting them have sex with them and letting them get away with it.  "Freedom" it turns out can be turned from a noble aspiration into an idol, it certainly is a substitute for God in American secular culture.  Look at how Ginzberg used it as his excuse for supporting the child-rape advocacy group NAMBLA.   

Update: Oh, there are even people who are, at times, classified as being in the Zen school of Buddhism who I respect, who I have never read anything against - though . . .  I have a lot of respect for Titch Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese teacher, "Thay".   I was deeply influenced by one of his followers who taught me walking meditation though the "mindfulness" aspect of it, just meditating on the sensation of walking, gave way to me using it to reflect on The Law and The Gospel.  I found the combination of Buddhist meditation technology and the Hebrew tradition was ever so much more than mere mindfulness.  

That "though", one of his Western lay followers who had started a publishing company and another corporate entity around TNH wrote an article complaining when TNH took control of those and folded them into an entity more in control of ordained persons living the religious life.  I don't know enough about it to get all of it but I wonder if, seeing the many dangers in commercial Buddhist clap-trap TNH wasn't trying to prevent that in his Plum Village community.   I don't know a lot about such interactions of religious publishing and commerce but I wonder what a study of that in regard to other religious publishing companies might show.   I don't think that "scandal" as some presented it as being in any way is like what I wrote about above. Anything, though, can be subject to corruption, that's certainly not a shock to a serious student of Buddhism.  Especially when there isn't transparency and accountability - look at the Mueller Report and the surrounding use of it.