"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night"
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl, 1956
Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem, Howl turned 50 this year. Howl at 50 stands as a prophetic and powerful, sexually-charged nightmare vision - a searing lament for a modern society diseased by materialism, conformity, and the mechanizations of war and destruction.
"who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa"
Soon after its publication in 1956, as Ginsberg sat safely in Algiers, Howl publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao were arrested on obscenity charges.
"who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness"
ACLU attorney Albert Bendich defended the men. Judge Clayton Horn's ruling that Howl was not obscene established an early legal precedent of "redeeming social importance". Ginsberg was never charged.
"who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated"
Fifty years after Ginsberg's Howl lit a fire in the literary world, ignited a debate on censorship and engendered a criminal case for obscenity - the murky semantics of the terms "obscenity" and "indecency" remain the bane of artists, free-speech advocates and those of us who feel that the depiction of a sex act between consenting adults is far less offensive and dangerous than a cavalier attitude toward the "collateral damage" of war or the malfeasance of our supposed leaders.
Under George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of the 9-11 hijackers who have used that day's tragedy to methodically dismantle our democracy, instill fear and assault our sensibilities, obscenity has become institutionalized. I don't refer to the "obscenity" of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover or Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but rather the truly morally repugnant act of sending men and woman to kill and be killed on a lie and a prayer - with the Iraq War being the central act of their obscenity around which all others orbit.
It's become increasingly difficult to understand and explain the perverse resistance of so many American's to confront the obscenity of real violence and destruction with the same zeal by which they are willing to attack a poem, painting or photograph. If it is in our better nature to eliminate obscenity whenever and wherever it appears, then I will be happy to identify opportunities for those who are having a hard time recognizing it when it genuinely rears it's ugly head.
First and foremost, we are beaten daily to near-death by the savage obscenity of war. Those who have lied to bring us war have developed a special flair for the obscene and appear to relish the opportunity to display it.
"who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons"
We endure the obscene corruption of our elected officials and of those who would pay for their favor. We are slowly bled to death by the obscenity of corporatism and it's collusion with government to create massive wealth for the very few at the expense of the many.
"who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality"
We are numbed into submission by the obscene machinery of the corporate controlled media - whose interests other than responsible reporting are so varied and vast that their allegiance to the guiding principles of journalism pales in comparison to their fealty to the power centers of Washington.
"a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars"
We are presented with frighteningly obscene evidence of US government sanctioned torture and the denial of basic human rights. The obscenity of a man who claims to follow the teachings of Jesus while allowing torture reaches a point at which words fail.
"who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second"
We are confounded by the repeated obscenity of hateful individuals in highest positions of government whose carefully conceived appeals to the worst of man's nature are designed to divide and discriminate against those already occupying the tenuous fringes of society.
"who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate, the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom"
Obscenity unlike beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Obscenity is a neutered beast that eats its young - not a sexual being entering its lover. Obscenity is a dark veil that cloaks the truth and suffocates the soul. Obscenity is the long running tragedy of violence and lies that continues unabated in the halls of the White House and Congress.
"the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
Thanks to Allen Ginsberg. Please support art, the important work of the ACLU, independent booksellers and the cause of free expression in all its forms.
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