Allen Ginsberg at Georgian Court, 1995, Q & A continues: – see here
AG: So, I realized that everybody that was running everything was a bunch of dopes. Total blunders in every department and it was all covered over by some kind of.. by official-ese language. So the official-ese language that was being used, as described by Orwell, is, generally, use of abstraction to cover over specific information, specific reality, and that the generalization and abstraction of official-ese was actually a kind of hallucination. And it all goes back to something that William Blake says, “Labor well the Minute Particulars, take care of the Little Ones, generalization and abstraction is the plea of the hypocrite named scoundrel, for Art and Science cannot be organized but in minutely organized particulars.”[Editorial note – the exact quote is -“Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones;/And those who are in misery cannot remain so long,/If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth/.…/He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars./General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;/For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars…“]. And that fits in with the poetics that I described in William Carlos Williams, “no ideas but in things”, no ideas but in minute particular details, direct perception. So, I began to distrust large abstract windy generalizations from the media, or from science, from anywhere, and appreciate contradiction at the same time—“negative capability”.
So that it finally gets more and more garish when you see the neoconservatives claiming that this is a Christian country and it should be going by God, (their God, they’re the interpreters of who the God is). It’s like the weirdest sort of schizophrenia, and they’ve got a lot of power now (1995 – sic). They got a lot of power over people’s minds because they own all these television and radio stations. They’re blathering constantly because they’re the only people with enough aggression to want to take over! Everybody else is, you know, already dizzy with the horrors that we’ve created on the planet, and, you know, wanting to, you know, maybe let go a little bit and not pursue an aggressive control policy, and here are these last fanatics, like the Ayatollahs and Pat Robertson. Well, the same fundamentalist fanatics, claiming to speak for some Nobodaddy, up there, somewhere else, and claiming to speak for them, claiming that their book – the Bible, or the Quran, is the Word, and everybody else has gotta obey it.
It’s just like the Stalinists with the Marxist theory. So they are all Stalin-oids, actually. Pat Robertson has a Stalin-oid mentality, and his language is the same, particularly in attacking art. Stalin’s attack on art was on, you know, the greatest poets that he sent to the concentration camps – They were “elitist individuals”, individualists. “cosmopolitans and elitist individuals” and that’s exactly the phrasing that Newt Gingrich is using against the artist with the NEA, – that this is an elitist bunch of elitist individuals, why should the taxpayer have to pay for these elitist individuals? Why should the Russian government have to sort of put-up money for degenerate elitist individuals like Akhmadulina, or Mayakovsky, or any of the great writers too the century? And Hitler had the idea for what … “degenerate art” , Jesse Helms‘ phrase too – or “spiritual corruption”, that was Mao Zedong’s phrase. It’s the same mentality and I have no doubt if those guys took over, they’d have concentration camps and mass deaths also because they believe that they have the word of God just like Stalin believed he had the word from Marx, although he was faking it. Mao thought he was the ultimate arbiter of what was reality. These guys think that there’s one reality. There’s no sense of negative capability – two things can exist in the same mind at the same time. They have no sense of that but are trying to impose a monotheist-absolutism known in the American East as the inerrancy theory of the Bible. Inerrancy – the Bible is making no errors, and you have to go back to that. That’s Pat Robertson’s basic thing, trained by.. there’s a guy behind it all, actually. There’s one elder power behind the throne who trained Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, (Jerry) Falwell. Ever hear of that? – the Reverend W.A. Criswell – anybody ever heard of him? – Criswell? I think he’s got a Church of Inerrancy or something like that in California. The two guys, a guy, (William Rush Dewey (sic?)), and another guy that I was talking about, Criswell, who actually were the mentors of all these fundamentalist, televangelist, theo-politicians. I think they have the same capacity for concentration camps because they believe that they are divinely inspired to the extent that they’re not hypocrites. You know, they’d be better off as hypocrites, maybe giving them the credit for being sincere – Fifty-fifty – are they hypocrites? or are they sincere? Do they really believe what they’re saying? Who knows? Don’t even know. That’s the worst part of it. If it’s just a conscious scam or whether they really believe that shit!
They say the Bible is.. inerrant, the world was born in 4004 BC, and not even as a symbol, but you know, is a literal thing. So, we’re faced with that, and I think that’s why there is such a renaissance of interest in the Beat generation because the Beat generation had a lot of individualists who had a sense of humor and tolerance and variety – sexually and metaphysically – and respect for spirit, and respect for medication, and an actual interest in examining the mind. And, above all, an interest in curbing our own aggression. And apparently the mentality of the All-American spirit from (Ronald) Reagan on up is that, in a free market, aggression is very important. Aggression wins. Aggression is the macho character, rather than a generosity of spirit or openness of spirit. There does seem to be a Darwinian aggression psychology that’s being cultivated politically and psychologically in the country, reinforced by television, reinforced by all this mental aggression of “I’m talking for God, and I know God, and you don’t know God.” So, we’re in for what Pat Buchanan does call ‘”a spiritual battle”, a battle for the soul of America. It’s really interesting and I think very often, very early, a lot of the Beat writers realized that, that there was, probably…. that’s Whitman when he says that unless in the preface to Democratic Vistas, where he says that, unless citizens developed affection for each other, actual affection of a glue for democracy, this nation was doomed to an impotence and a status among.. his phrase – “the damned of nations” – “among the damned of nations”, because we have so much power. What’s the remedy? He suggests – tenderness. What’s the remedy the right-winger suggests? Certainly, it isn’t tenderness, it’s some kind of moralistic, harsh, judgmental, put-down, sourpuss thing. I think the Beat generation people prefer to feel more glee.
to be continued