Upsoaring wings: Breath is money

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the grand old man of the Beat generation—poet, artist, bookseller and publisher—celebrated his 100^th birthday last month by publishing an autobiographical novel. He doesn’t consider himself a Beat poet, but he certainly captured those times.

As owner of City Lights Bookstore and Publishing, he published many of the Beats; he was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allan Ginsburg’s Howl. The subsequent trial was a landmark First Amendment case, which Ferlinghetti won when the judge ruled the poem had redeeming social value.

Seems odd that this happened in San Francisco, but it was the 50s.

Ferlinghetti identifies as a philosophical anarchist, and he has opposed totalitarianism all his life. In 2006, in the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the Tea Party and other bad juju, Ferlinghetti wrote a poem echoing Khalil Gibran’s “Pity the Nation”. It’s appalling that the update was needed 73 years after Gibran, and that it’s even more needed 13 years on.

“Pity the Nation”

(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerers

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows

No other language but its own

And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money

And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people

who allow their rights to  erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

 My country, tears of thee

 Sweet land of liberty!