Ferlinghetti’s Marvelous Intoxicating Liquor

When asked whether poetry still matters today, poet, publisher, activist and cofounder of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, told an interviewer that, hell yes, it matters.

Poetry, Ferlinghetti said, is “all the disparate elements of the new civilization, the new culture of the 21^st century. One of these days,” he continued, “the brew is going to coalesce into a marvelous new intoxicating liquor.”

Intoxicating indeed. For poetry has always been about evolution and revolution, whether of society or of the spirit. And as Ferlinghetti, who passed away yesterday at age 101 noted, it has always been, and will likely always be, the youth in society who take up the torch and carry it forward.

Ferlinghetti knew of whence he spoke, having nurtured generations of poets and writers including, in the early years, counterculture creatives such as Allen Ginsberg, Neil Cassady and Jack Kerouac among others.

The articulation of a new ecological and spiritual consciousness, Ferlinghetti observed, came out of the youth rebellion. And for decades they came to his bookstore and literary meeting place on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco, Beats, then Hippies, and generations that followed.

He participated in and helped foment a revolution in consciousness, publishing Allen Ginsberg’s, “Howl, one of the 20^th Century’s most famous poems, which led to Ferlinghetti’s arrest for “willfully and lewdly” publishing “indecent writings”.

In Ferlinghetti’s view, poetry was insurgent art, as described in his 2007 work by the same name.

“Poetry as Insurgent Art”

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?

What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic

times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna

St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American

or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words….

These last few years, Ferlinghetti’s words seem especially prescient. “Civilization self-destructs,” and, “Nemesis is knocking at the door.” So, we look to those who would be poets, capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times. We need them to reconcile the disparate elements of the new civilization and “conquer the conquerors with words….”

Rush Limbaugh: For Whom the Bell Tolled

Whether you loved the man or couldn’t stand him, Rush Limbaugh was a showman who used the airwaves brilliantly, and he hurt a lot of people in the process. For decades he got away with the same shtick, masquerading as a conservative and ridiculing anyone and everyone who didn’t agree with him.

From scientists studying global warming to Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, no one was safe from his vitriolic barbs. He slandered Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” on-air because she advocated for health insurance to cover women’s contraception. And he said former Philadelphia Eagle Donovan McNabb, who led his team to three NFC championship games and a Super Bowl, was overrated because the media wanted to see a Black quarterback succeed.

Limbaugh deserved an Oscar for turning in a convincing performance as an angry white man who was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. But if his listeners, 72 percent of whom were men, thought about it, they might have wondered what someone who makes $50 million a year has to be so angry about? Or how he pretended to occupy the high moral ground and feign righteous indignation for so many years, considering he was married four times and was a longtime abuser of oxycodone, despite publicly condemning drug abuse.

Colleagues who knew Limbaugh back in the day remembered a young man who bounced from job to job. One former co-worker from his early days in radio said when Limbaugh had little or no following and was struggling for ratings, he made an off-the-cuff inflammatory comment on the air and just like that, the lights on the station switchboard lit up. Being a cagey fellow, Limbaugh quickly connected the dots. Controversy sold, and the more outrageous his comments, the higher his ratings climbed.

His main appeal was fear, which has always been a big seller, especially with people who are most comfortable with simplistic explanations. Limbaugh clearly understood that, and he made it okay for his listeners to cling to their personal biases. When his mouth got him into trouble, he shrugged it off with, “that’s not what I meant,” a familiar refrain, these last four years in particular.

He never did apologize or retract his statements about McNabb or Fluke, who he said wanted the government to “pay for her to have sex.” Limbaugh dug in his heels, despite a backlash of public opinion and advertisers bailing on his show, and subsequently said of Fluke, “She’s having so much sex she can’t pay for it, and we should.”

At the time, Georgetown University president, Dr. John DeGioia, responded to Limbaugh with a quote by St. Augustine, which is as true today as ever. St. Augustine’s words, DeGioia said, “captured the sense of what is required in civil discourse: ‘Let us, on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim that we have already discovered the truth. Let us seek it together as something which is known to neither of us. For then only may we seek it, lovingly and tranquilly, if there be no bold presumption that it is already discovered and possessed.’”

Limbaugh wasn’t interested in civil discourse, laying aside arrogance or seeking truth. He was emblematic of a society that has become increasingly hostile and divided. This week, when the bell tolled for Rush Limbaugh, his ratings no longer mattered and his considerable wealth could not insulate him from the fate we all eventually face. He was called to answer to a Higher Power, one that asks us to do to others as we would have them do to us.