Religious Left and Its Bull
B ā m in Bengali can mean “buttocks.” B ā m can also mean “ointment.” Again, B ā m means “leftist.” The B ā m I am speaking of here is the vagabond, the eccentric wanderer, or even the beggar. When this sense of B ā m was joined with Dharma (“religion”), there arose, in the 1950s, a major literary revolution in America—the land of “un-leftist” culture. We know that in any country, a revolution has several centers. This one had three: Greenwich Village (New York City), Venice West (Southern California), and North Beach (San Francisco). A group of young men in their mid-twenties—followers of Zen Buddhism, believers in a Bohemian way of life, committed to writing literature for personal ends. Drugs, jazz, sexuality, and intellectualism—the literary historians named this clan of poets and writers The Beat Generation. Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac—these poets and writers of the Beat Generation created quite a stir in American social lif...