明天，便是毛泽东与斯大林、希特勒等臭名昭著的其他独裁者相聚三十周年的日子。三十年来，中国大地发生了巨大的变化。尤其是一九七八年开始的经济体制改革和对外开放，使得中国的经济得到了快速发展，人民的生活水平在相当程度上得到了改善。假如毛泽东没有离去，这些积极的变化是不可思议的。同时，毛泽东的幽灵也从来没有停止过在中国这片大地徘徊。他的集权主义的思想和留下的镇压性的政治体制，至今仍然是中国统治者治理国家的基石。

中国政府正在通过各种方式开展纪念毛泽东的活动。为了不至于让纪念毛泽东的活动对他们统治的形成威胁，他们煞费苦心地掩盖历史真相，为纪念活动定下了各种戒律，例如，各种纪念活动和纪念文章不准涉及毛泽东发动的文革，不准涉及反思反右、不准反思毛泽东等等。其用心良苦，路人皆知。

事实上，毛泽东思想的基本核心，不仅与中国社会的传统格格不入，与人类进步的趋势格格不入，即使是与现行领导人口头所宣示的政策主张也是格格不入。但是，现行领导人一方面宣称要与时俱进，另一方面仍然口口声声要高举毛泽东的旗帜，这实在是一幅滑稽异常的画面。

现行领导人上台以来，提出了“构建和谐社会”的口号。这个口号的提出，是为了应对此起彼伏的危机，缓和社会矛盾。但是这个口号实际上是与毛的基本思想完全背道而驰的。毛泽东自己宣称，他的核心思想是三个坚持：坚持阶级斗争，坚持无产阶级专政，坚持无产阶级专政下的继续革命。正是在这一理论基础上，他不断地挑起各种斗争。在党内，不断地与所谓修正主义分子和走资本主义道路的当权派作斗争；在党外，不断地与地、富、反、坏、右作斗争。在共产党内，他号称进行了十一次路线斗争。在他统治中国的二十七年间，斗得民不聊生，老百姓一贫如洗。

“以民为本”是现行领导人提出的另一个标志性的口号。这个口号同样与他们所要坚持的毛泽东思想格格不入。在毛的眼中，他的权力最重要，他在世界革命中的领袖地位最重要。至于人民的利益、以至于人民的生命都不过是染红他的王冠的牺牲品而已。一九五八年五月，毛在八大二次会议上放出了惊世骇俗的狂人呓语：“打原子弹没有经验，不知道死多少，最好人口剩下一半，次好剩三分之一全世界十九亿人，还有九亿多人，九亿人也好办事，几个五年计划就发展起来，换来个帝国主义灭亡，资本主义全部消灭，取得永久和平。所以说，真打原子战，不见得是坏事。”同年九月，他又写信给赫鲁晓夫：“为了最后胜利，灭掉帝国主义，我们愿意承担第一个打击，无非是死一大堆人。”如果说不惜让中国的一半人口葬身于原子弹的蘑菇云下只不过是毛的一个狂想，那末为了推行他的农业社会主义的主张而让数以千万的中国农民成为恶鬼冤魂却是千真万确的现实。在毛的治下非正常死亡的中国人大大超过了被日本人杀戮的中国人。在毛那里，人民不仅不是本，甚至连末也不配。

高举毛的旗帜，也与现行中国领导人所宣示的“继续改革开放”方针相违背。现行的所有有效的改革措施，无论是农村的承包责任制、还是城市的国有企业改革、发展私营企业、鼓励外国投资、保护私有产权、加入国际分工等等措施，无一不是被毛泽东明确批判为修正主义的东西。在毛的治下，不少人为了提倡、试验这些改进民生的措施而被整得妻离子散、家破人亡，甚至连国家主席也性命难保。

既然现行领导人的许多政策主张与毛泽东思想全然不符，为什么他们还要死死抱住毛的僵尸不放呢？其中的第一个原因，就是为了申明他们统治的合法性。从邓小平开始，历任中国领导人都宣称自己是毛泽东的正统传人。似乎不如此就无法证明自己统治的合法性。一个号称“人民共和国”的政府，在合法性问题上竟然不得不乞灵于一具三十年前制成的干尸。这不仅是对毛以后历届政府的绝顶的讽刺，也是十三亿中国人的莫大的悲哀。不知道什么时候，生活在二十一世纪、占世界人口五分之一的中国才能真正实行由人民来授予统治者权力？

同时，毛以后的中国历届领导人抱住毛的尸魂无法撒手，也是由于他们与毛的集权思想有著千丝万缕的联系的缘故。没有了毛的镇压的思想、没有了毛为他们留下的镇压人民的国家机器，他们将无法维持现有统治。在这一点上，他们可是一点也没有“与时俱进”。

现在正在台上的第四代中国领导人，他们的世界观是在中国思想史上最为压抑的时代形成的。除了毛泽东思想，他们不知道有任何别的东西。这是中国历史上最没有创造性、最没有理想的一代人，是一个在最黑暗的年代经过最严格的逆向淘汰的一代人。没有了毛泽东思想，他们就失去了自我。当然，他们的没有理想和实用主义的性格，也使得他们在处理各种危机时能够进行一些不论“主义”的改良。这就形成了前面所说得他们的一些政策主张与毛泽东思想的矛盾的现象。但是，这种改良无法形成大的突破，也无法应对大的危机。他们转来转去，最终还会回到毛的主义上来。从这一点看，中国人是无法指望在他们的领导下认真清算毛带给中国的灾难的。这个历史的任务恐怕只能靠下一代或者下两代人来完成。

独裁者的死亡，将带来国家天翻地覆的变化，斯大林死后的苏联是一个明证：一九五三年死，一九五六年就遭到鞭尸般批判，一夜之间，苏东各国的斯大林塑像被通通拉倒，制度由修正走向自由民主。然而，中国青出于蓝胜于蓝的独裁者毛泽东已死去整整三十年，偶像仍然屹立在天安门城楼，遗体还供奉在纪念堂，供人瞻仰崇拜。

这种奇迹当然是中共当局一手造成。毛和中共高层生前有正式契约，死后一律火化。可是，接班人为了提升其权力来源的正当性，悍然留尸造堂，愚弄天下人，其后更以社会稳定为名，禁止批毛，年复一年炮制大量扭曲史实的美化作品，继续造神运动。毛的文革浩劫，祸国殃民，滥杀无辜，都被「晚年犯错误」一语所掩盖。不许揭露，不许清算。令新生的一代又一代，脑袋被洗空，孜孜于物质追求，陷于历史和政治的无知与盲从。

但是，一个伟大民族的良知不会泯灭，嫉恶如仇的浩然正气不会断尽。对毛的理性批判，在近三十年中，仍是薪火相传，不绝于途。以其昭昭者而言，八○年代有李锐的《庐山会议实录》。作为毛的前秘书，李锐揭露中共历史上一件最卑鄙最丑恶的彭德怀冤案，把那个伟光正的党的神主外衣撕得粉碎。九○年代有御医李志绥回忆录，他以毛的贴身保健身份，描述这位中国空前的暴君的私生活，粗鄙而淫乱，把那偶像的圣洁的外衣剥得精光。来到新世纪，则有张戎和丈夫哈利戴合著的《毛：鲜为人知的故事》。这是凝聚中西文化智慧与价值观的一本毛泽东传记，作者以全新的视野和大量的发现，审视毛的一生，从而对毛和共产党在二十世纪中国的崛起，作出前所未有的惊人的剖析。

这不仅是对历史的澄清，也是对当代中国的启示，人们仔细玩味书中的精采故事后，自然会想到中共让人民付出巨大牺牲的那场革命，是多么荒谬的历史错位！而今日中国的集体沉沦，亿万人的男盗女娼，又是多么鲜明的对那场革命作了狠狠地报复！中共当局一九九六年废除反革命罪，这是他们做出的一项不事张扬的回应。虽然比起大规模引进资本主义只是一个小动作，但已显示共产革命在中国的三部曲：破坏、清洗、复辟，已经不可抑制地进入第三步。「还政于民」只是时间问题了。就像恩格斯晚年预言的那样，工人阶级必将放弃暴力而走向议会，问题是选择哪个门进去。

张戎毛传正在全世界畅销，中文版于国人期盼中也在香港隆重出版。本期专题作了独家报导。读过这本将令你百感交集的书，相信你会感谢张戎夫妇以十二年的辛劳，写了一本如纽约时报所说「全世界的人都爱读的书」。你会重新发现中国人的尊严之所在。
（金钟：开放杂志总编辑）

人间一晃三十年，老毛转眼已死了三十年了。回想当年毛泽东死时，我还在劳改队。听到他死了，我心里沉淀了一下，对我来说是凶是福不敢说，谁知会如何。虽然说我已不算犯人，也不算劳改份子，当时已是“强迫留场的就业人员”全场二千余人无一例外，编成十来个中队，对外称“地方国营霍县王庄煤矿”，对内是“山西省第四劳改独立支队。共产党的管理自有一套。“劳改”和“劳教”一旦到了头，人们就挪了窝，换成“就业人员”。我自“摘掉右派帽子”和“解除教养”已六年有余，在这个煤矿劳改队“就业”。我有一点工资，户口在这里，可以结婚（如果有人嫁给你）。每两星期有一天假。报了名，批准了可以去县城走一走。每天还是劳动。队长及干部都是公安人员。也有个禁闭室。没有站岗带枪的警卫，你要走就走，赶二十里路到县城去上火车,随你去那里，这边电话就跟着你去了。“全国一盘棋”一点也不会出差错的。

也许这是一个特别时期——“文化大革命”。你看全国从生产队到县城，从县城到中央，到处是红旗飘扬，不停的斗，斗上斗下，斗东斗西。老毛从1971年林彪反叛后也凉了。半瞎了一年多，后来又能看大文字了。人也累了，最后问了他身边的御医：“还有没有希望？”之后，一下子就完了。上边我说心里沉淀了一下，为什么“沉淀”？因为我估计着有不同的可能性。要是上台的人与毛有不同想法，我们这样的人就有好日子过，反过来，若要拿毛的鸡毛当令箭，那就很麻烦，我们有可能被“开算”。

折腾了二年，１９７９年终于离开了劳改队。

老毛怎么想？他没法想，他只要一歪倒，他就没得想。你把“它”摆成千年古尸，用高科技不腐不烂地展览，或者如同他的“战友”周恩来和刘少奇那样，烧了灰撒入海中，他都不知道，他已是万事皆空。

他不过是他人的“物品”而已。老毛成了他人的“物品”？！是的，“他”是人们的“物品”。胡锦涛就把他印上了人民币。今天毛泽东的形象就随着人民币全世界走起来了。胡锦涛不仅文革时期写了歌颂毛的文章而且今天还是如此恭颂。

也有人把毛当成“物品”的。据我的记忆，50—60年代的林昭就是全国“解放”后的第一个，她直犀入档，毫不留余地。林昭的指评成了不可替换的历史遗产。可惜中共的宣传部门真有气魄，她于是成了人不指、狗不啃的“反革命分子”。

又一个女共产党员，张志新，她也是“死硬”，她也是死咬住毛，不肯松口。最终，为了不叫她出声，把气管切断了，才开枪杀死。这两件事，我想老毛应该知道的。但是，他没应声。

待毛走了十三年之后，又有人拿他 —“物品”— 开刀，那就是1989年5月23日余志坚、喻东岳和鲁德成，他们三人蛋击毛象。这件事我保证老毛不知道。毛的大像挂在天安门城楼上，广场对面的大堂里摆着他的躯壳，任凭浏览（应该知道除了那张脸和手脚等躯壳外，其他物件早已挪移了）因为新的领导人还要吃他摆下的筵席。毛立下的规章，毛创下的法制，大致不变。却有人又来提出“五千年的专制可以休矣。” 他们手中没有工具可以把毛的大像从天安门撤下来，不然的话，非毙了不可。从林昭经张自新，再到余、鲁、喻也已卅年了。

三十年了，人间一晃，毛竟然还在。

再过三十年，人间再一晃，毛还会在吗？
──《观察》首发 

「导语：自杭州市萧山教案以来，浙江省近日至少又发生两宗群体抗争事件，浙江省成了中国这座活火山的一个喷火口。特将徃日剪辑的浙江旧闻串在一起，或者从中可以看出某些消息。毛泽东说：星星之火，可以燎原。现在已经不是星星之火，而且熊熊大火了；那么，离燎原的日子还会远吗？」

（一），浙江省最近真「热闹」

眼下中国是一座活火山，到处都是喷火口；而浙江省则是鼓包最多的省份之一。浙江省台州市，一名九岁女童溺水死亡竟演变成了群众暴力事件。九月七月晚六时左右，数百人冲击街道办公大楼，数辆汽车被砸，若干台电脑被毁，部分资料账册被烧。引起附近上千村民围观，警方出动了近四百警力疏散人群。至八日上午，事发现场仍有不少情绪激动的村民，三十余辆坐满警察的警车停在不远的椒江大桥上，防止事态进一步演变。（《中新网》、《联合早报网》）

九月六日瑞安市因官方包庇杀人疑犯也爆发了大规模群体抗争事件。该市警方出动了二十几辆警车，全副武装的特警队员拿着电棍，盾牌等，往人群中扔摧泪弹，乱棍打人；很多人被打伤，韩田村村长的娘被打伤了头.当天瑞安人民医院走廊上挤满了伤员。七日上午，几批市民分别游行到塘下镇府和塘下派出所抗议，两处工作人员全部逃窜.接着民众又涌到杀人嫌疑人开的工厂，砸了机器、又砸办公楼，帐本、文件等都被从高楼上扔下，五部汽车被群众打烂。

七月二十九日，浙江省杭州市调集大批防暴警察和武警，以数百辆军车运送到萧山区党山镇车路湾村，手持盾牌、警棍驱赶人群，随后由建设局召集的建筑工将建到一半的教堂拆除。当时从四面八方聚集到党山镇的地下基督教徒已达万人。场面一度失控，数十名教徒在沖突中被捕，另有多人受伤。杨幼光被打断两根肋骨、王爱珍被打断胸骨、还有人三根肋骨被打断，高国荣、王启明、沈建、沈巨克、王恩利、倪惠明、沈诸克、沈坚等四十七名教会领袖和基督徒被警方囚禁。关注事件并作出报导的《中国海洋报》浙江记者站记者昝爱宗先生被扣押七天后又遭报社开除。

二OO五年四月十日，浙江省东阳市画水镇农民在抗议化工厂汚染时受到三千多名公安、城管和执法人员镇压，双方发生大规模冲突。一名副市长和派出所所长被打成重伤，现场被损坏的汽车，有大巴车37辆，依维柯1辆，皮卡车1辆，包括宝马、皇冠在内的小轿车十九辆。大量催泪弹、警棍、橡皮棍、钢盔和制服被村民“缴获”并予以“展览”。村民方面有数十名受伤，王良平等十几名村民被严刑审讯，后被判处5年有期徒刑。（《维权网》等）

（二），浙江省为富人锦上添花

《新华网》报导：三十个拥有亿万资产的浙江省“老总”齐聚清华经管学院，从2005年11月7日开始接受为期12天的封闭式脱产学习。这是浙江省人事厅在清华大学首次建立非公有制经济人才培训基地，专门针对“草根浙商”量身定制培训课程。12天课程共需42万元（人民币，下同） 的学费由浙江省政府支付，住宿费和生活费则由学员自理。12天学费42万元，即一个老师对30个学员讲一天课，扣除教室租金，可收三万多元，不可谓不惊人。

据浙江省人事厅有关负责人介绍，该省民营企业家近80%都是农民出身，其中70%以上只有初中以下学历，被称为“草根浙商”。该省人事厅在清华经管学院为“草根浙商”专门量身定制的培训班，每年至少开两期。

据《京华时报》消息，此次培训班选拔学员必须符合四大标准：首先必须是省内年产值亿元、利税千万元以上规模非公企业的董事长、副董事长、总经理或副总经理；年龄在40岁左右；而学历要求是大专以上，可知所谓“草根”云云，是欺人之谈。

这则消息出笼后，网友一片哗然，几小时内就有几百条留言。绝大部分网友都持否定态度，或说多此一举的，或言“锦上添花的”等等，不一而足。浙江政府这样做，其冠冕堂皇的理由是提高这一群民营企业家的文化素质、政策法律素质和现代企业管理素质。如何使其合理合法地经营，不仅是这些富人自己的事情，也关系到当地经济的发展。因此，建立非公有制经济人才培训基地，对富翁企业家进行高层次培训，是有必要的。

但是，这些富翁们读书学习，不是为了提高自己的经营本领吗？为自己的事业而承担自己的学费，不是理所当然、天经地义的吗？而且他们也不缺这几个钱。

再说，比老板们读书急需政府财政资金的地方很多，如义务教育、“三农”问题的投资，下岗职工、城市低收入阶层、鳏寡孤独、老弱病残人员之救济，社会医疗、养老、困难职工住房资金投入。政府为什么不在这些地方“雪中送炭”，反而去为那些老总们“锦上添花”呢？

最近流行的民谣：“官员是条狗，见人就乱咬；老板扔块骨，他就跟着跑”，恐怕就很能说明问题.现在政府官员在组织上，是上级的奴才；在经济上是有钱人的走狗。所以现在的中共政府完全成了暴富阶层的代理人，政府官员与老板阶级在掠夺国有资产、社会资源中成为神圣的同盟者，用民脂民膏徃资本家屁股上贴金。相反，这个号称“为人民服务”的人民政府对人民就没有这么客气了。

（三），浙江省对穷人敲骨吸髓

这个富得不得了，富得流油的浙江省人民政府，一方面要贴钱给亿万富翁富婆上大学，给清华教师高额报酬，一方面又拚命地从乞儿兜里抢食，对贫困群体实行敲骨吸髓的盘剥，连最穷最脏的“捡破烂人”也不肯放过.

浙江省临安市人民政府去年公开拍卖“拾荒经营权”，中标者得以成立管理公司统一管理拾荒者（亦叫捡垃圾的、捡破烂者）；并公布经营城市的行政规定：

1，拾荒者必须统一佩証，牌証工本费每人60元；

2，统一着装，服装费每套60元；

3，统一车牌；

4，每月向拾荒者管理公司缴交 “经营权使用费”每人60元。

浙江省杭州市瓶窑镇的拾破烂者从去年起亦需按政府规定

1，向政府办的 “收旧拾荒管理服务站”缴纳压金每人200元；

2，购买尼龙背心（上写有 “再生使者”四个字和监督号码）每件50元；

3，缴交三轮车喷漆成本费；

4，缴交三轮车租金每天一元。

浙江省武康镇对拾荒者实行三环节、四统一和一指定的管理规定。

1，三环节：拾荒者必须经过审查、登记、发証三环节，才取得拾荒权。

2，四统一：统一划分区域；统一发放收旧拾荒服务証，一人一証，不得转让；统一着装，穿象征环保的绿色背心；统一车辆，三轮车之型号、颜色必须统一，并由管理公司统一出租。

3，一指定：废品由该镇27家收购店指定的收购点收购。

（四），不要忘记浙江省杭丝联等工厂的下岗工人们

浙江省杭州市国营企业的退休老人是杭州市、共和国建设者和国有企业改革的第一功臣，如今统统沦落为「困难的特殊群体」，他们的正当权益被剥夺、受侵犯，被逼于去年6月2日集体到市政府请愿，但遭到由市劳动保障局纪委书记姚萍亲临指挥的大批身穿黑色制服，不明来历的人抓、推、拖、打。杭丝联65岁退休老人张宁洲更是在车上遭到暴力殴打、揿头捂嘴、强行搜身的非人遭遇，当他难以忍受，喊「毛主席万岁」时，这批所谓的「执法者」竟恶狠狠地说：「你叫毛主席万岁就打死你！」

为此，陈忍鉴（住址：建国中路锅子弄30号，原杭丝联工人，电话号码： 0571-87812254）、王水根（原木材厂工人、0571-85135291）、陈绍淦（原浙麻厂工人、0571-88015461）、赵林云（原机床厂工人、0571-88057282）、吴鈊德 （原杭丝联工人、0571-88012763）等300余人杭州市企业退休人员再向杭州市公安局、市政府信访局申请於2005年10月20日举行游行，希望能引起政府部门的重视和使问题得以妥善解决，不幸冷血的政府又一次扼杀了这穷人的「维护尊严、讨回公道、伸张正义」的正当要求。

（五），普天下劳苦人都有一本血泪账

是不是仅仅浙江省人民政府如此对待老百姓呢？不是。凡是中共统治下的工人、农民、小市民、小知识分子，无一不受中共的压廹、抢掠和盘剥。例如大陆重工业基地辽宁的鞍山钢铁公司，原有四十万职工，几年改革下来，现在只剩下八万职工，「形势一片大好，经济效益不断提高，每年上缴国家几十亿税收」，但其代价是三十多万职工下岗回家，仅靠极低的工资来维持生活。鞍钢的「复兴」是牺牲一代工人阶级利益换来的，这些下岗工人集体上访要求增加工资，政府却养了大批警察来对付手无寸铁的工人，对他们进行殴打、抓扑。老工人们流着泪说，我们本来是领导阶级、是国家主人呀！

再如甘肃省，一个从事教育工作20—40年的民办教师每月薪水只有40元人民币，即每天的收入是一元多（中共甘肃省渭源县委副书记李迎新：《给中共甘肃省委、教育部的关於渭源县代课教师状况调研报告》，2005年7月28日《甘肃日报》）；也就是说，清华大学的教师收入是渭源县民办教师收入的三万倍，这大约是我们伟大祖国创造的又一个可耻的「世界记录」。

胡锦涛、温家宝的「新三民主义」政府有大把钱养打老百姓的警察、流氓，买镇压刁民的军火，收买为其帮腔的知识精英，却不肯救助水深火热中的贫苦百姓，却不肯稍敛对弱势群体的苛索。一边穷奢极侈，一边民不聊生；一边荒淫无耻，一边水深火热；一边是残酷的压榨，一边沸腾的火山。这就是今天中共统治下的大陆社会，这就是中共所吹嘘的「和谐」和「盛世」。

9-nov-2005於流浮山寨

新世纪新闻网（www.newcenturynews.com）

Howl at fifty

50 years ago, a San Francisco gallery poetry reading launched a literary renaissance that would change America’s consciousness. The spiritual and environmental legacy of Allen Ginsberg

by Jonah Raskin

He wanted poets to rival priests and poetry readings to replace Sunday sermons. His parents named him Irwin Allen, but he called himself Allen Ginsberg, and he wrote poetry with a passion. Fifty years ago, on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, an avant-garde art gallery located at 3119 Fillmore St. in San Francisco, he performed Howl for the first time in public and brought American poetry back to life. Jack Kerouac — then his oldest, closest friend — predicted that Howl would make him famous all over the Bay Area and that a poetry Renaissance would shake San Francisco.

Beyond the walls of “The Six,” and all across America, poets — with few exceptions — languished and despaired. At most colleges, English departments turned up their noses at living poets — and some dead ones, too. Even Walt Whitman went largely unread and, as the poet and critic Muriel Rukeyser observed in The Life of Poetry, men who wrote poems ran the risk of finding themselves branded homosexuals. Fifty years ago, America was still in the throes of McCarthyism and the Cold War’s big cultural chill. The conformist Man in the Gray Flannel Suit epitomized American manhood. Even in San Francisco, Howl’s birthplace, the district attorney would prosecute the poem — for obscenity.

Lookouts and Dharma Bums

By the standards of today’s outrageous rappers and performance artists, the groundbreaking poets who performed at The Six fifty years ago might seem staid. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Phil Lamantia and Michael McClure grew up in white, middle-class families. They did not go hungry (except by choice) or homeless — though they explored homeless haunts. Ginsberg would come to be known as a gay poet, but in 1955 he was only beginning to shape his sexual persona and hadn’t come out of the closet. Snyder and Whalen (ex-roommates at Reed College) later became Buddhists, but in 1955 Snyder hadn’t yet been to Japan and Whalen hadn’t vowed to become a Zen monk. That summer, Snyder worked in Yosemite clearing trails (earlier he had been a lookout ranger in Washington’s Skagit range). At 25, he was unpublished. The carefully etched poems about mountains, valleys, rocks and streams that later appear in his first book, Riprap (1959), were unknown.

In October 1955, they were all beginners. Even Kerouac, who attended the event (but didn’t read), hadn’t yet received literary acclaim and recognition. On the Road would be published two years later and Dharma Bums, which recounts his backpacking adventures with Snyder and The Six reading, didn’t appear until 1958. Although no person of color and no woman read that night, The Six event inspired poets of color and women — Le Roi Jones, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, and Anne Waldman, to name a few — because it brought poetry down from the sacrosanct halls of the academy. It took poetry off the musty printed page into the lives of listeners.

It is unlikely that The Six reading — the inaugural Beat Generation event — could have happened anywhere else but San Francisco. The city boasted a lively poetry scene, a bohemian subculture, and radical political movements. The city’s thriving working-class history made a vast difference to Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, and Lamantia, a surrealistic poet in the tradition of the French poets of the 1920s. The city’s radicalism inspired Ginsberg and encouraged him to make fun of the FBI in Howl and in his hilarious 1956 poem, America, which stands up surprisingly well.

In San Francisco, little magazines, (mostly mimeographed) published unknown poets. Moreover, poets met in private homes. Robert Duncan, the Oakland-born, UC Berkeley-educated poet, read his own dynamic work in his cozy living room. KPFA, which began in 1949, helped create a community of artists and writers. In 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an ex-New Yorker, opened City Lights  the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. The following year he began his own publishing company and, in 1955, issued his own book, Pictures of the Gone World, as the first volume in the Pocket Poets Series.

Into this rich cultural stew came two Easterners, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who had known one another since the early 1940s and who had vowed to forge a new American literature. The Six reading reflected an intense cultural cross-fertilization between the two New York hipsters and their West Coast counterparts. Kerouac and Ginsberg came from urban, immigrant backgrounds; Snyder and Whalen grew up in farming communities and lived close to the land in the Pacific Northwest.

All of them wrote poems that borrowed from contemporary idioms, celebrated both life and death, and expressed a sense of kinship with the earth and a compassion for the poor, the outcast and exiled. Poetry, they believed, should communicate with an audience and convey intensely personal experiences. They were all craftsmen who cared about language.

Plans for The Six were incubated at 1624 Milvia Street in Berkeley, a rose-covered cottage that Ginsberg rented for a pittance. Kerouac joined him, later Whalen moved in, and Snyder often visited, bringing his hibachi to cook supper. Ginsberg, who had worked in advertising in New York and San Francisco, knew how to publicize an event. Accordingly, he printed and distributed posters and postcards that read: 6 Poets at 6 Gallery. It was a catchy phrase that lured the curious and cautious alike.

Ginsberg had only arrived in San Francisco the year before (largely unknown, and mostly unpublished) with a note from his mentor, William Carlos Williams, to Kenneth Rexroth, the Chicago-born anarchist, anti-war activist, poet godfather and gadfly of Bay Area literature. Rexroth had his own weekly show on KPFA and hosted a literary evening at his home on Scott Street in San Francisco. Ginsberg met Lamantia there, as well as McClure  then a 20-something artist from Kansas City  and Snyder in Berkeley. When he selected poets for The Six, Ginsberg chose those he knew and liked. Rexroth was the obvious choice for MC.

Snyder wrote Whalen in Oregon that the reading would be a poetickall Bomshell. Whalen had better hurry to San Francisco, or hed forever rue his absence, Snyder warned. A person named Allen Ginsberg was on the program, he added, as an afterthought, and he wasnt to be missed. Snyders letter was prophetic. In a world obsessed with the atomic bomb and with blond bombshells like Marilyn Monroe, The Six exploded old ways of thinking and seeing and made a space for a new kind of poetry and performance art.

When Ginsberg Howled

Rexroth opened the evening  decked out in his trademark suspenders and pin-stripped suit  by lauding the Bay Area as an oasis of radicalism and creativity in the American wasteland of cultural and political conformity. Lamantia, whose Erotic Poems, had appeared in the 1940s, read the poetry of his friend John Hoffman, who had just died in Mexico. From the start, there was a palpable sense of brotherhood among poets both living and dead. And a sense, too, of the human links to the non-human world, especially when McClure read For the Death of 100 Whales, a poem of outrage and indignation inspired by the wanton slaughter, by a platoon of American soldiers, of a herd of whales. An innovative kind of ecological poery, inspired by headline news about the latest catastrophe, was born. Whalen gave an ironic reading of “Plus Ça Change,” a short poem that captures the characteristic alienation and angst of the Eisenhower era. Snyder, bearded and in jeans, read from Myths and Texts, a long work-in-progress, and from the five-part poem “Berry Feast,” that celebrates the myths of Oregon’s Native Americans, especially Coyote, their mythological trickster hero. “His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of old-time American heroes and orators,” Kerouac noted.

On
any other night of the week, Snyder might have brought down the house. But October 7 belonged to Ginsberg and to Howl, with its long, confessional lines, surrealistic images and its quirky blending of the optimistic voice of Walt Whitman and apocalyptic vision of T.S. Eliot. And, of course, Ginsberg was a superlative performance poet who carried his audience with him from beginning to end, stanza to stanza.

He had been writing and revising his poem all summer. Although it began as an experiment with breath, literary form and language, it evolved into an epic political rant about the American nation itself and his own generation. Howl defied generals, senators, the FBI, and the whole “narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism.” On October 7, Ginsberg wasn’t sure if he had finished the poem, but at 11 PM, he took the stage to read what he had so far, intoxicated from drinking the red wine that Kerouac had purchased with dimes and quarters collected from the audience. He steadied himself and began to recite the intensely personal opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

Moving his body as he imagined a rabbi might move before a congregation, Ginsberg built up momentum and delivered the poem’s characteristic alliterative phrasing, “who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy/ Bronx on Benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought/ them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain/ all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo.” He felt a “strange ecstatic intensity” well-up inside him, he would explain, and he came alive to the shouts and screams of intoxicated audience members, including Neal Cassady — the hero of On the Road and the “secret hero” of Howl — and to the cries of Kerouac, who wailed, “Go! Go! Go!”

When the poem came to an end, Ginsberg wept and so did Rexroth. McClure spoke for almost everyone at The Six when he said, of Ginsberg: “In all our memories, no one had been so outspoken in poetry before.” Audience members were shocked and dazzled by his verbal pyrotechnics. The next day, Ferlinghetti wired Ginsberg and asked for a copy of the manuscript, promising to publish it in the Pocket Poets Series. Ginsberg revised the section of the poem that he’d read. Then, he added two entirely new sections about the madness of war and materialism (and the promise of redemption, too), which made the poem much longer and far more challenging to read aloud. But he went on reading it from San Francisco to New York.

In 1956, when Howl and Other Poems went on sale for 75 cents, it caused a firestorm. The SF District Attorney prosecuted Ferlinghetti for publishing obscenity, and the little book went on to create an even bigger national and international stir. Howl and Other Poems became a bestseller. Since 1956, it has sold nearly one million copies in the Pocket Poets Series, and next year City Lights will publish a 50th anniversary edition.

Meanwhile, The Six reading attained the status of legend. Kerouac described it in Dharma Bums : “I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading… that night, which was, among other things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there.” Given its mythic force, it’s no wonder that poets look back longingly to the landmark Six Gallery for inspiration and validation.

Jonah Raskin is the author of American Scream: Allen Ginsbergs Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. He teaches in the Communication Studies department at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park.

Beat Mondays: October 3, 10, 17, 24, 31
Stanford Continuing Studies devotes five October Mondays to revisiting and honoring the poem Marjorie Perloff has called the most harrowing as well as the funniest of autobiographies. The evenings include: Stanford Assistant Dean Mark Gonnerman placing Howl between the shadow of Hiroshima and at the dawn of SFs Poetic Renaissance; Stanfords William McPheron, who curates Stanfords collection of Allen Ginsbergs Papers; Stanford teacher Hilton Obenzinger, author of American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania; Sonoma State Professor of Communication Studies Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsbergs Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation; and Steven S. Kushner, curator of the Cloud House Poetry Archives.

Beat Archeology: October 7
Re-experience in revelatory detail, the Holy Grail of Beat San Francisco/Bay Area  the Six Gallery reading by Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Phil Whalen, Philip Lamantia that included Allen Ginsbergs first public presentation of Howl. Transported by our Lumious Time Machine, reverberating the aura of the actual event, you will enter the howling vortex of spoken works, breaking dominant conventions that left Moloch Naked. This truly unique staged recreation/invocation is the alchemical collaboration of the Cloud House Poetry Archives & Harry Redl, the great iconic photographer of the Beats. Historic pictures will come alive and speak their mind-changing poetry that brought new worlds to 50s consciousness. This production of the SF POETMUSEUM is an act of wilderness preservation of our cultural being and the transmission of the poetic genome of the Bay Area. New College of California, 777 Valencia St. in the Mission.

Professor Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol said humans have evolved into accepting superstitions such as witches (Channel 4 ) Evolution keeps us superstitious. Now that’s lucky By Mark Henderson, Science Editor

HUMANS have evolved over tens of thousands of years to be susceptible to supernatural beliefs, a psychologist has claimed. Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive  despite the lack of evidence and advance of science  because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational, said Bruce Hood, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol. This evolved credulity suggests that it would be impossible to root out belief in ideas such as creationism and paranormal phenomena, even though they have been countered by evidence and are held as a matter of faith alone. People ultimately believe in these ideas for the same reasons that they attach sentimental value to inanimate objects such as wedding rings or Teddy bears, and recoil from artefacts linked to evil as if they are pervaded by a physical essence. Even the most rational people behave in irrational ways and supernatural beliefs are part of the same continuum, Professor Hood told the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich yesterday. To demonstrate his theory he asked members of the audience if they were prepared to put on an old-fashioned blue cardigan in return for a £10 reward. He had no shortage of volunteers. He then told the volunteers that the cardigan used to belong to Fred West, the mass murderer. Most hands went down, he said. When people did wear it people moved away from them. Its not actually Wests jumper. But its the belief that its Wests jumper that has the effect. It is as if evil, amoral stance defined by culture, has become physically manifest inside the clothing. Similar beliefs, which are held even among the most sceptical scientists, explain why few people would agree to swap their wedding rings for replicas. The difference between attaching significance to sentimental objects and believing in religion, magic or the paranormal is only one of degree, Professor Hood said. These tendencies, he said, were almost certainly a product of evolution. The human mind is adapted to reason intuitively, so that it can generate theories about how the world works even when mechanisms cannot be seen or easily deduced. While this is ultimately responsible for scientific thinking, as in the discovery of invisible forces such as gravity, it also leaves people prone to making irrational errors. In most cases, intuitive theories capture everyday knowledge, such as the nature and properties of objects, what makes something alive, or the understanding that peoples minds motivate their actions, Professor Hood said. But because intuitive theories are based on unobservable properties, such theories leave open the possibility of misconceptions. I believe these misconceptions of naive intuitive theories provide the basis of many later adult magical beliefs about the paranormal. This innate tendency means it is futile to expect that such beliefs will die out even as our scientific understanding of the world improves, he said. The mind is adapted to reason intuitively about the properties of the world. Because we operate intuitively, it is probably pointless to get people to abandon belief systems. No amount of evidence is going to get people to take it on board and abandon these ideas. Credulous minds may have evolved for several reasons. It was once less dangerous to accept things that were not true than it was to reject real facts, such as the threat posed by a nearby predator. This may have predisposed humans to err on the side of belief. Superstition may also give people a sense of control that can reduce stress. I dont think were going to evolve a rational mind because there are benefits to being irrational, said Professor Hood. Superstitious behaviour  the idea that certain rituals and practices protect you  is adaptive. If you remove the appearance that they are in control, both humans and animals become stressed. During the Gulf War, in 1991, in areas attacked by Scud missiles there was a rise in superstitious belief. I want to challenge recent claims by Richard Dawkins, among others, that supernaturalism is primarily attributable to religions spreading beliefs among the gullible minds of the young. Rather, religions may simply capitalise on a natural bias to assume the existence of supernatural forces.

Orange Crush

The execution of Theo Van Gogh

By BRENDAN BERNHARD

The most wicked woman in history

Queen and harlot, dark and fair, heroine and murderer, she has been an object of fascination for writers, artists and film directors down the centuries. Lucy Hughes-Hallett examines the many faces of Cleopatra

Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian

Her infinite variety … Frances Barber, Elizabeth Taylor and Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatras. Photographs: Tristram Kenton/PA

Cleopatra and Antony had formed a partnership that was as much a political alliance between two mutually useful potentates as it was a love affair. But the story, as Roman poets and historians tell it, was that Antony had become so besotted with the queen of Egypt that he was willing to give up his chance of ruling Rome in order to enjoy the pleasures of her bed. So Antony, the canny politician and commander with empire-building ambitions to rival Alexander’s, was reinvented as a degenerate hedonist and a traitor to Rome. As a by-product of that successful exercise in news manipulation, Cleopatra was cast as the woman for whose love’s sake the world would be well lost.

Cleopatra – the gratification of every conceivable desire – has been repeatedly reimagined by writers, artists and film-makers in accordance with desires of their own. She was one of the most powerful women in the ancient world, and she was defined by the Romans and their heirs as the foreigner – at once the menacing stranger and the temptress, offering the chance of escape from the tedious limitations of one’s own known world. So sexual and racial politics have shaped the variations on her story, transforming her from serpent to dove and back again to suit her public’s yearnings and fears.

Her morl status fluctuates. Cecil B de Mille offered the leading role in his sumptuous movie about her to Claudette Colbert with the words: “How would you like to play the wickedest woman in history?” His question anticipated the answer: “Very much indeed, please.” “Wicked” was already, in the 1930s, a term of approbation meaning sexy, edgy, thrilling, an infinitely more alluring epithet than boring old “good”: the hypocrisy at the heart of our culture has been part of Cleopatra’s legend for most of 2,000 years. But back in 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer made Cleopatra the first heroine of his Legend of Good Women. To him and his contemporaries she was the paragon of feminine virtue, the proof of her goodness being that she didn’t wish to outlive her man. In an age when love-matches were rare and widowhood the only condition in which a woman could be truly independent, men, it appears, found it hard to trust their wives.

The emphasis of her story wavers as often as her claim to virtue. To the Renaissance painters, it was about sex and money. They produced quasi-pornographic images of her suicide. Although all the ancient historians agree that Cleopatra had herself dressed in all her royal robes before applying the asp to her arm, artists almost invariably picture her dying in the nude, with the snake at her breast. Or they show her presiding over a magnificent banquet, in the act of demonstrating her prodigality and her wealth by drinking down a pearl dissolved in vinegar.

To the English and German dramatists who took up the theme after Shakespeare, it was about the relative status of wives and mistresses. In the Protestant cultures of post-Reformation Europe there was a lively debate about the new ideal of companionate marriage, one which spilled over into Cleopatra’s story: the reason Dryden’s Cleopatra feels so feeble is that she lacks a wedding ring. Next, in versions written in the period leading up to the American and French revolutions, the story became about the clash between rival systems of government. In some dramas (notably those produced under Louis XIV and his successors), Cleopatra and Antony represent the feudal nobility as opposed to Octavius’s centralising and modernising regime. In others, Cleopatra stands for the decadence (and romance) of ancient monarchy contrasted with Roman republicanism.

The storyline shifts. So does Cleopatra’s appearance. For several hundred years she was blonde. She was a famous beauty, and so medieval poets ascribed all the conventional attributes of beauty to her: hair like spun gold, sky-blue eyes and breasts “as white as ivory billiard balls”. The tradition was persistent. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra may have been darkened by “Phoebus’s amorous pinches”, but in Tiepolo’s magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Labia in Venice she is as pearly-pale as the earring she is about to drop into her gilded cup, with albino eyelashes and opalescent breasts. It wasn’t until the very end of the 18th century, the period when Napoleon sent his troops and his scholars to Egypt, that Cleopatra’s exoticism became once more (as it had been in her lifetime) the most important thing about her. Delacroix painted her as a kind of Gypsy fortune-teller, dark-eyed and tousle-haired.

Over the next century, as the European powers scrambled for territory in Africa and the Middle East, Cleopatra’s legend became the vehicle for theories about racial difference and justifications of imperialism. Artists represented her as an enticing Turkish dancing girl in gauzy harem pants and sparkly bra; lolling indolently on a divan, she became representative of a terminally decadent culture ripe for annexation by a benignly energetic western power. In the latter pose, she is usually surrounded by slaves bearing cups of sherbet and peacock-feather fans. Or, in many cases, writhing in agony on the floor.

In the 19th century the Cleopatra plot ceased to be the familiar, more or less historical one of Antony, Actium and the asp. In 1837 Pushkin revived a scurrilous piece of fourth-century gossip alleging that Cleopatra used to offer a night in her bed to any man willing to pay for the privilege with his life. He expanded on the theme. Cleopatra, presiding over a banquet in a mood of idle boredom, makes her terrible offer. Her courtiers are aghast, but a line of men beg for the prize. She rejects princes and generals, accepting instead a fresh virgin boy, whose execution she watches with relish the following dawn.

Romantics and decadents alike adored the story. Cleopatra was reborn as the femme fatale, the personification of the bourgeois male’s sexual guilt and the realisation of his most deliciously painful self-castigating fantasies. Plutarch had recorded that, in preparation for her own death, she tested poisons on her household slaves: the scene was represented repeatedly on canvas and on the stage, while Pushkin’s scenario became the basis for dozens of later versions. The tragedy of Cleopatra in which Sarah Bernhardt starred repeatedly over three decades (doggedly continuing even after she had lost a leg) was not Shakespeare’s, but one written to the actress’s order by Victorien Sardou, in which the queen is a sadistic voluptuary given to performing elaborate striptease. Meanwhile, the bestselling novelist H Rider Haggard came up with a new twist when he revealed that the youth Cleopatra took to bed was actually her own son.

Cleopatra had become the personification of vice, flouter of every convention, breacher of every taboo. She was barely human. Algernon Swinburne, in an essay that is part art criticism, part masochist reverie, enthused about Michelangelo’s drawing in which queen and asp seem to fuse into one Medusa-like being, while Gustave Flaubert called her “the pale creature with a fiery eye, the viper of the Nile who smothers with an embrace”. Ruthless, beautiful, bestial, this fantastic Cleopatra seemed to offer Europeans, feeling cramped in an increasingly regulated society, an escape into a Nietzschean wonderland of moral irresponsibility and violent pleasure.

By the time the Ballets Russes staged Fokine’s Cleopatra in Paris in 1909, she had become the figure of death. The dancer who played her, Ida Rubinstein, was carried on in a sarcophagus, wrapped mummy-fashion in yards of multicoloured gauze from which she was gradually unwound, her face chalk-white, her hair bright blue.

The fantasy of the death-dealing vamp flourishes in peacetime. In the face of the 20th century’s wars it came to seem a bit of a joke, and a sick joke at that. In 1917 the movie Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara (described by the Fox publicity team as the “Ishmaelite of femininity” and the “torpedo of domesticity”), bombed at the box office. In a world where young men were being slaughtered en masse, the femme fatale was redundant. Bernard Shaw scoffed at the idea of sublime passion, and wrote a Caesar and Cleopatra in which the queen of Egypt is a petulant teenager. Claudette Colbert played her as a flirty good-time girl and, in 1945, Vivien Leigh brought to the part, in Kenneth Tynan’s words, “the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag”. Cleopatra had become camp.

In the notorious 1963 movie she arrives in Rome on a mobile sphinx as high as the Senate house, accompanied by belly dancers, whirling dervishes, wheeled pyramids that open up to release flocks of white doves, scores of chariots, archers and armies of well-oiled, buff attendants in fetching pink loincloths. Arriving before Caesar, Elizabeth Taylor, heavily made up in early 1960s style with lots of eyeliner, false lashes and pale lipstick, bows deeply, her bosom looming large around th edges of her deeply cut gold-lamé bodice. And then, looking up at Antony, she winks. The scandal generated by Taylor’s on/off-screen affair with her Antony, Richard Burton, was gleefully welcomed by the film’s producers. To the 19th-century Romantic, the wages of sin might be death. To the 20th-century entrepreneur, it was good publicity. To a postwar generation avid for life and pleasure, Cleopatra offered not a fatal passion, but history’s best ever holiday romance.

In the last three decades of the 20th century, Cleopatra got serious again. She was allotted a role in a debate about race relations. Afrocentrist historians, led by Martin Bernal, argued that the culture of ancient Egypt had been played down by racist scholars unwilling to acknowledge that Greek civilisation, and therefore all subsequent western civilisation, had African origins: it became fashionable to describe the pharaohs as black.

But whatever colour the pharaohs were, Cleopatra was not one of them. She was the direct descendant on her father’s side of one of Alexander’s generals, a Macedonian Greek. We do not know who her mother was: her ethnic inheritance can’t be fully established. But we do know that when the director of a 1990s production of Shakespeare’s play, who had cast a black actress in the role of Cleopatra, talked about emphasising her “earthiness” and “the kind of non-European regality which allows someone to sit on the floor”, she was imposing yet another set of anachronistic preconceptions on to the image of the Hellenistic queen. Already, only a few years later, that director’s remarks sound insulting: we do not now think of “earthiness” and a reluctance to use the furniture as particularly “black” traits. In fact, Cleopatra shocked the republican Romans by sitting not on the floor, but on a throne of solid gold.

More recently, Cleopatra’s Middle Eastern identity has come to seem even more interesting than her African one. In 1929 the Egyptian dramatist Ahmad Shawqui, a campaigner against the British authorities, made her a nationalist heroine struggling to defend her country’s independence. The theme is ready for further development. No one retelling her story today could do so without an awareness that she was the ruler of what is now an Islamic state, at the moment of its invasion by a western superpower.

In Cleopatra’s lifetime, racist Roman propaganda characterised Egyptians as self-indulgent, sex-fixated and unmanly in their readiness to treat women as their equals, while Romans congratulated themselves on their abstemiousness, the austerity of their religion and their readiness for war. The stereotypes are still recognisable, but their ascription has been reversed. A militant Islamicist from the region that Cleopatra and Antony once ruled must now think of the west much as Rome once thought of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

Cleopatra is still changing, and she will continue to do so as long as her name is remembered. The forces that have repeatedly transformed her image, the forces of anger and anxiety and covert desire, are still at their lethal work in the world.

· Giulio Cesare is at Glyndebourne (01273 813813) until August 26. Antony and Cleopatra is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1 (020-7401 9919), until October 8, and at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (0870 609 1110), until October 14.

· Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of Cleopatra: Queen, Lover, Legend (Pimlico).

记者无国界 2006年9月8日 中国 程翔对非法判决提出上诉 记者无国界今日发布消息，表示支持新加坡“海峡时报”香港记者程翔对为期五年徒刑的间谍罪判决提出上诉。 该新闻自由组织加入了香港记者协会，呼吁立即释放程翔。“我们坚信重判程翔旨在一个惩罚记者进行调查并在香港新闻界制造恐慌。 程翔的律师何培华向法新社证实9月8日已向北京一家法庭提出起诉。律师说“他和他的家人认为判决太严厉并且不公正。” 一直坚持自己清白的程翔给家人传出信息，说判决不公正。 记者无国界对法庭居然把程翔在香港一家报纸上发表文章的内容作为证供表示震惊。 所谓间谍罪的指控完全是基于程翔与台湾基金会研究人员业务上的接触，而即便程翔真的接受台湾基金会资金而写作关于海湾战略的文章，也根本不能构成间谍罪。 整个审讯荒谬且保密，所引用的证据是所谓程翔的招供和学者的观点，而获取这些证据的程序违反了国际司法标准。 此外，把程翔发表的此类新闻称为的“国家机密”显示了北京当权者的偏执，目前中国已经有多名记者、异议人士和大学教授因为泄露所谓“国家机密”而入狱。 台湾当局1日否认程翔为台北的间谍。不过当局也证实的确有香港记者与台湾研究基金会有业务往来。 除了监禁，法庭还对程翔判处30万元(30,000欧元)及31万港元(30,000欧元以上)的罚金。程翔的一些家属在中国的财产被扣押。程翔的夫人刘敏仪对此大额罚款表示惊讶：“他们似乎以为我们有很多钱。” 记者无国界授权六四天网翻译,请以法、英文版本为准