One Nation, Under Gods
Page 53
“Buddhaheads”: Robert Asahina, Just Americans (New York, Penguin, 2007), 60. Asahina notes that when used as a phrase of derision by mainland Japanese Americans directed at those from Hawaii, the term had the double reference of “Buddha” and buta, Japanese for “pig.” In this sense, it also may have concerned supposed stubbornness (pigheadedness) of immigrant families reluctant to assimilate through conversion.
“Buddhists were more likely than Christians to maintain their native language”: As one account recalls this and related tendencies: “[Japanese Americans] who were Buddhist thought of themselves as the true Japanese because they retained their original religion. Those who became Protestant did so to seek better acceptance in mainstream society.” Florence Hongo, quoted by Richard Watanabe, “So What Is a Buddhahead?,” www-hsc.usc.edu/~rwatanab/buddha.htm.
“Subscription rolls of such publications”: See Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 31.
“The cherry blossoms on Mount Yoshino”: Fujimura, 98.
“That Privates Yamamoto and Shiomichi died for their country”; “But the above feeling is only the joy of reason”: Ibid. As mentioned above, while I refer to the second soldier as “Shiomichi” here and throughout, Fujimura uses the name “Shiomitsu,” it seems, in error.
“We are from the FBI”; “Wholesale Jap Raids”: Ibid., 50–51. Subsequent dialogue from Fujimura’s account of his interrogation appears on pages 54–55.
“like livestock”: Ibid., 62.
“asphyxiation”: Ibid., 92.
“This impermanent world”: Ibid., 57.
“Though I know”; “For over twenty years”: Ibid., 98.
“I guess I might as well tell you that we’re in action now”; “was as good as any”: Hisaye Yamamoto, “After Johnny Died,” Pacific Citizen, December 1, 1945.
“that unlikely place of wind”: Hisaye Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 20.
“who had died soon after he learned to walk”: Yamamoto, “After Johnny Died.”
“What would I know about God?”: Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, 69.
“All this is a temporary aberration”: From the biographical information on Pfc. Joe Shiomichi provided by the 442nd Veterans Club of Honolulu.
“Okaa-san, mother, this will probably be the last letter I write to you in my poor Japanese”: Fujimura, 99.
“his pregnant wife waved from the platform as his train left the station”: Vanessa De La Torre, “ ‘Relocated’ idealist lived—and died—devoutly ‘pro-American,’ ” Imperial Valley Press, July 5, 2004.
“A child’s death” and subsequent citations from the memorial service sermon: Fujimura, 98–99.
“shortened the Pacific war by two years”: Major General Charles Willoughby, quoted in United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 256.
“only crosses and stars”: Yamamoto, Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, 169.
“Protestant-Catholic-Jew”: Will Herberg’s classic book on mid-twentieth-century religious diversity in America was first published in 1955.
“one of the great patriotic shrines in the nation”; “vacant lot”; and all other quoted remarks in the section on religious symbols on U.S. military graves comes from the hearings of the Subcommittee on Public Lands, Congressional meeting minutes, H. J. Res 338-342-342, 82nd Congress.
“We probably owe it to her and the grace of God”: Joseph McCarthy, Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), 275.
“You seem to have altogether too many soldiers”: Fujimura, 114.
Notes to Chapter 17
“For ten years a new nation has grown”: The Human Be-in organizers’ press release is reproduced in Gene Anthony, The Summer of Love: Haight-Ashbury at Its Highest (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995), 147.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out”: Timothy Leary’s remarks at the Be-in can be seen online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSzTBP5PAU.
“Mr. Haight-Ashbury”: Michael McClure, appearing in a KPIX-TV documentary, which aired in San Francisco in 1967 and can be found online at https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/189371.
“building an electric Tibet in California”: Bowen, quoted in Kramer, 45.
“You mean to say you have a telephone in your meditation room?”: “Electric Tibet, baby!”: Ibid., 46.
“a serious religious occasion.” Ibid., 52.
“Never before had America, or the world”: Michael Bowen, The Royal Maze, Chapter 1, Part 1; online at http://www.royalmaze.com/my-odyssey-the-first-human-be-in/chapter-one-part-1/.
“I was on a mission from God [and] from John Cooke to do that Be-In,” Michael Bowen, quoted in Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (New York, Mariner Books, 2007), 300.
Amos Starr Cooke: Information on John Cooke’s missionary forebear can be found in multiple sources, including Emily Carrie Hawley, The Introduction of Christianity into the Hawaiian Islands (Brattleboro: Press of E. L. Hildreth, 1922).
“While the natives stand confounded and amazed”: Amos Starr Cooke, quoted in Edwin Grant Burrows, Hawaiian Americans: An Account of the Mingling of Japanese, Chinese, Polynesian, and American Cultures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), 41.
“decided to take his youngest son on a 37,000-mile jaunt”: The Straits Times (Singapore), March 25, 1935.
“Cole Porter was also on board”: Details about Cole Porter’s voyage on the Franconia can be found in Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 142–43, and Stephen Citron, Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 136.
“a very popular means of entertainment in many intelligent families”: Columbus (GA) Enquirer-Sun, July 31, 1892.
“a national industry which bids fair to rival that in chewing gum”: “Ouija Prostration,” New York Times, January 14, 1920.
“the performance is loose and flabby”: New York Times, December 16, 1940.
“There’s no hocus pocus mysticism”: June Morrall, “1970s Interview with Alice Kent,” online at http://www.halfmoonbaymemories.com/?p=11168.
“The root of all our difficulties, individual and social, is self-interest”: Meher Baba, “Address to America,” May 31, 1932. Quoted in C. B. Purdom, The God-Man (Myrtle Beach, SC: Meher Spiritual Center, 1971), 104–5.
“galactic telepathy”: Millen Vermilyea’s supposed ability to explore space psychically is mentioned in R. M. Decker’s 35 Minutes to Mars (Lakeville: Galde Books, 2004), 53–54. Decker refers to the first Mrs. Cooke by another of her many pseudonyms, Millen Belknap.
“a set of fantastic theories”; “dangerous”; “Suffering people”: Rollo May, “Do You Remember When You Last Died?,” New York Times, October 7, 1951.
“a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire”: L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (New York: Hermitage House, 1950).
“money sickness”; “havingness”: John Cooke’s time in Tangier is discussed on The Royal Maze, a website maintained by several of his former students: “Black Magic in Tangier,” online at http://www.royalmaze.com/black-magic-in-tangier/.
“I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is”: Quoted in Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 58.
“The news was received with mixed emotions”: The Aberee, “Scientology Acts to Legalize as Religion,” April 1954.
“Nobody in Tangier is exactly what he seems to be”: William Burroughs, “International Zone,” in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (New York: Grove, 2007), 128.
“one of the great hedoni
c mystic teachers”: Timothy Leary, Jail Notes (New York: Grove, 1970), 133.
“certainly the greatest painter living”: William Burroughs, letter to his parents, November 17, 1959, Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012).
“euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter”: Brion Gysin, quoted in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 273.
“They were the first rich hippies I had ever seen”: Brion Gysin, quoted in Terry Wilson, Brion Gysin: Here to Go (London: Creation Books, 2001), 81.
The Process: Brion Gysin’s novel about the Cookes, first published in 1967, was reissued twenty years later by the Overlook Press.
“The method of directed recall is the method of Scientology”: William Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg, October 27, 1959, The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959, edited by Oliver Harris (New York: Viking, 1993), 431.
“Somebody is reading a newspaper”: William Burroughs, interview with the Paris Review, Fall 1965, online at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/the-art-of-fiction-no-36-william-s-burroughs.
“about three feet off of a desk”; “Scientology has moved up into a bracket”: L. Ron Hubbard, “Elementary Material: Know to Mystery Scale,” lecture given January 7, 1955.
“We don’t believe in sickness”: L. Ron Hubbard, “Healing Promotion,” September 1, 1962.
“had affected his mind”: Meher Baba, quoted in Bhau Kalchuri, Meher Prabhu: Lord Meher, The Biography of the Avatar of the Age, Meher Baba (Asheville, NC: Manifestation, 1986), 5002.
“stepping right out of your pages”: William Burroughs, letter to Brion Gysin, January 21, 1970, Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco Press, 2012), 323.
“The Immortality Racket”: Gysin’s alternate titles are mentioned by John Geiger in Nothing Is True—Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin (New York: Disinformation Books, 2005), section 12.
“Like the Knights Templars of the 10th century”: Isabella Paoli, “A synopsis of the true story of the transformation of American minds in the 1960s,” wixarika.mediapark.net/en/assets/pdf/Roots_of_Awareness.pdf.
“a wizard that lives down the coast in Carmel Highlands”: Bowen recalled the first words he heard about Cooke, and the tale of his “initiation,” in unpublished chapters of his memoir, shared by one of Bowen’s students, Mark Walker.
“as good a marker as any for the arrival of the counter culture as a mass movement”: Hendrik Hertzberg, Politics: Observations and Arguments: 1966–2004 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 555.
“It was the first time I did see a new society”: Jerry Rubin, quoted in “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!” An oral history by Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Michael Simmons, and Jay Babcock, Arthur 13 (November 2004).
“We wanted to be a celebration of being alive”: Jim Fouratt, quoted in “10,000 Chant ‘L-O-V-E,’ ” New York Times, March 27, 1967.
“Acid actually played a very important role in the alteration of the American psyche”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Sloman, Simmons, and Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!”
“tune-in, turn-on, drop-out, jerk-off”: William Hjortsberg, quoting Emmet Grogan, founder of the radical theater troupe the Diggers, in Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan (New York: Counterpoint, 2013), 269.
Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: I’m indebted to Joseph P. Laycock’s article “Levitating the Pentagon: Exorcism as Politics, Politics as Exorcism,” Implicit Religion 14, no. 3 (2011): 295–318, for making me aware of the connection between Lewis Mumford and Allen Cohen. See also Derek Taylor’s It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) for other remembrances of the protest.
“One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century”: This assessment of Mumford’s book from the Christian Science Monitor appears in the backmatter of the 1968 Mariner Books edition.
“an effete and worthless baroque conceit”: Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 432.
“turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled”: Time, “Protest: The Banners of Dissent,” October 27, 1967.
“now in the business of wholesale disruption and widespread resistance and dislocation of the American society”: Jerry Rubin, quoted by Norman Mailer, “The Battle of the Pentagon,” Commentary, April 1968.
“We’re going to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet in the air”: Abbie Hoffman, quoted in Mailer, “The Battle of the Pentagon.”
“We didn’t expect the building to actually leave terra firma”: Keith Lampe, quoted in Sloman, Simmons, and Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!”
“You think Abbie believed in a lot of that stuff?”: Jim Fouratt, quoted in Sloman, Simmons, and Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!”
“The smell of the drug, sweet as the sweetest leaves of burning tea”: Mailer, “The Battle of the Pentagon.”
“We Freemen, of all colors of the spectrum”: Ibid.
“Ed Sanders and the Fugs are a bunch of crap”: Kenneth Anger, quoted in Sloman, Simmons, and Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!”
“the hippie element and weld it together with the hard line political reality”: Jim Fouratt, quoted in Sloman, Simmons, and Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!”
“Actually and expectedly, the hippies are wrong”: “Protest: The Banners of Dissent,” Time.
“The levitation of the Pentagon was a happening that demystified the authority of the military”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Sloman, Simmons, and Babcock, “OUT, DEMONS, OUT!”
“M-14 rifles, bayonets, clubs, and stone faces”: Mailer, “The Battle of the Pentagon.”
“caught on like wildfire nationwide”: Advertisement in The New Yorker, November 21, 1970.
“quintessential hippie tarot”: online at http://www.tarotpassages.com/TNewT.htm.
“a gathering-together of younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of”: Allen Ginsberg, testimony before the Trial of the Chicago 7.
“the great crippled wizard”: Timothy Leary, Jail Notes, 134.
Notes to Chapter 18
“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers”: Barack Obama, January 20, 2009.
“I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set”: John F. Kennedy, January 9, 1961, online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Address_of_President-Elect_John_F._Kennedy_Delivered_to_a_Joint_Convention_of_the_General_Court_of_the_Commonwealth_of_Massachusetts.
“Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts coast”: Ronald Reagan, January 25, 1974, online at http://reagan2020.us/speeches/City_Upon_A_Hill.asp.
“The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs”: Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address, January 12, 1989, online at http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/12/news/transcript-of-reagan-s-farewell-address-to-american-people.html.
“It was right here, in the waters around us”: Barack Obama, June 2, 2006, online at http://obamaspeeches.com/074-University-of-Massachusetts-at-Boston-Commencement-Address-Obama-Speech.htm.
“Be respectful”: Dreams from My Father (New York: Random House, 2007), 154.
“I was not raised in a religious household”: Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Random House, 2006), 202.
“Islam… is part of America”: “President Obama makes remarks before hosting a dinner celebrating Ramadan,” online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ4rn5z0LNw.
“There need to be many more of us in here”: Online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/mazie-hirono-sworn-in_n_2404267.html.
Video of Cory Booker’s Senate announcement: “Finishing the Work We Started,” online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCm2meC1SS8.
Hate crimes since 9-11: Curt Anderson, “FBI: Hate Crimes vs. Muslims Rise,” Associated Press, November 25, 2002.
2010 Gallup poll: Online at http://www.gallup.com/poll/125312/religious-prejudice-stronger-against-muslims.aspx.
“Regardless of what we look like”: Michael Laris, Jerry Markon, and William Branigin, “Wade Michael Page, Sikh Temple Shooter, Identified as Skinhead Band Leader,” Washington Post, August 6, 2012.
Hate crime rates: Online at http://www.aclu.org/maps/map-nationwide-anti-mosque-activity.
“on the spot where for long years wonderful cures had been performed”; “in carriages, in wagons, on horses”: Le Baron Bradford Prince, Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico (Cedar Rapids: Torch Press, 1915), 317.
“a small amount of sacred earth”: Ibid., 321.
“How and when the healing virtues”: Ibid., 317.
“Visitors to El Santuario come from all over the world”: Online at http://www.elsantuariodechimayo.us/Santuario/Pocito.html.
About the author
Peter Manseau is the author of the memoir Vows, the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, and the travelogue Rag and Bone. He has won the National Jewish Book Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, the Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. A founding editor of KillingTheBuddha.com and coauthor (with Jeff Sharlet) of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, he received his doctorate in religion from Georgetown University and is currently a fellow in American religious history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
www.petermanseau.com
@petermanseau
ALSO BY PETER MANSEAU
Rag and Bone
Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter
Vows
Killing the Buddha (with Jeff Sharlet)