Book Review: The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack

The Rajneesh Chronicles

by Win McCormack

     The USA had a lot going on in the 1960s and 1970s. Aside from the social changes initiated by the hippy counter culture and the New Left, American political hegemony and newly relaxed immigration restrictions resulted in an influx of exotic ideas, lifestyles, and practices. One result of this was the Cult Scare of the 1970s. Disillusioned with failed utopian dreams and an unfulfilled desire for structure and meaning, a lot of counter culturalists turned to new religious movements like the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and The Family International. Traditional Christianity had proven to be dull and lifeless and people craved something new to reflect their changing values. But not all was well in cult land. Within one decade there were the Manson Family murders and the mass suicides of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Some high profile cults were accused of brainwashing, kidnapping, and dishonestly appropriating people’s money. The big Cult Scare was upon us. Within only a couple years after the Jonestown massacre, a new cult arrived on the scene and red flags were flying all over the place. They were the devotees of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their leader’s intentions were no more noble than the aforementioned scoundrels. Win McCormack’s The Rajneesh Chronicles is a colleciton of magazine articles written contemporaneously to Rajneesh’s invasion and his eventual expulsion from America. 

     This book is somewhat annoying from the start. It begins with a timeline of events in the rise and fall of the cult. Reading lists like this can rarely be fun, especially when you know nothing about the people involved. It just is not an engaging way of telling a story. But it is necessary since the magazine articles that make up the bulk of the book do not run in chronological order. Reading them on their own would be messy and confusing without the timeline to guide you. 

     But anyways, the story starts at a controversial ashram in Pune. India where Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh attracted followers, mostly naive Westerners with lots of money, where he twisted standard Eastern practices like yoga and meditation to his own ends. Sexual orgies and other darker things were a large part of what went on. After having trouble with the Indian government over tax fraud, Rajneesh moved to America where his cult took over the isolated farming town of Antelope, Oregon and began building their own city called Rajneeshpuram. Needless to say, the people of Antelope didn’t take too well to the orange-clad so-called sanyasins, especially since they outnumbered the locals and eventually took over the city council and school board. The passages on the politics of Rajneesh are somewhat muddled and incomplete so if this part of the story is truly interesting to you, you might want to look to a better source for information. 

     Rajneesh himself mostly disappears from the articles after his arrival in America. He decides to take a vow of silence and appoints the sociopath Ma Anand Sheela to run the Rajneeshpuram cult. Narcissistic, machiavellian, and cruel, she runs the commune’s affairs like a true tyrant and eventually gets arrested for attempting to poison a city called The Dalles by putting salmonella in restaurant salad bars and the water reservoirs. 

     The best parts of this book detail the lifestyle and practices of the cult. Characteristics that mark Rajneeshpuram out as a typical cult include sleep deprivation, information control, unpaid and intensive physical labor, use of trances and altered states of consciousness, control over sexual behavior and diet, and, most importantly, infallible leadership. Encounter therapy groups involving physical violence, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and psychological trauma were used to break down members’ egos thereby dismantling their sense of individuality and the ability to think for themselves. Ecstatic trances involving yoga and dancing were used to facilitate an emotional bond with the larger group. Rampantly promiscuous sex was used to prevent individuals from forming intimate friendships or romantic relationships. Long work hours, sleep deprivation, and poor diet were used to make people too weak to think clearly or rebel. The questioning of leadership led to harsh punishments. They even built their own private crematorium to dispose of dead bodies due to the number of people dying from exhaustion or other causes that have never been revealed. Meanwhile, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela lived high on the hog with expensive jewelry, luxurious houses, a massive fleet of Rolls Royces, and frequent steak dinners at expensive restaurants in places nearby. It was an open secret that Bhagwan’s taste in girls was similar to that of Jeffrey Epstein’s. 

     The last section of the book backtracks to 1980 when the Rajneeshees first arrived on the shores of California where they infiltrated and took over a new age church. Considering the millions of dollars Rajneesh had brought over from India, you might wonder why they felt a desire to do such a thing. They had enough money to buy their own land and build their own church without having to dispossess anybody of their own space. But the beach-front chuch had luxurious grounds and beautiful architecture as well as a senile minister who had fallen in with Rajneesh while traveling in India. More importantly, the sanyasins used this as a test run for later taking over the town of Antelope. While this is an important part of the Rajneesh story, the internal affairs of a new age church’s board of directors is not exciting to read about. It is made worse because the author writes as if he can’t wait to finish writing so he can go home and do something more exciting like mowing the lawn or watching TV. 

     In fact, most of the writing in this book is dull. The story of this dangerous cult that fell apart before its leaders got chased out of America is interesting enough on its own to keep a reader engaged. But the writing is dry and lifeless. A fascinating story gets turned into a work of journalistic mediocrity. It’s like listening to somebody making a speech in an unemotional, dead monotone. Aside from that problem, it would have been nice to learn more about the biographies of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela since almost nothing about their lives previous to the cult is mentioned. 

     The Rajneesh Chronciles is one of those books where the story is good enough to stand on its own  while the delivery is subpar enough to make reading it a chore. Anyhow, most reasonable people would consider Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela to be grifters, but maybe they really did understand the Truth with a capital T. That Truth has nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment and everything to do with an understanding of human nature and the world we live in. The Truth is that a vast number of people are suckers and sheep and are easily led around by people who take advantage of them out of pure selfishness. Gurus like Rajneesh are enlightened enough to know that these people will gladly give away their money and their freedom of mind if it means access to unlimited sex and religious experience. When the infallible teacher arrives with a taste of what it is they want, they get trapped and the ones doing the trapping don’t have their best interests in mind. Freedom means being neither predator nor prey. Maybe that is the ultimate form of enlightenment. 

     

 

Book Review and Analysis: How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

How Soccer Explains the World:

An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

     Can sports explain the world? Let’s take an indirect approach at answering that question. In the Middle Ages, Europe’s landed aristocracy settled disputes by building up mercenary armies of peasants, giving them weapons, and directing them in battle like pieces on a chessboard. Military commanders were lazy rich people who bought their ranks rather than earning them based on skill or prowess (does this sound familiar today regarding big corporate business?). Other members of the idle rich class sat on the sidelines of these petty wars, cheering on their allied battalions while the unfortunate peasant soldiers, who would probably prefer to be at home relaxing, slaughtered each other in the mud, all for the benefit of the land-owning barons and dukes who profited from these skirmishes. This style of warfare was a part of the political system known as feudalism, though there was a lot more to it than that. But the theory here is that these pointless and brutal wars eventually looked like petty sadism that wasn’t too popular with the peasantry who grew the food that was leeched from them by the aristocrats, so the practice was sublimated into games and what we now call team sports. So can contemporary soccer explain how we got from feudal warfare to the most popular worldwide pastime? You would need a certain amount of education and cultural literacy to be able to make that connection, so the answer would have to be a reluctant no, at least not for most people. Therefore, the title of Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World should be ignored if you plan on getting anything out of this.

We don’t hear much about globalization these days. In fact contemporary right wing faux populism could well be a reaction against it. But twenty years ago, when this book came out, globalization was a big topic of discussion especially because 9/11 was still fresh in everybody’s minds. So Foer approaches his subject matter with that world view in mind. After all, aside from the Olympics, soccer is the most global sport. This is a very loose framework for this collection of essays, not a thesis to build an argument around.

Foer starts with discussions on hooliganism. We all know that soccer teams attract gangs that fight like boneheads with other gangs who support rival teams and sometimes the violence spills out into the streets where anybody or anything unlucky enough to be in their way could get smashed. Some of these gangs have ties to organized crime mafias or nationalist political movements. The first essay is about Serbian war criminal Arkan (may you never rest in peace) and how he brought all these elements together. The author, while embedded in the hooligan culture, also shows how Catholic and Protestant rivalries in Glasgow manifest in sectarian gang violence. These chapters leave some unanswered questions, like whether soccer makes ethnic or tribal conflicts worse or if it functions by containing them in localized conflicts rather than allowing them to flood out into the wider societies. The author doesn’t actually pose this question and doesn’t go deep enough to help you draw your own conclusions either. These essays are simply sketches based on interviews done with people he sought out.

There are a couple essays dealing with racism in soccer that stand out as the best in this collection. One is a historical piece about a Jewish soccer team in Austria before the Holocaust. Their motivation was to overcome the stereotype of Jewish people being physically weak and non-athletic. Another essay examines the life of a Nigerian footballer who dreamed of making it big by being hired to play in Europe, only to be slimed into playing for a team in Ukraine where he wasn’t welcomes with open arms. Thus, Foer addresses the issue of the internationalization of soccer to the point where teams are made up of players hired from other countries while local athletes get little or no representation in their home countries. The dream of globalization bringing the whole world together hasn’t worked out the way we all hoped it would.

Then we get some chapters on Brazilian soccer and the endemic corruption involved in its management. One sleazy team owner worked his way into politics and ran his team into the ground through graft and financial mismanagement. And of course no proper book about soccer in the 20^th century would be complete without at least mentioning Pele. The world’s greatest footballer raised himself out of poverty by being the cleanest and most entertaining player. After making his fortune in America, he returned to Brazil and entered politics in an attempt to eliminate corruption from sports. The system got the better of him and he ended up falling into corruption like the rest of them.

This makes a transition into the subject of management and team ownership. The subject of soccer transitioning from a working class spectator sport to an upper class one complete with clubs being flush with money from investors and advertisers. This all has a deleterious effect on the relationship between the teams and their fans, many of which can no longer afford to attend matches. This all ends with a chapter on the promise of soccer as an instigator of political change in Iran where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been unable to steer women away from attendance at games.

Franklin Foer is an investigative journalist and these essays read like what this book really is: a collection of magazine articles, quick and easy to digest, accessible, ephemeral, entertaining, and not too deep. It’s like iceberg lettuce, cheap and filling but not loaded with nutrients. It would be safe to say that each essay portrays an aspect of society that is an outgrowth or an intersection with the culture surrounding the sport; it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Foer uses soccer to explain much of anything happening outside this culture. One thing is certainly conclusive though: soccer and the dark side of the human psyche are intimately connected. How you feel abut this book in the end might have a lot to do with how you react to the disconnection between the title and its contents. I, personally, was a little disappointed. I’m not interested in watching soccer since it looks to me like a bunch of guys kicking a ball back and forth for an hour or two and I’d much rather be doing something fun like having sex, so I was hoping for something a little more introspective and it didn’t deliver on that point.

How Soccer Explains the World is light reading. It’s conceivable that soccer can explain the world, but that doesn’t happen in this book. It provides some snapshots of the culture of the sport, but as a reader you will be left to sort out the information and what it means on your own. It’s interesting for what it is and I can’t say it’s bad writing, but it isn’t literature to be taken too seriously. Maybe it’s something to be read on a long bus ride, in an airport terminal, in the waiting room at the DMV, or if you have some obnoxious friend who insists on making you listen to Jordan Peterson lectures. Maybe its something to keep your mind busy when your proctologist insists on not using general anesthesia during a colonoscopy. Anyhow, I’d rather read about why most Americans don’t know who David Beckham is or why they get lost if you talk about Manchester United, Arsenal, or Juventus. I’d also like to know why Brits gets so red-in-the-face angry when Americans use the word “soccer” instead of “football” considering that “soccer” is a word of British origin that was used by them until they switched to “football” in the 1980s. Can soccer explain why people like to fight over such petty trivialities? It must be the narcissism of small differences. I’d like to read a book that explains that. 

 

Book Review

The Soccer War

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

     If you are interested in remote and dangerous parts of the world, than The Soccer War would be a good book for you. Its author, Ryszard Kapuscinski, was a Polish journalist and war correspondent who got out to see the world before the communist system collapsed. In this collection of essays and dispatches, he writes about the times in Africa, Latin America, and the Mediterranean when he deliberately put himself into danger zones, sometimes almost getting killed, for the sake of reporting back to his home country, inform the communist world on what life can be like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The book starts on a fairly optimistic tone with one memorable essay about Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the first Black African president to come to power in the post-colonial era. The author effectively captures the vibrant and energetic rally in which Nkrumah makes a speech. Kapuscinski then points out why post-colonial leaders were receiving so much attention in the 1960s; his take is that because of colonialism and slavery, the West effectively wiped out the history of African leadership. Post-colonialism was a time when the African people needed new heroes to reawaken their nations and lead them into the future. They had no heroes in their historical memory so they looked to the young and bold heroes of their present for inspiration.

In other essays, the author continues examining the theme of post-colonial leadership with chapters on Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria. In the former essay, he fears for his life as Congolese mobs search for white people to lynch after the assassination of Lumumba. In the latter essay he writes about a coup that overthrows the revolutionary administration of Ben Bella. Both subjects are handled with sympathy and understanding for the people of those respective countries. In the essay on Algeria, he explains why post-colonial politics in the Third World are so troublesome. A young ideological visionary takes power and fails to lift his country up to greatness, an endeavor that takes time and stability. But progress happens too slowly, the populations grow frustrated, and agitation begins. The new politicians’ powers get sapped and drained as he struggles to maintain order and power while others challenge his authority in the form of coups and riots. Heavy-handed governing is the result which looks like repression to the citizens, so people rebel and a downward spiral of brutality begins. Any student of post-colonial history needs to read this essay because the author so clearly and succinctly evaluates and diagnoses the problem of political stability in the Third World.

Then, in this book’s titular story, “The Soccer War”, Kapuscinski tells about his time spent in Central America when the rowdiness of two soccer games between Honduras and El Salvador sparked a war between the two nations. With a kind of courage that seems almost bafflingly suicidal, the author demands to be taken to the front line of the war in the hills along the border. At the edge of the combat he flees into the jungle and finds a medical camp. He witnesses a strange sight when the Honduran soldier watch the death of a soldier, and mourn his passing without even knowing if he is on their side or the enemy’s. In the midst of all this chaos, Kapuscinski finds nothing but the sad reality of humanity. After making it back to safety, the author addresses the cause of the war as being a result of overpopulation and wealth-inequality in El Salvador, something that could be managed with effective governing. This means the war was entirely unnecessary.

Other chapters are less about politics and more about dangerous situations Kapuscinski had gotten himself into. He almost gets executed by Belgian soldiers in Burundi, burnt to death in Nigeria, and forced to escape from Ethiopia. But like the other essays, he always addresses these situations with pathos in an attempt to understand why these things are happening. His neutrality is uncanny and he never comes across as judgmental, even in the worst of times.

Kapuscinski’s writing is bold and endlessly gripping. If you are bothered by his machismo, just remember that he made all these journeys for the sake of learning what it means to be human. His nearly fatal attraction to danger can seem naive and even stupid at times, but his writing never gets arrogant; it is almost always about the other people and not about him so much. His writing style is reminiscent of Graham Greene with a little touch of Joseph Conrad thrown in, although it must be remembered that this book was translated from Polish so the translator should get some credit here.

The Soccer War reads a lot like an anthology of short travel narratives, but instead of hearing about some tourist’s extended vacation in Europe, some outsider’s alcohol or ganja fueled meanderings, or some backpacker’s treks through the wilderness, it is all about being at the wrong place at the wrong time and being their deliberately. It is more the author’s personal statement than a reliable work of journalism or history, but the insights he gives make this an excellent introduction to the study of post-colonialism and Third World studies. Or it might just be interesting to the general reader as well. In the end, it might make you feel as though life is lived more deeply, more richly, and more meaningfully at the peripheries of the world’s populations or the margins of human experience where you may not be safe but where you will experience the strongest manifestation of your will to live. 

 

Classic Account of Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

Bantam Books, 1969 edition/47th printing

mass market paperback

Available for purchase on Ebay here