Bonus Sample: Michael Parenti Went to a Yoga Ashram
Michael Parenti, the late Marxist political scientist born in 1933, recounts his 1987 revelation of a Caribbean yoga ashram leader who preached material renunciation while flaunting a yacht and seaplane. This incident exposed the Swami as a theocrat using wealth to suppress dissent, mirroring Parenti's own 1970 arrest at Illinois Urbana-Champaign where police falsely accused him of assault despite his efforts to protect demonstrators. Ultimately, the story illustrates how spiritual authority often masks authoritarian control, challenging the purity of alternative lifestyles. [Automatically generated summary]
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Short bonus episode today called Michael Parenti Went to a Yoga Ashram.
And it's a riff on a story that Parenti told to open a lecture in 1987 in Colorado called The Political Uses of Religion at the American Atheists Convention.
So I'll start by rolling back.
A few years ago, I went on a yoga retreat in the Caribbean, a little island.
It's an ashram where people practice yoga.
I went because I like yoga, unfortunately, this microphone in front of me, Can you all hear me all right?
Back there in the cheap seats, you can hear me.
Okay, fine.
Unfortunately, the head of the whole, this yoga sect was there, the head Swami, a very religious man, and he gave sermons every morning, which the guests were required to attend.
And every day he talked about love and the higher cosmic force of love.
And every day he talked about how spiritual things were everything and material things are nothing.
He was an Indian.
He used to say, spiritual things are everything, material things are nothing.
And then one day, his yacht got loose from the pier and it began to float away.
And he started to scream and say, get my yacht, get my yacht.
And he had a yacht and he had a seaplane.
And this man of love, I noticed, was filled with hate.
He yelled at people.
This man of God was full of ego.
He got up and talked about how no one is perfect, only I am perfect.
He kicked out a couple of people from the place because they raised some questions and he threatened to bring the police in.
And it occurred to me that this Swami was the perfect theocrat.
That what we had here was a theocracy, using the power of the state to enforce your will, countenancing no alternative opinions and up to your ears in wealth.
So who is Michael Parenti?
Well, he just died a few weeks ago, so you might have seen some posts about him if you didn't know him before.
He was an American Marxist political scientist and historian, born in New York City in 1933 to an Italian-American working-class family.
And he worked his way through city college and then Yale and then taught at a bunch of universities, including Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Vermont.
Now, if you haven't heard of Michael Parenti, or if you have a number of Noam Chomsky books on your shelf, but none of Parenti's, here's why.
According to an account by the late UVM philosophy prof and activist Will Miller, also Parenti writes about this in his autobiography, Parenti arrived at UVM in the fall of 1970 after coming from a springtime of anti-war protests at the University of Illinois.
At one of those protests, Parenti had been injured and arrested while trying to stop police from harming student demonstrators.
Sounds familiar?
This is a situation you'll recognize from today.
A cop in riot gear clubs him over the head and then claims that the professor had assaulted him.
So Parenti was convicted.
He was fined a couple hundred dollars.
But on his way to Vermont or prior to him arriving in Vermont that fall, the press there, including the Burlington Free Press, picked up the story and really publicly vilified him before his arrival.
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