Dispatch #9: Hare Krishna

The first thing you do as you enter the Boston Hare Krishna Temple is take off your shoes. In the next room, people stand around making small talk. Children run through the hallways lined with paintings of Krishna and portraits of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Nobody seems put off by a bewildered outsider wandering aimlessly through the temple. It may be a fairly common occurrence. “Hare Krishna,” people say as they pass.

There’s a gift shop with T-shirts and necklaces, paper masks and Krishna coloring books, cans of Sprite and Snapple. This isn’t the part of the temple where the religious rituals are held, apparently.

In a larger room downstairs people are singing and dancing before an altar. There are candles, flowers, and more paintings of Krishna. There are no Prabhupada photographs here, only a very lifelike and creepy statue.

Slowly, people trickle in, dropping to their knees and bowing to the floor, then standing again and moving towards the altar, dancing and singing the call-and-response chants. People are playing finger cymbals and drums. A woman sitting on the floor is playing a miniature keyboard and directing the singing and chanting.

As the room fills up, the singing, dancing, and chanting reaches a fever pitch. The altar is obscured by the crowd now. People appear to be having a blast.

Suddenly the music stops. Everyone drops to their knees, heads bowed to the floor. There are call and response chants.

Hare hare,
Hare hare,
Krishna Krishna,
Krishna Krishna,

And so on. Eventually people sit up, no longer bowing, although they remain on the floor. The curtains close, hiding the colorful altar with it’s flowers and idols and pictures of Krishna.

Then the slick temple pitchman stands, and gives his spiel.

Krishna is eternally grateful to those devotees who give money to pay for this and that thing that the temple requires. Today marks the end of the month of Kartik, he says, making it a specially opportune time to fork over some cash. Krishna won’t forget it. You can add to your “spiritual bank account,” according to the pitchman.

Regular temple attendees should be paying “anywhere from 31 dollars to 3.1 million dollars” a month, he says. “We say there’s no minimum, but $31 is really the minimum.”

He discusses the campaign to distribute copies of the Bhagavad Gita to hotels and random people everywhere. It’s going well. Devotees should take it upon themselves to distribute as many Gitas as possible. The pitchman’s own brother distributed 8,000 in Texas in a year, he says.

“We’re not here to put on a cultural display,” he says. “We’re here to spread the word of Krishna, and Krishna consciousness, and to chant ‘Hare Krishna.’”

Temple members are encouraged to buy Gitas by the case, at $108 per case. There are 24 to a case, like beer. He sells eight cases, taking pledges, in a style reminiscent of an auctioneer, before the devotees line up for dinner.

Dispatch #8: Book Fair

To smash the state, or ignore it and let it inevitably wither away? What tactics are appropriate in the fight for equality for our four-legged comrades, the domestic farm animals? Where can I find an abandoned house to squat in, running water to take a bath, and a vegan free lunch? These questions and more were quite possibly on the minds of visitors to the 2013 Boston Anarchist Bookfair at Simmons College over the weekend.

This was the third annual book fair, which first came to Simmons in 2011. Before that, there’d been a New England Anarchist Bookfair which went on for a while, but apparently faded away after 2006, and spent a few years in limbo.

“I don’t know where else they would go besides here,” said Eileen Fontenot, co-chair of the Progressive Librarians Guild at Simmons, which hosted the event. “It’s great that we have the space that we can provide, because we’re students.”

Fontenot is pursuing her M.S. in Library Information Science at Simmons. She is sympathetic to the anarchists, she said, but doesn’t really consider herself one of them.

“I’m anarcho-curious,” Fontenot said, “because I’m interested in everything, basically. I’d say I’m more of like, a socialist, you know?”

Several alternative publishers had tables at the event, including AK Press, PM Press, Wooden Shoe Books, Little Black Cart, and Black Powder Press. Representatives of well-known radical groups like Earth First! and the Industrial Workers of the World were also on hand. There was an “Anarkid’s Corner” with arts and crafts and children’s books for the next generation of anti-capitalists.

Most Americans wouldn’t take anybody seriously who calls themself an anarchist. Certainly, some of the book fair attendees’ ideas didn’t seem realistic. Nick Ford, a member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left of New England, who embraces the “anarchist” label, said that as far as politicians go, he agreed with a lot of things Ron Paul has talked about, but disagrees with him, “because I don’t think we should have laxer borders, or open borders. I think we should have no borders at all.”

Still, some anarchist ideas have become more mainstream in recent years. The 2011-12 Occupy Wall Street movement was heavily influenced by anarchist thinking (arguably to its detriment.) Critics of National Security Agency surveillance that have emerged since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of snooping programs earlier this year have appropriated arguments about government overreach that the anarchy crowd have been pushing for years. Obviously, anarchists think the government’s very existence is an overreach, and would like to push a little further.

People at the book fair were handing out stickers to put on cell-phones with slogans like “PRISM surveillance device,” “You Are Under Surveillance,” and “This Phone Is Tapped.”

Ford, for all his idealism, expressed a jaded view of the NSA disclosures. “Well, the public’s going to be outraged for a little bit,” he said, “and then things will probably calm back down, and the NSA will keep spying on us.”

Dispatch #7: Not So Anonymous

Gregg Housh casually comments that most of his friends are dead or in jail, like he’s telling a joke. Sometimes, he says, he doesn’t know why he keeps fighting for his cause.

Paradoxically, Housh has been described as a known member of Anonymous, the “hacktivist” collective of computer hackers, known for sporting Guy Fawkes masks from the movie V for Vendetta, making vaguely threatening Youtube videos, and stirring up trouble for corporations and government agencies.

“At one point I was,” he says. “I wore the mask, I did all the fun stuff. I went to our protests as anonymously as could be.”

Housh was “outed,” however, by the Church of Scientology. “They used private investigators,” he says, “and all kinds of government databases and access, to hunt me down because of what we were doing online to try and fight them.”

Now that Housh’s cover has been blown, he’s publicly an activist and a kind of unofficial spokesman for the hacker group. At the Digital Media Conference at Lesley University in late October, he gave a talk on surveillance and over-prosecution of hackers and journalists who have tried to expose questionable surveillance programs run by the government and private companies.

“You have people like Jeremy Hammond, who is facing ten years because he hacked one of these private intelligence firms,” Housh said.

He pointed out that Hammond had accomplices in other countries, whose sentences pale in comparison. “In Ireland his co-conspirators were found to have not done anything worthy of going to trial. They got no charges,” Housh said. “In England the maximum sentence was 18 months, and in Norway there was 20 hours of community service.”

Even more troubling is the case of Barrett Brown, who is facing decades in prison for re-posting a link online to files hacked by Hammond, which Brown copied from a news site where it had already been posted.

Aside from his public speech at the conference, I also asked Housh about his thoughts on increasing video surveillance.

“The big problem I have with it is actually something that Barrett Brown was uncovering, when he was raided and arrested, called Trapwire,” he said.

“Trapwire was this interesting system where a for-profit company was paying for access to all of these cameras systems in New York, and Dallas, and Chicago, and L.A., and also paying for access to the license plate readers at all the tollbooths and all of the red-light cameras for multiple states and multiple cities,” Housh said.

“They were aggregating all that data into an online database where you could put in someone’s identity or their license plate and it would track them across the country.”

Housh is most disturbed by the fact that Trapwire is a for-profit business, available to the highest bidder.

“You didn’t have to be a police officer to have access to this. You, if you had $125,000, could have had access to this system,” he said. “That is horrible.”