Oracles, perverts and the Dirtbag Left

For 500 years the State Oracle of Tibet has worked as a kind of angry immortal advisor to the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan hybrid of Dominic Cummings and John Dee. The current incumbent, like all previous ones, alternates between his human incarnation and his spirit version. ‘In Tibetan Buddhism, the unseen parallel world of spirits is not to be taken lightly,’ explains anthropologist David Sneath on Heart and Soul (BBC World Service). ‘There are so many other living species,’ the Minister of Religion and Culture tells Sneath, ‘many of which we don’t even see.’

Sneath interviews the cheerful sixty-something State Oracle (living in exile in Dharamsala), various government ministers, sincere religious leaders and younger Tibetan activists who see consulting oracles as embarrassingly dated. In the era of pocket black mirrors, mysterious algorithms and new spirits with names like ‘Google’, ‘Instagram’ and ‘Netflix’, consulting a State Oracle might seem a little like keeping a jester around for old times’ sake, but the previous one did, in fact, prove useful to the Dalai Lama, prophesying the invasion of China in 1950 — even drawing his holiness an escape map.

Sneath’s thoughtful, atmospheric broadcast conjures a world where politics, spirits and history are inseparable. Political podcasts, another ‘unseen parallel world of spirits’, perform similar work, tapping into currents unnoticed, unseen and unobserved by the mainstream media, fettered as it is by ideological rigidity, self-policing and the party line. Freed from tired formats and often illusory ‘balance’, podcasts at either end of the political spectrum increasingly prove popular. Two such examples, Red Scare Podcast and Bronze Age Pervert’s Caribbean Rhythms With BAP, on the left and the right respectively, command devoted audiences and much speculation about their presenters, highly public in the first case and strictly anonymous in the latter.

Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, the fashionable, New Yorker, Bernie Sanders-supporting hosts of Red Scare, are the doyennes of the ‘Dirtbag Left’, a term coined by regular guest Amber A’Lee Frost to describe ‘non-woke’ or ‘anti-identity’ socialists — that part of the left unafraid to mock and make jokes, even, or especially, against their own side.