Ed Sanders and a Drunken Jack Kerouac on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968

Posted on by Biblioklept

Published by Biblioklept

7 thoughts on “Ed Sanders and a Drunken Jack Kerouac on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968”

  1. Did today’s conversationalists like this have their minds incinerated in the bonfire of Fahrenheit 451? Goals without struggle are worthless. Jack Kerouac is funny as hell. Too bad we are going out with a whimper, not a bang.

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    1. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening today, even if we had more writers analogous to the Beats—I mean a conservative actually having artists and intellectuals on to talk about real stuff. It just doesn’t exist anymore.

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      1. Along with all the unspeakable violence that occurs today in our land goes the lives of passivity. It could be cause and effect. A great healer who worked on the premise that there was no evil no sin said that cancer was a cell’s psychotic reaction to death. Not many people seem to have caught on. The cost of freedom is a constant watch, as one of our beloved Elders said. Occupy was depicted as a bunch of spoiled middle class kids. The only other calls for action I hear reported in the media are those who would lead us into the pit of puritanism and theocracy. Reminds me of cargo religions. Maybe L. Ron was right and we are a planet of rebellious slaves who have lost the strain of rebelliousness. Dovetailing that is my ‘theory’ that we are being fattened up for a big feast by space creatures who like human flesh. Polluted fat and all. Maybe by our former masters. Conspiracy theorists used to believe it was some thing in the water. I think it is in the food. And in the water. And in the effort it would take to change the channel.
        Where to point the finger? Can’t be that we have become equitable and peaceable what with our wars of attrition, and lack of action at home helping the disadvantaged. I wonder how many times the neighborhood runt has to beat the tar out of big brother before he learns to leave those people alone and let them live as they choose. When people cry out to us in support of their quest for freedom, our leaders wring their hands and do nothing except maybe strangle and starve the civilian population there. If Syria is taken over by militant fundamentalists, we’ll be going to war there. When we could have helped at least a little in the beginning. I wonder what I am going to tell some one who deserves an honest reply, who has returned from the great crusade, other than I appreciate that he did what he thought was right. Will the present crop of vets make a difference or will they just get buried in the national conscience like the ‘Nam guys did. Apologized to a communist government about that war and never offered a word of contrition to our own brothers.
        I am not that good at writing in blogs and staying on subject. The perspective I have watching the above video is knowing who most of the principals were. Buckley, the slippery tongued Conservative, one of few who didn’t sound like an idiot. As LBJ remarked about B Goldwater, ‘in your guts you know he’s nuts’. Conservatives could use such an articulate spokesman now. At least we know where they coming from, racist, theocratic, robber barons who profit from anarchy in the market place. Kerouac was surprisingly discombobulated. I have seen him in other videos and I think that he had trouble with television cameras. Besides being high as a kite. The sociologist I saw in the public eye back in the ‘hippy’ days. Up on stage somewhere, maybe Berkeley. All that academic obfuscation. Young Mr. Sanders had a handle on the question and the whole concept of alternative societies.
        The hippies I remember from NYC and SF and Laguna were varied in their outlooks and the class that they came from. The main things that made them cohesive and identifiable as a group was their equitable attitudes toward each other and squares in general. Most of us believed that politics were outmoded and that the only real revolution would be real when most of the civilization would become conscious and change the path we were on. Historically, militant upheavals have ended up in a bad place, sooner than later. Our country excepted. All the communards that we communicated with followed the examples laid down by Jesus relative to his life, not the religions that came about later.
        I think we have been bought off with cheap trinkets that will become useless shortly after the power goes off. If you have ever had to wait out the results of a snow storm or hurricane you know what I mean.

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