By Alex Ferguson
The recent death of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg has engendered great keening and lamentation amongst our media elite.
Reading through page after page of fawning praise, one would suppose that they were grieving over the demise of some great humanitarian or artistic giant; a Gandhi or Milton whose passing has, in some measure, impoverished humankind.
Apparently, our cardinals of camp have fully canonized him as a secular saint. They even held a “Special Memorial Event” at UCLA’s Veteran’s Wadsworth Theater (6-22-97); the accolades and adulation amounting to nothing less than a Marxist mass.
“Poet is priest,” L.A. columnist Robert Sheer wrote of him back in 1960. “What a brave and gentle patriot …,” he tells us today.
Actually, not. Allen Ginsberg was a perverse little commie creep who robbed our poetry of all that was beautiful, uplifting, and ennobling and made it into something sordid, ugly, and vile.
Novelist Joyce Cary said that, nowadays, “anything the artist spits is art,” and that is exactly what we got from Allen Ginsberg. Sputum!
Like so many icons of the New Left, Ginsberg was raised in a Communist home; his Russian born Marxist mother, Naomi, eventually dying a raving lunatic in some madhouse. This was in 1956, the year that Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a mass-murderer. It was also the same year that the murderous Soviet Army crushed the Hungarian Revolution.
American Communism went into a tailspin. Allen, himself, “was hospitalized briefly in a psychiatric ward,” but seems to have eluded the snake pit’s clutches by switching his loyalty from Josef Stalin to Leon Trotsky. “America,” he intoned in his poem of the same name, “when will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?”
You remember Leon Trotsky. He was Lenin’s Commissar of the Red Army. It was he who engineered what came to be known as the “Red Terror,” in which millions were starved and murdered. Kind of a strange choice of hero for “a lifelong pacifist who eschewed violence no matter the cause in which it was employed.” (Sheer), but Ginsberg also supported the Viet Cong’s terrorist guerillas with equally embarrassing fervor.
Of course, this was the essence of Ginsberg’s so-called poetry. “He believed poetry should cause trouble,” according to U.C. San Diego literature professor Jerome Rothenberg. He and his fellow Beats “shocked and outraged the literary world with their scatology and obscenity and seeming disregard for meter and rhyme,” according to L.A. Times staff writer Tony Perry.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that today’s “literary world” loves scatology and obscenity and hates meter and rhyme. They love Ginsberg’s “absolute defiance.” You see, like some kind of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” America’s legitimate arts establishment has been replaced by these clueless cultural gurus who proclaim Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings to be great art, just as they assure us that this drip’s sick scribblings are great poetry.
The fact is that Ginsberg’s “art” consisted of getting stoned on LSD or speed or any one of a wide variety of narcotic drugs, and then writing down the disjointed rantings that these chemicals dredged up from the deepest depths of his depraved subconscious mind. What we get is stream-of-barely-conscious filth promoting drugs, socialism, and homoerotic promiscuity.
“Homoerotic”? Sure. Like his idol, Walt Witman, Ginsberg was gay, and that would be no one’s business but his own if it weren’t for his penchant for little boys. Poet Jeffrey Hart writes in May’s “National Review” that Ginsberg was a supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Moreover, Tony Perry tells us that, “he recently scandalized even some of his followers by suggesting that laws against sex with children are outmoded.”
It is not bad enough that our self-anointed intelligentsia believes that the emperor is clothed. Garbage resonates to garbage, and the garbage that spewed out of Allen Ginsberg resonates deep within their sordid souls.
Can legalized pedophilia be far behind?
Alex Ferguson is a longtime Whittier resident.
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