(Note: This is an open thread, but there is an Israel war thread just below this one.)
When I was a child, my uncle invited my parents to bring the family to stay for a few days in one of his two beach houses at Playa del Rey, California. This was before Marina del Rey was built, but after oil was found on the strand in nearby Venice during the 1930s, leading to the building of oil wells, which come with some bad smells, etc. So the neighborhood had seen better days.
The house he lived in was impressive and pleasant despite the deterioration of the neighborhood. Both houses might be considered mansions, though not large ones. Knowing my uncle, he probably got them at bargain prices, anticipating future re-development. The original development was built starting in 1921 in an area of sand dunes (rather than in the nearby wetlands) and attracted buyers like Cecil B. Demille. I don't know if anyone famous lived in the house where we stayed.
Anyway, we got there late, having gotten lost in Venice. We passed spooky oil wells. The house where we were to stay would probably work for a made-for-TV Halloween movie -- lots of wood paneling, small servant's quarters and strange narrow hallways and stairs. And being near the airport, there would be lots of foggy days for moody beach filming. Odd how they build California airports in the foggiest spots possible.
There were no lights in the neighborhood to speak of when we arrived, and there were hints that vagrants might have taken up residence in some of the houses.
Because Playa del Rey is near Venice, some of those vagrants could have been Beatniks. My parents did not approve of Beatniks. Dad went through the house with a baseball bat before allowing us to enter. I know -- He shoulda had a revolver.
When I think of Venice, California, I think of Beatniks as well as the later phenomena of Muscle Beach and widespread homelessness. Come to think of it, the Beatniks' romantic view of vagrancy may have something to do with today's homeless epidemic in Venice.
Anyway, Mark Judge has written a piece in which he recounts a night when a member of The Beat Generation started the campaign to subvert America's children as part of the larger culture war. I'm not sure it was THE night when the culture wars started, but it is definitely creepy:
"We'll get you through your children!"
That was the threat shouted by the poet Allen Ginsberg on a fateful night in 1958. Ginsberg was yelling at Norman Podhoretz, a conservative writer. The confrontation between Ginsberg and Podhoretz is described in Podhoretz's 2001 book Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.
The Podhoretz essay, called My War With Allen Ginsberg,� has stayed with me for years. I occasionally re-read it for its tremendous foresight, wisdom and power. It is a first-hand account of a night in America in which the modern culture war began. With elegant and at times very funny observations, Podhoretz predicted everything that would happen for the next 60 years: How we got to be a country awash in drug abuse, transgenderism (and the medical malpractice that comes with it), mental health problems, anti-Americanism and atheism. It�s the genesis of our modern cultural and political nightmare.
Most chilling is the part where Ginsberg, a drug user, sex addict and member of NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, bellows at Podhoretz: �We�ll get you through your children!� That very thing has indeed happened. It�s why Podhoretz, still going at 93, has never forgiven Ginsberg, who died in 1997. The left did in fact get back at square America by corrupting her children.
Allen Ginsberg was a member of NAMBLA???? We're still getting conflicting signals about whether the LGBTQ movement (Queer Theory and Transgenderism in particular) has anything to do with pedophilia.
The conflict between Podhoretz and Ginsberg was the result of the young Podhoretz slamming Ginsberg and his fellow writers. In the 1950s Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and others formed a literary group that would become known as the Beat Generation. The Beats thought America was too conformist. They advocated drugs, sex, poetry, alternate spirituality, and long car trips. Their most famous member, Jack Kerouac, wrote a book about their experiences called On the Road -- a book Podhoretz panned. The Beats were hugely influential to the counterculture of the 1960s (despite the fact that Jack Kerouac turned conservative late in life and hated hippies, but that's another story). For young people it became cool to listen to jazz, do drugs, and aimlessly leave home without much of a plan. The Beat influence was still huge when I was in college in the 1980s. . .
He went on: "For nearly four hours that Saturday night in 1958, Ginsberg and I had at each other on all of these issues."
Podhoretz argued in favor of George Orwell's idea that normal people living normal lives of faith, freedom, heterosexuality and steady work can have just as much joy, adventure, and thrills as anyone outside the system -- in fact maybe even more, as they would avoid drug addiction, sexual diseases and perhaps even hell itself.
Years later Podhoretz would come across a park in Massachusetts dedicated to the Beats and make this observation:
We were memorializing Ginsberg and Kerouac, thereby further weakening our already tenuous grasp on Orwell's saving fact, and abandoning the field once again to these latter-day Pied Pipers, and their current successors, who never ceased telling our children that the life being lived around them was not worth living at all.
Well, Mark Judge can pick that night as the start of the culture wars, including the war against children, but like it says in the movie poster at the top of the post, EXPLODING FROM ALLEYWAYS AND IVORY TOWERS . . .
Can you think of others before the Beat Generation who were trying to subvert the Children of America?
How is the War Against Children going now?
"I don't usually do long threads, but this is important to understand.
Upon learning stats like this, many people ask themselves, "How can this be real? If it were real, we'd hear about it all the time!"
You don't hear about it for several reasons, but here's a biggie:
The educational establishment doesn't care. They don't care that students can't read because they are operating under a different definition of "literacy."
When you think "literacy," you think "the ability to read and write." When the educational establishment thinks "literacy," they think "political literacy."
Our schools aren't teaching kids to "read" as you understand it. They are teaching kids to "read and write the word to read and write the world," to paraphrase Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist who's "literacy" program was imported into the United States in the 1970s and 80s.
In the highlighted case-pictured here - the educational establishment doesn't care that 0 kids can read with proficiency. "Learning to read" isn't their learning objective. That's why everyone hasn't been fired. They only care that kids are learning to "read" their "lived experiences" through a radical political lens. . .
Would Paulo Freire's program for political literacy have been accepted in the USA without the prior influence of the Beatniks (and others)?
Music
Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Last week's thread, Thread before the Gardening Thread, Sept. 30: Compare and Contrast: Dangerous African at the border, Africans brought to the Italian border.
How do progressives treat Ibram X. Kendi vs. Coleman Hughes? Update: Even when the latter is being sort of socialist in a TED talk?
Update 2: (on Kendi)
How now
@nytimes
Another hero
You created
Bites the dust
Also freedom of speech, "book banning", Gavin Newsom and Justin Trudeau. And more.
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.