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from acm #21: allen ginsberg, a conversation
acm: It was that localizing that I had in mind.
Kerouac, for instance, resisted it completely and turned right-
ag: I don't think so. Again, I think that's a disinformation
campaign sponsored by neoconservatives or the extreme Marxists who resent his
refusal to buy their police state. You've got to remember that Kerouac was attacking
Mao during a time when the United States and everybody was all in favor of the
Cultural Revolution, which turned out to be a great practice of mass murder.
People were carrying pictures of Mao in the United States when the Chinese hated
him and were under his heel. You know he killed forty million people, and condemned
everybody with eyeglasses or who had any sense of a foreign language or knew
anything about the machine tool industry to go shovel shit in Shanghai. At a
time when Kerouac was saying, I'm not afraid of Mao Tse-tung, when all the Harvard
radicals were scared of Mao and scared of putting down Mao. So for that Kerouac
was called a reactionary.
Then he also disapproved of the left anger and hysteria against the middle class
in the sixties. He didn't disapprove of the antiwar movement's opposition to
the war, he disapproved of them attacking their parents, which everybody now
disapproves of and realizes prolonged the war. So what Kerouac said was, I'm
a bippy in the middle, quote unquote. He wasn't right wing. He attacked both
left and right.
In '68 when he was on William Buckley's program, he undercut Buckley on the
Vietnam War. Buckley thought he supported the war, and he said, no, all those
South Vietnamese want to do is get our jeeps. And Buckley said, oh, come come,
Mr. Kerouac, that couldn't possibly be. So Kerouac leaned over like an old barfly
and said, well they got an awful lot of jeeps, didn't they? It just rendered
Buckley speechless.
The stereotype is that Kerouac moved right, but Kerouac never was either left
or right. He was sort of like old-fashioned Thoreauvian. Individualist, libertarian.
Saw whatever was good on both sides. He didn't like police, which is unlike
right wing. He didn't like the military. His ultimate view was a Confucion avoid
the authorities; he felt that it was a waste of time to fight with the authorities.
And finally, he said, them Jews-Ginsberg, Rubin and Hoffman-are inventing new
reasons for spitefulness. 1968. And that was true. Even Jerry Rubin admits it.
So he put his finger on things quite intelligently.
And if he'd been listened to, the Vietnam War would have been ended a lot earlier,
because I think the left has as much blood on its hands as the right for the
prolongation of the war after 1968. Having refused to vote for Humphrey, for
hatred of their parents-new reasons for spitefulness-Nixon squeaked in by half
a million votes. And escalated the war beyond anything Johnson or Kennedy had
dreamed of, escalated the carpet-bombing and the Agent Orange defoliation of
the Mekong. By 1968, 52 percent of the American people thought the war had always
been a mistake, according to Gallup. The left, with the majority behind it,
was still saying kill the middle class, bring the war home, carry the Viet Cong
flag. And so offended the middle class they couldn't leave the middle class
out of the war when the middle class was in favor of getting out. Particularly,
a couple of million people on the left refused to vote. The left still hasn't
acknowledged its own culpability on that. Still wants to be right, still wants
to be morally superior, and that's the problem of the left all along. At a time
when it was necessary to get over the earlier infatuations with Mao and with
Castro, who'd already established a police state that I was kicked out of in
'65, the left was still carrying pictures of Mao and Castro when anybody in
the CIA knew that these guys didn't know what the hell was going on.
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