Random

Just a memory from high school:

Allen Ginsberg came to my high school to speak and read poetry. At the time I fancied myself a bit of a beatnik--the 80s version--so I was quite enthralled. Of course, I had smoked so much pot earlier in the day that I fell asleep and missed much of the first part of his presentation. When I arrived he was on stage playing an accordion, "rapping" poetry about the evil CIA. Wild! It didn't occur to me that the man was a lunatic with a burning hatred towards the United States. I can't imagine what those not in thrall to such ridiculous bile presented as "poetry" felt--they must have been appalled and embarrassed for the school they taught at or attended.

The next day he conducted an informal Q & A for a smaller number of students. Of course, I was there to listen to this intellectual giant. A friend of mine (who was considering forgoing college altogether--extremely uncommon at my school), asked Ginsberg why he should go to college since clearly there was nothing to be learned from such a corrupt, bourgeois institution as higher education. Ginsberg replied that he should get as much education as he could---we were slightly surprised that he would sanction the "establishment" in that way.

What Ginsberg failed to realize is that he and his intellectual brethren had passed along to our generation a contempt for all formal institutions that extended equally to the armed forces as to higher education. It was all the same evil world we thought we would tear down, inspired by Ginsberg and later 60s radicals.

What we failed to realize was that Ginsberg's intellectual friends on the left were in the process of taking over and destroying a good many institutions---creating places that held the rest of American culture and civilization in contempt. So, of course, we should go to college---everyone needed to go to reeducation camp!