Showing posts with label Counterculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Counterculture. Show all posts

Friday, November 15, 2024

TOM LUONGO: Under Biden, we had a bunch of Ukrainian Nazis. We don't have that [now]. We may have a lot of people who are Israeli first, or owned by AIPAC, or whatever you want to call them, they are not ideologically related to this conflict with blood


11:00.  Under Biden, we had a bunch of Ukrainian Nazis.  We had Anthony Blinkin, Nuland, and all the other people.  We don't have that.  We may have a lot of people who are Israeli first, or owned by AIPAC, or whatever you want to call them, they are not ideologically related to this conflict with blood.  And that's a massive upgrade.  That means that ultimately these people are going to be transactional about this stuff, whereas Nuland and Blinkin and the others were not transactional about it.  This was personal to them.  Yeah, they were put in those positions to execute on that personal animus, and that's reality and as clear as day with Blinkin and it's clear as day with Nuland and Kagan and Bill Crystal, and all the rest of them.  Those people are not in power here.  What we have are a bunch of people who are . . . two things.  I'm trying to take the other side of the Pearl collection on this

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

I immersed myself in the literature of the counterculture, reading the drug-fueled rants of Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. . . . The one thing of lasting value that I did in college was to study Russian.

The conversation is here.

RICHARD POE: The fear lived on. All that fear they generated in the Sixties didn’t just evaporate. It poisoned the American spirit for decades. And this was intentional. The biggest fear they managed to instill in our parents was the fear of losing their children to the counterculture, to the mad culture of sex and drugs.

The media played on this fear. All through the Sixties and into the Seventies, the TV was showing us white middle-class kids on drugs. White middle-class kids having sex. White middle-class kids hating their parents, dropping out of school, running away from home, and living on the street.

The counterculture was like a stalking predator, stalking the suburbs, looking for kids to snatch.

In August 1969, the Manson murders broke in the news. Here was a hippie cult breaking into suburban homes and slaughtering people with knives. It confirmed Middle America’s worst fears that, beneath its seductive veneer, the counterculture was a raging beast thirsting for blood.

A few months later, in April 1970, antiwar activist Jerry Rubin said, “Kill your parents.” It was all over the news. The exact quote was, “Unless you’re prepared to kill your parents, you’re not ready to change this country. Our parents are our first oppressors.”

I remember the anger and fear in my mother’s eyes when she heard that.

As I sank ever deeper into a morass of mysticism, I immersed myself in the literature of the counterculture, reading the drug-fueled rants of Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and others of that sort.

The one thing of lasting value that I did in college was to study Russian. My grandparents had lived with us briefly in the early Sixties, when my grandmother was ill, and the beautiful sound of the Russian language is one of my earliest memories. As I grew older, I resolved that I would learn it.

So I studied Russian in college, and, in 1978, between my junior and senior years, I did a summer session in the USSR, at Leningrad State University.