“In a climate of fear and hysteria..” – It’s always revealing and instructive to “get to see the files”. We featured a lengthy post on Allen’s FBI files some years back (courtesy the pioneering work of Shawn Musgrave and Muck Rock). Another tenacious investigator. S.P. Sullivan is to be commended for just recently uncovering William Carlos Williams’ files – “He was one of Jersey’s most famous poets. The FBI worried he was a Communist”. Sullivan’s full report (just published, by Inside Jersey magazine, and on-line at NJ.Com) may be accessed – here
Recently appearing (on You Tube), Allen Ginsberg on a park bench in Tompkins Square Park, New York, in 1994 – “I would now like to make a little. speech – about politics”
AG: “I would now like to make a little speech – about politics. And I think what we need to do is open the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) Archives on COINTEL raids, government drug dealing, Kennedy-King assassinations, Iran Contragate, Panama Deception, Vatican Bank and Lavaro Bank thuggery etcetera (including the Bush-Noriega relations and other CIA client-agent scandals). And open up all secret files on the J.Edgar Hoover-Cardinal Spellman-Roy Cohn-Joe McCarthy alcoholic closet-queen conspiracy with organized crime to sabotage the US Labor Movement, sabotage Native American, African-American, Hispanic and Gay minority leaderships and blackmail Presidents in Congress, (and each other), for almost half a century.
And, as for drugs, what I would do is… I’ve got a policy on that. too. Decriminalize addictive drug problem. Doctors can cure addiction or provide maintenance if no cure. Reduce mass million expense on narcotics-addicted political prisoners overcrowding courts and jails, medicalize the drug trade. Decriminalize marijuana, since its disadvantages are minor. Preserve hemp grass as an unadvertized small cash crop for the failing family farm andencourage hemp fabric industries. For psychedelics, entrust and privitize them, give them to medical, education, and priestly professions. End military monopoly on LSD research and development. End tobacco farming subsidies and cut use.
So that’s my drug policy…and then for back-up statistics..
Tia Bonacora: Allen Ginsberg! Let’s legalize it.
AG: No, decriminalize it.
Tia Bonacora: Decriminalize it.
AG: And for statistics [1994], it’s got to be remembered that the number of deaths in America from illicit drugs are twenty to forty thousand each year, the number of deaths from alcohol are a hundred thousand a year, and the number of deaths from nicotine tobacco are, according to the Surgeon General’s reports, over four hundred thousand a year. So that’s the drug problem, not the illicit drugs
And, as for sexuality, sexuality is loose not fixed. They ought to legalize it.
A two-minute political rant that still makes plenty of sense almost a quarter of a century later.
The Jack Kerouac & Ed Ruscha show (see last week) in Florida, at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at SouthWestern State College, opens tonight with a public preview reception from 6.00pm to 7.00pm, and, from 7.00pm to 9.00pm, a special performance by legendary Kerouac collaborator, David Amram
More music – Arthur Russell – the Arthur Russell Festival for Creative Music Making takes place, Ellsworth Maine, July 2nd to 7th
Dylan and de Beats, Dutch Dylan-scholar and Beat admirer Tom Willems in-depth study of the influence of the Beat Generation on Bob Dylan has just been published this month in the Netherlands (in Dutch – an English edition is projected for the not-too-distant future). The book focuses primarily on the interconnections between Dylan and six key figures – Allen, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, notably, Michael McClure, but in its three-hundred-and-fifty-plus pages ranges further and freely. “In this book Willems tries to answer successfully the question: Is Bob Dylan one of the Beats?” the publishers declare – Dylan & de Beats also contains – as an extra – a never-before-published interview with Allen about recording with Dylan in 1971.
Please Do Not Howl”? – huh? – “Human Howling Causes Stress To Wolves” – Hey, as Aubrey Hirsch wittily observes on her Facebook post, “The zoo could make a killing if they put this on a t-shirt”!
