Gods like Ginsberg July 9, 1985

 

It’s Ginsberg time!

Tonight, tonight, when the highway’s right, we’ll travel up to WP to Ripmaster’s home away from home to watch him pay homage to the long-gone 1960s, as if the names Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Mario Savio mean as much to this generation as did to ours.

Ken Kesey is remembered for his Koo Koo Next – that is when he’s remembered. I remember him from having befriended one of the whackos from his legendary bus while I was living in LA.

Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty or Cody Pomera are names that have lost all luster in the new world just as the anti-heroes of the 1930s were lost on us.

I’m not sure Ripmaster sees this or cares, needing us to relive a youth he really never lived, trying to keep the sixties alive through this generation of students.

He like me well enough. Yet I am close enough to his age for him to feel threatened by me, since I’m not as enthralled with the sixties as he is, having lived through them on the street, having lived with the violence and drugs, the explosions radical set off in the name of peace.  He was always in the right place but never actually involved until late, getting his intellectual vibe second hand – although his status on campus as the radical professor allowed him to attract the real icons such as Ginsberg and earlier Abbie Hoffman, who people I also knew, Abbie from when I hung out at his runaway switchboard in the East Village in 1968, and later Ginsberg, who (as a gay man) attempted to pick me up at a poetry event in the late 1970s.

I’ve never been the radical extremist Ripmaster is attracted to, too blue collar, raised in a home with a blue-collar family, arriving on campus ten years after most kids with a decade of real experience against which to measure the propaganda colleges impose on younger minds.

I told him once the sixties sucked, because for me it was personal, as they never lived up to the hype, the love and peace people as meanspirited as those they condemned as warmongering conservatives. It wasn’t the radical right burning down cities or blowing up banks. It wasn’t the conservatives selling smack to kids in Washington Square Park or Sunset Strip.

We can excuse anything if we label it social justice and usually do, often doing everything bad that we blame other people for. We call any conservative a Nazi or a racist or a sexist or a pig, yet we hate when other people stereotype us.

We all took Ripmaster’s class on the history of the sixties because it was a cool thing to do, even though real history is about the back and forth, a power struggle between extremes and ultimately the satisfaction of finding a middle, going from a conservative Teddy Roosevelt to a radical Franklin, from Truman to Jimmy Carter, and now we get to preach about Ronald Reagan knowing the cycle will swing back to some future liberal.

Ripmaster’s classes gave us all the left wing intellectuals, the double bind theory, the power elite, the Marcuse propaganda and the rest at a time when those things had long gone out of fashion – even though a new radical left is already emerging in places like Cooper Union in New York City and the other Marxist enclaves (making me terrified of what kids will get turned into when the new generation takes over a few decades from now.)

Ripmaster talks about those times when he joined the Freedom Riders to undo Jim Crow in the deep south. He even has a scar above his eve from being beaten by southern police and talks about the jail time he spent with fellow revolutionaries. He hints about the communes he got involved earlier in the 1970s, and the free love all shared until petty jealousies broke up the party and how he once ejaculated in the woods when tripping on LSD.

And yet, for all this, for all the radical merit badges he has, for all the intellectual essays he’s written, opt ed pieces his authored for local and regional newspapers, he seems not to have experienced the same sixties most of the rest of us had, going from his roots in the  1950s as a naïve kid and plunging into the seventies clinging to what happened during the decade in between as if a life preserver.

Ginsberg is a great prize, coming to the campus like a demi-God, just as Abbie Hoffman had a few years ago, proof positive of just how hip Ripmaster still is, how still in touch with the core of the left, proving his cool after the fact and before the new new left rises to make it cool again – with me and Michael headed to campus to upset the apple cart – again.

 

 1985 Menu


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