“Iconic Clowns [2]: Abbie Again, The Long Good-bye”

Leonard’s comments on the occasion of the 1989 “No Regrets” memorial for Abbie Hoffman at the Paladium in NYC. Very funny and insightful walk through the celebrities in the green room: Peter Yarrow, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg…example:

I didn’t want to talk to Allen Ginsberg because I happened to be in the middle of reading a biography of him; and in this biography Ginsberg was in the middle of discovering, under the influence of ayuhuasca, in the jungles of Peru, that God was an octopus…”

Leonard describes the event as a “made-for-television overproduction and laments about how there was no time to “…contemplate our own failures of character, nor any silence to seek some courage.” The spectacle reinforces Leonard’s feeling that the myth has taken over the memory, “About Berkeley and Chicago I remember him; I’ve forgotten me.” The next day Leonard learns that I.F. Stome died and that the Mets traded Lenny Dykstra reinforcing his feeling of the death of, not an era, but a frame of mind. I.F. Stone is, of course the noted investigative journalist and Zionist (and later accused Soviet contact). Not really sure how Lenny Dykstra fit in.

New word: ayuhuasca = organic Peruvian concoction of various plants that many users have claimed led to a spiritual awakening. Kind of a psychedelic mate tea?

New learning: Funny random quote in the essay from Maxine Hong Kinston’s “very sixties book” Tripmaster Monkey,  “What if Chubby Checker does not mean us well? What is Chubby Checker is up to no good?” The authors name, the books title and the mystery of the context of this quote will compel me to read the book.

“Cultural Heroes [3]: Studs Terkel, a Wired Diogenes”

Leonard takes the opportunity to write about Terkel on the occasion of the publication of Race: How Whites & Blacks Think & Feel About the American Obsession. He sums up Terkel by writing, “He is, of course, the opposite of a public-opinion poll. He goes anywhere, but when he gets there he stays put long enough to let people explain themselves” and calls him “Our premier oral historian…”

Leonard notes that Terkel interviews and writes about people (mostly from Chicago) that “Have never shown up on Face The Nation…where all we here from are the male and the pale and their credentialed feedback…” and notes “America would be a better place if everybody listened to these working Americans, not just racial-humanist Studs Terkel.”

New name: Diogenes = Greek philosopher in the 4^th Century BC that founded cynic philosophy (also known as Diogenes the Cynic)

New learning: Studs Terkel played a sports reporter in John Sayles film about the 1919 Black Sox scandal “Eight Men Out.”

Studs (seems like only a B&W photo works for him:

“Cultural Criminals [2]: Kissinger Again, That China Card”

Leonard promised to “never write another essay about Kissinger,” but he couldn’t help himself. Evidently, Kissinger was going around as a TV commentator (for ABC), after the Tiananmen Square massacre, telling every one that he did not support sanctions against China. He also wrote that in a newspaper column that “…no country in the world would have tolerated its main square being occupied for eight weeks” and went on to praise China’s economic policy.

What HK did not tell people, is that he had a vested financial interest in China that would be hurt by sanctions…as a consultant to numerous US firms looking to do business in China and as a partner in a $75MM venture with the Chinese government. Kissinger was using his role as a political commentator to essentially shill for his clients. I guess this is what happens when unscrupulous ex-politicos become journalists.

Good Robin Williams quote in the essay speculating what you should say if you meet HK at a cocktail party, “Hi there, I loved you wars.”

New word: Tiananmen = Gates of Heavenly Peace

The occupation at he gate:

Old learning: Kissinger is a scum bag.

“Cultural Heroes (2): Allen Ginsberg, Angel-Headed Hipster”

OK, let’s get this out of the way. In Howl, the line reads “angelheaded [one word no hyphen] hipsters.”  

Early on in this essay, written before Ginsberg’s death, Leonard writes:

Howl is 32 years old, Ginsberg is 61 and the Constitution’s 200. That’s three consenting adults we’re still afraid of, and I’m secretly pleased a their continuing power to subvert.

Leonard sees Ginsberg (“the only beat with genuine talent” in he words of Whittaker Chambers) as a crucial force in waking America (and the world) from the 1950s and shoving them through the 1960s. Here’s a great passage that says it all:

Maybe because he contained in himself all countercultures, he was the bridge in the sixties between the Yippie media brats and the New Left Little-League Leninists. But his ultimate role, at every engagement of this second Civil War, seemed to be that of a nurse, like his friend Walt Whitman. [Howl drew on the free verse style of Leaves of Grass]

New word: Moloch = (from Part II of Howl) a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. Used in literature to represent something that requiring a very costly sacrifice.

New learning: Ginsberg was a life-long friend of Bob Dylan (and participated in the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Review). They also collaborated on putting several of Ginsberg’s (and William Blake’s) poems to music in the 1970s.  Here is September on Jessore Road (Jessore Road is a main connecting artery in Bangladesh):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wls0SqCFP9U

“Cultural Criminals (1): Kissinger Laughs”

Leonard’s commentary on the other famous “Dr. K.” inspired by word that Kissinger was writing a new book. Leonard’s thesis is simple: Kissinger is a bad man who did bad things that ironically led him to a Nobel Peace Prize and a “secure…celebrity.” He reminds us of the part Kissinger played in the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the death squads in Argentina and the secret, and indiscriminate, bombing of Cambodia. When asked to comment on the PBS News Hour about William Golding’s Nobel Prize for Literature, Leonard commented that, “He [Golding] seemed…to have done far less damage to literature than Kissinger had done to peace.”

Leonard commented that he wouldn’t object, “…if some said ‘war criminal’ and ‘Kissinger’ in the same sentence.”  To tie back to Hitchens, CH wrote a short book on that subject called The Trial Of Henry Kissinger. It was also made into a documentary in 2002.

New word: nimbus = atmosphere or cloud around a god or goddess.

New learning: In 1976, Kissinger probably encouraged the Argentine Military to “…kidnap and murder 9,000 people before Jimmy Carter and the human rights fetishists could take over Washington.” The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement was started in reaction to these “disappearances.”

Here is a picture of the movement I took in Buenos Aeries in November, 2012: