by Sanders, Ed
[Kerouac flashes thumbs down sign at the phrase “psychedelic drugs.”]
And then there’s a whole cadre of individuals [Kerouac breaks in with a short blurt, “Cadré.”] whom I term novices, who are attempting to achieve a certain transcendental state. Then there are teeny bopper kids who are sort of hanging on, and there are some ancient folks like Kerouac here who . . .
Kerouac: What do you mean ancient?
Yablonsky [to Kerouac]: Why couldn’t you have kept quiet while I was talking? I’ll keep quiet while you talk.
Kerouac: You said cadres; it’s cadrés,
Yablonsky [a bit mockingly]: I apologize for my semantics.
Kerouac: And I showed my thumbs down to Ginsberg over there in the back.
[Kerouac flashes thumbs down sign.]
Yablonsky: He’s a nice fellow.
Kerouac: We’ll throw him to the lions.
William Buckley: Well, what about it, Mr. Kerouac? You’re exercised about something, by something. . . .
Kerouac: Restless, it’s true. You had the right word, restless.
Buckley: What is it that in your judgement distinguishes the hippie? . . .
Kerouac [breaking into Buckley’s sentence]: Nothing.
Buckley: What distinguishes the hippie movement from simply an orthodox radical, say, Adamite movement?
Kerouac: Adamite? Adam and Eve?
Buckley: Now, Jack Kerouac, what I wanted to ask is this: To what extent do you believe that the Beat Generation is related to the hippies? What do they have in common? Was this an evolution from one to the other?
Kerouac: The older ones. I’m forty-six years old. These kids are eighteen. It’s the same movement. It’s apparently some kind of Dionysian movement, in late civilization, in which I did not intend, any more than I suppose Dionysus did, or whatever his name was. Although I’m not Dionysus [unclear], I should have been.
Buckley: That’s a point.
Kerouac: It’s just a movement which is supposed to be licentious, but it isn’t really.
Buckley: Well, licentious in what respect?
Kerouac: The hippies are good kids. They’re better than the Beats. The Beats, Ginsberg and I, we’re all in our forties. He started this, and the kids took it up, and everything, but hoodlums and communists jumped on our backs.
Buckley: Un-huh.
Kerouac: Well, on my back, not his [waves with cigar toward Ginsberg, in the audience], Ferlinghetti jumped on my back and turned the idea that I had that the Beat Generation was a generation of beatitude and pleasure in life and tenderness, but they called it in the papers the Beat Mutiny and Beat Insurrection, words I never used. Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.
Buckley: Well, then, your point was that a movement which you conceived as relatively pure has become ideologized and misanthropic and generally objectionable.
Kerouac: A movement that was considered what?
Buckley: Pure.
Kerouac: It was, in my heart.
Buckley: What about that Mr. Yablonsky? Do you see that as having happened somewhere between the Beats and the hippies.
Yablonsky: I thing there’s in early ’67 going back to around ’64 or ’65, there were a lot of people trying to return to sort an Indian-style of life, or to relate to the land differently, [Kerouac breaks in with a sotto voce “ya-oo.” Buckley shushes him.] trying to love each other, to communicate and be more open with each other, and I think recently it has taken a turn in a violent direction. A lot of the responsibility, I think, is due to drugs like methedrine and amphetamines. And perhaps the overuse, it’s been around quite a while now, of drugs like LSD. . . .
Kerouac: How about herring?
Buckley: What is herring? Is that a kind of drug?
Sanders: Cherry Herring.
[Big laughter]
Yablonsky: Kerouac is still on alcohol. There are other drugs now.
Buckley: What about it, Mr. Sanders, is that out of tone?
Sanders: You mention misanthropic and objectionable. Many of the so-called misanthropic elements of this generation are due to the war, in that you have a surly generation of draft eligible but literate and articulate people who are confronted with the hideous probability of having to go to an Asian land war.
So they have to go to war, and they’re faced with this looming, gloomy future, [A hissing sound here, probably from Kerouac] and that rather than die in Vietnam, they’d rather prepare themselves to articulate a lifestyle in the streets and in the open that really reflects something they really want to do, rather than this other thing they have to do later on which they don’t believe in, but they will do, because push comes to shove most kids go to war.
Buckley: It doesn’t account, for instance, for the restlessness in, say, Paris, where they don’t have that particular problem.
Sanders: That’s the Up Against the Wall . . .
[This segment ended, after which Kerouac’s chair fell off the studio riser, and it was obvious he was stumbly-drunk. The producer wanted to substitute Allen Ginsberg, who was in the audience, for Kerouac, but we all protested and on it went.]
William Buckley: Mr. Sanders, I’m interested in trying to pin this point down, because a lot of us heard that the restlessness of so much of American youth which has contributed to the growth of the hippie movement has to do with the trauma of Vietnam, but then all of a sudden a while ago in France it seemed like the entire student population exploded even though that particular provocation was singularly and conspicuously absent, France having been officially very pro–North Vietnam, very anti-America. How do you account for that, and has it caused you to perhaps to look into more generic sources? . . .
[I had read that Madame de Gaulle, wife of Charles de Gaulle, had taken a strong hand in controlling and censoring French culture following the May’68 uprising.]
Sanders: I think it’s the nefarious occurrence in French civilization of Madame de Gaulle.
Buckley: Madame de Gaulle?
Sanders: Because she has exercised a noxious influence on French television, sitting up and personally censoring it. . . .
[Outbreak of laughter]
No, that’s absolutely true, and I think that when you have a type of obnoxious matriarchy that’s evident in France, plus an encrusted, boring, boorish university structure, and the old man himself, there’s a huge structure there to revolt against.
Buckley: Madame de Gaulle is roughly equal to Vietnam.
Sanders: She’s Madame Nhu.
Buckley: Professor Yablonsky, what would you say if a student of yours told you that?
Yablonsky: I think in the United States, the hippies, with all the difficulties of defining them, come from the middle/upper social economic situations. These are generally people who have tasted the best that American society seems to have to offer, they have access to all the goodies, and they’re turned off by it, and they feel it’s kind of a plastic society, there’s no room for political change. I’m talking about the pure hippie. A pure hippie isn’t particularly involved in politics, he retreats from that, he’s withdrawn from it, and he’s involved in Cosmic Consciousness. There is an experience one seems to get under LSD, that a lot of people talk about, as putting them in touch with all things, with all people. There’s a kind of extremist effort at love which seems to dominate the hippie scene, a retreat from politics.
Buckley: Is there a causal relation between their adopting these attitudes and the Vietnam War. Or do you reject the Vietnam War as the proximate cause of the movement?
Yablonsky: I think the Vietnam War is part of it.
Buckley: If we had had no Vietnam War, we might have had the identical thing, is that your point?
Yablonsky: I think there’s no single cause for a particular movement. I think part of it may have been the assassination of JFK. I think that people on the left felt that through the establishment, through political devices, the society could move in other directions.
Buckley: In wh
at direction was it moving in 1963 that was pleasing to them?
Yablonsky: There was a movement toward greater welfare programs; resolving in some way the civil rights issues. There seemed to be some hope, and then this seemed to be snapped off, and a lot of kids who went to Mississippi . . .
Buckley: It’s precisely the movement that didn’t get passed in 1961, ’62 and ’63, the time you just enumerated, were passed in ’64, ’65 and ’66. So it seems there was almost a negative correlation between the civil rights legislation and welfare passages and the growth of the movement.
Yablonsky: I think you can cross-compare the limited JFK administration and the rather lengthy LBJ administration. I think the LBJ situation has been going through the motions of doing something. I feel and a lot of people have told me this, in the country.
There seemed to be a bit of a revival with Bobby Kennedy, and to some extent the McCarthy involvement. I think a lot of people are turned off from the political establishment, because they don’t see any hope for changing it. They use terms like “plastic,” and more severe words about it; they are disengaged; they’re uncommitted to it.
Buckley: What about it, Mr. Kerouac, does that make sense to you?
Kerouac: I lost the entire train of thought.
[Kerouac is red-faced, with his right fist pushed up against his face.]
Buckley: Well, the train of thought has to do with whether in the last few years people have ceased to look at the political process as possible in terms of bringing on the kind of world we want to live in, and maybe that has nothing to do with the assassination of Kennedy, and that kind of thing. . . .
Kerouac: No, that was an accident. I refer back to Count Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace, who said that at one time the hourglass, that’s the sand that’s coming down from one top of the hour glass onto the other, and that will be the end of war. I think that war will be over fairly soon, although I don’t know for sure. [Kerouac huffs.] That’s what Tolstoy said. The guy who taught ______, and Henry David Thoreau.
Buckley: Taught them a lot of foolish things.
Kerouac: I didn’t get the full context of your question.
Buckley: Well, the full context of the question is, are a significant number of Americans precisely [amazed?] when we enunciated the Great Society? . . .
Kerouac: Oh, Great Society!
Buckley: I.e., the society that was actually going to introduce politics. . . . Are they disillusioned, and does this have to do with the growth of the hippie movement?
Kerouac: I think the Vietnamese war is nothing but a plot between the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, who are cousins, to get jeeps from the country.
[Big laughter from the audience, applause from me]
Buckley: They’re not very good plotters, are they?
Kerouac: But they got a lot of jeeps! [Another round of laughter]
I think they’re pulling the wool over our eyes. We’re American lambs.
Buckley: They turned out to be more expensive than Sears Roebuck jeeps.
Kerouac: That’s what I really think there. As for the Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia, that showed the world what they’re like, what the Communists are really like; they’re really fascists.
Buckley: Mr. Sanders. [I was holding up my hand.]
Sanders: It was a terrible thing. If I were in Czechoslovakia, a student in Czechoslovakia, I would be putting out an underground newspaper, and doing my best . . .
Kerouac: Called what?
Sanders: Gutter Expletive/ A Magazine of the Arts.
[Lots of laughter, including from Kerouac, who guffaws, stamping his foot]
Buckley: Since you aren’t in Czechoslovakia, Mr. Sanders, what do you think it’s appropriate to do in the United States?
Sanders: During the presidential campaign?
Buckley: By way of protest against the Czechoslovakian situation?
Sanders: Well, I recommend sit-ins in front of the Russian mission. . . .
Kerouac: What for?
Sanders: To vigorously and more forcefully yet nonviolently to witness against it. I would advocate writing articles, and I would advocate maybe going to Czechoslovakia. The Fugs are going to Europe in a couple of weeks.
Kerouac [breaking in]: Bring your carbines?
Sanders: We are going to the Essen Song Festival in Germany, and we may just try to freak across the border into Czechoslovakia to visit Kafka’s birthplace. So we may have a homage to Kafka with our band.
Buckley: Do you draw any generalities on the basis of the behavior of the Soviet Union which instruct you in assessing other political situations?
Sanders: Yeah, like Mayor Daley in Chicago.
Buckley: What are those?
Sanders: Well, those are when you attempt to essentially get together to press a point about a war, about a freedom, or freedom of journalism; when you’re confronted by people like the Soviet leaders and like the leaders in Chicago, namely Mayor Daley and Mr. Stahl and Mr. Bougher of the Chicago municipal office, that you’re confronted with essentially the same position, you’re not allowed, you’re clubbed, you’re maced, you’re gassed, you’re freaked, zapped, pushed over. If you’re an old lady you’re thrown through a plate glass window; if you’re a cripple, you’re thrown against a streetlight; if you’re a peaceful, long-haired, loving protester, you’re smashed and knocked down; if you’re a cameraman, you’re bricked, and your camera is destroyed, and your blood is splattered all over you. It’s a nefarious thing, and there’s all kinds of correlations. And the lesson you would draw, would be to prepare yourself, in the sense of, if you’re nonviolent as I am, and if you believe in pacifism, you would attempt to create a body of love and life, so that that thing can’t happen, that there will be so many loving people there, that you will have a Festival of Life and all its attributes, and you can do that by praying together, by loving together. [I point over to Ginsberg in the audience.] Allen was singing Om in the streets, which is the Hindu benevolent word. By getting together and creating love, I think it’s a great force, at least in allowing you to demonstrate in the United States against Daley. You know, it’s Al Capone.
Buckley: Yeah.
Kerouac [looking over at Ed Sanders]: Beware of false prophets, who come among you dressed in sheep’s clothing, and underneath they are ravening wolves.
Sanders: Who’s that?
[End of second segment]
Buckley: Mr. Yablonsky, I would like to ask you this, because you have studied the whole hippie mentality. I was in Chicago, and so were a lot of people who would not really have recognized what happened on the basis of Mr. Sanders’ description. But I do think that Mr. Sanders means it; I think that he really thinks the cops were looking for old ladies and gentle people to savage. And I think that the fact he thinks it is interesting. I would like to hear your analysis that they seem to feel that it is compulsive to believe a Daley, who was after all is a hero of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, whom you associate with the best of the aspirations of the youth, how come they feel this way, what is it in their creed that requires? . . .
Yablonsky: First of all, I wouldn’t hook Daley in with JFK. He’s a big city boss. I just observed you and others on television in Chicago.
Buckley: Nothing bellicose about me. . . .
Yablonsky: I think that if the people were involved, the hippies, the Yippies, had been permitted to sort of do their thing, and to chant, and to have a peaceful march . . .
Buckley: Their thing involved the assassination of a few Democrats, wouldn’t it?
Sanders: Absolutely not!
Yablonsky: I think there were around maybe ten thousand young people who would have sung peace songs in the park. I think there was apparently a lot of frustration of their efforts to do something. . . .
Buckley: Wait a minute. You know Tom Hayden. You know Rennie Davis. You know these characters. Everybody here knows them. And we know these are not sweet little old flower children. They went there intend
ing to make a scientific, ideological point, which is to engage the police in violence in order . . .
Sanders [breaking in]: Not at . . .
Buckley: Be right with you. In order to try to produce a wave of sympathy which they succeeded and they are absolutely elated; it would have been impossible for the police to withdraw in such as a way to satisfy them, because the only way they could have been satisfied is by forceable encounter.
Yablonsky: You asked me about the hippies and the Yippies, and what they would have done. I tend to agree with you that there were other segments of the population, possibly including the Blackstone Rangers, and other groups who were prepared to stir something up if it didn’t happen, but I think there was such an overreaction, such a trigger-finger kind of situation, that these kids began to open the thing up, and before anything could get going, there was a lot of smashing. And then the others moved in. I think there would have been kind of a love-in type of scene in Chicago by a large segment of the young people.
Buckley: If you could have separated the two.
[I’m holding up my hand to speak.]
Sanders : They were very clearly were separated. There were two movements operating in Chicago. The Yippies wanted Lincoln Park, which is many miles away from the Amphitheater, and is many miles away from the Hilton. They wanted to have a Festival of Life with rock music in the park, with theater classes, with guerrilla theater, with like various poets and people coming together for a Festival of Life.
Buckley: What is guerrilla theater?
Sanders: Guerrilla theater is a bunch of people who don’t need props and who don’t need a regular stage.
Kerouac: Crucified chickens?
Sanders: No, that’s not guerrilla theater. But guerrilla theater just need themselves, and their own body makeup, and a few props like that. Anyway, we wanted Lincoln Park, and to use the beach to swim and sleep at. And the Chicago authorities continually thwarted us throughout a whole six months of negotiations, refusing at any point to allow any demonstrations, so they literally drove Allen, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and even Clive Barnes of the New York Times—driven out of the park at night by tear gas.