Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary magazine and who the New York Times called “a lion of neoconservatism,” passed away last week at the age of 95. He was a brilliant writer and ardent patriot, whose book My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative is a modern classic.
Podhoretz was also the man who saw the culture war coming.
It happened on a winter night in 1958, when Podhoretz, then a young writer, had a confrontation with the poet Allen Ginsberg. The resulting Podhoretz essay, called “My War with Allen Ginsberg,” is prescient. With elegant and funny observations, Podhoretz predicted everything that would happen for the next sixty years: drug abuse, transgenderism (and the medical malpractice that comes with it), mental health problems, anti-Americanism, socialism, and atheism.
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Most chilling is the part where Ginsberg, a drug user, sex addict, and member of NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, bellows at Podhoretz: “We’ll get you through your children!” That very thing has happened. Podhoretz never forgave Ginsberg, who died in 1997. The Left did, in fact, get back at America by corrupting her children.
The conflict between Podhoretz and Ginsberg was the result of the young Podhoretz criticizing Ginsberg and his fellow writers. In the 1950s, Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and others formed a literary group that would become known as the Beat Generation. The Beats advocated drugs, sex, poetry, alternate spirituality, and long car trips. Jack Kerouac wrote a book about their experiences called On the Road — a book Podhoretz panned.
In several essays, he blasted the Beats for “the conviction that any form of rebellion against American culture … is admirable” and that Ginsberg regarded “homosexuality, jazz, dope addiction, and vagrancy as outstanding examples of such rebellion.” Podhoretz ended one essay with this takedown:
Being against what the Beat Generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of mind and discrimination is a form of death. It has to do with fighting the notion that sordid acts of violence are justifiable as long as they are committed in the name of “instinct.” It even has to do with fighting the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture. It has to do, in other words, with one’s attitude toward intelligence itself.
This upset Ginsberg and Kerouac. So on a fall evening in 1958, the two writers called Podhoretz and asked him to come visit them in Ginsberg’s New York apartment and have it out. “As against the law-abiding life I had chosen of a steady job and marriage and children,” Podhoretz recalled, “[Ginsberg] conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by such grim responsibilities. It was a world that promised endless erotic possibilities together with an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life.”
He went on: “For nearly four hours that Saturday night in 1958, Ginsberg and I had at each other on all of these issues.” Podhoretz argued in favor of George Orwell’s idea that normal people living normal lives of faith, freedom, and work can have just as much joy, adventure, and thrills as anyone outside the system — in fact, maybe even more, as they would have avoided drug addiction, sexual diseases, and perhaps even hell itself.
Years later Podhoretz would come across a park in Massachusetts dedicated to the Beats and make this observation: “We were memorializing Ginsberg and Kerouac, thereby further weakening our already tenuous grasp on Orwell’s saving fact, and abandoning the field once again to these later-day Pied Pipers, and their current successors, who never cease telling our children that the life being lived around them was not worth living at all.”
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I often hear fellow Christians wonder how America got into it’s current mess – our kids backed up in hospitals for mental health issues, pornography everywhere, drug addicts on the street, the medical mutilation of children in defiance of the sex that God gave us.
“We’ll get you through your children!” Ginsberg announced on that pivotal fall night in 1958. The left has done exactly that.
