News Flash From the Asylum

[Triana]

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl".

You know:

"I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."

Just before his death, and into my third or fourth midlife crisis, I decided to become a writer. Couldn't decide between poetry and investigative journalism. Ginsberg read my poetry. He suggested journalism. And then he said, "You know, Greg, I'm an investigative reporter, too."

Yes, he was. In 1956, Ginsberg sat at a kitchen table in San Francisco and wrote that his friends were going crazy. They could still hear the voice of Joe McCarthy ranting and, out the window, count the Pentagon contractors polishing new war heads. In an America gone mad, insanity was the best defense.

"The soul," he reported, "should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse."

And that's still the news.


***
Greg Palast talks journalism a la Ginsberg with Laura Flanders tonight at 9:45 EDT on Radio Nation -- check your Air America and Community Station listings.

Armed Madhouse dispatches form the Front Lines of the class war will be released this Tuesday, 6-6-06 - for more information see www.GregPalast.com.

[spanone]

1. Thanks!

:hi:

[GrumpyGreg]

2. I thought Ginsberg was strange in 1956 and I still do !

The Beat crowd was hysterical!

[ewagner]

3. It was passe'

by the time I was in high school but the work of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti still resonated with me and all my friends/

I bought a copy of Howl for my son to read before he went off to college......the point?....all those bohemian views he would be exposed to and think were brand new, cutting edge ideas....well they weren't new.

I still admire the beat poets of the 50's thouugh...

[Triana]

4. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac....I still love 'em all...

...got several of their books - and I was born in 1960.