Totally Drunk Guy Is A Famous American Novelist Who Viewed Hippies With Disgust On National TV

Being drunk doesn't look good on anyone. But every once in a while during this interview, Jack Kerouac does share something pretty interesting.

Wow, Jack let's the cat out of the bag and the interviewer changes the subject. "There are people who create chaos so they can be elected to take care of the chaos."

It's really interesting to see how, just like today, people say a whole lot of words but say nothing meaningful at all. Kerouac had the most interesting things to say because he wasn't trying so hard to sound important.

Kerouac really hit the nail on the head when he said: “There are people who create chaos so they can be elected to take care of the chaos.” Relative today …March 26, 2024 …as it was in 1970’s.

"I cannot use your abuse, you may have it back" Jack Kerouac

I considered myself a hippie for a couple of years in the early 70’s and experimented with drugs including LSD, but drug experiences were always negative to me. At 17 I had a 12 hour “mystical experience” after reading a Buddhist text and Buddhism led me to reject drugs. By the time I was a senior in high school I felt disillusioned with the hippie movement which I felt was ruined by the drugs and I just wanted to “get my shit together”. I read Kerouac in college and loved “On the Road”, and crossed paths with Ginsberg who was a fellow student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I eventually converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church and traditionalist values. I now suspect that the hippie movement was co-opted by satanist globalist elite’s and that the CIA manipulated the movement to create social chaos, corruption, conflict, dissolution, and collapse in order to create a globalist fascist elite hegemony of evil which ties into what Jack was saying. I wish Buckley had just interviewed Jack on this topic.

Buckley always drove me up a wall. He was all head and no heart. He seemed to approach life this way. A worshipper of the intellect. He came across, at least to me, as not a fully developed individual. I got the distinct feeling he postured a lot. But then, those were the times - men were taught to suppress feelings very early in life.

This program aired on September 4, 1968. It is the original Firing Line and has nothing to do with that CNN trash show. It was the longest running public affairs show in the history of PBS. Buckley and Kerouac had been friends since their college days, even though they went to different ones. It was the last time Kerouac was on a TV show. He made few appearances in his life. In total he made only five appearances on TV. The professor is Lewis Yablonsky, who wrote the book, "The Hippie Trip". For reasons unknown after the show concluded, Kerouac attempted to attack Ed Sanders as they were exiting the studio.. He was stopped by several people from doing real damage. Within a year after his appearance on Firing Line, Jack Kerouac died of internal hemorrhaging due to chronic alcohol abuse on October 21, 1969.

I've seen this interview many times. Jack Kerouac was one of my heroes when I was a kid. I read On the Road when I was 14 & it changed my life. Through on the road I went on to discover the beat writers and then Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Haight-Ashbury, and the Grateful Dead - all of these events that add let up to the time right before I was born in '72. I was completely enraptured buy all of it. I saw that it got really out of hand when the Height Ashbury scene became nationally known and all of a sudden every middle-class brat in the country converged on San Francisco. I can understand Jack's frustration at this time. This interview, and reading a lot about Jack's experiences and frustration with the hippies and all that has really helped me come to terms with my own thoughts and feelings about the progression of those ideas going back to that time and leading up to now when my youthful naive idealism is rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror, and I am faced with a world that appears to be falling apart around us because of many of the ideas and movements that began then. I've become very much more conservative, and I was afraid that I would lose interest in, lose touch with, or have to let go of these things that I have always loved so much and found so much hope & inspiration in. It was Jack Kerouac's writing, along with Cassidy's antics, Kesey's bus & acid tests, The Deads music, informed a lot of my view of the world. The hippies took everything that was truthful and beautiful about what was happening up to the point of the Haight and turned it into something pretty ugly. I don't think that the truth and beauty is gone forever, I think those things are still around and still accessible, but much less noticeable.

Jack Kerouac was a product of counter culture of his time...he wrote what he saw...his chemical refreshment got the best of him at the end...if he was more of a sober character in life, he would have been better off. Love his books.

Jack is too funny. He didn't give a damn about hippies or liberal or conservative. Jack liked to explore the world in his own way without labels. It's the hippies who took to Jack because of his writing. Jack's close friend and fellow traveler Neal Cassidy was the man who dug the hippies, the magic bus, LSD and young hippie chicks.

Thank you for your years of incredible work David , this is so interesting.

Jack may be drunk but his wit is razor sharp!

The truth is that all those nice middle-class kids were the guinea pigs and playthings of the deviates of the former generation. Alan Ginsberg was certainly one of them. At first, they laughed at the kids that came to see them read poetry and drink Red Mountain Burgundy in North Beach dives or at the City Lights Bookstore, but the girls were so cute and fresh that they decided to encourage them, calling them "hippies," sort of junior hipsters. And that is where the term originated. Yes, I knew some of them and have some of the original source materials.

All four of those men proved anyone can show up in public and be accepted as representative of a group of people and the concepts they purportedly live by. Everybody should come to understand and accept that everyone else is just making it all up.

William Buckley, "How do victims of this violence react?" Kerouac " Ouch ! "

Kerouac: "I was arrested 2 weeks ago, and the arresting officer said 'I/m arresting you for decay'." Buckley: "I assume he was able to prove it..."

Jackturned very sour as he got older and further down the bottle...fame did not sit well with him but he left us a wonderful legacy of prose n poetry ..tender enlightening inspiring and entertaining

Born in '52, I knew the 60s firsthand. From my point of view a hippie was a hip person. Someone who was 'hip' to all the dirty underpinnings of our society. They wanted love not war. They wanted to get back to our basics. I think it was a glimpse into our better future.

I find Jack to be as boring as every other drunk I've ever been trapped in a conversation with.