WOI TV News Clips 378

Allen Ginsberg participated in a focus. This is the annual Fine Arts Festival, and of course he was, I think, initially contacted because of your work as a poet. Now, as a poet, what is the greatest influence on your particular work. The revolutionary consciousness of other poets and saints who turned me on to psychedelic experience with drugs and without drugs that have given me the gift to see that our society is completely mad, and our government's crazy, and is going to destroy the planet unless we regain control of our own bodies and our own consciousness, and begin treating each other like human beings again, and begin treating the earth like mama nature again. Now, some people express this only in their music, some people in their other kinds of daily work, but you particularly find your way of expressing it, or one way you express it, is in the written word. Written word, also but the spoken word, actually, the vocalization of the word, because like we did we lost track of the poet as prophet as bard as Shaman in the last 50 years, although that is our own American tradition with Walt Whitman, and it's the ancient tradition of the poet going back to times before Greece, before the Bible, before caveman, is a tradition going back through Isaiah, through the old Hebrew prophets, and the tradition that exists even in Central Asia, now or among our American Indians, people who have contact with their own unconscious who are able to see that the rational consciousness of the Pentagon war makers are  completely, it's completely a scam. I haven't heard it expressed in this form, but I have heard it expressed in the form of a elderly ecologist who was saying that he hoped that that the answer to the situation would be seen by the poet from the mountaintop and expressed and given the light for the people to follow. Well, it was seen from the Mountain top by William Blake long ago when he spoke about remove that dark satanic Mill, remember, it was it was 18th century at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when Blake first saw that the Industrial Revolution was a satanic plot to besmirch the breasts of Mother Nature. Now, you have these words into music. Yeah, I've been putting Blake Songs of Innocence and experience into tomb and putting out a record of them now. Right, and I have this copy right now, but at the same time, perhaps we should say is it just really right off the press, and is it available or not? Uh yeah, it's probably available by now, I  guess. (Inaudible) I just picked up a copy before I left. Oh, good. It's Blake Songs of Innocence and experience. All right, now. Want me to sing you one that's ecologically oriented? Yes. Yeah, that would make sense rather than talking. It's the introduction to experience by Blake, which is a poem that many of the students know, actually. Hear the voice of the bard. Oh, present, past, and future sees. Who's years have heard the holy word  that walk among the ancient trees. Calling the (inaudible) soul and  weeping in the evening [dew?]. That might control the starry  (inaudible) and fall and fall [and like we know?] Oh earth, oh earth return. Arise from out the dewy grass. Night is worn, and the morn rises from the slumberous [mask?]. Turn away no more. Why will doubt (inaudible). The starry floor, the watery shore, is (inaudible) till the break of day. To what that is, is an appeal to a Madden money hungry, junk addicted bank system to get off its war-making earth destruction kick and get back on to some kind of peaceful ecological reconstruction, back to earth, spirit, sex, love, humanity, away from a police state that is right now beginning to devour not only the United States but the entire planet, and it's more. Away from a violence as a form of aggression and adaptation? Yeah, away from a violence proposed by the state, promoted by the state, set to the citizens by the state from the top down including, as so obvious from today's and this week's newspaper, is the violence in Laos, which is a secret violence perpetrated by the CIA working through a supposedly peaceful organization, the AID program, kept secret from the American public as the Vietnam War had really been kept secret for many years from 56 to 62. Violence that spread all over the world that has begun to come home in terms of blastings and bombings inside the united states, and a violence which has as its source the mad dreams of bureaucrats in Washington who are making money from the war, and their friends in industry who are making money from the war, and who are like a bunch of junkies addicted to a war economy. Now, is this saying that some of the same threat as the violence that we have been so proud of throughout our our history as peoples, consuming the resources of the world. Consuming the resources of the world in the sense that yes, we do consume, what is it, forty five percent of the raw materials produced by the world, though we have only six percent of the population, so that one American is more dangerous to world ecology than twenty Indians. The same violence that we were so proud of in terms of the murder of the Indians, who were the owners of this land, and who took care of it better than we did, the same violence that led us to murder the 50 million bison that covered these great plains. Oh, what thread does this carry with the the recent trials in Chicago? Well, the trials in Chicago were trials of trials of that vision, actually. I think on the part of a violence-prone municipal government with its police, as described by official reports, the violence Commission report, the Walker report, as a group of police prone to violence, creating a police riot during a Democratic convention there, was a trial of people who came to make a political protest against the encouragement of police state and the affirmation of military tyranny through the Democratic Party in its convention. It was a trial of pacifists like David Dellinger who, who's an exquisite old man with a, with an old Catholic pacifist background. It was a trial of comedians and actors playing political roles more brilliantly than the Nixon place is, black magical political row. So actually it was a trial of a new awareness and an ecological awareness, and unfortunately that trial was allowed to go on by the good solid citizens of the country because the good solid citizens of the country seemed, to me at this point, to be so confused about their own relation to nature, that they're willing to buy a police state for fear of having to kick their matter habits. For fear of having to kick their refrigerator habits, and kick their automobile habits, their oil burner habits, and their gas burning habits. And I wanted to ask you how this was affect, going to affect you and how you go from here, but we've run out of time. Our guest has been Alan Ginsberg, poet, and he participated in focus, the Spring Fine Arts Festival at Iowa State. And thank you. Hare Krishna. I said to our graduating class, and I now say it to you alumni, that the time has come when those who believe in public higher education must stand up and be counted, for there can be little doubt that all over the United States, public higher education and the educational values and purposes it serves stand in real danger of being eroded away. Not only by mounting tuition costs, made necessary by inadequate public financial support, but also by pressures from both the far left and the far right who would limit and distort the university's functions to fit their own narrow and closed points of view. During the seventies then, we must be continuously on our guard, lest the basic foundation upon which the public university operates, public financial support which permits a low student tuition, is not eroded away. For if the time should come when students, through rising fee structures, are forced to take over a disproportionate share of the support of our public universities, then indeed our public universities will no longer be truly public. It is just as simple as that. In the decade ahead, the pressures from the political extremes to change the nature and character of the public university will continue to mount. It will be a period in which the public university will probably be under the threat of having its educational values and standards compromised, its functions whittled away, its public financial support eroded from beneath it. But in conclusion, let me say, that whether the universities in the 1970s will continue to be free and open and impartial centers for learning, whether they will continue to receive adequate public financial support, will, I believe, depend very largely upon you, the alumni of our public universities. You will set the climate of opinion within which the public universities must operate. It is you who can develop a widespread understanding of the indispensable role which the public universities play in making American democracy work. I know that you will not fail us in this job. I know that you love this university. I know that in the difficult decade ahead, you will support and defend this university as it continues to pursue its useful and noble purposes in the 1970s. Even in the best of times, a public university, because it belongs so peculiarly to the public, is subjected to pressures from the extremes of both the left and the right. In several times of national frustration and fear, such as we're experiencing today, when Americans are groping to find answers to the difficult and dangerous problems which seem to be overwhelming them, these pressures upon the public university becoming even more strident and demanding. Such pressures, if they were yielded to, however, would close the university down to fit a narrow and prejudiced point of view. They would silence the voices in the university which did not speak their views. They would distort the university's educational values which have been built up over the century, and would narrow down its course of study. And the university would thereby be transformed from a free and open educational institution, which objectively studies and examines all issues and problems, into a closed and darkened agency designed to promote a particular [eyes falls?] Certainly today, the university cannot retreat into an ivory tower, which has never been a structure of a public university. It cannot isolate itself from the rush and [torrent?] of the problems of its society, for the university has vast quantities of hard, objective, and impartial knowledge to bring to bear on great public problems of our times. Such momentous problems as environmental pollution and the feeding and clothing of our burgeoning population. But let me make it unmistakably clear that a public university, in bringing its knowledge and service to men and women living beyond the confines of the campus, must also continue to meet this commitment to the larger community, impartially and objectively. It cannot choose up size. The university cannot allow itself to become a political instrument, or to do so would destroy the university as a house of intellect, would destroy what the university is all about. Did... Cooking gourmet food doesn't have to be a difficult thing. As a matter of fact, it can be a lot of fun, and I'll show you how right here on my program at 12:40 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on WOI TV. And of course I would like to tell you who I am, maybe you don't know. I'm Billy Oakley from the Martha Gooch kitchen, and I know a little bit about cooking the old basics too, so why don't you plan to join me. 12:40 right here on WOI, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I'll be looking for you. Hello there, I'm Billy Oakley from the Martha Gooch kitchen, like to invite you to join me right here on WOI TV every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 12:40. We'll be cooking some of the things that your mom used to cook, some of the things that you like to cook, and some of the things you don't know how to cook, so do join me, won't you? That's at 12:40, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.