Free Republic

“I still believe that love is all you need,” Paul McCartney continues to proclaim, “I don’t know a better message than that.” And yet John Lennon took that love-uber-alles ethos to such an extreme in the 1970s that even his old rose-tinted mate was retorting, “Too many people preaching practices.” So it’s no surprise that the sardonic duo in Steely Dan rolled their eyes when they heard the ‘Smart One’s’ prayer for peace with ‘Imagine’ and a string of pious talk show appearances in the early 1970s. Steely Dan’s bold response to Lennon’s all-white evangelism signified that the prominent days...

Several days ago, one of my arch nemesis oldfartrants, a senile old hippie bum from West LA who has a YouTube channel advocating socialism has now called for the overthrow of Donald Trump. This, after spending nearly a decade referring to Conservatives as traitors and opponents of Barack Obama as seditionists. He attacks Trump comparing him to Hitler and attacking other conservatives such as Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Sarah Palin and so on. Yet now its not treason anymore to be in dissent, its no longer treason to want to overthrow an elected official like Trump or...

It can be easy to be jaded about the Beat writers in San Francisco, but even the most indifferent literary snob would be hard-pressed to walk away from "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum without feeling fuzzy inside. Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and running through September, "Beat Memories" is a collection of about 80 photos taken by Ginsberg and his friends in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s. Nearly every image is notated with the wobbly handwriting of Ginsberg, who added paragraph-length captions to the images in the 1980s...