Blood and Water
26th April 2023
The poet Allen Ginsberg’s sexual proclivity for little boys is well known, not least of all his membership in NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. His most famous remark about children, however, was not in any sense erotic. “We’ll get you through your children!” he screamed at Norman Podhoretz in 1958, at the end of a heated argument that saw the two men part ways as friends for good. This wasn’t a specific threat to Podhoretz, neither of whose children had been born yet. Instead, Ginsberg was issuing a prophecy about the fate of American, indeed Western, society as a whole. The revolution may leave you—the squares and the sticks-in-the-mud—untouched, but it will touch your children and your grandchildren—and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
Just how fateful a prophecy this was was revealed in the past week, when one Klint Ludwig appeared on CNN with erstwhile host Don Lemon. Ludwig is the grandson of Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old man accused of the attempted murder of Ralph Yarl. Lester is alleged to have shot Yarl, an African-American teen, after Yarl rang his doorbell late at night. Despite his injuries, Yarl was able to escape on foot. He and his supporters maintain he had simply rung Lester’s doorbell “by mistake” when he was going to pick up his siblings.