Blood and Water

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.

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