Nov 8, 2014 04:53 AM
The Sultan of Sewers: William Burroughs' anti-authoritarian vision
http://reason.com/archives/2014/06/04/th...-of-sewers
EXCERPT: [...] After Naked Lunch was published in 1959, Burroughs graduated from unknown writer to literary celebrity. Today he is widely regarded, along with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as one of the three towering figures of the Beat movement. He was one of the most prominent figures in the emergence of the postwar counterculture, and his influence stretches well beyond the Beats to the bohemias of the '60s, the '70s, and beyond. In 2014, a century after his birth in St. Louis, his work remains a touchstone for alienated cynics of all kinds.
Burroughs' worldview was miles from the peace-and-love socialism that our cultural clichés tell us to expect from a hippie hero.
In 1949, according to Barry Miles' new biography Call Me Burroughs, he complained to Kerouac that "we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism."
When he was a landlord in New Orleans he sent Ginsberg a rant against rent control, and when he found himself owning a farm in Texas he gave Ginsberg an earful about the evils of the minimum wage.
Eventually he departed for Mexico, and there he wrote to Ginsberg again. "I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time," he told his leftist friend. "I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia....At least Mexico is no obscenity 'Welfare' State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you." He added that Westbrook Pegler, a hard-right pundit who would soon be a vocal defender of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was "the only columnist, in my opinion, who possesses a grain of integrity."
[...] Two decades later, covering the Democratic Party's bloody 1968 convention for Esquire, Burroughs manifested a more left-wing aura. [...] "This is a revolution," he wrote in a 1970 article for the East Village Other, "and the middle will get the squeeze until there are no neutrals there." Still later in his life, he would identify "American capitalism" as his foe, specifying: "the American Tycoon...William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil."
So had the aging artist shifted from the far right to the far left? Not exactly.
Burroughs' hostility to the police was a constant throughout his career. In that same letter to Ginsberg that praised Mexico for not being a welfare state, he added this nugget: "Here a cop is on the level of a street-car conductor. He knows his place and stays there." And when Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road described a lightly fictionalized version of Burroughs, it declared: "His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops."
The hostility to corporate monopolies had been there in the early years too, with Burroughs displaying a particular fondness for conspiracy tales in which big business suppresses inventions that threaten the bottom line.
And the young Burroughs' hatred of the New Deal liberals who held power in North America didn't keep him from embracing the anti-feudal, anti-imperial liberals he encountered in South America. In Colombia he even gave his gun to a guerrilla boy. "Always a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face," he wrote to Ginsberg in 1953. "Wouldn't surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas."
[...] Burroughs was no conventional conservative. As a bisexual, a drug user, and a writer whose work was regularly damned as "obscene," he came to regard the right as a gang of bigots and busybodies. But he was no conventional radical either. His anti-authoritarian vision cut across the normal categories of left and right. "At the present time," he said in The Job, "we are all confined in concentration camps called nations. We are forced to obey laws to which we have not consented, and to pay exorbitant taxes to maintain the prisons in which we are confined." As an alternative, he called for consensual communities that "break down national borders."...
http://reason.com/archives/2014/06/04/th...-of-sewers
EXCERPT: [...] After Naked Lunch was published in 1959, Burroughs graduated from unknown writer to literary celebrity. Today he is widely regarded, along with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as one of the three towering figures of the Beat movement. He was one of the most prominent figures in the emergence of the postwar counterculture, and his influence stretches well beyond the Beats to the bohemias of the '60s, the '70s, and beyond. In 2014, a century after his birth in St. Louis, his work remains a touchstone for alienated cynics of all kinds.
Burroughs' worldview was miles from the peace-and-love socialism that our cultural clichés tell us to expect from a hippie hero.
In 1949, according to Barry Miles' new biography Call Me Burroughs, he complained to Kerouac that "we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism."
When he was a landlord in New Orleans he sent Ginsberg a rant against rent control, and when he found himself owning a farm in Texas he gave Ginsberg an earful about the evils of the minimum wage.
Eventually he departed for Mexico, and there he wrote to Ginsberg again. "I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time," he told his leftist friend. "I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia....At least Mexico is no obscenity 'Welfare' State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you." He added that Westbrook Pegler, a hard-right pundit who would soon be a vocal defender of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was "the only columnist, in my opinion, who possesses a grain of integrity."
[...] Two decades later, covering the Democratic Party's bloody 1968 convention for Esquire, Burroughs manifested a more left-wing aura. [...] "This is a revolution," he wrote in a 1970 article for the East Village Other, "and the middle will get the squeeze until there are no neutrals there." Still later in his life, he would identify "American capitalism" as his foe, specifying: "the American Tycoon...William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil."
So had the aging artist shifted from the far right to the far left? Not exactly.
Burroughs' hostility to the police was a constant throughout his career. In that same letter to Ginsberg that praised Mexico for not being a welfare state, he added this nugget: "Here a cop is on the level of a street-car conductor. He knows his place and stays there." And when Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road described a lightly fictionalized version of Burroughs, it declared: "His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops."
The hostility to corporate monopolies had been there in the early years too, with Burroughs displaying a particular fondness for conspiracy tales in which big business suppresses inventions that threaten the bottom line.
And the young Burroughs' hatred of the New Deal liberals who held power in North America didn't keep him from embracing the anti-feudal, anti-imperial liberals he encountered in South America. In Colombia he even gave his gun to a guerrilla boy. "Always a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face," he wrote to Ginsberg in 1953. "Wouldn't surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas."
[...] Burroughs was no conventional conservative. As a bisexual, a drug user, and a writer whose work was regularly damned as "obscene," he came to regard the right as a gang of bigots and busybodies. But he was no conventional radical either. His anti-authoritarian vision cut across the normal categories of left and right. "At the present time," he said in The Job, "we are all confined in concentration camps called nations. We are forced to obey laws to which we have not consented, and to pay exorbitant taxes to maintain the prisons in which we are confined." As an alternative, he called for consensual communities that "break down national borders."...