A Living Text

In William F. Buckley’s book, Inveighing We Will Go, there is a column from 1971 where Buckley quotes a letter sent to him regarding John Lennon’s Rollling Stone interview of that year. The writer of the letter to Buckley says:

These sheep-witted Beatles, fawned on and reverently looked up to by most of the young across the earth, although their dispositions are as mean as their intelligence and their morals are as base as their lineage, I make so bold as to suggest to you, started it all, and have dealt Western Society such heavy blows that it will be a century in recovering, if, in fact, it ever does.

These men are not innocents - they are sophisticated scoundrels capable of the most swinish behavior and their influence poisoned the headwaters of the Sixties and we now see that trickling stream of history as it gathers and deepens and broadens and rolls its mighty tides of drugs and antinomian attitudes, now already engulfing what remains of civilization in a few walled towns.