Ted Nugent Loathes Hippies

[heartoflesh]

This article appeared in the July 4th Wall Street Journal. One factual mistake I've found is Nugent claiming Mama Cass died of drugs. She died of heart failure and it was determined not to be drug related.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010291

 

[MrMerlin777]

I read this the other day.

Good ole Uncle Ted. I always find him entertaining at least, thought provoking at best.

 

[Jerusalem Blade]

Thanks for the article, Rick. Nugent's views have provoked me to share some of my own. I hope I offend no one with some views of my earlier life, some of it backslidden, and some unsaved; I am a storyteller, and perhaps these excerpts from my book, A Great And Terrible Love will shed some light on a despised era and culture.
-------

[size=+1]CAN THERE ANY GOOD THING COME OUT OF WOODSTOCK?[/size]

(with apologies to St. John’s Gospel, 1:46)​

​

There is as great disdain among Christian writers and speakers — Our Christian Leaders — toward Woodstock and the ‘60s generation it symbolizes as there was among rabbinic authorities in ancient Israel toward the district of Galilee, and the little village of Nazareth within it, during the time Jesus was alive in that nation. Even Nathaniel of Cana (another little Galilean village), who was to become an Apostle, initially saw no connection of Messiah with Nazareth,[a] and hence no prophetic worth in that place.

This is what two writers who are cited in Christian author Os Guinness’ “landmark” work on the ‘60s, The Dust Of Death, have to say:

First, social scientist Robert Nisbet:

“I think it would be difficult to find a single decade in the history of western culture when so much barbarism — so much calculated onslaught against culture and convention in any form, and so much degradation of culture and the individual — passed into print, into music, into art, and onto the American stage as the decade of the Nineteen Sixties.”[c]​

Second, social and political philosopher Allan Bloom:

“Enlightenment in America came close to breathing its last in the sixties.”[d]​

Compare these with ancient rabbinic attitudes:

“There was a general contempt in Rabbinic circles for all that was Galilean.”[e]​

“…the wretched town of Nazareth…[that] small despised place in despised Galilee.”[f]​

The old rabbis thought only in Judea — and particularly at its center, Jerusalem — was there to be found godly wisdom and practice, and that Galileans in general were rough and ignorant peasants (although it was ceded “they cared more for honor than for money”[g]), devoid of worth before God.[h]

Likewise is there a consensus among many Christians that Woodstock has no spiritual worth, but rather is the bane of all decency and wisdom, and what the generation Woodstock typifies is a blight on our world, worthy of all censure.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I am not of a mind to defend Woodstock or laud its great virtues, as I am well aware the Yellow Submarine sank — that our dreams and visions of changing the world for good came to nothing. And I want to say I do not consider the militant radicals — SDS, Weathermen, etc. — what I call the Woodstock generation, but fringe extremists. Nor do I include the Vietnam anti-war movement in “Woodstock,” at least not as one of its core “distinctives.” What I seek to do in this little piece of writing is show that something good did indeed come out of there. And I would that you brothers and sisters of mine in Christ stop knockin’ the place I call home, be it ever so humble and mean in your eyes!

When I talk of Woodstock I refer to a spiritual awakening, and to the quest for genuine, loving community — these two things.

Before the Woodstock Festival in Bethel, New York, in August of 1969, the seekers and wanderers that comprised the counter-culture youth of the ‘60s were sometimes called simply the Tribe, or Human Tribe, in honor of the Native Americans they respected for their simple lives and love of the land. The first time I became aware such a segment of society existed was in the summer of 1961, while visiting my two closest friends in the world, Gordon, and his sister, Phoebe. Redheaded Irish kids, Gordie a dancer and musician (Julliard), Phoeb a dancer (Julliard, Martha Graham), both with large hearts and good senses of humor. I was, admittedly, the culturally deprived Jewish kid (although I loved Kerouac in high-school English!); hangin’ with them was joy and education, rich as they were in soul and art. We both came from the same Manhattan neighborhood — the upper East Side, me from Park Avenue and 94th Street, they from 95th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues — and had known each other a couple of years before I went into the Marine Corps, and out of which I had just been freshly discharged (this before Nam).

They were now living in a loft in Chinatown (NYC), on East Broadway, and this was the first I had seen them for a year or so. After my time in the Corps, and then bumming at Carolina Beach in North Carolina, they were sights for my sore eyes!

As I was relaxing in the loft, catching up with them, they gave me this capsule — organic mescaline they called it — and said, “Take it, you’ll like it!” Trusting and loving them, I did.

Gordie, 5’ 11”, well-built and vigorous, usually merry-hearted, a bush of red hair on his head, and Phoebe, a classically beautiful face, high cheekbones, rich red hair, and a lithe well-formed body, they walked and moved with grace.

Dvorak’s symphony, Billy the Kid, was on the stereo, and it seemed there was a surreal gunfight happening in the air around us, the music unusually vivid and penetrating, sounds as solid as matter. Everything in the room — all the objects — glowed as though I were in an enchanted realm where things had innate beauty and life, and lavished the vivid essence of their being into my own through the wondrous portals of sight, sound and touch. I had never known life to be so glorious and rich!

A bearded man dressed in white robes had earlier been by our place to drop something off, and I was told after he left it was from him we got our drugs, and as I now looked out the window onto East Broadway I saw him and the two young women — also dressed in white — who usually accompanied him, gaily and gracefully walking down the street, I said to him in my thoughts, “It’s because of you my mind is deranged like this!” For along with the ecstasy of such heightened perceptions there was also an agony of inward awareness, and such profundity of affect — feeling — it was almost unnerving!

For Phoebe had once been my girlfriend of sorts, and I greatly desired the comfort and intimacy of her love now that I was back in New York, and would ordinarily have approached her on this wise, but under the influence of this….this having entered through the doors of perception into a strange heaven and hell (the titles of two Aldous Huxley books that were on the table before me, on the topic of this experience) — I found that I was incapacitated to broach this most personal of all personal questions from a terrible fear of being rejected by her. She was so much more of a person — the dignity, depth, and glory of her being! — than I had ever realized, and who was I to approach her with my petty desires and designs?

She was gorgeous and desirable beyond words, a quiet, joyous fire of a woman, and I stunned and overwhelmed by my own fear into silence. Still, aside from the pain of this, my heart was calm, and I thrillingly alert to these new depths of life.

They gathered me up and told me we were all going out to eat, and then go to a party. We went to a little restaurant in the neighborhood, and they ordered, but I couldn’t eat in this state, all I wanted was a beer.

At the party I met some new people (in my silent grokking of them) and I was continually amazed at the richness of their beings, the depth and beauty. It was as though I could see into the very hearts of them, and intuit easily the essence of their personhood. What a wonderful gift of sight! Yet it was deeper than sight, it was a knowing with my heart, an actual experiencing their hearts! As I sat there filled with the treasure of our shared lives, I realized I knew nothing of life, that I was ignorant to a profound degree. I had been a pseudo-juvenile delinquent, trying to be a tough guy and a lover, and after the Marines I didn’t know what I was. In later years I called this my “young jerk” stage, and from which I was transformed into a “young fool,” just one small step up.

Suddenly someone came in the room where most of the dancing was (and where I sat), and said, “We gotta split, the cops are here — too much noise!” So I followed someone who seemed to know where they were going and found myself out in the street (separated from my friends), and I willed myself to look as though I were a normal person out for an evening’s stroll, and not a drugged-up whatever you might call me! [LSD, and I think mescaline also, were still legal at this time, though I felt like an outlaw, being so conscious through the use of a drug.]

This may not sound much like I am defending my point, but bear with me; this was my initiation into the society of the counter-culture of the 60’s.

A day or two later I bought a book called Philosophy Made Simple (sort of like the …For Dummies series of our day), the first step in my quest to comprehend Life and Being. And I began to voraciously read. Freud, Jung, psychology, literature, anything that promised the depth and wisdom I knew I lacked, but had glimpsed the possibility of.

Soon after this experience I went to a junior college in Ocala, Florida — living with the family of my closest friend in the Marines — as my dad wanted me out of the city where he felt I might come under bad influences. I found teachers in Ocala who were a delight, and they were glad to have someone who had a genuine thirst for knowledge. After a year or so in Ocala with very good grades — my father decided to send me elsewhere, and the choices were either Bard College in New York or Rockford College in Illinois. When we looked at Bard I supposed it seemed to him too bohemian (which I loved), while Rockford seemed nice and normal. To Rockford I was sent! But it was a good school also, and the teachers there were likewise a great encouragement to such thirsty learners as myself.

While I was in my second semester at Rockford dad died (mom had died in 1959, when I was 17). In all our lives together we only had one heart-to-heart talk, and this was but a brief one a few days before he died. I didn’t know his heart, or my mother’s (she’d had cancer, and I was away in boarding schools from the age of 7 or 8).

After (or in the middle of the last of) I think three semesters I got the urge to hit the road, and travel around the world. My dad had bought me a new Austin Healy Sprite (identical to the MG Midget) when I was in Florida, and so — it was 1965 — I took off to Mexico, sleeping on the side of the road in a sleeping bag. Thus began my life as a wandering poet and writer. I had a few hits of LSD with me (safely tucked away), which I would share and take in Acapulco and Vera Cruz.

All this time I was in search of…what? Experience, adventure, love, wisdom… But underneath all these things was a quiet, continuing seeking for hints on attaining the “Illumination” or “Enlightenment” spoken of by various sages; as well as reading world literature I started reading spiritual works — the Sufi mystics, Maurice Bucke’s classic, Cosmic Consciousness (which posited — and sought to demonstrate — the notion that many Western poets, writers, and religious had experienced this, as well as the better-known Eastern mystics and gurus), the writings of Herman Hesse, Tim Leary’s translations into psychedelese of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Lao Tse’s The Tao; I pondered the teachings of Buddha, the Hindu Scriptures (and Joseph Campbell’s popularizations of these), etc etc.

I stayed in touch with my contemporary poets, both in the English-speaking world — especially America, whose poetry was diverse and vital — and whatever poets from abroad who’d been translated, particularly the French, Spanish, German and Italian, all of which had great, innovative talents. I sought to be attuned to consciousness and “language art” as it was manifesting in the world of my time.

I knew I lacked that inner indomitable vitality which was the Source of life, and I hungered for it. I could see the great poets and writers of my own day — Kesey, Watts, Ginsberg, Leary, Bly, Wright, Corso, Kerouac, Olson, etc. — themselves involved in these matters of consciousness, questing after visions of the divine in one way or another. We were a people bereft of God, and although acid, mescaline, mushrooms, peyote and the like gave us visions of the glory and wonder of our humanity, and of an ineffable Spirit that seemed the quickening principle of all life, we somehow always fell short being able to utterly unite with this Spirit, and were crushed by our own and others’ egos with their grasping, pushy nature, expelled from Paradise by our own selves! The attraction of Leary & Co. was their claim that through acid we could transcend the ego, and attain Illumination. It proved a false claim.

Listen! We were not fools in our quest, no matter how foolish we were in our failures! Religion in America seemed to us just so much nonsense; “the opiate of the masses” of spiritually blighted people, people who seemed to us caught up in some meaningless quest for security and affluence at the expense of their sacred humanity. The first taste of the new drugs instantly gave us the insight to see the absurdity of American life; as a saying of our time put it, “Western Civilization? It has not yet begun.”

The racism of that era rankled bitterly in our guts, as did the preoccupation with money, power, fame, and beauty, altars men and women gave their souls in service to. We wanted none of that!

The reason we of those times (40 years ago!) loved Tolkien and his Middle Earth was his (as our) love of natural life and loathing for the technical, industrialized society which scorched and wasted the earth. Plus he gave us a vision of the spiritual forces at play in the world, and the virtues of those who would make a difference in it.

It grieves me to hear the heart of our yearning ridiculed and scorned. It’s as though you never heard the Apostle John say, “…the whole world lies in wickedness”[j] – and that includes this America whose idolatrous altars you think we should have worshipped at with you!

How was it that I, a poet and writer intensively and extensively seeking out the voices of the spiritually aware, heard nothing in the contemporary arts or literature of the Lord Jesus? I heard about other spiritual teachers, but not Him. Why no voice lifted up among you of His glory, or His superiority over the others? Was it because you scorned poetry and the arts? Because you denigrated those expressions of the human spirit, and crushed those urges in so many among you?

We knew the world was evil — and the Amerika of the CIA, the KKK, and the treadmill work-a-day nightmare of quiet desperation and interpersonal alienation as rotten as any of it anywhere, just more “civilized” — and we acted to find a better way. There had to be more to life than what you offered us in 1950s and ‘60s culture. We, the children of those decades, were sick unto death with the malaise you drank like water. And we sought to purge ourselves of this sickness through our spiritual quest, and our experiments in creating intentional communities. Who knew what the true foundations for relationships were? We saw nothing of value in the communities of Christ in that day, so why do you revile us as casting off righteousness in lieu of pagan morality? We had no use for the uptight, selfish, comfort-oriented “nuclear family” (to the exclusion of those outside it) who loved their cars, TVs, alcohol, and the insulated lives you lived. You just did not seem deeply human — or even humane — to us.

Yes, we also made a mess of it, possessed as we were of the same human natures as yourselves. Were it not for the Lord Jesus wading into our midst with His mighty Spirit and saving those of us He did, we would have perished in our sins and depravity.

But I tell you, in the muddy field of Woodstock you missed a great treasure — a diamond in the mud — and amidst the gaudy beads you missed a pearl of great price. For my culture was no worse than yours — just different. And there were virtues in our search for better lives, and the longings for truth and illumination were our silent and ignorant acknowledgment of our need for God. Yet each culture was evil and under the devil’s thrall in its own way. But out of yours came good things, no? And out of mine likewise.

What good came out? I came out. And others like me. The Lord has raised me up a preacher and teacher of His Gospel, and I seek to be what I once decried the lack of when I looked at you 30 and 40 years ago.

Has not the Lord said (through Paul) that “the kingdom of God is not in word but in power,” nor is it realized with “enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power”?[k] And there is power in the Gospel of Christ. For example, there is the energy that comes from having perfect spiritual rest, and the heart (courage, morale) that comes from being perfectly loved, the both of which together translate into Resurrection Power, which may be quiet and unassuming, yet is the vitality of God in lives and situations.

And has He not given us directions for setting up communities of grace, communities of order, kindness, and love? If we as spiritual communities are secure in our Savior’s love and care, and are full of His Spirit as we increasingly know the depths and heights and breadths of His heart for us, we will have a strong and pure energy for lives that glorify Him and help our fellow humans. Such things are the nourishing fruit of sound doctrine and godly preaching.

Does not God “out of the base things of the world, and things which are despised”[l] choose and make such things as glorify His great name, that humankind should not boast of its supposed wisdom and prowess? The “straight” culture of America is no better in His eyes than the (albeit despised in yours) Woodstock culture. Admittedly much evil has come from the latter, much that is — and remains — very destructive, even in our time — but the same can be said for yours. When the dust has settled, it will be seen that out of Woodstock the Almighty has raised up chosen vessels who glorify His name in these days, and some of the characteristics of that culture yet in us redound to His praise and honor.

Nor am I ashamed of the culture and community I call home, both the generation I came of age in, and the town where my daughter and I (a single parent) lived for 19 good years. Brothers and sisters, before you knock my beloved Woodstock again, think of me, and of my prayers before the High Throne, that He who sits thereon would raise up laborers to work in that harvest, where some of the dearest souls I’ve known and loved still reside unsaved, precious humans just like you (although sinners — as you also once were).

I can’t be there now as the Lord has placed me here (in what I consider) the remote Middle East to do His will. Please don’t curse my home, but bless, and pray.

--------------
[a] But Matthew made clear there was one: Matthew 2:23. Check some good commentaries for the technical details of such exegesis.
The Dust Of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever (Crossway Books, 1994)
[c] Cited in Dust of Death, page xii. From, The Twilight of Authority, by Robert Nisbet (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 67
[d] Cited in Dust of Death, page xii. From, The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom (NY: Simon And Schuster, 1987), p. 314.
[e] The Life And Times Of Jesus The Messiah, by Alfred Edersheim (Mac Donald Publishing, n.d.), Vol. 1, page 225.
[f] Commentary On The Gospel Of St John, by E.W. Hengstenberg (Klock & Klock, 1980), Vol. 1, pages 106, 105.
[g] Unger’s Bible Dictionary, by Merrill F. Unger (Moody Press, 1981, Third Edition), page 387.
[h] John 7:49 ff.
If this reference is unfamiliar to you, check out the Beatles’ animated film, The Yellow Submarine, to see the dream and vision of hope we had of changing the world.
[j] 1 John 5:19
[k] 1 Corinthians 4:20; 2:4.
[l] 1 Corinthians 1:28

 

[jbergsing]

I'd love to sit in a deer stand with Uncle Ted ... that would a good day!

 

[MrMerlin777]

I'd love to sit in a deer stand with Uncle Ted ... that would a good day!

Would also make for a good venison BBQ after the hunt.

 

[mgeoffriau]

I find myself agreeing with a lot of Nugent's political and cultural views...unfortunately, I have yet to find any open and clear indication from him that he's a Christian. Most of what I find in his writing tends to the vague, "I respect my Creator, and commune with Him in nature" kind of stuff.

 

[puritan lad]

I find myself agreeing with a lot of Nugent's political and cultural views...unfortunately, I have yet to find any open and clear indication from him that he's a Christian. Most of what I find in his writing tends to the vague, "I respect my Creator, and commune with Him in nature" kind of stuff.

I agree. My brother has his cookbook. Unless he's been reborn since he wrote it, the language he uses makes it highly unlikely that he is a Christian.