The Zeitgeist caught up with Ginsberg in 1968

New Yorker 17 August 1968

"...he turned up at a rally at Town Hall protesting the indictment of Dr. Benjamin Spock for encouraging resistance to the draft. He spent the rest of January digging up information on the sins of the American military-industrial complex, and in February, armed with statistics, he left for a tour of thirty or forty colleges. In March, he was in Washington, talking with Robert Kennedy about the war. When the Democrats meet in Chicago, he will be there with his bells on, for "a mass manifestation of gaiety" by a few hunderd thousand of his friends."

For an account of what happened there a week after the publication date read here: http://www.geocities.com/athens/delphi/1553/c68chron.html

In March he talked with Bobby Kennedy; in June Kennedy was dead. The "manifestation of gaiety" was a bloodbath. The revolution ended before it started. Nixon, an obviously evil person, became president. (Raised in the culture of evil, I worked for his election as a Teenage Republican.) The ideas of the "amalgamated hippie-pacifist-activist visionary-orgiastic-anarchist-Orientalist-psychedelic underground" sown in our meat minds by Ginsberg et al -- as silly as they seemed -- remain on the edge of the scythe. In altered forms, some more sophisticated, some less, they continue to struggle with the same foes, wearing the same suits, a half century later.

Will I live long enough ever to see something new?

God, I hope so.