Now I Know Who John Lofton Is!

So in a post from much earlier today, or maybe technically last night, I linked to an interview between John Lofton and Allen Ginsberg, commenting on the fact that I didn’t know who John Lofton was, approaching the matter, I think, in a fairly civil fashion in the post’s first paragraph, and in a fairly snarky fashion in the second paragraph.

Well, now I know who John Lofton is, because he has left an understandably annoyed comment on the post in question.  Mr. Lofton is the editor of The American View, a website that, based on my browsing it for a few minutes, seems to have a lot of resources for people interested in Christianity and politics and the places where they meet.  It is probably due to my general lack of interest in Christianity that I was unfamiliar with Mr. Lofton at the time I read his interview with Mr. Ginsberg (which predates the American View, I think – I’m not certain, but I don’t believe that Allen Ginsberg and the internet ever existed simultaneously).

Mr. Lofton said:

So, you have to be “really famous” to be right?  No.  Your reasoning is incoherent – making you a perfect Ginsberg fan.

Zing!  Okay.  Maybe my reasoning was fairly incoherent.  Allow me to explain a little further.  My argument was not meant to be that since Allen Ginsberg is more famous than John Lofton, Mr. Ginsberg is right and Mr. Lofton is wrong.  As much as anyone, I believe that people are often made famous for entirely wrong reasons, and that people who are famous are full of shit.  My reasoning was that Mr. Ginsberg, in addition to simply being famous, is held in a certain level of renown by people who make it their business to study poetry, to know which poetry is good and which is bad.  I do not count myself as one of those people; poetry has very little interest for me.

To be fair, for most of the course of the interview, Mr. Lofton is not attacking Mr. Ginsberg’s poetry, but, mainly, his sexuality.  And at times, Mr. Ginsberg begins questioning Mr. Lofton in a less-than-friendly fashion.  I mean, I guess overall what struck me as most humorous about the interview was that neither party really seemed to like the other, and neither party felt the need to hide their dislike of the other, and yet neither party felt the need to terminate the interview.

And while I can’t agree with Mr. Lofton’s views on homosexuality, I do agree with him on an issue he discusses in this article in The American View.  The issue of potential war crimes committed by members of the Bush Administration is not getting enough press, and as I understand Christianity, this is the sort of thing they should be talking about, and yet many self-proclaimed Christian Republicans put their party’s interests above their principles of religion.  Although I don’t agree with his principles, he does seem to stick to them fairly firmly, and I have to respect that.