Impeachment talk has been in the air this week, with rallies in dozens of cities calling for Donald Trump to be ousted from office. Impeachment talk has been in the air for nearly a quarter-century now—you have to go back to George H.W. Bush for a president who didn't inspire a big chunk of the opposition to talk about kicking him out of the White House, and even then there was a small chunk of the opposition who wanted to kick him out of the White House. There always is.
In that spirit, here's the anarcho-pacifist Beat writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his 1958 poem "Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower" (with bonus video footage assembled ably by an anonymous YouTuber):
If you'd rather read to yourself than be read to, you can see the text of the poem here.
Ferlinghetti's four pages of antiwar verse did not inspire a mass movement to remove Eisenhower from office (nor was that the point), but it did help inspire a young broadcaster named Lorenzo Milam to try to start a pacifist radio station in Washington, D.C. I tell that story in chapter three of my book Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America; the short version is that it was 1958, the Cold War was in full swing, and the FCC wasn't about to license a dissident radio outlet in the nation's capital. After two years Milam gave up, applied for a license in Seattle instead (on the theory that maybe the authorities wouldn't care about an outlet located far away from the nation's capital), eventually got the go-ahead, and founded KRAB-FM, which in turn inspired a wave of listener-supported non-state, non-commercial radio stations around the country. Not a bad legacy. Certainly a better legacy than actually impeaching Eisenhower, which would've just saddled us with Richard Nixon a decade early.
(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)
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