People or puppets? What is this thing called love?

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Do we Americans know what love is when it comes to
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love. Are we acting as people or puppets.
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This series people or puppets is produced by the Union Theological
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Seminary in cooperation with the National Association of educational
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broadcasters under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center
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on today's program entitled What Is This Thing Called Love.
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You will hear the views and voices of novelist Geoffrey Wagner anthropologist
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Solon Kimball psychoanalyst Earl a Luma Studer and theologian
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Paul Scherrer.
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These are the man who will analyze some of the concepts created by our modern mass
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media and compare them with our traditional moral religious values.
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Here is the commentator for people or puppets. The president of the Union
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Theological Seminary in New York Dr. Henry Pitney even to you isn't what
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is this thing called love.
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The mass media provided us with several answers. Perhaps the most attention
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getting type of love is the variety offered by Hollywood.
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You'll see the kind of love the
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wonders of exploring. Right
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down below.
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Even when the content is very sensitive The selling appeal is the same.
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There is a pocket book containing 15 fine short stories by such writers as
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old as Steinbeck Bose and others. The collection is
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entitled The love makers and it is described as.
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The element of a lot of. Memory intimacies.
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I feel brilliant writing a review to you and then make it through.
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An expensive network television show and titled the changing ways of love
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depicted only a variety of views of sexiness. Perhaps
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no modern medium however does as successful a job any waiting love with
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sex as the popular song. Here's one entitled shut
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up by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley. The words are
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spoken so you can grasp and appreciate their full meaning.
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I well know that's.
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What it's like.
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In addition to the idea that love equals sex an idea aided and
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abetted by such different present day developments as censorship committees and
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Kinsey reports the popular song also illustrates another
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common concept of love love as an escape.
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Here are difficult questions. What Is This Thing Called Love. How
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significant are the views of love that you have heard. Are there other views of
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love. Are they significant. These are the questions our producer Philip
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Galba asked of our guest authorities.
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Dr. Earle heirlooms Jr. is a psychoanalyst. He is
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also a professor at the Union Theological Seminary and director of its program
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of the interrelations between psychiatry and religion. Dr. Louis.
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Love is a human emotion that is
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operative you know relationship. It's an emotion.
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That is a striving toward action and the action is. Reducing the
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distance between ourselves and the loved person or ourselves and the loved
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object in a sense is an attempt to bring together things which do
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or which we feel belong together. It has in a
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certain quality of urgency a certain quality of striving.
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A certain quality of hunger in its more infantile and
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childish forms and I use these for these terms descriptively and
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not in the sense of depreciating infantile it's quite.
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Quite. Desirable to be infantile when one is an infant. It's quite desirably childish
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when one is a child. And it's quite to be expected that the infantile and
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childish will always be with us to some extent but as we become more mature newer
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possibilities for love arise in which we can and do love that which is
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different from ourself. Love that which can not necessarily bring us
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immediate gratification.
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In other words begin to love other persons in their own right as persons in their own
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right and to seek their joy in their fulfillment as a
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as a joint operation with our own finding our fulfillment in other words we may find as we
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grow in love our highest joy and in the freedom and growth
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of the other person.
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Jeffrey Wagner lectures in literature at Columbia University. He
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is also the author of the study the rate of pleasure. Six novels
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including The Passion of the land and born of the sun. Two
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books of poetry the singing blood and the passion of Clive.
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Geoffrey Wagner also has translated the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.
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He principal question in fact the title for this program is what is this thing called love
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Mr. Wagner.
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No thank you is to go but I'm not any authority on love and today my God I
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challenge that because my six novels now haven't you.
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And a book called parade of pleasure many people interpret this as the novelist of
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course he's a man who knows all about love.
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Well you have to admit that if you write novels today I would guess that
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99 out of 100 of them are going to revolve around a. I love
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situation an erotic situation and as I say that I have to
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realize that this is a relatively new thing in our culture. And
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that certainly. In the classical period love is nuclear
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in this way in the Greek or Roman literature it is often a disaster of what they
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call a perch a body oh. And in the medieval period of
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course it's. Within a seated culture it isn't nuclear to literature in the
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way it is for us and I think it's healthy to remember that it is only in the so since about perhaps the
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17th century really that this whole psychic attitude to
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love being absolutely basic every time we pick up a novel or see a
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movie is quite new.
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Dr Solon Campbell is a social anthropologist.
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He was an authority on the family and marital patterns of several cultures.
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Dr. Campbell is now a professor of education at the Teachers College of Columbia
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University in New York City.
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Love. Is very different and
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means very different things
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depending upon what time and place one is concerned with.
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Thus.
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In American in contemporary American society the concept of
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romantic love is given. Pre-eminence.
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On the other hand there are. Other societies in the world where
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romantic love is often seen not as the desirable
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goal of people. But more particularly as an interference
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or a disturber of the normal course of life.
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The caution that I would make is that one must
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be careful to use the term
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love. In a variety of ways in
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which it. Has meaning. Erotic
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love or romantic love is only one aspect. Of
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the kind. Of deep emotional attachment.
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Which refers to this. Relationship between
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people. There are other kinds of love too. There is love of
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country love of God there is parental love there is
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self love each in their own way represents some
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aspect of what is contained within this
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term.
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Dr. Lewis is there any danger in this emphasis upon sexual love in our society.
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I think that there's always a.
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Certain amount of of oscillation in life between desire and
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satiation. And that pleasure is perceived
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as. Let's say as hunger is satisfied.
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And that after a time satisfaction leads to boredom and there's a new building up of tension
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but I think that as we grow we we love in different ways and urgencies arise in other
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areas. Also as we grow we we learn to handle urgencies with less
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frantic Innes and the man on the fuzzy tree.
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I think where our hostility is not handled not recognized
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and does not have. Appropriate
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expression. It makes our love go sour.
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Do you think other sometimes is hostility or aggression and this kind of urgency
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that we now call love.
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Oh I think a great deal I think that I think that what we call love
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is urgent without regard to the welfare and growth of both
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partners. It is either extremely immature love baby
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love which wants what it wants when its want when it wants it and is a gimme gimme
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proposition. Or else it is love mixed with
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hate and love masked as hate. And really what one wants is to
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control and overpower and master the other person or to get the other person to do this
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to do one rather than really to relate creatively to the other person.
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So sometimes a loss of urgency might be a loss of some negative.
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Yes I think that we could talk both of the of the of the urgency that is is
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negative in the urgency that's positive.
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I don't think that anything as strong as it is is as genuine
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love as no urgency to it I think it has a kind of urgency but it's its urgency
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probably is a whole lot less ruthless than what we're alluding to here.
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What is significant about our popular views of love.
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These song hits that are under discussion
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are quite interesting in this respect and you get asked what is some of.
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This Elvis Presley song All Shook Up. And
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as I talk the New York Times is printing a series of articles on The
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shook up generation. Harrison So is Brit. So I suppose that's taken from
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this song I'm in love I'm all shook up. And I think that that's another
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example of for instance the lack of articulation the
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lack of control the feeling of chaos. I mean love I'm all shook up and the last lines
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of Oh yea yea and so forth real the devastation of
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having to articulate and never having to correspond to. I do a
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somewhat scientific universe and indeed the universe that imposes
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rational discipline on you.
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It didn't bother you that all the automatic way that people accept the fact that this must be
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love again obviously is a symptom which I'm sure will pass.
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Yes well I think that's a very good point indeed I get elaborate on in this
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extent that the characteristic of this popular song is an extremely
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unrealistic idealization of course. Now if you take a song like I
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took one look at you that's all I meant to do. And then my heart stood
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still. It seems to me that the singer is saying precisely
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what the Troubadour was saying or what done to he was saying in the beat and moreover when he takes one look at
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Beatrice just all he meant to do in fact. And its might seem with
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love. Now this is of course in the Renaissance is regarded as a
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conventionalized love approach and it isn't taken seriously and it isn't taken seriously in
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our culture. It seems to me a normal release. However if of course it
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becomes a narcotic and the teenager indulges in it beyond
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simply regarding It is an idealization I should think it has a distorted effect on the
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personality to put it at its least. But I think that frankly these kind of
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love lyrics that one hears in commercial music and that is of course
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quite different from the love lyrics of true jazz which is unsentimental very
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often. I would say that this is a very strong flight from reality appears
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appeals to a very low level. First of all a lot of people don't listen to the
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lyrics and secondly even my youngest kind of students of
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17 and 18 year old I mean there's a lot of sounds lemon or I mean our listeners may have an
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affair than you think. I suppose it might have an effect. Some people think they have an
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effect. You know Frank Sinatra has apparently made a statement about.
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This particular song that you quote from Presley and he says that. I refer to
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the bulk of Rock n Roll it fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young
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people. It smells phony and false. It is song played and written for the most part by Kryten
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his goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and
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sly nude in fact plain dirty lyrics manages to be the martial music of
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every sideburn delinquent on the face of the earth.
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But how are you going to find out whether a song hit actually.
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It kind of distorts the personality the erratic personality of an individual. I would
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say if the person is very immature and they indulge in it as a knock in a narcotic
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way it looks it looks odd.
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Are there other views of love that are there other views of a different
This program has been transcribed using automated software tools, made possible through a collaboration between the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and Pop Up Archive. Please note that no automated transcription is perfect nor is it intended to replace human transcription labor. If you would like to contribute corrections to this transcript, please contact MITH at mith@umd.edu.