How The Children of Sal & Dean Destroyed The World
How The Children of Sal and Dean Destroyed The World
When you’re a kid, you’re basically an idiot. But that’s OK. Because you’re a kid. Eventually, most of us stop being idiots. If not completely, we learn enough to negotiate life, while not dying unnecessarily. The eternal youth cult of popular culture, then, is a bid for everlasting idiocy, as a way of life. This works well for advertising execs who know how to manipulate youthful idiots with shiny objects and promises of how to get girls. Or, guys. Or, some combination, thereof. If you follow their lead—the advertisers, I mean—you’ll become irrevocably cool, and seriously popular. Just buy what they’re selling, spend your hard-earned money on frivolous purchases, and life will be good. That’s the promise, at least, and youthful idiots flock to it like lemmings to the cliff.
Why am I writing this? Well, I just read an article about how Jack Kerouac saved America, by writing his classic stream-of-consciousness book of prose “On The Road.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I dig Kerouac’s writing, but I have no illusions about The Beats—that group of alcoholic, drug-addicted, writers and poets—who were deeply disaffected from postwar America. Apparently, because America was a bland, white-washed series of suburban tract houses, of moms and dads trying hard to fulfill the American dream, working at menial jobs, selling insurance and driving trucks, with the hope of sending their kids to college. Those poor, square, bastards.
They weren’t like Beat poet/icon Alan Ginsberg, having sex with anonymous men in public parks, which he wrote about in his poem “Howl.” Ginsberg was gay. This may reasonably explain his personal disaffection with American life. What did he expect from a country that just helped save the world from the very real threat of Fascism? In post-war America, gayness was not yet on America’s radar, in any significant way.
Unprecedented prosperity and freedom were America’s gifts to the world. But young folk—as always—think that freedom and prosperity are normal. When they weren’t and never have been. Hunger, poverty, war, bigotry, disease, these were normal. America was the anomaly—and that’s why “Gayness” was mostly, a non-issue in postwar America. Out of sight out of mind. Because of all the other looming priorities, I’d guess.
“But what about race and gender, woman’s rights, civil rights?”
I shake my head, wondering how a culture survives when people expect that the world should line up with whatever they’ve concocted in their heads, disconnected from any real understanding of history and human nature. Why doesn’t the good stuff—whatever it may be—just materialize, fully realized, like mayonnaise or a dozen brands of spaghetti on supermarket shelves. And, by the way, who builds those damned trucks and roads that get all those tasty goods to market?
“I dunno? They’re just there. They must materialize when we’re sleeping.”
“Maybe I’ll write a poem about it.”
Towards the end of his life Kerouac, the Beat’s renaissance man lived with his mother as something of a recluse, which he did, off and on, even at the peak of his fame.
At 47, Jack Kerouac was dead from cirrhosis of the liver.
His muse, Neil Cassady, alias Dean Moriarty, the anti-hero and anti-villain of Kerouac’s book “On The Road” lay dead from exposure next to a railroad track in Mexico, strung out on Benzedrine and whatever else he could put into his system. The great literary figure and anti-hero-archetype, Dean Moriarty, was dead at 42, one year before Kerouac’s own alcohol-induced demise. Both men were probably, at least, in part, murdered by their fame. That plus the endless expectations brought on by the loss of identity, as Kerouac’s myth supplanted reality, a myth that neither man could hope to live up to.
Allan Ginsberg lived into old age as a Buddhist and poet and was a seminal influence on the work of Bob Dylan, as was Kerouac. I assume, somewhere along the line that Ginsberg stopped performing oral sex on men in the park. Although, today, that would make him a hero, unlike the 1940s.
Another key figure in The Beat movement was the writer, William Burroughs, of Naked Lunch fame. Burroughs was a junkie/alcoholic who shot his 2nd wife in the face, after a failed attempt at recreating William Tell’s archery feat, only with a pistol and a glass of whiskey, instead of an apple and a bow. This was when Burroughs and his wife were on the lam from the law, due to his dealing and using heroin, both ending up in Mexico and South America. Oddly enough, Burroughs, like Kerouac, was politically conservative, believing that an ever-expanding government would inevitably become tyrannical. I guess, even thru the haze of booze and smack, Burroughs genius, like Kerouac’s, allowed a shoot of rationality to find the light.
Poet Gregory Corso, the youngest member of the Beats, was also an avid drug user. Corso thought America was just too damned conventional for his particular peccadilloes. As an older man, he spent his days in Europe, feted as a hero of the counterculture, whose poetry grew out of a search for his long-lost mother. He eventually found her, alive and well and living in New Jersey. She’d left Corso’s father after he’d knocked her front teeth out. A brutal father and abandonment by his mother probably explain Corso’s love of drugs and a lifetime of discontent, far better than his understanding of either America or it’s history and politics. The same was probably no less true of the others.
Maybe they should’ve been like Charles Bukowski the alcoholic and poet (in that order.) Bukowski wrote about life at the margins, while working a middle-class job at the post office. When he died, he was an old man, worth millions, in spite of his reputation as a street hustling drunk. The drunk part was true, though.
Here’s the thing; America changed over time, which is how widespread change usually happens, something artists seldom recognize, at least, when it comes to politics. Not in the blink of an eye—focused, as we would like it to be—on the great and mighty work that is us. The difference is, today, eternal youth is the desired result—youthful of mind, child-like, and childish, the eternal idiot as a symbol of freedom.
In other words, Jack Kerouac’s novel “On The Road” was a wonderful book, but it didn’t save the world. Neither did rock & roll or rap music, Bugs Bunny or The Beatles.
Youth culture, for the most part, was and is, a manufactured pseudo-reality. The stuff of Madison Avenue, clever poets, songwriters, and filmmakers, all of which are enabled by the vast postwar wealth and freedom of American culture. It was that wealth, generations in the making, that made youth culture possible. It should be obvious enough, then, that solving the problem of hunger, was a much bigger accomplishment than any prose or poem, no matter how inventive. Bigger than any book. Bigger than my imagination. Just ask a once hungry child.
How ably have we solved the problem of hunger, here in America? Hell. Today, even poor people suffer from obesity, in the U.S... This is probably a cue for all the would-be saviors to eagerly rally around some new cause, in an effort to solve the scourge of obesity. To save America, by means of their favored solution, that being some new version of Marxism. Why not? Starvation is a heck-of-a cure for obesity. Which, inevitably, follows Marxism and true socialism like a ravening disease.
And then, all the idiot children are off and running, once again.
“Maybe we should write a poem? Maybe that would help?”
Yeah. Maybe.
Mark Magula
When you’re a kid, you’re basically an idiot. But that’s OK. Because you’re a kid. Eventually, most of us stop being idiots. If not completely, we learn enough to negotiate life, while not dying unnecessarily. The eternal youth cult of popular culture, then, is a bid for everlasting idiocy, as a way of life. This works well for advertising execs who know how to manipulate youthful idiots with shiny objects and promises of how to get girls. Or, guys. Or, some combination, thereof. If you follow their lead—the advertisers, I mean—you’ll become irrevocably cool, and seriously popular. Just buy what they’re selling, spend your hard-earned money on frivolous purchases, and life will be good. That’s the promise, at least, and youthful idiots flock to it like lemmings to the cliff.
Why am I writing this? Well, I just read an article about how Jack Kerouac saved America, by writing his classic stream-of-consciousness book of prose “On The Road.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I dig Kerouac’s writing, but I have no illusions about The Beats—that group of alcoholic, drug-addicted, writers and poets—who were deeply disaffected from postwar America. Apparently, because America was a bland, white-washed series of suburban tract houses, of moms and dads trying hard to fulfill the American dream, working at menial jobs, selling insurance and driving trucks, with the hope of sending their kids to college. Those poor, square, bastards.
They weren’t like Beat poet/icon Alan Ginsberg, having sex with anonymous men in public parks, which he wrote about in his poem “Howl.” Ginsberg was gay. This may reasonably explain his personal disaffection with American life. What did he expect from a country that just helped save the world from the very real threat of Fascism? In post-war America, gayness was not yet on America’s radar, in any significant way.
Unprecedented prosperity and freedom were America’s gifts to the world. But young folk—as always—think that freedom and prosperity are normal. When they weren’t and never have been. Hunger, poverty, war, bigotry, disease, these were normal. America was the anomaly—and that’s why “Gayness” was mostly, a non-issue in postwar America. Out of sight out of mind. Because of all the other looming priorities, I’d guess.
“But what about race and gender, woman’s rights, civil rights?”
I shake my head, wondering how a culture survives when people expect that the world should line up with whatever they’ve concocted in their heads, disconnected from any real understanding of history and human nature. Why doesn’t the good stuff—whatever it may be—just materialize, fully realized, like mayonnaise or a dozen brands of spaghetti on supermarket shelves. And, by the way, who builds those damned trucks and roads that get all those tasty goods to market?
“I dunno? They’re just there. They must materialize when we’re sleeping.”
“Maybe I’ll write a poem about it.”
Towards the end of his life Kerouac, the Beat’s renaissance man lived with his mother as something of a recluse, which he did, off and on, even at the peak of his fame.
At 47, Jack Kerouac was dead from cirrhosis of the liver.
His muse, Neil Cassady, alias Dean Moriarty, the anti-hero and anti-villain of Kerouac’s book “On The Road” lay dead from exposure next to a railroad track in Mexico, strung out on Benzedrine and whatever else he could put into his system. The great literary figure and anti-hero-archetype, Dean Moriarty, was dead at 42, one year before Kerouac’s own alcohol-induced demise. Both men were probably, at least, in part, murdered by their fame. That plus the endless expectations brought on by the loss of identity, as Kerouac’s myth supplanted reality, a myth that neither man could hope to live up to.
Allan Ginsberg lived into old age as a Buddhist and poet and was a seminal influence on the work of Bob Dylan, as was Kerouac. I assume, somewhere along the line that Ginsberg stopped performing oral sex on men in the park. Although, today, that would make him a hero, unlike the 1940s.
Another key figure in The Beat movement was the writer, William Burroughs, of Naked Lunch fame. Burroughs was a junkie/alcoholic who shot his 2nd wife in the face, after a failed attempt at recreating William Tell’s archery feat, only with a pistol and a glass of whiskey, instead of an apple and a bow. This was when Burroughs and his wife were on the lam from the law, due to his dealing and using heroin, both ending up in Mexico and South America. Oddly enough, Burroughs, like Kerouac, was politically conservative, believing that an ever-expanding government would inevitably become tyrannical. I guess, even thru the haze of booze and smack, Burroughs genius, like Kerouac’s, allowed a shoot of rationality to find the light.
Poet Gregory Corso, the youngest member of the Beats, was also an avid drug user. Corso thought America was just too damned conventional for his particular peccadilloes. As an older man, he spent his days in Europe, feted as a hero of the counterculture, whose poetry grew out of a search for his long-lost mother. He eventually found her, alive and well and living in New Jersey. She’d left Corso’s father after he’d knocked her front teeth out. A brutal father and abandonment by his mother probably explain Corso’s love of drugs and a lifetime of discontent, far better than his understanding of either America or it’s history and politics. The same was probably no less true of the others.
Maybe they should’ve been like Charles Bukowski the alcoholic and poet (in that order.) Bukowski wrote about life at the margins, while working a middle-class job at the post office. When he died, he was an old man, worth millions, in spite of his reputation as a street hustling drunk. The drunk part was true, though.
Here’s the thing; America changed over time, which is how widespread change usually happens, something artists seldom recognize, at least, when it comes to politics. Not in the blink of an eye—focused, as we would like it to be—on the great and mighty work that is us. The difference is, today, eternal youth is the desired result—youthful of mind, child-like, and childish, the eternal idiot as a symbol of freedom.
In other words, Jack Kerouac’s novel “On The Road” was a wonderful book, but it didn’t save the world. Neither did rock & roll or rap music, Bugs Bunny or The Beatles.
Youth culture, for the most part, was and is, a manufactured pseudo-reality. The stuff of Madison Avenue, clever poets, songwriters, and filmmakers, all of which are enabled by the vast postwar wealth and freedom of American culture. It was that wealth, generations in the making, that made youth culture possible. It should be obvious enough, then, that solving the problem of hunger, was a much bigger accomplishment than any prose or poem, no matter how inventive. Bigger than any book. Bigger than my imagination. Just ask a once hungry child.
How ably have we solved the problem of hunger, here in America? Hell. Today, even poor people suffer from obesity, in the U.S... This is probably a cue for all the would-be saviors to eagerly rally around some new cause, in an effort to solve the scourge of obesity. To save America, by means of their favored solution, that being some new version of Marxism. Why not? Starvation is a heck-of-a cure for obesity. Which, inevitably, follows Marxism and true socialism like a ravening disease.
And then, all the idiot children are off and running, once again.
“Maybe we should write a poem? Maybe that would help?”
Yeah. Maybe.
Mark Magula