I have no intention of beginning an argument with you, but I do wish it known that much of what you have posted comes from a source that is very confused about who and what the Beats were. Simply put, a significant part of the comparison and analysis is just wrong. This is not a matter of saying that the Beats were "good" or "hardworking" or anything else of the sort. That is neither my view nor my point. But they were not the cartoonish figures that your source presents them as.
Nor, in fact, was there really any such thing as a beatnik "movement." Put plainly, beatniks weren't joiners. What is more, the roots of whatever it was that beatniks had in common came not from free love or Buddhism or communal living (nonjoiners don't live in communes!) but from the late-forties development of what its practitioners called cool jazz. Incidentally, they used that term to distinguish themselves from their fellow jazz musicians who played in the style of the late thirties and early forties that was called—you guessed it—hot (or red hot) jazz. The very term "cool"—the longest-enduring slang word in the English language—was first used in its present sense (which is essentially "wow! this is something really good, and what's more, my mom and dad and other square folks will hate it") by those musicians and the people who sought out their performances—notably, the beatniks.
The "marketing" of the beatnik idea was done by the Jєωs, of course, with Allen Ginsberg, one of history's greatest self-promoters and con artists, leading the way. He and his ilk were the ones who created the ridiculous notion that the so-called hippies were lineal descendants of the Beats. They weren't. Beatniks weren't political and they hated noise and crowds (recall that a central part of the cool jazz outlook or ethos or whatever you want to call it was a concern for reduced volume—indeed near silence—manifested by the rise of the solo jazz performer and the chamber-music-size ensemble, things that didn't exist during the Dixieland, swing, or big band eras; one of the most famous and admired groups in jazz history, the Modern Jazz Quartet, emerged from the cool jazz environment). The very idea of a Beatnik Woodstock or Beatniks for McGovern is thus simply inconceivable.
Whole books could be written about Kerouac—as of course they have been. Never having read any of them, I have no idea to what extent, if any, they are accurate, but the fact that a pompous, lying fool like Douglas Brinkley has been working to get himself anointed Kerouac's leading chronicler certainly doesn't bode well. (When I say I never read any of this stuff, I'm not counting Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which centrally concerns Ken Kesey and his bunch but also of necessity has a certain amount about Kerouac, because a close friend of Kesey's, Neal Cassady, was an equally close friend of Kerouac's and is in fact, along with JK, the protagonist of On the Road.)
To make just one point about JK, there was nothing hippieish about him in several important ways. Yes, he was interested in Buddhism, but he was also an old-fashioned American patriot who hated communists and spoke publicly in support of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He had no interest in celebrity, no interest in winning people over to drugs or leftist causes or social revolution. He was a guy with more daemons than one could shake a stick at, no doubt; a very sad and insecure man, more and more a loner as he got older, who made it plain that he loathed those who wanted to make him an icon of sorts and those—the hippies—who wanted to claim him as their progenitor and inspiration. As with so many other people so describable, he was a solitary drinker who drank far too much, and it was of course the drink that killed him before he was fifty.
One last note. It is a mistake to cite sɛҳuąƖ promiscuity as a distinguishing mark of either the Beats or the hippies. If I have learned one thing in my wearily long life, it is that virtually every single social movement in recorded history has included sizable numbers of young men whose principal reason for joining was to get laid and equally sizable numbers of young women whose primary interest was in doing anything that would piss off their parents. In fact, the sole exception that comes to mind is Savonarola's ascetic movement in Florence (from him has come the expression "bonfire of the vanities"). His exceptionalism cost him his life.
Topic: Beatniks (Read 956 times)