The Beat Goes On
By Jeff Kouba
Dennis Prager once wrote “whatever the Left touches it ruins.” In the 1950s, Leftists beheld Eisenhower’s America and set about trying to ruin it. In those years, America was the colossus astride the world. The only major power in the post-war years with its economy and infrastructure intact, America’s economic engine was roaring. Fueled by the GI Bill and real purchasing power, nuclear families ignited the rise of the suburbs while doubling the country’s Gross National Product.
Entertainment of the time reflected social norms. Programs such as Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver depicted stable, healthy families. Naturally the Left saw what was good and recoiled in revulsion.
The Beat Generation was a major Leftist reaction to 1950s culture. It began at Columbia University where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and other early Beats attended. William Burroughs attended Harvard, but he spent a lot of time in New York City’s subculture and was introduced there to Kerouac and Ginsberg.
I don’t think it is an accident that the Frankfurt School had relocated to Columbia University to escape the Nazis. Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Erich Fromm among others helped found the basis of critical theory, the destructive brew of Marxism and philosophy that is the grandfather of today’s wokeism.
The relation between the Beats and the Frankfurt School and how much the Beats absorbed while at Columbia is a topic for another time. What the Germans of the Frankfurt School unleashed in academia, the Beats unleashed in popular culture. Reacting to what they saw as constrictive conformity in Eisenhower’s America, the Beats rejected the wealth that the United States had created and instead wallowed in drug use and sexual exploration.
When Ginsberg began his poem Howl in 1954 with “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”, he wasn’t talking about the people depicted in Father Knows Best. He meant the kind of people he knew and celebrated.
Popular entertainment began to reflect the corrosive hedonism of the Beats, albeit within the guardrails of what was permitted in the 1950s. Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible was his reaction to McCarthyism, but he used a setting of sexually repressed Puritans to tell it. The shocking aspect of Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 wasn’t that James Dean’s rebel came from the gutter, it was that he came from a middle class family. The villains in Invasion of the Body Snatcher in 1956 were emotionless pod people. Later in the decade a common theme of Twilight Zone episodes was the disturbed and abnormal that lie beneath typical every day life.
The counterculture permitted by the Beats reached its crescendo in the 1960s, but it never burned out. The irony of a movement started by people so averse to what they saw as conformity is that it gave birth to today’s highly conformist wokeism and cancel culture.
Voices that dare speak in public or in social media against the patently absurd foolishness of, say, transgenderism or the divisive race hustlers are silenced.
The Beat Generation was a revolution from the Left against the mainstream. While today’s wokeism may not have a majority of adherents among the population, it is the majority view among those who command the heights of popular culture such as entertainment and academia, and increasingly, corporations.
And so, there will be an inevitable revolt, but, and this is where things will get interesting, it will come from the Right. I can’t think of a time when this country has experienced a revolution from the Right against the mainstream because at least up until the 1950s this has been a center-right country, and traditional values have been mainstream.
Donald Trump was one of the first mini-quakes, a warning in advance of the larger shocks to come. Crass though he was, he was elected because people hoped that his bull in a china shop persona might bulldoze away some of the detritus left behind the Woke Parade in a way that establishment figures like Jeb! would never even try.
The Left’s revolution was nihilistic. That won’t be the revolution of the Right, but what form it will take I can’t predict. I’ll close with this, though, a sign of how much ground as been lost. It’s just one random example among countless. It’s just some young people and an online role-playing session, but these poor deluded fools felt the need to stop and “share their pronouns”, as if that were an actual thing. (starting at about the 39 second mark). To the barricades!
April 11th, 2022 at 12:36 pm
Yup. You can’t spell dysfunctional without DFL.
April 11th, 2022 at 12:56 pm
You’re remiss in failing to point out that Kerouac,Ginsberg & the rest of their filthy crew were themselves degenerate sodomites. On the Road and Howl are both celebrations of addiction, fecklessness, degeneracy, mental illness and failure.
April 11th, 2022 at 1:41 pm
My theory is Lack of Causes.
Boudica and Joan of Arc led troops in battle. William Wilberforce led the charge to abolish slavery in the British Empire. Harriet Tubman ran the underground railroad to help American slaves escape. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in the Confederate States of America. Carrie Nation demanded we ban The Demon Rum. Susan B. Anthony marched for women’s rights. Eisenhower’s troops marched against the Nazis. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream of ending Jim Crow. These were Great Causes, fought on moral principle at great personal risk.
What Great Cause did the Beat generation have? What was their inspirational moral crusade? “Down with Beaver?” “Father Doesn’t Know Best?” “Ho, ho, we won’t go?”
And today, what Great Cause do young people have: “Trans Above All?” “Covid Masks Forever?” “Groomers for Everyone?”
There are no good causes left to fight. People who want to be honored like the heroes of old, can’t find anything worth fighting for. So they fight over nothing and fight against everything, because it’s all they have.
Old timers say kids these days don’t know how good they have it: plenty of food and easy work with unlimited entertainment. Kids these days say they have it rotten: good food, easy work and diverting entertainment don’t make a life worth living, that comes from achieving something noble, something great, something revolutionary. And there’s nothing left for them to do. All the Great Causes have been taken.
April 11th, 2022 at 1:51 pm
JD, that right there is suitable for framing. Thank you.
April 11th, 2022 at 2:05 pm
All the Great Causes have been taken.
From a Boomer point of view, maybe. But there is a Great Struggle on the horizon for people under 50 years of age. A struggle that will either end with 2 or more new countries created within the boundaries of the old United States, or re-built on the ashes of them.
We cannot continue this way much longer. There’s going to be a reckoning.
April 11th, 2022 at 3:35 pm
The Port Huron Statement of 1962:
https://images2.americanprogress.org/campus/email/PortHuronStatement.pdf
Imagine thinking you are demonstrating that you have your finger on the pulse of history when you write turgid nonsense like this:
The apathy here is, first subjective — the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation — the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.
Get that? The apathy is subjective, not objective. The object is the American situation, which is described as not just the separation of people from power, from knowledge, and from decision making, but the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, and from the pinnacles of decision-making.
“Howl” is awful poetry. It has not stood the test of time, to say the least.
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
Is it the “angelheaded hipsters” or the “cold-water flats” that are floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz? Who listens to jazz any more?
April 11th, 2022 at 4:03 pm
MP, lay off jazz, will you? What did Zappa ever do to you?
April 11th, 2022 at 4:28 pm
Who listens to jazz any more?
I do, but I take your point. Even Ginsberg moved on from jazz (cf. “Ghetto Defendant,” the Clash, 1982).
April 11th, 2022 at 9:44 pm
I don’t like Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” but I think it is clever and technically quite good. Ditto Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
But “Howl” is just bad poetry. It sacrifices precise use of language and imagery to appeal to adolescent emotions. The language is just really sloppy. The metaphors are all over the place. Might work as a heavy metal lyric.
Tim Murphy writes good poetry. Ah, I see that he passed away in 2018. Poor Tim had his demons.
Melville’s poetry is good. Wallace Stevens is good, as is Ezra Pound. Ted Hughes is not appreciated enough.
April 12th, 2022 at 8:13 am
Well…..civil rights and the threat of nuclear destruction to name two, but while these things played loudly in the background, the main focus of the beats was the stifling conformity of the post-war era.
People of a certain age remember:
– strict dress codes in the workplace. IBM literally check the height of your socks and the width of your tie.
-stifling work rules. Many of us remember working in large office bays where you had to raise your hand and ask permission to use the restroom.
– When you went to sell your house, the first thing a real-estate agent asked was “What church do you go to?” Since (nearly) everyone went to church, the question established your religion, ethnicity and income. ie, your social class. You were then sorted accordingly.
Anyone remember growing up in a neighborhood where the ethnic/racial lines literally ran down the middle of a street?
I do.
Back to the workplace, firms like Control Data, Intel and DEC were formed primarily because the founders couldn’t stand the strict hierarchical structure of large corporations like IBM and Univac.
One of the great symbols of the end of the 50’s is when JFK appeared in public without a fedora.
Actually, that meant something.
April 12th, 2022 at 10:16 am
Greg, it might be helpful to think of the conformity of the 1950s as a bulwark against totalitarianism.
Certainly, the civil rights movement has led to explicit calls for totalitarianism, since the choices people are allowed to make work against total equality of the races and the sexes.
April 13th, 2022 at 6:41 am
Rather than a bulwark, I tend to think that the conformity of the 50’s was totalitarianism itself. We have gone from having to raise a hand to get permission to pee to working at home.
That’s progress.
As for the totalitarianism of equality, I have said it here before: a vice is nothing more than a virtue taken too far.
What next? Equal rights for goldfish?
It is time to step off the Selma bridge….could someone please tell PBS?
April 13th, 2022 at 9:16 am
I’m a bit with both Greg and MP on the conformity of the 1950s. The justification certainly seems to be avoiding the excesses of the Commies, but in its effect, there were social, political, and even legal structures in place to enforce conformity. So it was a step or two better than totalitarianism, but still not liberty.
I personally notice that my “brand” of churches (fundamental/evangelical Baptist) still suffers to a degree from this. People went to church in the 1950s because “you went to church because the Godless commies could not”, and too many church leaders confused those “good years” with the rightness of the ministry model. Reality was that a lot of those pews were filled with people who were in fact Godless, but went to church out of social pressure.
We ought to take note today, no matter what our perspective is on the particular things we’d like to promote.