{"id":81489,"date":"2022-04-11T11:11:59","date_gmt":"2022-04-11T16:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81489"},"modified":"2022-04-11T11:11:59","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T16:11:59","slug":"the-beat-goes-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81489","title":{"rendered":"The Beat Goes On"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dennis Prager once wrote<\/a> “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<\/em>, Father Knows Best<\/em>, and Leave It to Beaver<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n


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<\/em> 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<\/em>. 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em> in 1956 were emotionless pod people. Later in the decade a common theme of Twilight Zone<\/em> 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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