Fifty Years Later

"... the Beat Generation's worship of primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hostility to intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as well. The hipsters and hipster-lovers of the beat generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything sociological and historical as the middle class or capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul-- young men who can't think straight and hate anyone who can; young men who can't get outside the morass of self..."

-- Norman Podhertz

"... the beat generation, by whatever name it is called, is the natural expression of our times, international in character and deeply rooted in the chaos of our society. For all his faults, the hipster is a hero of our times because he has rebelled against a society which is only rational but no longer sane, a society which, because it has divorced man from its intuitive self, can talk calmly of waging nuclear war. The hipster's ability to act spontaneously in a society which demands conformity is in itself an affirmation of the ability of the human being to will its own actions."

--David McReynolds

The above quotes are pulled from the epigraph of The Beats, edited by Seymour Krim and published in 1960 by Fawcett Publications. I was struck by the remarkable parallels between their generation and ours as illustrated by the voices of an underground movement half a century old. Who doesn't feel spiritually underprivledge and crippled of soul sometimes, when walking into a mall, or when buildings block the sky, or when watching a commercial? It seems the only major change in the past 50 years is that we've developed a myriad of ways to destroy the world since the inception of the atom bomb.

Since the US-led invention of the bomb, many young (and old) Americans have been struggling to come to terms with inhabiting, inheriting, and powering, even indirectly, a society that has developed the means to destroy the entire the world under the guise of protecting our "system"/God-given way of life. While the world seemingly falls apart around us, some try to make sense of it and/or transcend the the fear of our own earthly/spiritual destruction. Modernity as amounting ultimately in the ability to destroy absolutely has resulted in the hunger for "primitivism" that Podhertz references, and traces of it has survived the turn of the century.

Reading these accounts, however, I can't help but wonder what "our" atom bomb is, specifically that horrific entity that enrages us enough to speak or scream out against it. We have no shortages of options to choose from, but it's difficult to name a single unifying cause that has inspired an effective form of protest. For that matter, who is our Ginsberg? Perhaps the true legacy of the post-war generation is not only more destruction, but also more voices speaking out against more things.
If the contemporary world at large is a product of modernity and the subsequent mechanistic, un-alive processes we now assign to nature and human existence, we're also Kerouac's grandkids looking for some freedom anywhere we can find it.


More: Who Invented the Atomic Bomb?

Forgotten Beat Seymour Krim