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Waiting for the Rise of the NeoBeats

By Ray Reece  

It was more than half a century ago, in 1957, that Jack Kerouac published On the Road, his picaresque novel of yearning and alienation in a strange new America that became the bible of the Beat Generation. One year earlier, his friend and fellow traveler, the poet Allen Ginsberg, had published Howl, a Beat epic poem which became the hymnal of that generation. In the years before and after, through the mid 1960s, the founding canon of the Beat/Hip school of literature was amplified by such other outlaw scribes as William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Denise Levertov and Richard Brautigan.

What were the Beats about? What provoked them to howl at the moon on the margins of the American mainstream, hitting the road, immersing themselves in jazz and sex, pursuing ecstasy with religious fervor and writing about it in poems and novels that defied existing literary norms? To what extent were the Beats the progenitors of the Hippies who followed in the "counterculture" of the 60s and 70s? And why am I writing an essay that looks wistfully forward to the rise of a new generation of Beats and Hippies, along with their novelists and poets?

Consider the year 1956, when Howl was first published and taken to court on obscenity charges. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the affable hero-general of World War II, was serving his first term as president of the U.S. and setting an ambiguous moral tone. He had cautioned Americans to "beware the power of the military-industrial complex" but done nothing to mitigate it. On the contrary, in 1956, he cut the ribbon on a Federal Interstate Highway System conceived in part to facilitate the rapid transport of ballistic missiles and other military hardware across a nation engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Not coincidentally, this made possible the ensuing transformation of North America into a society completely dominated by and dependent on the automobile, with collateral influence on virtually every aspect of the citizens' lives - a form of voluntary enslavement. It was also in 1956, give or take a year or two, that the new technology of television began its sweep across the American continent, hence to establish the principal means by which a burgeoning corporate master class would further dominate the people of America and ultimately the world - another form of seemingly non-coercive bondage.

The operative term here is "domination." Loss of freedom, of dignity. An ironic after-effect of World War II, whose massive cruelty and violence - ostensibly in defense of freedom and democracy - had left many of its survivors reduced to a state of long-term shock. This was compounded by the Korean War in 1950, just five years after WWII, and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian democratic revolt of 1956, with the tacit approval of the American government.

So it was that the 1950s, in the shadow of the threat of nuclear annihilation, became increasingly a period of collective fear in America, characterized by the anti-communist witch hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy. And it was this psychology of fear, coupled with the triumph of the corporate model of social organization, which led in turn to the bizarre mass conformity that proved perhaps the defining hallmark of the 1950s - a conformity visible in everything from behavior and fashion to the "ticky-tacky houses" in America's new suburbs, themselves a by-product of the Interstate Highway System commissioned by General Eisenhower.

This was the world in which the men and women of the Beat Generation were expected to live, and their response was a rousing "Hell no!" They rebelled against the corporate model, at least in their anarchic lifestyles. Far from clocking in at 9 to 5 jobs and joining the march to consumerism and militarism, they worked and played on the sometimes dangerous edges of their society, often identifying with the underclass, eschewing Scotch for marijuana and speed, Baptism for Buddhism, Top 40 tunes for the jazz lamentations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Despite the protests of Jack Kerouac, the Beats were succeeded and to some extent emulated by the Hippie movement that arose in the 1960s. The Hippies, too, were social and cultural rebels, given to pot-smoking, wildly inventive art and fashion, and experimental lifestyles that included communes and back-to-the-land organic farms. Unlike most of the Beats, however, the majority of Hippies were explicitly political. Hence their support for the black civil rights movement and their fierce resistance to the Vietnam War, which they perceived as U.S. imperialism run amok.

Come we now to the first decade of the 21st century, with the planet in crisis like never before, led by global climate change, or GLOCCH, as I call it. The U.S. corporate elite and its foreign partners have deployed a strategy of globalization that is driving conformity and technological and economic tyranny to unprecedented heights. The military-industrial complex is a trillion-dollar enterprise on a permanent attack footing, currently waging a blatant war for oil in the Middle East. And the psychology and politics of fear, indeed of terror, have become a blunt instrument in the hands of government policy-makers and the corporate lobby riding shotgun.

These trends are graven so deeply in the mainstream social order that no politician seeking election in America today - least of all the current crop of presidential aspirants - would dare stray farther from obeisance to their weight than perhaps to emit a vague rhetoric of "change" and "hope." There can thus be little hope for a real rebellion of the sort that is needed apart from the flowering of a noisy new grassroots vanguard of passionate free-thinkers and non-conformists, of Beats cum Hippies, both in America and worldwide.

And why not? The conditions are ripe for just such a flowering. Let's call them the NeoBeats. Let's encourage them with our imaginations. Let's imagine that the next Jack Kerouac, the next Allen Ginsberg, the next Denise Levertov are poised at their keyboards even now, pouring forth a whole new literature of rage and yearning and hunger for authenticity - for experience unmediated by the corporate overseers.

Ray Reece is the author of Abigail in Gangland, a NeoBeat novel set in Texas, and a columnist for The Budapest Sun. He has written for Mother Jones, The Guardian, The Texas Observer and many other publications. He can be reached at www.rayreece.net.

judythpiazza@newsblaze.com