Posted on 09/09/2007 12:02:40 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Since it is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's ground-breaking book, "On The Road," many are using the occasion to reminisce about the author. However, Tom Hayden is using this anniversary as a way to lament in the Huffington Post over the fact that Kerouac was too much of an iconoclast to buy into his collectivist leftwing agenda:
Having set the stage for the '60s, Kerouac seems to have gone missing which at first I thought odd, but it made perfect sense because he defined himself as a loner on the margins. Suddenly confronted with the possibility of joining something, anything, he couldn't. His brilliant friend Ginsberg did join himself to causes, and succeeded. Howl [1955] became the Prophecy of the 60s while Kerouac still waited for Viking to publish On The Road. The black hipsters prefigured and hooked up with the civil rights movement which started with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the same year Howl was performed by Ginsberg at City Lights and Kerouac waited.
Kerouac as far as I know never joined himself to anything perhaps because of his age -- he was born in 1922, making him a fully-conditioned 40-year-old loner by the '60s -- or because he immersed himself in the first wave of Buddhism in America. In his Buddhist/loner perspective, perhaps, he came to oppose joining any sides in the many sides of the culture wars of the '60s. Nor did he sell himself to corporate branding nor to any of the seductive Machiavellians of the time. Tell me if I am wrong, but he was mainly invisible during a time when his private alienation became publicly manifest in an alienated nation of young people trying to live like James Dean.
Hayden just can't figure out why someone who seemed to be the voice of the Beat generation would reject the counterculture of the 60's. Perhaps that is because, as stated in the Chicago Tribune title of Ron Collins' column, Really, you might not know Jack:
Writing in the Chicago Tribune on Sept. 28, 1969 -- less than a month before he died -- Kerouac was emphatic: "I'm not ... a hippie." He had little sympathy for those "hippie flower children out in the park with their peanut butter sandwiches and their live-and-let-live philosophy." And he denied any claim to being the "intellectual forebear who spawned a deluge of alienated radicals, war protestors, dropouts, hippies, and even 'beats.'"
He wanted no part of it. What he did claim, in his journals and on television interviews, was an abiding faith in Catholicism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the political gospel of William F. Buckley.
At the height of the counterculture, Kerouac declared: "Listen, my politics haven't changed, and I haven't changed! I'm solidly behind Bill Buckley, if you want to know. Nothing I wrote in my books," he confessed in a 1968 interview, "nothing could be seen as basically in disagreement with this."
...Forget all those wild Kerouac images of Beats frolicking down zigzag highways and fornicating on the skid-row streets of Denver. For this one-time altar boy was a deeply religious man wed to his Catholicism. And despite his interest in Buddhism, it was the Christ of the Cross who most captured his imagination.
Still, Kerouac was nothing if not contradiction. There was a wide divide between the philosophy he preached and the life he lived. The most forgiving of confessionals could hardly accommodate the vices he committed during his alcoholic-driven life. This "Catholic without a church," as New York Times reporter John Leland aptly put it, was at the same time reverent and outrageous, conservative and rebellious, religious and sinful and spontaneous and revisionist.
In other words, Kerouac was a true individualist iconoclast, a fact that Hayden still finds incredibly frustrating:
Why oh why did Kerouac choose the middle between the Hippie-Yippie bloc who were his very descendants and the Military-Industrial Complex that wanted to shut down The Road if it only could? "You can't fight City Hall, it keeps changing its name," he wrote, but was it a cynical Buddhist scribble or a solitary writer's distancing or a memory of his own experience in Depression and War, or the deep belief in personal transcendence through the road? Was the purity he claimed too pure in the end, or was he somehow right about the 60s, but then again, how could he be? How could all choices be the same? The question I always wanted to ask Jack Kerouac was why the road, finally, had to be so very solitary, so empty of social action as a form of human solidarity against the presence of suffering and coming of death which so preoccupied him.
Too bad, Tom, that Jack Kerouac was too much of an individualist to squeeze himself into the leftwing ideological mold that you had so desperately wanted him to enter.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
A lot of ‘60s icons are turning out to not fit that mold. Hendrix was anti-communist, and apparently going anti-war was just not something that interested Morrison. I’m sure Hayden would be glad to write more flowery words for Huff n Puff to explain why.
Tom Hayden has always been one heck of a clown.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
In a sense. But America still has to survive until the death of the last of these hideous boomer totalitarians. It'll be another 30 or so years until the last of them goes to their reward. In the meantime, they will do as much damage as they can.
And damage they will do. They control the media, the universities, primary and secondary education, and the entertainment industries. They control half of our political establishement. HRC is the just the next (and maybe scariest) one to take her run at power and destruction.
So yes. The ideas are yesterday. But they are reaching the peak of their power right now.
What is interesting is that his experiences on the road happened prior to the advent of the Interstate Highway System. Another writer who wrote on the road was Ernie Pyle prior to his more famous WWII writings. He wrote travel stories on the road. Back then, without the Interstate Highway System, travel in this country was truly an adventure. And, unlike today's "travel writing" which is mostly shilling for hotels and restaurants, Pyle's writings focused primarily on people he met on the road.
Really? Robert Zimmerman is troubling them?
How is that?
He doesn’t buy into their agenda. That’s how. Or do you somehow think that Dylan is out there spouting leftwing nonsense because he ISN’T.
And a lot of them still haven't figured out that Jack was smarter than they were. They still wish he had been smart like them.
2. Morrison's father was an Admiral.
When I did my cross country last year, I took many detours off of I-90 and I-80. As a result, I went to places like Du Smet, SD where the Laural Ingells Wilder spent the largest portion of her childhood.
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
-—Jack Kerouac
The whole Countercultural Revolution made me want to throw up, back when it happened, for the very reasons suggested.
Here were all these punks and jerks claiming to be revolutionaries and saying no to authority and all that, yet they marched in lockstep just like lemmings or Nazis.
It’s still the same. The leftist moonbats will throw anyone out of their ranks into permanent exile who disagrees with them on a single point.
For years, because he went from Left to Right (okay more Right), Columbia University refused to teach any works of Steinbeck in their Lit. Classes.
>Or do you somehow think that Dylan is out there spouting leftwing nonsense because he ISN’T.
What is wrong with your brain, you twit?
I asked you a question, I did not invite you to thrill me with your mind reading acumen.
Why don’t you try to explain what you wrote instead of this borish attack?
Just reading the name Tom Hayden makes me laugh.
I love “On the Road.” It, along with “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” and Siddhartha, are three of the books I try to read every couple of years.
Ed
Um. From your question it sounded like you assumed Dylan was a leftwinger. Also his name is DYLAN. Originally Zimmerman but that is his right to change it. Strange that you bring that up though.
I always saw Kerouac as tending toward the libertarian side. Wasn’t Dennis Hopper just re-enacting Jack for the screen?
Because that is what I knew him as when I saw him perform “Lay Lady Lay,” in NYC.
They’ve had that problem with Dylan since he came to Nashville to make records with his long-time friend Johnny Cash which included, by the way, the “unknown at the time” Charlie Daniels doing that wonderful guitar work. For people who think they’re open-minded free-thinkers, lefties get awful pissed when others go on ahead of them, especially their “heroes”.
The conditions of the solitary bird are five:
The first that it flies to the highest point
The second, that it does not suffer for company, not even of its own kind
The third, that it aims its beak at the sky
The fourth, that it has no definite color
The fifth, that it sings very softly
—San Juan de la Cruz
Kerouac was no kind of Buddhist, didn’t get it at all. Existentialism was the center and Kerouac was one of the four Beatniks.
Sorry to dissapoint but Dylan NEVER bought into the Leftwing agenda. If you notice, he doesn’t involve himself in politics one way or another which I find refreshing.
Peace-love-dope.
Kerouac was like Buckley, who refered to himself "on and off" as either libertarian or conservative.
That's what they need, an islamic Kerouac.
The left (I’m not even sure that is what to call them anymore they are so degenerate) repeatedly demonstrate their inability to accept anything that does not fit their anti-American Misanthropic mode.
The same year that “On the Road” was published, 1957, James Jones’ “Some Came Running” was also published. It also show American culture prior to the Interstate Highway System. I consider it THE Great American Novel. Critics at the time HATED it because they thought it was too ordinary. Yes, it was about “ordinary” people and it gave the best look at small town life in America ever. Also there was a big segment where the main character and his friend drove from Illinois to Florida with a lot of interesting stuff in between. Be sure to get the UNABRIDGED edition of this fantastic book.
Yes you are right. I just wish I had lived before them and never saw them or lived after the last one is dead. I do not like what they have done and continue to do. There is something otherworld and off kilter in a errie way about them and their leftwing antiliberty thoughts. They make my skin crawl.
You’re right that Kerouac wasn’t a leftist. But given that he was drinking himself to death at the time, he wasn’t much of a political model or ideal whatever he thought. Right or left, he was a deeply unhappy man.
James Jones wasn’t really political but most of his friends were of the Left. However, he wrote the BEST inadvertently conservative book ever. It was the “Merry Month of May.” About the American colony in Paris during the leftwing strikes in May 1968. He wrote completely honestly and, despite whatever his own inclinations might be, gave us a look into narrow minded dogmatism of the Left. Some of it is incredibly FUnnie but you have to read the book for that.
It was the bennies that got him.
This is why I love FR. I took your reference to Siddhartha and went cruising thru Wikipedia. I read Siddhartha and most of Hesse's major works back in the 70s as a college student. It was a delight to think about them again. As I am now a college professor, I think I might go back and read 'Beneath the Wheel,' and recall what Hesse has to say about what can be soul-destroying aspects of education.
Hayden and his ilk have dried to airbrush the picture of sixties activism which coulod be very ugly up close.
“Youre gonna serve somebody, it may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but youre gonna serve somebody”
BoB Dylan
“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” - Manuel II Palelologus
exactly.
Nothing is so demanding of relentless conformity as the politics of the Left
thats a great T-shirt.
Well, I don’t think i’ll ask Tom what he thinks of Ted “Motor City Mad Man” Nugent. {Suck on my machine gun you commie a-hole}
wasn’t tom hayden married to hanoi jane???
“...hideous boomer totalitarians.”
Tom Hayden was born in 1939. He may be a “hideous totalitarian” but he’s not a boomer (1946-1964). You can dislike us without having to saddle us with the likes of him.
I seem to recall Bukowski having some harsh words for the girly-men as well (not Kerouac, the others).
Yup!
Ed
Yes, and can probably take the credit for brainwashing her.
We were just talking about Kerouac.
coinky dink?
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