Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Who Were the Beatniks? (Vanity)
Various | Various | Various

Posted on 11/25/2012 2:47:21 PM PST by DustyMoment

A lot of FReepers tend to blame Baby Bomers for the ills of the world. The fact is that the Baby Boomers didn't originate a lot of the counter-culture activities of the 60s, they learned them from the Beatniks. So, to help clarify where the Hippies came from, you have to know and understand who the Beatniks were. Here is their story:

Beatnik History
Imagine it is the year 1959.

You are seated at a table with a bottle of cheap red wine, a cigarette glows red in the ashtray. The place; a smoky, dimly lit, seedy, little bar in Greenwich Village, New York. A slight, bearded fellow with black sockets for eyes, listens to the rhythmic pounding of bongo drums.

A pallid, sullen, pouting girl in black stockings buries her head in a copy of HOWL.

A kid with a goatee, wearing tatty clothes, sandals and a beret smokes a bit of 'tea', and takes a long, heavy, luxurious draw of smoke.

A wide-eyed, red-eyed, streetwise, young, but old, Times square hustler surveys the scene.

A table of unwashed, uncouth, angry young men heatedly discuss the recent publication of THE NAKED LUNCH.

A girl with black-rimmed eyes, long, messy hair, wearing a large, shapeless sweater broods silently in a corner while her boy-friend, a whiskery, wiry, winsome young man nervously fingers a syrette of morphine.

A wild haired, bespectacled poet stammers out a poem to an entranced group of fresh faced poet-girls and poet-boys.

In 1959, in this smoke-clouded Greenwich Village bar, you would immediately know, if you were at all hip to the scene, that the ragged assortment of malcontents, delinquents, 'tea-heads', Bohemians, hipsters and hustlers before you, could all rather conveniently fit into the mould, effectively created and labeled by the media of the times as 'BEATS', or more sneeringly as 'BEATNIKS'.

Herbert Caen, a San Francisco journalist, first coined the term when he cried out, "I certainly don't intend to support my son if he wants to be a beatnik," meaning of course, one of those hairy, sandal wearing, coffee-house lounging, poetry spouting Bohemians. The media immediately seized upon the term as a rather "handy caricature for everyone associated with beatness." The real meaning of "beatness" lost all significance and was basically used to describe a physical type. Middle-class, conventional, smugly content Americans reading their Time and Life magazines could sit back, happy in their prosperity, and safely chuckle over the antics of the beatniks. Turtle necks, bongos and berets--what fun. Americans had become all to familiar with the beatnik but less so with the philosophy behind all of the trappings.

"I am the originator of the term, and around it the term and the generation have taken shape" wrote Jack Kerouac in a 1959 article called The Origins of the Beat Generation. The word "beat" had been used by jazz musicians, hustlers and hipsters in the 1940s as a street slang term meaning dead beat, down and out, exhausted, poor. In 1944 a Times Square street hustler and hipster named Herbert Huncke, a friend of William Burroughs walked up to Jack Kerouac and said "Man, I'm beat." "I knew right away what he meant somehow," wrote Kerouac, "I was a bum, a brakeman, a seaman, a panhandler…anything and everything, and went on writing because my hero was Goethe." In 1955 he published an excerpt from a novel he was writing called Beat Generation and the term started appearing in various publications.

In 1956 Allen Ginsbergs' Howl and Other Poems virtually exploded on to the American literary scene and seemed to scream out "beat." But in 1957 when Kerouacs' Beat Generation transmogrified into On The Road, the term "beat" suddenly became part of the American vernacular. According to Kerouac "youth had emerged cool and beat, had picked up the gestures and the style; soon it was everywhere."

The original group of Beat writers formed in New York in the mid 1940s. William S. Burroughs scion of a cultivated and established St. Louis family (his grandfather had invented the adding machine) first introduced the young Columbia university student Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to his friend, the Times Square hustler Herbert Huncke who in turn introduced them to the druggy, jazzy New York underworld. He taught them what "beat" was all about and was instrumental in securing drugs for all of them. Burroughs became involved with a "community of outlaws" and became addicted to the drug morphine. At this point Harvard graduate Burroughs did not consider himself to be a writer. Kerouac saw him as "an eccentric scholar, traveler, seeker of the facts of life." Burroughs was on a personal quest to find an alternative style of life-alternative experiences and alternative values. He was determined to pursue experience to the fullest and sought to escape the constraints of his conservative, up-right, conventional, upper middle-class upbringing. He sought to "expand consciousness" through his travels, through sexual experimentation, through the use of narcotics, and through art. "Artists, to my mind," he wrote, "are the real architects of change."

Allen Ginsberg was a young student at Columbia University when he met the much older Burroughs(thirteen years his senior). "He educated me more than Columbia, really," claimed Ginsberg. At Columbia, Ginsberg had become dissatisfied with his economics studies, and felt himself to be an outsider as a Jewish, homosexual. He was expelled for writing on a dirty window "Butler has no balls" (referring to the president of the university). Ginsberg was restless and intent on breaking the rules and in Burroughs he had found the perfect tutor. Burroughs unconventional life-style appealed to Ginsberg who was fascinated by his introduction into the "subterranean" Times Square underworld. In 1948 Ginsberg had a series of "mystic visions" of the poet William Blake and henceforth dedicated himself to becoming a poet. When he published Howl and Other Poems in 1956, considered by poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth to be "the most remarkable single poem published by a young man since the second war," he dedicated it to Jack Kerouac, "new Buddha of American prose," William Seward Burroughs, and Neal Cassady.

When Jack Kerouac met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg some time in 1944, he had already dropped out of Columbia to enlist in the navy, been discharged, and subsequently served as a merchant seaman. His "restless exuberance" had led him back to New York where he was encouraged to write by Ginsberg and Burroughs. Kerouac was struck by the open rebelliousness, the licentiousness, the madness of his new friends. The narrator of On the Road, Sal Paradise (Kerouac himself) proclaims at one point that "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved... the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing." It was with this mad group of beats that Kerouac was to find comradeship, inspiration and enlightenment and at the same time he acknowledged that they were "the most evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America." During the 1950s the publication of Jack Kerouacs' On the Road, Allen Ginsbergs' Howl and Other Poems, and William S. Burroughs' The Naked Lunch established the authors as a rebellious literary and cultural movement bent on shaking the foundations of American society. America in the fifties was enjoying an unprecedented period of economic prosperity while "silently enduring" the destructive forces of McCarthyism, racial intolerance, political suppression, and repressive conservatism. White, middle-class America with it's passionate addiction to the dollar had become smug, corrupt, hypocritical and suspicious of the individual. The "beats" were having none of it, and as Paul O'Niel stated in a LIFE article in 1959, the beats felt that "the only way a man can call his soul his own is by becoming an outcast." Allen Ginsberg wrote of his own "awakening" in the Columbia university bookstore one day when he suddenly became aware that everyone around him appeared to be hiding some sort of "unconscious torment from one another: they all looked like horrible grotesque masks, grotesque because hiding the knowledge from one another."

Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, were all uniquely different artists yet they shared many of the same themes and techniques. They were greatly influenced by Jazz music and the jazzy hipster New York underworld. The Jazz philosophy of "there are no wrong notes" greatly appealed to them. Jazz seemed to disregard all the rules. It was raw and emotional. The beats sought to write the way Jazz sounded with its syncopated rhythms and its screaming dissonance. Kerouac's typewriter became his musical instrument. The music of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker resounded in his works. And Ginsberg proclaimed in his book, Howl, "Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the Jazz bands marijuana hipsters peace and junk and drums!"

The Beats shared in their belief that modern society was lacking in spiritual values. They were opposed to the "rat race" which they felt deadened the soul, wasted time and brutalized feeling. All three artists felt the dissaffection of the outsider. They reviled the "square" who seemed to be "stuck in a rut" in his endless pursuit of the dollar. To be beat was to be appalled by the ugliness, the emptiness, the soulessness of contemporary society. To be beat was to refuse the American ideal. To reject suburban morals and values. To be beat was to come to terms with the reality of life as it was, to refuse the white-wash. The beats sought to penetrate beyond the glossy surface of things. They found conventional American society wanting in spiritual values and so they sought an alternative. They sought to expand consciousness through their travels, sexual experimentation, drugs, and delving into Zen Buddhism. Thomas F. Merrill in his study of Allen Ginsberg wrote that the beats were in effect "conscientous objectors."

Influences on Western culture

There are many authors who can claim to be influenced by the beats (see the individual articles for each of the Beat writers); but the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a huge influence on Western Culture overall, larger than just the effects of some writers and artists on other writers and artists.

In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural subdivision on intellectual/artistic/lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to -- or against.

There's no question that Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation (notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.

A quotation from Allen Ginsberg's A Definition of the Beat Generation as published in Friction, 1 (Winter 1982), revised for Beat Culture and the New America:

1950-1965:

Some essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement can be characterized in the following terms:

* Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.

* Liberation of the word from censorship.

* Demystification and/or decriminalization of some laws against marijuana and other drugs.

* The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.

* The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet."

* Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

* Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.

* Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation.

* Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing."

The essence of the phrase "beat generation" may be found in On the Road with the celebrated phrase: "Everything belongs to me because I am poor."

Transition to the "Hippie" era

Some time during the 1960s, the rapidly expanding "beat" culture underwent a transformation: the "Beat Generation" gave way to "The Sixties Counterculture", which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "Beatnik" to "hippie".

This was in many respects a gradual transition. Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement -- though equally notably, Kerouac did not remain active on the scene: he broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s protest movements as "new excuses for spitefulness".

The Beats in general were a large influence on members of the new "counterculture", for example, in the case of Bob Dylan who became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg.

The year 1963 found Ginsberg living in San Francisco with Neal Cassady and Charles Plymell at 1403 Gough St. Shortly after that Ginsberg connected with Ken Kesey's crowd who was doing LSD testing at Stanford, and Plymell was instrumental in publishing the first issue of R. Crumb's Zap Comix on his printing press a few years later then moved to Ginsberg's commune in Cherry Valley, NY in the early 1970s. (The Plymells never lived at the Farm, just visited there; although they remained in Cherry Valley.)

According to Ed Sanders the change in the public label from "beatnik" to "hippie" happened after the 1967 "Be-In" in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure were leading the crowd in chanting "Om").

There were certainly some stylistic differences between "beatniks" and "hippies" — somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful "psychedelic" clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality).

In addition to the stylistic changes, there were some changes in substance: the beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. To quote Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview (collected in The Beat Vision):

... the next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat thought changed with that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many people had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian revolutionary rhetoric. At the time of Castro's victory, it had to be rethought again. Here was a revolution that had used violence and that was apparently a good thing. Many people abandoned the pacifist position at that time or at least began to give more thought to it. In any case, many people began to look to politics again as having possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the beginning of civil rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the Movement.

We had little confidence in our power to make any long range or significant changes. That was the 50s, you see. It seemed that bleak. So that our choices seemed entirely personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any audience, or anybody would listen to us; but it was a moral decision, a moral poetic decision. Then Castro changed things, then Martin Luther King changed things ...

Drug usage

The country’s many drug abuse centers have served several generations, and will continue to do so as long as drug addiction remains a problem.

The original members or the Beat Generation group — in Allen Ginsberg's phrase, "the libertine circle" — used a number of different drugs.

In addition to the alcohol common in American life, they were also interested in marijuana, benzedrine and, in some cases, opiates such as morphine. As time went on, many of them began using other psychedelic drugs, such as peyote, yage, and LSD.

Much of this usage can fairly be termed "experimental", in that they were generally unfamiliar with the effects of these drugs, and there were intellectual aspects to their interest in them as well as a simple pursuit of hedonistic intoxication.

Benzedrine at that time was available in the form of plastic inhalers, containing a piece of folded paper soaked in the drug. They would typically crack open the inhalers and drop the paper in coffee, or just wad it up and swallow it whole.

Opiates could be obtained in the form of morphine "syrettes": a squeeze tube with a hypodermic needle tip.

As the Beat phenomenon spread (transforming from Beat to "beatnik" to "hippie"), usage of some of these drugs also became more widespread. According to stereotype, the "hippies" commonly used the psychedelic drugs (marijuana, LSD), though the use of other drugs such as amphetemines was also widespread.

The actual results of this "experimentation" can be difficult to determine. Claims that some of these drugs can enhance creativity, insight or productivity were quite common, as is the belief that the drugs in use were a key influence on the social events of the time.

Historical context

The postwar era was a time where the dominant culture was desperate for a reassuring planned order; but there was a strong intellectual undercurrent calling for spontaneity, an end to psychological repression; a romantic desire for a more chaotic, Dionysian existence.

The beats were a manifestation of this undercurrent (and over time, a primary focus for those energies), but they were not the only one. Before Jack Kerouac embraced "spontaneous prose", there were other artists pursuing self-expression by abandoning control, notably the improvisational elements in jazz music, and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists.

Also, there were other artists in the post-war period who embraced a similar disdain for refined control, often with the opposite intent of suppressing the ego, and avoiding self-expression; notably, the works of the composer/writer John Cage and the paintings and "assemblages" of Robert Rauschenberg. The "cut-up" technique that Brion Gysin developed and that William Burroughs adopted after publishing Naked Lunch bears a strong resemblance to Cage's "chance operations" approach.

The beatniks were certainly not the only form of experimental writing in the post-war period. Various other movements/scenes can be identified that were happening roughly concurrently:

* The Angries a group of post-war British writers with which the Beats are sometimes compared
* The Black Mountain poets (which John Cage was also associated with)
* The San Francisco Renaissance can be regarded as a separate movement of its own, with origins preceding the beats.

There were many influences on the beat generation writers: Blake was a large intellectual influence on Allen Ginsberg and there are striking echoes of Walt Whitman's style in Ginsberg's work; the novel You Can't Win by Jack Black was a strong influence on William Burroughs; Marcel Proust's work was read by many of the beats, and may have inspired Kerouac in his grand scheme for a multi-volume autobiographical work.

The full historical background arguably includes Henry David Thoreau, Imagism (especially Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and H.D.), the Objectivists and Henry Miller. Some points to consider:

* Gary Snyder read Pound early and was encouraged in his interests in Japan and China by Pound's work.

* William Carlos Williams encouraged a number of beats and wrote a preface for Howl and other poems.

* Pound was also important to Allen Ginsberg and to most of the San Francisco Rennaissance group (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, etc).



TOPICS: History; Miscellaneous; Society
KEYWORDS: beatniks; castro; cuba; hippies; history; misc; society
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120121-128 next last
To: elcid1970

Any “revolution” was for activists and political junkies, and people moving up in society, like college students and others who wanted to run a country and institutions, to takeover things, to replace people who ran things.


81 posted on 11/25/2012 7:20:59 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 79 | View Replies]

To: Fightin Whitey
I'm not aware of a “code”, but if you ever read the original Mother Earth News, you might recall the back to the land thing, a self suffientcy movement, similar to elements of the survivalist/prepper movement that emerged from that era, the Jesus movement came from that time as well, a wonderful Christian revival.

The old Mother Earth News was about how to rediscover doing and making things yourself, it was not political, and it included guns.

82 posted on 11/25/2012 7:35:17 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 78 | View Replies]

To: jobim

Tom, a welcome surprise to find any posting about jazz on FR - even better to find an informed view. Thanks.


83 posted on 11/25/2012 7:37:18 PM PST by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: DustyMoment

Above his pay scale ?


84 posted on 11/25/2012 7:42:34 PM PST by timestax (Why not drug tests for the President AND all White Hut staff ? ? ?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Fightin Whitey

By the way, Bill Ayers isn’t a boomer, he is the silent generation, as were just about every person of the 1960s who names are known.

If you want to see “silent generation” (born 1925 to 1945)leadership, then start running the birth dates of the famous counter culture figures, bands, musicians, activists, etc, of the 1960s and early 1970s, when boomers Sarah Palin and Obama, were little kids.


85 posted on 11/25/2012 7:44:13 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 65 | View Replies]

To: timestax

sent to wrong thread


86 posted on 11/25/2012 7:55:56 PM PST by timestax (Why not drug tests for the President AND all White Hut staff ? ? ?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 84 | View Replies]

To: DustyMoment
Ned Flanders' parents were beatniks.


87 posted on 11/25/2012 8:10:58 PM PST by Lancey Howard
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ansel12

Oh come, Ansel.

So I missed on Bill Ayers by a few years (or rather his parents did).

You know precisely the group of recent and present-day radicals I am referring to (they are UBIQUITOUS, in the media, in Hollywood, in the academy, in Washington) who were born post-war and who, for that matter, have been instrumental in setting the stage for Barack Obama. Do you suppose David Axelrod was weaving baskets in 1960? Cornell West? Katrina Van Den Heuval?

If you want to define “hippie” narrowly enough to include only you and Euell Gibbons, that’s fine by me. I meant to cast no aspersions on any fetish of yours.

It seems obvious to me that the ratio of your brand of hippie vs. the stereotypical long-haired maggot-infested Haight Ashbury burn-out would be almost identical to the number of present-day farmers’ market entrepreneurs who supported Palin as opposed to those who thrall for Obama.


88 posted on 11/25/2012 8:33:12 PM PST by Fightin Whitey
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 85 | View Replies]

To: Fightin Whitey

I don’t know what set you off, or made you angry, but I didn’t realize that we were in some sort of fight.

Evidently you have something else on your mind than what I thought we were posting on.

By the way, those people you mentioned are establishment people, not hippies.


89 posted on 11/25/2012 9:00:55 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 88 | View Replies]

To: ansel12

“The old Mother Earth News was about how to rediscover doing and making things yourself, it was not political, and it included guns.”

And don’t forget the Whole Earth Catalog. I still have a couple of copies of it. Collector’s items by now. Buckminster Fuller, et al.


90 posted on 11/25/2012 9:11:14 PM PST by flaglady47 (When the gov't fears the people, liberty; When the people fear the gov't, tyranny.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 82 | View Replies]

To: flaglady47

I have a couple of copies also, along with boxes of the early M. E. News, and some old Firefox series books, and a big collection of Backwoods Home, although I let my subscription expire.

Some of the original Mother Earth News people helped found Backwoods Home magazine, it is excellent, and I will resubscribed at some point.


91 posted on 11/25/2012 9:18:20 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 90 | View Replies]

To: flaglady47

By the way, I have an artist friend who Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller visited out of the blue, Fuller landed a helicopter in his yard, which was pretty impressive in the early 1960s.


92 posted on 11/25/2012 9:23:52 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 90 | View Replies]

To: S.O.S121.500
And the sixties still Suck.

Why do you say that? What about the 60s suck?

93 posted on 11/25/2012 9:28:08 PM PST by DustyMoment (Congress - another name for white collar criminals!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 70 | View Replies]

To: ansel12
This is a sample list of the beatnik generation (silent generation) who ran the 1960s.

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha . . . . . . . . .

Oh, you were serious!

94 posted on 11/25/2012 9:30:47 PM PST by DustyMoment (Congress - another name for white collar criminals!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 60 | View Replies]

To: Blue Ink

Son, I’d love to have this discussion with you, but I am not going to waste either my time or JimRob’s bandwidth.

I will correct a point you made about Vietnam - we didn’t lose. On the day after the TET Offensive, Walter Cronkite went on TV, looked America straight in the face and lied.

He told America that we had lost the Tet Offensive and, as a result, the Vietnam War. The fact is that the opposite was true. We won the Tet Offensive but Cronkite had a political disagreement with Lyndon Johnson and he took it out on us.

Decades later, many north Vietnamese generals wrote their biographies and acknowledged that we beat them so badly during Tet that they were on the verge of capitulation . . . . . . . until they heard Walter Cronkite’s newscast. Cronkite (NOT a Boomer!) is single-handedly responsible for that war being dragged on for another 7 years and for the death or mutilation of untold American young men and women as well as Vietnamese women and children.

As for your “touchy-feely” comment, you don’t know me and aren’t qualified to judge me or any other Boomer. I’ll leave the judging up to God.

And, tes, I AM a disabled Vietnam vet. Just thought you might like to know so you can hate me that much more. Enjoy your hatred.


95 posted on 11/25/2012 9:41:13 PM PST by DustyMoment (Congress - another name for white collar criminals!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 80 | View Replies]

To: Blue Ink

Son, I’d love to have this discussion with you, but I am not going to waste either my time or JimRob’s bandwidth.

I will correct a point you made about Vietnam - we didn’t lose. On the day after the TET Offensive, Walter Cronkite went on TV, looked America straight in the face and lied.

He told America that we had lost the Tet Offensive and, as a result, the Vietnam War. The fact is that the opposite was true. We won the Tet Offensive but Cronkite had a political disagreement with Lyndon Johnson and he took it out on us.

Decades later, many north Vietnamese generals wrote their biographies and acknowledged that we beat them so badly during Tet that they were on the verge of capitulation . . . . . . . until they heard Walter Cronkite’s newscast. Cronkite (NOT a Boomer!) is single-handedly responsible for that war being dragged on for another 7 years and for the death or mutilation of untold American young men and women as well as Vietnamese women and children.

As for your “touchy-feely” comment, you don’t know me and aren’t qualified to judge me or any other Boomer. I’ll leave the judging up to God.

And, yes, I AM a disabled Vietnam vet. Just thought you might like to know so you can hate me that much more. Enjoy your hatred.


96 posted on 11/25/2012 9:42:44 PM PST by DustyMoment (Congress - another name for white collar criminals!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 80 | View Replies]

To: DustyMoment

Freaks just like you you baby boomer!


97 posted on 11/25/2012 9:43:35 PM PST by dalereed
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: DustyMoment

What do you mean? Most of all of the famous names associated with the 1960s youth culture, were of the silent generation.


98 posted on 11/25/2012 9:47:34 PM PST by ansel12 (The only Senate seat GOP pick up was the Palin endorsed Deb Fischers successful run in Nebraska)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 94 | View Replies]

To: BfloGuy
“The Beatniks were members of the so-called “Lost generation” born between the onset of the [first] Great Depression and the end of WWII. “

Born in 37 and never even heard of beatniks until after the hippies of the 50s became predominate.

There sure wern’t any such creeps in So. California!

99 posted on 11/25/2012 9:49:36 PM PST by dalereed
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: dalereed
“hippies of the 50s became predominate”

I meant 60s.

100 posted on 11/25/2012 9:50:47 PM PST by dalereed
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 99 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120121-128 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson