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?
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