And these are the words that kept coming up in our discussion of the fifties: consumerism, conformity, homogeneity. Why? Because no one wanted to end up like Julius & Ethel. If you kept your head down and were happy being a white American suburb-dweller, obviously you weren't a communist. Okay. Except this rubbed some people the wrong way, so they got drunk and did (correct verb? IDK) benzedrine and went on long road trips and wrote obscene novels and poems and were called beatniks.
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| There he is--Mr. Ginsberg. |
But the CRAZY thing is that people still really care about those guys--about Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs, etc. On the Road was written in 1957 and remains a top-seller today. NYU professors profess that their courses on the beat generation regularly attract eight times as many students as are allowed to register. Today a really nice-looking man with 50s-Allen-Ginsberg glasses showed up to my English class even though he isn't in it just to learn more about the beats. Why?
We addressed the question in class. The conclusion was that college students like the idea of nonconformity--of establishing themselves as individuals among a crowd and of eschewing materialism. Being a beatnik is what young people really want to do. "If you had a dollar to your name," as my professor said, things would be different--and they will be different. As Winston Churchill said, "If you are not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain." Not saying I agree with that, but it's an interesting thought. We have lofty ideals and like the thought, at this age, of dancing to the beat of our own drummer, but will that outlook abandon us as we age?
I have certainly felt this way about my parents. Some of the things they care so much about, like how nice our lawn looks, just feel inane to me. And often I know they are judging other people for being not like them, like a sixty year old woman with waist-length gray hair--and I think who cares? I like the idea of having unruly gray hair at whatever point in life my hair decides to turn itself gray, but I know that my mother is going to have close-cropped blonde-highlighted hair for the rest of her life; is this a phase I'm going through? Not to say I disregard the wisdom of my parents; many worse fates could befall me than turning out like them. In general I think they are wonderful, but there are a few aspects of life in which I would prefer to do things differently. Perhaps it is impossible for me to be truly materialistic now because I am not concerned with building for myself a life full of stuff, but when I have my own home, who's to say what will happen? Our dear Austin threw away all his clothes, took up his cross and followed Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," but was that the blind idealism of youth? Or is it the blind materialism of age that clouds our vision and makes us care about things that don't matter? I can write letters to my future self to remind me not to be like everyone else, but that would be as useful as making a goal like "I'm not going to eat anymore ice cream tonight"--in ten minutes you want more ice cream and tell yourself that first goal was foolish and unrealistic. Amiright.
