McBeatnik


Tired of praising NASA, Al Gore, and the Bangles, McMax offers some insights into the political mindstate of the 50s:

"""" Mr. "X" needs to pick up a book by Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs and get a sense of what was really going on in those days........ The real people, the ones who were actually alive and had functioning senses, went underground. The media of the time didn’t mention them and that’s why they are believed to have never existed by the conservatives who long for the good old days. Drunks, bums, hookers, addicts, artists, jazz musicians, existed and thrived in the underworld as they do today. Belief in God, or the lack of it, had nothing to do with it then and it doesn’t now.""""


Generalized, oversimplified, tasteless--the usual NW posse fare. Kerouac for one WAS a media star for some time (the Beats were featured in LIFE, and other rags), as were quite a few jazz musicians. The beats may have not been Eisenhower conservatives, but they weren't card-carrying communists either, or RichardDawkins-like Tory atheists and skeptic philosophers (or wannabe Tory atheists---Kerouac never rejected his Catholic roots completely). And they sure in the phuck were not monolingual phonies and hicks like the NW crew (for one, however F-ed up most of the beats were, they were quite well read in French lit----so start with like Voltaire's Candide, and uh start over, McBubba).