http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/books/review/Siegel-t.html
By LEE SIEGEL
Published: October 8, 2010
The counterculture of the late 1950s and early 1960s appears to be
everywhere these days. A major exhibition of Allen Ginsberg's
photography just closed at the National Gallery in Washington. A
superb book, by the historian Sean Wilentz, about Ginsberg's dear
friend and sometime influence Bob Dylan recently made the best-seller
list. "Howl," a film about Ginsberg and the Beats, opened last month.
And everywhere around us, the streets and airwaves hum with attacks
on government authority, celebrations of radical individualism,
inflammatory rhetoric, political theatrics.
In other words, the spirit of Beat dissent is alive (though some
might say not well) in the character of Tea Party protest. Like the
Beats, the Tea Partiers are driven by that maddeningly contradictory
principle, subject to countless interpretations, at the heart of all
American protest movements: individual freedom. The shared DNA of
American dissent might be one answer to the question of why the Tea
Partiers, so extreme and even anachronistic in their opposition to
any type of government, exert such an astounding appeal.
Of course, on the surface the differences between "Beat" and "Tea
Party" are so immense as to make comparisons seem frivolous. The
Beats, though pacifist, were essentially apolitical. (Kerouac's
hatred of the left at the end of his life seemed most of all to be a
revulsion against the New Left's enthusiastic hating.) Their aims
were spiritual and sexual liberation, and a unifying wholeness with
nature. Insofar as they had sociopolitical ambitions, their goals
abolishing censorship, protecting the environment, opposing what
Ginsberg called "the military-industrial machine civilization"
were the stuff of poetry, not organized politics. In contrast, the
Tea Partiers seek the political objectives of "individual liberty,
limited government and economic freedom." Balancing the budget and
rejecting cap and trade are their hearts' desires, not sexual
revolution or the quest for spiritual harmony through the use of Zen
meditation and hallucinogenics.
Still, American dissent turns on a tradition of troublemaking,
suspicion of elites and feelings of powerlessness, no matter where on
the political spectrum dissent takes place. Surely just about every
Tea Partier agrees with Ginsberg on the enervating effect of the
liberal media: "Are you going to let our emotional life," he once
wrote, "be run by Time magazine?"
More seriously, the origin of the word "beat" has a connection to the
Tea Partiers' sense that they are being marginalized as the country
is taken away from them. According to Ginsberg, to be "beat" most
basically signified "exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking
up or out . . . rejected by society." Barack Obama meant much the
same thing when, during the presidential primaries, he notoriously
said that "in a lot of these communities in big industrial states
like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and
they feel so betrayed by government." That he went on to characterize
such people as "bitter" souls who "cling to their guns or religion or
antipathy toward people who aren't like them" only strengthened the
anxiety among proto-Tea Partiers that they were about to be "rejected
by society."
It's too bad that the movie "Howl" reduces the sociopolitical
meaning of the Beats to the obscenity trial that took place in San
Francisco in 1957, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood accused of
printing and selling "Howl," Ginsberg's explosively profane long
poem. Hollywood loves self-righteously to portray now-unchallenged
liberal causes under siege, even though in this case the cause of
free speech was vindicated when the presiding judge ruled that "Howl"
was a work of "redeeming social importance" and that Ferlinghetti
was innocent. What the movie should have spun out into its own
subplot was the fact never mentioned in the film that the judge,
W. J. Clayton Horn, was a conservative jurist locally renowned for
his Sunday-school Bible classes. Horn might well have been as much an
outsider in San Francisco's sophisticated social circles as
Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were in the eyes of the law. It takes an
outsider to know an outsider.
Or perhaps Horn had a glimpse of the future. The eventual
assimilation of Beat hedonism ensured that by the end of the
millennium, white middle-class Christians like him would themselves
be marginalized at least by the dominant culture as the "silent
majority." (Is the commercialization of Beat values why the film
"Howl" mischievously casts Jon Hamm, who plays the boozing,
womanizing, yet respectable advertising executive Don Draper in "Mad
Men," as Ferlinghetti's defense lawyer?)
When the Tea Party came along, however, the silent majority started
to get its voice back. Liberals could well be drawn nostalgically to
the Beats nowadays because all the countercultural energy belongs to
the other side. "When will you be worthy of your million
Trotskyites?" Ginsberg asked his fellow Americans in his poem
"America." The Tea Party has an answer to that rhetorical question. A
former community organizer might be in the White House, but the Tea
Partiers taking to the streets are now the ones supposedly influenced
by Saul Alinsky's Trotskyish "Rules for Radicals," not the liberals
who watch horrified and silent from the sidelines.
Then again, the Beats were as much at odds with the liberals of their
time as the Tea Partiers are with the liberals of today. The same
liberal air of elite-seeming abstraction that provokes the Tea
Partiers drove the Beats around the bend. For the Beats, liberals
were part of the power structure: they spoke loftily about conscience
and social obligation yet lived comfortably within the plush
boundaries of universities, law firms and financial institutions.
Worst of all, they accepted the government's role in organizing their
lives. Indeed, in the secret file the F.B.I. kept on him, Ginsberg
was described by J. Edgar Hoover himself as having a dangerous
"antipathy" toward government. Against the liberals' seeming
complicity with the status quo, the Beats took to the road in quest
of what Jack Kerouac (quoting Oswald Spengler) called a "second
religiousness" within Western civilization. With their noisy
commitment to their churches, the Tea Partiers also seem to want
their religious communities to take the place of government in their
lives. They would certainly sympathize with Ginsberg's antipathy.
Perhaps this mutual feeling of cultural exile is why some Tea
Partiers share with the Beats a reverence for the power of
imprecation in the matter of unbridled speech, they would have
been, with Judge Horn, on the side of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti.
True, the Tea Partiers' unnerving habit of bringing guns to town-hall
meetings would have repelled the Beats. But William S. Burroughs
fetishized guns, accidentally killing his wife while trying to shoot
a glass off her head. Violence, implicit or explicit, comes with the
"beaten" state of mind. So does theatricality, since playing roles
and manipulating symbols is often the first resort of people who do
not feel acknowledged for being who they really are. As the movie
"Howl" vividly shows, Ginsberg didn't merely write poetry, and he
didn't simply recite it. He turned his poetry readings into
theatrical performances of Dionysian proportions. Some people might
say the difference between Allen Ginsberg and Glenn Beck is the
difference between psychedelic and psychopathic, but Beck might well
envy Ginsberg's attempt, in 1967, to help Abbie Hoffman and a band of
antiwar protesters levitate the Pentagon by means of tantric
chanting, though Beck would no doubt concentrate his telepathic
efforts on the I.R.S.
American freedom is a many-splendored thing, and multifaceted too.
"We drove in his old Chevy," Kerouac says, with portentous joy, in
"On the Road." In the course of the exuberant tirade that gave birth
to the Tea Party, Rick Santelli of CNBC referred to the '54 Chevy,
"maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit." That might be as
close to a convergence of different ideas of American freedom as our
tortured polity will ever come.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment