Yesterday’s subversive literature is revealing because we often long for the very society the book sets out to undermine . . . rather like Soviet citizens who had to be kept from reading Brothers Karamazov to avoid sympathy for the comparative justice of the old regime. Reread On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Try not to be sickened by the causal abuse of women, children, older people. Study the utter selfishness of the main characters and ask if any of the beauty they “find” is worth the social cost.
I see great giftedness in writing turned to making the pig stye of the prodigal look sublime. As you glory in the prose, you do not notice the condescension, the filth, and the boredom. When Hope and I hit the road for Mexico on week (what larks!) we found beauty, Mexicans, and learned things. When Jack Kerouac went to Mexico, he and his friends sought out (and so found) the same decadent behavior they left in the States.
The difference between “hooking up” in club culture all around the world is not so great. Being stoned in Mexico is a great deal like being stoned in San Francisco. Mexico and San Francisco disappear in the mental fog of decadence.
The “beat” generation of artists were part of the long tradition of artists who used great gifts (and passages of On the Road are sublimely beautiful) to promote what seems, a generation later, like old-fashioned decadence. Oldsters comfort ourselves that our grandparents worried about Elvis, our parents about Styx, and this generation will be ok just like we are. Only we are not ok. Pervasive media and the decision to promote any media that sells, standards be mocked, has left us limp in facing the libertine and the libertine in finding new vices to exploit. There is almost nothing that can get the elites mad when it comes to private consensual behavior.
The beats won. The hippies won. The libertines won. How is it working out? We can now go to everyplace and see the same consumerism, decadence, and media. We do not need to go On the Road because we have paved over much that would offend our modernist immorality.
Our situation does make writing literature subversive to conventional morality harder. Tom Jones needed a robustly Christian England. On the Road needed late 1940’s and early 1950’s America. Now if a young person decided to spend a few years “on the road there is” (undoubtedly) a company that would help make this possible. Decadent parties are organized by the grownups. In earlier times the decadent parties of out-of-touch elites could trigger revolution but now mostly inspires envy. The danger is that some of our very brightest minds are turning from the hard discipline of crafts, trades, and academics to the easier pathway of selling personal peace and affluence.
Who celebrates those folk? Who makes their lives seem noble? On the Road leaves the poor and lower middle class, my family, appearing dull or dullards. We were too compliant to rebel and too stupid
Scientists discover things. Artists create beauty. Citizen-soliders defend us. Our elected representatives govern us. Pastors comfort and educate us. Psychologists help heal our hurts. I can go on admiring what my fellow Americans do in profession after profession. We could ignore the vocations and point out the folk who simply are good. These people focus on virtue and make our neighborhoods nice through the sheer power of their wholesomeness. Easy to roll my eyes at my neighbor I see hosing down the drive way, picking up some litter, or cleaning up the community until you live in a neighborhood where nobody does it or waits for the government to do it.
And then there are the parasites who live off the things everyone else creates and mock the failures of those who try to be good. Since at least the eighteenth century a certain group of artists have used their great gifts to pretend the parasites are not parasites. We have books that make their wastrel existence mythic, movies that glorify their intellectual indolence, and television programs that celebrate their moral failure. The most ridiculous aspect of this is that the very, very talented people producing the art are glorifying a lifestyle that would prevent the technology, intellect, or discipline necessary to make or sustain the art.
This should stop but probably will not. Cicero was admired by the founding generation of Americans but we are more likely to make a television series centered on Nero than Cicero. It need not be this way. Trollope poked at hypocrisy while supporting morality in popular novels. Frank Capra glorified regular people and their value in first-rate films. Ron Howard does the same.
I am not suggesting we ban On the Road or censor anything using the government. This is a sigh of boredom for the Lord Byron, Jack Kerouac, or Quentin Tarantino of each generation who insist (as they have the right to do) on the glorification of vice, indolence, and laziness. Here is hope that like past generations most of us remember that great science, art, and civilizations mostly come from hard work, discipline, sacrifice, and a refusal to live for the moment.
Here is an even greater hope that the second-raters do not produce a flood of treacle, sappy moralism, of the sort found in so many Christian films. Good people deserve great films, novels, and art. They are dishonored by second rate artistic goods. My grandparents were interesting people with stories to tell. They lived imperfect but decent lives. Great artists do not glorify their lives, instead turning to the beats and the degenerates who built nothing and consumed everything.
Somebody should tell their story.
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