{"id":11248,"date":"2010-10-08T13:35:06","date_gmt":"2010-10-08T13:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/08\/the-beat-generation-the-tea-party-and-the-meaning-of-beat\/"},"modified":"2010-10-08T13:35:06","modified_gmt":"2010-10-08T13:35:06","slug":"the-beat-generation-the-tea-party-and-the-meaning-of-beat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/08\/the-beat-generation-the-tea-party-and-the-meaning-of-beat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beat Generation, the Tea Party and the Meaning of ‘Beat’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to that indefatigable argonaut of the cybersphere, Dave Lull, for bringing Lee Siegel's The Beat Generation and the Tea Party<\/a> to my attention.  An auspicious find in this fine October, Kerouac month hereabouts.  If I wanted to be unkind I would say that the article proves that anything can be compared to anything.  But he does make some good points.  Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

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: \u201cAre you going to let our emotional life,\u201d he once wrote, \u201cbe run by Time magazine?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

More seriously, the origin of the word \u201cbeat\u201d has a connection to the Tea Partiers\u2019 sense that they are being marginalized as the country is taken away from them. According to Ginsberg, to be \u201cbeat\u201d most basically signified \u201cexhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out . . . rejected by society.\u201d Barack Obama meant much the same thing when, during the presidential primaries, he notoriously said that \u201cin 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.\u201d That he went on to characterize such people as \u201cbitter\u201d souls who \u201ccling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren\u2019t like them\u201d only strengthened the anxiety among proto-Tea Partiers that they were about to be \u201crejected by society.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Here some serious qualifications are in order.  Although 'beat' does have the connotation of 'beaten down' and 'exhausted,' this meaning is strictly secondary when compared to the term's fundamental meaning which is in the semantic vicinity of 'beatific,' 'beatitude,' The Eight Beatitudes<\/a>, and the Beatific Vision (visio beata<\/em>) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  Kerouac cannot be understood apart from his Catholic upbringing.  If we take Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise<\/em> (Jack Kerouac) of On the Road<\/em> as the main exemplars of beatness, there is nothing of the cool, jaded beatnik about them (the latter term an invention of the liberal media modeled on 'sputnik.')  They are not cool, but hot, 'mad,' joyously affirmative.  Every Kerouac aficionado thrills to the passage near the beginning of On the Road<\/em> where Sal confesses: ". . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved . . . ." (p. 9)<\/span><\/p>\n

The very name 'Sal Paradise' is a tip-off.  Salvatore, Salvator<\/em>: savior.  Paradise: the prelapsarian state, the state before the lapsus <\/em>or Fall, or else heaven.  Is there any book of his where our bourbon-besotted boy does not talk of heaven? It's all about salvation, happiness, heaven.  In part this is why he distances himself from Buddhism whose solution to suffering is merely negative: <\/span><\/p>\n

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma<\/em>, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there is the later OTR <\/em>passage in which the 'beat' is explained: <\/span><\/p>\n

. . . his [Dean's] bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins saying, "Yes, yes, yes, " as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now . . . . He was BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific. (OTR, 161)<\/span><\/p>\n

See also this Kerouac  interview<\/a> for confirmation.  This was two years before his death.<\/span><\/p>\n

Siegel's piece, then, is quite a stretch, but very interesting nonetheless.  But it is annoying when he quotes Ginsberg but provides no reference. <\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to that indefatigable argonaut of the cybersphere, Dave Lull, for bringing Lee Siegel's The Beat Generation and the Tea Party to my attention.  An auspicious find in this fine October, Kerouac month hereabouts.  If I wanted to be unkind I would say that the article proves that anything can be compared to anything.  … Continue reading “The Beat Generation, the Tea Party and the Meaning of ‘Beat’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,202,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs","category-kerouac-and-friends","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}