Growing up in a small town in the 70's, I was pretty protected from any real counterculture. I mean we had some hippies here and there running health food stores and teaching at the community college, but they never darkened the door of my white bread existence. Just some strange creatures I caught site of now and then, like some type of shy cultural Chupacabra.
I remember one day my dad took me to some kind of small shop and there was a man there wearing a red beret and acting kind of odd. Not abnormal, or anti-social, he seemed like he knew how to fit in, but didn't really need to do it all the way. The red beret was the perfect touch. He was out of place in our town, but certainly not as dangerous as those godless hippies I had heard about.
When we left the store, my dad told me that the man in the beret was a beatnik. My dad grinned and explained they were mostly harmless, but just saw things differently than others.
I didn't really think about beatniks any further until I was working at the call center while I was going to college. I had picked up a copy of "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac and couldn't put it down. It was incredible. I didn't approve of all the characters did, but I approved of how they lived their lives in such a way as to not accept every thought given to them. I liked how they did not let life just swallow them up but instead tried to devour all the joy, truth and love they could out of life.
I read more about Kerouac and his misfits. I found out he was a Roman Catholic, a Buddhist and had views that were all over the place, conservative one minute and liberal the next. Besides that, the idea of the Beatnik was utterly connected to much of the bebop, hard-bop and straight ahead jazz I adored.
Here's a line from "On the Road" that caught my eye,
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
I read some more of the Beat writers, like Allen Ginsberg famous rant-poem "Howl". These lines really spoke to me.
...who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality...I remembered Orwell's ideas about truth and reality being determined by the party in his book 1984, and how telling the truth is a revolutionary act in the face of universal deceipt. Ginsberg's idea of an enforced Absolute Reality running down those that would try to escape it seemed to mesh with this. It's crazy and on the edge of rejecting all of the norms of established society, but I also remembered someone else with crazy ideas and rhetoric that tried to turn the world upside down: Jesus Christ. I remembered how he had so angered the religious leaders of his day that they sought to kill him, even though he never sought to tear down the government and sought love and peace and truth and sacrificed his own life so that others could spread his messages of forgiveness, redemption and love against a religious world that sought to keep people guilty, condemned and confused.
The Beatnik movement started as a vibrant sub-culture that questioned societal norms and sought truth. It was not centralized, it was not inherantly liberal or inherantly conservative, it just was. Of course, later like every movement from hippies, to punk to hip-hop, it became commercialized so kids from the burbs could pretend they were different by picking up the uniform de jour from the mall so they could annoy their parents.
Still, for me, it was the first label I felt fit me. I'm not a complete redneck, I'm not a Liberal, but I'm not a Right-wing nut job, I don't know how to be a yuppie, at least not well. I'm an evangelical who goes to a fundamentalist church, but I don't agree with everything they say. I'm looking for truth, justice and world system that's neither paternal nor oppressive. I don't want to adopt a label that put me in a box like so many of them do. Beatnik for Jesus finally seemed to express how I felt in this world.
Thanks for reading,
AC
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