Fuck the Beat Generation

The Beat Generation: Shallow self-aggrandizing narcissists wrapped up in their own lives, romanticizing their supposedly unique experience of social alienation and confinement. They were in love with symbolic resistance, grand gestures and meaningless, infantile acting out of their frustrations with modern life. This is also true of the hippies, punks, rock stars and other subcultures they influenced.

Kerouac famously said, “You know, this is really a beat generation.” Well done, Jack. Every generation since the dawn of civilization has been a beat generation. When has human society every been free of social constraints, rules, the stifling of the human spirit and other forms of coercion? At the time those words were spoken, Kerouac was living in what was possibly the least oppressive society in history. It is precisely because the constraints were so loose that Kerouac was able to notice them and reject them at all. If he had been born only a few hundred years earlier, he would have simply been tortured and killed by the authorities. A little perspective is the cure for blowing your own romanticized struggle out of proportion.

Kerouac attempted to make the word ‘beat’ have similiar connotations to ‘beatific’ — seeking out the beauty and wonder of the world. Such noble sentiments. Is committing slow suicide by drinking yourself to death seeking out beauty and wonder, Jack? Is shooting your wife in the head while playing a drunken game of William Tell a way of throwing off social coercion, Mr. Burroughs? Or allowing your young son to be molested while in your care? The appalling moral failures of the beat generation and their cultural offspring should be a warning sign that these are not heroes or champions of the human spirit, but pointless nihilists who rationalized away their responsibilities.