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political, an attack on conformist culture, on militarism and war, on racial
and sexual attitudes, and on the very meaning of democracy and what it
meant to have a “free” society. Ginsberg not only wrote, but he was active in
various political movements–from “Ban the Bomb” to civil rights to antiwar
actions–his entire life. In fact, in 1982, he performed one of his most passion-
ate poems as part of the Clash’s “Ghetto Defendant,” a song about heroin
addiction, on its Combat Rock album.
Ginsberg by himself was a major figure in the arts, but he was also part of
an impressive community of writers who comprised the “Beatnik” Movement.
Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, published in 1957 [and written on a scroll],
stands alongside Howl as the most iconic work of that era. On the Road is
mostly autobiographical; the lead character, Sal Paradise, is actually Kerouac.
It hits the main Beat themes–poetry, drugs, jazz, and sex.The story, above all,
is about freedom, about being “on the road” with friends and fellow beats
Ginsberg [“Carlo Marx” in the book] and Neal Cassady [aka “Dean Moriarty”]
for a few years, about bus rides, hitchhiking, close calls and adventures. Along
the way, they meet fieldworkers, prisoners, and others who live on the seedy
side of life, but, to the Beats, give life its meaning, again, to beat a dead horse,
unlike the men in gray flannel suits. As with the other arts, those who con-
trolled American culture tried to contain the Beatniks, even featuring a Beat
character, Maynard G. Krebs, in the popular “Dobie Gillis” show. Krebs was
portrayed as silly and lazy, which did become a stereotype of Beats. Later, Lisa
Simpson would lampoon Howl after Bart destroyed her Thanksgiving Diorama
with her “Howl of the Unappreciated”–“I saw the best meals of my genera-
tion destroyed by the madness of my brother/My soul carved in slices by
spikey-haired demons.” Despite such satire, it is difficult to understate how
important On The Road and other works were to the Beat generation.
Countless young people and students read them and took off on their own
journeys, experiencing life in ways that previous generations, such as their
parents, never could have imagined, and actually being a vital catalyst to the
far-better known counterculture of the 1960s. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady,
William Burroughs, Ferlinghetti and many others took on the norms of every-
day life and shattered them, openly writing and talking about drugs, sex,
homosexuality, war and conformity in sharp ways, and thus opening up the
minds of their readers and listeners to a new world.