Actually Doing Work Right Now

            The idea of the “American Dream” is as flexible as it is abstract and broad, it then follows that this concept has changed over time. Today perhaps some might say the American Dream is coming into this country with nothing and following your dreams to success, but it has not always been so individualistic. At one time, shortly after WWII, the American Dream was the nuclear family- Mom, Pop, Timmy, Sally, their dog Sparky and their white picket fence. This was the image that everyone was expected to aspire to. Unfortunately, this is the 1950’s, so this image was not exactly all-inclusive; portrayals of this American Dream were all quite similar to things like “Leave It to Beaver” in that it only included what was considered the majority at the time, which was, in short, white Americans. Therefore it obviously did not include minorities of any kind, non-heterosexuals, the poor, or generally anyone who did not conform to that particular image. This American Dream was great for that “majority” but obviously it did not work out for that leftover “minority”, or for anyone who dared to question the moral majority. So, of course, a counter-culture emerged; not necessarily made up of minorities, in fact the most famous members of this counter-culture were a group of white males who simply did not want to settle for the Levittown house and the morality they have been told to accept. This group of white males eventually named their counter-culture the “Beat Generation”- a title with a bit of a contested origin. To this day there are those who claim that famous writer Jack Kerouac thought of the name but he himself passes credit to writer Herbert Huncke, claiming that “Beat” came from the idea of being “tired” or “beaten down” as that is how they perceived themselves. Despite this, Allan Ginsberg, another Beat writer, has written that Kerouac called it “a beat generation” first- “not meaning to name the generation, but to unname it”.            The whole point of this movement was not just to explore what had been demonized by society, but it was more about exactly what the name implied; the Beats were all about representing the ideas that had been beaten down. This was a time where a man having his hair too long or acting in such a way that middle-aged white Christian men would not typically approve of was not just strange but quite dangerous. The Beats were the people before the hippies, they were anti-conformists bent on exploring what they have been told should not be explored. They experimented sexually when society told them they could only be heterosexual, they smoked marijuana when society said drugs are evil, and they kept moving even though society said they should just settle down. That is exactly what Jack Kerouac tried to capture in his book “On the Road”, what is essentially his written recollection of a journey with other Beats. It can be argued that nothing happens in the whole book- they are all just constantly moving towards a perceived destination but it never seems too important, they are just on the road. That was the whole point- that is what the Beats were all about- they were kind of just on the move, enjoying their lives, whatever that meant to them, with no particular goals in mind. While perhaps today we can assign these kinds of people other titles and say they are not so unusual, at the time this was some mind-blowing behavior, and the fact the “On the Road” captures this unusual, nearly aimless behavior so well is what makes it such an important book.