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The important takeaway is that Kerouac was writing about real people with real lives and real challenges they had to face during real rough times in America. W
by joe_the_user 5y ago
The important takeaway is that Kerouac was writing about real people with real lives and real challenges they had to face during real rough times in America.
While the people Kerouac wrote about were very real, I would just want to correct one thing. Kerouac wrote about people voluntarily or otherwise in the lower classes at a time (the 1950s) when things were relatively pretty good to be poor, you could get bare survival with little effort, the hassles were limited etc, that's why you could have amazing cultural creations coming out of that group, that's why a bit later the hippies were OK with voluntary poverty, etc.
- perrygeo 5y agoThis is an important point to me. These people were living (by relative standards, absolutely thriving) with very little income, coasting on what a post-war, peak-cheap-oil society could provide. Sure, in their writing they occasionally questioned the status quo. But reading it in retrospect just highlights how materially lucky they were to have those crazy experiences. Road tripping across the US in search of something greater is a privledge; if I met Dean Moriarty and Jack Kerouac today, I'd probably give them an "OK Boomer" eye roll.
- sammalloy 5y agoYou’re right, but if you study history, you’ll discover that every generation has their own take on this phenomenon. #vanLife is just the latest version of it. Remember, Dean (Neil) transcended the Beats, became a member of the Merry Pranksters, and drove the bus for Kesey’s hippies who lived in it. It’s all connected.
- jeromegv 5y agoI'm not sure why you think that, poverty was high enough that Johnson thought necessary to start a war on poverty in 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty
- adolph 5y agoJohnson might have had fine political skills, but his strategic sense and application of war was a disaster.
- joe_the_user 5y agoThe thing that's not obvious this is that Johnson began the War On Poverty because having the lower classes in poverty wasn't politically acceptable in that time (partly because of the Cold War). In contrast, the lower classes not being able to afford rent or health care today is essentially acceptable. This link [1] shows income inequality plateauing around 1950 and then rising sharply toward the late 1980s, reaching the levels of the 1920 at around 2010. [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
- kingkawn 5y agoIn other words, the American social safety net was politically necessary only because of the threat of the socialist alternative
- asdff 5y agoEspecially before Reagan began gutting programs, American democracy was almost like socialism-lite. Plenty of work to be found that paid living wages. Well funded government institutions and social programs, plenty of straight up communist jobs programs too although they would never be referred to as such (I consider something like NASA to be a communist entity as the people own the means of production in this agency). Jobs programs. Etc. It was a big mistake we didn't restart the WPA after WWII however and really incentivized this idea of finding work within the public government instead of private industry that serves the public on a contractual basis.
- ciphol 5y agoKerouac's demographic at the time (young healthy adults) do pretty well in relative poverty. Other people, like the elderly and families with kids, do much worse. The War on Poverty was focused on those groups.