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Fear & Loathing, On the Road: Talking About My Generation

Richard Kadzis

Commentary:  Jack Kerouac published On the Road 60 years ago (September 5) to rave reviews, including by The New York Times, which predicted that the autobiographical novel would become to the Beat Generation what Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" meant to the Lost Generation.

Reviewer Gilbert Millstein called the book "…the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

The book chronicles cross-country road trips by Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and his friend Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) from 1947 to 1950 and their experiences with the emerging counterculture, including drugs and sex. (Cassady went on to drive Ken Kesey’s magical mystery bus, Furthur.)

On the Road wasn’t as much about the raw adventure of driving cross-country as a young, single guy hungry to discover life as much as it was a marker in the timeline of changing attitudes about the American Experience.

Kerouac wrote the book during a period often referred to as America’s “Age of Normalcy.” It was a time of new prosperity, an all-too-brief “Pax Romana” between World War II and Korea. Suddenly, there was a car in every garage surrounded by white picket fences and lush green lawns. June Cleaver was in the kitchen fixing dinner, wearing high heels and ready to mix hubby a welcome home from work martini. The suburban, automotive age had begun.

Kerouac embarked via automobile on what could only be described as a more glaring look at the cultural underbelly of the United States, a perspective tinted by an almost then unknown, underground drug, LSD.

What would a similar road trip today find?

A trip to Las Vegas for some fear and loathing did in fact lend some insight. Hunter S. Thompson, who invented the genre known as Gonzo Journalism, was as adept as Kerouac at unpeeling the complex psychographics of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s American persona.

Grappling with a New National Animas

The two books are overlays of each other. Both capture the disillusionment over the American dream. As Kerouac wrote, we think about our “well-ordered lives…never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”

It was the good Doctor, as Thompson was known, who pegged the essential tag line for Kerouac’s coast-to-coast odyssey: “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.”

It was actually the subtitle to Thompson’s classic American satire, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it could very well have been the nugget that encapsulated what amounted to Kerouac’s prologue to Fear and Loathing, On the Road.

While On the Road served as a pretext for the bohemian, beatnik and then hippie movements that would follow, Fear and Loathing, published 14 years later, was the subtext for a generation alienated by the Kennedy assassination, a senseless war, Vietnam, and the struggle for individualism in the face of the deep-seated conservatism of the Nixon Whitehouse.

“There was a fantastic universal sense,” Thompson wrote about the establishment vs. the new, up-and-coming counter-culture, “that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.

“There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…so now…you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Luck of the Draw

Demographers, sociologists, economists, politicians, historians, Wickipedia and other experts have classified American generations since World War I as follow:

·       The Lost Generation, also known as the Generation of 1914 in Europe, is a term originating with Gertrude Stein to describe those who fought in World War I. The members of the lost generation were typically born between 1883 and 1900.

·       The G.I. Generation is the generation that includes the veterans who fought in World War II. They were born from around 1901 to 1924, coming of age during the Great Depression. Journalist Tom Brokaw described U.S members of this cohort as the Greatest Generation in a book of the same name.

·       The Silent Generation, also known as the Lucky Few, were born from approximately 1925 to 1942.  It includes some who fought in World War II, most of those who fought the Korean War and many during the Vietnam War.

·       The Beat Generation, refers to a popular American cultural movement that most social scholars say laid the foundation of the pro-active American counterculture of the 1960s. It consisted of Americans born between the two world wars and who came of age in the rise of the automobile era, and the surrounding accessibility they brought to the culturally diverse, yet geographically broad and separated nation.

·       The Baby Boomers are the generation born mostly after World War II. There are no precise dates when the cohort birth years start and end. Typically, they range from the early-to-mid 1940s and end from 1960 to 1964. Increased birth rates were observed during the post–World War II baby boom making them a relatively large demographic cohort.

·       Gen X is the generation following the baby boomers. Demographers and researchers typically use starting birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960s and ending birth years ranging from the late 1970s to early 1980s. The term has also been used in different times and places for a number of different subcultures or countercultures since the 1950s.

·       Millennials, also known as Generation Y, were born in early to mid-1980s as starting birth years to early 2000s as ending birth years. As of April 2016, the Millennials surpassed the Baby Boomers in size in the U.S., with 76 million Boomers and 77 million Millennials.

·       Generation Z, also known as the iGenerationPost-MillennialsHomeland Generation, or Plurals is the cohort of people born after the Millennials. Demographers and researchers typically use starting birth years ranging from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, while there is little consensus yet regarding ending birth years. A significant aspect of this generation is the widespread usage of the Internet from a young age. Also called ‘Internet Babies.”

As for myself, I have the distinct privilege of being one of the few “Sliver” Baby Boomers to never have been called to war or into military service.

For those of us born between 1954 and 1960, there were no conflicts to respond to as we came of age at the end of Vietnam in 1975 and prior to the dawn of the War on Terror in 1980 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

It is a rare demographic subgroup to be amongst, and I am glad to say, it’s one time that I drew a ‘winning life’ lottery number. Sliver has turned Silver.

Richard Kadzis is a frequent contributor to KRWG Viewpoints. He is a former broadcast journalist with extensive knowledge of economic, environmental, sustainability, social, political and other related trends, issues, opportunities and events.