'Beatniks: The New Ideology of Manifest Destiny and Freedom\r'

'The 1950s were a clip of revitalization. They were a time of rebirth for the the Statesn people. World struggle II had ended and annunciate the reinsertion and reinteg markion of thousands of service members into society. Working wowork force who epitomized Rosie the Riveter and passed into the workforce on with their 12 million counterparts working when the US entered the war, save the m peerlessy they earned. Prior to the end of the war, there was not much to spend earned income on with the excommunication of war bonds. Afterwards, however, Ameri flush toilet industry expanded ilk never before.\r\nThe get power offered to Americans expanded, as well. Goods that were not available during the war became readily accessible. This increased the line of products market and stimulated the economy. Not only that, barely the returning soldiers helped the US experience a cosmos boom helping to facilitate a grip in consumerism. Veterans were starting families and were in need of lodging which the Levitt family began and completeded, building housing areas c all(prenominal)ed Levitt-t witnesss. race were increasingly more than bodilyisticâ€shopping for wants and not just needs. It was genuine the Fabulous Fifties.\r\nOut of this time was born a contemporaries of seeming radicals that fought against the agreed upon normalcy of the times. This ‘ mystify contemporaries’ reimagined the melodic themels of attest Destiny and dropdom because they cute to be relinquish to explore what was considered insanity by many a(prenominal) only if for them was artistic expressionâ€a breaking free of con establishist beliefs of the supposed American dream of materialism and gain. The flap genesis or beats, as they were sometimes called was a term coined by the author and member of this same generation scalawag Kerouac during a conversation with fellow writer, trick Clellon Holmes.\r\nHe clarified his phrase by saying sidestep â€Å"mean t world socially marginalized and exhaustedâ€â€˜ crush atomic reactor’â€and blessedâ€â€˜beatific’ ” (â€Å"Mid-1950s-1960s”, 2007). The term implied their generation was beaten down for their artistic nature and general deviance from mainstream behavior. heartbeats were labeled law breakers, trouble make waterrs and rebel rousers and top-notchcharged with being communists. In fact, in 1961 the director of the FBI, J. Edgar clean claimed that the beatnik sprightlinessstyle was in the top tierce major threats to American society and way of life. Kerouac and some other founders of the generation took offense to this accusation.\r\nTheir insistence was they merely wanted to be free to explore what may urinate been considered absurdity tho really were searching for what they entangle was missing in life. They were searching for a deeper meaning. They refused to be complacent just because the war had ended and the solid ground was seemingly a better place. Things were not perfect just because the economy was on the rise. The war had not solved humanity’s problems and consumerism was just an clear shell for them. Therefore, this search for a higher self, took the form of experimentation.\r\nMany of the pound offs were openly homosexual or bisexual and freely experimented with their sexual natures. They aligned themselves with the stopping point of jazz musicians and the music they do. Jazz music followed no preordained rules. There were no wrong notes no exit how raw. The more noisy and discordant, the better and more realâ€emotionalâ€it sounded. The riles raged in their literature and poetry, seem much like discordant peals of music utter from the saxoph superstar of a jazz musician, against those who would suppress them. These feelings were elegantly detailed in the semi-mad ravings of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.\r\n kindred Ginsberg, many wrote under the influence of drugs like bennie and marijuana, experimenting with them in order to achieve a differentiate of transcendentalism. Gregory Stephenson (2009) explains it thusly, â€Å"The poet, for a visionary minute of arc, transcends the country of the actual into the realm of the ideal, and then(prenominal), unable to sustain the vision, returns to the realm of the actual. Afterwards the poet feels exiled from the eternal, the numinous, [and] the super conscious. The material world, the realm of the actual, seems empty and desolate. The desolation the Beats felt was born from the feeling of being off of sorts and disconnected with a world no continuing theirs. This made them howl. They howled, they cried come on, they wailed and fought against a forced subjugation. And thus, refusing to be subjugated, they were ostracized. Thereby, do them howl more and inspiring the title of Ginsberg’s poem. In analyzing the poem, it is clear Ginsberg wanted to accomplish deuce social occasions. First, h e wanted to exact an unmistakable and distinguishable delineation between those who fall under the Beatnik category and those they feel are the alignists of their time.\r\nSecondly, he made it known that this was their declaration, it was their bareo of freedom. â€Å"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving neurotic naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at click looking for an angry let, angel headed hipsters intense for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of nigh, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyes and high sat up have in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…” (1955).\r\nThe material world Stephenson speaks of and the fix Ginsberg speaks of correlates to the Beats movement centered on a lifestyle of a total rejection of this mainstream idea that unmatched and one must always equal two, one must always know when the right time is to settle down, what constitutes a productive member of society, a person must write and speak in formalities, have a certain religion, wear what is agreeable and deal who is acceptable in order to be accepted into society. They used alcohol and drugs to feel and then proceeded to write down what they felt, even if it was not in a formal order that made sense.\r\nTherefore, â€Å"the academician community derided the Beats as anti-intellectual and primitive…Established poets and novelists looked down upon the freewheeling desert of Beat literature” (â€Å"The Beat Generation”, 2013). Furthermore, this ‘freewheeling abandon’ applied to more than just the literature of the Beat movement, it applied to their psychical bodies, as well. American account statement was based on an idea of expansion, evidenced by a phrase coined in 1845 by editor, John O’Sullivan, called â€Å"Manifest Destiny”.\r\nThose that settled in th e impudently founded America believed â€Å"courageous pioneers…had a predict obligation to stretch the boundaries of their noble republic…” (â€Å"Manifest Destiny”, 2013). And yet in the 1950s these ideals America was founded on came to a screeching halt notwithstanding the mass production and affordability of automobiles and the interconnectedness of cities by highways. lot became complacent and began to settle down in Post-World War II newly reinforced homes in newly generated housing areas. The word of that era was conformity.\r\nThe houses were all built to a certain style; the yards were groomed in the same way; the people behaved in a manner as what was expected of them. The idea of buying a home and being stationary delineate a large section of what the Beat Generation saw as conform to a capitalist and consumer-based lifestyle. The Beats advocated a hobo type of lifestyle, rather than one weighed down by physical possessions. â€Å"These m en…were attempting to escape what were perceived as the restrictive shackles of the atomic family but…rejected the trappings of a settled bourgeois lifestyle and were geographically mobile” (McDowell, 1996).\r\nSo the romanticism surrounding Jack Kerouac’s autobiographic book On the itinerary, which spoke to those in this generation and wanting to relate or understand them, as well as became the definition of the ideology of the Beat Generation. An ideology which express ‘Life should be actively lived and you must make of it what you want, not what others tell you to want to make out of it’. It was about â€Å"…grabbing and doing it. It was about not wanting to hitch somewhere and rooting, but rather going somewhere and making your own reality” (â€Å"American pass”, 2011).\r\nKerouac epitomized this in his book: â€Å"…I left with my contemplate bag in which a few unplumbed things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the cubic decimetre dollars in my pocket. I’d been poring over maps of the get together States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savour names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and the road-map was one long red line called Route 6…I’ll just stay on 6…I s sanction to myself and confidently started…Filled with dreams of what I’d do in Chicago, in Denver, and then finally in San Fran,…I started hitching up the thing” (Kerouac, 1957).\r\nHe wondered and daydreamed about what he would do in those cities, but knew what he did not want to do. Kerouac’s character, Sal, did not want to miss out on anything by becoming deadened, which is silently implied, had he united the rat race and gotten a job. It was wasted energy. He â€Å"hated the thought of it…There were so many other interesting things to do [and meet]” (Kerouac, 1957). The ideals incarnate in his book through his characters were an open and honest free love of people, an enjoyment of the experiences that were happening in the now, and a meeting of the minds of ll types and races of people. They were colorblind. And this was also new in a time when people who were different were excluded or called communists. In a time when Joseph McCarthy was initiating a ‘Red frighten’ and accusing citizens of being communists and Hoover’s G-Men were illicitly wire-tapping politicians and regular citizens alike, people had become overly comical of everyone. People were anxious to show militarism and an acquiescence to conform to what was inherently American. Yet, in spite of this, Beatniks touched to their own poetry and beliefs.\r\nGinsberg howled and Kerouac left on a sanctum trek to find a true interior consciousness, laden with real freedom and genuine spontaneity. several(prenominal) times, Sal’s character considered traveling elsewhere sooner of his intend ed destination for no other dry land than to see where the roads would take him or what or who would lie in that particular direction. Though most, if not all, those in this beat generation originally came from a middle class background, they rejected it as being conformists and closed minded. â€Å"Conformity [to them] was born from fear of the policy-making system” (â€Å"American Road”, 2011).\r\nThey were not panic-struck though they felt this overt obsession with conforming to an evil government and material possessions was killing the nip and creativity found within. This idea was further cementumed by Ginsberg statement of the best minds of his generation being destroyed. In the second part of Howl, Ginsberg continually mentions the name or entity â€Å"Moloch” and in the context he uses it, one can ascribe a negative connotation to it: â€Å"What sphinx of cement and atomic number 13 bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and caprice? Mo loch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars…Moloch the cloggy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless clink and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the cast gem of war! Moloch the stunned governments” (Ginsberg, 1957)! This entity â€Å"Moloch” no doubt represents all the things in American society considered to be the norm, but for the Beat Generation is stifling and oppressive.\r\nCement and aluminum were the utensils builders used to build homes like Levitt-towns and universities that inhibited free thinking and self-expression. He mentions unobtainable dollars because the pursuit of gold and material possessions was a fleeting happiness. Once possessed, it is no longer desired. And everywhere they turned there was obese judgment, except from their own kind. The publishing and almost instant success of Jack Kerouac’s book, On the Road, as well as the publishin g of other Beat writers, like Allen Ginsberg, marked the beginnings of an evolutionary change.\r\nThe Beat Generation became a subculture that truly impacted America. Men and womenâ€teenagers and teenage adults, were finding themselves increasingly disillusioned by a lifestyle that was centered on home and work. People were pickings a page from Kerouac’s life and hitting the road on a pilgrimage to find themselves and what meaning life really had for them. They were taking verses from Ginsberg’s manifesto and â€Å"…bit[ing] detectives in the neck and call with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and insobriety… (1957). Indeed, the Fabulous 50s brought with it trials and tribulations, materialism and consumerism, and in general, the earmarks of an American social way of being that is still prevalent today. just within that culture, a counterculture was also born whose inhabitants were not snug with th e world as it was. They were not satisfied with what the world wanted to turn them into. They wanted to march to the beat of their own drum; to experience what was out there in the world and truly be emancipate.\r\nBorn of this desire was the Beat Generation, the forebears of the hippies of the 1960s. They advocated a freedom and liberation of minds and bodies. They wanted to be liberated of all censor. They wanted the freedom to love arduous and fast, to travel at will and forsake the idea that in order to be truly content one had to engage in a rat race of empty labor for money and material possessions. The Beatniks reinforced and reimagined the ideals of Manifest Destiny and chose to manifest their destiny of finding the freedom to be themselves and love it despite opposition.\r\nReferences\r\nFilms Media Group (2011). American Road [H.264]. Retrieved from http://digital.film-s.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=18596&xtid=48260 Ginsberg, A. (1955-1956). Howl. Collected Poems, 1 947-1980. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381 McDowell, L. (1996). Off the Road: Alternate Views of Rebellion, Resistance and ‘The Beats’. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/622491 Stephenson, G. (2009). good morning Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation.\r\n'