I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 8

 
I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy 

Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s Part 8

 
There was a night in New Brunswick, probably in 1981, well before redevelopment remade the city. We had driven in to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Art Cinema, a theater that had certainly seen better days and now was known for running XXX films and midnight showings of Rocky Horror.

We got there early, had time to kill. There were for of us. Bill was there, and Rich, I think, and Wayne. Wayne would eventually move to Colorado and take up a conservative variation of Christianity. He died about five years ago from a brain tumor.

Wayne was, at this moment, the wild one in our group. Not Dean Moriarty wild, but he certainly was the one most likely to do something reckless or stupid — like the night, also in New Brunswick, when several of us (not me) were up on the rail trestle a block from the theater and down the street from the train station. I was down below — I was and remain the cautious man. I heard the whistle/horn of an oncoming train, then Bob scream out “where’s Wayne.” then just “Wayne,” as the train barreled through and past. Silence. No answer. Then, from out of the darkness he appears, laughing. H. e’d waited until the last moment, he’d ducked off the track on the other side out of sight. It scared the shit out of us, and he found it funny.

This particular night, we ducked into a small bar called the Stagecoach (I think) a couple doors down from he theater. We were going to get a drink — though we were probably underage, and it’s likely we were already stoned. We walked in and there was a small combo playing jazz in the back. We ordered and sat at a table and just listened. We were the only white people in the place, aside from the guy playing vibes. The band was tight with a strong bottom put down by the bass and drums. Atop this rode the vibes. My wanna-be Beat, late-adolescent mind imagined sparks coloring the air, the rolling swell of notes rising and swirling like a storm.

We finished our drinks, paid the bill, and left with what, in our youthful, white-boy minds, was a great story, an adventure. And for a bunch of suburban kids, I guess it was —but I see now that this sense of adventure was based entirely on a perceived danger, on the “otherness” of the situation, its exotic nature. New Brunswick was a place of “darkness” and we went straight into its heart.

The allusion to Conrad is intentional because, as great and important a writer as he was, he also trucked in racist views like most of his contemporaries. Books like Heart of Darkness and


Lord Jim are rife with ugly stereotypes and, even when a person of color is to be presented in a positive light, it is through the dimming lens of racial typecasting. Kurtz has gone native in Heart of Darkness, which in the English mind circa 1900 was unforgivable. (See Kipling’s The Jungle Book.)


This comes across most strongly in On the Road when Kerouac writes of jazz, as I said, though there are numerous other passages in which his racial reductiveness impairs his perception of reality.

A more extreme variant of this occurs in Denver. A morose Sal “walked with every muscle aching among the lights of27th and Walton in the Denver colored section” (180). He wishes he was black, or more accurately “a Negro,” the use of a noun rather than an adjective reinforcing the sense of difference. The “best the white world had offered,” he says, “was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”

He wants to shed his skin, to get closer to the bone, to the essence of life. To be a Negro, “a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned.” He wanted to shed his “white ambitions” and “exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.” The sadness of the passage can make it easy to overlook Kerouac’s use of racial stereotyping, especially because his intention is praise for groups he thinks somehow are more primitive and, therefore, more pure of heart and soul.

Kerouac, writing a scene that takes place in 1947 in a book that’s published in 1957 ignores the legal impediments and segregation imposed on black communities in the south and the de facto segregation of the north. The Civil Rights movement is in its infancy, but the Montgomery bus boycott is making national headlines as he moves the book toward publication. But in Sal/Kerouac’s mind, African Americans can be reduced to types, to caricatures; they are noble savages, primitives who are somehow holier and more pure, closer to a state of bliss unsullied by (white) civilization.

This is common thinking — or was — among the artistic class, especially in the 1950/. It is the central trope in Norman Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” in which he describes a cultural marriage between black Americans and
the American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (Mailer 304). 
Mailer is correct to describe black existence in 1950s America as living with “danger from his first day” — an observation that still holds. “(N)o experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk” (306).

However, he then makes the leap to ugly stereotyping, painting the black American as “following the need of his body” as a survival technique and eschewing, because he has to, because he can’t afford not to, the “sophisticated inhibitions of civilization” (306).

The Negro, he writes, has therefore
kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his organism.
The beat/hipster has bought into this essentialism, he writes, and is using his search for authenticity and spiritual purity, his efforts to become more like The Negro or Kerouac’s fedahin, to escape rather than press for social change. Mailer is far more political than the Beats — the essay originally appeared in Dissent in the fall of 1957 — about the same time that On the Road is published and rockets up the bestseller list. That Mailer ultimately is critical of this new hipster is unimportant — intention in this case does not override Mailer’s overly broad description of The Negro, who is purer in his relation to the world than the American mainstream (read white). He may want more from the new Beat Generation politically, but he still sees blacks as archetypes, as noble savages, as something apart from the rest of polite society.

We see this in Patti Smith’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger,” a song that compares the American artist, the visionary, the rebel to blacks as an oppressed group, as the principled outsider: the “black sheep,” the “whore,” are unwilling to conform, must stand “outside of society,” are a “rock ‘n’ roll nigger.”

The song, which she performs as an anthem, growling and spitting fire over a rumbling guitar-driven hard rock soundtrack, uses the pejorative ironically, of course, stripping it from its ugly history as an element of control and dehumanization beginning in slave times; it’s also meant to shock — “now that I’ve got your attention….”

The comparison here is meant to be flattering, but intention does not matter. That’s the great misconception when it comes to race issues. One can still be racist or express or hold racist ideas without having any animus toward blacks, Latinos, Asians and so on. Racism means seeing people as the embodiment of their race; it means objectifying people, robbing them of their individual agency. When Jack Kerouac wished he were a Negro because, as he believes, blacks are simpler and, therefore, closer to the essential truth, he’s engaging in racist thinking. When my friends and I transformed this accidental experience of a joyful noise, so to speak, into a white-kid adventure, when we played up the novelty and exoticness of the moment, we were engaging in racist thinking.

That’s one of the points made by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped from the Beginning, his important book on the history of racist thinking. All of us, he says, are capable of racist thinking, and that there is a long history of it in the United States, even among those working hardest to end slavery or Jim Crow or even now in the battle against police brutality.

I have a better understanding of this than I did when I was 19 — that I did when I was 29, 39, even 49. I do my best to avoid essentialist thinking, but I’d be lying if I said I’ve rooted it completely from my thought process.

I cringe now at my naivety, at my youthful lack of understanding of this, but rereading On the Road has raised a lot of questions and it’s important that I be honest about that night, even as I try to hold on to the sensation of hearing that music.
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Let’s call Trump what he is

President Donald J. Trump is a bigot.
I wasn’t going to put it so plainly, but I’m done mincing words. Trump sees the world in broad categories, and he judges individuals based on the identity tags he’s assigned. Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, “the blacks” — they all exist as types in the Trump world view. And these types dictate just how much of a citizen you might be.
That’s the context we should use to try and understand today’s announcement that transgender people will now be excluded from the military.
Forget his rationale. Like earlier opposition to gay and lesbian troops, or bebfoe that to desegregating the Armed Forces, this is not about military readiness or unity. It is about citizenship.
Being allowed to serve in the military — like being able to vote or engage in other civic activities is a sign of full citizenship. Proscriptions against gays and lesbians in the service drove them into the shadows and sent a signal to he broader culture that they were less equal as citizens than heterosexuals, a point underscored by bans on same-sex marriage.
Trump, who made the announcement of his transgender ban via a series of tweets (a gutless and disrespectful move), has signaled once again that he sees some Americans as being more equal as others. And yet, the mainstream press, much of Washington, his supporters and many others are willing to give him a pass.
Enough is enough. It’s time to call Trump what he is — a bigot, pure and simple.
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I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 7

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy 

Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s 
Part 7

It was On the Road that first introduced me to jazz. The book’s passages on the music are used to create an imagined soundtrack, one of explosive energy and appetite.


“They ate voraciously,” Sal says of Dean, Marylou and Ed, who have just raced east to find Sal, “as Dean, sandwich in hand, stood bowed and jumping before the big phonograph, listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called ‘The Hunt,’ with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic frenzied volume” (113).

And, yes, “The Hunt” is a nine-minute thrill ride. Called an extended saxophone duel by some critics, Gordon and Hunt press each other forward, the rhythm section pressing the accelerator pedal, the crowd revved and rowdy. It’s a “mad” performance, to borrow a term from Kerouac, and is every bit the wild bop Sal describes.

Later, in New York, “Dean was having his kicks; he put on a jazz record, grabbed Marylou, held her tight, and bounced against her with the beat of the music. She bounced right back. It was a real love dance” (125) — jazz as mating ritual, which is consistent with the word’s etymology. As the Online Etymology Dictionary points out, the word likely comes from the “Creole patois jass ‘strenuous activity, especially ‘sexual intercourse.'” Other potential origins are jasm, for “energy, drive,” and jazz may share the same sourcing as the slang word jism, for semen.

What’s striking to me is that in a few words, Kerouac is able to capture something essential about the music — even if he misses much of its subtext. For Sal — for Kerouac — the music offers a religious experience, a la the 12th century Sufi monks, the whirling dervishes who vow poverty and spin and dance in ecstatic rituals. The Beats — a designation applied well after the events of On the Road — saw work and money as necessary only insofar as it allowed them to chase ecstasy. Money filled the gas tank, paid the rent, kept the whiskey flowing and the tea rolled into joints. When money wasn’t available, the quest for enlightenment through kicks permitted them to beg, borrow and steal what was needed. Jazz was part of this chase, as a Sal makes clear in his description of  New Year’s weekend performance by George Shearing.
Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was a distinguished looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer’s-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes.
It’s all very quiet. Reverent. Then Shearing begins rocking — people are always rocking in Kerouac’s prose, as if they are davaning, lost in prayer. He starts slowly until “the beat went up”
and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all.
Kerouac’ prose gains its own momentum, the clauses shrink in length, coming in quick bursts like Shearing’s chords, which “rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up.”

As they “rolled and rolled like the sea,” the crowd revs up. Dean, sweating, shouts “There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!” Ecstasy unleashed. The music, the tea, madness that “would lead nowhere,” and yet, “everything was about to arrive — the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever” (128-129).

A drawing from the mid-’80s.
These passages offer Kerouac both at his best and worst, injecting the essential energy into his text, while also remaining innocent to the deeper political implications of the music. As Douglas Malcolm writes in “Jazz and African American Culture in On the Road,” Kerouac distills the music down to its individual stars, which is consistent with the Beat ethos of individual enlightenment.

Kerouac’ focus is on soloists, or musicians who derive their fame from their ability to rise up above the collective. This focus ignores the importance of band leaders and composers like Duke Ellington, whose “genius manifested itself collectively in his bands rather than as an individual performer.”
The characteristic which in Kerouac’s mind unites the historic musicians above all is their “madness”; the unavoidable implication is that he music derives not from rational thought but from visceral spontaneity. Hence Louis Armstrong springs like Adam from the “muds of New Orleans” and literally erupts playing with the “mad musicians” is hometown. Roy Eldridge’s music, although suggestive of “logic,” comes in “waves of power.” Charlie Parker was “flipped” out of his mind, and Lester Young is depicted as “the saintly goof” (Malcolm 102).
This is typical of a broader racial issue in the book, one tied to the old “noble savage” trope that has long hampered discussion of race and that has left much ethnographic study mired in stereotypes. Kerouac treats African Americans as a type — Mexicans, too, and the somewhat murky term fedaheen that he uses as an all-purpose moniker for the darker people of the world. He romanticizes them, assumes them simple and closer to the earth and god. An “old Negro couple” is described as picking cotton in California “with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama” (96), as an absurd and ahistorical observation as one can make (Malcolm cites a James Baldwin essay that criticizes the passage). Comments like this can be found through out, but they are especially noticeable when he writes about jazz.

He describes a night in San Francisco at a little “sawdust saloon” in the “little Harlem on Folsom Street.” A small combo was playing, led by a “wild tenorman” with a “bawling horn.”
The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from “EE-yah!” to a crazier “EE-de-Lee-yah!” and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bull neck who didn’t give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. (196-197)
This goes on for several pages, the music pushing the crowd to fervor, Sal and Dean and the crew in ecstasy, and the musicians pressing forward. It is describes as purely in the moment, just a set of free ideas blasted into the firmament, each individual pursuing his own sonic dynamite. No thought given to, no recognition of the tireless work out in before the players hit the stage — the composition and arrangement work, the rehearsals that allow each man to play off the other, the riffs tried and abandoned in the writing and arranging process, the plan hat is put in place before show starts. It just happens. The players are pure and operate on a direct line  creator.

This ignores both the history of the music and the deep intellectual seams from which the musical ideas are mined. No one can listen to Thelonious Monk or Charles Mingus and not hear the purpose behind every note and brushstroke, every solo and every riff.

I was listening first to Roy Eldridge and then to Coleman Hawkins with Eldridge as I wrote this. The Eldridge orchestra of the late-40s could truly swing. Eldridge’s trumpet is the driving force for much of what you hear on the records, but Bill Rowland’s work on the ivories, both as part of the rhythm section setting the foundation for the horns to blow, and then when his piano moves to the forefront, is riveting. The playing, composition and arrangement force you to hear both the unit in action and its individual parts. It resonates emotionally and intellectually. It is not accidental.

The Hawkins/Eldridge performance, recorded and originally released in 1957, can be heard as a duel, a prizefight between heavyweights, which would play into the individualist narrative Kerouac uses in describing jazz. And it’s not incorrect, though it is better heard as a dialogue between Hawkins sax and Eldridge’s trumpet, and a broader conversation among all players on the stage. Hawkins and Eldridge are the loudest, but by no means are they the most important players.

I often liken jazz to basketball, which can seem chaotic to the naked eye and driven solely by its stars. But at its best, the game mixes improvisation with a plan and even the best players — Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain — are only as good as their sidemen, only as good as the system (i.e., the arrangement). Lebron can improvise and win because the structure is solid, the plan is well thought out, and everyone is one the same page. 

Hawkins can dive into a blistering solo only if his sidemen have laid the foundation. It is a team effort, and the spontaneity is choreographed, not each note but the framework in which each note is played.

One other thing: Reading Kerouac on jazz today reminds us that, as a music, it is more vibrant and potentially revelatory than the staid concert hall jazz or easy listening instrumentals that the word conjures for many. It’s sweaty and dynamic and full of life. Turning it into chamber music is bad for the art form and not at all true to its origin. Kerouac gets it, even if he has created its own false mythology in the process.
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I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 6

The author, circa, 1983-184, pretending he’s The Boss.

I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy 

Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s

 
There is an old bank building on Route 130 in North Brunswick, next to the county correction facility. It houses a dog grooming business now, but back in the 1970s, our friends Glenn and Donna rented it and lived upstairs in what likely were the corporate offices.

The building has been on my mind the last couple days for two reasons — my reteading of On the Road and our visit to the annual Carnevale Italiano with my sisters-in-law and grand nieces. The Carnevale is on land adjacent to the jail between the jail and the old bank. As we approached, Annie pointed to the dog grooming place and said to everyone in our car, “Our friends used to live there. We used to have big parties there.”

Beatnik wannabe in my Army surplus jacket.

The first one — which is the party I associate with Kerouac — was a going away party for Annie’s cousin Gerry. She had lived with Annie for several years while attending college, was now finished and was going back to Long Island. We were at Glenn and Donna’s and realized that the first floor — where the public portion of the bank used to be — would be a perfect place for a bash, except that it was full of junk. The building’s owner apparently used the bottom floor to store all manner of uselessness, including used fluorescent bulbs, shelving, paper, lots and lots of paper. There was garbage and beer bottles, lumber, broken cabinets, and so on. The place was a mess, and unusable — unless we cleared it out, which is what we did, just as Sal and his buddies did in Central City, a former mining town above Denver where Sal and friends traveled for a weekend.


Babe Rawlins “knew of an old miner’s house at the edge of town where we boys could sleep for the weekend; all we had to do was clean it out. We could also throw vast parties there. It was an old shack of a thing covered with an inch of dust inside; it had a porch and a well in back. (52)

They cleaned up the shack. Sal and Babe went to the opera and, when they returned, the party began, the night “getting more and more frantic” (54).

Our party was less frantic, but still a massive bash. I don’t know how many people attended, but it was a full house. We didn’t gave a porch or a view of the mountains, but we had a vault recently cleared of trash and a working drive-up teller booth, a massive open floor, and a keg, and we gave Gerry a great send off.

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I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy, part 5

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsbert and William S. Burroughs in New York, before the events of On the Road.
I thought I was a beat, but I was just a boy 
Notes on Re-Reading Kerouac in my 50s


I think one of the reasons the novel is attractive to readers in their early 20s, in particular, is it’s simplistic anti-establishment bias.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/william-s-burroughs-the-art-of-fiction-no-36-william-s-burroughs
William S. Burroughs
Consider the section in which Sal and the fang visit Old Bull Lee. Bull — the book version of William S. Burroughs — is a libertarian-anarchist junkie who loves his guns, experiments with all manner of drugs, reads voraciously, and is an aggressive skeptic, a pessimist of the first order, who trusts no one and nothing. He did things “merely for experience” (143), had multiple personalities and a
sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without a prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening widows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. (144-145)
He hated bureaucracy, which I think is a common human feeling, but he also hated “liberals; then cops,” an all-purpose dislike of anything that might interfere with fulfilling one’s desires. Remi Boncoeur, Sal’s old prep-school buddy, has a similar world view, an ingrained antipathy toward authority. Remi’s term for authority figures who impose limits is Dostioffski — a bastardization of Dostoevski, who Sal has been reading. The Dostioffskis of the world are there to keep you down; they are “the man,” the straight world, parental. They interfere with the hedonism that drives Sal and his friends, which is all about kicks.

There is a scene in San Francisco that allows me to how my view of the book has changed over the years, perhaps more than any other. Sal is staying with Remi, who is working as a security guard. He gets Sal a job, but there is not enough money coming in so they supplement their income by stealing food and supplies from the former military camp at which they work. Sal and Remi break into the barracks cafeteria, which they do frequently to stock up on supplies. Once inside, Sal goes “to the soda fountain.”
Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. Then we got ice-cream boxes and stuffed them, poured chocolate over and sometimes strawberries too, then walked around in the kitchens, opened ice boxes, to see what we could take home in our pockets. (70)
Sal views these break-ins as risky, but justified. He doesn’t necessarily put this justification in words, but he does describe it as part of a bigger adventure, as just another necessary experience. And the younger me thrilled to this, understood implicitly the anti-establishment, anti-authority motivation. Stick it to the man, my younger self says.

My older self, my 54-year-old self, cringes at this simplistic reading. There is injustice — the camp is paying starvation wages, which makes the theft necessary — but Remi and Sal’s actions are still morally suspect, at best, and exist outside of politics when what is needed to address the issue is a political response. This individual act of rebellion, as satisfying as it may be, will do nothing to alter the broader dynamics and, in fact, may leave a worse situation for those who come after Remi and Sal are long gone.

This comes up through out the book — authority and rules exist as impediments and nothing more, without distinction, without any sense that some may be necessary. It is very much an American mode of thought, a bowdlerization of Emerson on self-reliance or Thoreau’s jeremiad in “Civil Disobedience” against immoral government power. Sal, Old Bull, Remi, Dean view authority itself as immoral, because it interferes with their pleasure or their intellectual curiosity.

Sal, for instance, walks by themselves to one of the levees of the Mississippi, near Old Bull Lee’s house.
I wanted to sit on the muddy bank and dig the Mississippi River; instead of that I had to look at it with my nose against a wire fence. When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? “Bureaucracy!” says Old Bull; he sits with Kafka on his lap, the lamp burns above him, he snuffs, thfump. His old house creaks. And the Montana log rolls by in the big black river of the night. “Tain’t nothin but bureaucracy. And unions! Especially unions!” (148)
This puts me in mind of Thoreau, the conservationist/naturalist, and the political rebel. Thoreau romanticizes the woods in Walden, is a narcissist of the first order. In a 2015 essay in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz describes Walden as
less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.
It is a fanatic’s book, a “paean to living purely, with all the moral judgment that the word implies” (Schulz). Walden was published nearly a decade after Thoreau’s seminal political essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which has been used as the foundation protest movements as varied as the push for India independence to the American civil rights movement.

“Civil Disobedience” is, as I said, a jeremiad. It is harshly — and rightly — critical of the political class’ overt (in the South and among many northern bankers) and tacit (among northerners willing to compromise) support for slavery. Thoreau argues that individual conscience has greater authority than that of any government, refuses to pay his taxes, because they are used to maintain the slave regime and to wage an unjust imperial war against Mexico. This is his nonviolent protest. He goes to jail, promises to stay there, but is released after friends pay his bill.

It is a solitary protest, a personal protest. It is steeped in American individualism, and ultimately lacks the force the effect change. It is a personal complaint absent a movement, though it is built upon the same moral questioning one finds in Erich Fromm’s On Disobedience and the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

The Beats constantly rage against the straight world, against the impositions of authority, but they rarely — at least in the decade after World War II — fully consider what amounts to true injustice and what it takes to push back. Small individual protests and minor criminal acts stand in for a declaration of individuality, and it is rare that Sal or Dean, in particular, consider how their actions create ripples in the universe, that they affect others in ways they do not foresee or perhaps care to see.

This is hedonism run amok. Hedonism as a philosophy seeks to maximize pleasure, but it also has an eye on the way our actions affect others. It is an extreme form of utilitarianism, which seeks to maximize good — an action is judged as positive if it creates more good than bad, if more people benefit than are hurt. Hedonism functions the same way, but the Beats, many among the Sixties generation, many of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, ignore the damage that can be left in their wake.

This is a young-man’s attitude, but it has infected the broader culture — think of all the dopey t-shirts available in t-shirt shops that glorify the act of getting falling down drunk or proclaiming the right to be an unmitigated asshole. 

And, to inject politics, think of the man we’ve installed as president. Donald J. Trump is a man who’s operated through out his life as a raging id, as pure desire and pure emotion.
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said in the 2005 conversation. “Grab ’em by the pussy.”
And this sums up our current cultural moment, one in which rich and powerful men like Trump and Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Ben Rothlesberger, R. Kelly and so many other feel as if there are no limits, as if everything including women’s bodies and minds are their’s regardless of whether there is consent.

But I’ve gone off on a tangent — I’m not implying that Sal and/or Dean or the rest of the On the Road gang operate in this way. But we can’t ignore the selfish elements of their world view — or I can’t today.

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