Beat movement redux or what would Jack do?

Gloria Bailen reports in The Boston Globe :

In 1946, Herbert Huncke told Jack Kerouac that being "beat" is the condition of being beaten down, or poor. But apparently, Huncke, a street hustler and drug addict, was also the eternal optimist: "To be down and out is to increase one's ability to see oneself clearly."

Could today's doomsday economics, cultural bankruptcy, and "why they hate us" value system signal an end to this reality-show era and the beginning of a newfangled "beat movement?" Sort of a Zen, hipster version of "Change You Can Believe In"?

Who today isn't questioning and redefining how to live our lives? We all want change, need change, but how much are we truly willing to change our mind-set and recalibrate our priorities? I realize, I'm one of the lucky ones. I don't personally know anyone duped in a Ponzi scheme, I still own my home (at least this month), and (as of today) still have a job, but fear is in the air, and I find myself reevaluating what's really important. Sometimes I wonder, WWJD? Well, what would Jack do?

During an interview for a documentary about Keraouc's novel "Big Sur," writer Aram Saroyan told me Kerouac was ". . . just like a little kid exploring in nature, and who else dared to do that because you had to have the big study and the big literary career and everything, and he just - he just wasn't buying it."

He wasn't buying it alright. In fact, he flat-out rejected anything that reeked of the conformity of the post-war, consumer society of the Eisenhower years. He never owned a car, he bought his lumberjack shirts and dungarees at the Salvation Army, and he considered Jello a major food group. Perhaps Kerouac was a bit extreme at times (and a preponderance of alcohol could have made "doing without" a tad easier), but aren't we on to something here?

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