The headline of the article is what irks me, and what inspires this post's title.
Fifty years ago, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped jump-start a cultural revolution. Are their visions still relevant today?
That's wrong, deeply and truly wrong.
They didn't start anything, they were followers, the analogy I'd choose is that they rode the wave of a changing culture and surfed with it rather than railed against it (like many of the 'squares' were doing at the time), but to say they, or any of the other Beats originated any larger movements within American and World culture is in my estimation inaccurate.
To borrow someone elses dismissive comment regarding Kerouac, that's not writing, that's typing*, and as far as Ginsberg, of all the Beats he was probably the most important, but their whole movement was a syncretic one built upon the shoulders of Dadaist and Modernist mixed in with some pretensions towards Eastern philosophies, nothing really truly new or Earth shattering.
The 'Cultural Revolution' of the 50s and 60s was happening regardless of what a few poets and dharma bums were doing in NYC and in SF, at best they were riders on a wave, not the prime movers of that particular 'happening' (or freak out even).
*(yes I know it was Truman Capote who said that specifically about On the Road, which I'm still very bitter about being forced to read in an undergrad survey course of 20th Century Literature, I could write a book just about how much I loathe that work. I could write a whole series of books about how much I hate Alice Walker's The Color Purple, that's the most loathesome book most college students are now forced to read, by far)
(also, Howl is a truly great poem, it transcends its 'Beatness', the works of Kerouac, and most of the other beats, don't)
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