"They were barefoot and hip, when most were square and shoed. They talked about freedom to a world where conformity reigned supreme. They were the children too young for the W.W.II Draft...they got out of going to Korea and they lived to fight against the War In Vietnam. They were colorful, but were they good Role Models?" They were barefoot and hip, when most were square and shoed. They talked about freedom to a world where conformity reigned supreme. They were the children too young for the W.W.II Draft...they got out of going to Korea and they lived to fight against the War In Vietnam. They were colorful, but were they good Role Models?"They were barefoot and hip, when most were square and shoed. They talked about freedom to a world where conformity reigned supreme. They were the children too young for the W.W.II Draft...they got out of going to Korea and they lived to fight against the War In Vietnam. They were colorful, but were they good Role Models?"
       -Mary Barnet, Poet

Article by Neil Creighton

              Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, are names almost everyone today is familiar with. They have arrived. They are the late great poets who gained fame beyond their expectations. Nothing about their written philosophies was very attractive to their peers back in the early 1950's. The Beats,   we call them, had rebellious attitudes that included offbeat sexual preferences, use of recreational drugs and a lot of other socially unacceptable behavior, back in the '50's.

         Isn't it odd, that the very ideas found so repugnant by the greater society 40 years ago, would become the standard of everyday life, as it is today? Yes,  Lenny Bruce would have loved HBO! He would have been their biggest star! It seems that the beats are really just the most recent in a long history of bohemianism that predates even America. Bohemians originally describes a people from Bohemia in central Europe. Long ago it became descriptive of a kind of devil-may-care lifestyle. Usually artists were considered free-living, free-thinking bohemians. Greenwich Village has always been a home to these kindred folks. Artists frequently discuss the problems of the the world, and, often as not, recommend libertarian alternatives that catered to their own lusts, in place of   good advice. Bohemians should never be taken seriously. Their strange and promiscuous ways are not meant for society as a whole.

          Well, apparently nobody told anybody that, and the '60's saw the growth of space age media, and at the forefront of it were hippies, who had all adopted the lifestyles of bohemian artists. Artists like Bob Dylan brought Ginsberg on stage with him, and Allan even went into the studio. All the young artists had been influenced by their older beatnik brothers and sisters. Meanwhile , the media was growing at the speed of satellites. Messages that were only available in New York and San Francisco were suddenly being heard, loud and clear, in color, and in stereo, all over the earth.
           Everyone wanted to be an artist. Free love and all that goes with it. The schools filled up in the '60's with hippie school teachers, one of the few ways to avoid the draft, all acting like Bohemian artists. They then became the administrators, and now the anti-social practices of the beat generation and historic bohemianism is the way of the Country! The ideas of intellectuals are often too clouded with their own protests and rebellions to be  universally applicable.  This is another Fine Mess we have gotten ourselves into. Bohemian America. The Beats are still with us, though we have lost a few. They must find this all highly amusing. Don't you?

Neil Creighton

LINKS Naropa Institute: Ginsberg Memorial

©1998 Neil Creighton. All rights reserved.