Fear and Loathing in a Clockwork Age

Ah! The noble search for identity. That intangible achievement that all artists lust after and lay in torment over. And during the post war era that struggle reached incredible magnitudes. The world cried out for legions of anti-heroes, who were only virtuous in their unapologetic and brutally honest lack of virtue. And the art world provided as many counter culture messiahs as was needed to "Damn the Man". The Beats, hippies, and punks are evidence that behind the white picket fence of suburbia lay an America that wanted more out of life than the sugar coated portrayals of domesticity and patriotism it received from pop culture. The unfortunate side of authenticity often lead to the conclusion that autonomy was an impossible dream and that just mere existence required an individual to compromise his integrity. The post-war generation developed an interesting love-hate relationship with the mass culture of it’s time. Some, like Andy Warhol, embraced the inevitability of mass culturalization in order to control the beast (yes, this is a reference to Revelations). While others recognized the American Dream as being a hypocrisy and so chose the Gold

Postwar America was extremely prosperous from the stand point of the middle class white suburbanite. The only problem was that not everyone fit that mold. And even those who were born into that environment often found it’s conventions limiting and unfufilling. At home the issues facing minorities went, for the most part, ignored. Jim Crow laws were allowed to stand in the south until major Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation to be unconstitutional. But even still that did not solve the problem of good old fashioned prejudice, which was as rampant as ever. And not every woman was delighted to once again be her husband’s house servant. The war machine of WW2 had given many women their first pay check. And the sense of power and freedom even menial jobs provided was not something many wanted to trade in for being cooped up in a split level tract house with only the companionship of a vacuum cleaner and a screaming five year old.

Examples of such beliefs can be found in the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet. Where Hamlet recognizes that only while he is inactive does he have possibilities. As soon as he commits to any one course of action his fate is set. Oberon, in his speeches expresses similar sentiments. The last stanza equates emptiness with a state of total knowledge, which is destroyed once we become something. "Everything", which is the opposite of the void, is ignorant. While the void, or the starting place, is Teaching. The implicat

Some topics in this essay:
Board Education, Golden Eternity, Damn Beats, Hamlet Hamlet, Age Ah, City Blues, Wei Hipkiss, Postwar America, PrincipleKrimp4 Kerouac, Buddhism Eastern, golden eternity, beat generation, blissful void, allen ginsberg, mere existence, jack kerouac,