The Only Rebellion Around
"Talk - endless talk - forms the warp and woof of Beat existence. Talk and the kind of exhibitionism that almost always moves the average man to uncertainty and embarrassment are the Beat's weapons against the world. Mostle he is incapable of anything else. Beats are seldom ignoramuses - wild or not, theirs is a world of ideas and a suprising number of them have at least some college education. But Dr. Francis J Rigney, a young San Fansisco psychiatris who has recently completed a massive study of the Beat Generation based on members of the North Beach community, feels that at least 60% of the beats with whom he communicated were so psychotic or crippled by tensions, anxieties and neuroses as to be incapable of making their way in the ordinary competitive world of men, and that another 20% were however just within the boundries of emotional stability.
What sort of heir are these to the long and stirring history of unpopular dissent in America? The 1950's, granted, have not been years calculated to produce a Thomas Paine or to insipite a crusade for rights of the working man. The Beat Generation has achieved its effects in part be default and in part as a result of the very prosperity it rejects. But, default or no, who ever heard of rebels so pitiful, so passive, so full of childish rages and nasty, masochistic cries? What would an old-time Wobbly have thought if he had encountered one on his way out of town after burning a bunkhouse or dynamiting a tipple? What would Thomas Jefferson, that advocate of the cleansing qualities of revolution, have been moved to say if he had known rebelliousness in America would come to this?
A hundred million squares must ask themselves: 'What have we done to deserve this?'"
- Paul O'Neil, The Only Rebellion Around
Life Nov. 30 (1959)
What sort of heir are these to the long and stirring history of unpopular dissent in America? The 1950's, granted, have not been years calculated to produce a Thomas Paine or to insipite a crusade for rights of the working man. The Beat Generation has achieved its effects in part be default and in part as a result of the very prosperity it rejects. But, default or no, who ever heard of rebels so pitiful, so passive, so full of childish rages and nasty, masochistic cries? What would an old-time Wobbly have thought if he had encountered one on his way out of town after burning a bunkhouse or dynamiting a tipple? What would Thomas Jefferson, that advocate of the cleansing qualities of revolution, have been moved to say if he had known rebelliousness in America would come to this?
A hundred million squares must ask themselves: 'What have we done to deserve this?'"
- Paul O'Neil, The Only Rebellion Around
Life Nov. 30 (1959)