To Comfort The Hated, And Hate The Comfortable.

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 

              madness, starving hysterical naked, 

       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 

              looking for an angry fix, 

       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 

              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- 

              ery of night, 

       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 

              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 

              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 

              contemplating jazz, 

       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 

              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- 

              ment roofs illuminated, 

       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 

              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 

              among the scholars of war, 

       who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 

              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the 

              skull, 

       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 

              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 

              to the Terror through the wall, 

       who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 

              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 

       who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 

              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 

              torsos night after night 

****

I don’t particularly care for Ginsberg, but even with the nauseating overuse of this poem, it’s hard not to be impressed by the raw vitality of it. It’s a great ripping chunk of hairy, drug-fucked craziness, and it’s no wonder the children of the 60s adopted it (even though it wasn’t written about them). They didn’t know what they were looking for, and a lot of them were misguided woolly-headed ideologues, but damn it, they were looking anyway, and anyone who said they couldn’t melt their brains with peyote and fuck Hells Angels couldn’t stop them.

Ginsberg died in 1997, just soon enough to miss the horrors of reality television becoming memetic. Still, if he was still alive it probably would have finished him off.

Reality television is Howl in full retreat with its pants around its ankles, hopping away like Benny Hill. What could be more opposite to pressing the raw nerve of conscious experience as sitting at home watching the actions of other people? Television as fiction is often crass and unnecessary, but this attempt to create real drama is far more scary. Not even mushrooms can be fed their own waste – they need fresh shit. The 21^st century brain, apparently, does not.

Reality television is successful primarily because it is a comfort to the stupid. Everyone is special, everyone is examinable, everyone has inner motives that need to be plumbed. Paper-thin and product of selective editing it may be, but everyone has character – a hero, a villain, a misunderstood loner. They are special in their blandness, outrageous in their minor scandals, evil in their mild irritations, heroic in their fish-eyed goodwill.

This process could be read as a massive double entendre, but it is deadly serious. It doesn’t seem to reveal to people that their celluloid wet dreams are hollow, instead it affirms their belief that they are indeed someone extraordinary. Instant stardom, created through no virtue, and the total devaluation of character. Is there anything more profoundly depressing than a huge snaking clog of youth squealing for the camera, thousands of overgrown fetuses in denim, united in their quest to audition to be the next sensationally vapid media turd?

Are there any real minds any more?

And may we have a few more who are a bridge over mankind?

Please?

****

i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by torpor, well-fed, well-shod livestock,

dragging themselves through a concrete jungle looking for a spike to sit upon,

whose immovable glacial misery still waits to become itself, patiently crouching inevitable until “what is a star?” is drawn from their throats

whose endless middling comforts extend as far as to shame the soul, but not to damage

who bared their ruby starfruit and inner secrets to the Almighty’s Markets, the invisible hand latex-clad, lubed up, clinically examining the state of their union

who passed through universities as cellular automata, absorbing, processing, regurgitating, privy only to the very fringes of reason, trickling out venereal

who sit in await of the wagon-trains of circumstance

whose worst secrets are indiscretions, and whose indiscretions are the very meanness in sinning which cries out to the Lord

whose pockmarked shorts bear the paint stripes of a thousand fences and roads straddled

who bend backward in supplication before their Yahweh, and cannot bend forwards

whose fear is palpable, snarling, cornered, miserable, savage but defanged, vital but baseless

who dreamt while waking

and while sleeping

and everywhere in between

the unspeakable cunts