Nothing’s changed since Howl
Long-haired and unkempt hipsters, skulking across lower-middle class Bay Area neighborhoods and lamenting the human condition, their own condition, and the condition of the volumes of dead and dying poetry that they bought discounted at a coffee shop, while around them the world keeps turning too quickly for them who spend their days thinking about what can, should, be done and never doing it. A vivid picture of the wasted minds of a generation wondering what care they should cast to their futures when their presents and their pasts are clouded with the indignities of being the “other,” the “other” of which they do not know because they don’t waste their thoughts on the incipient notion of us and them, they don’t even waste their thoughts at all, they experience what they can and dispel of the rest as unknowable; no waste, no mess, no cleanup required.
Those tendencies which occupy the minds and TV’s of the masses and take their place as society’s deepest faults are lamentable, of course, but the iniquities that permeate every aspect of American life extend beyond university courses and marches. Racism, income inequality, disease — these are buzzwords. They fly across the minds and screens of 330 million people but what can these people really do? The hipsters know.
The city lights draw them out of the inky midnight suburbs and into themselves, because every young person is lying until they move to a city. They’ve been lying to their parents their entire lives, because it’s been two and a half decades since mom and dad felt the lossless ravages of 20. They don’t understand. CNN and MSNBC and — God forbid — Fox News have no place in their worlds except as punchlines and proof that their way of life is both dying and dignified, as it always has been since the white men they idolize first put pen to paper while JFK tried to send them to Vietnam.
In the city they are locked into freedom; no one’s ever looked unsophisticated while cozied up with a cigarette against the bookstore’s outer coat, peeling posters for indie rock shows and poetry readings that never happened, and they’re positive that no one’s ever looked good in the suburban dog park. Menlo Park, no thank you — ‘those fucking techies are ruining a good place,’ they’ll tell you, glancing up only momentarily from a Facebook event that their iPhones just took care to remind them about. They recycle and have a succulent garden and take pictures of the trees and the Bridge for posterity. They’re not the problem.
But — you may argue — Apple isn’t trying to take over the world, and Google works for your self-betterment, not the other way around. Tesla really cares about you. No matter what the billboards at BART stops say, Elon Musk’s prerogative is not saving the human race from itself or whatever flashy quote he throws to Wired this week. $13.9 billion in individual net worth (this number probably fluctuates based on how recently SpaceX has dropped a rocket into the ocean) does not exist in a world where innovation is fueled by selflessness. It seems that the world from which the Bay Area’s technical utopia seeks refuge is the very world which enables its existence; as long as App store millionaires can feel that they’re doing their part by driving electric cars and terraforming Mars is more important to the public than accepting refugees, then Linkedin will still be worth as much as Paraguay. The hipsters don’t drive Teslas and their philanthropic foundations aren’t worth millions, but they ground themselves in a way that no one with a Github can.
The fascists are protesting again. Wait, no — the burning buildings and the secret police dressed all in black and rage are on my side, the good side, the side of peace. Take that, fascists. And fuck you too, Steve Bannon. Fascists live in the city too, but not because of the freedom or the culture or any of the right reasons, but because the long-haired and unkempt hipsters live there and need to be watched. The protests continue, and the socially conscious tune in on cable news networks, and the really socially conscious burn their way through a joint while they watch. There isn’t any right way to consume an entire city in fire and angst, but this is certainly the best way, we’re sure. Didn’t this happen in the 60’s? Those were the days; acid and the Dead and you could sleep outside and no one had a job. Now the Ginsbergs and the Kerouacs are waylaid by Betsy Devos and Bill Nye the Science Guy, chewed into an intellectual pulp and spit out with a degree in business and a nice set of hobbies. No one writes poems in the city, they write applications.
They were born 50 years too late, because 50 years ago they would have been different when it mattered, when the lines between good and the evil were blurred by superficial optimism and the ignoble belief that we’d be okay in the end of it all. Now they’re trapped, left drowning in a double Americano and thoughts of repression, yearning to be accepted as revolutionaries, as the art nouveau of the human makeup, but instead they have to go to school, wear a belt, and make something. Remembrances of a past they’ve read about, written about, even, are biting and melancholy, but it’s safer to postulate than it is to change. And so they grow their beards and they think.
They occupy artistic spaces and push the boundaries of what’s okay. They shift paradigms the same way that Uber and Antifa and Donald do, by raising eyebrows. And for all the challenges associated with life on the cutting edge, there just isn’t enough space for us all to be in the middle. Someone’s gotta do it, because without the coffee shops and the beards we’d have nothing to pull us back into ourselves. Conscientious criticism disguised as precocious wisdom is still conscientious, after all — it isn’t ignorant, and it certainly isn’t burning a building down. The counterculture dies with the hipsters, as they are its intellectual safeguard and its bridge to quasi-normalcy. Their blogs may not get a fascist out of office, but if enough people light enough matches, a real fire could start.
