Jack Kerouac, Neo-Con
In the spirit of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons, who delight in reaching back in time and claiming great figures as devotees of their orders centuries before the orders were invented, I claim Jack Kerouac as a neo-conservative.
I think there's a better case to be made for it than, say, the one that claimes Moses as a Freemason. While most of the beats moved into the radical left in the 1960s, playing elder statesman to the hippies, Kerouac supported the Vietnam War and became a devotee of William F. Buckley, the most L7 man in America.
In Ted Berrigan's 1968 "Paris Review" interview (PDF alert) with Kerouac, Berrigan asks him about Ginsberg's "radical political involvement," and Kerouac explains:
[elipsis in original]
Earlier he told Berrigan he had gone his own way from the rest of the Beats because he liked to "not have my mind proselytized, ad infinitum. They've even started crucifying chickens in happenings; what's the next step? An actual crucifixion of a man."
Perhaps he was contrarian to the end; a non-conformist in the truest sense; but his strong working-class Catholic New England background suggests this was a pure strain in him. In “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” an article for Playboy, he had written:
I think there's a better case to be made for it than, say, the one that claimes Moses as a Freemason. While most of the beats moved into the radical left in the 1960s, playing elder statesman to the hippies, Kerouac supported the Vietnam War and became a devotee of William F. Buckley, the most L7 man in America.
In Ted Berrigan's 1968 "Paris Review" interview (PDF alert) with Kerouac, Berrigan asks him about Ginsberg's "radical political involvement," and Kerouac explains:
I’m pro-American and the radical political involvements seem to tend elsewhere ... The country gave my Canadian family a good break, more or less, and we see no reason to demean said country.
[elipsis in original]
Earlier he told Berrigan he had gone his own way from the rest of the Beats because he liked to "not have my mind proselytized, ad infinitum. They've even started crucifying chickens in happenings; what's the next step? An actual crucifixion of a man."
Perhaps he was contrarian to the end; a non-conformist in the truest sense; but his strong working-class Catholic New England background suggests this was a pure strain in him. In “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” an article for Playboy, he had written:
I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his own begotten son to it. ... So you people don’t believe in God. So you're all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels?
