Geist, Guise and Guitar

Many students today are more interested in examples to follow than ideas to promote. They look for styles of life that will allow them the substance or illusion of personality. They search for external marks that may validate a hoped-for internal distinctiveness. It is a shortbreathed desire, eager for quick and dramatic manifestation, for outbursts of resentment or ecstasy rather than long-range expectations.

And it is this situation which explains the curious popularity of beatnik styles among such students. That somewhere there are genuine beats I do not doubt, just as somewhere there may be genuine hipsters. But anyone familiar with an American campus these days knows that, most of the time, what one encounters is a mimicry of the beat style—and one, it is no surprise, that comes almost effortlessly. Despite the hostile sermonizing it has evoked, the beat style has not been shunned by the campus squares; rather, it has been embraced by them. There is a general cultural...