Figure 11.1 The second half of a downswing of “WE.”
Figure 11.2 Mindset and values of a “ME” mindset.
| MINDSET | ME |
| BE #1. SECOND PLACE IS THE FIRST LOSER. | |
Values |
Rejects |
• Big dreams • Individual expression • Freedom • Feeling good, looking good • Rose-colored lenses • Personal achievement |
• Small actions • Conformity • Self-sacrifice • Self-denial • Personal responsibility • Reality check |
Figure 11.3 Alpha voices leading into a “ME” cycle.
| ALPHA VOICES LEADING INTO A “ME” (1953–1963) ME | |
Literature: Charles Baudelaire’s poems republished. Playboy makes its debut. J. D. Salinger writes Catcher in the Rye Jack Kerouac writes On the Road |
MESSAGE: Reckless, uninhibited heroes breaking free from restraints of polite society are what we want. Flaunt your freedom. |
Technology: The first Corvette |
MESSAGE: Whoever drives me is free to be young, free, and beautiful forever Life is an adventure. Hop in. |
Music: Rock and Roll is born |
MESSAGE: Loosen up and move around. It’s not obscene—it feels good and it’s fun! |
In the second half of the weary Downswing of a “We,” doubts and second thoughts begin to whisper, “Why are we doing all this?”
Although Charles Baudelaire died in 1867, his republished poems became an Alpha Voice that inspired a weary “beat” generation in 1953, halfway down a “We,” when society had pushed its dream of “working together for the common good” all the way to social obligation and halfway back down again. Under the weary, gray sky of the thirtieth year of “We,” the Alpha Voices of “Me” created a tropical island in the mind.
ME And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, “It is time to get high! So as not to be martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”1
CC Image
Charles Baudelaire’s republished one-hundred–year-old poems ignited our long-suppressed hunger for a little “me time” in 1953. Interestingly, Baudelaire was born in 1821, just two years before the Zenith of a “Me,” so that “Me” perspective (1823–1843) would have informed his earliest values. Sadly, the tipping point into “We” came when he was just twenty-two, so Baudelaire became an out-of-step, countercultural, minority “Me” voice in French literature during the Upswing of that “We” to its Zenith (1843–1863).
So outraged was French society at what Baudelaire had written that he, his publisher, and even the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals.2 Nearly one hundred years later, on May 11, 1949, during the Downswing of a “We” back toward a “Me” again, Baudelaire was vindicated, the judgment against him was officially reversed, and his banned poems were reinstated in France. Unfortunately, he was dead.
1953: Alpha Voices in Technology, Halfway Down the “We.”
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Cars: In 1953 they are heavy, bloated, and butt-ugly. But guess what arrives on the scene this year? The very first Corvette! And every one of them is a convertible. The message of that car was clear: “Whoever drives me is going to be young and free and beautiful forever, the sun shining always on them, and the wind blowing through their hair. Who needs a roof when it’s never going to rain? Who needs a backseat? ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane,’ and the open road are all that matter. Pull up to the curb alongside her, swing open the door, and say, ‘Life is an adventure, girl. Hop in.’”
Literature: Playboy made its debut in 1953 with a naked Marilyn Monroe on the cover of issue number one. Society gasped and was embarrassed, never suspecting that “free love” would be the mantra of its heroes in just a few more years.
The books that emerged during this Alpha window showed us reckless, uninhibited heroes who broke free from the constraints of polite society and flaunted their freedoms in the face of whoever might be watching. Baudelaire lives again.
Remember Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s thinly disguised diary of his cross-country journey with Neal Cassady, On the Road? Remember Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye?
Each of these tormented, self-willed heroes made our eyes pop open as we gasped, “He’s a wild man! He does whatever he wants and doesn’t worry about the consequences! He doesn’t obey the rules!”
Kerouac’s Sal Paradise said,
ME As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the dogs barked and Dean danced with Frankie, I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that phone and added all kinds of new ones, and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk.3
The Granger Collection, NYC
Salinger’s Holden Caulfield says, “Sleep tight, ya morons!”; “Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell”; and “I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.” 4
We had never read anything like these books, so we purchased three million copies of Kerouac’s book and sixty-five million of Salinger’s and then found a young man named James Dean to play this tormented, reckless, and self-willed hero in a movie called Rebel without a Cause. Dean played this same character twice more in East of Eden and Giant before driving his Porsche Spyder into a head-on collision at the age of twenty-four.
Tom Palumbo, New York, NY
Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose gives us a sense of how it feels when an Alpha Voice of “Me” begins to whisper in the ear of a been-doing-the right-thing-for-way-too-long “We.”
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical, and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven5
PhotoDune / Yuri Arcurs
Unable to reconcile himself to the “Me Generation” that blossomed all around him, Kerouac drank himself to death. These are the opening lines of his obituary in the New York Times, just twelve years after his book shook us like an earthquake.
ME Jack Kerouac, Novelist, Dead; Father of the Beat Generation: Author of On the Road was Hero to Youth—Rejected Middle-Class Values
Jack Kerouac, the novelist who named the Beat Generation and exuberantly celebrated its rejection of middle-class American conventions, died early yesterday of massive abdominal hemorrhaging in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hospital. He was 47 years old.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time,” he wrote in On the Road, a novel he completed in only three weeks but had to wait seven years to see published.
When it finally appeared in 1957, it immediately became a basic text for youth who found their country claustrophobic and oppressive.6
Kerouac’s On the Road became the bible of the Beats, later to be called the Beatniks, who in just eight short years would evolve into the Hippies.
But according to Kerouac’s authorized biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road was misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, “but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author.”7 Kerouac was trying to make everything holy. The very term ‘beat,’ for ‘Beatitude of Christ’ kind of came to Kerouac at a Catholic church. And when I edited his diaries, really almost every page, he drew a crucifix or a prayer to God, or asking Christ for forgiveness.
Yes, the Alpha Voices of literature often pay a heavy price for their immortality: Salinger went into deep seclusion for the rest of his life, and Kerouac drank himself to death.
But notice how the number-one song of 1953 is very similar to the songs of the previous thirty years. Literature and technology are whispering of changes to come, but not music—not yet.
1953: Song of the Year: “Vaya con Dios” (“May God Be with You”), Les Paul and Mary Ford |
MESSAGE |
Now the time has come to part, |
“I’m sad because I don’t have what I want. |
As 1953 spiraled toward 1958, a new musical genre, rock and roll, was born. No one knew quite what to think of it. Was it dirty and inappropriate, or was it lighthearted and free? The TV networks were so unsure how to handle it, they would show only the upper body of Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley on national TV. The public was simultaneously titillated and repulsed, fascinated and confused.
Just six months prior to the beginning of 1958, a young crooner said,
WE They are way off-base with their onstage contortions. I don’t think anything excuses the suggestive gyrations that some rock-and-rollers go in for. . . . I belong to the finger-snapping school myself. That, and a little tapping of the feet, is enough to satisfy my soul. And it seems to satisfy my audiences, too.
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Frank Sinatra, the king of the crooners, declared, “Boone is better than Elvis. He has better technique and can sing several types of songs. He’s the one who will last longer.”8
Although rock and roll wasn’t yet the choice of the mainstream majority, we were were not yet at the tipping point either. Indeed, most of the top-twenty songs for 1958 sounded similar to the whining crooners of previous years, but take a look at number four and seventeen—rock and roll.
A solid thirty of the Top 100 embrace the upbeat, new “Me” outlook called rock and roll, and another dozen songs lean gently toward it while keeping the other foot planted safely in crooner whine.
Library of Congress
National Archives and Records Administration
Two years later we elected a good-looking young president with a pretty wife, and on May 25, 1961, just prior to the tipping point into a new “Me,” President John F. Kennedy addressed a special joint session of Congress with these words:
ME |
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind. . . . |
Essentially, we said, “Let’s go to the Moon!”
“Why?”
“Because we can do anything! Youth! Beauty! Vitality! Energy! Nothing can stop us!”
ME |
Go-go-go Johnny, |
But Dr. Albert Schweitzer, one of the last great voices of the fading “We” said,
WE |
In the hopes of reaching the Moon, men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.9 |
With society rushing ever more quickly toward the tipping point, aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, “America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.” 10
So individuality and freedom of expression are paramount in a “Me,” whereas working together for the common good is paramount in a “We.”
“Me” and “We”—both are beautiful, but each have a dark side. The “Me,” like the gravity of the moon, creates tides of pride that rise higher and higher. The “We,” like the momentum of water, creates waves of polarity that crash upon the shores of society. The key to riding the waves is to understand the forces that move the masses and know approximately when a society will reverse and head back the other direction.
