In the fifties, America was divided into two camps. The “squares” were the first and the largest. This group was comprised of the President, Congress, and most other people. The second group was the “beats” or the “hip.” It was made up of a puny but vocal segment of the population and included writers like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Norman Mailer. (Mailer, a more macho incarnation of the "hip" than the other two, helped define the group with his notably-dated essay "The White Negro.") But before we continue tracing the historical development of “hip” and “square”—and the bearing of those two terms on our present era—I think I should make a small adjustment: rather than using the old-fashioned “square” and “beat” terminology, I will refer simply to “insider” and “outsider” culture, lest I risk sounding like some sort of raving baby boomer maniac. 

In the fifties—as we all know from watching Happy Days—conformity was hot.  But tensions seethed under the surface, until finally, in the sixties, society morphed from a place where it was “hip to be square” (in Huey Lewis’ immortal phrase) to a place where it was hip to be an outsider.  It was equally hip to be a good-natured prankster like Ken Kesey or to be a psychopath like Charles Manson.  Alienation was "in," and although the conformist pretending to be a non-conformist is someone we all rightfully despise, the truly alienated individual provides for good art.  The great Romantic poets and Bohemian painters are testament to this. And so, despite the manifold failings of the sixties and seventies, I think it is fair to say that decent art was being produced in all quarters.  Look at Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy—classic movies that explore alienation. And in the realm of literature, J.D. Salinger and Phillip Roth both flew off the shelves.  Throughout the forties and fifties, sublime jazz and hard-bop simmered and burned in the hip underground, and the electric guitar pyrotechnics of Jimi Hendrix provided a musical crown to the sixties.  Artistically, it was a very solid period, if a chaotic and uncomfortable one for nearly everyone.  But instability breeds creativity, whereas stability is fascistically dull.    

Yet today, like in the fifties, I propose that there is a cult of anti-alienation afoot.  Indeed, even at Dartmouth—nay, especially at Dartmouth—this cult is ascendant. The votaries of this cult don’t like it when Holden Caulfield gets upset about his brother’s death, drops out of school, and wanders around New York—they want him to “take some Prozac” and “stop whining.”  (If you’re skeptical, read the New York Times piece “Get a Life, Holden Caulfield” about how Generation Y kids react to The Catcher in the Rye. It’s subtly chilling.) Huckleberry Finn’s decision to help free Jim and say, “Alright then, I’ll go to hell,” would be equally foreign to them—who would want to go to hell, i.e. violate social conventions? But it’s not only their denial of culture that is troublesome, but the lackluster culture they create as a replacement. The anti-alienation cult is responsible for infantilized entertainment like Entourage and for the continued success of Michael Bay (of Transformers fame) and his fascination with PG-13 booty and explosions. This has caused the amount of young people attending independent movies to plummet—strictly the province of aging Gen X-ers nowadays. 

All in all, this resurrection of the “hip to be square” mentality—albeit stripped of the prudery and anti-drug attitude of the fifties—has been the death of art. My reasoning boils down to one first principle: to be adjusted and reconciled to life as it is lived on earth is to be boring.  Only those who are not well adjusted can offer any critique of society or learn any lessons that go beyond the basics of advancing a career and grabbing a girl.  A cursory scan of the lives of great poets and artists will automatically prove this point. To be plugged into the mainstream, to be an “insider,” is to wrap oneself in the snug blanket of contentment and go to sleep. Legions have slumbered so—might it also not be so radical to suggest that this is part of the appeal of frat culture?    

Today, in contrast to the sixties and seventies, outsider culture has no power.  When you see someone who has stylistically and spiritually embraced, say, the content of “Emo” music (or whatever the current equivalent of fatuous “sensitive” pseudo-punk rock is), you see someone who looks so impotent, so incapable of creating powerful art, of pursuing radical political change, or of embracing a spiritual or philosophical discipline that you would shudder with dread at becoming such a person.  The despair that defines Modern Art is another example—rather than creating art that expresses great ideas or the tragedy and joy of being human, artists do silly conceptual experiments that aren’t really that difficult or intellectually challenging to understand.  An artist will paint an entire canvas blue and beg the question, “Is this art?” A better question might be, “Who cares?”  Meanwhile, the mainstream, lowbrow insiders are virile, if short on intellectual and imaginative strength. Their energy level is simply higher.  They are on the side of time and tide.  Think about Michael Bay, Dane Cook, and every other popular rapper: they might be dumb but they are at least alive, unlike the Emo dude or the mopey neo-Goth.  It is merely a matter of balls and no balls.  And so I urge you to send the word forth from this time and place: help us get our balls back.   

It is my passionate and borderline religious conviction that outsider culture must be revitalized with great strength and great life-force in order to refresh our otherwise sterile culture. To risk speaking too broadly, what is needed is a conscious rejection of the insider’s goals—of money for money’s sake, of sex only for status, and of a dull, joyless life generally—and to replace them with an entirely new form of “Life as Art.”  We needn’t regard our economic circumstances—which enslave us in so many ways and buffer up the staid insider culture—as preventing us. Rather, those circumstances should be rejected as powerful social illusions and fetters. We can laugh them off.  

Our culture would be vastly enriched if many would attempt to do as James Joyce did in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce wrote, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”  There are certainly writers, directors, and artists out there who are doing this—who are taking up the call and blazing new trails. But will they be forced to blaze those trails alone?  Voices may cry out in the wilderness, but who is willing to venture out into that wilderness and respond?

This is the first installment of “The Buck Stops Here,” a recurring feature in which one of the editors of The Schoolyard will lay down some strict editorial thunder.