Words Colliding
America was born one Thursday evening when the beat movement collapsed under the weight of its arrogance, chewing on its own guts, believing it had reached the peak of Western culture as black clad monks tripped on mescaline and proclaimed answers to a riddle, the one the old Greeks, in all their wisdom, expressed in high-flying utterances,
words colliding…
some claimed to have discovered the First Principle—the perfect, un-embodied,unchanging, and atemporal Truth—only to have it stolen by the Church, which changed it into an impersonal,
invisible
and UNAPPROACHABLE God—a God who
would never fit the strict code of morphine-shooting, heroin-snorting, and pot-smoking hipsters armed with an exalted vocabulary and a heavenly language, who gathered in smoke-filled clubs in New York and San Francisco, unaware of a movement that would soon shake the ground on which they stood;
a movement created by long haired kids who had little regard for their parent’s music—the smooth, cool backbeat rhythms of jazz—that had been the symbol of rebellion against a society that would never be hip to the cats who hung out in venues that now were about to receive their own sons and daughters and electric guitars and dreams of peace; dreams triggered by an unwinnable war that took place in a jungle far from the clubs where beatniks still recited poetry
and snapped fingers
and looked inward
and shot up,
and died of coolness… and heroin,
blind to the wave of bra-burning free loving teenagers in bell-bottoms, who had not yet been numbed by their father’s drugs of choice,
nor been confused by Dr. Leary’s cosmic visions; the visions of a god who demands nothing, except that thou
turneth on,
tuneth in,
and droppeth out,
nor fueled by the opiate-clouded dreams of the Beats, but by smoke from burned draft cards and flying freak flags, which confused hipster parents who, in a not too far future, would embrace Nixon as he shook hands with Chairman Mao in a photo-op that was drenched in the blood of thirty million Chineseintellectuals and peasants who had stood in the way as progress created theperfect society—a PEOPLE’S PARADISE basking in the light of the rising Sun