I'm on a reread of "The Dharma Bums." One thing I am enjoying about it is that it allows me to hang out with some people who also don't fit in here in America.
Now, don't get me wrong, these guys are clearly assholes, and I wouldn't fit in with them either, but they express wonderful things like these lines from Japhy:
when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values..."
... now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.
Whether that was something said by Gary Snyder or in part embellished by Kerouac for the Japhy character, I don't know, but isn't that marvelous?
I have come to understand that it is hard to actually believe in freedom, and it is usually a mask for other values. The most common is prosperity, which is material ease and not being socially humiliated... I remember reading a comment online where someone said the way you can translate the "freedom" a conventional American talks about is "the freedom to exploit," and then contradictions start to make sense. Americans hate your freedom.
Well, my autistic, literal brain tried at one point to make freedom a value, and I tried to build the capacities for freedom in my students. I remember saying things like "learning to choose is so important that even the wrong choice is better than no choice."
But all you have to do is look at the growth of home owner's associations to realize that Americans don't want freedom.
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