From the Beat Reader:
He first met William Burroughs in 1944, when Burroughs was trying to sell a [stolen] sawed off shotgun and some morphine syrettes. Burroughs took Huncke, according to biographer Ted Morgan, as a sort of ‘Virgilian guide to the lower depths. . .[He] was the first hipster. . .an antihero pointing the way to an embryonic counter-culture, which would arise from this Times Square world of hustlers.. . .
Allan Ginsberg, on Huncke:
[Huncke’s] prose proceeds from his midnight mouth, that is, literal story-telling, just talking–for that reason it is both awkward and pure. . .In his anonymity & holy Creephood in New York he was the sensitive vehicle for a veritable new consciousness which spread to others sensitized by their dislocation from History and then to entire generations.
I will note that Brecht’s Three Penny Opera depends on the anti-hero, Mackie Messer, immortalized as Mack the Knife, who is a two bit criminal, thug, and cutthroat.
It is quite possible to look at all the unwashed masses of hippies as direct descendants of fuckups from the worst parts of New York. They preach love, but you don’t have to talk to an average hippy too long before you start hearing stories of theft, abuse, grotesque selfishness, violence, and even sociopathy.
One rich girl I know (Ah, you’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it) told me a story of being on the road with the Dead, and they have a ritual–I forget the name–where LSD is fed forcibly and involuntarily to someone while they are held down. She tripped for three days. I think she still has PTSD from it, although I don’t think she can admit it, since she still loves the Dead, and Deadheads.
Going to Berkeley, I ran into more Deadheads than I can count. By and large, the hard core ones are thieves, drug pushers, liars, and complete flakes. While I was there a group of them built some pipe bombs which were found before they could do anything with them, and of that group one later broke into the Chancellors house with a machete, and was shot dead by a cop.
Large things come from small things. This is why it is important to trace beginnings, because even large things carry the mark of their beginnings.
Our culture values hard work, honesty, civic mindedness, piety, family, courage, and it used to value frugality, which was made impractical by Fed policy of steadily diluting the value of our money.
To be “counter” to this, you need to value dishonesty, disengagement or active opposition to everything positive anyone is trying to do, laziness, radical selfishness, cowardice and prodigality.
This IS the “counterculture”. They are reasonably open about it. Watch Rent, and look for all this. The frustrated “auteur” is in nearly all cases a radical narcissist, who merely needs people from time to time.
What we see in the Democrats today–and in the principled rot in many Republicans–is all an outflow from people like Howard Huncke.
And I might comment that Beat has roughly the same connotation as Punk. Kerouac later tried to claim it referred to beatitude and similar words, but in the original use it referred to being tired, worn out, defeated, done. To being the dregs of society, the bottom, the gutter, the forgotten. Because this is what they were. This is who they hung around with. And nearly all of them were homosexuals. Burroughs was married for a time, but he shot his wife–accidentally, we are told, but perhaps accidentally on purpose. Kerouac was bi, Cassady was bi, Ginsberg was gay.
And the term punk came from the slang for what we would in America call a prison bitch. They were the ones who wound up getting fucked up the ass in jail. The losers. The bottom of the heap, who, understandably, were filled with rage.
Ginsberg actually worked with The Clash, which was highly appropriate.
Truth is knowable. What exists, can always be understood, or at least understood better. Clear thinking is possible. Clear language is possible. Principle based thinking can still be performed. Nonsense can be rejected, as needed with anger and even rage.
These things need to be said. And I doubt very much they can be said enough, much less too much.