AMERICA has become an antiseptic bourgeois blow-dried Disneyland populated by mannequins and robots. Grit, seediness, earthiness are wiped clean. The prose, the pose, the look and stance of the literati, constricted and refined, lacking authenticity and edge, style replacing substance, embodies this.
Jack Kerouac spoke of his horror of the life in Times Square, yet he went back again and again to look at it. He plunged himself into the realities of life. (Now if he saw the place he'd be truly horrified.)
There's no place in today's plastic air-brushed world for the reality of a Janis Joplin, with her earthy tones and splotchy face. Today, real talent is not even counted-- only the slickness of the surface.
Today's endorsed writers aren't Outsiders, but consummate Insiders; the world's winners; the most successful class of the most successful civilization ever: witty, affluent, and hip.
Yet truth throughout history has come more from those on the margins able to look objectively at the fakery of the slick Carnival of the "Best."
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