Along about 1958, a group of mostly white mostly men who would come to be called the Beat Generation were taking up typewriters and revolting against what they saw as the sterility of life in the Empire in their decade.

Their vision of hell was having to live Ward Cleaver’s life.

For the most part, this vision and their companion visions of a tentative heaven compelled them to live their lives unemployed. They took a lot of shit for that, but most of the shit rolled off their backs, in the moment at least. Though later, their champion Kerouac would end up a motherloving alcoholic conservative reactionary, unloved by liberals and conservatives alike–only loved by fellow poets, some of them, not including Truman Capote, for the hot fire of his early wordcraft.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The reason that the mostly white mostly men could live their lives mostly unemployed was simple.

It was that when they did dip their toes into the job waters, the pay was, in relative terms, spectacular.

You could join the Merchant Marine for a hitch and come back flushed with wealth by working class standards. You could go up a tower in the Northwest and watch for fires all summer, and the government themselves would reward you amply, funding the rest of a year for another round of soft personal revolution and revelation.

You may have been beat, but you could with a little savvy beat the system, giving as good as you got.

Twenty years later I read a lot about how to be savvy. There was the Mother Earth News back to the land angle … there was free love and free pancakes, somewhere to the West and recent past, they said. You didn’t even have to be a revolutionary, they said. You could just be an artist and capitalist on a very small independent scale. I read one by a cartoonist. Move to Cali, he said, where the rents are low and the sun shines on your utility bill all the time. Send out your stuff, wait for the checks to roll in, live on pin money in the meantime.

How was such a world possible?

“During the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency, from 1953 to 1961, the top marginal (tax) rate was 91 percent“.

Relative equality in the income distribution, that’s how.

No one, not even the richest slug living, actually paid anything like 90 percent of their income out in taxes. But they did pay, and much more than a third, or a fifth, or zero, or less than zero, like they would today.

That simple mechanism had a leveling effect on society at every level. Most everyone paid their fair share, and the fat cats stayed quite fatter than was healthy for their hearts. But the excess, the overflow, went exactly to places like the fire lookout towers of the Northwest, where it was found and collected by rebellious monks and poets like Gary Snyder and Kerouac himself, like manna from heaven.

In 1959, General President Ike stepped down, and he said some interesting things headed out the door.

“As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage”.

And, speaking about “the very structure of our society”, he said:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted”.

This Republican. This king of the Ward Cleavers. This war hero, this tax-and-spender. He saw the future.

He tried with great specificity to warn us.

We didn’t listen.

By the time of the last sad speech of Lyndon Johnson ten years later, the writing was on the wall.

One by one, the people who were listening, the real changemakers, were rooted out and gunned down, often literally, always metaphorically. Presidents and preachers. Radicals and visionaries. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Real wages plunged. Excess profits soared.

Tax rates tanked, and they took the average standard of living with them. The bodies of the sons of the poor came home in bags, and the sons of Bushes went to Yale.

Reagan busted the unions.

Clinton and Biden locked up the black men. Vietnam ended, so excuses for new wars had to be invented, to feed the Machine.

People slept under bridges and lived in their cars, but the ingrates failed to mention in their tales of woe how the military-industrial complex had blessed them, with a supercomputer in every pocket.

Nowadays in the aftermath, people are very fond of zombie movies.

Why would that be, do you think?

I suggest to you, in a beat tone of voice, that the Apocalypse has already happened, and that dreams and shows and games about the post-apocalyptic are the final refuge of distraction for drowning mice and burning rats.

Meanwhile, oligarchs and plutocrats flourish and frolic, hypnotized themselves by the soothing lotus of CNBC, or NPR, depending on their tastes.

So what’s your alternative, smart guy?

Anarchy.

Of a much better kind.

Now.