notes-shineThroughSatire

In our society, everything is subjected to irony. Due to the way our mass communication system works, in many cases, the masses see satirized versions of things without ever seeing the original things. A prime example from the present time (2008) is The Daily Show, a comedic show which some of my friends seem to get their news (and news commentary) from. I have heard it said by critics of "the system" that The Daily Show is the only critic voice to which many people are exposed.

Perhaps one characteristic of a successful ideology or subculture is that it can "shine through satire". By this I mean that, even if all you see is the satirized version, you extrapolate the original version -- and hence the original ideology or subculture can win converts through mass media even if mass media insists on only showing people the satire.

Consider this quote from Wikipedia about the Beat generation, vs. Beatniks (Beatnik was coined as a term making fun of Beats):

" While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in Pogo[31]), others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic posers. Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild. Bruce Conner also stated: "I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist... If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam."[32]

But for many young people, the popular image of the beatnik was their first contact with the subject. As Glenn O'Brien put it, "Maynard was sloppy, lazy, and did not respond to the mainstream of varsity culture. Maynard was post-romantic, a dreaming realist. I didn't know what a bohemian was, but I knew one when I saw one. As a preteen, I sensed that a beatnik was what I wanted to be. Maynard G. Krebs was a satire on beatniks, but that didn't matter because beatness shone through."[33] Thousands of young people on college campuses and high schools came to regard themselves as beats or beatniks in the late 1950s and very early 1960s and many of them were in sympathy with the popular stereotype[citation needed].

[edit] "Hippie" era

Some time during the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to The Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie." "