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Show Acting Alone Page 393 One fairly serious problem could very well come slithering in among all these happy ideological developments and spoil much of the resultant social good; and this problem would be something well worth considering in advance. There was a certain possibility that a cult of personality might congeal around the hack whose job it would be to bring forth the Great Battle to the public eye in its appropriately cynical form. The Elder felt fairly certain, however, that the country, in its current rightist counterinsurgent mood, could be relied upon to perform its unique mixture of cannibalism and assimilation, were a sufficiently noxious counterculture to try to re-emerge under the auspices of a single, pathologically energetic mouthpiece. This degenerate boy's energy, his admirable but tragically misdirected courage and effrontery, in being consumed, would contribute directly to the energy and courage of the resurgent Right, as in the mystical, mutually beneficial union between meal and cannibal. One has only to look at the vivacious smile on the face of a contemporary Chrysler dealer as he hooks his thumbs under his white vinyl belt, peers out from underneath his Beatle-bangs and describes his newest model as "far out," to gauge the amounts of energy that can be derived from a co-opted subculture, even after that subculture itself has been totally neutralized. It would be a re-enactment, in a sense, of the Kerouac myth (getting now a bit closer to, though still far short of, the Elder's own generation). See how the ravenous, peculiarly American adulation of his own devotees reduced the King of the Beatniks to an alcoholic wretch, a reactionary Mother-clinging clown, a devastatingly absurd parody of all the cultural affectations he'd championed? The only aspect of his well-publicized death that had the slightest |