Saint Jack ...

... The Beat Generation, the Tea Party and the Meaning of 'Beat'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull, who is appropriately given a featured role.)

Here some serious qualifications are in order. Although 'beat' does have the connotation of 'beaten down' and 'exhausted,' this meaning is strictly secondary when compared to the term's fundamental meaning which is in the semantic vicinity of 'beatific,' 'beatitude,' The Eight Beatitudes, and the Beatific Vision (visio beata) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Kerouac cannot be understood apart from his Catholic upbringing. If we take Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) of On the Road as the main exemplars of beatness, there is nothing of the cool, jaded beatnik about them (the latter term an invention of the liberal media modeled on 'sputnik.') They are not cool, but hot, 'mad,' joyously affirmative. Every Kerouac aficionado thrills to the passage near the beginning of On the Road where Sal confesses: ". . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved . . . ." (p. 9)

Precisely right.