Visions of Raven: Jack Kerouac and Film Noir 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

One of Jack Kerouac's last written pieces "After Me the Deluge" shares her fury. In it, he denounces "the politicians, the radicals, the cops and hoods, tax collectors and vandals," warning them, "It's much like what do you think a parasite is thinking when he's sucking on the belly of a whale or the back of a shark? . . . 'Where did this big, stupid brute get all that blood . . . How come he's so strong and free, not knowing how to live like I do?' So with human parasites feeding on their juicy national, personal, political, or racial host." ⁵³ While his country self destructs in wars, Kerouac sizes up the times in Vanity of Duluoz at the end of his life, "in 1967 as I'm writing this what possible feeling can be left in me for an 'America' that has become such a potboiler of broken convictions, messes of rioting and fighting in streets, hoodlumism, cynical administration of cities and states, suits and neckties the only feasible subject, grandeur all gone into the mosaic mesh of Television where people screw their eyes at all those dots and pick out hallucinated images of their own contortion and are fed ACHTUNG!" ⁵⁴

"He identified himself with America," Allen Ginsberg told an interviewer, "He realized if he were put down that meant America was going to move through an immense amount of suffering and would inflict a lot of suffering on the world. He realized that his personal tragedy of being rejected by the official arbiters of culture meant that America was in for a bad, bad scene. The vision of America that he and Whitman had was going to be a flop and there was going to be great destruction." ⁵⁵

That vision was paved by a lifelong experience. Like the stars of film noirs, Kerouac knew the forces of destruction and suffering. "Society is organized cruelty and nothing else." ⁵⁶ Washing dishes in World War 2, on a freighter full of TNT, made him question, "Who are these smiling Satans making all the money out of this? Whether they're Russian, American, Japanese, British, French or Chinese?" ⁵⁷ knowing, "There oughta be a better way to die in this world than in the service of Ammunitioneers." ⁵⁸ Taking that realization, after the war, the city, the murder and jail, he began to wander.

This Gun For Hire follows the circular trail from Raven's start, winding back up the tower to the source. Corruption began with the president of Nitro Chemical who employed a pushover, who paid off a killer to do the murder, steal and take the fall. Both Raven and Cody in White Heat were killed up there by police. Cody remained unrepentant, defiant to the end, Raven too, dying, asking Veronica Lake, "You didnŐt tell the cops, did you?" knowing full well her allegiance to them. He may have done the right thing taking out the president, but he didn't do it for the police society.

Jack Kerouac had enough experience with police and their mentality not to bow to them. The closest he came to their side was when he was a barracks guard, described in On the Road. "It was a horrible crew of men, men with cop-souls--I gulped at the prospect of making an arrest." ⁵⁹ "They were always sitting around on their asses; they were proud of their jobs. They handled their guns and talked about them. They were itching to shoot somebody." ⁶⁰ "I never had a gun in my life. It scared me even to load one. He desperately wanted to make arrests--This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do." ⁶¹ As Allen Ginsberg reminds, "If you read his essays like Lonesome Traveller, they were really attacks on the police state. Always. The whole thrust of his work was toward individualism and freedom." ⁶² In The Dharma Bums when Kerouac traveled the roads and rails free as an enlightened wanderer, "The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit in front of a nice television set in a madhouse--I saw so many cop cruising cars and they were looking at me suspiciously: sleek, well-paid cops in brand new cars with all that expensive radio equipment to see that no bhikku slept in his grove tonight." ⁶³ All the more illuminating at the end of On the Road when they get to Mexico and Kerouac observes, "Such lovely policemen God hath never wrought in America. No suspicions, no fuss, no bother: he was the guardian of the sleeping town, period." ⁶⁴ Beyond political corruption, betrayed by their laws and wars enforced by hired guns, Kerouac believes in the vision of a dream America, period.

Next page: "I'm taking orders from Heaven"