This is why even Barack can't save us now...

There I was, just a walkin down the street, far too animatedly mouthing the lyrics to a song from Where You Want to Be when I saw without a doubt the most undeniable sign of our culture's demise I have ever seen. A pimple-faced geek of an NYU freshman (unmistakable as such with a bookstore bag in one hand and an NYUCard lanyard in the other), smoking a black and mild, wearing a t-shirt with road lines painted down the center, and the words "beatific soul jack kerouac on the road" in three rows down the center. While I'm all for the NY public library exhibit where the t-shirt came from, this child clearly has missed the point. Jack Kerouac is not a fucking t-shirt. Once upon a time, before everyone associated the word "counterculture" with a bunch of trippy hippies, it was a concept not entirely unlike dissent, or subordination. If you let Jack Kerouac become a t-shirt, you let dissent become a stylistic choice akin to being metrosexual. Take that fucking shirt off you tool.