Cultural change through the eyes of Ginsberg and KerouacBrothers of the San Francisco Beat scene, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived in the midst of a consumerist cultural revolution, patriots of a forgotten mentality. As the nation's regional characteristics were rapidly homogenized by television, Kerouac and Ginsberg wrote poetry and prose that captured and contemplated the moment. They were contemporaries, sharing the same circle of friends and drawing from the same influences, but producing works that sought divergent means to the same conceptual end. Kerouac wrote with enlightened nostalgia, fascinated by preserving a form of individuals' pioneering spirit and tall tales in the midst of cultural change, while Ginsberg's poetry directly criticized society's shortcomings and decay; neither author completes the picture or the message, leaving something for the other. American culture of the mid-1950s and early 1960s is depicted with disgust and rejection in both Kerouac's and Ginsberg's works. They witnessed and documented a rich and varied culture, homogenized and sanitized by Dial television commercials and the Saturday Evening Post. Calls for rebellion and gray, cancerous images show America in decline and ripe for revolution. In Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, Japhy's revolutionary ideal rejects the new developments in American culture, "refusing to subscribe to the general demand to consume production, and therefore to have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap that in in reality they don't." that you want anyway like refrigerators, televisions, cars, at least new luxury cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and rubbish in general that in the end you always see anyway a week later in the garage, all imprisoned in a system of work, production, consumption. .."(97). Their America was a land of mass-market uselessness. In an era when stores across the nation sold identical products and everyone saw the same three television channels, the spark of regional character began to fade away. Kerouac paints his Dharma Bums as Whitman's heirs, poetic and thoughtful wanderers. Ginsberg also used Whitman to connect the past to the present in the poem "A Supermarket in California," asking the bard "We'll walk all night through lonely streets." ? The trees add shade to the shade, lights out in the houses, we will both be alone. / We'll walk dreaming of love's lost America past the blue cars in the driveways, home to our silent cottage?