The best way to learn things is to read. Granted, reading takes time and it can be a strain on one’s eyes, but it is surely the best way to learn. And when I say read, I mean reading good literature. If you want to learn about America, all you must do is read its greatest authors. I recently bought Tom Wolfe’s book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which is a wonderful example of immersion journalism, when a writer embeds himself in a certain culture for an extended period and writes about his experiences.
This book was about the six months he spent with Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters. Kesey was the guy who wrote the Oscar-winning film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but Kesey did a lot more than author novels. He was front and center in the consciousness expanding, acid-laced, free love cultural explosion that took place in the 1960s.
This movement inevitably started in California, the land of sunshine, surfers, Hollywood, Berkeley and Stanford University. That cauldron of fun and frolic also gave birth to the Doors and The Grateful Dead, and as Jerry Garcia says, “You really had to be there to understand it.” True enough.
As I worked my way through Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of the birth of the hippie movement, it began to dawn on me just how unusual that period was. So many things happened over the 10-year period from 1960 to 1970 that it’s worth looking back and analyzing it. The 1960s is when the Baby Boomers were coming of age, and it was preceded by the staid and steadfast 1950s with Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Donna Reed.
Apparently, Old Blue Eyes was not enough, so make way for LSD, cocaine, pot, Timothy Leary, The Doors, The Mamas & the Papas, Haight Ashbury, The Esalen Institute, flower power, Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, love beads, The Beatles, and Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests. Acid Tests were little more than insane and very noisy quasi rock concerts with strobe lights, movies shown on the wall as The Grateful Dead played and everyone in the place was stoned on LSD. You passed the Acid Test if you did not go insane.
I don’t mean to be sarcastic about all this because after all who can be critical of efforts to expand one’s mind? But the mistake made by the hippie movement and LSD is that it’s like equating the effort of reading an entire 952-page novel with the ingestion of a pill. A pill is quick and easy and even fun, but the benefits vis a vis mind expansion is short-lived at best and damaging at worst.
Social, quasi-religious revolutions take place about every 100 years or so and probably are crucial to cultural growth. Back in the 1850s, as science gained ascendance, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced that “God is dead” and this began the age of secularism. If God died, then who or what gives meaning to life? The search for meaning in a secular world led to the transcendental movement in America with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman being the central figures.
Transcendentalism embraced the goodness of nature and humankind and was a reaction to industrialism, capitalism, imperialism and the “death of God” with “Walden” by Thoreau and “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman being the most well-known representations of this movement.
It is difficult to determine how these cultural movements impact and remain embedded in the culture as it proceeds forward. It is notable that the famous Day-Glo painted school bus that was used to take The Merry Pranksters across America was named “Furthur,” illustrating Ken Kesey’s desire to move America further into the future. And like all mystics and mavericks, Ken Kesey, was hated, jailed, jeered, battered and bruised as a reward for his efforts. Or as my old buddy Bob Lipsyte of The New York Times would say: “No good deed will go unpunished.”
Shortly after the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, we were greeted by Yuppies, catch phrases like “Greed is good,” “Show me the money” as the nation re-embraced money, status seeking and consumerism. Ironically, all this feverish questing for goods and services, money and status, fame and fortune doesn’t seem to fill the world with much happiness or meaning.
So do not fear, there is yet another cultural revolution that will be coming down the pike in 30 years or so. This is inevitable because the thought of an endless future of interacting with computers and phone prompts, working from home, not knowing your neighbors, worrying about school shootings or random assaults, getting addicted to Tik-Tok, Snapchat and Instagram is nauseating.
This year or next year there will be a child born who grows up in all this maddening, vacuous chaos and by the time he or she is 30, the year will be about 2050 and this child will start a movement or even a revolution, big enough to give some hope and peace and joy and meaning to us all. Until then, just hunker down, find an enjoyable book to read and ride out the storm.
Long live Ken Kesey and the memory of The Merry Pranksters. They may have gone down the wrong path with LSD, but at least they tried to make improvements in a world without a god.
