In one of my one-on-one book clubs, a friend and I are reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. In it, Wolfe embeds himself with Ken Kesey, a writer turned lifestyle guru, and his followers, the Merry Pranksters, as they hang out in 1960s Haight-Ashbury and drive around America in a bus.
Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had achieved fame and wealth through his writing. During the mid 1960s, he decided to abandon commercial authorship, and began taking LSD and other psychadelics. He believed that the drug use would expand his consciousness. Some of the Pranksters were drawn to Kesey because they thought the same; others just wanted to party. Acid Test chronicles Kesey’s attempts to “graduate” his followers from dependence on LSD, into a higher, non-drug-induced consciousness. The results were about what you’d expect.
Near the beginning of Acid Test, Wolfe writes this beautiful description of Kesey’s youth and American Graffiti era teenage culture:
But of course! — the feeling — out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night — it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world — only 15, 16, 17 years old, dressed in the haute couture of pink Oxford shirts, sharp pants, snaky half-inch belts, fast shoes — with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV< atomic subs, ultrasonics — Postwar American suburbs — glorious world! and the hell with the intellectual bad-mouthers of America’s tailfin civilization . . . They couldn’t know what it was like or else they had it cultivated out of them — the feeling — to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils — feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression — but SUperkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer — The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance . . . .1
The above highlights two important themes from Acid Test: Kesey’s difference from his hippy followers and the power of postwar American culture.
Hippies, and before them, the Beats, viewed American society as culturally bankrupt. This cultural bankruptcy sprang not only from material wealth, but also from bourgeois aspiration to be cultured. The insurance salesman who lived in a 3 bedroom house with his wife and 2 children, voted for Eisenhower, was chair of the local Rotary, and had no intellectual interests outside of golf was not the only object of hippy scorn — his neighbor and fellow Rotarian who owned a landscaping business, bought sets of Mark Twain and Dostoyevsky from the Modern Library, and donated money to the local symphony orchestra was subject to derision, too. Each was “inauthentic,” trapped in a bourgeois cycle of aspiration and status competition. The hippy sought to overcome this sorry existence by embracing a bohemian “lifestyle,” using drugs (psychadelic and otherwise), and rejecting bourgeois norms of monogomy, stable employment, and frequent bathing. Jack Kerouac, Kesey’s contemporary, describes the intellectual contempt he and his friends felt for the average American:
. . . colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the [Beats] of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wondrous crapulous civilization.2
Leaving aside whether this analysis is accurate (it’s not), Kesey (and later, Kerouac himself) had a major problem with it.
In the 1960s, the Beat and hippy movements bled into political activism. As they did, their contempt for bourgeois America ultimately became contempt for America itself.
Kesey didn’t like this. His second book, Sometimes a Great Notion, is a great social novel in the tradition of Zola and Balzac. In it, he seeks to explain the relationships and motivations of the residents of an Oregon town that is the center of a logging strike. All characters, regardless of their background or beliefs — in a rebuke to Beat typecasting, Kesey makes the bourgeois lame-o a liberal, out-of-towner union organizer — receive judicious, knowing treatment. Kesey loved the bigness of America and the weirdness of its people, which the misanthropy of the hippies could not tolerate.
These weird Americans created a society of power and glamour in the 1950s and early 1960s that has no peer. This power and glamour came from all of the things Wolfe mentions: streamlined, powerful cars, material plenty, technological wonders like nuclear weapons, supersonic jets and NASA, and, above all, beautiful people living in a naturally beautiful environment.
This cultural power wasn’t just nice to look at. It also inspired envy (the good kind, of aspiration) in other peoples, particularly those in the Eastern Bloc. It is no accident that America defeated the USSR in the 1980s — a decade in which America recovered its cultural power and sex appeal, after the aesthetically and materially disastrous 1970s.
To end on a sour note — this is an Eeyoreish blog, after all — does the America of 2023 retain the cultural power and glamour to inspire envy in its enemies? I’m not sure it does.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Batnam, 1999), pp 38 - 39.
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin, 1976), p 39.