Nothing but BIG IDEAS on Johnny's reading list this past weekend: life, consciousness, and everything in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and liquidated Soviet citizenryThe Gulag Archiplelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Both are three decades old, both broadsided the culture when they came out (I would be reading something more current, but thus are the books that present themselves in second-hand shops when mollyfogging Alitalia airlines sends your nice new France-bought off the end of the earth).
In the case of Acid Test I thought I was grabbing a narrative by the one guy who had the stubbornness to the call the bluff of all those self-aggrandizing hippie kids. Other writers might have gotten sucked into the "Tune In, Drop Out" chic, but not old Wolfey. No, Wolfe has credibility 'cause even with all that literary talent, never in a million years is this guy ever gonna be cool.
Yeah, I know, dissing on hippies is about as fresh an idea as Tang. But still, to read el primero smackdown, that always interested me.
(Hey John, why the creepy Ann Coulter-like urge to see the noodlers get it?)
No, no, no, you misundestand. This is not about the neverending fight between the Lefties and Righties. This is about my lingering resentment of being condescended to by my buddy television set.
Like most kids, I spent way too many formative hours in front of the glass teat. And the consistent message beamed out to zombieland was Boomers Rule! History before the boomers was boring, but morality and good colorful life and hot sex were all kinda thought up by the 60s gang. On TV, my 1980s TV, everything that occured before 1963 seemed to come from a world of polite facades hiding a deep strain of idiotic hypocrisy. (Happy Days aside. No putrid river of hypocrisy from Richie and Co. But more important than whether or not Happy Days discredits my theory is the larger point is that...)
I opened the book rooting one way, and Wolfe's narrative completely got me on the side of these acid freaks grokking the groovy. At least in Wolfe's telling, Ken Kesey ledhis Merry Pranksters is all can-do American optimism. I don't have the time of the skill to really get into what the hell the point of it all that optimism was, but my new verdict is that Ken Kesey is cool people.
He died in November 2001, so I was too busy kissing my ass goodbye to notice the passing of a bygone drugbird. So belatedly: Happy trails, man.
Speaking of kissing your ass goodbye is a pretty segue into the horrible inside of Gulag. Hundreds of characters, all of them imprisoned and/or tortured and/or shot. I'm nowhere near done with the book, but the amazing part is that its godawful meatgrinding realism has had no effect on my enthusiasm for the removed-from-reality acid optimism of the hippie book.
So I'm no longer starved for ideas, though I remain starved for cereal. I really want some cereal. I would walk to Libya for some Apple Jacks in 2%.
