FREE ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN

The American Experience In
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Mass Comm and Society 
Late November, 2000
"Kesey in la casa grande with the wind up and the sky cloudy, and the Gulp flapping, and
the Rat plaster paneled with pages from out of Marvel comics, with whole scenes of Dr.
Strange, Sub Mariner, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Human
Torch--Superheroes, in short. All heads believe them to be drawn by meth freaks, because
of the minute phosphorescent dedication of their hands. Superheroes! Ubermenschen! (Tom
Woolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, page 288)".
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test by Tom Woolfe is a lovely piece of literary journalism
cooked up by renowned paperman Tom Woolfe. Written in 1968, the book (henceforth referred
to as Acid Test) was a rousing success at providing the world at large with a stranger
than fiction narrative of the formative days of the early "hippie," or "head" movement.
This book contains it all: Hell's Angels, the formation of the Grateful Dead, Owsely's
Acid, Jack Keuorac, Timothy Leary and more. It centers on an enigmatic young Oregonian-a
man who could be a farmer, or your son-in-law-who, for all intents and purposes,
co-founded experiments into things psychedelic and the attendant lifestyle that followed.
The man I am speaking of is one Ken Kesey, best-known for authoring One Flew Over the
Cookoo's Nest. This man, via mind-altering hallucenogens, transitioned from Stanford
University to Everywhere, U.S.A., picking up other interested parties every which way.
These fellow travelers become the "Merry Pranksters," and, on their painted bus dubbed
"Furthur," they attempt to explore the very edges of reality and consciousness. And Tom
Woolfe writes about it. Some academians (Of the New York University School of Journalism)
were so impressed by his work that they put it on a (relatively) short list of the 100
best examples of American journalism for the 20th century. Is this designation deserving?
I think so. I'm going to show you this rather than telling, but suffice it to say the
highest complement that I can pay is that Acid Test is truly a non-fiction novel. Pay
careful attention to the excerpts which follow. Here you will get a taste of Woolfe's
style, his attempt to capture, as he might say, not merely the overt facts of his subject
but the psychological flavor as well. 
It would be impossible to give a roll call to Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters, just as
it would be laughable to portray their story in a linear progression. A key element to
the overall motif of Acid Test issssss.....(I'm using a Tom Woolfe-ism here.) The
American Experience. If there is one thing about these Pranksters, these Intrepid
Travelers, that makes them of interest, it is that they seek to experience life in a way
that utterly thumbs the nose at all attempts to grovel at the posits of history. They
don't want yesterday. In fact, the whole point is to catch up to the cusp of now.
Let me set the scene for you: psychedelic drugs. In the 60s. They're everywhere. But as
our story opens, they're just beginning to proliferate. Here is an in-house description
of the Power the psychedelic experience packs, not in causing hallucination but in giving
a truer portrait of Reality: 
"...These drugs seem to be the key to open these locked doors. How many?-maybe two dozen
people in the world were on to this incredible secret! One was Aldous Huxley, who had
taken mescaline and written about it in The Doors of Perception. He compared the brain to
a reducing valve. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of
information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage
for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational so
utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere
survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience Without
his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced
the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few
months--until normal' training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world,
usually for good. Somehow, Huxley had said, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And
through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright..."
(Acid Test, page 40. All of the references contained herin are to Acid Test, unless
otherwise noted.)
"But these are just words, man!" reads the next line in the book. Words that were taken
in 
different ways by different parties involved. One of the best-known parties, from
slightly before Kesey's era, was Timoth Leary. Leary was a founding fellow for the League
for Spiritual Discovery, a kind of First Church of Acid that worked to provide a "safe
place" for "heads" to have psychedelic experiences, and, ultimately, for drugs to be
legalized and approved as a holy sacrament. This was a holy crusade for Leary and his
ilk, who had a penchant for all things old and eastern. Observe: 
"...an apartment with India-print spreads lining the walls and couches on the floor and
hand made Indian teapots and cups and three small crystals suspended from the ceiling by
almost invisible threads and picking up lights like jewels in the air, a place devoid of
all the crap and gadgetry of the modern American plastic life, for, as Leary had said, a
home should be a place of purity that the Gautama Buddha himself could walk into from 485
B.C. and feel at home. For some day grass must grow again in the streets, in pastoral
purity, for life is crap, a duress of bad karmas, endless fight against catastrophe,
which is to be warded off finally only by purification of the soul, utter passivity in
which one becomes nothing...but a vessel of the All...the All-one..."(page 323)
For Leary, the new experiences and planes of existence were best utilized when integrated
with the "most ancient pathes" of Buddhism and Hinduism. New wine in the old
wineskins...
"...as against the Kesey direction, which has become the prevailing life style of
Haight-Ashbury...beyond catastrophe...like, picking up on anything that works and moves,
every hot wire, every tube, ray, volt, decibel, beam, floodlight and combustion of
American flag-flying neon Day-Glo America and winding it up to some mystical extreme
carrying to the western-most edge of experience..." (Page 323).
The Merry Pranksters had a penchant for technology. After two commercially successful 
novels, Kesey was already calling writing "a thing of the 2-D past" and was more than
willing to welcome television and high-quality audio as the written word's successor. (
Historical note: Today, in the present, Kesey has went back to writing "mere" novels,
according to his website, http://www.key-z.com) Their bus and their hangouts were "wired
for sound", quite literally, and smell and taste and sight, to boot! They once made a
great Bus Trip from east to west (U.S.A.) and recorded a much of it for the first "Acid
Movie." And while the League for Spiritual Discovery was meditating at some shrine, the
Pranksters were splicing their film and merging it with strobe lights, variable-lag
playback microphones, music and smoke for the very first "multi media" presentations of
any sort-the "Acid Tests." 
And yet, there was nothing irreligious about any of this. The Pranksters' seeming
apprehension of the metaphysical was forming a religion all its own; an American
religion. No shrines, no sacraments. Buuuut, as Woolfe began to muse out loud:
"The experience-that was the word! And it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the
great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism,
Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all
began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Welch called "the experience of
the holy," and Max Weber, "possession of the deity," the sense of being a vessel fo the
divine, of the All-one."
Woolfe goes on to say that the "kernels" of foundation these religions came in a flash!
of insight (or experience) to their founders. Zoroaster, Guatama Buddha- flash! Their
initial experience had nothing to do with morals, salvation, or the hereafter, but with
experience. What made the Pranksters dangerous, Woolfe mused, was that they realized this
and so wouldn't seek to stabilize and normalize their experience. They would simply seek
to be, and continue experiencing (...what?...) until they went further...down the road,
in their bus, Furthur. 
Today, in the 21st century, the dominant chic philosophie is postmodernism, which (among
many things) supplants absolute truth claims with meaningful myths, or "metanarratives."
These are stories in which we derive lessons for life, or a context for living. The
Pranksters found and internalized a uniquely American Myth-that of the comic book
superhero. It is my suspicion that both Kesey and Woolfe were avid comic book readers. Do
see what I mean:
"The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance--And the
myths that actually touched you at that time--not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and
Aeneas--but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, the Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain
America, Plastic Man, The Flash--but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it
was--quaint?--when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as the honest American
myths? It was a fantasy world already, this electro-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in
the suburbs. There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan--the
family car! --a huge crazy god-awful-powerful fantasy creature to begin with,
327-horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven nights of lubricious luxury brougham
seduction-you're already there, in Fantasyland, so why not move off your snug-harbor
quilty-bed dead center and cut loose-go ahead and say it -Shazam!-juice it up to what
it's already aching to be: 327,ooo horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring,
Screaming on toward ... Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future ... Billy
Batson said Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental
gas in the research lab... and began traveling and thinking at the speed of light as The
Flash ... the current fantasy." (Page 38)
The "current fantasy" was transforming the Pranksters, with their American Religion, into

larger-than-life Superheroes quicker than you could say Shazam! There are over fifty
references to 
superheroes, and comic books, in Acid Test. Reading and drawing from comics, code-names
were donned:
"Steve Lambrecht was the Zonker. Cassady was Speed Limit. Kesey was Swashbuckler. Babbs
was Intrepid Traveler. George Walker was Hardly Visible. And Paula Sudsen
became...Gretchin Fetchin the Slime Queen!" (Page 69.)
And the name "The Merry Pranksters,"of course. They had costumes, too: 
"Mountain Girl has on the purple robe. Babbs has on an iridescent pair of pants of many-
colored stripes, made by Gretch. Kesey appeared in a glowing Yin-yang jacket. It was an
iridescent jacket with a huge Yin-Yang symbol painted on the back red, white, and blue
(Page165)."
In this new religion ritual did begin to develop, then. The naming of a person was a
signifier that 
they were accepted in the group-that they were "on the bus," so to speak. At one point
the 
Pranksters were in Mexico, fugitives from the law. A new girl began coming around, and it
was questionable whether or not she was going to be accepted. Finally the matter was
settled, for "[Kesey] had given her a new name, Black Maria. She was...Black Maria
(268)". 
With new names replacing old, strobe lights replacing altars, and costumes replacing
clothing, what replaced Food in their arcane world? As one could surmise, the
hallucenogen, "Acid", was the food of the future. But even their attitude toward the old
familiar LSD began taking on new dimensions with the Merry Prankster's American
Experience... 
"The [LSD capsules] had whimsical emblems on them, to indicate the strength. The most
famous among the heads were the "Owsley Blues"--with a picture of Batman on them, 500
micrograms worth of Superhero inside your skull (188)". 
Where, you might ask, do these daring antiheroes go with their mind-numbing escapades? 
Where does their road take them? Well, not to ruin a good thing for you, the reader, but
their Trip takes them further. Agree with them or not, they do explore the far reaches of
Reality, and Life itself, in attempt to reach, as Prankster Cassady would put it, now.
Not moments of lag time behind the present moment, but now now now. Futhur. This search
for the Now, the true American Experience, gets them into trouble though. To fulfill
their calling as superheroes to a Nuclear world they must be wiling to stand up,
heroically, for the path of Right, despite how their popularity with the "heads," the
"staight world", or anyone would be affected. 
"At the midnight hour, Kesey, masked and disguised in a Superhero costume, on the order
of Captain America of the Marvel comics pantheon, will come up on stage and deliver his
vision of the future, of the way "beyond acid." (Page 328)
"Beyond acid. They have the trip now, close the circle, all of them and they either
emerge as Superheroes, closing the door behind them and soaring through the hole in the
sapling sky, or just lollygag in the loop-the-loop of the lag. Almost clear! Presque
vu!--many good heads have seen it--Paul telling the early Christians: hooking down wine
for the Holy Spirit--sooner or later the Blood has got to flood into you for
good--Zoroaster telling his followers: you can't keep taking haoma water to see the
flames, man--And Dr. Strange and Sub Mariner and the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic
Four and the Human Torch prank about on the Rat walls of la casa grande like stroboscopic
sledgehammer Cassidys, fons et origo::::and it is either make this thing permanent inside
of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short
glimpse of the horizon::::(290)".
Lone superhero, 
Superhighway Cosmo hero,
Never lies.
Honesty's the best disguise
in the cops and robbers game.
I ain't Clark Kent.
I ain't Steve Lamb.
Popeye the Sailor I am what I am (309).
"...the Bay Area's Superheroes..." (347)
Kesey is "...wearing only white leotards, a white satin cape tied at the neck, and a red,
white, and blue sash running across his chest. It's...Captain America! The Flash! Captain
Marvel! the Superhero, in a word..." (352)
Bibliography
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe