The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  COSMO!

  —and once you find out about Cosmo, you know he’s running the show … It’s like we’re strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot, the Pranksters, the Beatles, the Vietnam Day Committee—the Vietnam Day Committee?—running through a slot, and all the wires are vibrated by Cosmo. Most people lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a mass of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller according to how close you are. They don’t—they can’t see that these “circles” are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely and that there is a great surge through the whole cable and that anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the thing …

  There is food in the thing.

  My comrades are envious.

  But they cannot harm me.

  Good fortune.

  —the I Ching

  … tends to react against political disorder because he is concerned with the deep basic religious experience, the deepest sources of life; transient politics are insignificant to him.

  —Joachim Wach

  It was against this backdrop, namely, the ultimate and the infinite, that an organization known as the Vietnam Day Committee invited Kesey to come speak at a huge antiwar rally in Berkeley, on the University of California campus. I couldn’t tell you what bright fellow thought of that, inviting Kesey. Afterwards, they didn’t know, either. Or at least none of them would own up, despite a lot of interrogations and recriminations and general thrashing about. “Who the hell invited this bastard!” was the exact wording. A regular little rhubarb they had for themselves. The main trouble with the Vietnam Day Committee was that they couldn’t see beyond the marvelous political whoopee they had cooked up. Why should they? From where they were looking in the fall of 1965, they were about to sweep the country. Berkeley, the New Left, the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio, the Rebel Generation, the Student Revolution, in which students were going to take over the universities, like in Latin America, and drive some fire up the clammy rectum of American life—you could read about it in all the magazines. And if you don’t believe it, come here and watch us, Mr. Jones—and so forth.

  They never looked beyond that, as I say, but it might have been no use, in any case. Maybe there was no way in the world anybody could have made the Vietnam Day Committee realize how their whole beano looked to Kesey and the Pranksters. Come rally against the war in Vietnam—from the cosmic vantage point the Pranksters had reached, there were so many reasons why this little charade was pathetic, they didn’t know where to begin …

  Nevertheless, Kesey was invited, and that was how the fun started. Marchers were pouring into Berkeley from seventy-one cities and twenty-eight states, for whatever such sums are worth—at any rate, thousands of students and professors from all over. There were to be teach-ins all day and also an all-day rally starting in the morning, with thirty or forty speakers to whip things up, and then at 7:30 in the evening, when the fever pitch was reached, they would all rise up off the Berkeley campus and march over into Oakland, fifteen or twenty thousand souls in a massive line, marching on the Oakland Army Terminal. The Oakland Army Terminal was where men and supplies were shipped out to Vietnam. Just to spice things up a bit—a large supply of gelignite had been stolen, and everybody had visions of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, the whole clump, blowing up in a gelignite earthquake of cops, peaceniks, Birchers, and probably spades and innocent women and children. Nobody had any idea which side had stolen the gelignite, but that only made it better.

  The gelignite scare seemed to give Kesey the inspiration for this prank. Kesey’s saving grace was that he never got serious where he could say it just as well with a cosmic joke. Kesey’s fantasy for the occasion was to come upon the huge anti-war rally as a freaking military invasion. It was a true inspiration, this fantasy. They were going to rig up the bus as a rolling fortress with guns sticking out and all the Pranksters would dress military. Then they would get cars and rig them up the same way, and at the head of the whole convoy, there would be—the Hell’s Angels, in running formation, absolutely adangle with swastikas. Swastikas. If would freaking blow their minds, or at least give their cool a test like it never had before.

  First they painted the whole bus a dull red color, the color of dried blood, in fact. Right on over the greatest riot of Day-Glo design in history went this bloody muck. But who gave a damn. Art is not eternal. Then they started painting military symbols on the dried blood, swastikas, American eagles, Iron Crosses, Viking crosses, Red Crosses, hammers & sickles, skulls & bones, anything as long as it looked rank. That very night, naturally, the seasonal rains started, and like the Chief said, art is not eternal. All the paint started running until it was the most dismal mess imaginable. Somehow that was appropriate. The next day, Gut and his girlfriend, Little People, showed up. Gut was in a kind of transition period, between the Angels and the Pranksters. He had his old Hell’s Angels sleeveless denim jacket on, but he had taken the insignia off, the lettering and the emblem of a skull with a helmet on, but you could see where it had all been, because the denim was lighter underneath. It was what you might call a goodbye-but-not-forgotten Hell’s Angels’ jacket. Anyway, Gut amazed the Pranksters by painting a big beautiful American Eagle on the bus, a little primitive, but strong. The big hulking jesus angel had talent. The Pranksters were all pleased as hell. They felt they had brought it out of him, somehow. Gut got everybody revved up. They built a gun turret on the bus and rigged up two big gray cannons that you could maneuver. Norman made a machine gun out of wood and cardboard and painted it olive drab. Other people were knocking together wooden guns of various ridiculous descriptions. Faye’s sewing machine was going. Pranksters, inner circle and outer circle, were driving in from all over. Lee Quarnstrom, of the outer circle, showed up with a huge supply of Army insignia, shoulder patches, arm patches, hashmarks, bars, stars, epaulets. Kesey was rigging up the bus with tapes and microphones and amplifiers and earphones and electric guitars. Hagen was rigging up his 16-millimeter camera and films. Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Joan Baez and Roland Kirk and Mississippi John Hunt were droning and clattering over the big speakers from over the way atop the dirt cliff. Then Allen Ginsberg turned up from Big Sur, with his companion Peter Orlovsky and an entourage of pale Chester A. Arthur High School hindus. Ginsberg sang mantras all night and jingled bells and finger cymbals. Cassady hooked down speed and worked himself up from a standing start, jerking, kicking, dancing—he seemed to be moving in time to the sewing machine on a long seam. Ginsberg seemed to be chanting in time to a Jainist’s whisk broom. Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, going faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It was a nice weird party.

  The next morning, October 16, the big day—the Pranksters blew the morning, naturally, all stroked out in various attitudes from the night before, and they were late getting off to Berkeley. Art is not eternal, friends. The plan was to meet the Hell’s Angels in Palo Alto and go roaring down the freeway in formation. They put on Prankster tapes and Cassady got in the driver’s seat. Everybody climbed on in their crazed military costumes, Hassler, Hagen, Babbs, Gretch, Zonker, June the Goon, Roy Seburn, Dale Kesey and all sorts of people, even the Mad Chemist—he showed up for this one—and Mary Microgram at the last minute. And then Kesey got on. Kesey was wearing a big orange coat of the sort highway workers wear so cars will see them. He had hashmarks on the sleeves and some kind of floppy epaulets flapping on the shoulders. He had a big orange Day-Glo World War I helmet on his head. It was so big and came down so far over his forehead his eyes were like two little flashlight bulbs under the lid. Kesey got up in the gun turret and they were off. Before they got to Palo Alto, in Woodside, in fact, the cops stopped them and hassled them and checked them over. The Pranksters did the usual, leaped out with cameras and shotgu
n mikes and tape recorders, filming and taping everything the cops said, and the cops left, but it ate up time.

  “Aha,” said the Mad Chemist, “the first skirmish.”

  “The Prankster Alert is out,” said Babbs.

  That was just about right. They kept getting stopped and hassled and checked over and losing time. They got to the rendezvous in Palo Alto—and no Hell’s Angels. They waited and waited for the Angels, then gave up and took off down the expressway, to Berkeley.

  They didn’t get to the Berkeley campus until almost dusk, and their arrival didn’t make any very momentous impression at first. Now, a full phalanx of Hell’s Angels, looking like a cross between the Gestapo and the Tonton Macoute—that would have been a different story, no doubt. Good and noisy, too. But as it was, the bus just pulled into the parking lot by the Student Union building and the Pranksters cut up as best they could, ack-acking their wooden guns at birds and planes. The big rally had been going on all day. They were out on a big lawn, or plaza, on the campus, about fifteen thousand of them, the toggle-coat bohemians, while the P.A. loudspeakers boomed and rabbled and raked across them. There was a big platform set up for the speakers. There had been about forty of them, all roaring or fulminating or arguing cogently, which was always worse. The idea at these things is to keep building up momentum and tension and suspense until finally when it is time for action—in this case, the march—the signal launches them as one great welded body of believers and they are ready to march and take billy clubs upside the head and all the rest of it.

  All the shock workers of the tongue were there, speakers like Paul Jacobs, and M. S. Arnoni, who wore a prison uniform to the podium because his family had been wiped out in a German concentration camp during World War II—and out before them was a great sea of students and other Youth, the toggle-coat bohemians—toggle coats, Desert Boots, civil rights, down with the war in Vietnam—“ … could call out to you from their graves or from the fields and rivers upon which their ashes were thrown, they would implore this generation of Americans not to be silent in the face of the genocidal atrocities committed on the people of Vietnam …” and the words rolled in full forensic boom over the P.A. systems.

  THE FIRST PERSON IN THE VIETNAM DAY COMMITTEE CIRCLE to notice Kesey approaching the speaker’s platform was Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist magazine. Most of the Pranksters were still on the bus, fooling around with the guns for the befuddlement of the gawkers who happened by. Kesey, Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and George Walker came on over the platform, Kesey in his orange Day-Glo coat and World War I helmet. Krassner ran his magazine as pretty much a one-man operation and he knew Kesey subscribed to it. So he wasn’t so surprised that Kesey knew him. What got him was that Kesey just started talking to him, just like they had been having a conversation all along and something had interrupted them and now they were resuming … It is a weird thing. You feel the guy’s charisma, to use that one, right away, busting out even through the nutty Day-Glo, or maybe sucking one in, the way someone once wrote of Gurdjieff: “You could not help being drawn, almost physically, towards him … like being sucked in by a vast, spiritual vacuum cleaner.” At the time, however, Krassner thought of Flash Gordon.

  “Look up there,” Kesey says, motioning up toward the platform.

  Up there is Paul Jacobs. Jacobs tends toward the forensic, anyway, and the microphone and loudspeakers do something to a speaker. You can hear your voice rolling and thundering, powerful as Wotan, out over that ocean of big ears and eager faces, and you are omnipotent and more forensic and orotund and thunderous minute by minute—It is written, but I say unto you … the jackals of history-ree-ree-ree-ree … From where they are standing, off to the side of the platform, they can hear very little of what Jacobs is actually saying, but they can hear the sound barking and roaring and reverberating and they can hear the crowd roaring back and baying on cue, and they can see Jacobs, hunched over squat and thick into the microphone, with his hands stabbing out for emphasis, and there, at sundown, silhouetted against the florid sky, is his jaw, jutting out, like a cantaloupe …

  Kesey says to Krassner: “Don’t listen to the words, just the sound, and the gestures … who do you see?”

  And suddenly Krassner wants very badly to be right. It is the call of the old charisma. He wants to come up with the right answer.

  “Mussolini … ?”

  Kesey starts nodding, Right, right, but keeping his eye on the prognathous jaw.

  By this time more of the Pranksters have come up to the platform. They have found some electrical outlets and they have run long cords up to the platform, for the guitars and basses and horns. Kesey is the next to last speaker. He is to be followed by some final Real Barnburner of a speaker and then—the final surge and the march on Oakland.

  From the moment Kesey gets up there, it is a freaking jar. His jacket glows at dusk, and his helmet. Lined up behind him are more Day-Glo crazies, wearing aviator helmets and goggles and flight suits and Army tunics, Babbs, Gretch, Walker, Zonker, Mary Microgram, and little Day-Glo kids, and half of them carrying electric guitars and horns, mugging and moving around in Day-Glo streaks. The next jar is Kesey’s voice, it is so non-forensic. He comes on soft, in the Oregon drawl, like he’s just having a conversation with 15,000 people:

  You know, you’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching … That’s what they do … They hold rallies and they march … They’ve been having wars for ten thousand years and you’re not gonna stop it this way … Ten thousand years, and this is the game they play to do it … holding rallies and having marches … and that’s the same game you’re playing … their game …

  Whereupon he reaches into his great glowing Day-Glo coat and produces a harmonica and starts playing it right into the microphone, Home, home on the range, hawonking away on the goddamn thing—Home … home … on the ra-a-a-a-ange hawonkawonk …

  The crowd stands there in a sudden tender clump, most of them wondering if they heard right, cocking their heads and rolling their heads to one another. First of all, that conversational tone all of a sudden, and then random notes from the Day-Glo crazies behind him ripped out offen the electric guitars and the general babble of the place feeding into the microphone—did anybody hear right—

  —all the while Kesey is still up there hawonking away on the freaking harmonica. Home, home on the ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-ange—

  —ahhhh, that’s it—they figure it’s some calculated piece of stage business, playing Home, home on the range—building up to something like Yah! We know about that home! We know about that range! That rotten U.S. home and that rotten U.S. range!—

  —but instead it is the same down-home drawling voice—

  I was just looking at the speaker who was up here before me … and I couldn’t hear what he was saying … but I could hear the sound of it … and I could hear your sound coming back at him … and I could see the gestures—

  —and here Kesey starts parodying Paul Jacobs’s stabbing little hands and his hunched-over stance and his—

  —and I could see his jaw sticking out like this … silhouetted against the sky … and you know who I saw … and who I heard? … Mussolini … I saw and I heard Mussolini here just a few minutes ago … Yep … you’re playing their game …

  Then he starts hawonking away again, hawonking and hawonking Home, home on the range with that sad old setter harmonica-around-the-campfire pace—and the Pranksters back him up on their instruments, Babbs, Gretch, George, Zonker, weaving up there in a great Day-Glo freakout

  —and what the hell—a few boos, but mainly confusion—what in the name of God are the ninnies—

  —We’ve all heard all this and seen all this before, but we keep on doing it … I went to see the Beatles last month … And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles … and I couldn’t hear what they were screaming, either … But you don’t have to … They’re screaming Me! Me! Me! Me! … I’m Me! … That’s the cry of the ego, and that’s
the cry of this rally! … Me! Me! Me! Me! … And that’s why wars get fought … ego … because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me … Yep, you’re playing their game …

  —and then more hawonkawonkawonkawonkawonka—

  —and the crowd starts going into a slump. It’s as if the rally, the whole day, has been one long careful inflation of a helium balloon, preparing to take off—and suddenly somebody has pulled the plug. It’s not what he is saying, either. It’s the sound and the freaking sight and that goddamn mournful harmonica and that stupid Chinese music by the freaks standing up behind him. It’s the only thing the martial spirit can’t stand—a put-on, a prank, a shuck, a goose in the anus.

  —Vietnam Day Committee seethe together at the edge of the platform: “Who the hell invited this bastard!” “You invited him!” “Well, hell, we figured he’s a writer, so he’ll be against the war!” “Didn’t you have enough speakers?” says Krassner. “You need all the big names you can get, to get the crowd out.” “Well, that’s what you get for being celebrity fuckers,” says Krassner. If they had had one of those big hooks like they had on amateur night in the vaudeville days, they would have pulled Kesey off the podium right then. Well, then, why doesn’t somebody just go up there and edge him off! He’s ruining the goddamn thing. But then they see all the Day-Glo crazies, men and women and children all weaving and electrified, clawing at guitars, blowing horns, all crazed aglow at sundown … And the picture of the greatest anti-war rally in the history of America ending in a Day-Glo brawl to the tune of Home, home on the range …

  —suddenly the hawonking on the freaking harmonica stops. Kesey leans into the microphone—