Oh boy. These opinions are going to need a lot of qualifying.
I was always a painfully annoying skeptical person. For about the past 15 years, I have also been a painfully annoying secular person. I am not really here for your beliefs, although I have learned to nod politely and brute force a conversation change whenever people’s spiritual or religious beliefs come up. I have paid hard consequences for my doggedness on these matters, and I would do it again. I should clarify that I am not like this merely with spiritual beliefs, but I tend to do this with everything. I try to make stringent epistemological demands on my own beliefs.
That heavily informs how I view the 1960’s and 70’s, and the messianic figure of those times. Timothy Leary wasn’t a bad person (as far as I know), but from a societal perspective I tend to value caution a bit more than “tune in, drop out,” which strikes me rather bad advice. I am very pro drug, but I strongly feel that they should be viewed as recreational substances up until the point that science and research proves their medicinal worth. That being said, I would like to announce here that I am a proud recreational drug user, which has included hallucinogens, and that I actually have plans to use drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, again in my future.
Reading this book made me glad that I came up in the era of MDMA’s popularization. All other factors ignored, MDMA users own the virtue of not really producing people who want to tell you about their conceptions of the fucking universe, and that makes it a regal drug in my book.
This is all to say that I despise the culture people have tried to make of drug use. The crown of this hatred is exactly the types of beliefs you can read all about in Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It is a lot of people making a big to do about their trips, and thinking that the really are opening up some kind of third eye instead of just experiencing the chemical equivalent of a roller coaster ride.
Despite this, I really liked this book. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test follows Ken Kesey (the guy who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and his band of merry drug users (called the Merry Pranksters), and the misadventures they have. The titular Acid Test refers to when these guys would dose people with LSD, which now a days would be considered a dick move. The merits of this work is all on the strength of Tom Wolfe’s style, which does a lot to capture the something that to my mind really feels like the spirit of the 1960’s. Sure, the silly adventures the characters of the book undergo were also good, and if I could only bring myself to give a fuck about the Beatles or The Grateful Dead, I might have liked it even more.
I delight in telling people that Toni Morrison does William Faulkner better than William Faulkner, and I can now delight in telling people that Tom Wolfe did a Jack Kerouac better than Jack Kerouac. The influence is clearly there (Neal Cassady being present in both books is a clear sign), but I think Acid Test wins over On The Road, again simply because the of the strength of the style.
