But by this time there were Hippies on the cover of Life, the Haight was in bloom, and everyone seemed to be turning on with something. It was bigger than both of us, and no one was listening to beyond-acid talk. Not even from Ken Kesey.

So ends Tom Wolfe's book.

II

TO WOLFE Ken Kesey is a Christ-like figure, the founder of a new religion. He stands at the center of a band of disciples ("The Merry Pranksters") and interprets for them the meaning of a new experience.

It is well to remember, as Wolfe says, that the religions we have today did not begin as the sets of moral precepts we know them as. They began with a new experience, and new ethics grew out of the new state of consciousness that this experience caused. It might be the direct experiencing of God say, or of Nirvana.

The experience that united the Merry Pranksters was, of course, LSD. One of the derelictions of Wolfe's book is his failure to delineate the ethical attributes of the LSD experience. He fails to describe the coherency of the Prankster's experience of acid and what they did in the world. But with all the acid that has been taken since by so many different people, the "meaning" of acid in the world, the ethical attributes of acid consciousness are becoming clear.

This is to say that many of the Prankster activities that Wolfe describes with such fanfare of exclamation marks are now common currency. LSD is no respecter of persons, of individuality. Though Wolfe implies that people are copying what the Pranksters did, it seems more likely that the same kind of consciousness and the same ideas come to people who take the same drug.

This may, along with the mass media, account for the stereotyped nature of hippie style. And in part the hippies are simply an anti-style, the negative of the affluent middle-class life style. After all there are only so many things you can do to blow straight people's minds.

III

WHAT blew their rigid old minds most of all was that Pranksters, hippies, heads, looked so extraordinary. Something startling, the extraordinary introduced into the everyday, is in a way a definition of the prank. The hippies and what they did were like pepper on ice cream for the straight world.

The Prankster motto was "Never trust a Prankster." But that simply meant "Expect the Unexpected." And then learn to love it. When you take LSD you either learn to groove on the unexpected, or you freak out. The unexpected is always there, right under our noses, and acid makes you see it. No matter how hard the plasterer tries to make the ceiling level there is always room for an A-rab to hide.

So much of our present situation is the response of fear, of hatred of the unexpected. Wallace's followers are scared of hippies, scared of long hair, scared of blacks, in part simply because they're different. Kesey and the Pranksters could have made a small difference. A prank properly performed could have given people a chance to adapt to the unexpected, to play along with it if they wanted to, to groove on it.

To imagine such pranks a Prankster would have to first overcome his own fears, save his own soul, The idea of bringing it all out front is an attempt to examine all the dark corners of one's own soul, to act out one's pent-up hatreds, one's repressed desires, aggressions, fantasies.

For in part what is so terrifying about the Chinese or the blacks is that we have unconsciously made them symbols for the unknown, unexpected aspects of our inner life. And if we could grow to accept the unknown within ourselves we wouldn't have to plaster every ceiling, every place, every person, until it is a level level level world.

These political, ethical consequences are implicit in the Prankster way of life, in the experience of acid itself. And perhaps if Kesey hadn't been busted (he eventually served a year's sentence), he could have invented the kinds of pranks that would help people to be less scared of the world and of themselves.