IV

KESEY'S only explicit political advice was given in a speech to a huge Berkeley peace rally. It was "to say fuck the war and just turn your back on it." This leads Wolfe to an asinine prediction of the "death" of radical politics, the end of organized demonstrations. He not only predicts, but at the end of the book describes this non-event as if it had actually occurred.

But acid did have implications for radical politics, even if Wolfe misses them. Acid perhaps revealed the true extent to which our own minds form the social reality we accept as given. It gives us leverage to move outside the kind of stolid consciousness society has formed for us, and which it reinforces. It shows us that there are alternative kinds of consciousness that lead to new kinds of political activity. Many have found again that you can, to a greater extent than expected, react to events the way you choose to act, not the way they want you to.

V

THOUGH little of what I have said is explicit in Wolfe's book, many of Kesey's actions do seem to point towards the meanings I've described. In effect these meanings are attributes of the acid experience, and Kesey was among the first to explore it.

But he hasn't been the only one, and each one who follows him down the acid trail makes his experience seem less unique. Wolfe never makes us feel we are in the presence of a great teacher.

By means of his style Wolfe does attempt to force feed a significance into what we read. For a moment the trick works, and an aura of newness shimmers about Kesey and the Pranksters. I believed myself to be in the presence of some new prophet, of a new and radical insight. But then, a moment away from the presence of the style, and the outlines of the event began to blur, the figure of Kesey himself became insubstantial. In the end the Christ-like robes Wolfe fashioned for Kesey are much too large. We are left with another acid-head and a bunch of kooky kids who did a few krazy things.

This shrinking effect--the way the book diminishes in memory--is the fault of Wolfe's own style. Fun to read, it is still frenetic, hopped up with exclamations, interjections aplenty. It is a hey-look-no-hands way of writing. No character can come to life in this style. There is, ultimately, Wolfe's style operating in a vacuum, doing tricks, pulling rabbits out of hats. And only later does one realize that--as on some acid trip--both rabbit and hat were imaginary.