The tyranny of the tinkerer
And other thoughts on the afterlife of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters
I recently published, in The Nation’s culture section online, an essay on Tom Wolfe’s 1969 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—his portrait of Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and the birth of the psychedelic movement. This piece came out of a re-engagement with Tom Wolfe’s work last fall, when I moderated a panel on a new batch of reissues of Wolfe’s early nonfiction. Between that and a previous study (which resulted in this New Statesman piece in 2023), I’ve now read most of Wolfe’s output—and Electric Kool-Aid, I’m convinced, is both his best book and his most unusual, for reasons that I describe in the piece.
I keep finding myself writing about Wolfe, a somewhat odd enterprise given the current uneven state of his reputation. In life he was a sort of crypto-conservative stowaway in New York liberal media, admired by conservatives but read also by liberals, and disdained in highbrow places. Today he continues to be read and loved by New York journalists, but mostly in secret. Publicly one is supposed to proffer qualms about the “out of date” aspects of his work. Meanwhile he is openly heroized by conservatives and right-liberals. In New York, his old stomping ground, a judicious silence is mostly maintained. But I see no reason why it should be impossible to seek an accurate picture of, uh, the man in full. At least one left-liberal writer has recently offered a substantially balanced portrait of Wolfe, as writer and sociologist, arguing that one doesn’t have to share his politics to find reading him worthwhile.
Anyway, the Nation article is here and I encourage you to read it if you’re curious. But I wanted to also add here, as I’ve gotten in the habit of doing, a more discursive and personal set of reflections on related themes: on the tyranny of the tinkerer in California in the Sixties, and on my own undergraduate encounters with the dregs of Kesey’s world in the South Bay.
I try to say something in the piece about how the Prankster ethos, and the counterculture more broadly, which has by now been disseminated around the world for fifty years or more, and to whose attitudinal orientation much of Europe itself has been converted (in some ways New York has held out more doggedly) was autochthonous. It sprang, as Wolfe puts it, directly out of “poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America.” In that sense, as I write in the piece, it was (this sounds absurd) classically Greek. Not in that anyone back then knew or cared about the Greeks, or in that their achievement is comparable, but in the sense that in the classical period the Greeks fashioned a philosophy and a culture out of what they had to hand, a commonsensical philosophical vocabulary (Strauss writes about this), because there was no antecedent tradition to refer to, or the Greeks weren’t interested any more in borrowing from various civilizations further East.
(If California in the Sixties was Greece, then Edith Wharton’s fin de siècle Northeast was Rome—a civilization that created something new by borrowing from an older, more worldly culture across an ocean, all while thinking of itself as more rustic and morally upright. Typical of America, perhaps, that we did things backwards: first Rome, then Greece.)
This is really just another way, I suppose, of phrasing one of the clichés about the counterculture, that it was an American original, flush with self-confidence and ignorance of all else, unlike previous eras in American culture that were for all their genius in some sense provincial or responding to influences from without. Of course there was much of that in the Sixties too, a boom time for Orientalism, but at its core, it’s true, it was something else. Not that the touchstone cultural achievements are necessarily all that imposing. I mean, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Pynchon, yes, holds up far better, and the novel, as a form, was not exactly the highest expression of the period’s sensibility, the experience was. But art is long, and experience is short.
Not short enough for us, quite possibly. It can be so hard to get a handle on the Sixties—you had to be there, but everyone who was there doesn’t remember, and all that. Reading the documents of the era, in the Penguin Sixties Reader, doesn’t help much. Articulateness was not the hallmark of the time. We’re too far from that time and yet too close.
What was that California, under whose shadow we still live? This isn’t the place to give a full cultural history, on which much ink has been expended elsewhere by people more knowledgeable than me. But two things that struck me in Kool-Aid, but also in Hunter Thompson’s book on the Hell’s Angels, and in other inquiries into the period, are how much it was a tinkerer’s paradise, and how integrated all these subcultural threads were with each other then—the heads, the surfers, the bikers, the automobile obsessives.
These are more like separate strands now, although they still overlap considerably. The California suburban upper-middle-class dad who likes motorcycles but also surfing is a familiar type. But in postwar California they mingled freely, in a realm terrifyingly dominated culturally by a middle-class monoculture (Mike Davis of course reminds us that millions of working-class minority Californians were carefully written out of this Beach Boys story).
Watching footage of the Hell’s Angels from the time, for example, they look rather less frightening than you’d imagine—they look mostly like middle-class Californians who had just gone to seed a little bit. The classic athletic builds, the full cheeks and earnest smiles not quite covered up by black beards. These were just guys! (These “just guys” did of course stab someone to death at Altamont.)
The raw material for culture at the time was fortuitously limited in kind but plentiful in quantity. You had a lot of middle-class guys who had some money and a house and a car and some time on their hands, and they liked to work with their hands and they had the opportunity to do so. A lot of them worked in the aerospace industry and handled machinery and liked operating and tinkering with machinery, big and small. There was a certain practical curiosity and practical improvisational inventiveness that did not generally coincide with curiosity toward things typically considered intellectual or literary. There was the sense that this penchant for tinkering could be applied to make better use of the leisure that everyone had at their disposal. Hence: surfing, motorcycles, cars, music. Boards could be endlessly modified, different materials borrowed and tried out; motorcycles could be taken apart and put back together again, cars brought to baroque sophistication (Wolfe got his big break writing about this). And all the scenes overlapped. The surfers took acid, the Hell’s Angels took acid. They were all made of the same simple stuff.
The Pranksters, as the piece mentions, were tinkerers themselves, self-taught filmmakers and bizarro musicians and audiovisual engineers, tireless constructors and deconstructors of the strobe lights and amps necessary to put on the Acid Tests, their storied underground parties. California in the Sixties was an empire of tinkerers. And tinkering was easier in California than in the industrial East because there was more space to maneuver and (this is saying the same thing) because California didn’t go through industrialization in quite the same way or at quite the same time. It fit the way that California, and the car, and the postwar world seemed to excavate in a different, postmodern form the old self-sufficient agrarian ideal that was almost buried under the concrete and steel of the early twentieth century. Forty acres and a mule, only it’s a car and a driveway to tinker on it in.
If the different components of this social and cultural tinkering world in California has separated out, lost the effortless interchangeability of that time—of course always contingent on exclusions—then it is because the state is no longer dominated in quite the same way by a unified middle class. There has been separation, upward and downward, and the ranks of the nonwhite working class have greatly swelled, in ways bourgeois culture in the state has not been able to adjust itself to satisfactorily.
Of course the tinkering penchant lives on, a portion of it having been channeled toward the computer, especially in the Bay which, not having the beach in the same way, and being the older sibling of the two Californias, lent itself more to that. And the computer is a more cerebral thing … at least a more abstract thing. Abstraction has been acquired. But Californians, I think it’s fair to say, are still, broadly speaking, practical thinkers, certainly more than they are political thinkers, as Easterners have learned to be, again speaking very broadly.
I’m not much of a tinkerer myself—or perhaps my tinkering simply takes the form of essays like this one. But I do think it can be salutary, a counterweight to the ever-increasing abstraction of PMC life, of email jobs and life (or “life”) online. It is a kind of reaction against the tedious specialization of modern life. I won’t be the guy in the Adam Smith pin factory who just does one thing all day every day, I am going to go home after that and make a whole pin myself and do all the different things that making a pin requires! As you can see, this “rebellion” leads directly to quietism. Not that most other things you might do with your spare time couldn’t be accused of the same.
Philosophers, at least, should be tinkerers, joining practical principles to abstract ones. And as for the opposite, we already know what happens when tinkerers try to become philosophers. Go read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and you’ll see.
***
One of the more surprising things for me, when I read Electric Kool-Aid for the first time, was what it revealed about the prehistory of the alternative student life, such as it was, that I was a kind of arm’s length witness of as an undergraduate at Stanford. Kesey had attended the famous creative writing program there, then under the direction of stern old Wallace Stegner. It was at Stanford, as the piece mentions, that Kesey had been tipped off by a grad student about the MK-Ultra-administered clinical trials at a local veteran’s hospital where he first got turned on to acid. It was apparently there that Kesey, for all his apparent clashes with stuck-up old Stegner, had imposed on him the MFA prose in which he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
And it was at Stanford’s bohemian cluster of cottages, Perry Lane, where Thorstein Veblen had once lived, and which was soon demolished to make way for a subdivision, that Kesey’s scene began to take shape. When he moved his group up to La Honda, in the mountains above Stanford, close ties remained to Palo Alto and environs, and periodically a weird engineer or like social type would float on up the hill to Kesey’s house, like a dead fish.
The piece mentions one of the Pranksters, this guy Paul Foster, who alternated between stints as a “computer programmer” and periods where he’d quit and hang out with Kesey’s crowd and tinker on things and do a bunch of drugs. From Kool-Aid:
He had a huge sack of googaws that he would carry around, of the weirdest stuff, bits of glittering glass and tin and transistor-radio shells, just the shells, and nails and screws and tops and tubes, and inside his sack of weird junk was a little sack that was a miniature of the big sack and contained tiny weird junk ... and you got the idea that somehow, somewhere in there was a very tiny little sack that contained very tiny weird junk, and that it went on that way into infinity ...
I knew these guys … they have multiplied since those days, the oddball software engineers, and Stanford is full of them. At Stanford you had a whole social universe made out of different types of computer science majors. The frat guys were computer science majors. The artsy kids were actually art practice minors, CS majors. There were stoners who were CS majors. And you also had the possibly autistic but in their way charming if a bit standoffish at first eclectic acid head computer science majors who wore weird getups and tinkered around and perhaps lived in one of the co-ops: student-run houses handed down from the Sixties.
The co-ops and their rituals, the Stanford marching band with its neon green tutus and controversial stunts at away football games, like the time the drum major was attacked by a pious Notre Dame student who objected to his conducting the band using a crucifix while in a nun getup—all of it, I realized reading Kool-Aid, is completely orthodox Prankster stuff.
Obviously the Stanford co-ops are more broadly a relic of the 1960s, with their clothing-optional flowers-in-your-hair ethos, the naked parades of people smeared with bright body paint, the pagan ritual-themed parties, the household government by consensus and the health-food fare made and served by students on rotation, often nauseating, sometimes sublime, sometimes laced with something, sometimes with clear warning, sometimes without … but a lot of it seems like it might have been inherited directly from the Pranksters.
Their ethos was, obviously, that of the jokester, and with a certain greater proximity to Americanism, via Day-Glo and cowboy boots, than the Haight-Ashbury variety, which tended more towards Orientalism and tie-dye. That is the ethos of the Stanford band, to a tee, and explains their penchant for practical jokes that are not always well received in middle America. The graffitied school bus parked in the lot behind the Enchanted Broccoli Forest (as one of the co-ops is called) must be an homage to Furthur, the famous International Harvester bus that carried the Pranksters across America and back, with Neal Cassady’s firm speed-fueled hand at the wheel, and was then interred deep in forlorn Oregon forest on Kesey’s estate up there.
No one ever told me about this history when I was an onlooker onto these circles as an undergrad, probably because not many people knew. I’m sure there were veterans of the scene loosely circulating about who knew the lore and would tell you about it at the slightest provocation, in the way that people like that do. But it feels almost, well, countercultural to inquire too deeply into the history, to put too much emphasis on it.
After all, the notion, back in the Sixties and by extension today in the places where that flickering sixty-year-old flame is kept haphazardly burning, was that this way of living was simply the genuine and authentic way of living. It had no history because history was exactly the inauthentic thing that they were obsessed with out on the East Coast and in Europe and which kept people from properly living authentic lives. This is the real thing, was the sense, and we aren’t doing it because Kesey and his friends, whoever they were, did it back then—we’re doing it now because it’s the right thing to do now.
But of course they are doing it because Kesey and his friends did it back then. There’s some intimation here of the way that the cultural flowering of the Sixties failed to mature, has not yet managed to concede that what was immediate and imperative then is now merely traditional. Merely? There’s much that traditions have to offer, this one at least as much as others. And we have a right to suspect that the reason for that is not so much the anti-traditional stance of the cultural manifestations of that era but rather, let’s be honest, their philistinism. That, at least, is a local tradition that you can count on being preserved!
And perhaps it’s in bad judgement to criticize these institutions too much, since there’s still enough independence in these places, the co-ops, for the university to see them as a threat to its precious reputation. Stanford was always a relatively conservative place overall—a wealthy private university founded by a rail baron in a sleepy rural zone of California, now a sleepy world-famous tech hub. Its culture of Sixties protest was hardly able to hold a candle to Berkeley’s—Malcolm Harris fails in his efforts to make it seem substantial in his Palo Alto (2023), which incidentally describes Kesey, without any love lost for the man, as Palo Alto’s most consequential twentieth-century cultural product.
But the South Bay has gone from ordinary middle-class California suburb and ranchland to affluent home archipelago of the tech and venture capital nexus, and Stanford from regional university to Ivy League rival. Its own student culture has become more pre-professional and tame, pushed in that direction by administration crackdowns on student social life, sanctions on the band for its irreverence, and the step-by-step removal of the privileges of the independent houses, which had been bought up by Stanford over the decades and absorbed into its residential empire. The co-ops put on the only parties worth going to when I was an undergrad, and for that, presumably, the university could never forgive them. But I had better stop, because I’m starting to sound like Ken Kesey here …