Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check-The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-In The Time Of Our Time- Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - A Book Review , Of Sorts

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days when I heard Tom Wolfe (not Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angels, etc.) the writer of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s to space flights in the 1970 to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died,  I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories without knowing he had passed.

I don’t know how he did at the end as a writer, or toward the end although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina but pound for pound in his prime he could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.   

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-A Dream Fragment On Looking For A Few Good…Mystics -In The Matter Of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

Zack James’ comment June, 2017:

You know it is in a way too bad that “Doctor Gonzo”-Hunter S Thompson, the late legendary journalist who broke the back, hell broke the neck, legs, arms of so-called objective journalism in a drug-blazed frenzy back in the 1970s when he “walked with the king”’ is not with us in these times. In the times of this 50^th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he worked the edges of while he was doing research (live and in your face research by the way) on the notorious West Coast-based Hell’s Angels. His “hook” through Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down in Kesey’s place in La Honda where many an “acid test” took place and where for a time the Angels, Hunter in tow, were welcomed. He had been there in the high tide, when it looked like we had the night-takers on the run and later as well when he saw the ebb tide of the 1960s coming a year or so later although that did not stop him from developing the quintessential “gonzo” journalism fine-tuned with plenty of dope for which he would become famous before the end, before he took his aging life and left Johnny Depp and company to fling his ashes over this good green planet. He would have “dug” the exhibition, maybe smoked a joint for old times’ sake (oh no, no that is not done in proper society) at the de Young Museum at the Golden Gate Park highlighting the events of the period showing until August 20^th of this year.   

Better yet he would have had this Trump thug bizarre weirdness wrapped up and bleeding from all pores just like he regaled us with the tales from the White House bunker back in the days when Trump’s kindred one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal was running the same low rent trip before he was run out of town by his own like some rabid rat. But perhaps the road to truth these days, in the days of “alternate facts” and assorted other bullshit    would have been bumpier than in those more “civilized” times when simple burglaries and silly tape-recorders ruled the roost. Hunter did not make the Nixon “hit list” (to his everlasting regret for which he could hardly hold his head up in public) but these days he surely would find himself in the top echelon. Maybe too though with these thugs he might have found himself in some back alley bleeding from all pores. Hunter Thompson wherever you are –help. Selah. Enough said-for now  

Book Review

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, Bantam Books, New York, 1968

The subject of “Gonzo journalism”, a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets “down and dirty” with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, “nothing but the facts, Jack” back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone’s face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to got to “edge city” in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, called the “new journalism”. The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.

While Thompson was more than happy to tweak “edge city” Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is on to something different from the run of the mill “straight” journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at "gonzo” didn’t work either. Here some of Wolfe’s entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms. The most polished form of those attempts is the early, now classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Below is a sketch of that work from another entry in this space today that gives the highlights:


"And why does Brother Wolfe (or is it really Brother Wolf?) earn this blame? Well, frankly, merely by telling this acid-etched (literally) story about the late author Ken Kesey (most famous for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion), his California-gathered (naturally, right?) tribe of Merry Pranksters, their then rural California coastal communal arrangements (or non-arrangements, or dis-arrangements, as the case may be), and their antics, including a collectively produced and massively-filmed cross-country “bus” ride that cemented their collective experiences. No kidding- you were truly either on the “bus” or off the “bus” if you got entangled with this crowd.

Oh, did I mention, as well, their deep-end “edge city” drug experiences, especially the then little known acid (LSD) trips? Those drug experiments, important as they were to the story line of the book, are, however, not what have me up in arms though. Hey, experimenting with drugs, or experimenting with sometime (sex, the karma sutra, Zen, zen, sex, abstract primitivist painting, free-form verse, sex, hitchhiking the universe, sex, etc.) was de rigueur in those halcyon days. I wouldn’t waste my breathe, and your time, recounting those kinds of stories. Everybody did drugs back then, or was….unhip. And almost no one, hip, unhip, cloven-footed, or haloed angel wanted to be thought of as unhip.

The others, those who claim memory lose today on the subject, or some story along those lines, just lie. Or were cloistered somewhere, and such circumstances are better left untold. Or, and here is my favorite, didn’t inhale. The number of guys (and gals) who NOW say that they didn’t inhale exceeds the total youth tribe members of the 1960s. Unless, of course, my numbers are off, slightly. I, in any case, need not go through that scene again. Read Wolfe’s book or watch Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider or ask your parents or…ouch, grandparents." Actually, read this book.

The Drug Wars 50 Years Ago- High School Confidential

DVD REVIEW

High School Confidential, MGM Productions, starring Russ Tambyn with Jerry Lee Lewis doing his hit song High School Confidential, 1958

Mary Jane, weed, tea, ganja, herb, stick and so on. Every generation (which should tell us something) has its own code words for its recreational drugs. But wait a minute. Drugs, especially marijuana, are bad for you, right? Why? Marijuana is the first step on the slippery slope down the road to serious drug addiction- heroin, opium, crack and so on. And then on to a life of crime and jail. Is this a story from today’s headlines? Well, I suppose it could be but it is not. This is the premise behind the 1958 classic B teenage movie "High School Confidential".

Now frankly, this year I have been on a Jerry Lee Lewis kick trying to establish who was the “king of rock and roll” during the 1950’s so I picked up this little movie to see if it could aid my Jerry Lee bias. While the lead-in scene of Jerry Lee on a truck doing "High School Confidential" in front of some California high school students is amazing this film did not help in that effort. What is the case, however, is how even back then when drugs were a fringe phenomena mainly indulged in by the “beats” like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and their crowd and other “anti-social” types the monitors of American teenage mores in the film industry had to weigh in to condemn this practice out of hand. Nothing new there and the police authorities (the good guys, right?) then were just about as successful (in reality, not in the film) as they have been today. That is to say that they have sought to fill the jails as their solution to the problem. Mainly with blacks and Latinos. But enough of that, for now.

This turns out to be a very campy movie complete with new boy Russ Tambyn (a very old teenager, by the way) in town (as an undercover vice cop) trying to become “king of the hill” in the teenage drug market. We have a glance at teen life in the 1950’s as seen by Hollywood with their take on “beat” slang (including a very nicely done be-bop poetic recitation by a young woman at a teenage nightclub), high school dances, hot rods on Saturday night(complete with a Rebel Without A Cause racing scene), grabbing girls (right from under the noses of other guys no less), 'dissing' teachers and headmasters and doing a little weed. (You know to liven up the party). All in the service of one thing- don’t. The only thing not done here is an explicit tie-in with drugs and rock and roll although with Jerry Lee present that might have been a little hard to do. Since this is the 50th anniversary of the release of the film I will finish with one conclusion from viewing the film and the facts of life since then- decriminalize drug use-now.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Vote Yes on California Prop 19 -Decriminalize marijuana (herb, maryjane, joints, ganja or whatever your favorite name for it is) - Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
 
Additionally, everyone who has ever smoked a joint, thought about smoking a joint or thought about inhaling the smoke from a joint, in short everyone from the baby boomer generation (except good old boy Bill Clinton it seems) should vote YES with both hands on this one, despite its limitations. Hell, if we had won our fight for the new society back then in the 1960s this would already be the law of the land (actually a better version as noted in the article) and nobody would think twice about it today.    
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Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010

Vote Yes on California Prop 19

Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!

OAKLAND—An initiative on the November 2 ballot in California would make the state the first in the country to legalize the sale of marijuana as well as eliminate criminal penalties for possession or use of an ounce or less by those over 21. It would make cannabis available for scientific, medical, industrial and research purposes and permit the cultivation of small amounts for personal consumption. Proposition 19, “The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010,” is written narrowly to leave much of pot use illegal and concerns itself with regulating and taxing its sale. Nevertheless, a vote for Prop. 19 is an elementary expression of support for a simple democratic right: that the government keep its claws off of people’s private lives.

Equally important, a vote for this initiative is a vote against the “war on drugs,” which is in the main a war against black people. While blacks and whites use marijuana at close to the same rate, the arrest rate for blacks is three times greater nationally and ranges up to four times greater in California counties.

The “war on drugs” has served to greatly intensify capitalist state repression, whose daily workings include street executions by marauding cops, such as the brutal killings of Oscar Grant in Oakland last year and Manuel Jamines in Los Angeles this September. In Latin America, U.S. imperialism—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has used the “war on drugs” as a pretext for expanding its military presence and propping up pro-U.S. regimes (see “Mexico: Down With ‘Drug Wars’ Militarization!” WV No. 953, 26 February).

Contrary to government claims, the criminalization of marijuana has never had anything to do with protecting anyone’s welfare. Anti-drug laws are designed to maintain social control and regimentation of the population, providing a legal pretext to repress black people, immigrants, youth and others.

Laws against marijuana were first adopted beginning in 1914 as a racist measure against Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. A federal ban in 1937 opened the era of campaigns against “reefer madness,” especially targeting both blacks and Latinos. The first federal “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, captured that ban’s spirit with such racist diatribes as “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

Today’s plethora of drug laws are an outgrowth of the web of legal repression under the “war on crime,” kicked off with Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Republican Richard Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.” These and subsequent measures were implemented to target black militants and the ghetto poor following the upheavals against segregation, poverty and racist cop terror in the mid-to-late 1960s. Under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the bipartisan “war on drugs” was officially launched, centered on a racist crack cocaine witchhunt. Incarceration rates skyrocketed, especially for young black men, for whom the capitalist rulers have had increasingly little use since the devastation of unionized industrial jobs beginning in the 1970s.

Starting in the early 1990s, marijuana arrests began to shoot up as crack cocaine arrests leveled off. By 2009, annual marijuana prosecutions had reached more than 858,000. More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana, and 46 percent of all drug arrests—nearly 760,000 a year—are for possession. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear the government’s opposition to Prop. 19, vowing that the Obama administration would “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws.

The government has no business criminalizing the personal use of any drug, for any purpose, regardless of its particular risks or effects. As communists, we demand an end to all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, prostitution, drug use, pornography and all consensual sex. Likewise, we oppose “sin taxes” on activities and products the bourgeoisie deems “immoral” or unhealthy, like alcohol and tobacco.

In fact, marijuana is among the safest of non-food substances consumed by humans. Yet under the Controlled Substances Act, the Feds put it on the list of the supposedly most dangerous drugs, Schedule I, along with heroin, and ahead of Schedule II drugs like cocaine and morphine. Despite the passage of Prop. 215 in 1996, which made medical use of marijuana legal in California, the federal government did not stop persecuting a number of patients with harrowing illnesses for whom pot provided some relief.

NAACP president Alice Huffman explained why the California NAACP endorsed Prop. 19 by correctly denouncing “the so called ‘war on drugs’” as “a war that disproportionately affects young men and women and the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor African-Americans” (San Francisco Chronicle, 16 September). For this, she has come under fire, with more than 20 black preachers and others demanding her resignation. Nate Holden, a longtime black Democratic Los Angeles politician, has come out against Prop. 19. The capitalist Democratic Party, and black elected officials in particular, have been instrumental in the anti-drug crusade. Huffman herself has endorsed Democratic state attorney general Jerry Brown for governor. Brown boasts of enforcing the racist drug laws and opposes Prop. 19. In their role of tying labor to the capitalist class enemy, the bureaucratic misleaders of almost all of California’s public workers unions have also backed Brown, who promises to cut public workers pensions.

The “war on drugs” has at times been supported by large sections of working people and the oppressed who wrongly believe that cops and prisons are a means for combatting the social pathology of drug addiction and the drug trade. In fact, decriminalization, by taking the superprofits out of the drug trade, would also reduce the crime associated with it. For those who wish, any associated psychological or medical problem that may arise from drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. At the same time, we understand that drug addiction in the ghetto is a reflection of the hellish conditions imposed on masses of black people in this racist capitalist society. As we wrote in “Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex: U.S./UN Crusade Against ‘Sex Trafficking’” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004):

“Recreational drug use is nobody else’s business, but widespread drug addiction and alcoholism sap the revolutionary energy of the working class and other sections of the oppressed. The social oppression that breeds alcoholism and drug addiction among the poor should be fought through the moral authority of the proletarian socialist movement, and not through state coercion.”

Whipping up hysteria about drugs in the workplace, the California Chamber of Commerce opposes Prop. 19 because the measure approves only the “existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance”—i.e., the current norm for subjecting workers to drug tests. We oppose all workplace drug testing, which the bosses use as a pretext to frame up or target militants and cow the entire workforce.

The racism and union-busting of the “war on drugs” come together in the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, under which port workers are branded as a “threat to national security” for offenses ranging from drug possession with intent to distribute to fraud and being an “illegal immigrant.” Under TWIC, many port workers have lost their jobs, disproportionately blacks and Latinos, and including members of the largely immigrant port truckers. As the Northern California District Council of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union declared in a statement endorsing Prop. 19: “Peoples’ lives are ruined for a lifetime because of criminal records incurred from using a drug that is used recreationally by people from all walks of life. Those criminal records fall disproportionately on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color.” Down with TWIC!

We support Prop. 19 as a step toward removing all laws against drug use, but we do not take a position on the particular schemes advanced by Prop. 19 to regulate the commercial production and taxation of marijuana. Moreover, we oppose the draconian measures it would mete out when it comes to youth—the other group specially targeted by drug laws—and those who provide them marijuana. These include up to seven years in prison for offering or providing pot to youth under 14, up to five years for ages 14-18 and six months for ages 18-21. Despite its weaknesses, however, if passed and actually implemented—no sure thing given federal and police hostility—Prop. 19 would eliminate a key legal pretext for state harassment and violence. Down with the racist and anti-labor “war on drugs”! For decriminalization of drugs! Vote yes on Prop. 19!