Biggie Fries

"Most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois, more petit bourgeois...homes with Culture but no money or money but no Culture."

~The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The last two months have found me slowly chipping away at this book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Not slowly because it’s boring, slowly because of my lack of discipline, my lack of “quiet time”, my lack of you fill in the blank.

If you haven’t read this book, perhaps you should. It’s really hard to say since I really don’t know who I am “speaking” to on this blog. Speaking at might be a more appropriate way of saying it. Speaking into the great cyber space void.

But here is this little book, a crazy piece of hippie memorabilia from the late 60’s. A loose chronicling of the early days of the acid movement, the be-here-now movement, the giant social upheaval that spawned from the psychedelic experience movement (a movement that still continues to this day).

The author, Tom Wolfe, takes the audience (which at the time of publishing was mostly a straight, middle class, “silent majority” readership) on a fantastic journey into the day-glo world of Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters. They paint a bus, take lots of acid, drive around America and basically help to ignite what eventually becomes the hippie movement.

So that’s the basic rundown. And throughout this strange tale of strange people doing strange things Wolfe asserts, or more likely stumbles upon, some very interesting observations about the American culture as a whole.

I opened this entry with a quote from a paragraph I read just today. Today being the second day of June in the year two thousand and nine. Today finding me in a country that has little culture to speak of, and what little culture there is isn’t even worth mentioning.

And this is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of my generation: we are inheriting from our parents generation not only an unheard of amount of debt (60 Trillion and counting!) but also a culture that has been so exploited, so wrung dry of any uniqueness, any semblance of authenticity that we literally find ourselves standing amongst the ruins (in our case they are sheet metal strip malls instead of the large stone Pyramids) of an utterly mind numbing landscape devoid of anything worthwhile.

We are the generation of no money and no culture. Welcome to the future, would you like biggie fries with that?