Free love, psychedelic drugs, progressive rock… The sixties were a time of political and cultural turmoil in the United States: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. , the space race, the civil rights movement, the emergence of the hippies, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War protests, and the formation of the New Left all happened in that eventful decade. The American Dream of the 1950s—home ownership, nuclear families, television sets, laundry machines, and cars—was challenged by a potent counterculture.
In the words of John Hollowell, author of Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel: The dominant mood of America in the 1960’s was apocalyptic. Perpetual crisis seemed in many ways the rule. Throughout the decade the events reported daily by newspapers and magazines documented the sweeping changes in every sector of our national life and often strained our imaginations to the point of disbelief. Increasingly, everyday “reality” became more fantastic than the fictional visions of even our best novelists. (3) As Hollowell states, the phenomena of that era seemed nothing short of incredible to the average American reader.
This inspired something interesting to take place in the literary field as well: alongside traditional journalism and fiction began to appear articles and reportages that seemed to be a strange mixture of both. Current events and changes in the society, such as protests, the flocking of hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, and the surfacing of a psychedelic drug scene, were recorded in a way that borrowed stylistic and structural features from fiction, but documented real events 3 and characters: the sixties witnessed the birth of fictionalized accounts of nonfictional subject matter.
Hollowell describes the new form of writing in terms of form and the role of the author. Contrary to traditional journalism, its focus was not on the neutrality or objectivity of reporting, but the introspections and observations of the writer: One significant direction the new writing took was toward documentary forms, eyewitness reports, and personal and confessional narratives. The work of certain novelists, as well as that of certain journalists, reflects an unusual degree of selfconsciousness about the writer’s role in society, and the unique character of American life. 5) These nonfiction narratives—either parts of them, or in full—were often initially published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The World Journal Tribune, Esquire Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and later in book form. The new style of writing inspired many attempts to classify it: creative nonfiction, the nonfiction novel, literary journalism, gonzo journalism, and (the) New Journalism were some of the labels put on the movement.
In this paper, I will be using the term new journalism, because it best captures the mode of the movement: at the time, combining journalist writing with conventions of literary fiction was exceptional and, indeed, new. Furthermore, the term was established by a new journalist shortly after the movement started to gain interest and it is used more frequently to refer to the genre than the other ones mentioned above. In the frontline of the new journalists were three interesting writers: Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
All of them wrote several works in the 1960s and early 1970s that can be regarded as new journalism. For the purpose of my study, I have chosen one work from each author: The Armies of the Night (1968) by Mailer, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) by Thompson, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967) by 4 Wolfe. The works vary a bit in form, but clearly utilize new journalist techniques and portray different aspects of the sixties counterculture, so I hold them as fitting examples of the genre.
In my thesis, I discuss how Mailer, Thompson, and Wolfe portray the American society of the 1960s, and how this view corresponds to the notion of the American Dream. 1. 1 Aims and methods Many would agree that the sixties, with its countercultural movements and fresh ideas, was a fascinating decade. But why dig deeper into new journalism, the American Dream, and the American society of the sixties? The hippies have trimmed their beards, the radicals gotten real jobs, and the last traces of flower power withered away long ago— so why bother? Well, this is why: the sixties left a profound imprint on American culture.
It was a time when people thought they could really change the world into a better place through political activism, spiritual experimenting, and artistic expression. They hoped and demanded that the abstraction of the American Dream would become reality; a reality that included those previously left out, such as minority groups and the poor, and a reality where there was space for solidarity and humanity. Furthermore, there was also an alternative American Dream for the first time in American history— one that was not defined by material success, but rather by spiritual values and selffulfillment.
The experience of living like a free spirit, embracing new ideas, and reaching out for a better world did not last long, but it left a significant footprint in history and culture. The new journalists captured this distinct and exceptional era in their works, and it is through their portrayal of the American society that we can better understand the revolutionary new ethos that surfaced for a short time in the sixties, 5 before sinking back into the depths of intellectual and spiritual apathy again.
Because when the trip ended in the early seventies, something died with it. To bury the whole American Dream with the sixties would be too much, but a great part of it certainly seems to have been lost with the assassinations of bright new leaders, the violent suffocation of protest movements, political scandals, and the longdrawn-out war in Vietnam. As it became evident that the movement had ultimately failed in its attempts to make a difference, the American Dream fled a little further from those who fought to put it into practice.
My aim in this study is to produce understanding of this relocation of the American Dream in the popular imagination, and the role of new journalism as a part—and as a testimony—of the 1960s counterculture. By examining the American society of the sixties through Mailer, Thompson, and Wolfe, I demonstrate that something changed permanently in the cultural atmosphere and in the conceptualization the American Dream during that era. One of the reasons I decided to conduct my thesis on this particular topic was that there has not been a study thus far that examines multiple new journalist works in the conceptual framework of the American Dream.
There are studies on how the American Dream has been perceived and what it has meant in different eras, such as The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation by Jim Cullen and Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion over Four Centuries by Cal Jillson. There are also several studies on new journalism and counterculture, such as Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel by John Hollowell and The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee Terry H. Anderson.
There is even a study about the psychedelic movement and the American Dream, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens, but no study has shed light on how the shift that the American Dream underwent in the 6 sixties is visible through new journalist writing. The three new journalist works I examine—alongside sociological, cultural, and historical records—function as a looking glass into the events and mentalities of the sixties; especially the disillusioning proceedings that caused the dreams and utopias of the sixties generation to shatter down.
This study hopes to provide a valuable addition to the cultural history of the sixties and to the effort of conceptualizing the American Dream. In order to do all the things I mention above, I have adopted a multidimensional approach. To begin with, works of new journalism are rather difficult to define in terms of genre: they are neither exactly fiction nor exactly journalism. The characters and events they depict are real, yet elements of exaggeration, altered reality, and artistic expression can be found in the texts.
New journalism balances on the line between fact and fiction, which makes it a rather challenging subject to study. Most theories of literature focus on traditional forms of literature, such as novels, short stories, and poetry, while mass media research provides tools for analyzing primarily news journalism, television programs, and advertising. The fuzziness of my subject matter calls, thus, for a more interdisciplinary approach, which draws its inspiration from both literature studies and the social sciences.
Because new journalism is based on the idea that the events, places, and characters are real, my theoretical framework had to include social and historical knowledge of American society and politics. However, because new journalist works ultimately fall into the realm of literature, I found that some literary criticism is in order as well. In order to examine the cultural stance of the new journalists in relation to the American Dream, I have adopted a theoretical position that most resembles New Historicism (also known as cultural poetics).
New Historicism is a branch of literary criticism that examines history through literature and literature through history. 7 Explained concisely by Mari Peepre and Nely Keinanen in Reading our World: a Guide to Practical and Theoretical Criticism, New Historicism examines “the historical and sociological events of an era and relates them to the literature that produced them. [—] New Historicism believes in referentiality: literature refers to and is referred to by things outside itself” (251). According to Charles E.
Bressler in Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, New Historicists—unlike New Critics—believe that a literary text cannot be interpreted isolated from its context. Deriving from a Marxist tradition, cultural studies, and the thinking of French philosopher Michel Foucault, New Historicism views texts as “culture in action” (183), which is to say that writing is perceived as an act of participating in one’s society and culture. According to Bressler, New Historicists believe that “all texts are really social documents that reflect but also, and more importantly, respond to their historical situation” (187).
The three areas of interest to a new historicist are therefore “the life of the author, the social rules and dictates found within a text, and a reflection of a work’s historical situation as evidenced in the text” (189). My primary focus is on the things that the texts refer to outside themselves and especially how they refer to these things, not the texts in themselves as autonomous objects of artistic expression. I believe that works of new journalism give us valuable information about the 1960s in America: they provide us with cultural information that is inevitably left out from strictly factual historical accounts of the era.
Cultural and historical knowledge can only be pieced together from multiple sources: there is no such thing as objective history or a single truth about a certain era, so the subjective visions of the new journalists bring a valuable addition to the canonical sources of historical knowledge. My approach differs, however, from New Historicism as viewed by Bressler in at least one respect: I have not extensively researched the biographies of the 8 authors, since I find this information irrelevant to my study.
I do not deem necessary to plough through shelves of books about the childhood events of Mailer, Thompson and Wolfe (although this could easily be done), or go through their original notes and recordings to catch the tiniest details of their working processes (although even this could be fairly easily done 1 ). I believe that it is possible to examine works of literature in their historical context without having read the entire production of the author. For the purpose of my study, it has been sufficient to concentrate on the three new journalist works at hand and the historical events they portray.
The key concepts I use in my study are theme and motif. For the purpose of my study, I found it suitable to use very simple definitions of the concepts, commonly used at the very basic level of literature studies. I understand theme as the larger abstract entity of textual content that tells us what the text is about, and motifs as the components that construct and develop the theme(s). A Theme is the central subject matter of a text and a motif a reoccurring element that carries some sort of significance in relation to the theme.
Although there can also be free motifs that do not necessarily tie into the main theme, I have chosen to discuss mainly the motifs that reveal something about the general themes of the three works. I have categorized the themes I found most important under the main chapters of this study: criticism of the American society, criticism of the Vietnam War and the search for the American Dream. It should be noted that thematic analysis is a highly subjective method of study: one critic might raise particular themes or motifs above others, while another critic might hold other themes and motifs more valuable.
Here, I have chosen from each text the themes and For example, a box containing five compact discs of Hunter S. Thompson’s taped recordings from 1965 to 1975 was released October 28th, 2008. Most of his correspondence with editors and friends has been published earlier between 1979 and 1994 in the four volumes of The Gonzo Papers. 1 9 motifs that are most relevant to the countercultural context and the relocation of the American Dream. In addition to the concepts of theme and motif, I found useful to study the deeper cultural meanings associated to some of the motifs in the texts, that is, their connotations.
Connotation and denotation are common terminology in linguistics, but here I will use a more culturally oriented definition, originally introduced by Roland Barthes in the 1970s. John Fiske summarizes this approach aptly in Introduction to Communication Studies. According to Barthes, there are two orders of signification, that is to say, the meaning making process. The first order is called denotation, which is the straightforward meaning of a sign. The second order, connotation, is used to express all the other meanings that are attached to a sign, in addition to the denotative meaning.
According to Fiske, connotation “describes the interaction that occurs when the sign meets the feelings or emotions of the users and the values of their culture” (86). Barthes himself used the example of photography to distinguish between the two terms: “Denotation is what is being photographed; connotation is how it is photographed” (86, emphases original). By examining also the connotative meanings relating to the themes and motifs, I try to get a firmer grip on the cultural notions behind The Armies of the Night, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
From this contextual standpoint, I have analyzed in the three texts the themes, motifs, and connotations containing information about the sixties America. In order to make the most of my analysis, I have familiarized myself with relevant background reading. As the main sources of theoretical background for the socio-cultural framework, I have used several current social scientists and historians, such as Terry H. Anderson, Alexander Bloom, and Todd Gitlin, as well as contemporaries of the new journalists, such as Christopher Lasch, Theodore Roszak, Philip Slater, and Alvin Toffler—some of 10 hich might be best classified as left-wing intellectuals. As the main sources of historical information and American politics, I have used such scholars as John Diggins, Paul Levine and Harry Papasotiriou, and John A. Moore and Myron Roberts. As theory on new journalism, I have used multiple approaches to the genre by different authors, such as Phyllis Frus, John Hellman, John Hollowell, and Tom Wolfe. Fully acknowledging that my approach is rather wide-ranging and multidimensional by nature, I nevertheless feel that it best suited my purpose in addressing the socio-cultural context as well as the textual features of the works.
Below, I first introduce the concept of new journalism, and briefly the author profiles of Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. I then proceed to discuss the concept of the American Dream, examining the origin of the concept as well as its role in popular culture. In the second chapter, I discuss how the writers’ criticism of the American society is manifested in their attitudes towards ideology, politics, religion, capitalism, and the media. In the third chapter, I examine how the writers process the Vietnam War, and how these views relate to fundamental American values, such as liberty and patriotism.
In the fourth chapter, I discuss how the authors depict the new visions of the American Dream that arose from the countercultural imagination, and also how some of those visions failed once it was attempted to actualize them. Finally, conclusions about the dislocation of the American Dream and ideas for further research are presented in chapter five. 1. 2 Defining new journalism The term new journalism—sometimes also the New Journalism—started to circulate among the public in the mid-sixties.
Nobody seems to know who exactly coined the term in the first place, but Tom Wolfe made it a household name by his book The New 11 Journalism (1973). He begins his pioneering account of the new movement by shamelessly boosting the new genre and intentionally (or possibly unintentionally) exaggerating its significance in the literary sphere: I doubt if many of the aces I will be extolling in this story went into journalism with the faintest notion of creating a “new” journalism, a “higher” journalism, or even a mildly improved variety.
I know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world … causing a panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century. (3) By aces, Wolf is referring to the authors he included in his anthology of new journalism: Gay Talese, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, George Plimpton, Hunter S.
Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and of course himself, just to mention the central ones. The book has a section on the beginnings of new journalism and over twenty excerpts from works that Wolfe considers fine examples of the genre. The New Journalism has been regarded as one of the most important works that theorize new journalism: it was the first effort to set the rules and define the ideology of the movement. It has to be mentioned, however, that not everyone agrees with Wolfe’s classification and definition of new journalism.
For example, George Plimpton thought of his work rather as participatory journalism (see Bill Beuttler) and Truman Capote preferred to call himself the inventor of the nonfiction novel (Hollowell, 59–60). According to Wolfe, the literary atmosphere of the time was profoundly dominated by the novel, but despite its reign there began to emerge experiments combining traditional newspaper reporting with literary devices, such as dialogue, focalization, and onomatopoeia. The idea behind this new direction was, according to Wolfe, that “it just might be possible to write journalism that would … ead like a novel” (9). In his study of the genre Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, John Hollowell argues that the major reasons behind the rise of new journalism were both economical and cultural. Many magazines were struggling to make a profit 12 and hold on to their readers during the rise of the electronic media, which made the editors more favorable to experimenting with new styles. What is more, the emergence and growth of an underground press advocated imaginative writing and free form (38– 39).
Wolfe emphasizes, however, that new journalism was not entirely new: the central characteristics of the genre—”scene-by-scene construction,” “realistic dialogue,” “thirdperson point of view,” and “recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene”—emulate the techniques of the realist novel (31–33).
The innovativeness of new journalism lies not, thus, in its literary techniques, but in the notion of reporting actual events in a fictionalized form—re-creating the experiences for the reader, if you will. The discussion concerning the innovativeness of new journalism is by no means unanimous. According to Hollowell, sporadic works of earlier reporting and travel literature—some dating back all the way to the seventeenth century—bear much resemblance to the new journalism of the sixties.
It was in that decade, however, that the genre truly flourished in newspapers and magazines after slowly picking up momentum during the forties and fifties (33–36). In Hollowell’s opinion, writers of new journalism or nonfiction novels do not really constitute a movement, although he admits their works “reflect shared assumptions and techniques” (15). Instead, he defines new journalism against traditional news reporting: “The most important difference […] is the writer’s changed relationship to the people and events he depicts” (22). Hollowell notes that style—”the use of fictional devices borrowed from short stories and novels”—was 3 the other main feature that set new journalism apart from conventional newspaper stories (22). John Hellmann, on the other hand, argues that new journalism was indeed new in his study of new journalism, Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction: First, it overcame the weaknesses of the traditional fictional contract, in which the author promised plausibility, by replacing it with a journalistic one promising factuality; second, it overcame the limitations of conventional journalism and realistic fiction by exploiting fully and frankly the power of shaping consciousness found in fabulist fiction.
The result was a new form both wholly fictional and wholly journalistic through which the individual human consciousness could directly make or organize the seemingly chaotic world into a work embodying a meaningful engagement of the two. (19) Consequently, Hellmann classifies new journalism as a genre of its own. He asserts that new journalists aimed to create an aesthetic experience, which is read because it contains not just factual information, but also—perhaps more importantly—the author’s interpretations, impressions, and personal experiences of a certain subject matter (24– 25).
Hellmann explains that journalists confronted “subjects the significance of which lay in their experience, in their consciousness” (3, emphasis original), which made them seek alternatives to the rigid forms of traditional news reporting. So, instead of trying to describe these new phenomena through conventional methods, new journalists “sought new forms and frankly asserted their personal perspectives” (3).
Hollowell makes a very insightful observation concerning the nature of new journalist writing: instead of relying heavily on facts and quotations, “the writer tries to reconstruct the experience as it might have unfolded” (25, emphasis original). This, I think, is a key factor in understanding new journalism: although based on fact, new journalist narratives do not tell us merely what happened and why—they transmit impressions, insights, and visions of culturally important phenomena.
Characterizing the genre further, Hollowell adds two more fictional devices to compliment the four listed earlier by Wolfe: “interior monologue” and “composite characterization,” which 14 means compressing evidence of multiple real personalities into one fictional character (26). Another characteristic of new journalism both Wolfe and Hollowell identify, is the authors’ intensive and time-consuming commitment to the topic at hand.
For example, Hunter S. Thompson followed the motorcycle gang Hell’s Angels around for over a year in order to write Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) and Truman Capote studied the events surrounding the murders of a Kansas farmer family for six years before writing In Cold Blood (1966). One final aspect of trying to define new journalism is its relevance to the sixties counterculture.
Hellmann points out that much of new journalism’s potency as a countercultural force lay in its freedom from the constraints of objectivity: “Almost by definition, new journalism is a revolt by the individual against homogenized forms of experience, against monolithic versions of truth” (8). New journalists often aimed to present an alternative story, an option to the apparently objective and “monolithic” accounts of the established mass media.
New journalism’s relationship with the counterculture is of course most evident through its subject matter, which is, according to Hollowell, “intimately bound to the extreme experiences of the social and political climate of the decade” (40). He observes that the new journalists often wrote about personalities and phenomena unfamiliar to the average, middle-class American reader. The subject matter revolved around “emerging patterns of social organization that deviate from the mainstream culture,” such as subcultures, gangs, artists, celebrities, and criminals (40).
This is not to say that the mainstream media did not cover these subjects; only that new journalists made also the other side of the story, flavored with experience and sensation, available to the general public—readers could feel as if they were sitting in the middle of an anti-war protest instead of their living room couch. New journalism and alternative magazines were thus an essential aspect of the counterculture, as “their 15 freedom from journalist conventions helped to counteract the pervasive tradition of objective reporting” (Hollowell, 39). 1. 2. 1 Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) was a prominent figure in the artistic scene of America: he wrote plays, novels, screenplays, and newspaper articles, and directed movies. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, after which he wrote many fictional and nonfictional works. Mailer was a central countercultural figure, often sharply criticizing the American society in his writing and public speeches. In 1955 Mailer co-founded the magazine Village Voice, an alternative weekly newspaper featuring politics and arts. From 1952 to 1963 he was also the editor of Dissent, a magazine concerned with culture, society, and politics.
He was a Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York in 1969, but failed to be elected (see author introduction in The Armies of the Night). Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize twice: in 1968 for The Armies of the Night and in 1979 for The Executioner’s Song. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (1968) depicts the events at the March on the Pentagon, an anti-Vietnam demonstration held in Washington D. C. in October 1967. Mailer participated in the protest as a public figure: he gave several speeches and intentionally got himself arrested.
He assumes an omniscient narrator position, referring to himself often as “Mailer,” and observing himself from the outside. The book is divided into two parts subtitled History as a Novel and The Novel as History. The first part, which is more than two thirds of the book, is a personal view on what happened on the weekend of the demonstration. It begins with Mailer giving a speech at the Ambassador Theater, moves on to depict the burning of draft cards at the Department of Justice, and finally the march to the Pentagon and Mailer’s stay in jail.
The second part is a more objective account of the 16 event, containing several excerpts from newspapers and eye witness reports. It functions as an overview of the demonstration and as an assessment of how it was treated in the mainstream media. 1. 2. 2 Hunter S. Thompson Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) began his literary career at the age of 18 as the editor of the Eglin Air Force Base newsletter, but was soon discharged on account of inappropriate behavior. Later, he worked for—and was fired from—several newspapers, located mainly on the East Coast of the United States (McKeen, 6).
Eventually, Thompson drifted to California and to South America, from where he started contributing to The Observer. He returned to the United States at age 25, writing occasional articles for magazines and doing odd jobs here and there (McKeen, 7). Thompson’s first new journalist work that gained public interest was Hell’s Angels, partly published in The Nation in 1965 and as a book the following year. He did some political reporting, and in 1971, Thompson’s most popular book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, was published.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas tells the eventful story of Thompson’s (under the name of Raoul Duke) attempt to cover the Mint 400, a motorcycle race, and the National District Attorneys Conference on Drug Abuse with his attorney friend, Oscar Zeta Acosta (under the name of Dr. Gonzo). The objective of covering the events for Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone turns into a wild quest for finding the American Dream somewhere in the decadent depths of Las Vegas, involving severe drug abuse and terrifying ordinary law-abiding citizens. Thompson’s writing is a blatant blend of reportage, hallucinations, stream of consciousness, and dialogue.
His style came to be known as gonzo journalism, a subgenre of new journalism that relies heavily on the subjective experiences and fantasies of the author, and the effect of narrating events 17 while under the influence of intoxicants (a state in which Thompson often admittedly was during the sixties and seventies). Tom Wolfe Tom Wolfe (born 1930) started writing for newspapers after receiving his doctorate in American Studies from Yale in the late 1950s. According to his own words in The New Journalism, Wolfe suffered from “an overwhelming urge to join the ‘real world'” after spending five years in graduate school (4).
He worked at several newspapers, such as The Washington Post, Esquire and The Herald Tribune, writing mostly feature pieces and articles for Sunday supplements (Wolfe, Journalism, 4–6). Wolfe’s first attempt at new journalism was The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965. Since then, he has written several nonfictional and fictional works, the most famous of which are perhaps The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967), which was partly published in the short-lived World Journal Tribune, and The Bonfire of Vanities (1987), which was initially serialized in Rolling Stone.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967) reports the story of the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies that started to gather around the American novelist Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), in the sixties California. The Merry Pranksters engaged in various forms of countercultural activity, such as public performances, anti-war rallies, and psychedelic experiments. The group became probably most legendary for its “acid tests,” which were collective LSD trips, involving music, fluorescent props, performances, and plenty of “electric Kool-Aid,” a mixture of LSD and juice. A large part of the novel oncentrates on a road-trip the Merry Pranksters made on an old school bus across the United States in 1964. Wolfe recounts the Merry Pranksters’ tale on the basis of his own personal observations, as well as tapes, film clips, and notes collected by the Pranksters and their friends. Wolfe describes his 18 mode of writing in the Author’s Note of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: “I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don’t think their adventure can be understood without that” (367).
Defining the American Dream
Some concepts have become so integrated into our everyday uses of language that we rarely stop to think of their definitions. The American Dream is such a concept: it has penetrated cultural texts and the popular imagination for decades, even centuries. Furthermore, it has done so not only in the United States but also around the world. The American Dream has come to symbolize the global yearning for freedom, success, and hopes of a better life. The sheer scope of the concept, not to mention its elusiveness, raises an important question from the vantage point of my study: how can such an amorphous term be examined?
The American Dream is an abstraction, and can only be located and studied through concrete forms of embodiment, such as advertisements, literature, films, speeches, and plays. In this thesis, I discuss the American Dream in three works of new journalism, but first we must examine the origin and meaning of the concept, and the ways in which it has inspired American popular culture and the popular imagination.
Origins of the Term
The intellectual foundations of the American Dream can be traced back to the very beginnings of the United States of America.
In his book The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Jim Cullen sketches out six different facets that have contributed to the notion of the American Dream: the religious purity of the Puritan settlers, the establishment of political freedom with the Declaration of 19 Independence, the dream of upward mobility, the dream of equality, the dream of home ownership, and the dream of easy living on the West coast. Political scientist Cal Jillson has also traced the evolution of the American Dream in his book Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion over Four Centuries.
Jillson argues that although America is based on the American Creed (“liberty, equality, opportunity”) that is guided by the American Dream, it has not been “a shimmering vision of a fruitful country open to all who come, learn, work, save, invest, and play by the rules” (7). Jillson follows, to some extent, the same evolutionary phases of the dream as Cullen, but constantly reminds his readers of the elusive and exclusive nature of the dream: despite good efforts, the values it embodies have never quite realized in the United States.
From the Puritan legacy of self-improvement and emerging capitalism, the tripartite credo—”life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—of the founding fathers, and Abraham Lincoln’s journey from a lowly log cabin to the White House, to the civil rights movement, the suburbanization of America, and the Californian way of life, the dream has been around for centuries, evolving and transforming along the way. As to the actual expression, it is not known who coined the phrase in the first place.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest appearances of the American Dream—”the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity though hard work, determination, and initiative”—date back to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not, however, until the 1930s that the American Dream was more widely defined—or, according to Jillson, popularized (6)—as a concept by American historian James Truslow Adams.
His interpretation of the dream in The Epic of America (1931) is commonly considered as the initial characterization of the concept: [T]hat dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. […] It is not a 20 dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. 404) Adams’ definition of the American Dream relies heavily on the notion of equality and democracy. For him, an essential part of the dream is the freedom from the class structures and social order of the old continent, Europe, and the idea of self-government. He uses the Library of Congress as an emblem of American democracy: “Founded and built by the people, it is for the people” (414). Adams also sets out to define the values that should guide the American Dream: “It is easy to say a better and richer life for all men, but what is better and what is richer? (407, emphases original). According to him, the realization of the American Dream depends ultimately on the people. He emphasizes individual as well as communal effort in constructing the “Great Society” 2 , and building it “better” rather than “bigger” (411). The American Dream, however, includes more than the dream of upward mobility, the notion of equality, and getting the good things in life. The ideas and values behind the American mentality and way of life are also key factors in understanding the dream.
In The Pursuit of Happiness: Government and Politics in America, John A. Moore Jr. and Myron Roberts lay out a set of values and beliefs that in their opinion characterize what is essentially American. They start with the Puritan ideals, the frontier mentality, and the melting-pot thesis, and go on to explore the American set of mind through popular culture, violence, materialism, racism, women’s role in society, mobility, the cult of youth, and education.
They also declare what they consider to be 2 Adams uses the Great Society in quotation marks, which indicates it might be a reference to English socialist and political scientist Graham Wallas (1858-1932), who published The Great Society in 1914. Wallas defines the Great Society as a modern, industrialized, and urbanized society that relies economically on global capitalism. The Great Society is more widely known as the set of political programs Lyndon B.
Johnson initiated in the 1960s, but I will return to this later in chapter 2. 1. 21 the most fundamental American values: democracy, justice, freedom, individualism, reason, accommodation, and progress (17–45). For example, according to Moore and Roberts, “America’s duty to serve as an ideal for all humankind” derives from the Puritan ethos and idea of American being “a city upon a hill,” whereas the frontier left Americans “with a heritage of individualism, equality, and respect for the ‘common person'” (23).
The melting-pot and salad bowl theories, on their part, explain the importance of the immigrant dimension of the dream, which entails visualizing America as a “land of opportunity” (25) and the efforts to “recognize and encourage diversity” while “maintaining social and political harmony” (27). According to Moore and Roberts, the idea of America and the national character consist of a mosaic of meanings and traditions. These are the building blocks of the American Dream, some more potent than others. The concept cannot be understood fully without considering these elements that have shaped, and continue to shape, American culture.
Moore and Roberts conclude their contemplation of the ideas and values that have shaped American culture and national identity with a summary of the unique context that has sculptured the American Dream: Happiness is a prime concern of democracy, and in its pursuit, Americans have created the world’s first and richest consumer economy; have undertaken to mass produce education, entertainment, and goods on an unprecedented scale; and have sought to build a society in which most people would be free to follow the star of their own destiny in their own fashion.
And if in the process, we have become a restless, troubled, and sometimes divided people, that is a price that had to be paid for having shifted the focus of politics from the grandeur of the few to the well-being of the many. (45) This rather sententious review takes into consideration one final aspect of the dream: its exclusiveness. Adams, Cullen, Jillson, Moore, and Roberts all acknowledge that the American Dream has not been open for all: for long, pursuing the American Dream was the sole privilege of white males. The dream has been overshadowed by slavery, 22 egregation, racism, homophobia and insufficient women’s rights, which has caused the people to feel “restless, troubled, and sometimes divided. ” Nevertheless, the American Dream is a concept that has left a unique mark on the nation. To quote former President Bill Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union address, “America is far more than a place. It is an idea. “
The American Dream in Popular Culture
The American Dream has been a prominent theme in popular culture ever since the dime novels—paperbacks produced for mass markets—of nineteenth century writer Horatio Alger, Jr.
His successful stories of upward mobility, featuring protagonists rising from rags to riches, were an important part of creating the American myths of success and achieving the American Dream. The formula for achieving the American Dream in Alger’s books was a combination of luck, virtue, and hard work. According to Richard Weiss, author of The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale, the myth of success actually goes back all the way to the life guides of the Puritans, but was widely popularized from the second third of the 19th century onwards (4).
Weiss states that the myth of success—success meaning “virtue, money, happiness, or a combination of all three” (15)—”stands as one of the most enduring expressions of American popular ideals” (3). The myth of success is something that appeals to everyone regardless of age, status, or background, and this has made it the inexhaustible fuel for products of popular culture. Since Alger, the American Dream has occurred in countless narratives of popular fact and fiction: books, magazine articles, advertisements, plays, and movies.
It has penetrated the popular imagination through family sit-coms, self-help books, catalogues, and children’s tales. The popular imagination is full of different versions of the dream. According to Moore and Roberts, the massive ideological machinery that 23 produces popular culture can be seen as both a victory or a defeat of the minds of America: “America’s mass society and ‘pop’ culture have reached new heights of organization and technique and, depending on one’s attitude or tastes, are still viewed as either a fulfillment or a travesty of the American Dream” (28).
Cullen suggests, on a more positive note, that the dream lurks somewhere in the midst of cultural expression: “Amid the striving, some worthwhile and some appalling, the American Dream is most fully realized in works of art” (179). It is through these works of art and products of mass society that the notion of the American Dream has spread around the world and inspired the popular imagination globally. Because the American Dream is by no means a fixed ideal, it is mirrored constantly in cultural discussion. The meaning of the concept varies in different eras and different contexts.
Up until the sixties, the dream had been somewhat tightly associated with the ideal of material success, but in the sixties, the ideological arena was suddenly open for a re-evaluation. The countercultural movements challenged the idea of continuing in the footsteps of a conventional, conformist society, and started searching for new ways of pursuing happiness, justice, and self-fulfillment. This sudden shift in conceptualizing the dream and rethinking the structures of society sparked new kinds of popular culture: the new decade left a distinct mark in music, literature, journalism, and films.
The expectations, hopes, and dreams of Americans, especially the vast generation of young people that wanted to change the course of their future, were recorded in these artifacts of popular culture and left for later generations to examine. The continuous relocation of the dream can therefore be traced only by looking at what people have produced and consumed in a certain era—what they have expressed of their hopes and dreams in the records of culture.
Life: Criticism of the American Society
The new journalists often had a critical stance towards the United States in their writing. Especially Mailer came to be known as one of the harshest critics of America, even though he considered himself something of a patriot. The countercultural context, in which the new journalists were operating, contained the idea of questioning the social order and ideological constructions of mainstream society. In America Since 1945: The American Moment, Levine and Papasotiriou label especially the years 1965–68 turbulent.
During those years America saw many violent civic riots and anti-war demonstrations, the rise of countercultural movements, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The turbulent times inspired many Americans to assess their country and policy makers with a critical eye. In this chapter, I discuss how Mailer, Thompson, and Wolfe observe the society of their times by examining the themes and motifs in their works that relate to ideology, politics, religion, capitalism, and the media.
Mailer is perhaps the most eager of the three to criticize the “totalitarian” and “technocratic” structures of American society, while Thompson focuses on the absurd dimensions of corporate capitalism, and Wolfe describes the alternative countercultural lifestyles that were breaking off mainstream America. Ideology, politics and religion In all three works, the authors discuss ideological, political, and religious aspects of American culture. Although there is a strong anti-Establishment undercurrent in all three books, the authors do not seem to think that the American society is completely immoral and corrupt.
Mailer approaches the subject matter through criticizing the technology-oriented mindset of 1960s America and the Establishment’s devices of 25 disseminating its ideology, Thompson reflects the long arm of the law, and Wolfe considers the hierarchical structures that seem to naturally belong to all human communities and the ways in which power and authority manifest themselves. Issues of authority, hierarchy, and control Mailer’s critical commentary about American society can be roughly divided nto three thematic spheres: the technocratic and totalitarian mindset of the power elite (“technology land”), the rule of capitalism (“corporation land”), and the distorting media (“totalitarian communications”). According to Mailer, all of them are aspects of the Establishment. Mailer himself uses mostly the term “authority,” but I use Establishment to refer to the ruling elite and the structures of society they control. For consistency, I use the same term also when discussing similar themes in Thompson and Wolfe. In this subchapter, I discuss the first of these themes: the technocratic and totalitarian mindset.
In The Armies of the Night, Mailer criticizes the blind technology faith of the sixties. He brings forth not only his own antipathies towards technology—”for periods when he was writing he looked on transactions via telephone like Arabs look upon pig” (14)—but also the broad-spectrum technology worship of the era. His criticism of technology worship intertwines with his views on totalitarianism and middle-class liberalism. Mailer uses terms like “liberal academic intelligentsia” and “liberal technologues” when discussing the prevailing ethos of the liberal power elite.
His attitude towards the matter becomes very clear at a party of liberal academics, which he refers to as a “coven,” a gathering of witches: “His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics” (25–26). Mailer accuses the liberals of allowing the Establishment to “convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho” (25), believing in the omnipotence of technology, and living in utopian dreams: “[Liberal academics] had built their hope of heaven on the 26 binary system and the computer, 1 and 0, Yes and No” (27).
Mailer is clearly disappointed in the nation’s leading intellectuals and accuses them of expecting technology to solve all the problems. This, in Mailer’s mind, leads to a passive state of affairs: it is easier to make great speeches and paint utopian visions of a better America than to actually do something. In his evaluation of American culture in the 1960s, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point, Philip Slater shares with Mailer some of the fears and sentiments towards technology: We certainly treat echnology as if it were a fierce patriarch—we’re deferential, submissive, alert to its demands. We feel spasms of hatred toward it, and continually make fun of it, but do little to challenge its rule. Furthermore, since the technological environment that rules, frustrates, and manipulates us is a materialization of the wishes of our forefathers, it’s quite reasonable to say that technology is the authoritarian father is our society. (51) Here, Slater regards technology as an authority that controls its users, rather than the users controlling it.
In the sixties, huge leaps were made in technology: man was sent to the moon, satellite broadcasting began, the first heart transplantation was made, the first computer video game was invented, and so on. These innovations surely prompted people’s faith in technology as a cure-all, but at the same time, the techno-centric lifestyle raised questions and criticism. In another assessment of change in America, Future Shock: A Study of Mass Bewilderment in the Face of Accelerating Change, Alvin Toffler argues that the industrial society is turning into a super-industrial society.
According to him, this revolution involves the idea of technology as the “great, growling engine of change” (25), fueled by knowledge (30). Toffler notes that “[i]mportant new machines do more than suggest or compel changes in other machines—they suggest novel solutions to social, philosophical, even personal problems” (29). Toffler’s comment reflects technology’s enormous sphere of influence that spread through the sixties society. Technological innovation seemed to provide 27 solutions to everything, from healthcare to housework.
This is the assumption that Mailer opposes: not technology as such, but the notion of knowledge lagging behind technology. For Mailer, intellectual laziness is synonymous with the overly optimistic view of technological innovation as a solution and a quick fix to everything. Theodore Roszak attributes the rise of the counterculture to the criticism of totalitarianism and technocratic thinking in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition.
What Mailer identifies as the Establishment, or rather, what the Establishment has transformed America into—”technology land,” “corporation land,” and “the Great Society’s supermachine”—Roszak discusses as “technocracy. ” He defines technocracy as a “society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts, who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge” (8). The technocracy is “ideologically invisible,” “eludes all traditional political categories” (8), and is the product of capitalist profiteering and accelerating industrialism (19).
Roszak’s characterization suggests that the technocratic Establishment is nearly impossible to oppose since it is invisible and elusive. The technocracy is characterized by “the relentless quest for efficiency, for order, for even more extensive rational control” (21). Much like Mailer, Roszak views capitalist ideology as strongly connected to the Establishment. He argues that in a technocratic capitalist society, corporations take on the role of public authorities (18), appropriating thus an illegitimate amount of control.
This kind of technocratic configuration inevitably resembles more a totalitarian society than a democracy, which is exactly the point Mailer wants to make about American society. According to Mailer, the Establishment brainwashes members of the society through capitalism, technology, the media, and institutions, such as the Church and the 28 Ministry of Defense. In The Armies of the Night, the Pentagon becomes the main motif symbolizing totalitarianism.
It represents everything Mailer is opposing: the decaying moral of the government, mass consumerism, oppression, and, above all, totalitarianism: [T]hey were going to face the symbol, the embodiment, no, call it the true and high church of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, blind five-sided eye of a subtle oppression which had come to America out of the very air of the century […] yes, Mailer felt a confirmation of the contests of his own life on this March to the eye of the oppressor, greedy stingy dumb valve of the worst Wasp heart, chalice and anus of corporation land, smug, enclosed, morally blind Pentagon, destroying the future of its own nation with each day it augmented in strength. (126) The religious imagery in this passage is interesting: Mailer sees the Pentagon as a “true and high church” of military and industry, and as a chalice (a cup for communion wine) of “corporation land,” i. e. capitalism.
The pair “chalice and anus” on its part implies that Mailer sees the Pentagon as a massive, ideological digestive system: an individual, free thinking man goes in, and a brainwashed, warmongering “mass man” (188) comes out. Mailer identifies the Pentagon as the “morally blind” eye of the oppressive Establishment and as the “valve of the worst Wasp heart. ” It is worth noting that Mailer depicts the Pentagon through bodily metaphors: the digestive system, the sense of sight, and the center of blood circulation, the heart. These images portray America as a rotting corpse, which is decaying from the inside—because inside, at the very core of American society is the Establishment, consisting of “smug” White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (“Wasps”) who are incapable of seeing other alternatives than sending more troops to Vietnam.
The image of the Pentagon as the Establishment’s digestive system and as a homogenizing machine is further strengthened later in the text: Floods of totalitarian architecture, totalitarian superhighways, totalitarian smog, totalitarian food (yes, frozen), totalitarian communications—the terror to a man so conservative as Mailer, was that nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism. The machine would work, grinding out mass man and his surrealistic wars until the machine was broken. (188) Here Mailer identifies more specifically what comes out of the Establishment’s machine: “mass man and his surrealistic wars. ” He also identifies the channels through which the Establishment is promulgating its ideology: architecture, infrastructure, food, and the media—all things that belong to everyday life. There is thus no escaping the Establishment: it has infiltrated everything.
Mailer fears that America is turning into a monotone society full of zombie-like citizens impotent to resist the Establishment: “High church of the corporation, the Pentagon spoke exclusively of mass man and his civilization; every aspect of the building was anonymous, monotonous, massive, interchangeable” (240–41). Hollowell points out that Mailer is sincerely worried about the direction the American society is heading: “At the heart of Armies lies his deep concern for the individual in a society increasingly governed by bureaucratic and totalitarian impulses that threaten personal responsibility” (96). It is interesting that Mailer has such a gloomy perception of people’s capability to resist the Establishment, when he is actually in the middle of one of the biggest anti-war demonstrations of the sixties, where thousands of citizens fiercely protested against the autocratic government.
Perhaps his critique is intended for those who did not participate in the demonstration, namely, conformist mainstream Americans still stuck in the values of the previous decade: “Narrowness, propriety, goodwill, and that infernal American innocence which could not question one’s leaders, for madness and the boils of a frustrated life resided beneath” (180). For Mailer, the ethos of a conformist mass man is the ultimate abhorrence and plague that afflicts the American civil society. These passages show the Pentagon as a personification of the omnipresent and omnipotent Establishment. Mailer identifies also other instances he considers working under the Establishment: The authority had operated on their brain with commercials, and washed their brain with packaged education, packaged politics. The authority had presented itself as 30 onorable, and it was corrupt [—] It lied through the teeth of corporation executives and Cabinet officials and police enforcement officers and newspaper editors and advertising agencies, and in its mass magazines, where the subtlest apologies for the disasters of the authority were […] grafted in the best possible style into the ever-open mind of the American lobotomy: the corporation office worker and his high-school son. (98–99) This passage reflects again Mailer’s notion of Americans as a nation of involuntary marionettes controlled by the Establishment. According to Mailer, Americans have undergone a mass lobotomy and brainwash, which further intensifies the notion of a people incapable of thinking for themselves and resisting the status quo.
Mailer suggests that the Establishment has spread its tentacles to practically every sector of society: it operates on the brains of Americans through “corporation executives,” “Cabinet officials,” “police officers,” “newspaper editors,” and “advertising agencies. ” Mailer accuses the Establishment of being corrupt and covering up its “disasters” in a way that preserves the hegemony. His critique is aimed at the Establishment, but also, and more importantly, at his passive fellow citizens, even leftists, who let themselves be fooled. Wolfe examines matters of authority, hierarchy, and control through the Pranksters’ attitudes towards the conventional structures of society and the power relations that are evident inside the group.
Even though the hippie communities of the sixties were all about cutting loose from conventional societal structures, such as traditional family models and work communities, Wolfe notes that the Merry Pranksters are, in fact, organized around one leader figure and that they have a specific ranking order, which he calls “the Prankster hierarchy” (151). Newcomers have to earn their place in the group and their status is determined by their behavior, appearance, and athletic abilities, among other things—just as in any other youthful reference group of the times. Wolfe observes that Kesey is referred to as “the Chief” when spoken about “as the leader or teacher of the whole group” (21) and that the Pranksters hold “briefings” to organize their activities. Briefing is an expression that connotes military 31 discipline and orderly conduct, things that are the total opposite of the Pranksters’ way of life.
Although the group might have used the term in an ironic sense 3 , it nevertheless reveals that the Pranksters had not moved quite so far from the straight world and the Establishment as they thought they had. According to Wolfe, in conflict situations group members “take it to Kesey”, who functions as a mediator (145). Kesey is therefore the authority and decides on several occasions what the others should do, and also on many occasions, what to think. For example, when the group is on the road, Kesey decides when and who can have LSD from the communal reserve: “Sandy feels his first twinge of—what? Like … there is going to be Authorized Acid only. And like … hey are going to be separated into performers and workers, stars and backstage (71). This sense of having a division of labor and social status underlines the fact that the group dynamic was not as egalitarian as they intended. They also play a game called “Power” on several occasions: “Thirty minutes of absolute power in which your word was the law and everyone had to do whatever you wanted” (106). These observations about the group dynamic and power games indicate that hierarchy and the division of labor inherently belong to the Western civilization—a tradition, in which even the most anarchistic countercultural group of the sixties had its roots.
At the level of ideas and ideals, it might be possible to leap into a state of free-flowing anarchy, but in practice, many must have discovered that the internalized norms and structures of order were not easy to replace. Wolfe makes an interesting observation about the group’s reluctance to acknowledge the power relations present among them. Kesey, while clearly the chief and authority in the group, is also called the “non-navigator” and the “non-teacher” Wolfe notes that the Pranksters used the term inside the group, so it was not something he came up with. It was brought to use by Ken Babbs, who had served in the U. S. military during Vietnam (131). 32 (115), as if to downplay the hierarchical structures that penetrate even the Pranksters. The group has enveloped itself in a bubble, where they have created their own games and their own rules.
They seem to imagine that once transcended into their own little community, they can remain completely unaffected by mainstream society and its “games”. Wolfe describes the dynamic between the group and the law enforcers as “the cop game” (137) and the “justice game” (273). Wolfe also uses phrases, such as “copgame cops” and “cop-and-jailhouse-and-judge-and-lawyer game” (137–138), to convey the group’s attitudes towards the Establishment. To the Pranksters, everything is a game. For example, when the police raid the Prankster residence, Wolfe observes that “the Pranksters played it like they saw it: namely, as a high farce, an opera bouffe [—] it was just the most wacked-out cop game anybody had seen any cops play (137–138, emphasis original)
In addition to the law, also other structures, institutions, and norms of the Establishment are seen as games: going to work regularly and aspiring to climb the career ladder is the “occupation game” (123) and even other countercultural elements, such as student movement and the New Left were, according to the Pranksters, playing old, political games. Wolfe also notes that the Pranksters shift between the mainstream and the marginal, and they alternate their stance towards the Establishment according to their needs. They attempt to control people and events by drawing them into what is their counterpart to the Establishment’s games: the “movies. ” Most of the time they try to pull authorities into their movie, under their sphere of influence and control, but when it is in their interest, they take refuge in the straight world and even play along with the “cop game” or the “cop movie”.
For example, when the Pranksters make a stop at New 4 According to Wikipedia, Opera bouffe is a genre of 19th century French operetta, which is characterized by comedy, satire, and parody. 33 Orleans on their bus trip and wander into a black neighborhood, they are happy to see the police intervene before the racial tension amounted to action: “for once they don’t pile out and try to break up the Cop Movie. They go with the Cop Movie and get their movie out of there” (85). So on some occasions, the Pranksters play it straight for the straight world, to get what they want—be it protection, media coverage or avoiding legal punishment.
Encounters With God
The traditional notions of religious sentiment and Christianity experienced a momentary inflation in the sixties, along with many other conformist and conventional values of the previous decades. Spirituality, on the other hand, increased its appeal: finding new ways of being in harmony with the universe and searching for new dimensions in ones relationship with God were prominent reasons behind experimenting with psychedelic drugs. Wolfe concentrates on describing the spiritual seeking of countercultural movements, while Thompson observes the theme of religion on a more personal note. Mailer, on his part, contrasts religion, and particularly Christianity, with the clashing values of technocratic society. Wolfe describes the LSD experience as fundamentally religious. He notes that there is “something so … eligious” about the atmosphere around the Merry Pranksters which he later identifies as “the experience” (116, emphases original). Wolfe compares the experience to the birth of a new religion: What they all saw in … a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly! – All-in-one – flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to. (117, emphases original) The essence of this new religion was the experience of a cosmic unity and the group mind, which Wolfe describes above. He elaborates the comparison by examining the 34.
Pranksters against Joachim Wach’s theory on how religious communities are founded. He observes that Wach’s description matches exactly the way in which the Pranksters formed around a charismatic leader (Kesey) and a new experience (LSD). According to Wolfe, the experience involved tuning in on “a higher level of reality,” “a perception of the cosmic unity,” and “a feeling of timelessness” (130). The religious allusions of the LSD experience are strengthened by Wolfe’s characterization of Timothy Leary’s and other LSD gurus’ efforts to promote drug experimenting as a “messianic conviction” (123). Wolfe also describes in detail the Pranksters’ interest in oriental religions and gods.
For example, they look for spiritual guidance from the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text (130) and incorporate religious practices like meditation, which is usually associated with Eastern philosophies, to their everyday routine. They experiment with different modes of expression, many of which, like taking large quantities of LSD followed by “talking in Tongues” (174), resemble religious experiences. Wolfe notes that Merry Pranksters were seen as a sort of religious community not just by themselves, but also by outsiders: Somehow Norman got the idea the people at Kesey’s were like, you know, monks, novitiates; a lot of meditating with your legs crossed, chanting, eating rice, feeling vibrations, walking softly over the forest floor and thinking big. Why else would they be out in the woods in the middle of nowhere? (140)
The lifestyle of the Pranksters imitates indeed that of a religious community. Spirituality is sought through renouncing materialism, reconnecting with nature, and experimenting with the religious practices of other cultures. According to Wolfe, people came to Kesey’s place to perform spiritual quests, to do “the Tibetan thing,” for example (140). So in a way, the Prankster headquarter was a pilgrimage destination. In a section that describes the Pranksters’ visit to a California Unitarian Church conference, the religious aspects of the Prankster experience are discussed in relation to a mainstream religious community. Kesey is described as “a prophetic figure” (172) who created an experience 35 hrough which some of the younger Unitarians “experienced mystic brotherhood, albeit ever so bizarre … a miracle in seven days” (172, emphasis original). In fact, it is implied that he profoundly influenced the other religious community: “for a week Kesey had mystified […] and taken over the whole Unitarian Church of California. They would never be the same again” (178). The remark of creating “a miracle in seven days” parallels Kesey to a god or a prophet, which is intensified by portraying the other Pranksters as his disciples. Wolfe also describes a scene in which Kesey envisions himself as god while hallucinating from drugs: “YOU ARE GOD [—] he knows with absolute certainty he has … all the Power in the world” (176).
Wolfe’s observations show that the religious and spiritual elements of the Prankster experience were essentially drug-induced hallucinations and that the “god” who possessed all the control was not actually Kesey, or any of the other Pranksters, but LSD. Thompson approaches the subject of god and religion from a more personal standpoint. He examines sin, guilt, and the idea of a savior with a humoristic undertone as he is fleeing from Vegas after having committed all sorts of illegal activities: Jesus Creeping God! Is there a priest in this tavern? I want to confess! I’m a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor—however you want to call it, Lord … I’m guilty. But do me this one last favor: just give me five more high-speed hours before you bring the hammer down; just let me get rid of this goddamn car and off of this horrible desert.
Which is not really a hell of a lot to ask, Lord, because the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty. All I did was take your gibberish seriously … and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal. [—] And now look at me: half-crazy with fear, driving 120 miles an hour across Death Valley in some car I never even wanted. You evil bastard! This is your work! You’d better take care of me, Lord … because if you don’t you’re going to have me on your hands. (86–87, emphases original) Thompson’s schizophrenic monologue explores the notions of guilt, sin, and redemption. The main character, Raoul Duke (who is Thompson himself), is continuously testing to see how much he can get away with before he gets caught.
Here, the authority he is trying to outrun is not the police or any other instance of the Establishment, but God 36 himself, the ultimate judge of one’s sins. His mad confession turns into a threat, as he states that “I’m a fucking sinner [… ] I’m guilty” and almost in the next sentence that “the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty” after which he blames God for being on this strange trip in the first place. There is a good deal of irony in stating that the thought of him not being guilty is an “incredible truth”: he knows he is guilty, but tries to bargain and negotiate, and ultimately threaten God. This observation introduces Thompson’s idea of the modern hero, whose primary method of survival is self-reliance.
He questions heavily the notion of there being a savior up there to redeem us all—to him, this religious construct is ultimately a fallacy and taking God seriously is something that belongs to the past. Thompson’s idea of the modern hero, who relies on no one but himself is a theme I will come back to in chapter. Mailer discusses religion and Christianity in terms of the values they represent to Americans. He contrasts religion with the modern, technologically oriented society: Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, a son of God, and the center of the Corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology.
Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ. (200) Here, Mailer contrasts corporate capitalism with religion by stating that the essence of Christianity is “a mystery,” while the essence of industry and commerce is “a worship of technology. ” This passage highlights the conflict of values that many people had to confront after the Second World War as the United States became the wealthiest and most industrially and militarily advanced nation in the world. According to Alvin Toffler, the American society of the sixties was in the grip of “future-shock” caused by the “super-normal rates of change” that developed societies were experiencing (20).
Toffler argues that Americans were “simultaneously experiencing a youth revolution, a sexual revolution, a racial revolution, a colonial revolution, an economic revolution, and 37 the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history” (166). These revolutions, their rapidness and concurrence, have led to the average American’s situation, which Mailer titles “schizophrenia” (200). He also observes in the passage that this development was dividing the mind and the soul, separating experiences into spheres of rationality and spirituality. Having to balance one’s faith in God and in technology produced thus a polarization that had never before presented itself.
Mailer continues to ponder the conflicting values of his society by portraying the Vietnam War as an outlet for the confusion and suppressed anxiety of Christian Americans: The love of the Mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no mystery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for the condition—since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temporary relief to the schizophrenic. So the average good Christian American secretly loved the war in Vietnam. It opened his emotions. He felt compassion for the hardships and the sufferings of the American boys in Vietnam, even the Vietnamese orphans. […] America needed the war. It would need a war so long as technology expanded on every road of communication, and the cities and corporations spread like cancer; the good Christian Americans needed the war or they would lose their Christ. (200–201) Mailer’s observation of America being in a state of “suppressed schizophrenia” connotes disease, mental sickness.
This collective qualm, which has resulted from the profound changes discussed in the previous paragraph, needs an outlet (a “cure,” a “relief”), which, according to Mailer, is the war in Vietnam. It is serves as a ventilator for the urge to commit an “expression of brutality. ” Mailer employs images of sickness also in portraying the advance of technological progress (“cities and corporations spread like cancer”). The sickness of the American society can be cured and Christ salvaged through projecting violent outbursts on the war fought on the other side of the world. Mailer seems to suggest that in a society that values technology and rationality above all, the war has replaced religion—at least temporarily—as the communal spiritual and emotional experience. The war inspires Mailer to utilize other religious metaphors as well.
He gives a statement to the public after being released from jail: “You see, dear fellow Americans, it is Sunday, and we are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam. Yes, we are burning him there, and as we do, we destroy the foundation of this Republic, which is its love and trust in Christ” (226). Mailer decides to appeal to the public on behalf of the anti-war demonstrators by deliberately using a Christian approach: even though he is not a Christian himself, he thinks this is the best way to reach as many average Americans as possible. Mailer turns the act of Holy Communion (commemorating the body and blood of Christ) into an act of desecrating the body and blood of Christ: the nation is destroying itself in Vietnam.
The crumbling foundation of America—”its love and trust in Christ”—could only be stopped by retreating from Vietnam, even though “the average good Christian American secretly loved the war. “
Capitalism and the American Way of Life
A large part of the criticism that the new journalists aimed at the American society focuses on capitalism and the ideology of pursuing profit at the expense of everything else. Many of the countercultural movements of the sixties broke away from corporate America and the accelerating competitiveness of free enterprise. Experiments with collective ownership, communal spaces, and the distribution of free food 5 were statements against a society dictated by commerce. For Mailer, capitalism ties into the monstrous military-industrial complex (the Establishment) I discussed in chapter 2.
In San Francisco, a street performance and activist group called The Diggers distributed free food on a daily basis in the Haight-Ashbury region. According to Digger member Peter Berg interviewed in the WGBH documentary film Summer of Love (2007), by giving out free food right in front of ordinary citizens the group wanted to show that an alternative lifestyle was possible; one where you would not have to work for a living, use money, or belong to capitalist society. This, of course, proved to be an unsustainable solution. The Diggers food drive is mentioned also in Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties (170). 39 Mailer’s “corporation land” pictures America as a cold, technocratic machine that moulds people and nature for its own benefit.
Thompson approaches capitalism through what he regards as its grotesque by-products: Las Vegas, the commercialization of the American Dream to milk middle-class consumers, and the surreal aspects of free enterprise in a market economy. Wolfe touches on the theme through examining the leap from middle class to counterculture and contrasting the lifestyle of the Merry Pranksters to the suburban living arrangements of the mainstream.
Corporate Capitalism as the New Creed
There is a reoccurring motif in The Armies of the Night, which is “corporation land. ” It is mentioned several times, and it seems to be a critique of capitalism as well as the government. There are several passages in which Mailer underscores the divide between the capitalist, suburbanized society and nature.
To him, a capitalist mass society signifies the very opposite, or even travesty, of the natural order of things: [N]ow corporation land, here named Government, took over state preserves, straightened crooked narrow roads […] and corporation land would succeed, if it hadn’t yet, in making nature look like an outdoor hospital, and the streets of U. S. cities, grace of Urban Renewal, would be difficult to distinguish when drunk from pyramids of packaged foods in the aisles of a supermarket. (129) Mailer accuses the government of turning nature into “an outdoor hospital” and streets into supermarket isles in the pursuit of economic expansion. The connotative meanings attached to a hospital is that it is sterile, antiseptic, and very clean—all contrasts with nature, which is wild, unpredictable, and ultimately beyond the control of human beings.
These connotations also apply to the notion of a supermarket: what could be more sterile, in a cultural sense, than an artificial construct full of synthetic and processed foods? The accusation goes even further: American corporations are in Mailer’s opinion “more guilty than the communists at polluting the air, fields, and streams, debasing the value of manufactured products, transmuting faith into science, technology, and 40 medicine, while all embarked on scandalous foreign adventures with their eminently practical methods” (82). Mailer’s allegation is heavy: capitalist profiteering has led to the contamination of the environment, the emergence of a throw-away culture, substituting spiritual values with technology-faith, and most abhorrently, the involvement in war that benefits the military-industrial machinery.
As discussed earlier, Mailer links all the appalling aspects of American society ultimately to the totalitarian ideology of the Establishment. He continues his line of thought on the modern way of life that is completely alienated from nature: For years he had been writing about the nature of totalitarianism, its need to render populations apathetic, its instrument—the destruction of mood. […] totalitarianism was a deodorant to nature […] the Pentagon looked like the five-sided tip of on the spout of a spray can to be used under the arm, yes, the Pentagon was spraying the deodorant of its presence all over the fields of Virginia. (129) Here too, authority is presented as something that interferes with nature by deodorizing it, making it sanitary and sterile.
Comparing the Pentagon to a can of deodorant is to say it is controlling its environment by spraying ideology around in order to “render populations apathetic”—deodorant is after all something we use to control our natural bodily functions, an artificial substance to make us odorless and neutral. As a side remark, a group of demonstrators had rented an airplane to drop daisies on the Pentagon during the march. The plane was never permitted to take off, but the flowers were then distributed to the protesters who put them into the gun barrels of the soldiers guarding the Pentagon. This is interesting from the vantage point of Mailer’s idea of Pentagon as “a deodorant to nature. ” In attempting to cover the building in flowers, the 6 The daisy incident, as told by Ed Sanders (member of folk/rock band The Fugs), appeared in Charles M. Young’s article “March on the Pentagon” in Rolling Stone’s web-version (July 12, 2007). 41 emonstrators acted as a counterforce to the Establishment, bringing back nature—in the form of fragrant daisies—to a place that was the source of the deodorizing process. Mailer examines finally the ideological shift that living in an exceedingly money-centric society has created: “American Civilization had moved from the existential sanction of the frontier to the abstract ubiquitous sanction of the dollar bill” (169). This statement indicates that the very basis of the American Dream has moved towards a more material definition. While previously success might have equaled individualism and hard work (the frontier mentality) it was now measured against wealth and the growth rate of the economy.
Mailer uses phrases like “cold majesty of the Corporation” (201) to intensify the notion of the “ubiquitous sanction of the dollar bill. ” By juxtaposing a corporate authority with the ruling power Mailer implies that Americans are truly governed by a capitalist elite. This relates closely to another interesting juxtaposition discussed in chapter 2. Mailer portrayed the Pentagon as the “high church” of both the military-industrial complex and the corporation. In discussing the military-industrial, technocratic, and totalitarian Establishment in terms of religion and monarchy, Mailer implies that it operates enabled by a mandate of people’s faith: the majority of citizens blindly believe in their government, without questioning the premises of its logic.
This observation is a critique of the state of democracy in the United States: the idea of participatory democracy had become a joke to Mailer, as he watched mass man obediently going along with the Establishment’s capitalist plot. Thompson comments on corporate capitalism and the free market economy by examining the logic that guides these systems: I wondered what he would say if I asked for $22 worth of Romilar and a tank of nitrous oxide. Probably he would have sold it to me. Why not? Free enterprise…. Give the public what it needs—especially this bad-sweaty, nervous-talkin’ fella with tape all over his legs and this terrible cough, along with angina pectoris and these godawful Aneuristic flashes every time he gets in the sun. I mean this fella was in bad shape, 42 officer.
How the hell was I to know he’d walk straight out to his car and start abusing those drugs? (101, emphasis original) This passage conveys, rather humorously, the basic concept of free enterprise: you can sell anything to anyone as long as they want to buy it. Thompson suggests that although making a living according to the law of supply and demand might be legally justifiable, it is not always morally valid. The mentality of “I’m-just-giving-people-what-they-want” functions like a disclaimer from all moral responsibilities to fellow man: fast food corporations sell as much unhealthy treats as they can, because there is a profitable market for it.
Liquor and tobacco companies create youthful commercial campaigns, because while underage drinkers and smokers seriously damage their health and are a major social concern, they are also a target group for the company’s products. Responsibility is imposed on the consumer, as the profiteer is free to do whatever they want—”How the hell was I to know”?
The Squares and the Straights: The American Middle Class
The countercultural activists of the sixties—as significant as they culturally were— belonged to the margins of American society. The mainstream went about their business as usual: climbed the career ladder, drove their kids to school, ate dinner together at the same time every evening, and so on, living the American Dream of home ownership, the nuclear family, and social prestige. This was not, however, the dream everyone wanted to pursue.
There was a window of opportunity for change and rebellion: in the sixties, there were more young people than ever in the United States—nearly half of the population consisted of teenagers or young adults in that decade, as the post-war babyboomers had become youths. Those who turned to the counterculture for alternative life experiences often distinguished themselves visibly from the mainstream by letting their hair grow long, dressing in colorful and deviant clothes, and experimenting with drugs. These were signs in themselves, setting hippies, motorcycle outlaws, and other countercultural figures apart from the “squares” and the “straights” of middle class America. Countercultural phenomena were often perceived as a threat by the mainstream, but at the same time there was a sincere curiosity and fascination about it .
The blatant contrast between counterculture and mainstream is perhaps most colorfully portrayed in Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: the Merry Pranksters dress in flags and gas masks, experiment with psychedelic drugs, live in a communal log house, give public performances, and drive around in a psychedelically decorated school bus. Their main mission is to “muddle people’s minds” (66) and stir up “consternation and vague befuddling resentment among the citizens” (68). Heckling ordinary law-abiding citizens for their own amusement is also what Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo do in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson has great fun depicting the prejudiced, narrow, and conservative middle-class minds that crowd Las Vegas.
Mailer, on the other hand, belongs more to the mainstream than the margin, but is nevertheless a part of the anti-war movement, and thus, the counterculture. His take on the countercultural forces at play is perhaps more generational than anything else: he compares his own stance of a grumpy, intellectual, middle-aged man against the various youth cultures present at the demonstration. In this subchapter, I discuss how the elements of mainstream America appear from a countercultural context. The counterculture—especially the motorcycle outlaws and the hippie movement—attracted lots of attention from the mainstream. In Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson describes how ordinary people flocked to see the infamous motorcycle gang wherever it stopped.
The hippies in Haight-Ashbury were another so called tourist attraction: the documentary film Summer of Love (2007) shows busloads of middle-class Americans from across the country driving around San Francisco, gawking out the windows and browsing their hippie vocabulary. According to Anderson, the Gray Line Bus Company instituted the “Hippie Hop” tour, the “only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States” (174). Both Mailer and Wolfe touch on the theme of making the leap from middle-class to countercultural activist, and they observe the deep divide between the so called normal way of life and the alternative way of life. Wolfe portrays the hippie lifestyle as drifting in the margins of mainstream America: This is the way they live.
Men, women, boys, girls, most from middle-class upbringings, men and women and boys and girls and children and babies, this is the way they have been living for months, for years some of them, across America and back, on the bus, down to the Rat lands of Mexico and back, sailing like gypsies along the Servicenter fringes, copping urinations, fencing with rotten looks—it even turns out that they have films and tapes of their duels with service-station managers in the American heartland trying to keep their concrete bathrooms and empty DispenseTowels safe from the Day-Glo crazies … (21) In this passage, Wolfe contrasts the hippies with gypsies to illustrate their nomadic and irregular lifestyle and the resentment and prejudice they often received from the mainstream. Wolfe describes the clash between the mainstream and the counterculture as a battle, even a war: hippies have to fence with “rotten looks” and duel with gas station owners.
The fact that Wolfe contrasts the deviant lifestyle of the hippies with that of the mainstream in a service station setting highlights the divide between these two dimensions of experience—though it is also a natural setting for the clash of cultures, as every layer of society stops at a service station every now and again. He depicts the scene as a place “where the Credit Card elite are tanking up and stretching their legs and tweezing their undershorts out of the aging waxy folds of their scrota” (20–21). This image purposefully visualizes the aging, conformist, rigid American middle class as a repulsive “elite,” which is exactly what the countercultural movements wanted to break away from. Wolfe examines the transition from middle class to counterculture through what he calls the “Beautiful People letter:” “Actually, there were a lot of kids in the early 1960s who were … yes; attuned. I used to think of them as he Beautiful People because of the Beautiful People letters they used to write their parents. [—] Most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois, more petit bourgeois” (122). Wolfe examines here the shared background of many that pursued the hippie lifestyle. He observes that they were most often average American teenagers that came from average families—the basic units of the American society. He gives then a prototype of the letter: Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went: ‘Dear Mother, ‘I meant to write to you before this and I hope you haven’t been worried.
I am in [San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende, Mazatlan, Mexico!!!! ] and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene. We’ve been here a week. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, how it happened, but I really tried, because I knew you wanted me to, but it just didn’t work out with [school, college, my job, me and Danny] and so I have come here and it is a really beautiful scene. I don’t want you to worry about me. I have met some BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE and …’ … and in the heart of even the most unhip mamma in all the U. S. of A. instinctively goes up the adrenalin shriek: beatniks, bums, spades—dope. (123–24)
The “Beautiful People letter” Wolfe reconstructs here shows the instinctive reaction of the middle-class American to the counterculture: “beatniks, bums, spades [referring to African Americans 8 ]—dope. ” These are all things that represent a threat to the conventional conformist American lifestyle. Beatniks abandoned the social conventions of the fifties society and went on a quest to find an alternative way of being; bums belong to the outskirts of society, occasionally hollering at by-passers, asking for money they have not earned; Black Panthers in the streets, demanding their rights by fair means or foul; and finally the worst of them all, drugs. Mind-altering, unpredictable behavior inducing drugs that made ordinary people go out of their minds.
No wonder that getting the “Beautiful People letter” produced an “adrenalin shriek” in the white, middle-class parent. The passage describing the letter also names the things the counterculture, See Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 15 and Terry H. Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee, 248 8 46 especially the hippie movement, wanted to renounce: education, the career-oriented mindset, and the traditional notion of coupling and starting a nuclear family, which Wolfe often refers to with the phrase “Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis. ” Wolfe continues to describe the “Beautiful People” phenomenon by emulating the experience of being young in that era: Us! and people our age! –it was… beautiful, it was a … hole feeling, and the straight world never understood it, this thing of one’s status sphere and how one was only nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two or so and not starting out helpless at the bottom of the ladder, at all, because the hell with the ladder itself–one was already up on a … level that the straight world was freaking baffled by! (123) Breaking loose from the hierarchical structure of mainstream society was one of the key experiences of the sixties generation. They had created their own way of being, which set them radically apart from their parents lifestyle. Thousands of young adults wanted to escape “occupation-game labels,” such as “clerk” or “executive trainee” (123) and create an alternative way of being.
Wolfe further contrasts the very different lifestyles of “the Beautiful People” and mainstream citizens through a character that belongs to both spheres. He describes a young man whose life alternates between “stretches of good straight computer programming, during which he wore a necktie and an iridescent tealgreen suit of Zirconpolyesterethylene and was a formidable fellow in the straight world” and “stretches of life with … Speed, the Great God Rotor, during which he wore his Importancy Coat,” a jacket covered by a collage of “ribbons,” “slogan buttons,” and “reflectors” (147). Wolfe describes thus the concepts and status symbols attributed to straight society (work, neckties, suits) and to the counterculture (drugs, peculiar clothing).
The transition between the two cultures is signified by substituting the conventional office uniform, the suit and necktie made out of synthetic materials, for a jacket with attitude. Symbolically, it is a transformation of a mass man—or an Organization Man, to use William H. Whyte’s definition from the 1950s—into a free individual. Thompson approaches the American middle-class straight society by contrasting it with its worst fears. He portrays the attitudes of “the squares” towards marginal elements of the society, such as the drug scene: We were idling at a stoplight in front of the Silver Slipper beside a big blue Ford with Oklahoma plates … two hoggish-looking couples in the car, probably cops from Muskogee using the Drug Conference to give their wives a look at Vegas.
They looked like they’d just beaten Caesar’s Palace for about $33 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed for the Circus-Circus to whoop it up…. … but suddenly, they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them: “Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin? ” No reply. No sign of recognition. They’d been warned about this kind of crap: Just ignore it…. “Hey, honkies! ” my attorney screamed. “Goddamnit, I’m serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin’ smack! ” He was leaning out of the car, very close to them. But still nobody answered.
I glanced over, very briefly, and saw four middle-American faces frozen with shock, staring straight ahead. (151) Thompson’s portrayal of typical “middle-Americans” is not very complimentary: “hoggish-looking” individuals who come to Vegas for cheap thrills. Like in the previous passage by Wolfe, appearance is of importance also here: a “300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt” and a “Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit” are certainly sights that would alarm members of the mainstream. This passage reveals the tension between the mainstream and the marginal: decent, law-abiding Americans wanted to stay at arm’s length from the deviant characters that came with the counterculture.
By suggesting that the couples are from Muskogee Thompson is probably alluding to a popular 1969 song by Merle Haggard, Okie from Muskogee, which could be described 48 as a kind of theme song for straight society. The horrified Oklahomans, or Okies, manage to escape Duke and Gonzo, and Duke is left wondering whether they will inform the police about the incident: “The idea that two heroin pushers in a white Cadillac convertible dragging up and down the Strip, abusing total strangers at stoplights, was prima facie absurd” (153). The appearance and behavior of the two are so extreme that Duke concludes nobody would believe such a twosome ever existed, even in the furthest margins of society.
Thompson gets to the core of mainstream America and its backward attitudes towards the counterculture when Duke and Gonzo go to the Drug conference: Dr. Bloomqvist’s book is a compendium of state bullshit. On page 49 he explains the “four states of being” in the cannabis society: “Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square”—in that descending order. “The square is seldom if ever cool,” says Bloomqvist. “He is ‘not with it,’ that is, he doesn’t know ‘what’s happening. ‘ But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to ‘hip. ‘ And if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes ‘groovy. ‘ And after that, with much luck and perseverance, he can rise to the rank of cool. ‘” (139)
This passage conveys the incredibly distorted logic of the nation’s leading narcotics expert who is completely out of touch with reality. As a self-taught narcotics expert of sorts and also as a journalist who records the phenomena of the real world, Thompson deems the official outlook on the drug scene as “dangerous gibberish” (139) that can lead to excessive measures in dealing with the problem. The passage shows how gullible officials and “experts” can be when confronted with subjects they are prejudiced towards. Thompson suspects that some of these so called truths about drug culture were probably put in Dr. Bloomqvist’s mind by someone like Timothy Leary,
Haggard’s lyrics celebrate the “square” way of life, as this excerpt demonstrates: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee; We don’t take our trips on LSD; We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street; We like livin’ right, and bein’ free; I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee; A place where even squares can have a ball. (http://www. cowboylyrics. com/lyrics/haggard-merle/okie-from-muskogee497. html) “With a straight face” (139). To make his point, Thompson concludes: “These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni” (143). He comes to the conclusion that the convention is a joke, a “prehistoric gathering” (138) that was put together by “people who had been in a seconal stupor since 1964” (144). The authorities and officials of the mainstream were helplessly behind their times. Thompson keeps exploring the values of straight society in the context of the drug conference.
He notes that most of the police officers resemble stereotypical conformist remnants of some previous era: “for every urban-hipster, there were about twenty crude-looking rednecks who could have passed for assistant football coaches at Mississippi State. [—] Here was the cop-cream of Middle America … and, Jesus, they looked and talked like a gang of drunken pig farmers” (140). Thompson associates the police with pigs on several occasions: he suspected the Oklahomans at the traffic lights to be police because they were “hoggish-looking” and compares the police at the conference to “drunken pig farmers. ” This, in my opinion, has more to do with issues of appearance than the fact that police were often called pigs by members of the sixties counterculture. The “hoggish” mainstream middle-American was the yardstick against which all the urban-hipsters,” “freaks,” and other countercultural elements could be measured. Thompson refers to Middle America as “the Outback” and explores the geosociological divide through a remark made by Doctor Gonzo: “I saw these bastards in Easy Rider, but I didn’t believe they were real” (140). This illuminates the point that the social scenery of California was very different from that of Middle America, and the lack of real life encounters with the counterculture was undoubtedly a crucial factor in the rigid and retarded views of the guests at the police conference. It was an encounter of prejudices, where a “freak” from California and a police from Middle America met for the first time.
It is interesting to note that the various phenomena that deviated from mainstream America in the sixties were made accessible to the larger public by the media, and especially the new journalists. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler argued that American society was disintegrating into subcultures that diverged considerably from the norms of the mainstream middle class. According to Toffler, the gap between these social groups would soon be so wide, there would have to be “transcultural translators” to interpret one group to another. John Hollowell applies this idea to Wolfe: “Wolfe might be called such a translator for the Kesey group since he interprets and explains their deviant life-style to middle-class readers. He parallels Wolfe with a tour guide who “introduces to the reader exotic manners and values quite alien to his own”(134) and a “wonder-struck anthropologist just discovering some new exotic lore” (138). This characterization can also be applied to Hunter S. Thompson when he observed the Hell’s Angels, although instead of a tour guide he was more like a researcher or scientist observing a pack of wild animals, relating their manners and habits to the curious middle-class American tucked away in the safety of their suburban home. The new journalists made the countercultural phenomena accessible to the mainstream; after all, the deviancies (hippies, acid heads, motorcycle gangs, and activists advocating minority rights and protesting war) concentrated in certain places, such as California and the upper East Coast, so someone
