During the summer of 1969 it became apparent to every sane person that the hippy movement was an unmitigated disaster. Born out of an admirable desire to change the world for the better, by the time Woodstock came about it had denigrated into nothing more than a bunch of filthy, white college students wasting their parent's money by ingesting drugs, taking off their clothing and rolling around in the mud. The root cause of this failing can be directly traced back to one particular bus trip taken by Ken Kesey and his friends in 1964.

They called themselves the "Merry Pranksters", and they traveled across this country with a lot of LSD and little desire to take themselves very seriously at all. Pranksters indeed, to them it was all a joke. Despite the gravity of what was going on around them, they chose to have fun. The Kennedy assassination, race riots and Vietnam were no deterrent to Kesey and his gang of happy-go-lucky drifters, and this reprehensible attitude was the ultimate downfall of the hippy movement.

Time and again history has shown us that the worst thing one can do in life is to stop taking it seriously. These latter-day Neros are the worst sort of plague on humanity, hiding behind their jaded exteriors and prematurely claimed wisdom. Theirs is a condescending attitude born not of perception, but of shortcomings. They would rather point and laugh than offer their fellow man a helping hand or a few words of encouragement, because deep down they know they are lesser creatures than those who operate with righteous purpose, and they wish to destroy the holy fire that burns in men of noble calling. These are people who offer earnest-sounding insight to the lost only to gain their poorly placed trust, then use that trust against them, cackling when the mark realizes they've bought into nothing more than a charade.

How Ken Kesey and those in his orbit became such societal vultures, and what became of them afterwards, was examined in a book written by Tom Wolfe titled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Unfortunately, the lackluster writing of Mr. Wolfe results in a book that absolutely fails to engage the reader on anything but the most superficial level. Wolfe has two main problems with his writing. First, he is the consummate outsider looking in, never able to tell his subjects' stories effectively because he is never able to connect with them. His second problem is that he desperately tries to hide his disconnection by injecting his writing with lingo copped from the people he studies. It works about as well as a parent trying to connect with their teen through the use of overheard high school vernacular.

But somehow a blue silk blazer and a big tie with clowns on it and...a... pair of shiny lowcut black shoes don't set them all to doing the Varsity Rag in the head world in San Francisco. Lois picks off the marshmallows one by one; Cool Breeze ascends into the innards of his gnome's hat; Black Maria, a Scorpio herself, rummages through the Zodiac; Stewart Brand winds it through the streets; pailettes explode - and this is nothing special, just the usual, the usual in the head world of San Francisco, just a little routine messing up the minds of the citizenry en route, nothing more than psych food for the beautiful people, while giving some guy from New York a lift to the Warehouse to wait for the Chief, Ken Kesey, who is getting out of jail.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

This sort of nonsense doesn't make me feel like I'm a part of the 1960's San Francisco counterculture, it just makes me think that Tom Wolfe is a great big ol' dork. The whole book goes on like this, and it is very painful because by page 6 you realize that Wolfe is totally unqualified to write about these people. He has no fucking clue as to what's going on, and one can easily imagine his impeccably white-suited self standing amidst a sea of grubby hippies, taking notes like a sophomore psychology student interviewing a homicidal schizophrenic and trying to act like it's all routine. "Yes, yes, and these 'schrooms' you are taking, they are not like the ones people buy in the supermarket? ... I see. Tell me more about 'the herb'"

Tom Wolfe didn't stop displaying his ignorance with this book, though. In 1975 he published The Painted Word, a critique of modern art from the always thrilling view point of someone who doesn't understand it. He then followed up that tour de force with From Bauhaus to Our House, an equally uninformed look at modern architecture. That's pretty much all he does. He takes subject matter that he doesn't understand and then attacks it in a way that is about as revealing and provoking as political commentary from a taxi driver.

You want to feel all warm and fuzzy inside about hating those people who made a lot of money in the 80's? Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities just for you. You want a superficial treatment of real estate development in the early 90's? Give A Man in Full a read. Don't worry about being asked to stretch your little noggin around any complex character motivations. Tom Wolfe only provides you with easily digestible cardboard cutouts, conveniently packaged for rapid disapproval. In Wolfe's novels the world is exactly how you think it is, and he always offers comfortable reassurance for us little people.

If there's one thing we can learn from Kesey's death, if there's one thing history can teach us, it's that Tom Wolfe is a fucking menace. He was bad enough when writing nonfiction, but he really crossed over the line when he started publishing novels. If anybody deserves to die of liver cancer, it's him.