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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, December 17, 1968
Soothers, not healers
The cabinet appointed by Richard Nixon underscores the syncopated rhythm of the times.
If we are in the midst of a social revolution, one would not know it by examining the cabinet chosen by Nixon. The President-elect has clearly accentuated the "forgotten America" that so often keynoted his campaign speeches.
The Nixon cabinet is composed of men who will offend few, nor will they pacify many. They are men who lean more to the right than to the left. They are men established in their respective professions, but men who command little if any substantial followings. They are men with little experience in governmental administration or policy formulation, but men who inherit little of the stigma of the past administration. They are men who will soothe rather than heal.
Nixon has said publicly that he does not expect to be a greatly loved leader, rather he intends to be a respected leader. He seemingly has picked a cabinet in keeping with this philosophy. In some quarters this blandness will probably prove an asset, but in dealing with today's dissidents, it will be a definite liability. It will be for history to judge if the dissidents will discredit the Nixon administration.
Nixon wrote of the collage of student and racial minorities during his campaign for the presidency. His official family appears to be Act II
of that play. Any move to accommodate dissenting factors in the Nixon cabinet would possibly be viewed as tokenism. But as an indicator of Nixon's recognition of dissent and as an indicator of future Nixon policy, an appointment to pacify the noisy minorities would have been of timely value and countless importance.
On the surface, the Nixon cabinet appears to be as cool and cautious, as the image the President-elect has tried to project himself. But the important questions to be answered are: has Nixon underestimated the amount and possible consequences of dissent in this country; and, will the course taken in selecting the cabinet indicate the course taken in policy formulation by the Nixon administration.
To many it is reassuring to see Nixon following the route he pointed to in his campaign. He's shown a consistency of action that may be what a divided country needs.
However, Nixon will not be able to remain aloof and above the changin' times for long. Some time during the next four years he will have to face the realities of dissent. Not until he, is forced to dirty his hands for the first time will the course plotted by Nixon be known.
Richard Lundquist Assistant Editorial Editor
Kansan Book Review
Wolfe probes psychedelia
By SCOTT NUNLEY
"The Electric Kool-Aid Test!"
Diablo!
This -bus, full of crazies in American flag coveralls, painted in dayglio nightmares, thundering out Dylan's amplified harmonica as it heads its high way across the straight continent of Northern Suburbia.
Sudobia.
It's the Goldwater summer of 1964, and Ken Kesey's 1939 International Harvester school bus is fighting a freaky path to the World's Fair. Two years before, Kesey had become an acclaimed first novelist with his brilliant "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Two years before that, Kesey had been quietly making $75 a day at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital-dropping LSD under the bushy brows of the clinic's psychologists. (But nobody had heard much about that side of the Celebrated Young Author from Oregon.)
Then in 1965 and again in 1966, Kesey was arrested on marijuana charges. Fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution!
The nation suddenly learned (if they cared) what the growing psychedelic underground in California had slowly discovered, that Ken Kesey was beneath his dull street identity of "Responsible Writer" none other than mystical "Dr. Strange," the dayglo-raider and LSD-poisoner of Straight America.
All this (and many more!) gave Tom Wolfe ripe material for his first full-length madadventure into journalism, "creative" journalism—a bastard genre exploding into the literary aridity of the country's news coverage.
Tom Wolfe first broke into the new field with the 1965 success of "The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," a collection of his pop-journalism articles that had originally appeared in such mass-audience outlets as Esquire. Three years later, Wolfe's second (and extremely inferior) collection was out: "The Pump House Gang," with credentials from the London Weekend Telegraph and the New York World Journal Tribune.
Wolfe's own style of the new journalism had by then been obviously copywrited:
"But of course! A heroine of her times! Electra of the Main Stem!—in order to show the new world a pair of-at last!—perfected twentieth-century American breasts. You have only one life to live. Why not live it as a put-together girl?"
Any Wolfe article now reads like any other Wolfe article, only the "facts" get updated. With a profusion of asides and exclamation points, the Wolfe-news lurches and flashes its surprising way to
Excitement!
Yes! and—success, and even—of course! insight!
insight:
Because in spite of the pretention, before the monotony sets in, and under the goosed rhetoric,
Tom Wolfe is bringing to life persons and situations the usual news reporter bypasses.
Here the current scenes of Anglo-American
living are exploded from the Inside out, while the astonished reader lives—ooh yes! Lives!—the vicarious iovs of someone else's days and nights.
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is a surpassing master-sucess of this Tom Wolf technique.
From the pounding interior of the Kesey Cult, Wolfe snatches colorful characters and rushes out their own stories across the 400 pages of his B-K.
Kesey himself—"Chief"-the non-navigator of the group's Trips, and the country-boy visionary of a psychedelic crusade to reach the Limits-Edge City!-to break every rule, every barrier, every icon, to remake America or at least to blaze the way. Out! Further!
Ken Babbbs (the ex-Vietnam helicopter pilot) —"Yeah, yeah, right! Right! Right!"—running the Controls of the group's fantastic electronic monster of light and sound projectors, tapes, variable lags, amps, and unmusical instruments. The non-doctor himself.
Sandy Lehman-Haupt—"Dis-MOUNT"—feeling left out of Kesey's inner circle, raging away at the Great God Rotor on amphetamines, losing control at last—isolated—paranoid—breakdown! and then throttling his beatup cycle down down into Mexico to steal his own expensive Ampex tape recorder back from Kesey's Pranksters.
Like Hesse's Leo, Kesey leaves the group (to flee into Mexico) and "From that time," Hesse admits, "certainty and unity no longer existed in our community, although the great idea still kept us together." The collapse of Kesey's quasi-mystical Trek Into the Undared could only have its analogs in other mystical literature.
Wolfe sees the final disintegration of the cult, the inevitable depressing crash from the heights of its energy, as a parallel to Herman Hesse's "Journey to the East."
Perhaps it's too early to judge: if Kesey's Trip did provide the channel for the exploding power of California Psychedelia, with all its current nationwide repercussions, what have we gained?
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" in all its glory never quite says. Wolfe, ultimately, if pleasantly, cops out.
The question, of course, is what was it all worth?
Did Kesey actually help to re-awaken America? Or, with Ken hard at work on a third novel, is Kesey's Trek really There yet?
John Marshall The black lady
Bitching is "in" for most people nowadays. But the nasty word that used to mean something about a female dog has been honed down to a mild, hackneyed, overused term called "protest." To protest or bitch is about all anyone can do nowadays. Everything is bad. Teachers. Adults. The GAP-generation and credibility. Police. Any presidential candidate. Pride. Faith. America. America. The Flag. Everything that used to mean something good or warm or nice is bitched at.
Perhaps our problem is that we can afford to do it. But there are some people right here in Lawrence who are proud. Who like where they live. Who marvel at some of the changes that have taken place in this society. There are some people who REALLY DID have it bad-but still like it here.
Read about one.
THE BLACK LADY
The black lady was sitting with her face to the sun looking out onto 19th Street from inside the laundromat. Her back was to the huge shiny steel automatic dry cleaner that was flopping her clothes up against the thick see-through window.
She just sat there staring out, maybe, at Lawrence High School, or the boys who were trotting on their way from the gymnasium to the grade school for a short Saturday afternoon scrimmage. But she was thinking about how different it was.
"Things are changed," she mumbled. Her eyes were glassy and they stared out at where the boys had just trotted past. Three of the boys were black.
Forty years ago when she had been small in southeastern Oklahoma they had used tennis shoes to go to Sunday School. Tennis shoes were so durable and when the soles got worn or the sides were roughed up too much to wear, they used the old shoes to beat the living room rug.
"We weren't allowed to run in them much because it was hard on them. Besides, we didn't have anywhere to run anyway."
But things are a little better now for the glassy-eyed lady in the laundromat because her husband has a good job and brings in enough money to feed and clothe the rest of the children. $54.23 a week.
In back of her, the big shiny electric automatic dry cleaner ground to a stop. The black lady looked at it and smiled. You could see the wrinkles and the tooth missing and the frazzled, Saturday-morning hair under the net—the hair was gray here and there; and you wondered why it was not white as you looked at the sad brown eyes in the sun and tried to think of something to keep the conversation going.
You almost gagged inside because you knew that half the reason you wanted to keep the conversation going was to get something to say in your column. Things like that make you want to get sick.
She was putting the clothes into a tattered wicker basket when she noticed the book on the table next to the dry-cleaner. CRISIS IN BLACK AND WHITE by CHARLES E. SILBERMAN it said on the front.
"It has changed," the sad-happy-weary lady said. "We used to save our quarters so we could have good meat once in awhile. Now we put them in the machine over there to dry-clean our clothes."
well, not really- not really about you, she was told. The smile on her face was thick and straight, biting into some of the teeth on the lower row.
"Well, not really—not really about you," she was told.
"Is that about me?" she asked.
"It used to be I couldn't read book titles," she said. "Now I can." The mouth was proud now and so were the eyes. Now the eyes can understand.
She had bought a book when she was 13 and couldn't read it for 24 years. "I kept that book for a long time and almost lost it during the war. But I promised myself I would learn to read and I did."
When she was 38. A birthday surprise for her husband and she read him the first chapter. Robinson Crusoe.
She picked up the book that wasn't really about her and looked at the chapter titles and smiled. "Do they really know?"
You don't have an answer. Nobody does.
They write a lot of things about black people nowadays, she said. "They write so many things and there are so many speeches that nobody knows what to call US anymore. One day Negro. The next Black. And the next Afro-American."
What difference does it make now? she said. "Used to be we were all just Niggers."
She was looking out the window again. "It's such a beautiful building," she said. "And I heard they were trying to decide whether to give black people in that school more rights."
She had never been in a high school. And she wouldn't change it today. "I used to see pictures like that," she said, pointing at the school. "It's so good that all kids can go to a school like that."
Things sure have changed, she kept saying. Now tennis shoes just for sport. Books ... so many books to read. Modern schools with black and white students in them. Television to see the world. Magazines and newspapers to tell you about everything. "All from the schools now. Such changes, such good changes," she said, looking out into the sun at the school building.
Too bad she doesn't know about racism or students' rights.