SA: The Merry Pranksters and Kesey, what was positive about them?
http://www.escapefromwatchtower.com/ginsberg.html
AG: Well, first of all they didn’t reject the American flag but instead washed it and took it back from the neoconservatives and right wingers and war hawks who were wrapping themselves in the flag, so Kesey painted the flag on his sneakers and had a little flag in his teeth filling. Actually his Merry Pranksters were Korean War veterans[Vietnam veterans: ed.], Ken Babbs among them, who were sort of like big macho Americanists. And it was an Americanist movement to regain the old American tradition of Prankster, Voyager, Explorer, Davy Crockett, individual enterprise can-do, but can-do in a peaceful rather than in a warlike way. Family-oriented, Kesey coming from a big family and the gatherings being at La Honda at his family home, so it was an extended family notion. There was also the idea of humour and art being the basis for political gatherings and the Acid Tests. * Humour and daring and adventureness rather than paranoia and fear, cutting through paranoia, and we’re going right into the paranoia and seeing its emptiness. On a political level in ’64 Neal Cassady, who was the hero of the earlier Beat thing, drove Kesey’s bus cross-country during the Goldwater-Johnson presidential campaign with a slogan painted on the bus, “A vote for Goldwater is a vote for fun.” * and went thought Texas and all through the South with that slogan, exploding the whole serious hawk and war issues. It was Kesey also who had turned the Hells’ Angels onto acid and warded off their attack on the 1965 peace march that Jerry Rubin, Snyder, myself, and others participated in, * as distinct from the heavy political people whose ground was that this is the last conflict with black-shirted fascists and we should attack them with chains instead of having a flower power march as a demonstration as theater. So he had a good idea of public theatre.
* See Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
* Barry Goldwater, an ultraconservative Republican and Arizona senator, was the Republican candidate against incumbent President Johnson. He took a harsh stance against the Soviet Union and opposed any arms-control negotiations. Many feared his extreme anticommunist stance might cause a war with the Soviet Union.
* Berkeley activist Jerry Rubin, heading the Vietnam Day Committee, planned a series of marches from Berkeley to Oakland protesting the draft and the Vietnam War. Ginsberg and Gary Snyder participated in the first October march changing mantras to calm the protesters. The police and Hell’s Angels seemed inevitable. Ginsberg offered advice in the form of a handbill titled “How to make a March Spectacle” (see Deliberate Prose, New York: Harper Collins, 2000).
SA: Was flower power all about theatre?
AG: Oh, yeah. About ’67, sticking the flower into the barrel of the Pentagon gun during the levitation, * and flower power actually meant the power of green, growth, and ecology. It was planet news, so to speak, for an ecological statement. It didn’t mean idiot sentimentality, it meant the basic power of matriarchy, the feminine, Mother Earth, vulnerability, and the vulnerability of the earth itself, and also the long-lasting strength. And a lot of the influence, brought in to some extent by Snyder and the anthropological poets, was American Indian, the headbands and ponytails of the Indians. Then there was also the added influence of oriental thought, both Japanese and Indian, Buddhist and Hindu. The Hindu iconography was very powerful in the Oracle, like the Be-in issue had a giant poster of a Saivite sadhu smoking grass so it was a confluence of grass, psychedelics, and Eastern Indian and American Indian peyote ceremony that was influential on the style of dress and demeanor and earth thinking.
* The Pentagon Levitation. On October 26, 1967, tens of thousands joined in a march on the Pentagon. Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, of the avant-garde rock group the Fugs, and many protesters performed the Pentagon exorcism for which Ginsberg provided the text titled “No Taxation Without Representation.” The event is described in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night: History as a Novel. The Novel as History (New York: New American Library, 1968).
http://www.escapefromwatchtower.com/ginsberg.html
AG: Well, first of all they didn’t reject the American flag but instead washed it and took it back from the neoconservatives and right wingers and war hawks who were wrapping themselves in the flag, so Kesey painted the flag on his sneakers and had a little flag in his teeth filling. Actually his Merry Pranksters were Korean War veterans[Vietnam veterans: ed.], Ken Babbs among them, who were sort of like big macho Americanists. And it was an Americanist movement to regain the old American tradition of Prankster, Voyager, Explorer, Davy Crockett, individual enterprise can-do, but can-do in a peaceful rather than in a warlike way. Family-oriented, Kesey coming from a big family and the gatherings being at La Honda at his family home, so it was an extended family notion. There was also the idea of humour and art being the basis for political gatherings and the Acid Tests. * Humour and daring and adventureness rather than paranoia and fear, cutting through paranoia, and we’re going right into the paranoia and seeing its emptiness. On a political level in ’64 Neal Cassady, who was the hero of the earlier Beat thing, drove Kesey’s bus cross-country during the Goldwater-Johnson presidential campaign with a slogan painted on the bus, “A vote for Goldwater is a vote for fun.” * and went thought Texas and all through the South with that slogan, exploding the whole serious hawk and war issues. It was Kesey also who had turned the Hells’ Angels onto acid and warded off their attack on the 1965 peace march that Jerry Rubin, Snyder, myself, and others participated in, * as distinct from the heavy political people whose ground was that this is the last conflict with black-shirted fascists and we should attack them with chains instead of having a flower power march as a demonstration as theater. So he had a good idea of public theatre.
* See Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
* Barry Goldwater, an ultraconservative Republican and Arizona senator, was the Republican candidate against incumbent President Johnson. He took a harsh stance against the Soviet Union and opposed any arms-control negotiations. Many feared his extreme anticommunist stance might cause a war with the Soviet Union.
* Berkeley activist Jerry Rubin, heading the Vietnam Day Committee, planned a series of marches from Berkeley to Oakland protesting the draft and the Vietnam War. Ginsberg and Gary Snyder participated in the first October march changing mantras to calm the protesters. The police and Hell’s Angels seemed inevitable. Ginsberg offered advice in the form of a handbill titled “How to make a March Spectacle” (see Deliberate Prose, New York: Harper Collins, 2000).
SA: Was flower power all about theatre?
AG: Oh, yeah. About ’67, sticking the flower into the barrel of the Pentagon gun during the levitation, * and flower power actually meant the power of green, growth, and ecology. It was planet news, so to speak, for an ecological statement. It didn’t mean idiot sentimentality, it meant the basic power of matriarchy, the feminine, Mother Earth, vulnerability, and the vulnerability of the earth itself, and also the long-lasting strength. And a lot of the influence, brought in to some extent by Snyder and the anthropological poets, was American Indian, the headbands and ponytails of the Indians. Then there was also the added influence of oriental thought, both Japanese and Indian, Buddhist and Hindu. The Hindu iconography was very powerful in the Oracle, like the Be-in issue had a giant poster of a Saivite sadhu smoking grass so it was a confluence of grass, psychedelics, and Eastern Indian and American Indian peyote ceremony that was influential on the style of dress and demeanor and earth thinking.
* The Pentagon Levitation. On October 26, 1967, tens of thousands joined in a march on the Pentagon. Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, of the avant-garde rock group the Fugs, and many protesters performed the Pentagon exorcism for which Ginsberg provided the text titled “No Taxation Without Representation.” The event is described in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night: History as a Novel. The Novel as History (New York: New American Library, 1968).
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