In 1968, the author Tom Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his nonfiction account of the rise of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a group of psychedelic-fueled proto-hippies who traveled the country on a vibrant, Day-Glo-painted bus they called Furthur, ostensibly to further the cause of a new age of awareness. They also seemed to get off on driving really fast and listening to skull-shakingly loud music while out of their gourds on LSD, but, hey, everyone must find their own path to enlightenment, right?
The Merry Pranksters, according to Wolfe anyway, had very few rules, but one of their most oft-repeated mantras was: “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
Well, duh, Kesey. It’s not Schrödinger’s bus, and no human can occupy two spaces at once. On its face, that philosophy tends toward the simplistic. Put another way, it’s the sort of thing you might think was life-alteringly profound if you were riding the peak of your third acid trip of the week and grooving to the Beatles’ Help! blasted at the kind of volume that heralds an early onset of tinnitus. On the other hand, there’s a simple brilliance to it. You’re either along for the ride, or you’re not. The Pranksters were on a trip to “intersubjectivity,” as they called it, a sort of communal ego death, and they couldn’t afford to have someone on the bus moaning, “Are we there yet?”
Buses have been front of mind for me for the past two weeks or so because my son and I have been living in my mother-in-law’s converted school bus. My wife — and most of her family — caught Covid. I know, it’s so 2021, but some things never go out of style. So, my 6-month-old son and I moved onto the bus for 10 days, and I can assure you, it was no Acid Party.
As we waited out the Covid storm, I couldn’t help remembering how horribly our nation bungled the pandemic. And how that slow-motion catastrophe seemed to shatter one of the remaining threads of commonality we shared, leading to a series of avoidable mistakes and miscalculations.
So, I find myself wondering, how did it happen? The answer, I propose, is that we’re not on the bus. We couldn’t all get on board a cohesive plan to combat a relatively unknown and potentially deadly vascular infection, and so over a million Americans died in less than two years (1,197,497 according to the CDC, as of January 2022). We couldn’t get on board with a plan to fight fascism, and now the Washington, D.C., police force is under federal control and we’ve built a concentration camp in Florida, where we hold prisoners without due process.
We have to get on the fucking bus, and we have to do it now. We need to wrest the steering wheel away from the psychopaths intent on driving us off a cliff, and we have to be okay with the realization that all of us on the bus aren’t going to agree on everything. Communal ego death sounds fun and all, but group-think is for hive insects, not mostly-hairless apes. We’re going to have to collaborate on solutions, and to do that we’re going to have to relearn how to communicate with each other without demonizing each other.
Republicans of conscience, you’ve got to denounce the white supremacists in your midst. Democrats, you’ve got to realize that taking a knee in the Capitol doesn’t mean shit if you won’t back up your gestures with policy decisions — policy decisions that help all Americans, not just the donor class. More importantly, you’ve got to realize that we’re not turning back the clock to 2019 or 2015; if you want to motivate people, you have to work for them. Progressives? Ya gotta stop fighting among yourselves, and you’ve gotta be welcoming to any newcomers ready to join the fight.
We cannot be distracted by culture wars, empty gestures, or the Presidential Outrage of the Hour. We have to pick a destination, collaborate on the road map, and ignore the flashy tourist traps along the way. Let’s get on the bus, together, and let’s go somewhere worth the journey.
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, are on the bus.