The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

As I have gotten older, my taste for fiction has considerably diminished. I am focusing more of my attention on nonfiction (biographies, memoirs, essays, journalistic reports, and humor) -- most recently, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson.

I had read Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers -- assigned reading while I was in college -- and was captivated by Wolfe's "New Journalism" style. The following passage particularly tickled my fancy and stimulated my synapses. Background: A college teacher reads aloud an excerpt of Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, then asks her students for their comments.

One of the ghetto brothers raises his hand, and she turns to him with the most radiant brotherly smile the human mind can imagine and says, "Yes?"

And this student, a funky character with electric hair, says: "You know what? Ghetto people would laugh if they heard what yo just read. That book wasn't written for the ghettos. It was written for the white middle class. They published it and they read it. What is this 'having previously dabbled in the themes and writings of Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire' that he's laying down in there? You try coming down in the Fillmore doing some previously dabbling and talking about Albert Camus and James Baldwin. They'd laugh you off the block. That book was written to give a thrill to white women in Palo Alto and Marin County. That book is the best suburban jive I ever heard. I don't think he even wrote it. Eldridge Cleaver wouldn't write something like that. I think his wife wrote it . . . Pre-vi-ously dab-bled . . . I mean like don't dabble the people no previouslies and don't previous the people no dabblies and don't preevy-dabble the people with no split-level Palo Alto white bourgeouis housewife Buick Estate Wagon backseat rape fantasies . . . you know?

As for Thompson's profile, my interest in the subject matter was born more from my fondness for sixties biker flicks produced by American International Pictures than it was from an attraction to Hell's Angels . . . whom I consider scum.