Ken
Kesey In Adelaide 1988 .
Ken happened to be in the
city for the writers festival and this interview was broadcast on
the ABC . Of course, I didn't know he was in town until he had left !
Interviewer: Jolleys
Boat House, a fashionable hidey hole for the fashionable middle class -
and right in the middle of it , the leader of the hallucinogenic revolution
, Ken
Kesey
. The man the FBI said would wreck society and leave it to drug crazed
hippies , the people who don't know how to behave in restaurants.
But the middle class have survived and Kesey fits into it quite
well , there are no horns or devils tail, but he's still a revolutionary
and he still wants to change society. |
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Kesey:
I'll tell you what I think about it and why literature is good.
The people who have read Heart Of Darkness ,
when they saw Apocalypse Now , they had a
sense of evil and people who don't know what evil is , they're vulnerable,
it can slip up on them , a nation that doesn't know when its about to go
wrong is vulnerable and one of the jobs of the writer is to delineate evil
and say. Hey , if you go that way , you'll end up
like Rome.And that's NOT a popular thing to do to a nation. There's
been a period of about 15 years in the US where what I've had to say ,
nobody wants to hear it.
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When I first got into the
drug business- ( sound of baby crying off camera ) - see what it does ,
it makes babies cry- when I got into drugs I'd never even been smoking,
drinking beer or anything, I'd been training for the Olympics in wrestling
, in good shape and the United States govt said, we need some volunteers
to go in this strange room that the doctors and professors and generals
didn't want to go in , but they wanted to know what was going on in there,
so they hired a bunch of students to go and look it over .
Interviewer: and they were the great
acid tests ?.
Kesey:
Yes and mescaline and psylocybin and LSD 25 and LSD 6 and all those
various drugs that were being developed by the C.I.A for their own ends
as the Freedom Of Information act revealed that they were doing this to
try and break down prisoners.
Interviewer: Do you think that if you
had not gone through that , that your life would have gone the way it went
?
Kesey:
Oh, it was the most profound thing that has ever happened in my
life , second to the death of my son a couple of years ago.
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Interviewer:
Well having said that , do you still take LSD ?.
Kesey:
Will this show be screened before I get out of Australia ?.
Interviewer:
Yes , Sat night.
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Kesey:
Of course I'm not taking LSD , I didn't bring in LSD into Australia
Interviewer :
Of course not.
Kesey:
Of course not
( much laughter)
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Interviewer:
You did things like introduce the hells angels to L.S.D,
was that a very wise thing ?
Kesey:
LSD to the hells angels was a whole lot better than giving
them beer and barbiturates , that's when they beat up on each other. Hells
angels on LSD , you know they sit and study the movements in the bubbles.
( laughs ) |
Interviewer:
What would you say to the kids
today about what they should or should not take ?
Kesey:
I never tell kids to take LSD. I think at that time in our history
there was a stiffness that went around the US like a tarter on the
teeth . LSD was a way of going in there and getting the tarter loose so
that the gums could be healthy again . We bled for a while but I don't
see the need for that in my kids. |
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Interviewer :
One more question, what about wrestling ?.
Kesey :
Well as I have always said , wrestling is the sport of reason
. Football , boxing , they are all trying to decrease the reason and intelligence
of the opponent by knocking them out , but the wrestler doesn't try to
knock anybody out. He gets them by the arm and sits them back there and
says. |
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"Now listen carefully to me or I'm gonna break your shoulder"
and you reason with them . And writing is the same for me, You get
them by the brain and you put a half Nelson on them and you say. "Listen
, I'm gonna reason with you , I'm gonna tell you something that might be
a little hard for you , but its , its correct."
So you try to increase the consciousness of the person .That's what.
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Amen to that . Thank you Ken - and rest easy , we'll carry on spreading
the message .