After All These Years – Excerpt
And there’s plenty of evidence that the larger mob is also still around-in Berkeley, Boulder, Austin, Madison, New England, upstate New York and anywhere the seeds of the sixties rooted and took hold.
“I don’t know anyone who has been involved in all this seriously who has ever quit,” says Kesey. “All the people I know are working just as hard, and they’re becoming very skillful at it.” He thinks for a moment. “The Grateful Dead’s a good example. These guys have never got off the elevator, saying, ‘Okay, here’s as high as we’re gonna go. We gonna get off at Menswear.’ They’re still on the elevator, and they’re going to go as high as they can.”
Kesey tips back in the rickety chair that’s usually in front of Faye’s sewing machine and puts his feet up on the couch. Through the thin walls of the old house you can hear Bahbs and Zonk laughing. “This isn’t the throwing Molotov cocktails kind of revolution,” he says. “But it is a revolution. It’s psychedelic Christian philosophy, the belief that love and mercy are the most powerful things in the world, a belief in the old, traditional American dream.
“What the last two decades show is that if something really is beautiful, you can burn it and bury it and put it in jail, but it is more resilient than evil. Finally, the bad stuff does decay and goes back into the earth. Finally, it washes itself out. Listen,” he says with his characteristic mixture of sincerity and mirth, “there is in the United States right now a cadre of revolutionaries just waiting for the cause.”