Month: September 2014

A technicolor dream bus called “Furthur”
captained by a man named Kesey is zigzagging across the country.
It’s no coincidence that exactly 50 years ago, a nearly identical
magic trip took place.

Zane Kesey is the son of American literary and cultural icon,
Ken Kesey, who participated in early government tests with
psychoactive drugs like LSD, wrote the powerfully
anti-establishment novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s
Nest, and then gathered on a busload of folks who called
themselves Merry Pranksters and travelled the country experimenting
with drugs, playing avant-garde music, and spreading love and
mischief. Kesey and his gang were integral bodies in the
constellation of American counterculture, whizzing around and often
colliding with Beatnik-era survivors like Neal Cassidy, budding
writers like Hunter Thompson, groups like the Hells Angels, and
yet-unknown bands like The Grateful Dead.

Zane, who has the same mountain man frame and infectious smile
as his father, thinks a lot of that stuff was pretty cool, so this
May he launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised more than enough
funds to do the trip again. Wearing an electric-blue zebra-stripe
carnival-prize pimp hat and a day-glo-splattered jumpsuit, he
rolled into the college town of Kent, Ohio this Monday and
explained his aim:

On the surface we’re doing the 50^th anniversary trip
and just going out and doing a bus trip and having fun, but deeper
down we’re setting out to see what that seed has blossomed into and
how much of the ’60s is still out there and whether it’s thrived or
shriveled on the vine and so far we’re seeing a lot of really good
stuff.

The nutshell of the ’60s and almost what made it fall apart is
[the idea that] all you need is love. And if you got everyone on
that same page it would be a beautiful world. Not everybody got on
that page. I’d still like to get everybody on that page.

Another part of the goal is to raise interest and money for a
long-delayed restoration project of the original Furthur bus (there
are several), to preserve that piece of American history. He and
his pranksters stop in cities for jam band shows, play some music
of their own, and sell blotter paper. Zane makes it clear, the
paper is just art. It’s drug free and so is the bus.

He’s never had a taste for LSD and says that although drugs can
be liberating, they were not an unequivocally positive feature of
the movement his father started. “It’s really important for us not
to have that in the trip. And ‘don’t do drugs’ is not necessarily
our message. As long as you do all the steps you did before, you
dress up crazy and act crazy and have psychedelic music and lights
and everybody’s having fun, it can be just as much fun.”

His intrepid fellow travelers seem to agree. They range in age
from “Pinky,” who just turned 21, to some older souls who almost
certainly qualify for Social Security. Brendan, who says he’s “an
outlaw in spirit” just joined the bus this week, claims he traveled
all the way from Iraq to part of the fun. All decked out in hippie
and raver attire, they enjoy having dance parties going down the
highway.

Asked about their best experiences so far on this journey, many
said they couldn’t single any out.

“Every day is the most interesting day with the pranksters,”
says Matt, who serves as documentarian for the trip. “They’re going
to be friends for life.” For him, “a big part of the message is
showing that we can go even further in another 50 years” in terms
of developing music, the arts, and the freedom to be “outgoing and
creative and not caring what people think about you.”

They’re warm, if elusive, individuals. Some of them like
“Thumpah” go by their prankster nickname instead of their given
name. He wants to “prank at free will and allow people to think
that which isn’t really is, but at the same time in very humorous
gesture.” Far out.

Scotty, a.k.a. “Dontcha Know,” says one of their favorite
recurring is to tell someone who looks rather serious, “Hey, you
dropped something.” The person looks down. “Oh, you dropped your
smile!”

“I hate seeing people all depressed and driving in their boring
cars and going to their boring jobs and thinking we have to be on
this path. It doesn’t have to be like that.” says a young woman
named Enthusiastic. She’s a 7^th grade teacher and wants
to “show kids that they can change the future” by “taking back our
freedom and really using it. Making new music, exploring new ideas.
Going further forever.”

It’s a tall order to capture and recreate the energy, optimism,
and absurdist humor that shaped American counterculture 50 years
ago, but today’s pranksters come at with a palpably genuine
attitude, and they do succeed.

The tour is making stops in Maine and Rhode Island, and then
they’re heading, rumor has it, for a stop in San Francisco before
parking the bus back on the Kesey property in Oregon.

A technicolor dream bus called “Furthur”
captained by a man named Kesey is zigzagging across the country.
It’s no coincidence that exactly 50 years ago, a nearly identical
magic trip took place.

Zane Kesey is the son of American literary and cultural icon,
Ken Kesey, who participated in early government tests with
psychoactive drugs like LSD, wrote the powerfully
anti-establishment novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo‘s
Nest, and then gathered on a busload of folks who called
themselves Merry Pranksters and travelled the country experimenting
with drugs, playing avant-garde music, and spreading love and
mischief. Kesey and his gang were integral bodies in the
constellation of American counterculture, whizzing around and often
colliding with Beatnik-era survivors like Neal Cassidy, budding
writers like Hunter Thompson, groups like the Hells Angels, and
yet-unknown bands like The Grateful Dead.

Zane, who has the same mountain man frame and infectious smile
as his father, thinks a lot of that stuff was pretty cool, so this
May he launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised more than enough
funds to do the trip again. Wearing an electric-blue zebra-stripe
carnival-prize pimp hat and a day-glo-splattered jumpsuit, he
rolled into the college town of Kent, Ohio this Monday and
explained his aim:

On the surface we’re doing the 50^th anniversary trip
and just going out and doing a bus trip and having fun, but deeper
down we’re setting out to see what that seed has blossomed into and
how much of the ’60s is still out there and whether it’s thrived or
shriveled on the vine and so far we’re seeing a lot of really good
stuff.

The nutshell of the ’60s and almost what made it fall apart is
[the idea that] all you need is love. And if you got everyone on
that same page it would be a beautiful world. Not everybody got on
that page. I’d still like to get everybody on that page.

Another part of the goal is to raise interest and money for a
long-delayed restoration project of the original Furthur bus (there
are several), to preserve that piece of American history. He and
his pranksters stop in cities for jam band shows, play some music
of their own, and sell blotter paper. Zane makes it clear, the
paper is just art. It’s drug free and so is the bus.

He’s never had a taste for LSD and says that although drugs can
be liberating, they were not an unequivocally positive feature of
the movement his father started. “It’s really important for us not
to have that in the trip. And ‘don’t do drugs’ is not necessarily
our message. As long as you do all the steps you did before, you
dress up crazy and act crazy and have psychedelic music and lights
and everybody’s having fun, it can be just as much fun.”

His intrepid fellow travelers seem to agree. They range in age
from “Pinky,” who just turned 21, to some older souls who almost
certainly qualify for Social Security. Brendan, who says he’s “an
outlaw in spirit” just joined the bus this week, claims he traveled
all the way from Iraq to part of the fun. All decked out in hippie
and raver attire, they enjoy having dance parties going down the
highway.

Asked about their best experiences so far on this journey, many
said they couldn’t single any out.

“Every day is the most interesting day with the pranksters,”
says Matt, who serves as documentarian for the trip. “They’re going
to be friends for life.” For him, “a big part of the message is
showing that we can go even further in another 50 years” in terms
of developing music, the arts, and the freedom to be “outgoing and
creative and not caring what people think about you.”

They’re warm, if elusive, individuals. Some of them like
“Thumpah” go by their prankster nickname instead of their given
name. He wants to “prank at free will and allow people to think
that which isn’t really is, but at the same time in very humorous
gesture.” Far out.

Scotty, a.k.a. “Dontcha Know,” says one of their favorite
recurring is to tell someone who looks rather serious, “Hey, you
dropped something.” The person looks down. “Oh, you dropped your
smile!”

“I hate seeing people all depressed and driving in their boring
cars and going to their boring jobs and thinking we have to be on
this path. It doesn’t have to be like that.” says a young woman
named Enthusiastic. She’s a 7^th grade teacher and wants
to “show kids that they can change the future” by “taking back our
freedom and really using it. Making new music, exploring new ideas.
Going further forever.”

It’s a tall order to capture and recreate the energy, optimism,
and absurdist humor that shaped American counterculture 50 years
ago, but today’s pranksters come at with a palpably genuine
attitude, and they do succeed.

The tour is making stops in Maine and Rhode Island, and then
they’re heading, rumor has it, for a stop in San Francisco before
parking the bus back on the Kesey property in Oregon.

In an interview with Nick Gillespie, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
explains why he supports limited military action in Iraq:

While the beheadings of U.S. citizens James
Foley and Steven Sotloff are a factor, he says, Paul is
especially insistent that protecting the U.S.
consulate in Erbil, Iraq is a major cause for ongoing concern.
Erbil is near Mosul, a city overrun by ISIS with relative ease, he
says, and it’s of paramount importance that the United States
protect its diplomatic personnel in Iraq.

“If it was wrong not to protect the consulate in Benghazi, then
it’s wrong not to protect the consulate in Erbil,” he says.

In the same conversation, Paul also reiterates his commitment to
congressional authorization of all warmaking, the need to stay out
of Syria, and why Middle Eastern countries must be the ones who
bear the biggest burden in defeating ISIS.

View this article.

In an interview with Nick Gillespie, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
explains why he supports limited military action in Iraq:

While the beheadings of U.S. citizens James
Foley and Steven Sotloff are a factor, he says, Paul is
especially insistent that protecting the U.S.
consulate in Erbil, Iraq is a major cause for ongoing concern.
Erbil is near Mosul, a city overrun by ISIS with relative ease, he
says, and it’s of paramount importance that the United States
protect its diplomatic personnel in Iraq.

“If it was wrong not to protect the consulate in Benghazi, then
it’s wrong not to protect the consulate in Erbil,” he says.

In the same conversation, Paul also reiterates his commitment to
congressional authorization of all warmaking, the need to stay out
of Syria, and why Middle Eastern countries must be the ones who
bear the biggest burden in defeating ISIS.

View this article.

I don’t agree with everything in Dahlia Lithwick’s
Constitution Day column, but I agree about this:

You say you’ve never heard of
Constitution Day™, a federally mandated holiday. Well, that is
probably because it’s only been a federally mandated holiday since
2004, when Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia invented it in much
the same fashion that all of our greatest national festivals have
come about: He tucked it into a massive appropriations bill. The
relevant rider of the Omnibus Spending Bill of 2004 amended Title
36 of the United States Code (Patriotic and National Observances,
Ceremonies, and Organizations) by substituting “Constitution Day”
for “Citizenship Day.”

Constitution Day commemorates the signing of the U.S. Constitution
on Sept. 17, 1787, and also celebrates “all who, by coming of age
or naturalization, have become citizens.” The law itself provides
that all educational institutions receiving federal funds—which
means virtually all of them—must offer up some sort of educational
program about the Constitution. It also requires that the head of
every federal agency offer each employee educational and training
materials about the Constitution on that day. If Constitution Day
falls on a weekend, as it did in 2005, 2006, and 2011, it is
observed on the contiguous weekday.

Now, mandating the nationwide teaching of the document that
protects the most fundamental American freedoms may itself be
unconstitutional, as Nelson
Lund and the
Heritage Foundation noted back in 2006. But, of course, that is
just one of those idiosyncratic things that makes the holiday so
special.

If you follow the Heritage and Lund links, you’ll see
strict-constructionist arguments of a sort that Slate
writers do not usually endorse. I’m not complaining; it’s just odd
that this, of all possible issues, is where the site would find
room for those ideas. I suspect Lithwick just couldn’t resist the
#SlatePitch contrarianism of suggesting Constitution Day is
unconstitutional.

Whether or not she’s right about the legal question, I don’t
think federal education mandates are a good idea. In this case, the
mandate has the additional problem of being confusingly vague,
especially since “all educational institutions receiving federal
funds” is an awfully broad category. And that leads us to my
favorite detail in Lithwick’s article: “In 2005, when the law
first went into effect, massage schools and cosmetology programs
evidently flew into a collective panic over how to meet its
requirements.”

Bonus link: From the Yes, Libertarians Like To Argue
About Things You Thought Were Settled files, here is
Reason‘s 1987 debate, “Did
the Constitution Betray the Revolution?“

According to a study published in the journal of
the National Academies of Sciences, more than two-thirds of all the
innocent people on death row have yet to be exonerated.

Civil libertarians and liberals justifiably find this
outrageous. Conservatives should, too. After all: For every
innocent person sitting behind bars, there’s a guilty perp walking
around free, laughing his head off at the sap who took the fall for
him—and the boneheads who made it happen. What’s the solution? It
would be a good start, argues A. Barton Hinkle, if every state
followed the lead of North Carolina and established its own
Innocence Inquiry Commission. It’s time to start righting the
wrongs of our broken criminal justice system.

View this article.