Raw Insight on Topics That Shaped the World

“When I launched the Realist . . . in 1958,” recalls former Yippie Paul Krassner in his introduction to this collection of interviews from his satirical magazine, “I was a lone voice, but irreverence has since become an industry.”

Krassner’s offbeat magazine, the Realist, may never have had a large circulation, but it stands as a vivid example of the exuberant, no-holds-barred spirit of the 1960s. Although interviews as a genre once tended to be rather solemn exercises, Krassner’s exude a playful familiarity that, far from being rude or “impolite,” is cheerfully egalitarian and friendly. Indeed, many of his subjects seem to be his friends or, at very least, kindred spirits. In many ways, this being on the same wavelength makes for easy and fluent conversation. In other ways, it discourages rigorous questions and serious discussion, which perhaps was one of the counterculture’s main weaknesses.

Sex, drugs, politics, comedy, radical protest and pornography are just a few of the topics touched on in Krassner’s conversations with folks like Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Woody Allen and Jerry Garcia. Ranging from 1959 to 1999, these interviews can be read as a documentary history of the so-called counterculture.

Although some of them may well have been shocking when they first appeared, viewed in retrospect, they reveal odd patterns and linkages among otherwise disparate political and cultural trends. In 1962, for example, Krassner interviews Dr. Robert Spencer, an idealistic physician who risks imprisonment by performing safe, low-cost abortions at a time when they were dangerous and expensive. “I don’t see why any doctor, if he had the law with him, would . . . charge that much,” muses the good doctor. “I know I never do--I don’t believe in wringing money out of people--they’ve got one misery in their head when they come to see you; why add a few others?”

In hindsight, we know that abortion was legalized a decade later. But who would have foreseen the sweeping change in attitude toward moneymaking that has overtaken the medical profession?

At the same time, we may note that at least two of Krassner’s interviewees who might be seen as catalysts of the sex-and-drugs revolution are on the side opposite to Spencer’s. In 1971, writer and druggie prankster Ken Kesey, concerned about the rights of the defenseless unborn, characterizes abortions as “probably the worst worm in the revolutionary philosophy”; while in 1962, the sperm-obsessed Norman Mailer even inveighs against all contraception.

It may seem a small point, but many of the men interviewed (of the 21 subjects, only two are female) refer to women as “girls.” More significant, many of them keep harping on the same refrain: Playboy founder Hugh Hefner complains about “a castrated, female view of life” and “the growing womanization [sic] of America.” “We think it’s a man’s world, or should be.” Hefner’s adolescent goal of an endless stream of compliant playmates seems downright wholesome, however, compared with Mailer’s muddle-headed embrace of violence as “manly.”

Two of the most interesting and thought-filled interviews are with Zen philosopher Alan Watts in 1959 and psychotherapist Albert Ellis in 1960. While Watts preaches a liberation based on detachment from the petty concerns of self, Ellis champions a rational and liberated attitude toward sex.

Clearly, such ideas helped shape the outlook of the 1960s counterculture. Yet one also detects the seeds of the right-wing libertarianism that also began to take hold. Ellis worries overmuch about people’s “neurotic” desires to be self-sacrificing: He even expresses some respect for Ayn Rand. And Watts draws a sharp distinction between personal acts of charity (good) and impersonal government and institutional programs (bad): He would give money to a beggar, but he would not send a CARE package to unknown victims in a far-off land.

If right- and left-wing forms of totalitarianism share some of each other’s worst qualities, so, too, it seems, do right- and left-wing forms of individualism.