EXCERPT FROM THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST (1968, P. 38-39) WOLFE, TOM.
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| But of course!-the feeling-out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night-it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world- only 15, 16, 17 years old, dressed in the haute couture of pink Oxford shirts, sharp pants, snaky half-inch belts, fast shoes- with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics- Postwar American suburbs-glorious world! and the hell with the intellectual bad-mouthers of America’s tailfin civilization… They couldn’t know what it was like or else they had it cultivated out of them-the feeling-to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils- feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression- but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was a common any longer- The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very neon Renaissance-And the myths that actually touched you at that time-not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas-but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash-but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it was-quaint?-when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as the honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this elector-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs. There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan-the family car!-a huge crazy god-awful-powerful fantasy creature to begin with, 327 horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven nights of lubricious luxury brougham seduction-you’re already there, in Fantasyland, so why not move off your smug-harbor quilty-bed dead center and cut loose-go ahead and say it-Shazam!-juice it up to what it’s already aching to be: 327,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring, screaming on toward… Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future… Billy Batson and Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in the research lab… |


