I don't feel like doing this regular today. That's not how it's done in the underground, the counter-culture, when men are trying to find their way around the walls, and end up going through them because we've had, straight-up, enough. Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is the frustration of going up against the authorities to be turned down, churned into the family of The Normals, fuck it.
Chief Bromden has been moppin' and playin' dumb on that loony ward for ages, who knows how long? Perhaps since man created government, or since man stopped making the God of Norms, the God of Norms started making him, or since we believed the hype about any type of God in the first place and forgot who we were. I'm sure it'd be better to rundown the ensemble of nutbags, so on, so forth, but this story was all about Bromden to me, the grand sad Indian narrator mopping around, remembering the origin of LIFE in AMERICA, and RP McMurphy bringing him back to it with the swagger of a young Jay-Z moving in. The hustler, jolted these kids to life, these brainwashed rejects and made them feel that life didn't have them by the balls, but they could squeeze its genitals whenever they damn well pleased. The nemesis was, of course, Nurse Ratched, the one to fear, the one who used EST and lobotomy as punishment. She was THE MAN crushing cats for nothing, because she could, to keep order, but mostly because she could, you could never assume her agenda revolved around anything wholesome though she leaned on wholesome intentions in the face of equal authorities, and like that, she pulled the wool over the eyes of everyone like grand old God and Norms and The Bullshit. So the showdown was on, but it wasn't just Bromden's soul at stake, you had to feel it was yours and mine and everyone we love and those who are lost who we, of course, don't love. Liberation, in short. So as McMurphy plays within the nurse's norms for the most part, follows ward policy for the most part, doesn't do enough to get himself buried but enough to annoy her, we are cheering for him and ourselves...but what do we say when he does go over edge, when the line he cannot cross become too tempting because he's too righteous, too mad, to toe it, then ends up on a hospital bed with Nurse Ratched's grand solution, becomes a Lobotomy Vegetable and gets smothered out by merciful Bromden...but Bromden picks up that damn immovable object and crashes it through the window, gone and out, the cycle of broken, "I been away a long time" last line, tears, satisfaction, was McMurphy the martyr, HOW DO YOU FEEL? He felt as big as a mountain. HOW DO YOU FEEL?
ALL THIS BOOK MEANS TO ME: That not a soul can touch you unless you let it, let yourself believe you are crazy, that you are not worthy, that there is a way of doing things and either you do it or you are a freak and un un un un un un worthy, right? Fuck them. That the powers are not so secretive but in front of us with a straight face and all the cards in their deck yet we have something in us that trumps it all so they can take our money and run the casino dry and we can take that empty beer bottle and go for their throat though we may be the ones who have the bottle turned on us we've just distracted the authorities for another one of us and we nip and fight like Winston did in "1984" but less foolishly with less to lose just our lives and we will do that anyway screw it. That you can be caught up in your own gloom or you can raise hell.
"There's no more fog any place." BROMDEN.
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