Cuckoo For You

 

Getting What You See

 Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a quaint expose into the world of the mentally challenged, morally judged, and socially marginalized individuals who often struggle on a daily basis to be part of a society that excludes them.  These are the people who for a number of reasons swim against humanity’s current with vigor and uninhibited zeal until some entity, judgment, or law informs them that the way they travel is deemed wrong, or at the very least misdirected and unacceptable for proper socialization in the global scheme of human existence.

Kesey wanted his reader to understand that the world as we know it is most often the world the way we see it.  For instance if we see the world through a delusional fog as Chief Broom did, then we are subject shroud our true reality in the clouds of our discontentment  while contemptuously seeking approval from those who have been appointed or commissioned themselves  to be superiors.  It is from the “nation of images” or the imagination that we build fortresses of familiarity and erect symbols and rituals that provide restful appeasement for subdued spirits in tranquil turmoil and abject pain.

  It is from this point of view and eons beyond that the author gives us a taste of blatant inhumanity, pronounced insanity moral indigence, and revoked freedom in increments for limited consumption so that we can get a glimpse of our society’s weaknesses, strengths, and the opportune threats that could cost us millions in profits both tangible and intangible in a book whose well-timed appearance is as necessary now as it was in 1962.

 

Kesey and others like him allowed themselves to create alternative worlds of perception and thinking as they participated in research of various hallucinogenic, and euphoria inducing drugs.  These chemicals produced a backdrop for “imagery epiphanies” that would literally reach into the deep caverns of human behavior and produce images and actions that we would rather not acknowledge, let alone reveal.

The acknowledgement of weakness at its best can empower the frailest of human spirits; for it is there that Divine strength is made perfect or matured so that one reaches in among the spirit’s fragments and receives help to interdependently cope with the problems of humankind.    At best, being human is the most humane thing that one can do to keep in accordance with society full of rules, parameters, and guidelines that do not leave room for errors in judgment, lapse of common sense or God forbid mental illness. 

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the way Ken Kesey chose to show society how its failure to remain human has caused suffering and shame to those who have no one to turn to in the face of emotional disaster.  Everything, from its vividly descriptive dialog to its use of truth and candor sans political correctness, showed that the real point of weakness of these characters stemmed from an inability to accept the infirmities of those who exhibited difference in expression or experience even though they were engrossed in the same struggle.

 Kesey, in a way that would have been comedic had it not been so painfully true, adeptly pointed out many of the weakness of modern society in this book; the aforementioned lack of acceptance was only one of the prominent defects displayed in this literary work.  Others included the abuse of authority, the lack of compassion for other human beings regardless of their plight or station in life and the involuntary coercion to make those deemed condemned conform and comply with wishes of others without regard to personal feeling or preferences.

Strength is matured and manifested in humans during the times of complete and utter weakness.  One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest points out the fact that inability is just a state of mind and perception as in the case of the Chief Bromden.  Certain segments of society at the time of this writing were undergoing metamorphosis just as the Chief.  They too, had been made to feel small, incapable and without voice and though they too acted as if they could not hear or speak, then the time came that would allow them to break free from institutions that sought to demean, defame, and remove vitality from their reach.

The overall threat of a society such as the one Kesey and I live in is one of inflexibility and unrelenting attitude regarding change.   This obstinate disposition is nothing more than arrogance and ignorance in a pretentious act of civility that entraps even the most well meaning members of a society and causes them to be obstructers of the evolution of humankind as a whole.  This threatens the very core of our existence as a progressive body of earth dwellers and disallows the possibility of condemned segments of individuals to incur the necessary change that could bring about the global assimilation that is so desperately needed for worldwide harmonious living.                         

I am in totally agreement with Ken Kesey, his band of Merry Pranksters and all of those amazingly eclectic INDIVIDUALS who would not settle for the mundane existence of conformance that society had to offer them because it is, was and always will be radically rational people who will bring about change of perception which causes change in behavior therefore making the world a little bit better, one person, one cause, one fantastic book at a time.