American Fun (3 page)

Radical democracy can be fun only when the citizens cut loose and get involved. In order for a society to grow and thrive, its citizens must be willing to tussle. Even in our thickly mediated culture—where experience passes through screens big and small; where communication is texted and tweeted; where play plays out on keyboards and consoles, triangulated between players on a video screen, often from points across the globe; where sex is had on pornsites and webcams; indeed, where citizenship is exercised through donation checks and in the privacy of voting booths—even in this sprawling culture of distance, classic fun remains
im
mediate: football, keggers, mosh pits, step; skateboarding, improv, political protest; hands-on, face-to-face, playful activities that require dexterity and a sense of goodwill to avoid the pitfalls of injury or shame.

In order for a society to enjoy its own power, to risk a few friendly collisions without descending into eye-gouging anarchy, it must have a radical sense of civility. Its citizens must be able to engage in rough play without losing sight of each other’s pleasure. At the funnest moments in American history, citizens have done this exceptionally well. They have reveled in the law’s gaps and shadows, all the while showing due respect for their neighbors’ rights and happiness. They have turned social conflict into joyous upheaval and have strengthened the nation in the face of adversity. And so do we see the full measure of this subject. Fun is risky and rebellious for a reason. Fun is frivolous and silly with a purpose. The state may try to keep people apart, as it did for decades following
Plessy v. Ferguson.
Big Business may try to market thrills and get between the people and their fun, as
George C. Tilyou did with
Coney Island, as
Nintendo ingeniously does with
Wii. But the drive to get down, get dirty,
get real,
remains stronger than the rolling Mississippi.

……………

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUN
is in fact structured rather like the Mississippi. Its pure source water came bubbling up from a variety of early folk sources—from Merry Mount and the Revolution, from slave culture and the
gold rush. These streams flowed strong during the Age of Jackson, when rowdy Americans embraced and practiced their
heritage of pure folk fun—often to the horror of social reformers. Mixing and mingling in the
antebellum decades, these streams combined into a national culture—of
political fury, of black festivity, and of risky freedom on the wide frontier. This early American fun, born of much struggle, still flows strong in the national consciousness.

Like the Mississippi River on its southward journey, American fun’s river has been strengthened and muddied by major tributaries along the way—three to be exact. Each one flows from its own cultural era; each one contributes its own political tint. The first joined the mainstream in the
Gilded Age, when the people’s rough and rebellious pleasures were simulated and packaged as commercial amusements; fun became spectacle and mechanized play, and the crowd was divided into actors and consumers. The second coursed in during the
Jazz Age, when Sons of Liberty resistance became popular practice and the hothouse flowers of African-American folk culture inspired wide participation; disenfranchised groups—women and blacks and youth in general—made smart and creative and antic innovations to a newly energized public sphere. The third tributary flowed in the 1960s. Riding a rising tide of popular upheaval, blending an excitement for revolutionary-era rebellion with sex, drugs, rock, and
pranks, a new generation of hedonistic rebels chose lacerating fun over
apathy,
consumerism, and violence.

These three tributaries—the commercial, playful, and radically political—keep flowing into our current
Internet Age. They pour nutrients, pollutants, and sheer life-force into the great American gulf—which is to say, into the citizenry. They mix and mingle to make delightful hybrids—from commercially funded
flash mobs to
YouTube-fueled Rube Goldberg machines. They inspire the people to come together in marvelous ways, as in the blitzkrieg
street theater of the
Cacophony Society and
Improv Everywhere. But so much
contemporary American fun stays loyal to its heritage. To be sure, the latest innovations in
popular entertainment—in 4-D movies, in millennial
roller coasters, in the entire
video game industry—are only perfections of the controlled participation that
George C. Tilyou invented on
Coney Island. By the same token, even the freshest
pranks of the
Occupy movement or of the ingenious pranksters, the
Yes Men, hark back to the
Yippies and the
Diggers and, indeed, to the Sons of Liberty. In these you can taste the purest source water.

VERA SHEPPARD’S GRANDCHILDREN WERE
the do-it-yourself teens of the 1970s and early 1980s. Fed up with gang violence and excluded from nightclubs, early
hip-hop innovators jacked into streetlamps and reinvented pop culture on inner-city street corners. In a similar vein, hardcore
punks, disgusted by Reagan-era
New Traditionalism, founded a self-sufficient nation on the virtues of primitive
rock ’n’ roll. B-boys and B-girls fought for turf in the “
cypher” with feats of acrobatic style. Hardcore punks from L.A. to Boston thrashed, bulldozed, and stage-dove in the
mosh pit, unleashing their aggressions against corporate America in colliding, kicking, often bloody fury. B-boys and B-girls joined together as
Zulu Nation; their motto was “
Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun.” The mosh pit had “anarchy” tattooed on its forehead. But as anarchic or criminal as it may have seemed—even to many of its young participants (not to mention the cops at the door)—the mosh pit perfected American democracy. Its raging conflict was totally consensual and held aloft by sacred rules.

In the history of American fun, B-boys and punks stand shoulder to shoulder with the earliest Patriots. For both generations freedom was more than an idea; it was a virtue to throw your whole body into.
Patti Smith, a pioneer in New York’s punk scene, felt the same duty to save the people’s music that the Patriots felt to American liberty. Fearing it was “
falling into fattened hands”—the hands of Capitol and EMI—she and her ragged CBGB crowd envisioned themselves “as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll.” As she remembers it, “We would call forth in our minds the image of
Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning
the people to wake up, to take up arms. We would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”

B-boys and punks, like revolutionary Patriots, exulted in their youth. Both generations strutted in primitive
costumes that set their law-abiding elders’ teeth on edge. Both invented do-it-yourself technologies—for publication, gathering, food, and shelter—that sidestepped corporations and the king, respectively. The Patriots had the likes of
Samuel Adams and
James Otis, leaders who inspired the lowliest dockworkers to believe they could form a republic of rough and active citizens. B-boys and B-girls were lightning-tongued MCs who honored the earliest black folk traditions—vocal, musical, fiercely athletic. Punks had insanely high-energy rock bands who inflamed their minds with a fierce new ethics—against
commercialism, against race prejudice, against all that phony
yuppie bullshit.

In past decades there’s been a national explosion in bold, loud,
political merriment. From anti–World Trade Organization rallies to
gay pride parades to the range of ethnic holidays, identity groups from throughout the population have tapped into the nation’s heritage of fun for ways to come together, be seen, and be heard. More than ever, despite a runaway entertainment
industry that would keep the people warming its seats, Americans are deliberate about having their fun. For some, it’s the civil way to rebel. For some—like the thousands at
Burning Man or the Sturgis, South Dakota, Motorcycle Rally—rebellion is just the best reason to party.

But at a time when both the
Boston Tea Party can be trademarked by drug companies and average citizens take on
Wall Street, it is important to revisit the origins of rebellion. For even when the stakes were highest—for Patriots, for slaves, for
forty-niners—the pioneers in American fun managed to keep the battle civil. Full of crazy punk-rock courage, they dove into the crowd with big bloody smiles and
surfed
the citizens’ dangerous passion.

1

O
N THE ELEVENTH DAY
of the eleventh month in the year of 1620, forty-one men shuffled on the decks of a creaky cargo ship. They had been bobbing for weeks within Cape Cod’s fingertip; most of them had not yet stepped foot on land. Despite three months of animosity and sickness, they lined up to sign a binding social contract. The signers represented less than half of the ship’s passengers, and the majority were like-minded “Separatist”
Pilgrims, but otherwise they were a pretty motley crew: merchants, preachers, a physician, a tailor, a soldier of fortune, an indentured servant, even a mutineer named Billington who would become the first hanged man on
Plymouth Plantation. The document, of course, was the Mayflower Compact.

Some four hundred years later, many hold up this paper as the earliest vestige of American democracy. If you read it the right way, you can almost see it: the undersigned came together in a “
civill body politick” and agreed to obey laws that would be “most meete & convenient for the generall good of the Colonie.” When you read it in its proper context, however, you see that it guarantees the authoritarian system that the
Separatists had in mind for New England. The “generall good” was of course the Separatist good, anchored in devotion to
Calvinist
law. More to the point,
those who trace America’s democratic tradition back to the makeshift Mayflower Compact—from framers of the Constitution to Pulitzer Prize–winning historians—prefer to see the people’s power refined within government, or legally bound on a dotted line. But America’s lifelong yen for democracy has much racier, messier origins.

The compact was written under serious duress. Winter was closing in. The Pilgrims had been bobbing in the harbor for weeks, and their scouts had already drawn deadly fire from indigenous people hiding in the woods. They needed to erect a “governmente” fast. William Bradford, the compact’s principal author, reports that the document had two main motives. Some of the unfaithful among their number had been giving “
discontented & mutinous speeches” about using “their own libertie” once they hit shore; containing these rogues was the first order of business. Indeed, without the contract, “none had the power to command them.” Second, the compact, if it could get enough buy-in, would prove “
to be as firme as any patent” in setting up a system that the English courts would recognize. Once a small majority had signed it, all they needed was to elect a leader. They chose the “
godly”
John Carver on the spot.

Carver may have been the benevolent leader that Bradford made him out to be (managing to “[quell] & overcome” uprisings with his “just & equall carrage of things”), but the following spring, after a hot day in the fields, he died of sunstroke. Bradford himself was promptly elected governor, as he would be annually for the next thirty years. Bradford’s regime—much more accurately than his Mayflower Compact—tells the true story of America’s character, or at least one fierce side of it. William Bradford was nobody’s democrat. He crossed the Atlantic to build a fortress in the wilderness where he could wall out natural and social evils and wall in his tidy hive of “Saints.” He was the first in a long line of American fortress builders—from slave owners and Klansmen to
corporations and country clubs—
elitists, oligarchs, and authoritarians for whom the wilderness was either weeds to be incinerated or woods to be hewn into exclusionary towns. He was also the first great American curmudgeon.

And he had his work cut out for him. Fortress builders always do.
Not only did his Pilgrims face the constant peril that they had known to expect when they left Amsterdam—sickness, starvation, Native American hostility. But, more surprisingly, they also encountered an ideological threat to their fastidious utopia:
Thomas Morton, who founded a camp of free-loving bondservants within striking distance. A lover of the wilderness who consorted with Indians, a radical democrat and reckless hedonist, Morton represented an opposing side of the incipient American character, the gleefully unruly side. Cheerful, curious, horny, and lawless, he anticipated the teeming masses, the mixing millions who would exploit the New World as an open playground for freedom, equality, and saucy frolic. His experiment in insanely energized democracy at his anything-goes
Merry Mount colony, thirty miles north of Plymouth’s spiky fortress, made confetti of their Mayflower Compact. Bradford’s coup to bring it down, in the spring of 1627, counts as the first volley on the battlefield of American fun.