American Fun Read Online Free

and the Revolution, from slave culture and thegold rush. These streams flowed strong during the Age of Jackson, when rowdy Americans embraced and practiced theirheritage of pure folk fun—often to the horror of social reformers. Mixing and mingling in theantebellum decades, these streams combined into a national culture—ofpolitical 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 theGilded 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 theJazz 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, andpranks, a new generation of hedonistic rebels chose lacerating fun overapathy,consumerism, and violence.
    These three tributaries—the commercial, playful, and radically political—keep flowing into our currentInternet 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 fundedflash mobs toYouTube-fueled Rube Goldberg machines. They inspire the people to come together in marvelous ways, as in the blitzkriegstreet theater of theCacophony Society andImprov Everywhere. But so muchcontemporary American fun stays loyal to its heritage. To be sure, the latest innovations inpopular entertainment—in 4-D movies, in millennialroller coasters, in the entirevideo game industry—are only perfections of the controlled participation thatGeorge C. Tilyou invented onConey Island. By the same token, even the freshestpranks of theOccupy movement or of the ingenious pranksters, theYes Men, hark back to theYippies and theDiggers 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, earlyhip-hop innovators jacked into streetlamps and reinvented pop culture on inner-city street corners. In a similar vein, hardcorepunks, disgusted by Reagan-eraNew Traditionalism, founded a self-sufficient nation on the virtues of primitiverock ’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 themosh pit, unleashing their aggressions against corporate America in colliding, kicking, often bloody fury. B-boys and B-girls joined together asZulu 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