One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

because I usually don't agree too much with Hollywood.

But everyone remembers her, a fictional character, the main antagonist from Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

She is the head nurse at the Oregon State Mental Institution where my grandfather Tongate once worked, where I have cousins who worked there.

She's the head nurse at the psychiatric hospital, and she rules her ward with strict routines, with emotional manipulation, and with cruelty.

I mean, it's like Ken Kesey,

famous Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author.

um you know part of that whole kind of like hippie experience of and then the beat experience of the 50s and then entire 60s he first took lsd in 1959 as part of a cia as part of mk ultra yeah and was like you know what this shit is good you know who shouldn't needs to take this like authors and musicians need to take this shit

KC, who was dramatized or portrayed by Jim Belushi? Yes, I believe so.

And that was Ken Kesey's parties out in his place.

And Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and was one of the first CIA guys to take acid.

That's why he wrote the book.

And they paid him a million dollars and made him sign an NDA when the studies on acid were over.

That was a psychedelic bus that left the same day and took the same route.

It said they were going to New York City for Kesey winning an award for his book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

OK, but he didn't go straight to New York City.

He went down to the civil rights movement areas and promoted psychedelics throughout the South, where all these Freedom Summer, you know, white Freedom Summer activists were joining black activists down there.

First off, there's a kid sitting at a desk right behind her who's reading The Exorcist, and then she's sitting there.

I-- she's, you know, starving for intellectual stimulation, and she's never been to a library before, and she's grabbing books like The Handmaid's Tale, I Know Where the Cage Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, um, Looking for Alaska, uh, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I mean, these are-

Yeah

And they've got some authors.

Uh, Chuck Palahniuk, uh, uh, Fight Club author, the author of Fight Club, uh, came from Oregon, as well as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey, uh, also, uh, Oregon.

And then of course, there's plenty of athletes, but I always like my athletes with Nebraska connections.

Former Husker basketball player Jayr Strobridge, uh, was an Oregon Duck.

So a really big deal.

Psychiatry could really damage your reputation, especially if you were seen as this masculine, self-reliant breadwinner like Bill was, right? If you guys remember last episode, I mentioned One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and how it stigmatized electroconvulsive therapy.

But on the whole, that book, which was written by Ken Casey, would also help humanize people with mental illnesses.

And that was published the exact same year that this haunting occurred.

She selects a few, gets a stack, and the camera zooms right in on that stack, and guess what, everybody? It is a pile of nationally banned books.

We see The Handmaid's Tale, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Looking for Alaska, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

I tell you what, peoples, the tears be flowing.

It was an amazing scene, definitely one I shall treasure as the road we're on gets worse.

Well, this is a phenomenon of the '60s that took place.

I think everybody and his brother bought a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and read it and thought that every single institution was not redeemable and therefore should be cut, uh, shut down.

And so that's, this is the price you pay for letting people that have serious i- i- illness, you know, psy- uh, psychosis, there's a real problem.

You got psychotics running around.