Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  The spirit of that revolution continues to flourish. The sense of community is celebrated at such annual events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, Earthdance, and the Starwood Neo-Pagan Festival. Countercultural notions that were nurtured four decades ago are still blossoming into mainstream consciousness. And all the remaining psychedelic relics I know have not stopped serving as agents of change.

  STRANGE BEDFELLOWS AMONG THE YIPPIES

  Sixties-bashing is in fashion again. Columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes, “The excesses of the 1960s gave rise to a conservative counterrevolution. Abbie Hoffman begat Ronald Reagan; Timothy Leary begat John Ashcroft. Just as the counterculture railed against free-market capitalism and traditional morality, a resurgent political conservatism—which would exhibit its own excesses—emerged to preserve and defend them. The ’60s bequeathed us the culture wars, and the divisions it wrought became the organizing principles of national politics.”

  Sixties-bashing reared its psychedelic head during one of the Republican “debates” in October 2007. John McCain said that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats would raise taxes, and he singled out a proposal she made for federal funding of a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock festival. “I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event,” he said, adding, in reference to having been a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict, “I was tied up at the time.” And Mike Huckabee, speaking of Clinton’s health care plan, said, “When all the old hippies find out that they get free drugs, just wait. . . .”

  But there was one particular week in 2006 when 1960s-bashing had a print-media field day.

  As a co-founder of the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, I observed how they were able to manipulate the media to further their antiwar mission. If you gave good quote, you got free publicity. Furthermore, in a tactic borrowed from the CIA, if you manipulated an event covered by the media, no direct manipulation of the media was necessary. If the Yippies presented newsworthy street theater, then the press manipulated itself.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your agenda, that kind of behavior has a way of backfiring. And so I was both amused and annoyed by an item in the “Inside the List” column by Dwight Garner in the August 13 edition of the New York Sunday Times Book Review. He wrote:

  “Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, has a book on the hardcover nonfiction list this week—his Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin Press) makes its debut at No. 1. Ricks’s book got a boost from strong reviews and from appearances on both The Charlie Rose Show and NPR’s Fresh Air, where Terry Gross interviewed him on two successive days. Ricks is a fleet, vivid writer, but he’s also got a gift for radio. On Fresh Air, he filled the air with analogies that were funny, sad and apt, sometimes all at once. George Bush and his team were like ’60s radicals. (‘They really were going to, kind of, “groove on the rubble,” as Jerry Rubin used to say. They were going to tear it down and see what happened.’)”

  Ricks told me, “I actually think that, more than anyone realizes, Bush was formed in reaction to the ’60s, and that is what I had in mind when I said (and wrote) that.”

  “Has it come to this?” asks anthropologist and Yippie archivist Samuel Leff. “With the Iraq war now an obvious catastrophe, Ricks is comparing the Bush gang’s mindless destructiveness to ’60s radicals like Rubin? John Dean correctly compares the Bush and Nixon White House as regimes much more like fascism than democracy. The destruction of democracy, then and now, emanated from a radical Oval Office. Richard Nixon put thugs to work breaking the noses of protest leaders, from Abbie Hoffman (successful) to Daniel Ellsberg (unsuccessful).”

  From the Richard Nixon tapes:

  NIXON: “Aren’t the Chicago Seven all Jews? Davis is a Jew, you know.

  CHIEF OF STAFF H.R. HALDEMAN: “I don’t think Davis is.”

  NIXON: “Hoffman, Hoffman’s a Jew.”

  HALDEMAN: “Abbie Hoffman is. . . .”

  NIXON: “About half of these are Jews.”

  Anthony Summers’ book on Nixon, The Arrogance of Power, includes a photo of Hoffman with his nose bandaged, being taken away from his apartment by a detective. The caption reads, “In 1971, Nixon and Haldeman discussed using Teamster thugs to beat up antiwar demonstrators and smash some noses. Two days earlier, they had broken the nose of Abbie Hoffman. ‘They got him,’ Haldeman now told the president.”

  In the August 17 issue of the Los Angeles Times, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg—in an op-ed piece titled “Who Are You Calling a Fascist?”—wrote:

  “In the mouths of the neocons, ‘fascist’ is just an evocative label for people who are fanatical, intolerant and generally creepy. In fact, that was pretty much what the word stood for among the 1960s radicals, who used it as a one-size-fits-all epithet for the Nixon administration, American capitalism, the police, reserved concert seating and all other varieties of social control that disinclined them to work on Maggie’s farm no more. . . . Time was when right-wingers called the ACLU a bunch of communist sympathizers. Now Bill O’Reilly labels the group and others as fascist, with a cavalier disregard for the word’s meaning that would have done Jerry Rubin proud.”

  Leff comments that, “If Nunberg had been thrown down the stairs, as Rubin was, by the New York City Tactical Police Force—a Waffen SS–type goon squad of especially large men in uniform—who raided his apartment looking for drugs on secret orders from the FBI, Nunberg would have less ‘cavalier disregard’ for using Rubin’s name in the same breath as the authoritarian fascist personality of Bill O’Reilly. He is as much like Jerry Rubin as Slobodan Milosevic is like Che Guevara.”

  On August 20, Frank Rich wrote in his New York Times column:

  “The hyperbole that has greeted the [Ned] Lamont [Democratic primaries] victory in some quarters is far more revealing than the victory itself. In 2006, the tired Rove strategy of equating any Democratic politician’s opposition to the Iraq war with cut-and-run defeatism in the war on terror looks desperate. The Republicans are protesting too much, methinks. A former Greenwich selectman like Mr. Lamont isn’t easily slimed as a reincarnation of Abbie Hoffman or an ally of Osama bin Laden.”

  Yeah, right. It was bad enough that a brainwashed American public would even believe Bush administration propaganda that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were married in Massachusetts and then adopted a Chinese baby. But Hoffman was a defendant in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and bin Laden was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now, however, in the guise of history, they were retroactively paired. Abbie and Osama, together again.

  In 1967, when I told Abbie that he was the first one who made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died the previous year, Abbie said, “Really? He was my god.” The combination of satirical irreverence and sense of justice that Lenny and Abbie shared was the essence of the Yippies—a term I coined to describe a phenomenon that already existed: an organic coalition of stoned hippies and political activists who engaged in such actions as throwing money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, then explaining to reporters the meaning of that symbolism.

  Folksinger Phil Ochs summed it up: “A demonstration should turn you on, not turn you off.” So when journalists link the Yippies with misleading bedfellows, at best it’s careless shorthand; at worst it’s deliberate demonization. Osama bin Laden wanted an airplane to crash into the Pentagon. Abbie Hoffman merely wanted to levitate it.

  THE PARTS LEFT OUT OF CHICAGO 10

  In 1967, Abbie Hoffman, his wife Anita and I took a work-vacation in Florida, renting a little house on stilts in Ramrod Key. We had planned to see The Professionals. “That’s my favorite movie,” Abbie said. “Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin develop this tight bond while they’re both fighting in the Mexican revolution, then they drift apart.” But it was playing too far away, and a hurricane was brewing, so instead we saw the Dino Di Laurentiis version of The Bible. Driving home in the rain and wind, we debated the implications of Abraham being prepared to sl
ay his son because God told him to. I dismissed this as blind obedience. Abbie praised it as revolutionary trust.

  This was the week before Christmas. We had bought a small tree and spray-painted it with canned snow. We were tripping on LSD as the hurricane reached full force. “Hey,” Abbie yelled over the roar, “this is pretty powerful fuckin’ acid!” We watched Lyndon Johnson on a black-and-white TV set, although LBJ was purple-and-orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. “I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war,” he was saying, and the heads of the other presidents were all snickering and covering their mouths with their hands so they wouldn’t laugh out loud. This was the precise moment we acknowledged that we’d be going to the Democratic convention in August to protest the Vietnam War. I called Dick Gregory in Chicago, since it was his city we were planning to “invade.” He told me that he had decided to run for president, and he wanted to know if I thought Bob Dylan would make a good vice president.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, “but to tell you the truth, I don’t think Dylan would ever get involved in electoral politics.”

  I also called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting when we returned. The conspiracy was beginning.

  On the afternoon of December 31, several activist friends gathered at the Hoffmans’ Lower East Side apartment, smoking Colombian marijuana and planning for Chicago. Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft.

  We sought to utilize the media as an organizing tool, but we needed a name so that journalists could have a “who” for their “who-what-when-where-and-why” lead paragraph. An appropriate word to signify the radicalization of hippies. I came up with Yippie to describe a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross- fertilization at civil rights rallies and antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet. It was the ultimate extension of dehumanization.

  And so we held a press conference. A reporter asked me, “What happens to the Yippies when the Vietnam War ends?” I replied, “We’ll do what the March of Dimes did when a cure for polio was discovered; we’ll just switch to birth defects.” But our nefarious scheme worked. The headline in the Chicago Sun-Times read, “Yipes! The Yippies Are Coming!” What would later happen at the convention led to the infamous trial for conspiring to cross state lines to foment riot. As an unindicted co-conspirator, I felt like a disc jockey who hadn’t been offered payola.

  Flash ahead to 2005. I got a letter from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and then a call from Brett Morgen, director of The Kid Stays in the Picture. They were co-producing a documentary about the antiwar movement of the 1960s. It would have no narrator and no talking heads, only archival footage and animated reenactments based on actual events and transcriptions of trial testimony. However, Allen Ginsberg floating a few feet above the floor while he chants can be construed as cartoonic license.

  Brett invited me to write four specific animated scenes:

  1.“Birth of the Yippies”

  This would include the hurricane, the meeting and the press conference. Excerpt:

  [The house is shaking mightily on its stilts. ABBIE, ANITA and PAUL are looking out the window through wildly waving curtains as the house feels like it will be swept away. Books are falling off the shelf. Newspapers are swirling around the room.]

  ABBIE [screaming]: “This whole house is gonna blow straight out to Cuba! [lightning strikes] We’re coming, Fidel! [sound of thunder] Sock it to us, God!”

  2.“Got Permit?”

  We meet with Chicago deputy mayor David Stahl, attempting to get a permit for the revolution—that is, permits to sleep in the park, set up a sound system and march to the convention center. Excerpt:

  STAHL: “C’mon, tell me, what do you guys really plan to do in Chicago?”

  PAUL: “Did you ever see that movie, Wild in the Streets? [A thought balloon shows the image of a group of teenagers dumping LSD into the water supply.]”

  STAHL: “Wild in the Streets? We’ve seen Battle of Algiers.” [A thought balloon shows the image of a guerrilla woman, fully covered except for her eyes, planting a bomb in a cafe. The camera pans to a little boy eating ice cream.]

  What would occur in Chicago that summer, then, was a clash between our mythology and their mythology.

  The Chicago Tribune later reported that Bob Pierson—a police provocateur disguised as a biker and acting as Jerry’s bodyguard—was “in the group which lowered an American flag” in Grant Park, the incident that set off what The Walker Report: Rights in Conflict would officially label as “a police riot.” Pierson himself wrote in Official Detective magazine, “I joined in the chants and taunts against the police and provoked them into hitting me with their clubs. They didn’t know who I was, but they did know that I had called them names and struck them with one or more weapons.”

  3.“Acid Testimony”

  I decide to take a tab of LSD at lunch before testifying—call me a sentimental fool—but why? Excerpt:

  PAUL: “To enhance the experience. No, actually, because I wanna throw up in court. I’ve learned that if I drop acid with a big meal, it always makes me vomit. That way, I don’t have to memorize all those dates and places. And it’ll be my theatrical statement on the injustice of the trial.” Abbie was furious and stopped speaking to me. Ten months later, I mailed him a movie ad—The Professionals was playing in our neighborhood—resulting in a reconciliation.

  4. “Women’s Liberation”

  The purpose of this scene, taking place at the feminist protest outside the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, is summed up by former Yippie Robin Morgan. Excerpt:

  ROBIN: “And so we say goodbye to the male-dominated peace movement. Women will no longer serve as their second-class comrades. No more working hard behind the scenes while the male superstars do all the grandstanding and get all the credit and achieve all the notoriety. No more playing a critical role in building a movement but then being denied access to the policy-making process.”

  (The plan was to toss tangible items of male oppression—a bridal gown, a safety razor, a girdle, high-heeled shoes, panty-hose, Playboy magazine, a pink brassiere—and burn them in a “Freedom Crash Can,” but an ordinance forbidding anything to be burned on the boardwalk was enforced. Nevertheless, a burning bra has become the symbol of women’s liberation. Sometimes a metaphor can serve to reveal the truth more vividly than the actual facts.)

  Although Brett “loved, loved, loved” the scenes I wrote, the backers objected to the use of LSD, fearful of diverting attention from the main focus of the film. Brett’s baby, diapered by the backers. I was disappointed, if only for the sake of countercultural history. The CIA originally envisioned employing LSD as a means of control; instead, for millions of young people, acid served as a vehicle to explore their own inner space, deprogramming themselves from mainstream culture and living their alternative. The CIA’s scenario had backfired. Anyway, my suggestion—instead of referring to it as acid, Abbie could yell, “Hey, this is pretty powerful fuckin’ aspirin”—was rejected.

  Thus, the hurricane segment of the “Birth of Yippies” scene, which was originally going to open the film, has been omitted. My implied “threat” in the “Got Permit?” scene that the Yippies would pour LSD into the reservoir, plus the entire “Acid Testimony” scene, are also out. And, unfortunately, the “Women’s Liberation” scene isn’t included because of time restraints.

  I was supposed to do the voice for my own animated character, but Abbie’s son, Andrew, had auditioned to do his father’s voice, and though he sounds
eerily like him, he apparently wasn’t a skilled actor, so it was decided to have professional actors—including Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo and Liev Schreiber—do all the voices. What a relief—I thought it was because I didn’t sound enough like myself.

  During an interview with Videofreex during the trial, Abbie said, “We don’t wanna be martyrs. We wanna live to see the overthrow of the government. Be a great fuckin’ movie.” Brett’s goal wasn’t quite as ambitious as overthrowing the government. When he called to tell me that the documentary had been selected to open the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, he mused, “Wouldn’t it be great if Abbie’s legacy turns out to be that he helped to end the war in Iraq?”

  I hadn’t seen any of the rough cuts and didn’t know what to expect at the festival screening, but Brett got a standing ovation. Although he was born two months after the protests in Chicago, he had managed—with the aid of 180 hours of film, fifty hours of video, 500 hours of audio and 23,000 pages of trial transcripts—to reveal in this neodoc the horror and the humor, the rhetoric and the reality, of those events and their aftermath, in a style and rhythm calculated to resonate with—and inspire—contemporary youth.

  Yippie organizer Jim Fouratt said it “excites the imagination.” Nick Nolte, who did the voice of prosecutor Thomas Foran, asked defendant Tom Hayden for his reaction. “I loved it,” he replied. “I think that Brett authentically and brilliantly captured the experiences and the feelings of what we were going through.” Then, turning to Brett, he added, “So thank you for the next generation from our generation.”

  Structurally, the film alternates between the action in the streets and the progress of the trial, with the utterly shocking imagery of defendant Bobby Seale—the national chairman of the Black Panther Party, voiced by Jeffrey Wright—being bound, gagged and shackled to his courtroom chair for insisting on his constitutional right to represent himself after being turned down by the Elmer Fudd–like Judge Julius Hoffman, voiced by the late Roy Scheider.