Finally, there's Liberate, which is essentially a guide on how to live free in four cities: New York, Chicago, and San Francisco and LA. But it's the attitude of community action that comes through that makes it worth reading. Steal This Book is not anachronistic, it's alive and well, and remains a feisty little blueprint for expressing your freedom in a locked-down world.
Abbie took 'taking the mickey out of' the MIC' to heart. He didn't just talk the talk, he strat the strut. Just a year before he and the Yippies ran Pigasis for the presidency in their Festival of Life outside the DNC convention, Abbie had had a go at the Industrial (or corporate) side of the MIC by leading revelers to the NY Stock Exchange and raining dollar bills down on the brokers below. As Larry Sloman describes it, "The brokers started scrambling, pushing each other, grabbing for the money. When the avalanche subsided, they actually looked up at the gallery and demanded 'More!'" As the straight press chased him with the 5Ws, Abbie shouted over his shoulder, "Guerilla Theater," laughed, and hopped into a getaway cab.
In October 1967, during a mass-protest march on the Pentagon, Abbie took the mickey out of the Military side of the MIC when he convinced officials he could levitate the Pentagon and entered into negotiations as to how high. Said Daniel Ellsberg, working on the Pentagon Papers at the time, "Levitating the Pentagon struck me as a great idea because removing deference from any of these institutions is very important..." Abbie's friend, Sal Gianetta, described the scene: "Ab was adamant that the f*cking building was gonna go up twenty-two feet... If the f*cking building went up twenty-two feet, the foundations were gonna crack, so there was discussion about foundations and cracks, it was f*cking unbelievable." Abbie and the officials negotiated the levitation down to three feet and "they sealed it with a handshake."
Just before the event, Abbie had contacted John Garabedian, a reporter for the New York Post, who relates how Abbie informed him that
hippie chemists had invented a new wonder drug which combined the best properties of LSD with a drug called DMSO... [and] on the day of the march to the Pentagon... hippie chicks would fill squirt guns full of this love potion... and squirt them on the soldiers or anyone else of an evil or war like frame of mind thereby causing them to want to stop making war and immediately make love.
Talk about love as a battlefield.
Ironically, the military developed this idea later. It became the Gay Bomb, winner of the Ig Nobel Peace prize in 2007. It, too, would have caused the enemy soldiers to 'turn on' each other and orgy-up the battlefield. Presumably, the idea was scrapped when an ear got whispered into and some General Studly suddenly realized, like a freight train, that with a shift of wind the blowback could be devastating. More Pentagon levity.
After Abbie went underground in 1974 to avoid going to trial for dealing cocaine, he continued, as Barry Freed, to be an advocate for change and to defend communities from the destructive powers of the System. Living in upper-state New York, he helped fight against the dredging destruction of the St. Lawrence River system by the Corp of Army Engineers. However, having to keep his head down and his psyche out of the limelight didn't suit Abbie and, word is (p.277), he became gloomier and more depressed as time went on. Being without his wife, Anita, and son, america, deepened his suicidal ideation. Still, his work with Save the River was extraordinarily important.
Abbie showed he still had a working protest finger in 1986 when he and Amy Carter (and others) defended their arrests following disruptions of CIA recruitment efforts on a college campus in Massachusetts, successfully arguing in court with a 'Necessity Defense' that their minor criminality had the far greater public benefit of shedding light on the criminal activities CIA in Central America. This event was a welcome alternative celebration to the crap provided to the public during the televised Iran/Contra hearings, during which Oliver North successfully marketed himself as a hero.
Not long before Abbie committed suicide, he was still at it, trying to rouse the troupes, in a series of debates with his old Yippie pal Jerry Rubin, who'd gone over to the other side. In his last Yippie versus Yuppie debate, in Vancouver, in 1988, the two tangled over the same ol' question: Can the System be effectively resisted from the outside, or must change come from inside? Rubin made some good points, noting that "male chauvinism helped take down the movement," and that Yippies "were not open to self-criticism," but when he calls the Babyboomers Yuppies taking over the reins of government, Abbie rightly points out that Rubin is just a "born-again capitalist" and that Yuppies are not new; they're a throw-back to the so-called Status-Seekers of the '50s, making Rubin a regressive, not a progressive.
As if to demonstrate how much air has gone out of the '60s party balloon, during the Vancouver debate one female student ran up on stage and attacked Rubin with a cream pie, disrupting the event. It was almost comical watching the woman make her escape, nobody giving a sh*t; even the camera seemed indifferent. It was hard to tell who it was more embarrassing to -- Abbie or Jerry. The entire debate is worth watching. It's available here.
Looking ahead to the horror show ahead in November, what with Democrats seeming in disarray -- Warren fading fast, Bernie looking ancient, Biden looking done, and Buttigieg on the ascent: You can almost see Trump handling any of them on stage with his nincompoop's invective in October; you can smell re-election; you can almost predict the world's end can't be far behind. Wouldn't it be nice to have Abbie here for some guerilla theatrics; to maybe lead Congressmen in an Augusto Boal tactic or two -- Legislative Theatre, making laws as psycho-drama, senators acting out citizens without health insurance, representatives acting out young people crushed by student debt, Pelosi tearing up the military budget, and Abbie presiding like some genius clown shaking us loose from the gravity of the situation.
(Article changed on October 28, 2020 at 03:09)
(Article changed on October 29, 2020 at 01:43)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
