Word: hoffmans
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...Hoffman was already 31 when he and Jerry Rubin formed an amalgam of political pranksters into the Youth International Party. "Yippies believe in the violation of every law," he once told a crowd, "including the law of gravity." In 1968 they ran a pig for President. As a lead-up to that year's Democratic Convention in Chicago, they vowed to spike the local water supply with LSD. The schemes were mostly put-ons and fodder for the press, Hoffman's most faithful co-conspirator. It was revolution as street shtick...
...Hoffman practiced it more dexterously than anyone else, even as one of the Chicago Eight, the group of radical activists, including Tom Hayden and Black Panther Bobby Seale, who were tried for plotting to disrupt the convention. Hoffman and four others were found guilty of crossing state lines with intent to riot, a conviction later overturned...
...facing a long sentence on cocaine-sale charges, Hoffman jumped bail. Eventually he settled in a small town in upstate New York, where he took the name Barry Freed and busied himself with environmental issues. When Hoffman came out of hiding in 1980, on the cusp of the Reagan era, he seemed a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up in a new world that was moving not forward but backward into the somnolent 1950s...
...Hoffman pleaded guilty and served time on lesser charges. Though dismayed by the apolitical younger generation -- "Never trust anyone under 30," he declared -- he never stopped protesting. It was Timothy Leary, the advance scout of the LSD generation, who eulogized Hoffman most deftly last week. "An American legend," Leary called him. "Right up there in the hall of fame with rebel Huck Finn, rowdy Babe Ruth and crazy Lenny Bruce...
colleagues brace themselves for a knock-down, drag-out battle. -- Hugh Sidey calls on Wright to step aside. -- Are dull politicians the next big trend from California? -- Abbie Hoffman, the antic revolutionary, dies...