Word: hoffmans
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...Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the Yippies' brilliant impresarios, compiled a ridiculous mock agenda that the authorities took in earnest: the Yippies threatened to put LSD into the city's water supplies, to drug the delegates' food, to get "hyperpotent" male Yippies to seduce the delegates' wives, to paint cars to look like taxis and kidnap delegates to Wisconsin. The underground Express Times warned, "If you're going to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair" -- a sardonic echo of the sweet flower-child tune of the summer before ("If you're going to San Francisco...
...media event with flowing blood and absurdist overtones. The aging Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanted om in Lincoln Park. Jean Genet, the French homosexual playwright and ex-convict, wrote titillated prose about how attractive and powerful the cops' thighs were. Abbie Hoffman developed a cordial relationship with the plainclothes policemen assigned to tail him everywhere, but he shook them sometimes and spirited around town in a score of disguises...
...Abbie Hoffman, founding father of the Yippies and still, at 51, a social activist, has an arresting theory about time and the stages of human development. "The world really began for us," his idea goes, "on Aug. 6, 1945, when the atom bomb was dropped. So that during the '60s we were all young. The whole world was going through its youth, its atomic youth. If you looked at the magazines at the time, they were all youth oriented, and the culture was all youth oriented." Today, says Hoffman, it is not only that the baby boomers are getting middle...
...Hoffman hypothesis of atomic aging, the world was about 22 years old. The baby-boom generation, not only in America but in much of the rest of the world, grew up not merely in the shadow of the Bomb but also in an envelope of common experiences. Television gave them a collective memory -- of Howdy Doody and Beaver Cleaver, of public events (most vividly and traumatically, the assassination of President John Kennedy). Then, in the mid- and later '60s, the young endlessly enriched and elaborated their culture, through music mainly and through drugs and costume and linguistic style (groovy...
Woodstock and the "Woodstock Nation" that Hoffman wrote about would come in 1969. The year 1968 was more politically preoccupied. But the personalities and anthems of rock gave pulse to the politics and identity to the young. It was the sound that they inhabited -- Steppenwolf, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles going into their White Album phase and, above all, Bob Dylan, still. Dylan's music had a genius of portent: "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind." Back...