by Zvi Baranoff
So, it is not exactly that Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Joni Mitchell, the Illuminati and others conspired to elevate Donald Trump to the Presidency, although they all factor in. Then again, they each factor into the inevitable spectacular downfall of Donald Trump as well.
Somehow there is a circus geek living in the White House. He got there to some extent using tricks learned from us. Rest assured however that it is ephemeral, and as real and as brutally uncomfortable as it all may be, this too shall pass.
This Trump phase will be remembered as a most unpleasant and nasty pothole that we should have swerved and missed but instead we drove right through it and we all got bumped around pretty bad. That said, it will soon be but a fading image in our rearview mirror as we continue along on the unending highway.
Let us be positive. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. If we are lucky the light will not be an oncoming truck. Any way you figure it though, the only way is forward into the future and that is where we are all heading.
Donald Trump and the Trumpians love to fixate on the Fakeness of the Mainstream Media (MSM) and have declared journalists to be the Enemy of the People. The Resistance has declared journalists to be Heroes on the Front Line of the battle for Truth.
This is how the political and cultural terrain is perceived by looking at it through the kaleidoscope of Social Media as well as the Mainstream Press. The Truth is surely out there somewhere but neither of these descriptions is quite it. We are mostly seeing things through the distortion of manufactured reality receptors.
Fear not though. I will tell you the Truth. You can trust me. I do not promise that you will like the Truth. Frankly, I prefer sugar coated lies because they go down easier, but in the Marketplace of Public Opinion we sell what we have and hope somebody will buy it.
For now, we shall focus on how to blame the mess we are in on the Woodstock Nation, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Concert.
The Media
The thing you need to know about the media is it is not really a thing, certainly not a single entity. It is not monolithic and does not exactly walk in lock step although it is consolidated in fewer hands now than it was even a few decades ago. There are all sorts of competing interests and differing values and conflicting perspectives.
Editors and station managers and such are neither heroic nor demonic. They are just running a business.
The media institutions on the whole are culturally and politically conservative. The newspapers and TV stations are owned mostly by deep pocketed corporations or very wealthy families and as a result identify with the general interests of the ruling class. All that said, a newspaper is primarily a business based on selling advertising competing for revenue with other papers. The advertisers base their decisions on how to spend their money primarily on circulation. That's why newsboys (news persons?) would stand on the corner hawking papers. A hot story or a good cover photo is what sells the paper. The same is essentially true of TV.
Reporters are also neither heroic nor demonic. On the whole they are mostly kind of like the rest of us. They are working people trying to scratch out a living using the skills that they have. They are not much interested in doing any heavy lifting or deep digging or getting dirty. Like most folks, they tend to be lazy and easily manipulated.
Their bosses want them to provide enough sizzle to sell the papers, which is what sells the advertising. The content does not really matter much, although it cannot be blatantly offensive to either the readers or the advertisers. That may be a balancing act because the corporate interests are not always aligned with the primarily working class interests of the readers, and visa versa.
Understanding all this, parenthetically, helps one understand the nature of so-called social media such as Facebook that we all interact with to some degree or another these days. As Marshall McLuhan declared famously the medium to be the message, and so it certainly may be true of “social media” as well. Content is mostly irrelevant. Marketing is everything. All the flashing imagery is manipulation, now as well as it was back then.
Abbie Hoffman was a genius at manipulating reporters. The goal was to get a counter narrative across through the mechanisms of the Mainstream Media. He practiced and taught this tactic and did both well. Whoever tells the story controls the story and Abbie was a master storyteller. He was also very likable and that goes a long way.
The media may not be our friend but it is very good to maintain friendly relationships with the media's front line, the reporters. Some of the reporters liked smoking pot and that made them all the more pliable.
The trick is to present the story to the reporter in as complete a package as possible and make it sizzle enough and visual enough to be front page material. If you do it well, neither the reporter nor the paper realizes that they are being manipulated and will deliver your message for mass circulation. This way you break through the unconscious and unstated self censorship of the press. Abbie did it well.
Hocus-Pocus
Perhaps Abbie's biggest hoax, his largest hustle, was the very creation of Yippie! The name was a total fabrication, a play on the word hippie. The founding of Yippie is credited to be December 31, 1967, that is to say at a New Years Eve party! Abbie wrote "If the press had created 'hippie,' could not we five hatch the 'yippie'?" and that is just what he and a few friends did.
The story is that Yippies are political hippies. YIP is a supposed acronym for Youth International Party. What about the “pie” part of the name? Some Yippies started throwing pies at reactionary politicians so that seemed as good of an explanation as any. The truth is that YIP was a totally imaginary organization.
That is not to say that it did not exist. It sort of did. It sort of didn't. Some people claimed to be Yippies and were not. Some claimed not to be and were. Yippies were unaffiliated, generally independent activists that shifted in and out of shadows. Some were hippies. Some not so much. Most smoked pot. Some of them sold pot.
Abbie's early books were also largely Hocus-Pocus. Abbie found a way to get the fairly conservative publishing industry to produce and distribute his propaganda. He got the media to promote it and convinced book sellers to give it prime visual display space at the register. His books sold and he made money on them.
Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album was published in 1969. It was written while Abbie was awaiting trial for the Chicago riots. It is a stream of consciousness description by Abbie of the concert. Shortly later he banged out Steal This Book, and published that in 1971. Steal This Book was the ultimate hustle. Everyone went apeshit over the title and bookstore managers, afraid that folks would steal the book, placed it at the register for safe keeping resulting in increased sales, so...It really is a Barnum and Bailey world!
Steal This Book was a throw together thing. Much of it is pure nonsense. It proclaimed to be a manual for revolution. It did have some useful recommendations and organizing tricks for those with little or no budget. It offered some limited economic and class analysis and a bunch of silliness. It had some motherly advice for young would be revolutionists such as the suggestion of carrying a jacket with you when hitchhiking because it gets cold at night! When the book first came out it was part of that imaginary revolutionary culture seeping through the general stodginess of that time. I found it quite influential in my youth.
Steal This Book was hugely successful on a market level. Concerning the success, Abbie was quoted as saying, "It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List." Somehow I doubt the sincerity of the sense of embarrassment, or that he resented being paid royalties on the sales. Abbie thrived on attention and surely loved that his book was selling and likely considered it all very funny anyway he looked at it. The swirling accusations of plagiarism - that parts of the book are ACTUALLY STOLEN - add to the mystique surrounding this complex hoax and cultural manipulation.
The Twenty Foot Joint
I admit to telling my shares of whoppers to reporters. In the late 1980s I was involved in organizing a National Marijuana Smoke-In that coincided with the Greens National Conference in Eugene, Oregon. We held a rally in the park, a march to the conference to confront the prohibitionist tendencies of the Greens of that era and a demonstration later at the local newspaper office.
Local pot activists had created a large prop joint. It was maybe ten feet long at the most. They hauled it to events on top of a pickup truck. It had big redwood beams in it to keep it straight. It was filled with hay and wrapped in some sort of canvas. It had slogans painted on it. It was heavy as hell and it took several large young men to carry it about on the march.
“How big is it?” asks a reporter and I glibly say around 20 feet. “What's it made of?” asks the scribbler, and I claim that it is filled with hundreds of pounds of locally grown cannabis. Note that we are standing right next to this thing and it has redwood and hay sticking all out of the ends. The TV News reported that a TWENTY FOOT joint filled with WEED was at the demonstration!
This stuff is too easy! It does, however raise some moral questions. Of course we want to put our own spin on the news, but when is it OK to lie?
The 1960s were troubled times
So, back to the 1960s. In Southeast Asia the Vietnam War dragged on and on throughout that decade. In the States the antiwar sentiment grew. Activists struggled with finding effective strategies to confront the War Machine. This was also the decade of the Civil Rights Movement, political assassinations, armed self defense, hijackings and rock & roll.
This was as well an historical period of deep distrust of the media, perhaps because they suppressed news, sometimes lied and generally upheld the values of the status quo.
Some of us searched for and hoped to find hints of truth to be revealed through rock lyrics on the radio, Mad Magazine and the National Lampoon in print, and the Smothers Brothers and Laugh In on TV. We tried to read between the lines. We looked for hidden meaning. We looked for secret signs. We believed in conspiracies because the apparent truth was unpalatable and unacceptable. We believed in conspiracies and some of those actually turned out to be true.
When I graduated High School I went out searching for the Woodstock Nation that Abbie had written about. All I actually found were the shredded illusions of the mythology and the sad reality of an America torn apart by war and corporate greed with a broken heart and a scarred soul. But, that was not until the mid 1970s. Abbie had already been busted and had slipped away into hiding, living under an assumed identity and out of the public eye. No one officially knew where he was and if they did know, they were not saying.
The Underground Press
In the 1960s and into 1970s, the combination of the political and cultural upheavals and the widespread distrust of the news industry also provided fertile ground for the development of the underground or alternative press. While Abbie did his best to hijack the Mainstream Press, on another level activist journalists and propagandists produced Underground Newspapers. Some writers, most notable Hunter S. Thomson and Paul Krassner, somehow walked the tightrope that spanned these two seemingly very different institutions.
In the Undergound Press there was some wonderful journalism and there was lots of shlock and there was some out and out unadulterated bullshit.
One paper that came up towards the end of that period was called Yipster Times and took on the role of the “official” Yippie newspaper. Of course, this officialdom label is funny in and of itself because YIP was an imaginary organization and now a totally fictional concept had an official National Newspaper!
The Yipster Times began publishing in 1972, which was really after much of the Underground press had already disappeared. It plugged on, first as a monthly, then as a quarterly and then as an “occasionally” changing the name to Overthrow in 1979 and carrying on the Underground press tradition throughout the 1980s.
Around 1985 these folks published a book called The Secret History of the ‘70s. The second edition morphed into a mammoth tome entitled the Blacklisted News and jokingly called the Yippie Bible. Ten copies of that book fit in a box, a very heavy box. The book was a solid mishmash of years of underground publishing as well as photos of demonstrations, manifestos, training manuals, diatribes, cartoons…
There were multiple editors and they each stuffed the book with whatever they wanted. (I have one article I wrote, originally published in Community News in Philadelphia, reprinted in Yipster Times that came to be engraved in Mythical Yippie History on page 221 of the Blacklisted News.)
Cases of these were stacked on the first floor of 9 Bleecker Street in Lower Manhattan. The newspaper office was on the third floor. The second floor primarily served for sleeping, although sometimes you might find Yippies or fellow travelers crashed out in a loft or on a couch or right on the floor, anywhere.
There was a junkie priest living on the ground floor for a while, although no one knew at first he was a junkie because he kept it on the down low. Later, after it became clear that he had a drug problem and he had moved out, an interesting discovery was made in the stacked cases. He had been diligently taking cases of books from the center of the pile and selling them on the side to fund his habit. He creatively left a façade of a solid wall for all to see. The middle of that pile had been hollowed out like an igloo.
The Yipster Times effectively blended propaganda and investigative journalism and snark and shock. It also published the telephone credit card numbers of large corporations, making telephoning free for anyone so inclined, as long as you made your calls from a payphone. The free phone calls made the paper well worth a buck even if one had no interest in the political content.
In spite of a fair degree of nonsense, the Yipster Times sometimes broke some important stories that other news outlets either missed or ignored. There is an old and obviously insider joke about how something becomes news. First it is in the Yipster Times and then it is in High Times. From there it goes it the New Times and then the New York Times.
Many years later the building was transformed into a Yippie Museum and coffee house in an attempt to hold on to that physical piece of cultural mythology. The prime motivator at Number 9, as the place is commonly referred to, was Dana Beal. He went to prison for a year on a marijuana charge and the bank seized the building and sold it.
9 Bleecker Street now houses a boxing and exercise studio that calls itself Overthrow. The owner explained that when they bought the building there were piles of Yipster Times and Overthrow papers there and he decided that Overthrow made a great name so that is how he named the business. Of course, much time had passed by then, waters of the cultural streams and rivers under the bridge of history.
The two hands of social manipulation
Anyway, the two strategies of manipulation of the mainstream press and the creation of the alternative outlets of the Underground Press worked in tandem and both promoted fantasies with a hope of turning a fictional Counter Culture into an actual thing.
The networks of communes and solidarity and such were mostly not really there, or at least spread very thin. Some joked that there is New York and there is San Francisco and all the rest of America is New Jersey. Actually, most of the rest is Kansas or Michigan but semantics and geography aside, there was not much of a true alternative culture and economy anywhere. New York and San Francisco may very well have been more fun and had better live music but reactionary forces controlled pretty much the whole country and the only liberated land - territory that the Underground actually controlled - was imaginary.
Abbie, the perpetual myth maker, imbued a political nuance into essentially non political cultural events, the Woodstock concert a prime example. The concert has been transformed through popular perceptions as a cultural high point of the 1960s, and Abbie helped create and foster that illusion.
Indeed, a bunch of great bands made some fabulous music there. Nonetheless, it was a disaster area by any level headed analysis. It is a miracle perhaps that things had not gone much worse. Folks like Wavy Gravy and the Hogs Farm crew worked heroically to feed and shelter the hippies and flower children that showed up totally unprepared.
Abbie took this disaster area and claimed it as Liberated Territory and idealized the concept in his book Woodstock Nation. When Abbie faced trial in Chicago after the riots at the Democratic National Convention, Abbie claimed citizenship of the Woodstock Nation, and that the US government had no authority over him.
Joni Mitchell claimed in her song that there were a half million people at Woodstock. Maybe that is poetic licence. Maybe it is cultural and political propaganda. Maybe it is just a lie.
Rock stations and stoned hippies and a pliable mainstream press and a tenacious underground press created and fostered a believable illusion - at least believable until put to the sniff test. Upon closer examination, it was all mostly smoke and mirrors.
Battling for artificial territory
So, we learned that one way to capture the imaginary territory and project it as if it was real, physical territory was to fly our own flag at events.
The Vietcong flag was already well known in America and for all extent and purposes the Vietcong were winning the war over there, kicking ass. Both the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong (National Liberation Front) flags portrayed a yellow five pointed star. Various Marxists globally incorporated a red five pointed star into their imagery, flags and printed literature. The Vietnamese and other flags were being used by leftist demonstrators at rallies and marches in the USA.
Somebody projected a large pot leaf onto a red star on a black background and by sleight of hand created an alternative flag waving narrative and a Yippie battle flag. When photographs of large crowds at a concert or festival included this symbolic statement the crowd is transformed by the image in the mind of the beholder as being the constituency of the flag wavers, a mass of political and cultural revolutionaries. Mostly, however, the folks were just there for the party. Good guerrilla theater, and like I said, the media is way too easy to manipulate.
Relying on self created mythologies, the antiwar movement was perhaps self deluded about their real organizational strength. They chose to concentrate efforts on protesting at the Democratic National Convention. They billed the event as the Festival of Life.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had become the darlings of the press because they never seemed short of some sort of hocus-pocus that resulted in good press. They came up with a large hog, named it Pigasus and declared it the Yippie candidate for President! They found themselves in a starring role and a presumption of leadership was projected on them. When the demonstrations resulted in a bloodbath of police rioting, they were among those that were charged with conspiracy.
The trial turned into a circus and Abbie was again in his element, playing the clown.
You cannot really blame folks that want to claim some sort of victory out of all this, but politically speaking, it was mostly a defeat for the left. We proved capable of being a disruptive factor but wielded almost no measurable political power. Waves crash on the shore and then recede. Abbie and company had been surfing on a wave that had done both.
The Sixties are over
Abbie and Jerry had been outside the Democratic Convention brawling with the cops in 1968. At the Miami Convention four years later in 1972, they managed to get themselves credentials to be on the Convention floor. They had cleaned up their outer appearance and were all in for Democratic candidate George McGovern.
While the “elder” Yippies were aligning with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, others protested outside. They had, at least temporarily, started calling themselves Zippies to differentiate themselves from those that they accused of selling out.
Inside or outside, it probably did not matter much. This time around the protesters got somewhere between little and no media attention. The electoral strategy ended with Nixon winning reelection in a landslide.
The Coke Bust
A year later, Abbie was arrested on cocaine trafficking charges. Abbie claimed that not only was the bust a setup but what he was really doing was investigative journalism and he was working on an article. He had introduced the buyer to the seller in pursuit of the news and they both happened to be undercover cops and Abbie was in deep shit.
This also left the Yippies in a very awkward position. The most famous Yippie, the figurehead, the fellow that coined the name, had just got busted for hard drugs. The Yippie political line had been that pot is good and white powders are bad or put another way, that there is a clear distinction between Life drugs and Death drugs. Abbie was busted with the wrong kind of drugs. His line of defense did offer some political wiggle room, but things did not look good. Rather than face trial, Abbie skipped bail in 1974 and went underground.
By getting arrested for something politically indefensible and morally questionable, Abbie had really fucked up. Blood however is thicker than water and sometimes friendship and solidarity is what is called for, even when your friend goes out and does something really, really stupid. Fortunately for Abbie he had made a lot of friends along the way, friends that were willing to put aside judgment and stand up for someone who had so often stood up for us as a movement, as a culture and as an activist community.
While Abbie was in hiding, friends and supporters campaigned for a resolution of his legal problems. There were demonstrations in his support and Bring Abbie Home concerts and some back channel discussions. All this resulted in Abbie surrendering to authorities on September 4, 1980. On the same day an interview with Barbara Walters was aired on 2020. Not only were the 1960s over but so were the 1970s, for Abbie, for us, for America. Many of our dearly held self delusions were toast.
Abbie was sentenced to a year in prison for the cocaine bust. He served four months and was released.
Abbie went on to write several well written and worthwhile books. He did some lecturing and a pseudo debate on a National Tour billed as the Yippie vs. the Yuppie with his friend Jerry Rubin. He at times played the role of elder statesman, but that was not a role he cherished. Abbie had earlier been catapulted onto the center stage and he was probably not happy with the less prominent roles that he was later offered.
Imagery Manipulation
So much of what we all remember from the 1960s and ’70s was the result of symbolic manipulation. We did it all the time. Put flowers on Mickey Mouse and have him flash a Peace Sign and a symbol has been appropriated. The Peace Sign of course, was just the V for Victory. We appropriated that too.
You see media manipulation is just a trick. It is relatively easy to do and anyone can learn how to do it. The Right Wingers learned it from us!
When I see a Confederate Battle Flag flying at a Country Music festival, I do not jump to the conclusion that everyone there is a racist or Klansman or whatever. I assume that the crowd's attachment to the flag is mostly a matter of juxtaposition and that it represents the hearts and minds of these concert goers no more than the Yippie flag truly represented the rock & roll crowd that happened to be photographed with that other banner of manipulation. The crowd is there for the music and the party. The flag creates the opportunity for manipulation of the images and if the newspapers or TV stations use the image, everyone is being played.
Sometime in the 1970s one began to see the rise of the campus conservative simulated underground newspaper. They were snarky and snide rags and seemed to attack the establishment but shifted the blame towards liberals and the left. Many of these student papers were generally aligned with the Libertarian Party which was founded as a form of cultural manipulation in the early 1970s. Before the hijacking of the term “libertarian” by the Libertarian Party, the word was commonly used to describe anarchists. Now, rabid capitalist advocates claimed the mantle, the name and a very arbitrary definition of liberty.
There was something weird going on. All the snark and resentment and counterculturalism that we had been fine tuning our political opposition was adopting.
Of course, we never played fair. The game was stacked against us, and we understood that and we worked with what we had. The System held almost all of the cards. What we had was the combination of unwavering belief that we were on the right side of a great moral battle and that we were way more creative and artistic than the Suits! Truth was highly pliable for us because the world as we knew it was so horribly unfair and brutal that all we could do to not be ground down was live in our own fantasies as much as possible and hope that through some mechanism of mass delusion we could change the world.
We were all brought up, for better or for worse, on TELEVISION and in spite of evident revolutionary posing, we were Americans and a product of the consumer culture. We just thought that if we ran the TV stations, we ruled America. The TV and other media however are not the ruling class but merely serve the interests of the ruling class. The Powers that Be have other tools in their toolbox, including the National Guard and a militarized police force. American Imperialism may be a Paper Tiger as the Maoists told us, but it also has very real teeth.
So, we battled back and forth for the Hearts and Minds of America. The System however had most of America by the Stomach as well as by the Short Hairs. We envisioned a short term struggle because we were TV children. The struggle however has dragged on for decades and the terrain keeps shifting.
Now, in the Internet Age, the fascists adapted aspects of our strategy. They took a cute frog and turned it into a Right Wing political statement. They took the OK hand sign and declared that it means White Power.
The thing about back then is that we were far fewer in numbers than the presence we projected but our political and cultural influence far exceeded our tiny circles. This the Right Wing has figured out and seeks to imitate. The BIG difference is that, despite our flaws and delusions we advocated for a utopian transformation and that has broad appeal. The Right Wing is promoting a dystopian nightmare and if that is what they are selling, their product has a really short shelf life.
On the whole, we may all be very susceptible to manipulation but it has to be based in hope. No one takes acid hoping for a bummer, although that may be a risk. No one gets laid with the intention of getting crabs. The bummers and the crabs however are risks that come with the territory, but never the intent.
We may be fools and we may be fooled over and over but it is always with a hope for a better tomorrow. You may lose your last $20 bill to a Three Card Monty shark in the subway, but it happens when you think you can win. Hey, you never know.
Jack traded the family cow for magic beans. He was obviously hustled, but nonetheless the beanstalk grew. It was clearly foolhardy to climb that beanstalk and just plain stupid to challenge a giant, but it does all work out in the end.
The Right Wing surge and the cultural manipulations by these Fascist Trolls is short lived because not only are they few in numbers but they are also weak in spirit and they have nothing to fall back on. They are not very artistic or creative. They lack soul and mojo.
We know that what we were doing back then was Street Theater and even back then we pretty much knew it was make believe. The Fascists actually seem to totally believe their own myths. That is unsustainable.
So, all is not doomed. We may have helped create the conditions that led to the Trump Presidency but we know that it will fall and fall hard because one thing we learned over the decades even if we had not understood it back then is that one must build from the ground up. Any other way of doing it just results in shit falling down!
You see, they lied to me when I was young and to some degree I resent it. I learned to lie and in many ways I got good at it. On some level I feel guilty. But, only so guilty. The political terrain is constantly shifting, and we have to be adaptive, creative and resourceful. You have to think on your feet and if you slip on a banana peel, you get up and take a bow and act as if you did so on purpose!
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The 1980s was hard on us all
The 1980s was a decade of political reorientation. On the national level everything continued to move to the right. We had Reagan in the White House. We had Contra wars armed by the CIA, funded with cocaine sales and the Afghanistan rebels armed by the the CIA and funded by opium sales.
Many of the next generation of Yippie type activists shedded that identity and worked within the environmental movement. As the 1980s unfolded, cannabis activists opened new fronts of the political debate by the introduction of the idea of medical marijuana and the unveiling of hemp as a separate track of great importance. The AIDS outbreak made Medical Marijuana access critical and the growing understanding of the global environmental threats documented the necessity of hemp.
In the early and mid 1980s the Green Movement in Europe led to the formation of Green Political Parties and these parties offered hope and a possible road map for American activists as well. Throughout the 1980s many of the loosely associated Yippie network began to define themselves as Greens. I had moved to Phoenix Arizona and became involved with a newsletter called Green Action that morphed into a nationally distributed newspaper that published throughout the mid to late 1980s, some of that time as a monthly.
Throughout the 1980s the publishing and organizing went on. Activists debated the possibility of creating a Green Party, the platform for this potential party and the structure that the party should adopt. Those of us that had come from the Yippie tradition were often held in suspect and were shunned or slandered or pushed to the side. The central organizers wanted nothing to do with cannabis (officially) including hemp which they considered a Trojan Horse. Of course, many of them did not mind smoking our weed!
Abbie Hoffman was 52 at the time of his death on April 12, 1989. He died by gulping down 150 phenobarbital tablets and booze. Shortly before his death he had spoken at a Greens conference I had organized in Philadelphia, and he spoke eloquently and with clarity.
I was on my way to New York with a load of weed destined for the underground medical cannabis market when I heard the news. I had stopped at my parents’ house and just as I was walking in the TV news came on with the report of Abbie's very untimely death. This death essentially marked the end of another decade and another era. The 1980s were well burnt toast.
Shortly after Abbie's death I helped march the Giant Joint on the Green Conference and shortly afterward that I severed all ties with those folks that were scheming to start an American Green Party.
Time moves on, a stream with us floating in it
The decade may have been down and the Greens may have been irrelevant but the ball had been set in motion and some continued to tinker about with the formation of an electoral political party.
The Party they eventually created went on to pull just enough votes to tip the scales in several very close elections. The Green Party helped throw Florida to Bush in the election that was determined by hanging chads and the Supreme Court. And again, the Green Party helped tip the scales that resulted in the Trump Electoral College election victory. We had simply walked away from the Greens by 1990 with a feeling of general disgust but in hindsight perhaps some more proactive response would have served history better.
Abbie, we miss you!
Abbie's death needed some time and perspective. It had troubled me when it happened and continued to nag at my consciousness for all these years. The loss was not personal as I was not part of his social circle but it was the death of a role model and a death that was self inflicted. Suicide usually leaves us with more questions than answers and a feeling of emotional disruption for the surviving even if it is a dramatic ending for the primary actor.
Most public explanations focus on injuries he had sustained and his battles with depression. Some point to the auto accident and the pain he was in and that he lacked health insurance. Others note the rightward political shift of the nation and say that he was simply depressed. And then, here was the founder of the YOUTH International Party and somehow he had gotten old. All those things may be true, but none of them either individually or combined answer the question as to why he chose to off himself.
Abbie publicly proclaimed the Yippie line separating Hard Drugs from Soft Drugs but he had not internalized that valuable advice. He continued to use cocaine and evidently some close to him enabled this continued use. He would not put it down and it was not healthy or useful or wise. He was not just playing the drug dealer when he got popped but he was being a dealer and a sloppy one at that.
He was a manic human being and there are certainly different influences that lead to manic behavior and one of those is cocaine. Cocaine use is not sustainable. It really is best to leave it be and if Abbie had taken his own public advice on the topic he might still be with us, an old man with stories to tell. Instead, he was a meteor and a legend.
Maybe all of our heroes are deeply flawed. Abbie certainly was. He was a superhero, cape, mask, bravado and all. Long ago, Shakespeare described all the world to be a stage. Abbie played the world stage. He played all sorts of roles and played many of them well. Too bad he turned down the last role he was offered of an elder statesman and advisor. I think that if he had given it time, that role would have grown on him and he would have played that well too. Instead, he slipped out of theater's back door. That is really too bad for the rest of us.
Sleight of hand and magic lanterns and kaleidescopes and psychedelics and Hocus-Pocus and lies and manipulation is how we survived the 1960s and 1970s. Understanding that is how we will survive the Trump regime and prepare ourselves for the next wave. There is always change. Change is the only constant. That, and magic and Rock & Roll.
