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Cultural Revolutionary I Knew Abbie Hoffman—Whom I Think

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Cultural Revolutionary I Knew Abbie Hoffman—Whom I Think preface "I'M A B B I E HOFFMAN" Myths are the only news, and the only thing that stays true all the time is a lie. Abbie Hoffman, 1968 Cultural Revolutionary I knew Abbie Hoffman—whom I think of as the quintessential spirit of the sixties—for almost twenty years, and for much of that time I wasn't sure when he was acting, when he was for real, and when he was acting for real. I suppose that's why I have such contradictory feelings about him. Looking back at Abbie from the vantage point of the nine- ties, it seems to me that he was the first American cultural revolutionary in the age of television. He was a very funny and a very sad character who saw his life and times as a story that he could tell and retell again and again as he went along. The point, of course, was to inflate himself and deflate the established order. What most of us think of as "objective reality" didn't exist for him; while he managed to outwit it time and again, it finally caught up with him. In the end, Abbie the comedian became a tragic figure. He also embodied the sensibility called post- modern. Nowadays, postmodernism is a cliche that has lost most of its clout. But long before it entered the academic world, Abbie was a walk- ing, talking postmodernist. A great many critics have tried to define the term, but no one, it seems to me, has done it as well as the writer E. L. Doctorow, who published Abbie s first book, Revolution for the Hell of It, when he was an editor at Dial Press, and who created an Abbie Hoffman-like character named Artie Sternlicht in his radical novel The xvii xviit / Preface Book of Daniel. "There is no fiction and no nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative," Doctorow asserts in his essay "False Documents." Moreover, he explains, "history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history." Abbie would have agreed. Almost all of Abbie's books, including his unreliable autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Mo- tion Picture, are "false documents" in Doctorow's sense of the term. All of them blend fiction and history, news and entertainment. Moreover, Abbie's dramatic life itself is a "false document": a fabu- lous story that blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and fan- tasy, autobiography and mythology. While it makes for fascinating reading, it also creates nightmares for fact-hungry biographers. After his suicide in April 1989, at the age of 52, the New Yorker observed that "Abbie Hoffman led three lives. social activist, yippie anarchist and white-collar impostor." By my count he led more than half a dozen lives. Abbie was orphan, imp, outlaw, martyr, patriarch, prodigal son, lost soul, and tragic hero. Moreover, he consciously tried to be Prome- theus, Dionysus, Wandering Jew, Ulysses, Faust, Robin Hood, Pied Piper, and Road Warrior. He was like a contemporary incarnation of Proteus, the god who was continually changing his form—who ought to have served as the deity of the sixties, an era of unprecedented trans- formation and metamorphosis. "The thing about movements is that they move," Abbie explained in an interview with the East Village Other in May of 1969, near the apex of the political and cultural movement of the sixties. "That's what a movement does—it moves and if you are a part of a movement, you have to recognize that . you and your tactics have to change and at that very rapidly." Like the sixties them- selves, Abbie was constantly moving and always in motion, which is why I see him as the quintessential spirit of the era. Elusive, mercurial, and ambiguous, he was and still is hard to pin down, hard to define. He believed his lack of definition meant he couldn't be co-opted by the "square" culture he wanted to transform. While he was still young and energetic, he seemed capable of changing forever. As he aged, however, he became increasingly locked in habitual gestures, and his inability to give rebirth to himself depressed him. The manic boy wonder turned into a cranky old man. The first time I saw him, I was on a panel with Susan Sontag at the Preface / xix Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. It was 1967 and the topic was the moral and political responsibility of intellectuals vis-à-vis the war in Vietnam. Abbie showed up in the audience as a cowboy, firing off a toy cap gun and complaining that in the movement there was too much analysis and too much intellectualizing, and not enough social- ism or direct action. The next time I saw him was on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I was an assistant professor of English and American literature. He was again in costume, but this time he was accompanied by Jerry Rubin, his on-again, off- again sidekick during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. Abbie and Jerry and a few friends had just created the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies, a kind of roving anar- chist theater group whose antics were designed to make the powers- that-be sit up and pay attention. Driving cars they had made to look like police vehicles, and wearing the uniforms of Keystone cops, Abbie, Jerry, and the Yippies descended on the campus and announced they were looking for drugs. The loony performance was in protest of a drug raid by the Suffolk County Sheriffs Department that had been staged for television to make students look like drug-crazed freaks. Over the next year or so I saw Abbie several times on the stage of the Fillmore East on the Lower East Side. On one occasion he described how he'd been arrested by the Chicago police, shortly after the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, for carrying a concealed weapon: a penknife. Pacing across the stage, and talking nonstop, he casually tossed the weapon in the air—with blade open—and caught it in his bare hand. On another occasion he appeared onstage wearing a white shirt, tie, and jacket, and explained how he'd evolved from his existence as a mundane salesman for a pharmaceutical supply company in Massachusetts into a bona fide long-haired, pot-smoking hippie in Manhattan. As he talked, he changed his clothes to emphasize the pos- sibilities >for change. By the end of the performance he was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boots; his long curly hair, which had been carefully held down, was now unruly. For years we were at the same places at the same times, but so were thousands of others. We were at the March on the Pentagon in October 1967 to protest the war in Vietnam, and we were arrested during the student takeover of Columbia University in April 1968, but we never xx / Preface met. Then, in 1969,1 reviewed Hoffman's second book, Woodstock Na- tion, for Liberation News Service, the movement's self-styled answer to the Associated Press. Soon thereafter, Abbie called to say he appreciated my favorable comments. We finally met face-to-face at the Law Commune, an office of radical attorneys who were defending the Black Panthers, Yippies, and Colum- bia students who had been arrested for occupying campus buildings to protest the university's discriminatory policies. From time to time we saw one another at political events and parties on the Lower East Side, and at "hip" restaurants like Max's Kansas City in Union Square. "We didn't become friends, however, until the winter of 1970, when he was 34 and I was 28. By then the Chicago Conspiracy trial was over, and Abbie was a media celebrity and the movement s male sex symbol, an icon of the revolution. For countless young men who wanted to defy the system and at the same time become famous, Abbie was a flesh- and-blood role model. By then, too, I was no longer a straight-and- narrow academic. I had been arrested and pummeled by a dozen or so New York City policemen after a demonstration to protest the murders of two Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and the Village Voice had splashed my picture on the front page with the caption "Moratorium Man Beaten." I'd taken a leave of absence from teaching to write a book about the British empire and British literature, and when I wasn't in the library I was a reporter and activist in the movement. Among other tasks, I carried messages between members of the Weather Underground, who envisioned themselves as armed revo- lutionaries, and their aboveground contacts, including organizers, jour- nalists, lawyers, family members, and friends. One afternoon at Macy's I received an envelope and was asked to deliver it to 114 East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. Under no circum- stances was I to engage in conversation with the individual who an- swered the door. The document was, of course, for Abbie, and I soon learned that it outlined how he might help the underground. It also inadvertently served as a letter of recommendation for me and proof of my radical credentials. As a professor I didn't carry much weight in Abbie's scale of nonconformist values, but as a courier who had access to the underground I was a force to be reckoned with, at least in his eyes.
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