Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (37 page)

It was one of the spectacular images of the 1960s: the troops with their bayonets sprouting daisies, frozen in a tense face-off with the antiwar activists. By sundown most of the press had left. The police moved in with tear gas and arrested people—over eight hundred in all—and many were brutally beaten. But these tactics did not dampen the spirits of the demonstrators. They were elated by what had transpired. Some felt that it was a watershed event, comparable in magnitude to the Boston Tea Party. “It made me see that we could build a movement by knocking off American symbols,” said Rubin. “We had symbolically destroyed the Pentagon, the symbol of the war machine, by throwing blood on it, by pissing on it, dancing on it. . . painting ‘Che lives’ on it. It was a total cultural attack on the Pentagon. The media had communicated this all over the country and lots of people identified with us, the besiegers.”

After the march Rubin decided to remain in New York with his girlfriend, Nancy Kurshan. They spent the next few months with Hoffman and his wife, Anita, cooking up new stunts so audacious and compelling that the press would have to cover them. “An event doesn’t exist until the media announces it,” Rubin asserted. “Once the media announces it, it is an event whether or not it exists.” He
and Hoffman believed that television was little more than an elaborate mirror game the authorities used to pacify the public. In their stoned reveries they dreamed of switching the mirrors around in order to reflect a different set of images that would shock the viewers, blow their minds, and make them confront the idea that there was a crazy alternative to the straight way of life.

Hoffman and Rubin possessed an uncanny knack for showmanship, a sixth sense for what would capture the imagination of young people. But they needed some kind of focal point, a central theme that would enhance the impact of their efforts. On New Year’s Day 1968 they dropped acid together so they “could look at the problem
logically
,” as Rubin put it, and they hit upon a recipe for social change. Mix one part hippie and one part activist, marinade in Marx (Groucho, not Karl) and McLuhan, season radically with psychedelics, and what do you come up with? Paul Krassner, editor of the
Realist
, a satirical underground magazine, said it first: “Yippie!”—the battle cry of the Youth International Party. It was a name to conjure with, a rallying point for stoned politicos and militant hippies who had merged the “I protest” of the New Left with the “I am” of the counterculture. “We figured we could create a new myth of the dope-taking, freedom-loving, politically committed activist,” Rubin explained. “Some day, we dreamed, the myth will grow and grow until there were millions of yippies. . . . Soon there will be yippies and a Youth International Party throughout the Western world.”

The Yippies didn’t go along with the notion that being a serious activist meant you couldn’t have a good time. Convinced that boredom was a revolutionary sin, they were determined to make outrage contagious on a mass scale. “No need to build a stage,” said Hoffman, “it was all around us. Props would be simple and obvious. We would hurl ourselves across the canvas of American society like streaks of splattered paint. Highly visual images would become news, and rumor mongers would rush to spread the excited word.”

The Yippies were political pranksters, and their lunatic style of attack played upon the media’s insatiable appetite for anything new or eccentric. They knew the press would give them free publicity as long as they flaunted the holy goof: burning money on Wall Street; appearing naked in church; dumping soot and smoke bombs in the lobby of Con Edison’s headquarters; mailing Valentine’s cards to persons unknown, each containing a joint. Their bombastic antics were framed as political commercials (“advertisements for the revolution”)
that would mobilize oppositional consciousness and compel people by dramatic example to change their lives. “Our lifestyle—acid, long hair, rock music, sex—is the revolution,” Rubin declared.

To the Yippies the masses of American youth were potential revolutionaries who merely had to be “turned on” by media buttons—and by LSD. They believed that acid was a subversive instrument, and they urged everyone to take the drug in order to break the mind-forged manacles that bound people to a repressive society. This presumably would lead to an understanding of why a revolution was necessary, thereby accelerating the dawn of a twentieth-century utopia. “Once one has experienced LSD,” said Hoffman, “one realizes that action is the only reality.” But what kind of action did the Yippies propose? Drugs made them more willing to gamble on their intuitions. “Mostly it’s a catch-as-catch-can affair,” Hoffman admitted. “You just get stoned, get the ideas in your head and then do ‘em.”

TV and LSD: both magical and instantaneous, both ways of leapfrogging the long and arduous task of grassroots political organizing. The Yippies had no predefined strategy other than
épater les bourgeois
(tweaking the nose of the middle class) via media freaking. They rejected the idea of a program as too confining. Ideology was dismissed as “a brain disease.” If they had any doctrine at all, it was that people should do “whatever the fuck they want.” Rubin described his Yippie vision in the closing passages of
Do It!

At community meetings all over the land, Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem.

There will be no more jails, courts, or police.

The White House will become a crash pad for anybody without a place to stay in Washington.

The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared.

All watches and clocks will be destroyed. . . .

The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm. . . .

The Yippies were not an organization in the formal sense. They had no membership list, no direct relationship with a grassroots, face-to-face constituency, and it was not clear whether their views represented a majority opinion in hip communities; nevertheless, these TV-promoted gadflys became the most celebrated spokesmen for the youth movement. In this respect the Yippies had much in common with Timothy Leary, whose status as leader of the psychedelic
movement was certified by the media rather than by those who actually took LSD. Leary also lacked an organizational base but was adept at manipulating the press, which was one of the reasons the Yippies sought him out. “We had many analytical discussions about the tactical necessity of using the media,” Leary recalled. But he was not particularly enthusiastic when the Yippies asked him to endorse their cause. Despite the halfhearted response Hoffman acknowledged his debt to the High Priest of LSD: “I studied his technique of karmic salesmanship.”

The Yippies were the first group on the left to define themselves solely through the media projections of their flamboyant leaders. On their own terms they were quite successful. They articulated a spirit of revolt that was alive in young people throughout the country and helped foster an antiestablishment consciousness among some who might not have been reached in any other way. But the Yippie approach was not without pitfalls. As former SDS president Todd Gitlin explained, “When movements become too ‘mediated,’ it becomes hard to tell the difference between a movement and a fad, a movement and a trend, or just a press conference. The results are pernicious for movements. The line between leadership and celebrity becomes very thin. It’s easy for leaders to cross over and become wholly unaccountable to a movement base.”

Rubin and Hoffman were the two most famous radical celebrities of the 1960s. Their lust for the spotlight, doubtless the product of personal as well as political motives, drove them to new peaks of self-promotion. But the Yippies paid a high price for a ticket on the publicity loop. As four-star attractions in an ongoing radical soap opera, they inadvertently trivialized the very issues they sought to dramatize. The result was a parody of left-wing politics that may have undermined serious efforts to reform America. “I didn’t know if I was headed to Hollywood or to jail,” Rubin later confessed. “I purposefully manipulated the media, but on a deeper level I see that it was mutual manipulation. To interest the media I needed to express my politics frivolously. . . . If I had given a sober lecture on the history of Vietnam, the media cameras would have turned off.”

So the Yippies kept pranking and the cameras kept cranking. The most outlandish, abrasive, and extravagant gestures were the surest to be broadcast, and the media, always hungry for novelty, gave leading roles to those who, in Gitlin’s words, “seemed like Central Casting’s gift to revolutionary imagery.” By no means, however, did
the Yippies have a monopoly on movement histrionics in the late 1960s. Indeed, their zany youth cult capers were timid in comparison to the militant theatrics of the Black Panther party.

Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers first gained attention the following year when they strolled into the California state capitol building in Sacramento twenty strong, with their leather jackets, black berets on blossoming afros, and loaded Magnum rifles and shotguns, to protest a bill forbidding such weapons in Oakland, where the Panthers were based. The ensuing publicity gave them a big boost, and they began to organize chapters in urban ghettos across the country. Initially their focus was on police brutality and self-defense, but soon the Panthers developed a black socialist ideology and a forthright party program that reflected the influence of Malcolm X, who in the final years of his life had rejected antiwhite bigotry. To promote the party in the community, the Panthers launched a variety of “survival programs,” such as free medical clinics, pest control projects, and free breakfast for poor children (black, brown, and white) on a daily basis—an idea that had been suggested by the San Francisco Diggers. Meanwhile they continued to cultivate the symbolism of violence. Their overinflated language, menacing leather attire, and radical cool provoked a great deal of attention in the mainstream press, and thousands of young blacks joined their ranks.

The Panthers rejected the goal of assimilation into a system they saw as repressive and inhumane—a sentiment shared by many white radicals. The black nationalist culture, with its dashikis, tiger-tooth necklaces, and afro haircuts, often espoused values similar to those of the white counterculture: spontaneity, simplicity, respect for individuality and ethnic identity, cooperation rather than competition, and so forth. A number of black activists were also into drugs—mostly marijuana and cocaine—for rest and relaxation. Some of the Panthers, for example, liked to get stoned and listen to Bob Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
on headphones. They were particularly impressed by “The Ballad of a Thin Man,” which taunted “Mr. Jones,” the archetypical honkie who knows something’s happening but doesn’t know what it is. “These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something,” Bobby Seale recounted, “and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. They’d be trying to relate to an understanding about what was going on, ‘cause
old Bobby [Dylan] did society a big favor when he made that particular sound.”

While the black power movement had a strong cultural component, it never embraced LSD, which made only minor inroads into black society during the 1960s. Reality was already too heavy a trip in the ghetto, and many black militants were unkindly disposed toward the black soul singers and rock stars who expressed a preference for hippie drugs in their music: Sly and the Family Stone (“I Want to Take You Higher”), Jimi Hendrix (“Are You Experienced?”), the Chambers Brothers (“Time Has Come Today”), the Temptations (“Cloud Nine” and “Psychedelic Shack”). Certain black radicals, such as A. X. Nicholas, went so far as to denounce these songs as “counterrevolutionary” and urge that they be boycotted by the black community.

Thus it took on added significance when Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information of the Black Panther party, offered to make an alliance with those notoriously wacked-out acidheads the Yippies. “Eldridge wanted a coalition between the Panthers and psychedelic street activists,” Rubin explained. So they got together, smoked a lot of grass, and composed a “joint” manifesto called the Panther-Yippie Pipe Dream. “Into the streets!” Cleaver proclaimed. “Let us join together with all those souls in Babylon who are straining for the birth of a new day. A revolutionary generation is on the scene. There are men and women, human beings, in Babylon today. Disenchanted, alienated white youth, the hippies, the yippies and all the unnamed dropouts from the white man’s burden, are our allies in this cause.” The Black Panther party newspaper later featured an article entitled, “The Hippies Are Not Our Enemies.”

The prospect of a genuine coalition between white radicals and black militants sent chills up the spine of the political establishment in the United States, which greatly feared, in the words of former air force secretary Townsend Hoopes, “the fateful merging of antiwar and racial dissension.” But the Panther-Yippie alliance was more symbolic than anything else, and only nearsighted observers could have thought otherwise. The Yippies were essentially freelance activists whose shadow organization lacked a community base; hence there was nothing for the Panthers to ally with other than an image, a set of fleeting gestures. But the Yippies and Panthers did share certain important attributes. Both knew how to use the media in
creative ways to get their message across, and both were excited about the prospects for an explosive year in 1968.

Gotta Revolution

Few people realized just how intense things would get in 1968, and no one was prepared for the bewildering series of events that unfolded. With each passing month the political temperature rose a few more notches. First there was the Tet offensive launched by the Viet Cong in February, which belied President Johnson’s optimistic predictions of an impending US victory. Twenty thousand Americans had already been killed in action, a hundred and ten thousand were wounded, and still there was no sign that the war would be over in the near future. A “dump Johnson” movement mounted by doves within the Democratic party gathered unexpected momentum when Senator Eugene McCarthy decided to challenge LBJ for the presidential nomination. McCarthy scored an impressive showing in the early primaries, and on March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.