Miami and the Siege of Chicago (19 page)

First organized for this action in Chicago back on March 23 in a YMCA camp in Lake Villa, Illinois, in a conference of about one hundred anti-war groups, the project had then seemed a direct action capable of attracting large numbers, for Johnson was still in office, and the war in Vietnam showed no sign of ending. Plans, more or less under the aegis of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (the same clearing house organization which had led the march on the Pentagon) were made for mass demonstrations to protest the nomination of Lyndon Johnson. Since the President was to announce a week later that he would not run again, and the start of the Paris peace talks soon followed, many of the members of the anti-war groups were distracted, and efforts for this huge mobilization under the leadership of David Dellinger, editor of
Liberation
and chief architect of the march on the Pentagon, Rennie Davis, who headed the Center for Radical Research, and Vernon Grizzard, a Boston draft-resistance leader, were lost in the move of many of the younger workers to the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns. The dream of a broad front of radical groups to meet in Chicago seemed no longer practical. So more modest plans were consolidated between Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, perhaps the outstanding young leader of the New Left now that Jerry Rubin was a Yippie and Mario Savio was relatively quiescent. Between Hayden, Davis, and Dellinger, the Mobilization would function. Where aims were similar to the Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner—editor of
The Realist
—and Jerry Rubin there would even be cooperation. Rubin, a former associate of Dellinger on the march to the Pentagon, had been working since December 1967 with a vision of bringing one hundred thousand kids to Chicago to hold a Youth Festival which by a sheer mixture of music, witchcraft, and happy spontaneous disruption would so exacerbate the anxiety of the Establishment that Johnson would have to be nominated under armed guard and real Texas guns. Needless to say, plans of the Yippies had also suffered from Johnson's withdrawal.

Nonetheless, by mid-summer, the wings of the MOB and Yippie army were more or less ready. On one flank was the New Left, still generically socialist, believing in a politics of confrontation, intelligent programmatic warriors, Positivists in philosophy, educational in method, ideological in their focus—which is to say a man's personality was less significant than his ideas; on the other flank, Yippies, devoted to a politics of ecstasy (we will avoid comparisons with Hubert Humphrey's politics of joy) programmatic about drug-taking, Dionysiacs, propagandists by example, mystical in focus. (Rubin had once burned some money in a debate with a Trotskyist.) By the summer of 1968 each group had however so influenced the other on campus, via street activity and in demonstrations, that their differences were no longer significant. Indeed under the impact of Rubin's ideas, the emphasis was much on a politics of confrontation which searched to dramatize the revolution as theater.

But let them speak for themselves. Here is a quotation from Tom Hayden of the New Left:

Here is a quotation from Ed Sanders, characteristic of the visionary aspects of Hippie prose:

The more practical—by Abbie Hoffman in
The Realist:

The Yippies like the Hippies were famous for their optimism. The permit was not granted by Stahl or Daley. In turn, an offer by Daley on August 21 to allow a march from 1
pm
to 4
pm
in a part of Chicago miles away from the convention was rejected by the Mobilization. Hayden said that marchers coming to Chicago “by the tens of thousands” preferred to be at the Amphitheatre. So the city got ready for a week of disorders its newspapers had advised it to avoid. One can only divine the expression on Daley's face when he read literature like the following—it comes from a throwaway in Lincoln Park, given out on Sunday afternoon August 25:

A moment:

The following is a remark by Dino Valente, an electric guitarist. It ran as the headline in an advertisement in the
East Village Other
for an album of his records.

Yes, the Yippies were the militant wing of the Hippies, Youth International Party, and the movement was built on juice, not alcoholic juice which comes out of the mystery of fermentation—why, dear God, as fruits and grains begin to rot, does some distillate of this art of the earth now in decomposition have the power to inflame consciousness and give us purchase on visions of Heaven and Hell?—no, rather, we are speaking of the juice which comes from another mystery, the passage of a metallic wire across a field of magnetism. That serves to birth the beast of all modern technology, electricity itself. The Hippies founded their temple in that junction where LSD crosses the throb of an electric guitar at full volume in the ear, solar plexus, belly, and loins. A tribal unity had passed through the youth of America (and half the nations of the world) a far-out vision of orgiastic revels stripped of violence or even the differentiation of sex. In the oceanic stew of a non-violent, tribal ball on drugs, nipples, arms, phalluses, mouths, wombs, armpits, short-hairs, navels, breasts and cheeks, incense of odor, flower and funk went humping into Breakthrough Freak-out Road together, and children on acid saw Valhalla, Nepenthe, and the Taj Mahal. Some went out forever, some went screaming down the alleys of the mad where cockroaches drive like Volks-wagens on the oilcloth of the moon, gluttons found vertigo in centrifuges of consciousness, vomitoriums of ingestion; others found love, some manifest of love in light, in shards of Nirvana, sparks of satori—they came back to the world a twentieth-century tribe wearing celebration bells and filthy garments. Used-up livers gave their complexions a sickly pale, and hair grew on their faces like weeds. Yet they had seen some incontestable vision of the good—the universe was not absurd to them; like pilgrims they looked at society with the eyes of children: society was absurd. Every emperor who went down the path was naked, and they handed flowers to policemen.

It could hardly last. The slum in which they chose to live—for they were refugees in the main from the suburbs of the middle class—fretted against them, fretted against their filth, their easy casual cohabiting, their selflessness (which is always the greatest insult to the ghetto, for selflessness is a luxury to the poor, it beckons to the spineless, the undifferentiated, the inept, the derelict, the drowning—a poor man is nothing without the fierce thorns of his ego). So the Hippies collided with the slums, and were beaten and robbed, fleeced and lashed and buried and imprisoned, and here and there murdered, and here and there successful, for there was scattered liaison with bikers and Panthers and Puerto Ricans on the East Coast and Mexicans on the West. There came a point when, like most tribes, they divided. Some of the weakest and some of the least attached went back to the suburbs or moved up into commerce or communications; others sought gentler homes where the sun was kind and the flowers plentiful; others hardened, and like all pilgrims with their own vision of a promised land, began to learn how to work for it, and finally, how to fight for it. So the Yippies came out of the Hippies, ex-Hippies, diggers, bikers, drop-outs from college, hipsters up from the South. They made a community of sorts, for their principles were simple—everybody, obviously, must be allowed to do (no way around the next three words) his own thing, provided he hurt no one doing it—they were yet to learn that society is built on many people hurting many people, it is just who does the hurting which is forever in dispute. They did not necessarily understand how much their simple presence hurt many good citizens in the secret velvet of the heart—the Hippies and probably the Yippies did not quite recognize the depth of that schizophrenia on which society is built. We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches—the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small—the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia—life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam. What the Yippies did not recognize is that their demand for all-accelerated entrance into twentieth-century Utopia (where modern mass man would have all opportunities before him at once and could thus create and despoil with equal conscience—up against the wall mother-fucker, let me kiss your feet) whether a vision to be desired or abhorred, was nonetheless equal to straight madness for the Average Good American, since his liberated expression might not be an outpouring of love, but the burning of his neighbor's barn. Or, since we are in Chicago, smashing good neighbor's skull with a brick from his own back yard. Yippies, even McCarthyites, represented nothing less by their presence than the destruction of every saving hypocrisy with consequent collision for oneself—it is not so easy to live every day of your life holding up the wall of your own sanity. Small wonder the neighborhood whites of Chicago, like many small-town whites in other places, loved Georgie Wallace—he came in like cavalry, a restorer of every last breech in the fort.