Eminentoes I Abbie's Road to Stardust
Lindberg, Tod
some friends created from the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange. Hoffman writes: We started clowning, kissing and hugging, and eating money. . . . I passed out money to freaks and tourists...
...And even the press, in a spirit bequeathed by the 1960s, described Hoffman's surrendercum-media event as a "media event," designed to promote his book...
...Pandemonium...
...Instead, Hoffman stresses the good time...
...As a memoir, the book is a miserable failure, because there is no consideration of motive, of why Hoffman did what he did...
...Barbara Walters, at the end of the J "20/20" interview, said she had asked Hoffman if the timing of his surrender had anything to do with the release of his book...
...And if he was going to give himself up, why not get a little extra mileage out of it for his book...
...Two months after our band of mind-terrorists raided the stock exchange, twenty thousand dollars was spent to enclose the gallery with bulletproof glass...
...Hoffman's account of the march on the Pentagon is written with much the same carefree abandon...
...But did Hoffman really think he was giving up his freedom...
...Stock brokers scrambled over the floor like worried mice, scurrying after the money...
...In fact, they even suggested that Barry Freed's play at model citizenry might have been motivated by a desire to get a light sentence, or even to avoid any conviction at all...
...Hoffman writes of being in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his fellow (and at that time, real) revolutionaries: There were about thirty of us on defense patrol ready to put into operation Plan B to fight the Pigs if they returned...
...Hoffman tells us that at the time he only wanted to be a free spirit, taking nothing-especially revolutionary tactics-too seriously...
...Rubin got the message...
...Hoffman devised an antidote: "As soon as he and his friends hit shore, I took them down to Wall Street to burn up some money...
...Hoffman is telling us that he and his friends had clowned, kissed, and hugged their way to the creation of pandemonium, and also that the stock exchange people were made so nervous that they took expensive steps to insure their unimpeded function...
...Only later do we get an inkling of the meaning of this event, as reflected in Hoffman's gleeful recollection of its consequences: Was it a real threat to the Empire...
...this would only undermine Hoffman's mythological creation of himself...
...The net effect of this obfuscation, and indeed of much of the obfuscation in this book, is to minimize all the unpleasantness of the 1960s, and if this is too brazen, then at least to minimize the unpleasantness in which he himself took part...
...When Hoffman first met Jerry Rubin, he thought him too stiff and serious...
...I hate drugs...
...By contrast, today's myth of the hippie, in Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, Hair, and elsewhere, contends that we should no longer take the radicals so seriously...
...Someone out there had read the ticker...
...A good time was had by all...
...And so on for three and a half pages...
...It was sure a pretty piece...
...Once I burned money at the stock exchange...
...it is enough to deny them meaning...
...Hoffman clearly had a great time, and from his account it seems like something anyone would have a great time doing...
...Hoffman tells us that he was "in the crowd" at the Lincoln Park rally preceding the riot, but makes no mention of where he was during the riot itself...
...At the end of Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, Hoffman provides us with a curious epilogue: Maybe I was wrong...
...For instance, we read thai the police attacked the hippies in Grand Central Station, that the police stormed the hippie barricades at Columbia University, that the police rioted against the hippies in Chicago Fortunately, Hoffman had done nothing to cause these attacks: "Despite the then popular rhetoric about 'pigs' I always dealt one-to-one with those lined up behind the law"-a most curious claim...
...the New York hippies would march and then perform a rite of exorcism on the evil Pentagon, a rite inspired by an earlier "glorious night of religious group-grog...
...What we have left, if anything, is Abbie Hoffman as heroic figure, gleefully tilting at nasty windmills...
...Government officials spoke of "near civil war conditions," and one need not read far in radical literature to find reference to fascist Amerika's attempts to crush the revolution...
...We do not have to deny thefact of these actions...
...But that is not how we do things, and so our .dilemmas are how to treat the revolutionaries justly, yet mercifully, and later, how to think about them at all...
...But in Hoffman's case, cynical manipulation undermined book sales...
...I don't know much about other systems, but if you pick up the newspaper or turn on the TV, all the others seem to be falling apart...
...This was way out of line...
...But not everyone is willing today to find consolation in this falsehood...
...Our system of democracy is the best in the world...
...Upon Jerry Rubin's invitation ("Abbie, why don't you get all those freaks off their asses and join us in Washington...
...Oh, there were unpleasant moments...
...One would expect that the supposed effectiveness of the demonstration would receive more emphasis from a radical cultural revolutionary...
...As for that "pretty piece," in Soon to be a Major Motion Picture Hoffman protests that "guns and bombs were something completely alien to anything in my background...
...In 1969, Hoffman wrote a book called Woodstock Nation, the subject of which is the hope and promise of "WOODSTOCK NATION," the leading alternative to "PIG NATION" Amerika...
...The kids were on a gay romp, trying "to deal one-to-one," and if there is blame to be laid, it is on the police, the national guard, and the government for their failure "to deal one-to-one...
...We had about twenty or so weapons, an escape route, and well I just don't know what the f--k I'd do if they came back...
...For all the critical acclaim, Forman's revival of Hair was a flop, and Hoffman's Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (with an introduction by Norman Mailer...
...They are bad for you...
...The answer he clearly expects, and the one consistent with the new 1960s mythology, is simply and conveniently: Come home, Abbie Hoffman...
...During the 1960s, of course, the motives and goals of counterculture radicals were taken very seriously...
...People work hard to make money . . . Nuclear energy is clean and it's fun...
...he originally endorsed the riot, he tells us, but later was critical of it...
...I passed out money to freaks and tourists alike, then all at once we ran to the rail and began tossing out the bills...
...The sacred electronic ticker tape, the heartbeat of the Western world, stopped cold...
...has not been a best-seller...
...In fact, he now views these tactics as so unserious as to be barely revolutionary...
...After all, a failed revolution in most other countries results in the summary execution of its participants...
...At first this seems enticing: It would allow us to breathe a little easier...
...During Hoffman's famous "Chicago Seven,' conspiracy trial, the wealthy "Gold Coast" section of Chicago was the scene of the socalled "Days of Rage" riot...
...he coined the term "Days of Rage," he tells us, but the Weathermen, an underground group, were really responsible for it...
...At the conclusion of this litany, Hoffman gets to the point: "Now can I come back...
...Greed had burst through the business-as-usual facade...
...That the revolutionaries were the nation's children only compounds the problem...
...How much easier simply to pretend that nothing had been really revolutionary, that there was no moral dimension to the ideas and actions of the radicals...
...She said that Hoffman told her that he would be crazy to give up his freedom for commercial gain...
...I wondered what kind of jolt the shotgun would give...
...The police did not return, alas, so Hoffman missed his opportunity...
...It would be as good a place as any and as good a reason as any to blast my first Pig...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
