The Abide Guide: Living Like Lebowski by Benjamin Oliver & Eutsey Dwayne

Author:Benjamin, Oliver & Eutsey, Dwayne [Benjamin, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781569759950
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: 2011-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

The mythical Dude of Film, Jeffrey Lebowski, is based on a very real Dude of History, a feller by the name of Jeff Dowd.40

Dowd, a movie producer friend of the Coen Brothers, served as the inspiration for the cinematic Dude in several ways: He has self-applied the name “Dude” since he was a kid; he digs bowling and imbibing White Russians; and he was the Seattle Seven…well, he and six other guys (actually, one of the Seven was a lady friend).

After an anti-Vietnam War protest they organized in Seattle turned violent, members of the Seattle Seven were arrested in 1970 and charged with conspiracy to incite a riot. The Seven belonged to a protest group at the University of Washington called the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), which was affiliated with the radical anti-war Weather Underground faction. The Weathermen, as they also called themselves (after a Bob Dylan lyric), emerged after Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) disintegrated into chaos in 1969.

Before its collapse, SDS had galvanized what became known as the New Left in the early ’60s with a manifesto called The Port Huron Statement. This document was for that decade’s youth rebellion what Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence or Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was for the American revolution: a clarion call, only this one mobilized a generation to fight oppression and racism, end war, and make America a more humane, egalitarian society.

Although Dowd had nothing to do with writing any draft of the Statement, compromised or otherwise, he was, like so many in his generation, profoundly inspired by it—hence his involvement with SDS and SLF. In many ways, Dowd’s freewheeling activism and dedication to living a creative, self-determined life personifies what the Statement defined as the purpose of life: the “ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.”

That’s the literal connection between the Dude and the anarchic spirit of the ’60s. It’s also why we think it made the overachieving, millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski so uptight. As the sands of time were burying the Big Lebowski’s beloved reactionary ’80s, right there in his oppressively clean mansion sat the abiding, slovenly epitome of the ’60s revolution wearing a wrinkled hoodie, T-shirt, and shorts.

And on a weekday, too.

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