The Hippies by John Anthony Moretta

Author:John Anthony Moretta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

11

The Emergence of the Yippies and the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention: The Beginning of the End for the 1960s Counterculture

“A yippee is a stoned idealist, moved by a vision of a future utopia. He is a romantic. It is not fear which moves the yippee; it is faith and hope.”

—“Notes from a Yippizolean Era,” East Village Other, February 16–22, 1968, 8.

As introduced in Chapter 7, on New Year’s Eve 1967, during a euphoric and clairvoyant moment of “reefer-madness,” Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Paul Krassner conceived of a new, theatrically inspired, “street-action-oriented,” aggressively provocative manifestation of hip; a fusion of hippie “flower power” and New Left political activism; a new brand of hipster whose agenda and ideology reflected the composite of all current countercultural ethos and activity. They believed that they could attract the apolitical hippies to their movement if they made political engagement fun by promoting and incorporating into their activities dope, rock music, and the general saturnalia of the hip scene. To Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner, Yippie “became a label for a phenomenon that already existed, [the] organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists.”1 Intrigued by all the “creativity that was coming out of the hippie movement”—the Diggers “free food in the streets” as well as their “theater of the streets”—and by the vitality “coming out of the political movement,” Rubin recalled those counterculturists who joined YIP reflected “the merger forged of the political radical and the hippie, and it [the term] describe[d] that restless youth tying into a political movement.⁠… If one could combine the new culture of the young people [that of the hippies] with the frame of reference of politics, one would have an explosive combination that would challenge America to its foundations. It would steal the children of America. The young people would choose us because we had excitement and they had boredom.”2 Indeed, Yippie leaders believed the turned-on baby boom generation represented the revolution in embryo, and what the mainstream media called the “hippie lifestyle” was actually those individuals who had already committed themselves to the impending youth insurrection against the Establishment. Although such a projection turned out to be wrong on several levels, at the moment, 1968, the Yippies were determined to make their assertion come true.

The Yippies condemned both the old and New Left, for being “romantics” who still believed the nation’s working class to be the revolutionary vanguard (such as the Communists or the Progressive Labor party), or the New Left who endlessly debated on how to bring about the revolution. To Rubin, New Leftists were “dogmatic Puritans” who stood for sacrifice not fun and thus they turned people off, especially at their mind-numbingly boring, tedious meetings or with their bombastic ideological pronouncements and “position papers.” For Rubin and his Yippie compatriots, “Impulse—not theory—makes the great leap forward. Ideology is a brain disease.” To the Yippies, the New Leftists were not revolutionaries, for how could they be when their movement was “made up of part-time people whose lifestyle mocks their rhetoric.

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