Little Guy'll

 

Sometimes

 

Snowed Under by Ruling-Class Images

 

Excerpted from Abbie Hoffman's autobiography Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture, ©1980:

Lenin once wrote that art was counter-revolutionary because it showed beauty in the present, while revolution promised beauty in the future. It's true that art-for-art's sake leads to performing modern dance for Shahs and Sheiks or discussing sculpture at afternoon tea with the Rockerfellers. Yet creativity is needed to reach people snowed under by ruling-class images, and only artists can manage the breakthrough. Artists are the collective eyes of the future. One of the worst mistakes any revolution can make is to become boring. It leads to rituals as opposed to games, cults as opposed to community and denial of human rights as opposed to freedom.

In organizing a movement around art we not only allowed people to participate without a sense of guilt but also with a sense of enjoyment. The use of fun in struggle was a new notion. Even in Mississippi where we were truly frightened most of the time with people shooting at us, living with the constant thought that we might lose our lives, it seemed like people enjoyed their "work." All I did was admit it felt good. There's no incongruity in conducting serious business and having fun. This pissed off the straight left to no end.

Saint Abbie Hoffman

In this excerpt from Fates Worse Than Death, copyright 1991, Kurt Vonnegut talks about one of my personal heroes, Abbie Hoffman:

I mentioned Abbie Hoffman in that piece about books as mantras for meditation. I realize that most people nowadays don't know who he was or what he did. He was a clowning genius, having come into the world that way, like Lenny Bruce and Jack Benny and Ed Wynn and Stan Laurel and W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton and Fred Allen and Woody Allen and so on. He was a member of my children's generation. He is high on my list of saints, of exceptionally courageous, unarmed, unsponsored, unpaid souls who have tried to slow down even a little bit state crimes against those Jesus Christ said should inherit the Earth someday.

He did this with truth, anger, and ridicule.

He spent the last years of his short and frantically unfunny life attempting to protect Nature in the Delaware River Valley. He left his family without a cent. He had a criminal record, including flight from prosecution for a drug deal. But his most memorable crime was his violation of a law which has never been written down in so many words: "Monster fuck-ups engineered by your own government are not to be treated with disrespect until the damage done is absolutely unforgivable, incomprehensible, and beyond repair."

Swap

Excerpted from Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut, ©1991:

I was willing to believe back in the 1960s that deep meditation as practiced in India might be a way to achieve happiness and wisdom which had not been previously available to people of European and African stock. The Beatles also believed this for a while. I doubt that the late, great (I mean it) Abbie Hoffman ever believed it. He wasn't about to give up his frenzied sense of humor, the sanest thing in this country during the Vietnam War, in exchange for personal, inner peace.

I would have been glad to make that swap.