Abbie Hoffman: a dissent and response

In response to this post, Steal (download free) This Book, Marulis wrote:

Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but I always thought that Abbie Hoffman was a phony, an unethical exploiter, and a plagiarist. Try reading Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan for an eye-opener about Hoffman and Leary and the rest of those professional media manipulators.

Sure, I was only a street kid with barely a ninth grade education but even I could see beyond their phony brand of fluff.
There is no nostalgia in my mind for those guys, just memories of the damages their selfish hi-jinks caused They were preeminent A-Holes of the very first order.

Unlike, say, the blissful reaction to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, those praising the student activists from late 1960s meet stiff resistance. Even the activists from the mid-1960s disapproved of those who came later. Mario Savio was serious in the face of serious issues. Frolic disgusted him.

Hoffman was anti-war with bells on. Confronted by a bad war and everything The Greatest Generation chose to ignore (racism, sexism and homophobia), he danced at his revolution like a class clown with a microphone. What the Wife of Bath claimed for herself he could claim, that he had the world in his time.

But Lord Jesus! When I do remember me

Upon my youth and on my jollity

It tickles me about my heart’s deep root.

To this day does my heart sing in salute

That I have had my world as in my time.

In defense of Hoffman, I won’t say he was right about everything although I think he was. I’ll say he was young.

Andrew Marvell:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may…

He sported and he stood up. Was he phony? Only in the eyes of those seeking consistency. An unethical exploiter? Hell no. A plagiarist? Note the title of his book. He was a property-is-theft kind of guy. It isn’t good for anyone’s character to be so right as a teenager. Of course it went to his head. Obnoxious and charming at the same time, he never lost faith that America could one day live up to its own ideals. His mistake was that he wanted that happy time to be his time and was crushed by the country’s wide, long swing to the right.

Where did he get his faith in justice? From the Civil Rights Movement, and from reading Allen Ginsberg.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

You made me want to be a saint….Any Catholic could have told him, saints tend to come to bad ends, and their grace co-opted to serve a corrupt institution.  Because Hoffman could not be remade in the image of the state, he has been rejected, even by those who should know better.