REVOLUTION FOR THE HELL OF IT by "Free." 231 pages. Dial. $4.95.
"Free," the author of this disjointed but somehow engaging nonbook, is in reality Abbie Hoffman, 32, the wire-haired co-founder of the yippie movement. A self-described "nice Jewish boy from The Bronx" who attended Brandeis and Berkeley, then worked in Mississippi for S.N.C.C. before dropping into hippiedom, Hoffman has now produced a slender, acid-infused account of the rise of the nonviolent yippies. The book trips along almost gaily on currents of aphorism and imagination. Between its often outrageous put-ons and put-downs lies much that is of significance to American youth—and those adults who would understand the radical young.
The trouble with the American lib eral middle class, Abbie complains, is that—among other things—it lives the myth of Abraham and Isaac backward: " 'God is dead,' they cry, 'and we did it for the kids.' " (Abraham, of course, was prepared to kill his own son for God.) On student revolt, he comments: "And so you ask, 'What about the innocent bystanders?' But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent." He is particularly ferocious toward the press: "The headline of the Daily News today reads BRUNETTE STABBED TO DEATH. Underneath in lower-case letters: '6,000 Killed in Iranian Earthquake.' I wonder what color hair they had?"
Co-Optation and Copulation. By the spring of 1968, hippies had realized that Flower Power was dead. The Diggers, those altruistic dispensers of free food and medicine, had largely disbanded, LSD had given way to methedrine, and the crash pads echoed to the frenetic screams of "speed freaks"; the grisly murder of "Groovy" Hutchinson and Linda Fitzpatrick cast a pall over hippiedom. Only a small band of the movement's founders and gurus, including Hoffman, chose to form a political link with the ideological New Left. The result was the Youth International Party (YIP), which was founded at least partly in hopes of converting the angrily activist Students for a Democratic Society to a more lenient and joyful concept of revolution.
At a conference of yippies and New Leftists in Denton, Mich., a legendary Digger named Emmett Grogan hurled the yippie challenge. As Hoffman recalls it: "All of a sudden he erupts and kicks the table over. He knocks down a girl, slapping SDS'ers right and left. 'Faggots! Fags! Take off your ties, they are chains around your necks. You haven't got the balls to go mad.' " For some reason, the New Leftists were not charmed. Leaders like Tom Hayden continued to talk owlishly of "imperialism" and "cooptation" ("I thought he said copulation" deadpans Abbie.) So the hoped-for meeting of political hotheads and acidheads failed. To the yippies, the directors of S.D.S. appeared grim, uptight, overly prone to meting out violence.