The Era was one of tie-dyed nirvana, with a sunrise of purple-haze to lead the daily parade of altered-states and altered-egos of the double dazed, and not one, let alone 76 trombones to lead the procession down Mainstreet U.S. of A., eh? Old enough to kill, but not old enough to drink or vote, now that is teetotaling totalitarianism of the highest parental and political degree. Alice had her restaurant, Phil Ochs ached, Mr. Dylan wanted to know the answer my friend, and Country Joe did the bodybag rag while Jane, the Fonda fond of Hanoi, annoyed the hardhats and hard-headed men of construction sites and Merle the Pearl Haggard himsef', that damned Okie from Muskogee...where sandals are not considered manly footwear and they don't take their trips on LSD...rotgut moonshine maybe so's you beat yer wife near half ta death, me'be and that little cousin of yorn, all of 13 now, shore starts to look good all filled out and all. Yep, these were the pious Americans...middle Americans..middle finger Americans...the ones you see on the Opry stage and audience. Goddamn love it or goddamn leave it....or just bloody Goddammnittttt!
The draft created a runaway train, fueled by dissent and a rather large needle full of a propensity for protestation. Draft cards and bra's burned side by side, with the bra's the bigger attraction, I'll grant you. Ok, number 0004 going up in flames does not, I repeat, does not have the imaginative visual appeal of a massive 44-double D going up in heat and flames and shooting full into the sky like a Fourth of July rocket! Twin silo's unleashed for peace and equality. Freedom for Freidan...and glorious Steinham and that cute little bunny tail of hers that could not only topple the Pentagon, but levitating it, then in the end...end the war...bring about the peace...and get ready for the next one...a real fucking "Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" moment....
All that fuss and confusion, fusion and fission over Vietnam. You’d swear to hell she were a $2,000 call girl and one prime hot piece of ass the way we attacked her looking all commie foxy in her commie red negligee, sheer and sexy for the times. If war was sex, then Vietnam was a gas generator powered Vaginal Machine sucking our country's politicians and generals into her moist opening deeper and deeper, content with being red, white and screwed. What a bitch she were. She was explosively sexy in one of those Pentagon sort of ways and was a mighty morsel that fed the wheelchair wounded vets living on giant gulps of morphine and absorbed in it’s opiated dreams. Vietnam was a tempting tasty treat of a whore, hard to resist for that crazy uncle from out of town, the one that no one talks about in the family and is the one shunned at family gatherings. "Youbetcha! Why, it's jes' my crazy old Uncle Sam. Hell, he had spent decades pimping out Lady Liberty as a soiled dove, and political prostitute of The Demon, Cracy in war after war after war from the brothels of Montezuma to the whores of Tripoli," A tip of a Panama Red hat and a bust your balls canal greeting as Teddy of the Big Stick Tribe yelled "Bully, bully" all the way home. Sans a redcoat revulsion and revolution, sans the twin's WWI and II, America has for the most part been seen, analyzed and concluded by "foreign" eyes, as the Ugly American.
The USA was leaning left and holding leviathan demonstrations to levitate the Pentagon, which was leading to the demise of the short lived garden of Flower Power Hedon and would soon be trampled underfoot as Kent State added four more dead in Ohio to the body count, (as though 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese) weren't enough to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an addict addicted to a sense of false democracy with war machinations.
The B-52's in the Sixties weren't just some damned mindless band on the radio, and napalm was not a froo froo drink on the veranda in a tropical paradise. Hell..the Sixties were on fire with anti-war sentiment and all some of us wanted to do was avoid the draft, go up country, jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. Some of us had those options, the Vietnamese did not. It was their country being told to bend over and take it in the ass. Hell where could they go to get away, and did they want to?
The Democratic National Convention of '68 was a lesson in the horrifying lines of demarcation over Vietnam the thin thread that separates a Police State from a People’s Democracy. The Elections of '68 in and of themselves were a farce, a frightening drama unfolding eventually between two nominees from both parties, that were not even in the category of strange bedfellows. Democrat Hubert Humphrey had an irritating voice that largely worked against him. Nasal and high pitched he sounded more like Truman Capote going into labor. On the other side of the two faced political coin of the realm was Republican Richard Nixon. Never trust a politician with a perennial five o'clock shadow and the jowls of a rabid bulldog. The only viable candidate it seems was an actual pig, called Pigasus nominated by Phil Ochs and nomination accepted by Jerry Rubin. This "peoples" nomination took place during the riots and both Ochs and Rubin, along with the pig were arrested by Mayor Daley's goon squad in blue on an obscure still on the books livestock ordinance violation! Ok, too many police pig puns I can get drowned in here..Pig Puns..Pig Pen..see?
This civics lesson of democracy eventually exploded for five days with the Chicago police rioting with billy clubs and batons, brute force all in the haze of a tear gas that floated in an ethereal manner, a dreamlike fog that burns and brings reality to a crashing halt. The cops rampaged beating everything in sight including journalists covering the appalling events that would make Syria's president proud. Journalists cameras were smashed, film confiscated, and heads busted. Even Dan Rather was the victim of brutality on the convention floor and writer Terry Southern ran for cover into an apartment building along with Bill Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet their heads bleeding from wounds sustained as journalists/observers.
The counter convention of the people was planned by many factions of the American Left but the clown prince's were the Youth International Party or Yippees along with the SDS. Eventually the riots culminated in more blood flowing than water filling Lake Michigan. Country Joe MacDonald sang it loud and and sang it proud along with "300,000 of you fuckers out there!" The hook and seed of the song, "Gimme an F" was screamed at the counter culture crowd, crowded, and packed tight in true cannery row style at a whacked out Woodstock. An ocean away, sat Vietnam, a divided country by external forces beyond it's control,that was also ripping to shreds the social fabric of the United States. The counter culture was encountering clashes in the streets between rioting police in Chicago and street fighting baby boomer men and boomer women...yip, yip, hoo-ray Yippies, with Jerry and Abbie acting as its fulcrum. They, combined, were a lefty act of leftover vaudeville of guerilla political comedy, destined to fade into the dark night of changing times.
The Chicago Seven, Angela Davis, jet Black Panthers, wild and wooly Woodstock, hap, hap, hempy Haight Ashbury, and a plethora of psychedelics in the chemical rainbow of a multi-colored psychotropic of cancer ablaze with a hallucinogenic explosion caused by mushrooms, pills, tablets and crumbly weed and hashish for paper and pipe. Arlo was coming into Los Angeles carryin' a couple of keys, while numerous other Americans were heading north of the border carrying only a backpack, a pack of rolling papers and visions of a life free from war living under the maple leaf canopy of protection of the war resisters movement. Either way...we pleaded..."don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man. Leviathan demonstrations to levitate the Pentagon, which led to the demise of the short lived garden of Hedon spawned by the tender loving care of love and peace of the Flower Power Generation would be trampled underfoot and suffer from Flower Power Degeneration as Kent State added four more dead in Ohio to the body count, (as though 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese) weren't enough to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an addict addicted to a sense of false democracy with war machinations. Democracy is a noble movement, but as practiced in America, it's a diluted illusion of freedom, similar to taking pure grade heroin and cutting it to dilute it's potency in order to stretch the softer product in a further effort to increase volume and thus, street profits. Uncle Sam is the proverbial school yard pusher of low grade democracy to countries who don't want it. Dick Gregory, Black activist and comedian stated in the Sixties regarding Vietnam.."Shit, I don't know why we have to shove democracy down the Vietnamese throat at the point of a bayonet. In my old neighborhood, if something was THAT good, we'd steal it!"
The B-52's in the Sixties weren't just some damned mindless band on the radio, and napalm was not a froo froo drink on the veranda in a tropical paradise. Hell..the Sixties were on fire with anti-war sentiment and all some of us wanted to do was avoid the draft, go up country, jump in the water and stay drunk all the time. Some of us had those options, the Vietnamese did not. It was their country being told to bend over and take it in the ass. Hell where could they go to get away, and did they want to?
As the convention convened all hell was about to break loose….and it did with a fury. The battle was on and the youth culture of America would never be the same again…..
The Democratic Anti-Convention in Chicago - 1968 (Part Two) by Mike Marino Fresh air had been displaced unceremoniously, and menacingly replaced by tear gas cannisters in the near Chicago future of 1968, but, for the time being present it was intoxicatingly heavy with euphoric elation bordering on a storm the barricades revolutionary erection that lifted the spirits of the youth culture of the Sixties on an updraft with sense of real change in the air, optimism for the future, and an arrogance on both sides of the divisive line of democracy’s demarcation drawn in the generational sand. The political system was now on a collision course of disaster heading for a total melt-down.
The radical street fighting cacophony of "Make Love, Not War" became entangled limbs intertwined with those of the bittersweet transcendental Wizards of Om! Haggard old Merle “aw shucked” his way through a rendition of musty old attic smelling Muskogee shit kicker philo-prophet full of shit proud Okla Okie twang with a twinge of mental illness attached to it that affected the older gen with a case of "my constipated country right or wrong" philosophy. The country had created home-grown enemies, and it was time to flush them out physically to enervate the “resistance” and it’s threat of a cancerous rebellion in a quest for peace, not war, life, not death. It was democracy by douche-bag!
Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Bobby Seale, Tom Hayden …. it was the revolutions synergistic A-list of party crashing participants and any lefty who was any lefty was there standing in the left wings as the stoic right wing looked on with a glimmer and gleam in the eye that was seeing “red” and ready to act in a concordant accordance with others to put down the revolt and short circuit it’s societal synapse with guns, tear-gas and clubs if necessary. In the end it made the Ferguson protest look like a church social.
The writer and co-author of the screenplays for Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, Terry Southern, was on hand covering the convention for left wing periodicals, but the scene that stands out in television 3-Dimension is the live telecast of regular media type, Dan Rather with his mojo set to stun being being carted off, unceremoniously from the convention floor, with an appalled Walter Cronkite giving a blow by blow commentary. Mayor Daley of Chicago was glaring at the podium in a classic case of a Political Portrait of Dorian Gray whose time had come and gone. The nexus of violence in Chicago has a familiar current event aura about it, and the tone and mood were set in concrete when a 17 year old teen-ager, Dean Johnson and another boy were accosted by cops on the street on a hot August Thursday evening for violating curfew. The cops took a real “Ve Vere Under Orders” Gestapo stance when confusion over whether Johnson had a gun or not in his possession. Cops being cops shot him three times anyway in order to “protect and serve” I guess an ordinary illegal choke hold was not enough to subdue the teen! YIP and he SDS organized a memorial service for the murdered teen. As they gathered in memorial mode cops arrived and told them to move along which they did. Never argue with an armed cop unless you are also armed and dangerous too and ready to go for the head shots.
On Friday the protest was devoted to Pigasus!!!! YIP was ready to formally announce their candidate for Pig Prez in the pork persona of Pigasus the Pig. The crowd was already in place at the Civic Center Plaza when Rubin arrived with the candidate who would be president and not end up in a can of Spam! The police were also waiting..perhaps they recognized themselves in Pigasus! Once Pigasus was released after being nominated officially by Phil Ochs. members of YIP were promptly arrested including Rubin and folkie Ochs.
Another event that eventually erupted into violence, (there were so many) was the free music festival sponsored by YIP. Of course appearing on stage was no eh Carpenters or the Monkees, instead it was the insightful, inciting, igniting, energizing MC5! Outside in Lincoln Park the crowd was getting as restless as villagers ready to storm Dr. Frankensteins castle to kill the god-beast Prometheus the mad doctor had created...so with pitchforks held high and decibels cranked up higher, it was time to Kick Out the Jams Motherfuckers!!!
Kicking out the jams was actually the protocol desired by the Yippies to defuse the political tension that would infect the convention in the turmoil of the growing Peace Movement and who better to kick them out than the Motor City Five, better known as the MC5 as everyone knows the formula … E=MC! Incidentally the Five was the only group who actually showed up in Chicago to perform although many were invited. I guess CSNY missed the Greyhound tour bus, but wrote about anyway so when you hear “Please Come to Chicago” they weren’t even there.
The Five were scheduled to kick it in by kicking it out around four in the afternoon but the cops refused entry to a flatbed truck that had been hired as the portable stage. If that wasn’t enough Yip was using borrowed electric power from a nearby concession stand and the owner had a change of political heart and denied them access to it. It was at this point of confusion that Abbie Hoffman made his play and got the flatbed stage truck parked nearby though not in the park proper. The cops agreed to it but the crowd, unaware of the deal surrounded the truck and the cops.
The MC5 finally kicked out the jams with a freeplay free concert outside the convention hall, and they did amidst all the chaos. Just as they were finishing the cops moved in and the Five began removing their equipment as fast as they could. Having been through many riots before, they didn't need a crystal ball to know what was next on the "to protect and serve" agenda. The MC5 have the distinction of being the only band to actually perform a free concert amidst the melee and police riot that subsequently defined the American meltdown of the American wet-dream, and many were now thinking of bullets over ballots. The revolution was on....or so we thought.
Emotions were now being pushed to the outer limits as Hoffman made the announcement that the the cops stopped the music and began giving on the job revolutionary training on how to leave the park peacefully without getting your head busted open like a ripe melon in an open-air market. The protesters were also taking no chances and began arming themselves with makeshift weapons at hand. The cops were getting nervous and all their riot gear couldn’t hide the rising temperature of contempt they were obviously feeling for the concert goers slash protesters slash Americans. The cop tactics included forming a skirmish line around the bathrooms in the park, I guess eh reasoning was “if the shit hits the fan” it will have somewhere to go.
The crowds now taunted by an ominous police show of force reacted to Newtons Law of Motion to law enforcement..for every action there is a reaction. The cops who had been hassling and harassing the crowd were now themselves surrounded and hassled back with a heaping helping of heckling with sharp barbs that would have made Don Rickles proud.
The protesters had exited the park under the brunt of brute force and were making escape routes along Clark Street. you guessed it, order were given now to clear Clark Street. The cops who had now lost control, fueled by right wing adrenalin flowing hot went berserk. The park incident incidentally was merely the only plausible prelude to what was to follow not only on national television, but worldwide! Rubin was orgasmic as he later told a magazine interviewer, “This was fantastic. It was only Sunday night. They might declare martial law in this town.” Prior to the convention Mayor Richard Daley, the Heinrich Himmler of Chicago promised that “Law and Order” will prevail and at what cost? How much do extra clubs and guns and ammo cost, not to mention mace and riot helmets? Another cost factor was the communications system employed by the cops borrowed from the military, in case this was overkill for Chicago they would be ready to storm the beaches of Normandy once again and march on Berlin! Crowd control and riot techniques were also part of the training drill.
The decision was now made to take the battle to the streets of Chicago and not the park. Remember Occupy Wall Street? It took place in the park ON Wall Street. Pay attention to history...and learn and when you say Occupy Wall Street...occupy the damn thing, not the park. The streets were a more viable battleground as there was an arsenal of asphalt weaponry available as ammunition. Allen Ginsberg was not howling but instead was Om’ing as he led protesters from the park peacefully, once on the streets the SDS took over and began a blockade of North Ave when the police attacked again in furious force with a violent vindictiveness leaving the carnage of bloodied heads, bodies kicked and bleeding in the streets and numerous arrests. This time the protesters fought back heaving bricks and chunks of the street at the cops and stoning the police cars overturning some of them. Imagine if he SDS were not involved and instead he cops had to face a contingent of Weathermen or members of Germany’s Bader Meinhoff Gang?
The battle lines were drawn but war was not over yet. It was just beginning and so was the trial of the Chicago 7..but that’s another story…..
Burn Baby Burn! Chicago There Goes the Revolution! - Part Three By Mike Marino The trial of the Chicago 7 was a regular P.T. Barnum three ring circus of verbal sparring between the defendants and a crazy old judge. The court jesters of the revolution were in full flower and by the time the curtain was about to come down, the jury found them all "Not Guilty of Conspiracy" on February 18, 1970. It was a victory for free speech, but Judge Julius Hoffman, still had one small ace up his sleeve. and cited all the defendants for contempt of court, including their attorneys. Sentences ranged from two and half months to four years. John Froines and Lee Weiner were acquitted completely while the remaining five were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Each was fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. Abbie Hoffman, no relation whatsoever to Judge Julius Hoffman although Abbie did call him “Dad” in court one time, recommended that the judge try LSD and even offered to set him up with a dealer. In 1972 all the convictions were reversed by a Court of Appeals, and the Justice Department decided not to retry the case. The contempt charges were also overturned and the defendants all went into different directions as if a shot gun had blasted them into post-Revolution space.
Abbie Hoffman, the class clown and court jester of activism published Steal This Book in 1971, and many of us did just that, and bookstores then refused to carry it. (Why carry a book that would end up in someones oversized field jacket, as opposed to cash in the bank) Later he was arrested in 1973 on drug charges. He always claimed he was set up and the cocaine was planted, which was not an unusual police tactic at the time.. In 1974 he skipped bail and had cosmetic surgery that would have made Priscilla Presley jealous, and went underground once again, he hid for several years in plain sight in New York State under the name Barry Freed working on environmental campaigns. In 1980 he surrendered to authorities and received a one year sentence, but was released after four months.
His yellow jacket wasn't complete yet, and in 1986 he was arrested again with others including Amy Carter, daughter of Jimmy Carter, for his involvement in a protest against CIA recruitment on the University of Massachussets campus.One of the witnesses for the defense was former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Hoffman along with the others were found not guilty. He appeared as himself in the Oliver Stone movie, Born on the Fourth of July, a film that was released 8 months after Hoffman's suicide in April of 1989. He regularly lectured audiences up until his death about the CIA's covert activities including assassinations disguised as … well...suicides!
Then there was the Rubinesque Jerry Rubin. Political activist and author of the book “Do It!” made his left turn early in life and was involved in the planning of the March on the Pentagon along with Abbie Hoffman and another Chicago 7 defendant, David Dellinger, where they tried to levitate the building but alas and alack, it would not budge, but, the 82nd Airborne was on hand to prevent them from entering the building and although the Pentagon did not rise into the air, the rifle butts of the Airborne came down on protesters heads. After the Chicago Trial Rubin became quite the Yuppie businessman and was one of the early investors in Apple Computers.
In the 1980's, as the Batman and Robin of the "revolution" Rubin and Hoffman embarked on a debate tour of the U.S. called "Yippees vs. Yuppies" where Rubin proclaimed that the accumulation of wealth was the "real American revolution" and that activism was hard work and the abuse of drugs and sex made the counter culture a scary entity! You know, we are the people our parents warned us about! He made a ton of cash running multi-level marketing schemes for health foods, and was eventually killed by a hit and run driver in front of his massive penthouse on Wilshire Boulevard in 1994, a fitting end to an activist turned capitalist, eh? Hopefully the vehicle that ran him down was a Mercedes, and not some cheap ass domestic car.
Then there is Barbeque'n Bobby Seale, who along with Huey Newton (Burn, Baby, Burn) was a co-founder of the Black Panther Party and the defendant in the original Chicago 8 Trial, who due to his belligerence, was severed from the trial and bound and gagged on orders of Judge Julius. He was sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court, and a contemptible court it was indeed. In 1970, while in prison he was back in the courtroom for the New Haven Black Panther Trials. Panthers had allegedly murdered fellow Panther Alex Rackley, who it turns out was a police informant. One of the Panthers turned states evidence and claimed that the order to murder Rackley was given by Seale himself, the jury couldn't reach a verdict and the charges were dropped and Seale was released from prison in 1972. He wrote a cookbook, Barbeque'n With Bobby, which is not exactly the Anarchists Cookbook, but bonafide tasty recipes for the carnivore in all of us and the proceeds go to various non-profit groups and social organizations, and was involved in advertising for Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. In 2006 he appeared in the film, “The US vs John Lennon” to talk about his close friendship with Lennon. He's on Facebook today and who knows, there may be a cooking show in his future on the Home and Garden Television Network. Maybe the next cookbook will be called, "Fire Up The Grill, Burn, Baby, Burn!