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Cheese N Crackers 006
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-[ C H E E S E ' N ]-
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___|text file # 006|___-[ C R A C K E R S ]-______________!___________________
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* "a bit on a revolutionary" |`.
*______________________________________[ brian : 25th of October, 2002 c.e. ] *
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When most people step foot into my apartment, the first things they generally
see are comprised of a photomosaic poster of Bob Marley, sitting next to that
on the kitty-korner wall is a poster advertising the former Government Inter-
vention Into Your Mind movie, Reefer Madness, about the "deathly effects of
marihuana"; when the people avert their eyes to the wall on the right, deeper
in the room, behind the couch, they see a lithographic, black and white photo-
graph of a straggly lookin' hippie, bearing a shotgun in one arm and protruding
his middle finger into the air with his other, wearing a big happy smile on his
face.
- "Who's that?"
- "Abbie Hoffman."
- "Who's he?" and then I have to explain to them who he is. I just gen-
erally sum everything up in two words:
- "Oh, just this Woodstock Activist."
- "Oh....okay."
And then what? It's not as though these people will take a sudden interest in
the man. Hell, has anyone (anyone without just a bit of intellect) ever heard
of a "Woodstock Activist"? If I weren't aware of the culture back then, I'd
honestly have no idea what I was saying to everyone who asked about the guy
with the gun.
I was introduced to Abbie Hoffman early in high school. His exposure to me was
sudden and I don't remember how I first heard the name. I may have just been
randomly browsing the internet and seen him. Or, maybe I had seen the infamous
'Steal This Book' in a bookstore and remembered the name on the cover and un-
covered some information on him later on.
It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I began to truly understand
his story. One day in my Creative Writing class, I was to write a tribute poem
about anybody I thought worthy. At that time, I ran through my head different
names of potential revolutionaries, partially because I felt rebellious at the
time and because I hated everyone in the class. Names went through my head:
Che. Zack De La Rocha. Chavez. Abbie Hoffman. And that's when I realized he was
going to be my choice.
Immediately, I hit the internet and unearthed some commonly well-known facts a-
bout the guy. He was involved with the Chicago Seven (or Chicago Eight, if you
include former Black Panthers member, Bobby Seale); he arranged a huge mob of
citizens to circle around the Pentagon in hopes of elevating it off the ground;
he, along with a few other activists, stood above everyone at the New York
Stock Exchange and burned thousands of dollars in notes and released the sheds
of scorched paper to the capitalists below.
This particular assignment, the tribute poem project, called for a visual piece
to go along with it. Seeing as how I was writing about Abbie Hoffman, there was
no visual I could think up better than a burning American flag.
I came to school the next day with an American flag that I had torched with my
lighter and scribbles of "FUCK THIS COUNTRY" I wrote with a black Sharpie pen,
the "C" in the word "FUCK" a tad charred from the burning.
That day, I had gotten talked to by a couple teachers, mostly challenging my i-
deas with their patriotism. I just smiled and told them thank you. When I had
gotten into my Creative Writing class, the teacher, a middle-aged female health
guru and former activist, told me that the flag was a perfect idea.
I had gotten an A on that portfolio.
But Abbie didn't stop there.
The more information I learned about Abbie, I began to become more and more in-
trigued by his life. I had purchased the ultimate hippie handbook, 'Steal This
Book', before I really had gotten into him. However, after getting deeper into
his affairs, I went down to a revolutionary book store in downtown Seattle
(Revolutionary Books, located off Broadway on Nagel Place) and purchased a book
he wrote later in his career, 'Steal This Urine Test', a critique on the stand-
ardized drug testing for businesses in the 1980's; I also picked up 'Woodstock
Nation', in which he had written in three days, stoned out of his mind, at
Woodstock. The newest work of his that I've added to my collection is his auto-
biography, 'Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture', which I'd been searching for
for quite a while. I still have yet to obtain his first book, 'Revolution For
The Hell Of It', 'Vote!', 'To America With Love', a collection of letters Abbie
and his later wife, Anita, wrote to each other, 'Square Dancing in the Ice
Age', and, lastly, 'The Best of Abbie Hoffman, but they are to be gotten even-
tually, I'm sure.
To this day, I still read articles about him and interviews in which he was
subjected to. I bid on a 1976 edition of Playboy that had an interview with the
fugitive at the time. It cost me $3.00 altogether and is a very fascinating
read. I'm sure you can find a transcript for it somewhere online. In fact, I
just searched GOOGLE and came up with a web site that has scans of the actual
Playboy interview in, each page a JPEG:
-) http://216.39.161.171/hayduke/Abbie/Abbie_interview/page_1.htm
There are many resources on the web that one could dig up some general informa-
tion on the rebel. Some of these include:
-) http://www.theaction.com/Abbie
-) http://foia.fbi.gov/hoffsum.htm (his FBI files)
-) http://www.teaching.com/earthday97/center/text/webstock19.htm
-) http://www.ibiblio.org/mal/MO/philm/abbie/
-) http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id92/pg1/
-) http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/chicago7.html
-) http://www.freespeech.org/yippie
It's really not that hard to do a little research.
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with everything Abbie Hoffman ever did.
After all, he was a little nuts. But it was Abbie that helped end the war in
Vietnam (along with a million others) and it was Abbie that pointed out some
truth in the then (and still) corrupt government of our country. God Bless
Amerika.
_______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.bubblemonkey.org/cheesencrackers
cnc-006.txt written by brian
<brian@bubblemonkey.org>
copyright (c) 2002, your mom. 
