Soul on Acid

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.

Enter Bobby. YIP seemed doomed. New York cops broke up the yippie invasion of Grand Central Station; kids who valued their skulls began to stay away in droves. Bobby Kennedy's entry into the 1968 presidential race, followed by Lyndon Johnson's dropout, sent yippie stock tumbling. As Abbie notes: "Come on, Bobby said, join the mystery battle against the television machine. Participation mystique. Theater-in-the-streets. He played it to the hilt. And what was worse, Bobby had the money and power to build the stage. We had to steal ours. It was no contest." Worse still, many yippies really liked Bobby. A planned YIP "festival of love" in Chicago, intended as the young party's high point, suddenly seemed impossible. If Bob Kennedy were nominated at the Democratic Convention, which the lovefest was meant to attack, many yippies who admired Kennedy would probably have dropped out of the movement. The party was on the verge of disbanding.

The assassination removed the only leader capable of capturing the allegiance of the far-out. "We postponed calling off Chicago," Hoffman explains, "and tried to make some sense out of what the hell had just happened. The United States was proving more insane than Yippie! Reality and unreality had in six months switched sides. It was America that was on a trip: we were just standing still."

Levity and Levitation. Not for long. Yippie goings-on during the Democratic Convention in Chicago brought the movement prominence far beyond its numbers ("From four to 200,000, depending on the weather," according to Hoffman); the clubs of Dick Daley's cops, used indiscriminately on yippies, newsmen and bystanders, even won it some measure of sympathy. Essentially, the movement remains devoted to what Hoffman calls a "free America," by which he means an America in which no body has to pay for anything. In the upcoming Nixon Administration, the YIP will doubtless find ample targets for further demonstrations--perhaps an attempt to levitate the Treasury Building. Nothing violent, though. Alone among all the anti-Establishment revolutionary forces in the U.S., YIP doesn't believe in it. "Although I admire the revolutionary art of the Black Panthers," says Abbie, "I feel guns alone will never change this System. You don't use a gun on an IBM computer. You pull the plug out."

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