Back when activism was more fun. . .

Sam Smith – Paul Krassner, whom I once described as being the Moses of the alternative press, has sent me a collection of clips and videos from the past, over which I wasted several hours.

Until, that is, I realized that I was falling for the standards of many of today’s activists i.e. analyze, attack, argue and get angry. I had momentarily forgotten that the 1960s were not only effective but fun, working on the principle,  as Duke Ellington put it, that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

In the 1960s you not only fought for freedom and justice, you practiced it, enjoyed it and took time off from the battle. An alternative life - called the counterculture – was created. Krassner helped show how to do it – as the journalist who started the key pub, The Realist, but was also a member of

member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies. He was a friend of people like Lennie Bruce and Groucho Marx and was funny himself.  As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "His writings make me hopeful." And we loved publishing his work.

Krassner was far from alone. One of the videos he linked me to featured an interview with Tuli Kupferberg, a poet and creator of the Fugs. Wikipedia tells more:

The Fugs is a band formed in New York City in 1965 by poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, with Ken Weaver on drums. … The band was named by Kupferberg, from a portmanteau for "fucking ugly" used in Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead.

A satirical and self-satirizing rock band with a political slant, they performed at various war protests - against the Vietnam War and since the 1980s at events around other US-involved wars. The band's often frank and almost always humorous lyrics about sex, drugs, and politics have caused a sometimes hostile reaction in some quarters.

Their participation in a protest against the Vietnam War in the late 1960's, during which they purportedly attempted to encircle and levitate the Pentagon, is chronicled in Norman Mailer's novel "Armies of the Night."

I won’t bore you with any more enthusiasm, but rather cite a few examples of Krassner at work while having fun. For example, in an LA Times piece that we republished in the Progressive Review, Krassner explains getting involved in the Vietnam issue and the Democrats’ role in it:

I called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting. On the afternoon of December 31, several activist friends gathered at the [Abbie] Hoffmans' Lower East Side apartment, smoking Colombian marijuana and planning for Chicago [where the Democratic convention was to be]

Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft. We sought to utilize the media as an organizing tool, but we needed a name so that journalists could have a "who" for their "who-what-when-where-and-why" lead paragraph. . .

I came up with Yippie as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet. It was the ultimate extension of dehumanization. And so we held a press conference.

A reporter asked me, "What happens to the Yippies when the Vietnam war ends?" I replied, "We'll do what the March of Dimes did when a cure for polio was discovered; we'll just switch to birth defects." But our nefarious scheme worked. The headline in the Chicago Sun-Times read, "Yipes! The Yippies Are Coming!" What would later happen at the convention led to the infamous trial for crossing state lines to foment riot. . .

In a Variety article last year, Krassner told more of the convention tale:

Folksinger Phil Ochs observed, “A demonstration should turn you on, not turn you off.” It was the credo of the Yippies (Youth Intl. Party). We were in Chicago at the Democrats’ convention, where a certain competitiveness developed between Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Abbie bought a pig as a presidential candidate, but Jerry thought Abbie’s pig wasn’t big enough, mean enough or ugly enough, so Jerry went out and bought a bigger, meaner, uglier pig, which was released outside City Hall. In the elevator inside, a few cops were chanting, “Oink. Oink.” A book, Surveillance Valley, states: “The generals wanted to be consumers of the latest hot information. During the Chicago riots of 1968, the army had a unit called Mid-West News with army agents in civilian clothes and they went around and interviewed all the antiwar protesters. They shipped the film footage to Washington every night on an airliner so the generals could see movies of what was going on in Chicago when they got to work in the morning. That made them so happy. It was a complete waste of time. You could pick up the same thing on TV for far less, but they felt they needed their own film crew.

If you would further insight into the style exemplified by Kupferberg and Krassner, this 28 minute 1993 video featuring the two, supposedly addressing Krassner’s then new book, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut, but getting into everything from antics at the Chicago 7 trial to LSD.

And if you ask yourself, how can such wild and wandering characters be effective in times of crisis, just remember that, of late, we haven’t stopped any wars that America was in, and these guys actually helped to do just that.