> I see your point, but if a crass "Tolja so!" demo would make joanna
> sick, and she's _one of us_, what'll it do to bystanders who are
> sitting on the fence? I've sometimes thought that, while I myself
> found Abbie Hoffman one heck of an entertainer, the ultimate effect
> of all his anti-war showmanship was to _prolong_ the Vietnam war.
Abbie Hoffman wasn't an entertainer, he was one of Herbert Marcuse's finest students at Brandeis, and did more to promote Marcuse's line of thought directly to the heart of American culture than the whole population of the American left put together (with the help of some McLuhanesque media antics). Which was quite easy to do in the 60s, considering the marxist left was busy vying for power in their sick little power elite games and vilifying Marcuse for suggesting that POLITICS IS part of the problem...
"What is to be abolished is not the reality principal, not everything, but such particular things as business, politics, exploitation, poverty."
Specifically, in that order: business, politics, exploitation, poverty.
"To forget this is to mystify the possibilities of liberation."
The only people Abbie Hoffman ever alienated were humorless people, and people that took themselves too seriously (read totalitarians, power freaks, and ideologues).
I spent many long nights as a teenager attending Murray Bookshin's Anarchos meetings in a tenement apartment on the lower east side, listening while Murray, Abbie, other elders whose names are lost to me (one... Vinnie, had been in the Lincoln Brigade), discussed the fine points of building a more humane society to believe such a simplistic statement as: "the ultimate effect of all his anti-war showmanship was to _prolong_ the Vietnam war."
Leigh www.leighm.net