Rewriting the Sixties

As a co-founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party) with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in 1967, I observed how they were able to manipulate the media to further their antiwar mission. If you gave good quote, you got free publicity. Furthermore, in a tactic borrowed from the CIA, if you presented newsworthy street theater, the media manipulated itself. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your agenda, that kind of behavior has a way of backfiring. And so I was both amused and annoyed by an item by Dwight Garner in the August 13 New York Times Book Review. He wrote:

Thomas Ricks, the senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, has a book on the hardcover nonfiction list this week... [Fiasco] got a boost from strong reviews and from appearances on both "The Charlie Rose Show" and NPR's "Fresh Air".... He filled the air with analogies that were funny, sad and apt.... George Bush and his team were like 60's radicals. ("They really were going to, kind of, 'groove on the rubble,' as Jerry Rubin used to say. They were going to tear it down and see what happened.")

Of course, glibness isn't necessarily a virtue. "Has it come to this?" asks Yippie archivist Samuel Leff. "With the Iraq War now an obvious catastrophe, Ricks is comparing the Bush gang's mindless destructiveness to sixties radicals like Rubin?"

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