Free (Abbie Hoffman), "Revolution for the Hell of It"
I hate hippies.
As much as I hate hippies, I like Abbie Hoffman. Maybe it�s because he hated hippies as well, once even calling a press conference to tell the media that hippies were dead.
But there are two things I really like about him. He was totally fearless, thinking up the most outrageous things to smack a point home, my favorites being when he and his friends went on a tour of the Wall Street Stock Exchange and tossed money onto the trading floor, causing a near-riot as white guys in suits pummeled each other whilst scrambling for dollar bills. (The stock exchange soon after put up a partition of bulletproof glass so such an incident would not happen again.) Another highlight was when he applied for official permits to levitate the Pentagon in order to �exorcise the evil demons within.�
Hoffman stuck to his morals all the way up to his death (and I still find his death to be veddy suspicious), still working with non-profit grassroots organizations while his former partners turned into yuppies, conservatives and Christians. (Notables included his former partner in crime, Jerry Rubin, and former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.)
There�s a great video that I�ve only seen the first part of that faced Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman against each other in a final debate. Rubin comes off as the most idiotic, selfish, corporate-culture mouthpiece, while Abbie simply says that chasing money is a pretty stupid way to live your life.
Shortly before his death, at a time which drug testing in the workplace was just starting to become commonplace, he wrote a book on how to beat testing, or, if you didn�t care about the job, how to destroy the testing machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pretty cool. I even read it, and I don�t do drugs, or not any that I can be arrested for, anyway.
At the same time, Rubin was advocating hiring people on a part-time basis to save money by not paying for health benefits.
�Steal This Book� should be required reading for everybody who distrusts the cops or corporations that surround us, and despite being written in the 60s, there are still at least a dozen passages that could still be used in resistance movements today. (Example: if you�re in a situation where riot police are closing in, a person strategically placed on top of a building with a bullhorn commanding �Right flank, turn!� in an authoritative voice can cause a fair amount of havoc.)
Unfortunately, �Steal This Book,� this is not. This consists of numerous articles written over an unsubstantiated amount of time, and hence there is no main structure despite being divided into subsections. There are some moments of good advice, but he has a tendency to ramble here more often that not.
Worse, he sometimes comes dangerously close to sounding like one of those �groovy free love� espousing hippies that I want to hit with a baseball bat.
