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RICHARD POIRIER
assertion with the somewhat perplexing remark that "the new
structure will be created by the new man." How is this to be,
unless the old structure, in all its ascribed repressiveness, produced
the new man who will then produce the new structure?
Rubin's "demonstration theater" as described in his
Yippie
Manifesto
is an expression of bombastic assurance about the Pro–
tean self. In chorus with other radical writers Rubin asserts that
"the mind is programmed," but he is even more confident than
the others that somehow we can, as he tells us, "get in there and
break that bloody program!" Acting on his own instructions he per–
forms not one but various parts of himself. When refused entrance to
the New York Stock Exchange by an official who tells him that "you
can't come in. You are hippies and you are coming to demon–
strate," he simply changes identities, or rather calls upon one of
his other identities, and thereby gains admission. "Hippies? Dem–
onstrate? We're Jews," he retorts. "And we're coming to see the
stock market." But he does more than perform parts of himself;
he also performs those parts of the culture which others do not
want to see "demonstrated." He insists that art or performance
can be a distillation, a concentration of the images of life. He thus
disrupts the Stock Exchange not by "demonstrating" himself, as it
were, but by demons trating the nature of the Stock Exchange and
by forcing some of its habitues to "demonstrate" those parts of
themselves which they hide under the style of decorum. He and
his friends drop dollar bills from the top of the Exchange and
watch "these guys who deal in millions of dollars as a game-–
chasing and fighting each other for dollar bills thrown by the
hippies."
In a curious way unknown to him, Rubin also resembles an
earlier American dissident, Henry Thoreau. By punnings and role
playings, Thoreau's style is designed to subvert the meaning in his
society of, for example, "ownership," just as Rubin catches a
number. of social absurdities in such puns as "subpoenas envy";
and Rubin believes, even more than did Thoreau, in the possibil–
ities of creating new myths and a new man. "We are a new genera–
tion, species, race," he asserts, and seems little concerned with
the problem that if contemporary man really is as programmed as
he says he is, then Rubin ought to agree with Harold Rosenberg
