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Farber then discusses Mayor Daley and his police department, and
points out that Mayor Daley did not agree with Tom Hayden about war
criminals and the illegitimacy of the Democratic Party. The Mayor, who may
not have been the nicest man, was not a stupid one. At a news conference
before the convention, he said:
We are talking to the hippies, the Yippies, and the flippies and
everything else . .. We are talking to the newspapers and some of
them are hippies and Yippies. And to the TV and radio, and a lot of
them, I guess, are leaders in these movements.
The Yippies and Mobe were successful in "freaking out" the Mayor and
the police. Rumors abounded of dynamite under gas lines, poison in hotel
food, LSD in the city's water supply, mortar attacks on the convention, cut
power lines, and even assassinations of political leaders. The protesters pro–
voked, cajoled, heckled, and ridiculed the forces of order, and succeeded in
getting the police to lose their cool, to riot, smash heads indjscriminately, in–
cluding some established and middle-aged heads, and some placed in front of
television cameras. The Yippie and Mobe strategy of Hayden and Davis
proved to be successful beyond anyone's wildest imagination, illustrating how
minorities could use the media to enormous political effect.
It
is a lesson that
passed into the commonplaces of rarucal politics. Though Farber doesn't draw
tills point out, ills study of "perception" is also a study in impression manage–
ment, and here the few scored a big victory.
The Yippies understood , at a level of sophistication adequate to the
task, the political importance of mass culture and television. They also
understood the political importance of drugs. Here is Jerry Rubin in 1968:
Marijuana makes each person God ... Marijuana is destroying the
schools. Education is conditioning. Pot deconditions. School makes us
cynics. Pot makes us dreamers. Education polarizes our brains into
subjects, categories, division , concepts. Pot scrambles our brains and
presents everything as a perfect mess ... Marijuana is a truth serum
... "Why die on Hamburger Hill?" asks the pot-smoking Amerikan
[sic]
soldier, as he points his gun at the Captain who orders him to take a hill
only the Viet Kong want?
John Sinclair, a musician from Detroit, praised LSD for bringing
"everything into focus for the first time in our lives . . . Until we started eat–
ing
all
that acid we couldn't figure out what was happening - we knew tlllngs
were all wrong the way they were but we didn't know how they could be
illfferent ... LSD cleared
all
that up." It sure djd.
