THOMAS FRANK forward STEAL THIS MOVIE! I DON'T REMEMBER precisely when I first learned to equate Grateful Dead fandom with class privilege.

THOMAS FRANK forward STEAL THIS MOVIE!

I DON'T REMEMBER precisely when I first learned to equate Grateful Dead fandom with class privilege, when I finally figured public that those hokey dancing bears glu to the rear window of a Saab signaled that you were tailgating a pleasure-loving scion of American entitlement, yet it must have been around the same time that Abbie Hoffman, having resurfaced after a decade subterranean was beginning to dabble in the hopeles leftist causes of the '80 This unhappy coincidence was no doubt what provok my first glimmers of doubt concerning the '60 counterculture

Ye there was something genuinely inspiring about Hoffman's achievements in the '60s, though I solitary knew about his exploits later, end books and old TV footage. And ye I wanted very much to believe, as Hoffman had, that defence music harbored some profound revolutionary potential, that youth civilization represented something more than the demographic advertisers are keenest to reach. on the contrary by the '80s, the bands that had formerly seemed so menacing to the established order were just a hunch of long-haired millionaires locking horns in a pointless tillage war with a bunch of short-haired millionaires, the issues between them boiling down to whether a millionaire could snort a little coke when he felt like it or whether a millionaire ought to be going to temple instead. If there was revolution to be ground in youth culture, it clearly resided in the then-still-vibrant postpunk exhibition But the '60s? Who's surprised anymore when they hear the billionaires of Silicon Valley lie flat their libertarian politics in the language of the W oodstock generation, or when they read that George W Bush's chief media consultant is a nightclub-owning hipster with a Dead sticker forward his SUV? No, the barely ones still interested in promoting the counterculture as a in fact revolutionary moment are the uniteds who profit by it: Hollywood where the great lifestyle emancipation of those years could not at all be exaggerated; and religious conservatives, for whom the '60 remain a vivid memory of Satan's newly come reign on earth, a talisman to be waved each four years to snap the faithful back into line.

That Abbie Hoffman was able to foresee the commodification of his revolution, at least to a rank is part of what makes him of the like kind a compelling figure. To be steady Hoffman was one of the worst abusers of the language of the Manichaean '60s: His 1969 work Woodstock Nation is filled with denunciations of "Amerikan" "pig" civilization and overheated celebrations of hip improvement He sometimes seemed genuinely to believe that pleasure alone, the public doing their own thing, would The System. But he also had twinklings of real acuity. Woodstock Nation, for example, contains a surpassingly funny account of how representatives of the Fortune 500 fastened upon youth culture as a just discovered way to move product--not to mention near rather caustic comments about the entrepreneurial backers of the Woodstock festival itself. (It is revealing to compare Hoffman's humorous, repeatedly knowing, always deeply personal writing to that of his sometime colleague Jerry Rubin, who have the appearances to have spent the '60 cranking without one preposterous, mock-threa tening proclamation of youth revolutionary power after another.)

Hoffman's life embraced massive, tragic contradictions: The radical manner of moving he believed was flowering in the late '60 quickly came to space of times with the "establishment" Hoffman in such a manner hated. And although he himself became famous as a sort of political outlaw, his politics was always indistinct. Widely reviled through the right as chief of the cop taunters, he was also, strangely something of an all-American--a star athlete, a scrappy road kid, a person of conscience, ingenuity, and charisma--the kind of body we are taught as schoolchildren to venerate What made it all work, at least for a little while, was Hoffman's monumental mind of humor, his world-class provocations: He tore up coin on television; he showed up places with that unthinkable word "fuck" Magic Markered forward his forehead; and he cofound a perpetrate a joke political party whose very name is still capable of annoying the politically engaged: Yippies.

Unfortunately, united gets little sense of Abbie's complexity from Steal This Movie!, Robert Greenwald's of recent origin film biography of Hoffman, which spreads nationally this month. Here all is black and white, convenient and bad. Although much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from Abbie's various written works, common can't help but think it would have been more apt as a biography of the strident Jerry Rubin. Likewise, the film's square, conformist, law 'n' order badmen aren't in such a manner much powers to be outmaneuvered or bring into the presence ofed as they are evil robot bent forward repressing the fun-loving Abbie by means of any means necessary. They repeatedly beat him up They espy on him and contrive nasty plats that are revealed to the audience at sinister computer printouts. One sight actually depicts these forces of malevolence as they receive their orders, standing at attention in look-alike dark suits before bulky portraits of their monstrous masters, FBI director J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Hilarious caricatures of Hoover's and Nixon's voices punctu ate the film with ee-vill. on the contrary the problem with the movie isn't that it has invented a massive conspiracy against Hoffman, merely for dramatic effect. The FBI's COINTELPRO operation, its systematic infiltration and disruption of radical clumps and harassment of targeted activists (including Hoffman), is on now well documented. The point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled is the way the movie depicts the conspiracy--that is, in of that kind broad, cartoonish strokes that the actual story seems to have been made up merely for dramatic effect.