For this future cultural analyst, the legendary '60s were an after-school special. And in my sprout's eye view of the world, Abbie Hoffman came on screen at the perfect time to serve as a more timely and hip successor to Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman.
So Hoffman, no less than Mr. Neuman, will always have a place in my heart, if only for the infamous Wall Street action. That was the one in which Hoffman and friends went to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and showered the trading floor with thousands of dollar bills.
As expected, the brokers made a piggish spectacle of themselves groveling for the loot. The revelatory symbolic purity of that act stands. And so does the adolescent thrill of seeing all those stuffed shirts reduced to their lowest common denominator.
When Hoffman emerged on the '60s sound stage with actions of that sort, he quickly stood out from the crowd of more "serious" anti-war spokespersons. Hoffman was different because he had a sense of humor, which always seems to be a rare commodity among world-savers.
But mostly Hoffman stood out because he was one of the very few participants in the '60s melodrama who realized at the time that he was actually playing a part in a TV show. With rock-and-roll instincts and a dash of undergrad psychology, Hoffman tried to turn the familiar devices of TV "info-tainment" into instruments of political power. For all of his subsequently honorable efforts as a community organizer, and for all his other less honorable moments, that prescient use of television will undoubtedly stand as his legacy to history.
It's an ambiguous legacy. For one thing, although they would never admit it, contemporary right-wing media wizards from Michael Deaver to Roger Ailes owe Abbie Hoffman a big political debt. Also Abbie-and-company's eye-catching media politics probably did retard the development of a genuinely popular movement back in the glory days. And it certainly gave momentum to some of the movement's more narcissistic and self-destructive components.
But Hoffman didn't invent screen-deep politics, he just discovered what already was. It's pointless to bemoan that reality now that the genie is out of the bottle. The problem now is to find ways to continue the struggle for democracy and peace on that very ephemeral terrain. Hoffman at least tried to do that.
MEMORIES OF HOFFMAN as a public figure are clouded by his long disappearance in the 1970s. In 1974 he was busted in a cocaine deal under circumstances that were never properly explained by either Hoffman or the police. Facing a possible life sentence, Hoffman split. He finally surrendered in 1980 and disclosed that he had been living and working in upstate New York under the name of Barry Freed. In that identity he had a new family, was the leader of a successful local environmental campaign, had testified before a U.S. Senate committee, and served on a New York state environmental commission.
After surfacing, Hoffman served a short sentence in an anti-drug program and returned to his life's work of creative agitation against the capitalist state. He was then, at best, only a second-tier celebrity. But even in his newfound relative obscurity, Hoffman continued to fight the good fight as a grassroots environmental organizer and as a national father-figure to the re-emergent student movement. I think he didn't get enough credit for this. Memory being what it is, he was often lumped in with his colleagues from those days who had moderated, mellowed, or sold out.
For the record Hoffman wasn't the one who ended up working on Wall Street. That was Jerry Rubin. He wasn't the one who fell for a teenage Indian guru and was last seen selling insurance. That was Rennie Davis. He wasn't the one who married a movie star and became a state legislator. That was Tom Hayden.
Hoffman was the one who moved to un-exotic, upper-middle-class Bucks County, Pennsylvania (where he died), to lead a rather unromantic environmental campaign. He was the one who last made headlines going to jail with students who were protesting CIA campus recruitment, and winning acquittal on the charges.
Hoffman was nobody's hero. He often came across as cantankerous, eccentric, and even obnoxious. But he stayed true to his school. And these days that counts.
Up to that point, Hoffman's is a great American story. It was not for nothing that he titled his autobiography Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. It should have been. Or better yet a mini-series. And the last episode should have been predictable. It should have depicted an aged Hoffman bent but unbowed and still carrying the flame of radical dissent. In this ending he, like Saul Alinsky and I.F. Stone before him, would become a venerated figure despite himself.
But that's not how the story ended. Instead of the martyr's death Hoffman might have welcomed, or the wise old age he and we deserved, Hoffman just got way too drunk and took way too many downers and never woke up. It was a death full of private anguish and empty of all but the most ghoulish public import. It was the celebrity death of a Truman Capote or Dorothy Kilgallen, and of the legions of lonely, depressed, and unfamous others.
It was sad. It was embarrassing. And, perhaps worst of all, it was inappropriate.
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