Love and Dope

Our combox pal Michael Blowhard makes a great find from the celebrated art critic Robert Hughes (whose book "Barcelona" is one of my favorites), writing here about the damage the Sixties -- his Sixties -- did to him and his wife and child. Read this excerpt -- but the whole piece is an extraordinary tale of life on another planet. The very last paragraph, where he tells what happened to his son, is heart-stoppingly sad. But this take on the Sixties is the philosophical gist of his piece:

It was a time of collective self-importance, which masked — not very effectively — a striking indifference to the way the world actually did and might work. I hardly met a single person in the “underground” context who didn’t, no matter how sexually available or amusing, turn out in the end to be ignorant and rather a bore.

The depths of tedium that can be plumbed by sitting around half stoned, listening to people chatter moonily about reuniting humankind and erasing its aggressive instincts through Love and Dope, are scarcely imaginable to those who have not suffered them.

I went through a stupid infatuation with the Sixties for a couple of years in college. Came to an abrupt halt when I finally met my hero, Abbie Hoffman, whose visit to campus I'd helped arrange. I was his handler. Radicalism was just a shtick for him by that point. He was late for his lecture; I found him in his room on the phone with his bookie back in NYC. He told me he had more riding on the Mets game that night than we were paying him to speak (which was thousand$). After his off-the-cuff talk, telling adventures tales from the hallowed Sixties, we repaired to a bar with members of the Progressive Students Network, the campus leftie group. Abbie proceeded to eat a handful of pills and wash them down with pitcher upon pitcher of beer. Later, he asked me to take him to a place where he could meet a woman for sex -- but he put it so crudely that it shocked me, a good little liberal idealist, that he was such a sexist.

We ended up the night drunk, driving around the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College campus, yelling out the window like idiots. The Jimmy Swaggart Bible Police stopped us, and the guy who was driving had to try to talk him out of having us arrested for trespassing, which we certainly were. Abbie leans out the window and bellows drunkenly to the security guard, "I'll have you know that if you arrest us, I'll have it on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning."

The rent-a-cop, to his everlasting credit, drawled, "Mister, I don't care who you are, get back in the car and shut your mouth."

He let us go. We dropped Abbie off back at the place where he was staying, in luxury campus housing for special guests of the university. He ended up smoking dope that night there with some nut from the PSN, and nearly missed his flight the next morning. A few days later, I heard from a friend at Penn, I believe it was, that Abbie Hoffman had just been there speaking, straight from his appearance at LSU, where according to Abbie the students were too afraid to stand up to that fascist Jimmy Swaggart.

Abbie Hoffman overdosed on pills two or three years later. The Wikipedia entry on him says Hoffman "has remained a symbol of the youth rebellion of that decade." Yep.