'We would not be turned back'

The MOBE is predicting thousands of young mainstream "Clean for Gene" supporters of anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy will descend on Chicago, while we Yippies use the underground press to try and attract countercultural youth with an imaginary scheme to put LSD in the drinking water. This act, FYI, is physically impossible; given the amount of LSD needed to make any difference. I know, I once put hundreds of packets red dye in the reflecting pool in Washington DC to protest the war and it just dissipated.

For the sake of historical accuracy, I will also disclose that we Yippies claim we're going to fuck on the beaches and burn Chicago to the ground. Ok, so, this sounds a little over the top threatening, but why would anyone in their right mind actually take Yippie seriously?

Mayor Daley is not a Yippie.

Nor is FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

By the time we roll into town, police forces from all over the state have been brought in, the cops are wired, the National Guard is mobilized, and tension is extremely high. Stew always believed that Mayor Daley, a Democrat, was set up by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to overreact to our Yippie exaggerations, so Americans would watch approvingly on television as hippies and anti-war demonstrators are rightfully put down and Richard Nixon gets elected as a law and order candidate.

Which is, in fact, what comes to pass. Mayor Daley denies all permits.

In fact, six months before the Convention, Mayor Daley had issued a "shoot to kill" order for demonstrators.

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The problem for them was that they underestimated us.  We were frightened but despite our fears we persisted.  They may have thought their threats before the Convention would deter us.  They were wrong.  They may have thought the first round of tear gas would deter us.  They were wrong.  They may have thought the first cracked head would stop us.  They were wrong.  We would not be turned back.

It was an amazing few days and a yippie's delight in the sense that we were always out to capture the media's attention and in this case we did.  The media reported the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, because they found themselves at the end of the same billy clubs and tear gas as we.  Even reporters as respectable as Dan Rather were attacked by the cops.  They were not embedded journalists.  For that moment in time there seemed to actually be a free press!  One reporter is quoted as saying, "This whole thing has moved me so far left, I can see the back of my head." 

The long-term impact of Chicago 68 has been much debated.  There are many layers to such an analysis and that is not the subject of this piece.  But there is no doubt that Chicago 68 became an iconic moment in American history.

As I write this there are people outside both Democratic and Republican conventions chanting, "Let's recreate 68."  Of course history cannot be recreated.  These are very different times.  But let's hope the determination to be part of a worldwide process for peace and justice persists.

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Chicago 10 is a cleverly conceived, if at times disappointingly realized, attempt at historical narration that strives to deliver a contemporary resonance. The most affecting piece of the film comes from the longest uninterrupted archival footage, which shows Chicago police wading into streets jammed with demonstrators with clubs and fists raging wildly. The tear gas residue, the carnal brutality at the hands of the state, and the transparently false statements by elites justifying their savagery will be familiar to anyone who saw footage from the 2008 Republican National Convention protests. And in a frightening example of history's repeating cycle, eight protest organizers arrested during the recent protests now face up to seven and a half years for conspiracy charges amplified by Minnesota's version of the Patriot Act. Yesterday's allegation of communist subversion is today's terrorism enhancement charge.

Yet with a different political climate and a different convention protest, the Minnesota 8 trial, should it come to that, will hardly resemble their Chicago forbearers. In providing a representation both romantic and convincing, Chicago 10 shows that "state of mind trials," as Hoffman described the conspiracy, are corrupt forms of theater. Perhaps the best advice from that trial for thinking about the current one comes not from Hoffman but Dellinger. In his pre-sentencing statement, which he quotes in his memoir, From Yale to Jail, Dellinger said "I think I shall sleep better and happier and with a greater sense of fulfillment in whatever jails I am in for however many years than if I had compromised, if I had pretended the problems were any less real than they are, or if I had sat here passively in the courthouse while justice was being throttled and the truth was being denied. I salute my brothers and sisters in Vietnam, in the ghetto, in the women's liberation movement, all the people all over the world who are struggling to make true and real for all people the ideals on which this country was supposed to be founded, but never, never lived up to."

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