Hooray for the Yippies

Phillip Adams reports for The Australian:

Contemporaries of the hippies, the Yippies were a small group of satirical subversives who persuaded the media and the FBI they were a mass movement.

They did this by initially holding press conferences outside stadiums as crowds left rock concerts. Then they became one. A few of the originals remain friends of mine and, half a ¬century later, our phone conversations are still listened-in-to by the FBI. This is understandable given the Yippies' successful invasion of Disneyland, their rabble-rousing activities at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, their unsuccessful attempt to levitate the Pentagon and their threat to put LSD into the water supplies of major cities. An attempt to gridlock Washington DC on May Day 1971 by crowding roads and bridges led to the largest mass arrest in US history. Oh, I almost forgot. They tried to run a pig for the Presidency.

One of my favourite Yippie stunts involved a few sneaking into the visitor's gallery at the New York Stock Exchange and tossing handfuls of dollar bills over the railings. Here, in the belly of the capitalist beast, rich men in suits trampled each other over a few crumbs from the table, and the place had to be closed down. Before spending billions on the bail-out, Obama could have tried the same approach – to dramatise Wall Street's insatiable greed.

As well as tossing money, the Yippies tossed pies. They reinvented cream pies as a potent form of political protest – weapons of mess distraction. Public figures up to William F. Buckley Jr were targeted by Yippie hitmen. And if the Right didn't like the Yippies, neither did the traditional, humourless Left, who saw them as foolish and embarrassing. Exactly right. That's what made the Yippies so marvellous.

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