The Yippies' Last Stand
Running with the ghosts of Chicago's past
My scalp is tingling. Do you feel it, too? I think it has something to do with the electricity coursing through my system in anticipation of the Democratic National Convention kicking off tonight in Chicago. Or maybe it’s just the eczema.
The truth is, political conventions tend not to excite me. Back in my magazine days, when I was forced at gunpoint to report on them in person, I used to strive NOT to cover anything that actually happened during the four-day propaganda showcases inside the arena. Whole conventions would go by without me once setting foot in the main hall, with all those inebriated delegates wearing all manner of donkey-or-elephant themed atrocities, hoping their sartorial abasement would be captured for even a moment on live television, back when the networks still cared enough to broadcast all three primetime hours of these self-congratulatory wankfests.
Instead, I would attend off-site events, trying to bake some word-loaf out of things and people that had no chance of getting on TV. So I’d ride with the anarchists as they detonated a protest parade float in front of Madison Square Garden. Or I’d trek to an adult bookstore on the wrong side of Philly during the Republican convention to listen to porn star Nina Hartley — wearing nothing but stiletto heels and press-on nails — hold forth on the politics of the day to a crowd of lechy tossers (likely escapees from the Utah delegation), who’d dropped by to purchase video titles like White Trash Whores 3 and Black Knockers Volume 60. (Just because they were sweaty horndogs didn’t mean they didn’t celebrate diversity.) Or I’d hang out with actor Billy Baldwin at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, or actor Stephen Baldwin at the Republican convention in New York. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but for a brief spell in the early aughts, I was one of the nation’s foremost Baldwin Brother authorities.
This cycle, however, I will camp in front of C-SPAN, suffering through the nightly ordeal so I can chip in my two cents throughout the week over at the New York Times. By the time it’s over, odds are even that I’ll be too sick of the convention to write another piece here. (Though you never know.)
Neither will I inflict a convention preview on you. Okay, maybe just a short one: Kamala Harris will accept the nomination. Mawkish speeches will be made that will be overanalyzed to death, and that no civilians will remember thirty seconds after their conclusion. Crippled children or other “real-people” unfortunates will be wheeled out as political props. John Legend will sing, since whenever three or more Democrats are gathered anywhere for any reason, John Legend is required to sing.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this short romp through Chicago during the last time the Dems held their convention there in 1996. It was a different time: social media did not yet exist. Bill Clinton was cruising to his second term with none of us yet knowing what he’d been up to with his soon-to-be-famous intern. People actually thought it was acceptable to do the Macarena in public. And yet, my subjects were harking back to an earlier time, still: 1968, the last time the Democrats had come to Chicago, when Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police beat protesters like the family piñata.
At an Al Sharpton rally in a West Side slum, I met a shirtless man in a Stars’n’Stripes cape. (Professional journalist tip: whenever you meet a shirtless man in a cape, always break out your notebook.) His name was Free, and he was one of the last remaining Yippies, the clown princes of protesters who were all over the ’68 convention. We joined forces, and an odyssey ensued, which would see me ride along with Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman’s kid, as well as storming the wrong government building with the Chicago Seven’s Dave Dellinger, as we tried to get arrested. Things got a little messy, but it still beat the hell out of listening to an Al Gore speech.
So enjoy, as you limber up for this week’s festivities, with some quality bonus tracks on the other side of the paywall — if you’re still a free rider, which you can easily rectify:
Chicago
I linked up with the stranger named “Free” out of curiosity and desperation. Three convention days packed with Women’s Political Caucuses and DLC plenaries can leave a man spoiling for old-school high adventure. And Free promised me he was the world’s “most famous Yippie alive.”