Brain Damage Control: The Yippie Scourge

Recently, the Associated Press published a profile of me by cultural correspondent John Rogers. This is what he wrote:

“The movement [Krassner] helped launch is not remembered fondly by everyone. David Horowitz, the former 1960s radical turned conservative commentator, said that although he likes Krassner personally, he believes he and other Yippies must shoulder much of the blame for crises such as AIDS and drug addiction. ‘It was one long incitement against America, against all the guidelines, the morals and mores that helped people make it through life,’ [Horowitz] said of the Yippie movement. ‘I think Yippies in the end were a terribly destructive force.’”

So I contacted some original Yippies and Yippie sympathizers and asked for their recollections of our insidious plan.

Michael Simmons: “The Yippie High Command decided that more junkies and sick homosexuals would radicalize the populace, leading to revolution, while acknowledging that we run the risk of not only pushing the country rightward, but encouraging certain former left-wing radicals – even red-diaper babies – to defect to the lunatic fringe.”

Matt Neuman: “Wasn’t a prevailing theory of HIV’s origin the eating of green monkeys by humans? What if Yippies broke into a factory that makes Slim Jims and substituted dehydrated green-monkey meat for the dried beef? As for Yippies causing drug addiction, that’s too far-fetched.”

Lou DeCosta: “Steal a helicopter and dump concentrated doses of heroin and the AIDS virus up and down the California aqueduct so it’ll get carried to LA. Everything – good and bad – starts in LA and spreads out from there. Then, in a Yippie version of Helter Skelter, mass panic ensues, and the Yips – who have stolen the government’s top-secret AIDS vaccine for themselves – step in to fill the leadership void, quash the masses and institute the American Mao-Mao revolution (but without the drab jackets). Hey, it still might work.”

Judy Gumbo: “The Yippies accept full responsibility for causing the entire AIDS and drug epidemic – and, to make up for it, we and the entire million-person Yippie Army are going to dig up the gigantic Yippie stash of marijuana that’s buried under the Pentagon and bail out every person with AIDS or addicted to drugs who wants to partake.”

Rex Weiner: “There was the Jujitsu Solution, which was meant to pull the right wing into our grasp and wrest them under control, entirely by their own aggression and unbeknownst to them. Our movement employs producers within the television industry who control talking heads like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in order to capture the attention of the right-wingers. Movement producers use high-tech methods to insert ultrasound waves in their broadcasts, which cause the cells of repeat listeners to these shows to mutate, divide and multiply with extreme morbidity – that’s called cancer, AIDS, erectile dysfunction, Lyme disease, hangnails, whatever.

“The left, of course, long ago cornered the market on cures for those maladies with the help of indigenous witch doctors who supplied the ancient secrets of rainforest-tree bark, snake venom, toad sweat and hemp-blossom essences, including Viagra, Cialis and even Extenz – all of which is a left-wing plot to limit the staying power and shorten the penises of right-wingers, thus giving relatively well-hung left-wingers with more staying power the evolutionary advantage.”

Michael Dare: “What a scumbag David Horowitz is. Too bad you didn’t levitate the Pentagon and drop it on his head. For him to blame the Yippies for the actions of the CIA, who actually did participate in the AIDS and crack epidemics, is beyond redemption. Why would you have done such a thing? Obviously, you weren’t on the take. Let’s see those checks from the CIA to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin for ‘having sex and doing drugs.’”

Paul Krassner did a reading from Who’s to Say What’s Obscene, plus a Q&A with the audience, at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. You can see that hysterical event on C-SPAN at c-spanarchives.org/program/289187-1.