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On the 40th anniversary of the antiwar demonstrations at the Democrats' convention in Chicago, Yippie Paul Krassner remembers how it all got started...

This past week marked the 40th anniversary of the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention.

Flash back to 1967. Abbie Hoffman, his wife, Anita, and I took a work-vacation in the Florida Keys. It was the week before Christmas. We had bought a small tree and spray-painted it with canned snow. Now we were tripping on LSD as a hurricane reached full force. The wind and rain were fierce, and our rented cottage on stilts was shaking.

“Hey,” Abbie yelled over the roar, “This is powerful f****n’ acid!”

We watched Lyndon Johnson on a black-and-white TV set, although LBJ was purple-and-orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. “I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war,” he was saying. And the heads of the other presidents were all snickering and covering their mouths with their hands, so they wouldn’t laugh out loud. This was the precise moment we acknowledged that we’d be going to Chicago in August to protest the Vietnam War. A bipartisan war, that was then under the Democrats’ watch.

I called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting when we returned. I also called Dick Gregory in Chicago, since it was his city we were planning to “invade.” He told me that he had decided to run for president, and he wanted to know if I thought Bob Dylan would make a good vice president.

“Oh, sure, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think Dylan would ever get involved in electoral politics.”

On the afternoon of December 31, several activist friends gathered at the Hoffmans’ Lower East Side apartment, smoking Colombian marijuana and planning for Chicago. Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats presented politicians their speeches at the Amphitheater, we would in turn present bands--from the Fugs (a missing link between rock and punk) to the MC5 (a “kick out the jams” group from Detroit)--performing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft.

We sought to utilize the media as an organizing tool, but we needed a name so that journalists could have a “who” for their “who-what-when-where-and-why” lead paragraph--a name to signify the radicalization of hippies. I came up with “the Yippies” to describe a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and straight politicos. In the process of cross-fertilization at civil rights marches and antiwar rallies, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the globe. It was the ultimate extension of dehumanization.

Bob Pierson--a police provocateur disguised as a biker and acting as Jerry’s bodyguard--was in the group which lowered an American flag in Grant Park, the incident which set off what “The Walker Report: Rights In Conflict” would offically label as “a police riot.” Pierson admitted, “I joined in the chants and taunts against the police and provoked them into hitting me with their clubs. They didn’t know who I was, but they did know that I had called them names and struck them with one or more weapons.”

Flash ahead to 2005. I got a call from Brett Morgen, who would be directing a documentary about the protests and the conspiracy trial that followed. It would have no narrator and no talking heads, only archival footage and animated re-enactments. Brett invited me to write a few of the animated scenes. The film woud be based on actual events and transcriptions of trial testimony. However, the image of Allen Ginsberg in the lotus position levitating several feet above the floor while chanting “Om,” can be construed as cartoonic license.

Chicago 10 opened the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, but the opening scene of the hurricane was missing. The backers had objected to the use of LSD, fearful of diverting attention from the main focus. I was disappointed, if only for the sake of countercultural history. The CIA originally envisioned employing LSD as a means of control. Instead, for millions of young people, it served as a vehicle to explore their own inner space, deprogramming themselves from mainstream culture and living their alternative. The CIA’s scenario had backfired. Anyway, my suggestion--instead of referring to it as acid, Abbie could yell, “Hey, this is powerful f****n’ aspirin”--was rejected.

In the scene of veteran activist Dave Dellinger saying, “The power of the people is our permit.” At the start of a march from the bandstand to the Amphitheater, I would’ve liked to hear Phil Ochs’ song, “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” but I appreciated Brett’s use of Eminem’s rap, “Mosh,” instead. Rather than music from the 1960s, Brett preferred contemporary groups, from Beastie Boys to Rage Against The Machine.

The DVD of Chicago 10 has just been released, and it will be shown on PBS October 22, 2008. Meanwhile, in a masterstroke of co-option, a commercial for the Oral-B battery-operated toothbrush now features the ’60s slogan, “Power To The People.”

PAUL KRASSNER is the founding editor of The Realist and a founding member of the the Yippies. He blogs regularly for ARTHUR MAGAZINE, the FREE all-ages counterculture magazine. Find out more about this Great American freethinker at paulkrassner.com.