GLENN BECK AIN’T ABBIE HOFFMAN

Last Saturday, I ran a piece by David Brooks – The New York Times village idiot – that blathered on about how the Tea Bag activists tactics were not dissimilar to those of the Yippies of the 1960s. So okay. I was sold by the basic observation. But, when Brooks started comparing Glenn Beck to Abbie Hoffman, folks cried enough already. I only met Abbie on two occasions, and I’ve neither met Beck nor would want to, but be assured, good people. The two are totally dissimilar. Beck is no Hoffman. Mercifully Alexander Zaitchik has made the same point less flippantly and in print. (From Munz.)

“There is a fresh interpretive fad in the young field of Tea Party Studies: The New Right of 2010 as the New Left of the 1960s. According to this nascent meme, today’s conservative grassroots holds strong echoes of earlier radicalism on the left. The Tea Party movement that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama’s birth certificate is, in this view, more than just the latest herpetic outbreak of Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid “pseudo-conservatism.” It is a reincarnation of the New Left and 1960s counterculture. The Tea Partiers, it is becoming fashionable to argue, are the heirs not just of the John Birch Society and the young Barry Goldwater, but also of Students for a Democratic Society and the young Abbie Hoffman. If this analogy smells suspect, it’s for good reason. Yet it appears to be gaining traction, especially among a certain breed of moderate with confused understandings of Tea Party conservatism, the New Left, and '60s counterculture. In late February, Michael Lind wrote a Salon piece in which he claimed, "The tea partiers are the hippies of our time…In Glenn Beck, the countercultural right has found its own Abbie Hoffman." Although Hoffman was never a hippie (he called flower children "glassy eyed zombies" and passed through the civil rights and antiwar movements on his way to founding the Youth International Party in 1968), and Beck is neither exuberant nor radical (he is a sexually repressed Mormon businessman who exemplifies modern crackpot reaction), Lind’s strange comparison nonetheless found an admirer in David Brooks of the New York Times. Last Friday, March 4, Brooks expanded on Lind’s thesis in a column titled "The Wal-Mart Hippies." (Click here for the rest.)

And while we on the subject of chaos and disorder, my ego insisted that I post a link to some of my own recollections of back when I was in the 1960s confrontational demonstration business. (Just click here.)

And now click here for The Rolling Stones (when they were really good)

The secret words are Forced and Repeat