but he was more a collegian liberal type while I hung with the freaks.) Anyway, what we came up with was, I am sure, a completely lame and absurd piece of adolescent indignation. While college students revolted against the war, racism, and authoritarianism in school, we boiled it down to authoritarianism at school. The one thing I remember is that we had a cartoon of a teacher wearing a swastika armband busting a student for smoking in the boys’ room. (Eat your hearts out, Brownsville Station!) It was that stupid. To this day, I consider The Lower Left Corner a great success. Eight pages, Xeroxed front and back and stapled together… we entered the school each armed with a boxful… probably about 80 copies each total, and started handing them out selectively, avoiding the jocks and straights (by the way, straight used to mean “not hip.”) We got to homeroom—official start of the school day. The principle came over the loudspeaker. “Anyone caught with a copy of the paper called The Lower Left Corner will be immediately suspended from school.” All eyes on me. Homeroom ends and as the door to the hallway swings open, I step out into my first taste of celebrity. All the jocks that usually threaten to beat me up or cut my hair off are jostling for a copy of the forbidden paper… even thanking me upon receiving. Laughing, I thrust the pieces ‘o’ crap into the grasping hands, happy also to get rid of them so that I wouldn’t be caught with any copies… and then I waited for the administrative consequences.
4.17 Yippie! Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner hatched the term “Yippie” in 1967 as a deliberate attempt to reclaim the media hype surrounding the less political hippie movement. The Yippie publication Youth International Party Line (1971) is often cited as an essential milestone in the evolution of the hacker subculture
None were forthcoming. I had beaten the system… and in two ways. I’d gotten the administration to act out the very authoritarian impulse that we were lamely dithering about in print; and I learned something that served me well through the rest of my career as a high school “sixties radical. “ If the authorities think you’re political enough to run to the ACLU, they’ll leave you alone and bust your intended audience instead! We created and “printed” one more issue of The Lower Left Corner. As I recall, it was on an antiwar theme and we paid more attention to the quality of the text and design the second time out. This time, we handed them out without any attempted interference. Teachers even used it as a source for classroom discussions. And of course… no one cared. Let the story continue in Fall of 1971. I’m 19. I meet Tommy Hannifin at a rally against the killings at Attica State. He’s shouting the not-so-secret codeword… YIPPIE! We converge and excitedly share our mutual love of the Yippies funny and fun acid-infused, prankster, wild-in-the-streets take on The Movement as a Youth Culture Revolution. I tell him that I want to create a Binghamton Chapter of the Yippies and start an underground newspaper. And so we did. I should be clear. I had never thought… even for a moment, about journalism as a craft and/or a career. It didn’t even occur to me that I should think about it in those terms. Indeed, to the constant worry of Mom and Dad, I never thought about career at all. I assumed that The Revolution would render those issues moot. I simply reached for the Reality Hackers : Appendices : Participants
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