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"Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive": Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow

"Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive": Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System... MOLLY HITE he title quotation, "fun actually was becoming quite subversive," is not from Gravity's Rainbow, although I would argue that Thomas Pynchon's great novel takes it for granted. The observation is part of Abbie Hoffman's testimony during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven, young men from various antiwar and revolutionary groups who were accused of disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention. In statements carefully scripted to be cued by his attorney, Leonard Weinglass, often with unintentionally hilarious interruptions by prosecutor Richard Schultz and judge Julius Hoffman, Abbie observed, "fun was very important . . . it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rat race." Furthermore, he added, the rat race, the nine-to-five, five-day-a-week workload at the center of the lives of most middle-class Americans even during the economic boom of the late 1960s, "didn't make any sense because in a few years . . . machines would do all the work anyway" (Hoffman). Hoffman's point, familiar at the time to sociologists and cultural theorists as well as members of the counterculture, was that the work ethic had lost http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Literature University of Wisconsin Press

"Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive": Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow

Hite, Molly
Contemporary Literature , Volume 51 (4) – Apr 2, 2011
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Abstract

MOLLY HITE he title quotation, "fun actually was becoming quite subversive," is not from Gravity's Rainbow, although I would argue that Thomas Pynchon's great novel takes it for granted. The observation is part of Abbie Hoffman's testimony during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven, young men from various antiwar and revolutionary groups who were accused of disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention. In statements carefully scripted to be cued by his attorney, Leonard Weinglass, often with unintentionally hilarious interruptions by prosecutor Richard Schultz and judge Julius Hoffman, Abbie observed, "fun was very important . . . it was a direct rebuttal of the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rat race." Furthermore, he added, the rat race, the nine-to-five, five-day-a-week workload at the center of the lives of most middle-class Americans even during the economic boom of the late 1960s, "didn't make any sense because in a few years . . . machines would do all the work anyway" (Hoffman). Hoffman's point, familiar at the time to sociologists and cultural theorists as well as members of the counterculture, was that the work ethic had lost

Journal

Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press

Published: Apr 2, 2011

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