Yippie, Stew Albert: RIP

aron pieman kay pieman [at] pieman.org link


i knew stew albert thru my relationships with the yippies....i first saw him at a symposium against repression in 1969 at ucla....then i would follow his acrivities via reading the berkeley bab and berkeley tribe...that led to me along with many others traveling to miami beach in the summer of 1972 to protest the vietnam war....at both the repukelikkkan and the dumbocratic conventions which were being held there....
there i met up with the yippies and i relocated to nyc(prior to that i was living in la, organizing the griffith park love-ins).
anyway i would be in touch with stew now and then especially the last 5-6 years since we renewed our acquaintance online....
it was great that stew was online inspiring progressive folks to rise up against bush along with a multitude of other webspinners.....he will be missed!! i will miss calling him for political inspiration!!! however in stew's memory, we cant give up!!! hey it was the early yippies that got me into political pie throwing!!!

aron pieman kay
http://www.pieman.org
pieman [at] pieman.org


http://www.pieman.org

As one of the creative directors of the Yippies, Stew Albert helped to script the 60s. Stew's life is a joyous rebuttal to the slurs of mean-spirited bigots such as David Horowitz and Newt Gingrich that the 60s counterculture unleashed a moral rot at core of American society.

Of course, Stew was the true moralist. And the prime moral virtue was to live honestly. He had seen his own government spy on him and his family for no justifiable cause, politicians betray their constituents, cops beat and gas demonstrators on the streets of Chicago, university presidents summon National Guard troops onto campuses to abuse and kill students, and generals repeatedly lie about the war in Vietnam, where 54,000 young Americans and 2 million Vietnamese died.

The Yippies thrived on the exposure of moral hypocrisy. Their creative mischief made radical politics fun. The Yippies proved to be more effective than the dour pronouncements of Tom Hayden or the trustfund bombers in the Weather Underground. The Yippies didn't need George Lakoff to tell them how to "reframe" an issue. They learned from the Situationists as well as vaudeville acts and Borscht Belt comedy routines, from the Marx cousins, Karl and Groucho. And because of that their legacy lives in Earth First and Greenpeace. The chaotic carnival of protest that overswept the streets of Seattle during the WTO meetings owed much to the Yippie brain trust of Albert, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

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http://counterpunch.org/stclair01312006.html