SLSL Intro, Steal This Dress!

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

Pynchon was a member of the inbetween generation:
too young for the beats, too old for the hippies. Ditto
for the Korean and Vietnam Police Actions. His was 
the cohort of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He was
never at risk during Johnson's big build up for being
drafted. By the time the proto-typical campus radical,
Mark Rudd, shut down Columbia- the spring before "The
Summer of Love-" Pynchon would have been thirty years
old. He would have been "redlined" by most of the hippie 
steet chicks as over the hill, or, part of "the system," 
unless, of course, he chose to play the role, like Abbie 
and Jerry.

Hoffman and Rubin, however, inspite of their frivolity
and media savvy, actually had more legitimate roots
in the liberal tradition, being sons of the secular Jewish
working class. Hoffman was a tireless worker for
Negro civil rights, and had risked life and limb in the 
deep south organizing voter registration drives.
Rubin was strictly working class, and studied in Israel,
where he came face-to-face with the sectarian hatred 
we are all too familiar with these days.


Hoffman and Rubin were responsible, to a large extent,
for politicizing the hippie generation, using the media 
which the hippies had been weaned on. To that end, they
became cartoons. Both are now members of the 
"Thanatoid Nation."

In terms of age, Hoffman, Rubin and Pynchon would
have been closer to Weed Atman and Brock Vond,
rather than to the "college kids" of the time.

respectfully