From my reread of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman:
Steal This Book is, in a way, a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika. It preaches jailbreak. It shows you where exactly how to place the dynamite that will destroy the walls. The first section--SURVIVE!--lays out a potential action program for our new Nation. The chapter headings spell out the demands for a free society. A community where the technology produces goods and services for whoever needs them, come who may. It calls on the Robin Hoods of Santa Barbara Forest to steal from the robber barons who own the castles of capitalism. It implies that the reader already is “ideologically set,” in that he understands corporate feudalism as the only robbery worthy of being called “crime,” for it is committed against the people as a whole. Whether the ways it describes to rip-off shit are legal or illegal is irrelevant. The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
Community within our Nation, chaos in theirs; that is the message of SURVIVE!
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to fuck the system, but destroy it. The weapons are carefully chosen. They are “home-made,” in that they are designed for use in our unique electronic jungle. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be fucked. Let me illustrate the point. Amerika was built on the slaughter of a people. That is its history. For years we watched movie after movie that demonstrated the white man’s benevolence. Jimmy Stewart, the epitome of fairness, puts his arm around Cochise and tells how the Indians and the whites can live in peace if only both sides will be reasonable, responsible and rational (the three R’s imperialists always teach the “natives”). “You will find good grazing land on the other side of the mountain,” drawls the public relations man. “Take your people and go in peace.” Cochise as well as millions of youngsters in the balcony of learning, were being dealt off the bottom of the deck. The Indians should have offed Jimmy Stewart in every picture and we should have cheered ourselves hoarse. Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Be clever using section two; clever as a snake. Dig the spirit of the struggle. Don’t get hung up on a sacrifice trip. Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn’t allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.
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For better or for worse (probably for worse), this passage had a big impact on me when I first read it at age 18. I was unfortunately influenced by some of Abbie Hoffman's outrageous pronouncements like:
To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
...which at the time caused me to think it was okay to steal from a supermarket if you could get away with it. (Sigh, what an idiot I was.)
During my college years, I was fond of quoting this section. My email archive reveals that on December 2nd, 1996, I actually copied this out into an email I wrote to a friend. I included this introduction at the time:
Here’s some food for thought for you. It is a passage from Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (Yippie founder, and one of the Chicago eight--but you probably already knew that.) Take note—I don’t agree with everything he says. I am in total agreement with him when he points out the problems in American society (or Amerika as Abbie puts it, but I’m not sure what the unconformist spelling stands for) however I part ways from him regarding his violent solutions. Here it is:
....and then I proceeded to quote the entire above section.
I also quoted a line from this section in my Chimes article on the Death Penalty from 1999 (see here and here):
“Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime.” -- Abbie Hoffman.
....which I now also look back on with embarrassment. For one thing, quoting Abbie Hoffman in a political article only encourages people not to take you seriously. But even beyond that, this quote wasn't really about the death penalty. Abbie Hoffman was talking about the difference between killing in war and killing in peacetime. In my mind, it was related to the death penalty because I equated "murder in a uniform" to a uniformed officer executing the death penalty, and "murder in a costume" to the person receiving the death penalty. But I think I was stretching things a bit too far.
But put a pin in all of that for right now. When I finish this book, and get around to reviewing it, I'll talk more about the politics of it. For now, I want to forget about the politics, and focus on how effective this prose is.
I was taking a freshman English class at Calvin College at the time, and every week we had to bring in a piece of writing that we liked to share with the class. I brought this piece in. I edited it slightly. I cut out the meandering parts and just kept in the punches. And, because this was Calvin College, I changed "we will forever be fucked" to "we will forever be deceived". If memory serves, my edited version was something like this.
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to change the system, but destroy it. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be deceived.Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Surprisingly (this was Calvin College, after all), the professor actually liked it. After I got done reading it aloud, she commented, "A very powerful piece. And what makes it so powerful? It's that parallel structure."
And, I think I agree. If you read the above passage aloud, and you emphasis the words dramatically, and get into the rhythm of the parallel structure, then it can be a very effective piece of rhetoric.
Sidenote: In the sentence:
A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression.
...I was never sure if "its" was meant to refer to the army or the small nation. That is to say, I wasn't sure if "it's people" was supposed to mean "its own people" (i.e. the people of the country that the army is from, or in other words, American citizens) or if "its people" is the people of the small nation. Back in college, I thought it meant the former, but rereading it now, I think it's probably the latter.
So, if we're scoring this passage on its prose style, maybe take off one point for an ambiguous pronoun.
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