Throughout this year I have embarked on a journey of self-education through reading inflammatory recipes for revolution and amongst the incendiary material on my bookshelf, works concerning the New Left appear the most prominently. The New Left, unlike the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s, focused on social activism and American culture. Elvis Presley and the Lone Ranger were just as important as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Their main aims were ending the War in Viet FUCKINGnam, ending racism at home, and protesting the conformist, capitalist, greedy, Amerikkkan lifestyle, amongst other initiatives, As I mentioned, I’ve read several books this year on this subject that I highly recommend to anyone and everyone. These include:

From Yale to Jail By: David Dellinger
Steal This Book By: Abbie Hoffman
The Black Panthers Speak By: Various Panthers
Kingdom of Fear By: Hunter S. Thompson
Flashbacks By: Timothy Leary
Soon to Be A Major Motion Picture By: Abbie Hoffman
Fugitive Days By: Bill Ayers
Do iT! Scenarios of the Revolution By: Jerry Rubin

It’s been fantastic learning about these turbulent times through such diverse, charismatic, and first hand accounts. It’s really funny seeing how certain figures are portrayed differently in various works. For example, acid guru, Timothy Leary paints Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as pessimistic, Anti-American agitators that advocate violent revolution. Leary says some nice things about the boys, but he tends to omit their personal charm and dedication to social change. On the contrary, through the Yippies’ eyes, the sky is the limit, nope scratch that, after they levitated the Pentagon they could fly with it to the moon! You’ll have to do some reading to understand what the hell I’m talking about right now haha. All of these characters appear in just about all of these books at least once. And the aforementioned protests at the Pentagon, the 1968 (Un)Democratic National Convention and ensuing Chicago Conspiracy Trial are events that are discussed in depth in all of these works. I have also read about Tim Leary’s prison break through his perspective as well as his rescuers’, The Weathermen. Here are some other key New Left figures I haven’t mentioned:

Tom Hayden
Noam Chomsky
Howard Zinn
David Horowitz
John Lennon
Allen Ginsburg
Angela Davis
Mario Savio
Rennie Davis
That is by no means a complete list.

Chris DeCarlo