Steal This Dinner
“There’s always going to be someone who is the naughty judge, someone who’s going to be the governor who double-crosses the people, and there has to be a me. If there isn’t a me, we’re in big trouble.”
———Abbie Hoffman
Chicago Seven defendant and counterculture dissident, Abbie Hoffman, once defined himself as “an orphan of America” and “a child of the Woodstock Nation”. The media recalls him as rising to national prominence by trying to levitate the Pentagon, for his protest throwing money at the New York Stock Exchange, or for wearing patriotism in an American flag shirt on national television. Hoffman once said, “Myths are the only news, and the only thing that stays true all the time is a lie.” And so it is with him. The Abbie Hoffman the world remembers is a fiction borne of media spin and personal mythology.
