Nation: Hair

“It was cultural genocide,” complained Yippie Leader Jerry Rubin, “an assault on the Yippie culture by the capitalist imperialist culture.” Until last September, Rubin sported a magnificently wild mane that looked as if he had teased it with an Electrolux. But when he entered California’s Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center to do 45 days on charges of being a public nuisance, the warders sheared his hair down to a respectably Middle American two inches.

After Rubin emerged from jail looking like a plucked chicken, his Yippie colleague Abbie Hoffman sent out the word from Chicago, where both are defendants in the conspiracy trial: “Help Jerry make a wig.” Before long, whole bags of hair tumbled in from across the country; at least a dozen bundles arrive daily now. With all of that, Rubin could doubtless fashion a fascinating brindle mop. Instead, he has bought himself a ghastly bouffant woman’s wig to wear until his own hair returns to suitably radical length. Surely, going to the barricades in drag is going to give revolution a bad name.