Youth: The Politics of YIP

They poured into the vast main concourse of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station 3,000 strong, wearing their customary capes, gowns, feathers and beads. They tossed hot cross buns and firecrackers, and floated balloons up toward the celestial blue ceiling. They hummed the cosmic “Ommm,” snake-danced to the tune of Have a Marijuana, and proudly unfurled a huge banner emblazoned with a lazy “Y.”

The Yippies—1968’s version of the hippies—were celebrating spring. Hardly had the equinoctial orgy begun, when it turned as bleak as a midwinter blizzard. A dozen youths scaled the information booth, ripped off the clock hands, scribbled graffiti and defiantly passed around lighted marijuana “joints” in full view of the Tactical Patrol Force. The fuzz charged, billy clubs flailing, and arrested 61 demonstrators. Battered but unbowed, the celebrants coursed off to the Central Park Sheep Meadow to “yip up the sun.”

Creeping Meatball. After a winter in which the hippie movement seemed so moribund that its own members staged mock burials in honor of its death, the Yippies have suddenly invested it with new life through their special kind of antic political protest. The term Yippie comes from Youth International Party, an amorphous amalgam of the alienated young that coalesced in Manhattan two months ago around a coterie of activist hippies, all in their late 20s and early 30s. “The YIP is a party—like the last word says—not a political movement,” argues the East Village’s Abbie Hoffman, who last fall tried to levitate the Pentagon (TIME Oct. 27, 1967). Says Yippie Leader Ed Sanders, 28, of the Fugs rock group: “It’s the politics of ecstasy.”

Ecstasy begins with a platform certain to make any hippie yell yippie: an end to war and pay toilets, legalization of psychedelic drugs, free food, and a heart transplant for L.B.J. Also advocated: “juvenile exhibitionism”—a favorite hippie habit most recently practiced by at least 50 young men and women from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, who stripped to the buff in Golden Gate Park before a crowd of ogling onlookers.

“Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!” goes the rallying cry, and it has brought to the Yippie standard such underground gurus and goblins as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Realist Editor Paul Krassner and Jerry Rubin, a key organizer of the Pentagon March. Hard-core Yippies may number as few as 400 nationwide, but Fug Sanders reckons that the total following may now have reached 250,000.

Festival of Life. “Our attitude is basically satirical,” says another YIP leader, Keith Lampe, 36, in a rare Yippie understatement. Already Yippies have demonstrated their distaste for air pollution by invading the Manhattan offices of Con Ed to deposit black chrysanthemums with secretaries, hurl soot at executives and detonate smoke bombs. They parodied the police by staging their own mock predawn narcotics raid at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York. Next month Yippies from coast to coast are planning an Indian ghost dance* against American foreign policy.

But what the Yippies are really pointing toward is Chicago. There, come the last week of August, they intend to hold a six-day “Festival of Life” in comic contrast to what they call the Democratic Party’s “National Death Convention,” which will be running concurrently. The Yippies aim to set up a lakefront tent village in Grant Park, where they can groove on folk songs, rock bands, “guerrilla” theater, body painting and meditation. Through the park they will bear on a blue pillow their very own presidential candidate: Lyndon Pigasus Pig, a ten-week-old black and white porker now afattening at the Hog Farm, a hippie commune in Southern California. Other possibilities being considered: a lie-in at Chicago’s O’Hare Field to prevent Democratic delegates from landing or, failing that, a fleet of fake cabs to pick up delegates and dump them off in Wisconsin.

Looking back on the melee at Grand Central, many non-Yipping hippies are wondering if the politics of YIP are not already too controversial for comfort. The Chicago shindig, they fear, could well result in a far larger number of clubbed and lacerated heads. Yippie leaders themselves are in a mood for “better communication with authorities.” Last week, promising to behave themselves, some Manhattan Yippies opened talks with the Mayor’s office about holding a YIP-out with rock bands and theater troupes in the Sheep Meadow on Easter Sunday.

* A messianic ritual meant to bring back the buffalo and ward off white bullets, the original Ghost Dance movement was not infallible. At Wounded Knee, S. Dak., on Dec. 29, 1890, more than 200 Sioux Ghost Dancers were machine-gunned to death by the U.S. cavalry in the last “engagement” of the Indian wars.