Museum will have Abbie’s trash, Rubin’s road kill

[struggle4progress]

By Lincoln Anderson

The Yippies, or Youth International Party, were always known for their sense of the absurd. In 1968, a year after their founding, they ran a pig named Pigasus for president and the next year Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin famously turned the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial on its head with their courtroom antics.

But a plan for a Yippie Museum — along with a virtual coffee house, gift shop and counterculture comedy club — on Bleecker St. is no joke.

Among items slated for the permanent collection are part of Rubin’s remains scraped off a California road, a portion of LSD guru Tim Leary’s ashes supplied by Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press, a sampling of Hoffman’s garbage and F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. files back from the days when people could obtain such classified information ...

And there’s more. Further upstairs will be the Institute for Advanced Political Protest. Weberman said this will focus on the study of the practice of “surreal protests,” like when Hoffman stopped the trading at the New York Stock Exchange by throwing money down onto the floor, which prompted the Stock Exchange to install Plexiglas barriers in the viewing gallery ...

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