Yippie Founder Paul Krassner Still Testing Limits
JOHN ROGERS, AP: He was once a child music prodigy and in the decades since, Paul Krassner has been everything from political satirist to author, editor, anarchist and an advocate for both peace and pornography.
But the title he may favor is one he found buried in his FBI file. “To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute,” a letter in the file said in response to a favorable magazine interview with the co-founder of the Yippie Party, the group that notoriously disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “He’s a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.”
So Krassner titled his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut.
“I figured I might as well make use of it,” says the author, smiling broadly as he sits in the living room of his modest tract home in this sandy, sagebrush-dotted corner of the Mojave Desert on a scorchingly hot morning. On a nearby table is a copy of A People’s History of the United States of America by historian and social activist Howard Zinn.
For someone who has lived figuratively on the edge of society for most of his life, Krassner appears to have made the move literally as well, having left Los Angeles’ epicenter of counterculture, Venice Beach, several years ago to take up residence in a place where the temperature sometimes hits 120 degrees, accompanied by blast-furnace winds of 70 mph or more.
But the co-founder of the group that once ran a pig for president and tried to disrupt the seat of capitalism by throwing dollar bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, says he has come to love his quiet little piece of Americana with its backyard views of the snowcapped mountains towering over Palm Springs in the distance.
Krassner, who made his debut at Carnegie Hall as a violinist at age 7 (and then almost immediately gave up music because he couldn’t get along with his teacher) is 77 now. That’s a number he confirms with both a sheepish grin and a faux apology: “I’m sorry, I don’t know how that happened.”
