Paul Krassner reviews the new book Operation Chaos by Matthew Sweet in the latest issue of Reason. A snippet:
In March 1981, I delivered a comedy routine cum keynote address at a convention of Yippies. I asked the audience a rhetorical question: “How would you like to be a Secret Service agent guarding Ronald Reagan, knowing that his vice president, George Bush, is the former head of the CIA?” Satire would soon be outdistanced by reality: At the end of the month, John Hinckley shot the president, hoping to impress the actress Jodie Foster and take her bowling.
On April 2, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner quoted a dispatch from the New Solidarity International Press Service, an outfit run by followers of the unlovable conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. “A group of terrorists and drug traffickers linked to Playboy magazine,” it said, “met in New York City’s Greenwich Village area and publicly discussed an assassination of President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush. The meeting, convened by the Yippie organization, featured former Playboy editor Paul Krassner and numerous individuals associated with High Timesmagazine, Hustler magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times.”
I was scheduled to perform stand-up at Budd Friedman’s Improvisation Comedy Club in Hollywood the next month, and Friedman had asked me to try to get some advance publicity. “Paul,” he told me after the report appeared, “that’s not exactly what I meant.”
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