By The People’s History of the Grand Valley
In recent weeks, the resistance in Portland has leaned heavy into the idea of tactical frivolity. They have deployed inflatable frogs, naked bike rides, and absurdist humor to face down heavily armed federal agents. It’s a tactic with a long history and a track record of success, both here in America and abroad.
It’s hard for the regime to claim that resistors are hardened antifa terrorists, when they show up to the front lines as an inflated menagerie. People seem to have grasped the concept and at the recent No Kings 2.0 event the nation was awash in absurdist costumes, above all inflatable frogs. Of course this tactic makes more of an impact contrasted with riot cops, like in Portland, but it still undermines the ‘antifa terrorist’ narrative.
The tactic was used to some success during the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, whose protests were met with overwhelming state violence. Groups like Billionaires for Bush, the Yes Men, and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, made the absurdity absurd.
Another master of the tactic was Abbie Hoffman and the Youth International Party, or Yippies. They famously ran Pigasus the Immortal (an actual pig) for President in 1968, applied for and got permits to levitate the Pentagon, and brought Wall Street to a standstill by tossing a couple hundred one-dollar bills onto the trading floor. Stock trading came to a halt while traders wrestled on the floor with each other after the paltry $1 bills.
By the late 1970s the Yippies, who had always advocated for the legalization of drugs, began hosting “Smoke-Ins’ around the nation and on April 15, 1978, the Yippies descended on Grand Junction Colorado for what organizers billed as The Free Festival. “Free Music, Free Love, and Free Marijuana,” read one poster.
We were the “cheerleaders of the revolution,” said Cabins Lance. “I loved that groucho marxist attitude [of the Yippies], they could be serious and they could be un-serious at the same time.”
Lance was part of what the Daily Sentinel would later call “outside agitators” that organized the Grand Junction Smoke In.
A couple local Yippies joined by Yippies from around the nation met in Grand Junction for a series of organizing meetings in the months leading up to the event.
According to Lance, one meeting was a total wash because one of the Yippies showed up with a full canister of laughing gas. “But we got it done, permits, banners, all of it…The local Yippies organized the bands, and we brought in lawyers.”
Just days before the event The city pulled the group’s permit, claiming that the group planned on giving out ‘free marijuana.’
David Burnis clarified at a press conference, “This is an organized protest against current marijuana laws. We’re pretty sure people will bring their own.”
Burnis declared that the Yippies were going to gather with or without a permit, and that they would not allow their people to be passively hauled off to jail. “What we are suggesting is passive resistance. If one of our group gets led to jail, we will physically hang onto him.”
Lines were drawn. A letter signed by 18 inmates of the Mesa County Jail and sent to the Daily Sentinel, summed up the situation. “Protest to any law not representative of the people as a whole, is provided for in the bill of rights. We wish to appeal to the law enforcement agencies as well as demonstrations, to keep their heads in confrontations which will in all probability be unavoidable.”
By noon around 500 people had gathered in Lincoln Park. Moments after the event officially started the chaos began.
“We assumed the local police would stand around the outside of the crowd and pick people off, but that’s not what they did. They walked INTO the crowd,” said Lance. “Me being Yippie I followed them, [the cops] walked over to this poor little college kid, and [the cop] goes ‘this one’ and when they grabbed him, So I grabbed him, and bear-hugged his legs… and I wouldn’t let him go.”
Lance was the first arrest, “When they stood me up one of the cops got popped in the head by a bottle, and that started the whole shebang.”
“They got Dave Burnis, and Treetop (another Yippie organizer) at the mic,” said Lance.
“They had all of us ‘outside agitators’ within the first few minutes,” said Lance “which means without leaders the locals stayed in that park and fought the cops,” said Lance. “They held the park late into the night and even made a bonfire.”
“They maced this religious guy calling for peace, they maced the editor of the college paper, and later that evening they tear gassed everyone,” said Lance. The Sentinel reported that a high-school baseball game had to be delayed because the tear-gas drifted into the stadium.
By the end of the day 23 people had been arrested, most of them local to western Colorado.
The fire department was called. “By 8:30pm the festival goers were gone– many of them a little damp from a fire hose ran amuck and somehow put out the crowd while the bonfire burned,” the Daily Sentinel glibly reported.
“They actually busted less people [in Grand Junction] because the people fought back. Kudos to Grand Junction,” said Lance, who had participated in numerous ‘Smoke-Ins’ with the Yippies in the 1970s.
Eventually all the outside organizers had their charges dropped, if they promised to never come back to Grand Junction. Lance and Burnis each spent about two weeks in jail before being kicked loose.
The Daily Sentinel opined about numerous letters they received but didn’t publish, which blamed the police for the violence at the Free Festival, and instead concluded “It was conceived as a challenge to the mores of Grand Junction residents and was designed to create a confrontation with law enforcement. It achieved both aims.”
The Yipster Times, came to a very different conclusion, “Once again an American police department had shown the world how easy it is to start a riot.”
Lance had some parting advice for today’s revolutionaries: “Fight, struggle, organize! Don’t waste time convincing people–find your people and start taking actions.”
“Also, if you really get political, and you are going to do real things, you need to be willing to cut off those friends that ain’t. This country is heading into some serious times,” said Lance adding with a laugh, “but always use humor.”
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