In1972 I was in a book store in Chapel Hill, NC and picked up a copy of a magazine called “The Realist”. I was a High School kid from Rural NC and was blown away by this Mag, which was completely outside of any form of media I had previously encountered. I can’t say it was the mag’s fault I became a Dixie Liberal, but it Did help. Today I read in the Washington Post that the Publisher of “The Realist “ has passed on, so I say: “Goodbye Paul Krassner, and thank you for the humor and the outrage; the seriousness and the silliness and most of all, thank you for letting me know I did NOT have to conform to Whitebread American Mediocrity.”
From the Washington Post’s Harrison Smith:
He was a standup comedian encouraged by Lenny Bruce, a biting satirist celebrated by Kurt Vonnegut, and a swashbuckling drug enthusiast who took a “trip” with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, dropped acid before testifying at the Chicago Seven trial, and “ingested those little white tabs” with Groucho Marx in Beverly Hills. In those heady years of 1960s radicalism and experimentation, Paul Krassner was also an irreverent ringmaster of the counterculture, known for battling censorship and decency laws, coining the term “Yippie” to describe his anarchic cohort, and founding the Realist, an influential magazine of satire and social criticism. An FBI agent once described him in a letter to Life magazine as “a raving, unconfined nut,” a phrase that Mr. Krassner gleefully adapted for the title of his memoir. “The FBI was right,” comedian George Carlin later said. “This man is dangerous — and funny, and necessary.
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Mr. Krassner was 87 when he died July 21 at his home in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. His daughter, Holly Krassner Dawson, said she did not know the precise cause. In news stories, Mr. Krassner was sometimes described as the “father of the underground press” — a title that once led him to “demand a blood test.” He preferred to call himself an “investigative satirist,” and he filled his magazine with articles grounded in truth but that often veered into fiction. “I never wanted to deprive readers the pleasure of discerning what is true and what’s not,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “Our only sacred cows,” he added, “are irreverence and obviousness.
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“From my own experiences as an activist, going back to the early ’60s, there were only two sources of information in the country that we really trusted and that went against the mainstream information. Those were I.F. Stone’s Weekly and the Realist,” political activist Abbie Hoffman later told the Chicago Tribune. With activists including Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Mr. Krassner formed the puckish Youth International Party, whose members were known as Yippies. He said he was vacationing in the Florida Keys, smoking “Colombian grass” on New Year’s Eve 1967, when the group began discussing the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago.