Paul Krassner took the title for his memoir, “Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut,” from a poison-pen letter to Life magazine about a story on Krassner and his underground magazine, The Realist.
“You must be hard up for material,” said the letter, supposedly from a college professor but actually written by an FBI agent. “To classify Krassner as some sort of `social rebel’ is far too cute. He’s a nut, a raving, unconfined nut. As for any possible intellectual rewards to be gleaned from The Realist-much better prose may be found on lavatory walls.”
Now, some 25 years later, does the iconoclastic Krassner-the man who gave the yippies their name and palled around with Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary-believe the authorities are still watching?
“I don’t feel paranoid about it,” Krassner, 61, said from his home in Venice, Calif. “Essentially, I’m a satirist. I think they’d want to infiltrate the environmental movement before they get to me.” He pauses. “Of course, if there are any negative reviews, I’ll say it’s part of a disinformation campaign.”
Krassner founded The Realist in the late ’50s after reading an article that pointed out the need for an American equivalent of Punch, the satirical British magazine. Pushing the boundaries, the magazine published political satire-including the notorious “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” a send-up of William Manchester’s “Death of the President”-together with commentaries by Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Richard Pryor and Kurt Vonnegut, and interviews with people such as Lenny Bruce and Allen Watts.
Published 1958 to 1974, it was a popular and critical success. At its peak, The Realist had about 100,000 subscribers, and Library Journal called it “the best satirical magazine in America.” Krassner calls it participatory journalism.
“I constantly stepped over the line with The Realist,” Krassner said. “I read a magazine article in 1962 that said there was no such thing as a humane abortionist. So I interviewed a humane abortionist, Dr. Robert Spencer, who was known as `the saint’ in Ashland, Pa.
“After the interview was published, I got a lot of calls from women, and the magazine became an underground abortion referral service. So I really stepped over the line in terms of abortion. It was absurd that scared women had to turn to a satirical magazine for medical help, but that’s the way it was.”
The magazine covered the big counterculture issues of the day-the antiwar movement, the campaign to decriminalize marijuana, the 1968 Democratic Convention. It was in preparation for the convention in Chicago that Krassner gave the yippies their name.
“It was just a label to describe a phenomenon that already existed,” he said. “There was an organic coalition of the hippie dropouts and the political activists as they realized they had more and more in common.
“The political activists could see that it was a political act to go smoke a joint in the park and defy authority, and the hippies realized that dropping napalm was an extension of the dehumanization that allowed authorities to put young people in jail in this country for smoking flowers.”
In 1985, Krassner reintroduced The Realist as a newsletter.
“It was during Reagan years, and I missed doing it,” he said. “I think there’s a hunger for political humor.”
Krassner said he believes the time is right for his memoir-cum-social-history:
“There seems to be a renewed sense of counterculture now in the ’90s, not only among the people who lived at that time but among their kids who are old enough to understand their roots.”
