DAVID PEEL
We Nominated a Pig
- The Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everybody knew what was coming. The war, the cops, the tear gas. And in the middle of all of it, the Youth International Party — the Yippies — nominated a pig for President of the United States. A real pig. Pigasus. That was his name. We nominated a pig and we meant every word of it.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin organized the whole thing. The press showed up because they thought it was a joke. It wasn't a joke. It was the most honest thing that happened at that convention. Every politician in that building was lying. We put a pig on stage and at least everybody knew what they were looking at.
The cops arrested the pig. They arrested the pig. Seven Chicago cops to take down one pig and five Yippies. They charged us with disturbing the peace. The pig disturbed the peace. At the most violent political convention in American history, where the police beat reporters and gassed delegates and cracked open heads on Michigan Avenue, the disturbance of the peace was a hundred-pound pig in a park.
That's what the Yippies understood that nobody else got. You can march. You can petition. You can write letters and hold signs and do everything the textbook tells you. Or you can nominate a pig and get on the six o'clock news. Which one do you think moved more people?
My FBI file — the first page — says Security Matter, Youth International Party. That's how they filed me. Not as a musician. Not as a performer. As a Yippie. As a security matter. Forty pages because I was associated with people who nominated a pig and threw money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Abbie threw dollar bills from the gallery and the brokers crawled on the floor to pick them up. Live on television. That's what scared them. Not the money — it was a few hundred bucks in singles. What scared them was that everybody watching could see what the brokers really were.
Jerry Rubin brought Lennon to see me in Washington Square Park. That's how I got to Apple Records. A Yippie introduced me to a Beatle. Everything important in my life happened because somebody showed up and did something ridiculous. Jerry showed up at the NYSE with dollar bills. Abbie showed up at the convention with a pig. Lennon showed up at my park with a record contract. None of it made sense. All of it worked.
The Chicago Seven trial. Abbie, Jerry, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, John Froines. Judge Julius Hoffman — same last name as Abbie, no relation, no sense of humor. Bobby Seale was literally bound and gagged in the courtroom. Bound and gagged. In an American courtroom. Because he wanted his own lawyer. That's not a metaphor for anything. That's what happened.
I didn't testify at the trial. I wasn't one of the Seven. But I was a Yippie. I was in the street when the pigs — the real ones, the ones with badges — beat people bloody outside the Hilton. I was there when the whole world was watching. And I went back to the park the next day and played my guitar. Because that's what you do. The revolution doesn't take a day off.
Abbie went underground for years. Jerry became a stockbroker — I never understood that. Bobby Seale wrote a cookbook. Tom Hayden became a state senator. Everybody went somewhere. I went to the corner. I stayed on the corner. Because the corner was always the point. The Yippies understood something that the straight left never did: you don't need an office. You don't need a headquarters. You need a pig, a guitar, and a TV camera. The revolution is a show. And the best stage is the street.
People ask me what the Yippies were about and I say this: we were about making the powerful look ridiculous. Because they already were ridiculous. We just held up a mirror. A mirror shaped like a pig.
See also: Forty Pages — the FBI filed him under "Security Matter — Youth International Party." The Apple — Jerry Rubin brought Lennon to the park. Have a Marijuana — 1968, same year as the pig. Up Against the Wall Street — forty-three years later, still in the park. They’re Throwing Me a Party — nine years after the curtain, still booking the room. ICE in Our Drinks — Mardi Gras 2026, same fight, different century.
David Peel
