This is the memory palace, Amnit D'Ameyau, a postcard from Anaheim, California, August 6, 1970.

The riot cops were out in force as Don colored sleeping beauty's castle.

They were prepared for an invasion of Disneyland.

Flyers had been appearing seemingly out of thin air for weeks, under windshield wipers

tacked to telephone poles, wheat pasted to the walls outside record shops.

They said the Yippies were coming.

The Youth International Party founded two years before by Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin

to protest the war in Vietnam and now Cambodia.

With a belief that politics and mass media and capital, it hypnotized the masses.

It made America complacent and compliant with a ruling order that was leading it to

its destruction.

And with the idea that they could subvert that order, with dramatic protests and street

theater and surrealism and drugs and pranks that would disrupt the routine in the road,

that would punch through the screen of illusions that allowed the powerful to stay that way,

in which shake people out of their passive acceptance of their lives as they were, and

a war no one wanted.

And so the Yippies rained cashed down from the gallery above the New York Stock Exchange

and brought the center of global commerce to a halt, just for a moment.

While traders on the floor looked up, wonderstruck and tried to catch each flitting snowflake.

So the bills landed on the ground and all was scrambling, grabbing chaos.

And so they marched on Washington and surrounded the Pentagon and tried to levitate the building

with a kind of magical thinking no more absurd than some of what passed for sober planning

...