“The whole idea of promotion is myth. In the Sixties we created a myth of disruption. There was disruption, but the country was nowhere near as disrupted as people believed it to be. And the myth that I created about myself was not the truth—but I didn’t really create it either. The media took it. Today, obviously, although I don’t like it, I’m playing on the ‘anti-capitalist goes capitalist’ myth. The world’s playing on it. They’ll play on it forever.”
Jerry Rubin struts, chest-proud, like a little rogue wave breaking. His hair is dry, mussed, somewhat thin: the sort of place where you’d find a hen’s egg laid. Small, effeminate feet: a slight mother’s pinch of color in his cheek. Rubin will look straight ahead when you talk to him: as though the sound were coming through a crackly earpiece. We’ve paid, all 16 of us, $21 each for this seminar in promotion and selfhype. Cheap enough, I think: after all, in that phrase Me Decade, Rubin is the first-person singular referred to. He may also be, I suspect, shallower than lip gloss and more pretentious than a Lhasa apso. But his smile is witch-ball radiant: gemutlich and winsome. You want to get an early pregnancy test after he has grinned at you. Hell, he can amuse me. Moreover, Rubin is so starkly, so self-confessedly the hustler, the bootlegger of contact-paper images—he has taken such pride in cynicism and marketable humbug—that a weird inversion will set it. After just one quarter-hour you begin, well, to doubt his insincerity.
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