War in the Closed World (3): Incidents from the Revolution
Sunday Night Journal — February 14, 2010
I’m not making any effort at this point to begin at the beginning of my story. The order in which pieces of it appear here may have nothing to do with their order in the final work. For now I’m only rummaging around in my memories, and writing about whichever of them is uppermost in my mind on any Sunday.
I can’t remember exactly when this first incident happened, but it was certainly no earlier than 1968, and probably no later than 1969. I would have been a sophomore or junior in college, at the University of Alabama. Beyond the west end of the campus there was a residential area of many blocks consisting of old houses that had been divided into apartments. I lived in that general area, as did most of my friends and acquaintances. I was at the apartment of some one of these, though I have no idea now whose it was, or why I was there, or anything else except a vague memory of it being a typically shabby, messy hippie apartment.
All I remember is something said by one of the people there. I’ll call him Roger. I didn’t know him very well. He was an influential person in the fairly small but very visible campus radical community. But unlike most of us, who hurled contempt on the conventional world from outside and were ready to burn our bridges to it (or thought we were), he seemed to want to keep one foot in the mainstream. He was active in campus politics. He dressed neatly and fairly conventionally. His hair was a little longer than was usual but not excessively so—it didn’t hang to his shoulders or puff out in an unkempt frizz. I thought of him when the records of Bill Clinton’s attempts to avoid the draft were published: Clinton, as you may recall, was very concerned with “maintaining his viability within the system.” As, it seemed, was Roger.
I think I recall that he paid only a brief visit to whatever group was assembled in the apartment. Perhaps he was politicking; I recall that we was talkative, in a way that seemed to me a little stagey. I recall him standing at the door, about to leave, and giving a little speech, of which I recall only the last words: we, the radicals, would do this, and we would do that, and the effect would be to “free up this university.”
Addled though I was with the desire to rebel in every way, I still had enough of my wits about me to wonder what he meant. I went home wondering what he meant, and I suppose it’s significant that I still remember the moment. What and where were the chains from which we needed to be freed? What in the university was oppressing us? What was it that he thought we should be able to do that we were being prevented from doing? We were American college students, and by virtue of that fact alone among the most privileged people in the world. Whatever rules the university imposed on us were fairly trivial and easily evaded. True, there were laws forbidding the use of drugs, and they were a threat to us, but the university had nothing to do with those laws and no power to change them. There were still restrictions on the girls who lived in the dormitories, but few in our crowd lived there.
The question recurred to me from time to time: free to do what? Not to do the work assigned in our classes? Perhaps that was it: we should be given good grades and degrees regardless of whether or not we earned them; surely the demand that we do one thing and not another was oppressive in itself.
But of course the most likely thing is that he had nothing in particular in mind. It was only words, the sort of words we used all the time, never troubling ourselves to look closely at what we might mean by them. But yet they were not entirely empty words: they did express a real anger, obscure and incoherent though it was.
Some time after this—and I think I can pin this down to sometime in the winter or spring of 1970—Jerry Rubin, a then-famous radical activist, was invited by some student group to speak on campus. I think there was a controversy about whether the administration would allow him to speak, but in the end he did, in Foster Auditorium. I went to hear him. I remember a crowd mostly standing; if there were seats there must not have been enough. I remember Rubin barking and ranting from the stage, but not a single word he said; I think it’s safe to assume that it was poisonous nonsense.
What I remember is a brief encounter with Roger. He came up to me in the crowd and said the crowd was too quiet; he wanted things to be livelier. He told me to move around in the crowd and clap and cheer and try to get others to do the same. And I remember feeling that what my ears were telling me was so appalling that I had trouble believing them.
If there was any firm and specific conviction that was supposed to characterize our movement, it was that one was always to be authentic—never to pretend to any thought or emotion that was not genuine, never to behave in a way that was not a direct expression of what one really felt or thought. The commercial and political hype that dominated American life was evil, filling the air and the minds of the people with manipulative falsehoods, and we were to deny and defy that spirit in our lives as well as in our politics. And here was someone telling me to engage in just the sort of manipulation we despised.
I reacted as a believing Christian might on being asked to assist in perpetrating a fraudulent miracle: disgusted and angry. Of course I was absurdly naïve; the various radical movements were at least as much interested in imagery and advertising as any corporation. I don’t remember giving Roger any answer, and he moved on through the crowd, trying to get people worked up.
I can’t say this was any sort of turning point for me, but it was one of many moments of disillusionment that didn’t so much turn me against the movement as toward a very dark cynicism (which came naturally to me anyway). It is well to be stripped of destructive illusions, even if it’s painful. I just wish I hadn’t had these particular illusions in the first place.
