VLVL "the Movement"

[Malignd]

<<At Kent State there were two different groups
organising the daytime rallies, a peaceful group
calling themselves World Historians Opposed to Racism
and Exploitation (WHORE) and a more radical group
called the New University Conference. But each night
there was rioting and street fights in the local town
which weren't on the days' agenda. On the second night
the ROTC building on campus was burnt down. The
Governor ordered a curfew, the students defied it and
rioted again the following night, and then at the noon
rally of the fourth day after another exchange of rock
throwing and tear gas the Guardsmen opened fire. You'd
need to be pretty ignorant to try to claim that
student protests were this chaotic and
poorly-organised in the earlier period (1964-8), and
that the course of events at Kent State was the rule
rather than the exception.>>

This is disingenuous.  My point has never been that
student protests in 1964 were or were not well
organized, less organized later; rather that there was
no broad-based, unified counterculture--

"a more or less unified and potent sociocultural
entity and political lobby" ... “a bipartisanship ...”


--as you describe it.  This idea--a broad-based unity
of purpose between southern Baptists, Berkeley
radicals, hippies, yippies, SDS, SNCC, old line
Eastern liberal Ecumenicals, Norman Mailer, and Robert
Lowell--is, I’ve argued, a myth.

What do you think killed it?

<< Nixon in Washington, Altamont, the Manson murders,
the slow disintegration of SDS, Kent State, the
failure of the campus strikes, the Weathermen
Underground and the New York apartment bombing -- all
these things and more were sounding the death knell of
"the Movement".>>

This, again, is romantic tripe.  The student protests,
outrage over Cambodia, the civil rights movement,
these were affected by Altamont?  By the Manson
murders?  You believe that? 

This string began with your making the stupid comment
that--

<<”By 1968-9, the time depicted in the novel, the
counterculture had forgotten all about civil rights
and the Vietnam War ...>>  

Really.  Then, you hastily tried to amend that:

I think it's fair enough to say that by the end of '68
and into 1969 and beyond ...>>

Rather an open door, that “beyond.”

<<”... by the end of 1970, the wheels had totally
fallen off.”>>

Okay; 1970, then?  

<<The student movement started falling apart pretty
dramatically at the end of '68, as I've said, and from
1971 on it was all but non-existent.>>

Well, maybe not 1970.  Sometime in there, anyway.

As you put it:  <<”I clarified the statement.”>>

Clarified, yes.  In 1968, Johnson was President; in
1971 Nixon was preparing for his second term.  

Then you cited the nationwide student strike and the
rally you call the “March on Washington,” 100,000
strong, in response to the actions in Cambodia at a
time when, according to at least one of your
chronological soundings, the “wheels had totally
fallen off.”  One must excuse a reader for being
confused.

And now this plucky bit of chutzpah about Kent State,
disorder and chaos at a single university in the midst
of a strike going on nationwide.  It’s an example of
what has been my point from the beginning:  there were
disparate groups that, from a distance of forty years,
appear organized in a way they never were.  What went
on at Kent State was uncoordinated in any but the
loosest way with, say, the concurrent strike at
Princeton or that on any of 400+ other campuses.  That
the Kent State protest was unruly and, finally,
tragic, is irrelevant to anything I’ve said.  

My argument hasn’t been one of when the coordinated
front fell apart; rather, that there never was a
coordinated front of the sort you believe existed to
fall apart.  The question of dates has entirely been
one of your trying to distance yourself from
(“clarify”) things you wish you hadn’t been foolish
enough to have said and of trying to force this false
idea of organizational entropy in the “movement” onto
a timeline.




	
		
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