Shutting down New York

[Terrance]

Why is the press and the academic publishing industry buzzing with all
this 1968 stuff again?  Kerry, Dean, Bush, where were you when the
communists and the militant radicals tried to destroy liberal democracy
in the US in 1968-1969?  Do we need more books on this subject? Do we
want them? Maybe we do, but right here we've got Pynchon's Vineland and
we don't even open it up and read what's in it. It's not a sympathetic
portrayal of the Lefty-America at all. It's a very harsh satire. 

Pynchon goes straight to the Red hot heart of the problem: the
communists and militants. 

1968 was the year that SDS's program read as follows: 

1. elections are a fraud, the only action available to the people is
direct action
2. we support people's war in Vietnam (the communist cause) 
3. we support the right of  black people to liberate themselves and form
their own state by any means necessary and the necessity for police to
be disarmed and the militants to be armed. 
4. we support violent armed struggle and a militant revolutionary youth
movement (teaching HS kids how to drop explosives into the plumbing
systems of schools, etc.)


NOTES

Morgan Spector, New Left Notes
SDS constitution as revised at 1967 convention, printed in New Left
Notes, June 10, 1968
Guardian, Jan 6, 1968, p. 9.