Shutting down New York

[Paul Mackin]

On Sun, 2004-02-01 at 12:24, Terrance wrote:
> 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.)
> 


The thing everybody needs to remember is that these were 18-22
year-olds. (Rudd was 22)

I wish I could convey to p-listers what it was like to view these
goings-on as an adult in 1968. I was more sympathetic than average,
shouting the slogans with the best of them. Anything to embarrass the
Administration and make it more difficult to continue the war was my
theory. But did I or other grownups--sympathetic or unsympathetic and
including Pynchon I would guess--take the SDS rhetoric with any degree
of literalness--believe there was even a remote possibility that it
could carry out the avowed program. No, No, No. (of course this didn't
deter the FBI from trying to infiltrate, which is the thing they do) My
point is that as long as the by '68-69 preposterous rhetoric of SDS  was
only talk plus embarrassing though harmless marches on the Pentagon,
etc., etc., the Establishment had no reason to feel very threatened. It
was merely children being a naughty. (usefully naughty to my way of
thinking) Only when word turned into violent deed did a crackdown on the
relatively few (very few) need to follow. 

Do a thought experiment. Think of the 22 year olds of your present
acquaintance and imagine them overthrowing the government.


  

> 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.