VLVL remembering the Movement

[pynchonoid]

Lots of good stuff on the Web, gotta agree with jbor
on that (see below), but it's no substitute for
personal experience....

[...] For Dean’s Yale contemporaries, the spring of
1970 remains a watershed, a reference point of
enlightenment as well as disillusion. The
precipitating circumstance was an impending
murder-conspiracy trial, in a New Haven courthouse, of
several members of the Black Panther Party. Thousands
of demonstrators, it was predicted, would descend on
the city May Day weekend, and the university had to
decide how to prepare. Normal academic business was
put on hold as students and faculty, anticipating who
knew what, engaged in intense self-scrutiny. In
classrooms, ad-hoc teach-ins, and ubiquitous
bull(shit) sessions, a previously insular community
grappled—in ways novel, naïve, fatuous, and noble—with
issues of race, class, criminal justice, and liberal
hypocrisy. (A parallel source of agitation was
America’s recent invasion of Cambodia, which led to
the killings, during a May antiwar protest, of four
students at Kent State University by Ohio National
Guard troops.)

Over dinner with several reporters in Seattle during
the Sleepless Tour, and during a subsequent interview
with me, Dean reminisced about his experiences at
Yale. He had been, for the most part, a passive
observer of the turbulence—moderate and open-minded
but “very uncomfortable” with the radical left. 

“Even though I majored in political science, clearly
I’d given up on politics, perhaps by my sophomore
year,” he said. “I attribute that to the war and the
attack by Nixon on the civil-rights movement. I
decided I wasn’t going to be able to change the
country, because the government wasn’t a true
democracy. So I did things like tutoring—I tutored
poor kids in a New Haven middle school—the sort of
thing you do when you’re trying to change one life at
a time, not the whole system. 
“Even though I majored in political science, clearly
I’d given up on politics, perhaps by my sophomore
year,” he said. “I attribute that to the war and the
attack by Nixon on the civil-rights movement. I
decided I wasn’t going to be able to change the
country, because the government wasn’t a true
democracy. So I did things like tutoring—I tutored
poor kids in a New Haven middle school—the sort of
thing you do when you’re trying to change one life at
a time, not the whole system. 

“Yale was an extraordinary, incredible place to be
because of the changes that were going on there. I
didn’t work that hard—I didn’t kill myself to get
grades, except in classes I really loved—but I wanted
to learn a lot. It wasn’t unusual for me to take extra
courses; instead of the required nine course credits a
year, I’d take ten or eleven. I took courses about the
wider world: Marxism, philosophy, different societies,
particularly African. I took a lot of history. One
professor who made a big impression was Wolfgang
Leonhard, who taught Russian history. He’d been a
Party official in East Germany and had defected. A
fantastic lecturer. He once told us, ‘Pravda lies in
such a way that not even the opposite is so.’ That
really hit home. I felt he wasn’t just referring to
the Soviet government but to our own at the time. You
knew it from some of the things Nixon talked
about—denying the bombing of Cambodia—or from
Kissinger’s ‘Peace is at hand’ statement, when clearly
peace wasn’t at hand. They said these things just to
get reëlected. I think there are some similarities
between George Bush’s Administration and Richard
Nixon’s Administration: a tremendous cynicism about
the future of the country; a lack of ability to
instill hope in the American people; a war which
doesn’t have clear principles behind it; and a group
of people around the President whose main allegiance
is to each other and their ideology rather than to the
United States.”

In the end, no blood was spilled in New Haven during
the 1970 May Day spectacle, damage to university
property was minimal, few protesters were arrested,
many of us inhaled our first doses of tear gas, a
colossal volume of gassy rhetoric was spewed. The most
valuable legacy of that unique era was the recognition
that, good intentions notwithstanding, one was not
entitled to the satisfaction of a tidy sense of
resolution. It took years to make sense of what we’d
absorbed, but one easy short-term
rationalization—driven home by Nixon’s crushing defeat
of George McGovern in the 1972 election and its
bewildering aftermath, Watergate—was that conventional
electoral politics offered inadequate solutions to
what ailed American life. [...]

read it all in the New Yorker:
<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040112fa_fact>

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