VLVL Ditzah and Zipi Pisk

[Richard Fiero]

Terrance wrote:
>  . . . I sure would like to hear from anyone who has a copy 
> of Sale's SDS. Howaboutit? Anyone? Page 423
>
>"Thursday, April 4. . . . Law student meeting, King shot. Times Square."
>
>This is the section that Pynchon parodies. Violence, violence, violence.
>
>The Pisk Sisters are not quite as Sick as Dick Nixon or Brock Vond, but
>they are the sick secret bombers in the whole sick 60's crew.

Violence? Parody? Hmmmm.
==========
423  SPRING 1968

as many as a million.* This obviously had an impact on the 
entire student generation, and the liberal community in 
general, as Walter Lippmann wrote (just a week, incidentally, 
before the President's announcement):

The President is confronted with the resistance, open or 
passive, of the whole military generation, their teachers, 
their friends, their families. The attempt to fight a distant 
war by conscription is producing a demoralization which 
threatens the very security of the nation.

It also led to a turnabout in public thinking on the draft, so 
that by the middle of 1968 pollster Louis Harris figured that 
36 percent of the public was against the system, a figure that 
would continue to rise as the war went on; so pervasive did the 
antidraft attitude become that even Richard Nixon announced his 
support for a draft overhaul, and the Congress of the United 
States showed so little support that it actually refused to 
renew the draft authority for a long time in the middle of 
1971. Few in Washington now doubt that there will be a thorough 
overhaul, or quite possibly the abolition, of the draft within the next decade.

"Thursday, April 4. . . . Law student meeting, King shot. Times 
Square." The assassination of Martin Luther King at a motel in 
Memphis, Tennessee, was a propelling moment for radicals both 
black and white: it seemed a signal, as if one were needed, 
that the old ways were finished, that whatever romance lingered 
from the civil-rights days was dispelled, that the time had 
come for more than nonviolence, more than working with the 
system, more than moral witness.

*Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd have made the closest study 
of this issue, in their book, The Resistance. Their figures are 
admittedly uncertain, but even if their guesses are not perfect 
they indicate the scope of resistance: some 5000 turned in 
draft cards publicly, "several times" as many probably have 
done so privately, between 10,000 and 25,000 draft-delinquent 
cases were reported to the federal government yearly from 1966 
to 1969, Department of Justice prosecuted 3161 people in the 
high point of resistance between June 1966 and June 1968 (and 
would go on to prosecute another 6000 in the next two years), 
Canadian exiles number something close to 15,000, 
nonregistrants are estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000, COs 
grew in the two years after the Pentagon demonstration from 
23,800 to 34,500, delinquencies from 15,600 to 31,900, and 
alternate service increased by 737,000. Resistance in some 
form, then, may have been practiced by at least a million young 
men in the years after the rise of draft resistance.
==========