VLVL Ditzah and Zipi Pisk

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 20:09, 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.
> > ==========
> 
> 
> And the next page? 
> 
> The ghettos exploded. 
> 
> King is dead. 
> 
> Violence, violence, violence. Violence in the ghettos. 
> 
> 
> And Pynchon parodies Sale's self-serving account. All these former
> SDS'ers turned academic historians and celebrities claiming some kind of
> "I was there" knowledge of the hand job they think was their revolution,
> selling books and movies of themselves, building bombs in Oregon. 
> 
> 
> College Of The Surf, dudes. Yeah, they named the buildings after surfer
> dudes. Way Cool!

I would like to hear more about this? Pynchon is obviously poking fun at
the student revolutionaries but is he doing more?