Pynchon mention re rock, paper, scissors game

[Terrance]

> 
> Rob, I'm confident I have not misconstrued Sale's critique of the
> Columbia debacle.
> The students there were desperate and defiant, violent, polarized, and
> Sale agrees with the Conservative critics of the events and the tactics.
> Pynchon's ironic parody is a scathing satire.

Just want to clarify my point here. Let me quote from Sale: 

Page 434-435 Sale, SDS Resistance, 1965-1968  Spring 1968



Sale says that the action faction had Columbia seized on some important
issues (racism--Harlem Land, imperilism--IDA,
Authoritarianinism--arbitrary rules about student protest and
discipline), but these issues were also irrelevant. 

Irrelevant, Sale says, 

"in the sense that they were only a few, and n ot especially the worst,
of many similar issues that could expose the nature of the system of
which it was a part, and that even in a university sanctioned by the
gods and governed by saints could be made a target by those who were
really addressing themselves to the larger maladies of the society for
which the university stood as surrogate. Conservative critics were
right, for the wrong reasons, when they argued that if the university
had given in on these demands the radicals would have found three others
just as urgent; or, in the words of the famous Berkeley slogan, "The
issue is not the issue." 

Sorry I mis-typed when I wrote, "The Issue is the Issue" in previous
post. 

page 437

And in Math, where Tom Hayden and melange of New York street radicals
including some of the Motherfuckers had come to lend their support, all
kinds of politics were represented but the communards turned out to be
rather more concerned with "life style" than rhetoric.