THE BOOTBLACK STAND: Letters to Plunkitt for Senator Hartke and Senator Kennedy
Publish and Prosper Points of Rebellion by William O. Douglas Random House, 5 rubles 97 awfully small pages with big print It is simply impossible to take Points of Rebellion seriously. The...
...Some of us have to be students, and the orthodoxy envisioned by Rexroth is threatening to roll us over in the seventies...
...The dissenters have been profoundly shaken...
...Creating a crisis is perhaps the most fruitful contribution one can make to chaos...
...The New York Times called Mr...
...Of all the great Hoosier Solons I would rate you right at the top-right up there with Senator New and D. C. Stephenson...
...Even more heartening is the realization that your circulation has expanded from 5,000 to over 30,000...
...The AFL-CIO would greatly expedite chaos in the seventies if it were to demand that all hard hats receive at least two years exposure to one of the social sciences...
...The man is, after all, a Supreme Court justice...
...So it is that healthy nonconformity has literally blasted its way into the American conscience, and The Alternative's Jolly Boys gleefully await Mr...
...Plunkitt: This fall I am faced with an arduous and crucial campaign to retain my Senate seat in Massachusetts...
...The hour of repression is at hand...
...Unfortunately most of us do not possess the necessary talent, a truth most of our rock singers, kinetic poets and junk artists have proven most convincingly...
...Pundits who fawn over the new conformists characterizing them as the All-American Boys of the seventies are hastening the destruction of the American University more surely than the bombers, the buffoons or the bedwetters...
...Here my review concludes...
...Now, the distinguished Dr...
...Immediate adoption of the "Princeton Plan" will do more to bring the university into politics and politics into the university than any comparable quack plan yet averred...
...No more idealistic young demonstrators, no more attacks on the police, no more harmless bombings or debuts before the cameras of CBS...
...Though a student's appearance is as distinct and discernible as that of a month-old corpse at an Irish wake, none of the sages are repining over this conformity...
...Many of them are walking epidemics...
...It restores one's faith in the level of literacy that prevails on our college and university campuses at a time when the actions of a noisy few have called into question the viability of higher education...
...At The Alternative we believe that there is nothing inherently wrong or unusual about conformity...
...Douglas, on foreign affairs: Our leaders have acquired the "virtually paranoid" belief that "the world is filled with dangerous people...
...And today rumors are spreading that Mr...
...What is your suggestion...
...One of the more appreciable benefits of commitment is that it triggers calculable action, and the dreamersif they are to realize their dreams-must be able to rely on a supply of cannon fodder...
...Also you will have done much to create a more honest political atmosphere in this incomparable democracy...
...in which he magisterially declared amid gusts of oohs and ahhs "No, because there is an alternate way of life available to us here and now...
...Every American-if he is to avoid banishment to hard labor in Nebraska-will be suspect and nonconformists will not even be allowed the pleasant relaxation of occasionally burning an American flag...
...The editors of Commonweal remarked: "Probably never before were so many young people urged by their elders to revolt...
...William Kristol The Bootblack Stand Dr...
...Rhodes "inquired of Professor Hook if he "hated students...
...He has sent his brigandes into Southeast Asia to make off with the lavish treasure of that famous Eldorado and turned America's young and underprivileged into veritable Helots...
...Well if we are to assure that the seventies prove as adventurous as the late sixties The Alternative's Standing Committee on Continuing Chaos urges that university administrators continue to demand opulent budgets enabling them to drag the university into every arena of American life and to expose it to every source of discontent...
...In 1958 the poet Kenneth Rexroth sensed a breeze through the doldrums...
...From the middle fifties to the middle sixties, conformity served as the professors' most reliable motif in a ceaseless cacophony of twaddle...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/ o The Establishment, R.R...
...There are babes in arms who would be ashamed to be the author of Points of Rebellion...
...All are motivated by the loftiest ideals...
...Your most humble etc., Vance (Rupert) Harke I am glad that you ask...
...Students and faculty alike must make every little social unpleasantness into a catastrophe...
...For many are stupid, and some are willful, dreaming great dreams...
...Beset by unspeakable cruelty, the universities ignited into a heroic reenactment of the Paris Commune, vaulting the nonconformists to spectacular and immediate stardom...
...Youthful idealism will dissolve into the crucible of democratic process...
...To devote any more time to the distinguished Mr...
...Not only does it-if publicized with drama and tastelessness-never fail to unsettle the citizenry, but it gives the authors of crisis a splendid opportunity to invite crackpot speakers to the campus-assuring the growth of spectacular ignorance amongst exploitable students, revulsion amongst citizens, miserliness amongst legislators and joy amongst Alternative readers...
...it is now to be found everywhere on the left (especially among the young, who are fighting "Them"), of which Douglas is a leading guru...
...First we shall discuss the common nonconformist...
...But then maybe babes in arms are not afflicted by mercenary publishers...
...The ultra-advanced nonconformist has discovered an immensely freer, more satisfying life than his predecessors ever dared envision...
...Denis Hayes placed the whole issue in its cosmic perspective by saying: "We are in trouble as a species, and the unrest of this country's young people and af their peers around the planet is perhaps the healthiest development for which one might have dared to hope...
...What is remarkable is how the truth hawkers managed to reverse themselves so ignominiously...
...GWP Dear Mr...
...They have been peddling moonshine for years...
...How they had revelled in the gay antics of their months of glory...
...In the long run we suspect historians will record that, under the tutelage of the dons, students have been more often victimized than pampered...
...Sadness frames all their days...
...Rhodes "a complex, altruistic youth...endowed with an extraordinary faculty to come up with inspiring new ideas and get other people to carry them out...
...Now it will no longer even be safe to riot at the Democratic Convention or to burn a library...
...it can be purchased in all bookstores...
...But we do not mean to be disputatious...
...Supposedly the education mills of the land were grinding American youth into bland conformity, pulverizing them to adjust to society, smothering their creativity and putting all our nascent Beethovens to flight...
...the Sea-where they scored as well...
...The book is, alas, neither serious nor humorous...
...Plunkitt: I am running for the Senate in Indiana, What should I say...
...In almost any American urban center they can be seen shuffling stupefactively through the streets, paw outstretched, pleading for a cup of coffee...
...Our present age is a glorious one teeming with nonconformity...
...Douglas, quoting with approbation-nay admirationa 16-year old boy who asks his father this unique question:"Why did you let me be born...
...Consider the euphoria they evoked from the late Fred Harvey Harrington, president of the University of Wisconsin...
...I shall pass it on to you but only in strictest confidence and for a slight charge...
...Best Regards, Philip M. Crane Member of Congress...
...Now at The Alternative we are not so sanguine about commitment...
...This is a sly and crafty tyrant and it is the duty of the enlightened to do him in...
...Richard Speck has been committed...
...How do you escape it...
...Nonetheless, no thoughtful observer is very surprised that the dons carried off their hoax so masterfully...
...Some are even given to ambushing police and butchering judges...
...And there is one more sure-fire remedy to a dull decade...
...But whereas the common nonconformist generally just slouches around parks and public restrooms, the more energetic, advanced nonconformist busies himself with the bombing of buildings, beating professors, and threatening politics...
...lest it bring even more havoc to this land which we love, the Hessians are urged to kick their way out of civilized society, yielding any hope of self-sufficiency or civilized achievement...
...Remember Northwestern-Northwestern by...
...What is to be done lest the seventies prove a bummer...
...Herr Himmler and Herr Eichmann made admirable efforts, but without the forensic savoir faire of a Kunstler, their chances were slim and none...
...THE CONTINUING CRISIS Continued From Page 2 with delinquent students and identified their activities not as instances of "academic unrest" but of "academic disruption and violence...
...But in the past...
...All this demanded some pretty high-toned salesmanship, for both images are moronic and the latter is dangerous...
...Douglas considers this deeply philosophical) The above are, believe it or not, some of the saner and more reasonable things in Douglas' not very substantial book...
...A New Demand Response System...
...Avoid kidney infection...
...Further we suggest the utter politicalization of the campus...
...And for the best of reasons-today America's new conformists are their conformists, and all those chafing apprehensions about a generation of robots have been soothed by the clatter of regiments of students goosestepping into the dawn of a brave new world--the very same world that the dons have spent the last half century concocting...
...At any rate, ,to paraphrase Lord Keynes, contemporary men who believe themselves free from the ideas of the past are usually slaves of some defunct ideogogue...
...Mustered by their preceptors to intimidate university administrators and topple the sordid Nixon regime...
...In Ohio and later in Kansas a number of the more intelligent nonconformists had even managed to get themselves killed...
...Nonetheless an enormous number of the illuminati in the media and at the great universities are more cheerful, and with good reason...
...Back in the Dark Ages the geniuses were utterly unable to bestir the conformists of the "Quiet Generation" whose members were as numb to their horror stories as Billy Graham is to voodoo...
...EDITORIAL Continued from Page 2 conformity through their empty crania...
...Laurence O'Brien, has recently revealed that the Nixon junta purposefully and instantly dragged the economy pari passu into inflation and recession-all the while deluding the citizenry into believing Congress was dominated by Democrats...
...Let us not see it opened to the "politicians of vision...
...Dress in black pajamas, straw peasant hat and sandals...
...Their coercive life style has created a barbaric underworld but one step removed from the monkeys in the zoo...
...The university's shield of Liberalism is withering before the continuing salvoes of the new orthodoxy ushering in an age of intolerance as bleak as any in our history...
...Of course one should hardly have to mention to the educational-political complex that every conceivable type of young person must be carted off to the university where, for four years, he can diddle at the knee of some fraudulent philosophe...
...We shall read it at a more reflective pace and in our next issue analyze it with our typical cool detachment...
...Hence rather than anxiously heave their bosoms over youth's slavish conformity to society, the dons now sweat over society's failure to conform to youth...
...Later in the decade Mr...
...Well in this book Douglas capitalizes, just to name a few, Force, Blacks, Whites, and-so help me God (a word which Douglas probably wouldn't capitalize)-Highway Lobby...
...Brewman Kingster in caterwauling for the support of racists and common gangsters...
...And just as there are archangels, seraphim and cherubim, there are many different ranks of nonconformists...
...The book is positively infantile, and to a degree which I am afraid can be appreciated only by reading the book...
...If I disappoint my readers for not seriously attempting to refute the "points" Douglas supposedly makes in Points of Rebel-, lion I apologize, but his points are simply not worthy of serious consideration or serious refutation...
...Feel free to continue your daily chores, campaign vigorously, mingle with the crowds and you will feel in the pink in no time...
...It is no secret that on many campuses gullible members of the Chosen Generation serve as Hessians for activist faculty...
...Those persons advocating politicalization are blatantly exploiting ignorant students and contemptuous of the rights of the civilized few...
...Time even published "Rules of Nonconformity"--sort of a beatitudinal blueprint for the Lee Harvey Oswalds of the "quiet generation...
...certainly it should not have surprised the fifties' great minds that gregarious creatures like the Homo saps conform...
...Published in August, it focuses on the unique position of minority groups in the Congolese electoral process...
...America's economic marvel, Dr...
...Lindner's next manifesto...
...They are the enemies of academic freedom and a nuisance to dispassionate scholarship...
...How horrid...
...Nothing is more likely to improve education than the benign attentions of Democrats and Republicans...
...fifteen years their prestige has soared, for they have mastered dramatic techniques for attracting the increasingly influential media and have grown enormously proficient in delivering scholarly anagoges on almost any national occurrence...
...The serene Mr...
...After President Nixon unleashed his terrible blitzkrieg into Cambodia and ordered the Kent State Massacre, no one could say for sure what the future would bring...
...Mouthing the elliptical language of what in more primitive times were adjudged mental defectives, he yammers, "ya know," "like I mean," "dig it," and expletives too racy for reproduction in this family magazine...
...Through-art," he replied...
...Plunkitt has agreed to, through this column, advise American statesmen in this time of troubles...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana, 47401, Continental U.S.A...
...It makes smiling to large crowds difficult and when I take pills to relieve the pain it clouds my mind, and I can speak only second semester Spanish...
...It will assure rapid transformation into those magnificent academic cathedrals which are the glory of Latin America...
...The book is more than stupid, more than cliche-ridden, more than simple-minded, more than an insult to almost any reader's intelligence...
...Even as the smoke curled from his charnel halls of ivy, he recently extolled them as the flower of the Twentieth Century...
...Finding the present extent of political evangelizing amongst faculty and students dreary enough, The Alternative opposes further attempts to turn the university into a kind of chiliastic Tammany Hall...
...Douglas LL.D...
...Still, perhaps a few short excerpts can illustrate my point...
...Yet today as commentators blubber about "youth's idealism," "the priorities of youth," "the life-style of the young," and "youth culture," the dons seem peculiarly unconcerned about conformity...
...Hook said the threat to universities comes from within and is traceable "to one fundamental poisoned premise"-that unless social and foreign policy problems are solved, campus disruption and violence will continue...
...Dear Dr...
...However certain of these advanced nonconformists have been known to camouflage themselves in the style of "the Middle Americano" when applying for Ford Foundation grants, employment at Health, Education and Welfare, or purchasing explosives...
...These wondrously diverse nonconformists are, as you would expect, a powerful inspiration to their mentors...
...Allow me to reveal to your just three...
...Cordially, Senator Edward Kennedy Take care of your heart...
...This nutty view of things has always characterized the far right...
...Already infested by hordes of the new conformists and their sputtering mentors, the American University is fast taking on the appearance of Bug House Square...
...When properly laced with their delicious acids and herbage, they have been known to reenact the early experiments of the Wright Brothers from eighth floor windows or to dive prankishly into flaming trash cans...
...It is titled Escape...
...American youth is about to lose its dearest freedom-the freedom to act like jackasses while the public picks up the tab...
...Letters To the Editor: Let me congratulate you, Bob Tyrrell, Tony Oa'mpaigne, and the rest of the staff of The Alternative for a truly superb publication that meets a real need on the campus today...
...Worse still, the professors might have to find legitimate work, and the television commentators might cease their glamorous tales of crisis and vatic affirmations of catastrophe...
...Never again will the massed nonconformists of Yale be able to follow their leader Dr...
...Members of the intellectual vanguard realize that Mr...
...Grimly the pundits prophesy that our non-conforming darlings will soon have to bury their books on Russian literature and cancel their lessons in modern dance...
...Have you ever noticed how people who have a conspiratorial and often paranoid view of history and the world tend to put everything in capital letters (i.e., a John Bircher will write about an International Communist Conspiracy...
...Viewing the embryonic youth culture he observed "An orthodoxy is forming, and like all orthodoxies it is a system of lies and evasions, a ritual of the lazy and the greedy...
...Adopting a cunningly tailored peasant dress, he earnestly slouches about various loafing spots never before dreamed of like street corners, front porches, and parks, where he seriously discusses such senseless curiosities as Western civilization...
...However, the single most fascinating aspect of Points of Rebellion is not its inanities, but rather a particular and peculiar stylistic idiosyncrasy Douglas exhibits...
...would be disrespectful...
...I once had a similar affliction and an old Hoosier doctor cured me within a week...
...These creatures embalm their marvelous minds with wonderful new drugs and drift about encased in invisible placentas of joy...
...I will look forward eagerly to the opportunity to get acquainted with some of the fine minds that, despite so much of a corrosive nature attending the university experience today, have still managed to learn, to inquire, and to express themselves with lucidity...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has just completed a penetrating study of the last Congolese election...
...Nixon has-in not quite twenty-four months-made America the terror of this globe...
...The next rank of nonconformist is the advanced nonconformist whose raiment does not differ significantly from that of his more common brethren...
...to introduce diverse opinion into society-which of course leaves the precious nonconformist no choice than to turn his governmentally endowed wonderland into a war zone...
...These are gay, jaunty imps...
...Remember Harvard where their spring festival had actually cost the local burghers over one million dollars...
...It is said that senility is much like childishness, and advanced senility much like infantilism...
...et us not see it opened to the "politicians of vision...
...all retire to asylums early in life...
...Every distasteful abrasion of our elevated standards must be loudly and threateningly billed "a crisis," and if possible it must be souped up as a "moral crisis...
...Still many idiotic Liberals see these beasts as the culmination of all their bedazzled hopes and abstractions, so they have darlingized them replacing as a national idol the image of the Ail-American Boy with the image of the idealistic young bomber...
...On 4 August Senator Allott of Colorado suggested on the Senate floor that "we disband the President's Commission on Campus Unrest and all read the Wall Street Journal...
...As we go to press the three hundred page report has been out for twenty - four hours, but the speed readers at CBS, ABC, and the New York Times have all editorialized prolixly on it...
...So assiduous is the common nonconformist in his conviction that the world would be vastly more intelligent were Congress to enact compulsory sensitivity training or the President to raise the rock festival to cabinet level that he will even abandon his loafing grounds to take part in a spirited rampage on behalf of peace or some other worthy cause...
...Lindner in the scholarly pages of McCall's playfully urged that mothers "Raise Your Children to Rebel...
...The most distinctive rank of nonconformist is also the most entertaining, and we shall categorize him as the ultra-advanced nonconformist...
...To wit: Douglas, upon returning to the United States from a totalitarian country: "It's great to be back in a nation where even a riot may be tolerated...
...History has produced some other idealistic nonconformists in the image of our advanced nonconformist, but never did they embellish their nonconformity with the coruscating moral razzle dazzle, intoned by, say, David Dellinger...
...ooh) It is the way natural to man, the way he must and will take to achieve the values he aspires to just because he is human.(ahh)" These were palmy times...
...Wrap your leg and lower back in two hundred yards of elastic bandage, and-under the bandage-pack twelve pounds of warm, fresh cow dung (remembering the industrial character of your state, try jackass dung...
...Our story begins around 1955 when some luminary by the name of Robert Lindner briefly burst from obscurity to publish a very profitable book: Must You Conform...
...For instance the Red Guards are committed and Mr...
...What renders conformity wrong is what the saps conform to, and today large numbers of students-always mistakenly characterized by the gross generalization, "American Youth,"--are conforming to anti-intellectualism, solipsism, and treacherous totalitarianism...
...At every opportunity before the good folk of your great state say...
...Those mentors who cannot agree on their younglings' intelligence, prudence, and civilizational achievement (such qualities always defying the calibrations of hagiographers) can at least sing as one to the students' commitment...
...it is merely pathetic...
...We have moved from an age in which supposedly everyone was a conformist to our present age in which supposedly everyone is a dissenter or nonconformist, and public spokesmen had better not disagree with the Zeitgeist of dissent, for to do sowe are admonished-is to polarize society-i.e...
...This device of constantly misusing capital letters (or rather of overusing capital letters) does indicate a certain type of thinking, a certain-dare I say-almost paranoid mentality...
...Unfortunately my old back ailment is acting up again and the pain is unbearable...
...Nixon intends suspension of the Bill of Rights and cancellation of the 1972 elections...
Vol. 4 • November 1970 • No. 1
