LETTERS

...Richard Speck has been committed...

...Creating a crisis is perhaps the most fruitful contribution one can make to chaos...

...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...

...Lindner's next manifesto...

...Members of the intellectual vanguard realize that Mr...

...In the long run we suspect historians will record that, under the tutelage of the dons, students have been more often victimized than pampered...

...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 of their peers around the planet is perhaps the healthiest development for which one might have dared to hope...

...At The Alternative we believe that there is nothing inherently wrong or unusual about conformity...

...Sadness frames all their days...

...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...

...What is to be done lest the seventies prove a bummer...

...Now it will no longer even be safe to riot at the Democratic Convention or to burn a library...

...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...

...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...

...These are gay, jaunty imps...

...Brewman Kingster in caterwauling for the support of racists and common gangsters...

...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...

...Of course one should hardly have to mention to the educationalpolitical 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...

...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...

...Even more heartening is the realization that your circulation has expanded from 5,000 to over 30,000...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Throughart," he replied...

...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...

...Nonetheless an enormous number of the illuminati in the media and at the great universities are more cheerful, and with good reason...

...In Ohio and later in Kansas a number of the more intelligent nonconformists had even managed to get themselves killed...

...This is a sly and crafty tyrant and it is the duty of the enlightened to do him in...

...The hour of repression is at hand...

...Best Regards, Philip M. Crane Member of Congress 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...

...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...

...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...

...Nothing is more likely to improve education than the benign attentions of Democrats and Republicans...

...Lindner in the scholarly pages of McCall's playfully urged that mothers "Raise Your Children to Rebel...

...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...

...Many of them are walking epidemics...

...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 so--we are admonished--is to polarize society--i.e...

...Remember Harvard where their spring festival had actually cost the local burghers over one million dollars...

...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 campusassuring the growth of spectacular ignorance amongst exploitable students, revulsion amongst citizens, miserliness amongst legislators and joy amongst Alternative readers...

...What is remarkable is how the truth hawkers managed to reverse themselves so ignominiously...

...Let us not see it opened to the "politicians of vision...

...Those persons advocating politicalization are blatantly exploiting ignorant students and contemptuous of the rights of the civilized few...

...America's economic marvel, Dr...

...Their coercive life style has created a barbaric underworld but one step removed from the monkeys in the zoo...

...Remember Northwestern--Northwestern by_ the Sea--where they scored as well...

...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...

...Students and faculty alike must make every little social unpleasantness into a catastrophe...

...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...

...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...

...Later in the decade Mr...

...EDITORIAL Continued from Page 2 conformity through their empty crania...

...From the middle fifties to the middle sixties, conformity served as the professors' most reliable motif in a ceaseless cacophony of twaddle...

...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...

...Never again will the massed nonconformists of Yale be able to follow their leader Dr...

...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...

...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...

...The New York Times called Mr...

...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...

...And just as there are archangels, seraphim and cherubim, there are many different ranks of nonconformists...

...For instance the Red Guards are committed and Mr...

...American youth is about to lose its dearest freedom--the freedom to act like jackasses while the public picks up the tab...

...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...

...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...

...No more idealistic young demonstrators, no more attacks on the police, no more harmless bombings or debuts before the cameras of CBS...

...Youthful idealism will dissolve into the crucible of democratic process...

...And there is one more sure-fire remedy to a dull decade...

...Herr Himmler and Herr Eichmann made admirable efforts, but without the forensic savoir faire of a Kunstler, their chances were slim and none...

...The ultraadvanced nonconformist has discovered an immensely freer, more satisfying life than his predecessors ever dared envision ; all retire to asylums early in life...

...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...

...Nonetheless, no thoughtful observer is very surprised that the dons carried off their hoax so masterfully...

...They have been peddling moonshine for years...

...But in the past...

...Consider the euphoria they evoked from the late Fred Harvey Harrington, president of the University of Wisconsin...

...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...

...Laurence O'Brien, has recently revealed that the Nixon junta purposefully and instantly dragged the economy part passu into inflation and recession--all the while deluding the citizenry into believing Congress was dominated by Democrats...

...In 1958 the poet Kenneth Rexroth sensed a breeze through the doldrums...

...Further we suggest the utter politicalization of the campus...

...And today rumors are spreading that Mr...

...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...

...Beset by unspeakable cruelty, the universities ignited into a heroic reenactment of the Paris Commune, vaulting the nonconformists to spectacular and immediate stardom...

...The most distinctive rank of nonconformist is also the most entertaining, and we shall categorize him as the ultraadvanced nonconformist...

...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...

...First we shall discuss the common nonconformist...

...Allow me to reveal to your just three...

...certainly it should not have surprised the fifties' great minds that gregarious creatures like the Homo saps conform...

...The editors of Commonweal remarked: "Probably never before were so many young people urged by their elders to revolt...

...He has sent his brigandes into Southeast Asia to make off with the lavish treasure of that famous msa.,r~an and turned America's young and underprivileged into veritable Helots...

...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...

...endowed with an extraordinary faculty to come up with inspiring new ideas and get other people to carry them out...

...0 Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania--The government said Thursday 170 persons have died in Tanzania during the past year after taking medicine given them by witch doctors...

...For many are stupid, and some are willful, dreaming great dreams...

...Grimly the pundits prophesy that our nonconforming darlings will soon have to bury their books on Russian literature and cancel their lessons in modern dance...

...Now at The Alternative we are not so sanguine about commitment...

...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...

...Nixon has--in not quite twenty-four months--made America the terror of this globe...

...In almost any American urban center they can be seen shuffling stupefactively through the streets, paw outstretched, pleading for a cup of coffee...

...But we do not mean to be disputatious...

...How horrid...

...Even as the smoke curled from his charnel halls of ivy, he recently extolled them as the flower of the Twentieth Century...

...Time even published "Rules of Nonconformity"-sort of a beatitudinal blueprint for the Lee Harvey Oswalds of the "quiet generation...

...Mustered by their preceptors to intimidate university administrators and topple the sordid Nixon regime...

...The next rank of nonconformist is the advanced nonconformist whose raiment does not differ significantly from that of his more common brethren...

...The dissenters have been profoundly shaken...

...All are motivated by the loftiest ideals...

...Some are even given to ambushing police and butchering judges...

...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...

...Rhodes "a complex, altruistic youth...

...It will assure rapid transformation into those magnificent academic cathedrals which are the glory of Latin America...

...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...

...The serene Mr...

...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...

...They are the enemies of academic freedom and a nuisance to dispassionate scholarship...

...The Alternative November, 1970 21 Letters To the Editor: Let me congratulate you, Bob Tyrrell, Tony C impaigne, and the rest of the staff of The Alternative for a truly superb publication that meets a real need on the campus today...

...All this demanded some pretty high-toned salesmanship, for both images are moronic and the latter is dangerous...

...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...

...It is no secret that on many campuses gullible members of the Chosen Generation serve as Hessians for activist faculty...

...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...

...Some of us have to be students, and the orthodoxy envisioned by Rexroth is threatening to roll us over in the seventies...

...So it is that healthy nonconformity has literally blasted its way into the American conscience, and The Alternative's Jolly Boys gleefully await Mr...

...One of the more appreciable benefits of commitment is that it triggers calculable action, and the dreamers--if they are to realize their dreams--must be able to rely on a supply of cannon fodder...

...Nixon intends suspension of the Bill of Rights and cancellation of the 1972 elections...

...How do you escape it...

...These creatures embalm their marvelous minds with wonderful new drugs and drift about en22 The Alternative November, 1970 cased in invisible placentas of joy...

...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...

...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...

...How they had revelled in the gay antics of their months of glory...

...These wondrously diverse nonconformists are, as you would expect, a powerful inspiration to their mentors...

...Our present age is a glorious one teeming with nonconformity...

...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...

...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...

...Rhodes "inquired of Professor Hook if he "hated students...

...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 All-American Boy with the image of the idealistic young bomber...

...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...

...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...

...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...