Eminentoes / Radicals Redux
Kakutani, Michiko
"Eminentoes / Radicals Redux" by Michiko Kakutani Thanks to features in Newsweek and People and spots on TV, we have been treated, over the last year, to a nostalgic rerun on the sixties radicals: not only "Where...
...On television, Dick Cavett tells Jane Fonda that he's sorry if he ever gave her a hard time in the past, that we all realize now she was right about the war from the beginning...
...she now lives in Los Angeles and is rumored to be a friend of Jerry Brown...
...to unilaterally disarm, there is growing evidence of what Harvard sociologist David Riesman calls "the new vanity of believing that America is the worst among nations and that we [must]search to locate the worst villains within that worst America...
...well, utopian, and for some of our revolutionaries, it didn't take long to discover that their alternatives to the bourgeois grind didn't exactly bring them closer to nirvana...
...Shmuel, the Schlemiel of a Mathematician—though he knows he doesn't have a Chinaman's chance, he yields to his mother's endless nagging, and seeks THE GRANTSY...
...Radicals Redux "Everyone I know is into self-improvement now," writes Rubin in Growing (Up) at 37, his latest contemplation of self...
...Shallow argument that—but effective...
...Angela Davis, self-styled disciple of Mao and Marcuse, has been teaching a course called "The Female Condition: Search fora Marxist Approach" at Stanford University...
...Even Hayden himself admits the revolutionists were something less than selfless...
...With Senator Church indicating he thinks the CIA is a greater threat to the nation than the KGB, and Paul Warnke, our SALT negotiator, urging the U.S...
...Toni, the Tyrolian Typologist—he knew the surfaces of the female form like nobody's business, but whose business got him no body, when he tangentially tiptoed too tentatively toward the top ticket, THE GRANTSY...
...Brian de Bois-Gilbert—he almost ran off with the beautiful Jewess in Sir Walter The American Spectator April 1978 25...
...Speaking of what he calls George Jackson's "assassination" (Jackson's the one who was shot by guards after he and his fellow inmates killed five people while trying to escape from prison), Julian Bond says "it was the expected outcome of his constant attacks on a vicious system which was unable to crush his spirit or his body...
...I t's here...
...Beatrice, the Beautiful Biologist—ready to do anything, even to offer up her sleek, slithering, slim, slender, sassy, seething, sensual—and all-around yummy—body in her sensuous quest for THE GRANTSY...
...Elaine Brown, who headed the Panther party while Huey Newton sojourned in Cuba, was until recently an advisor to Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson...
...But while it is certainly nice to think that one is different from the boring, mediocre horde, that things would be peachy if only people didn't build bombs, such visions are...
...Farley, the Felonious Philosopher—Who knew how the forces of free will and determinism struggled for possession of his soul...
...Outwardly, they have mellowed: Instead of wearing berets and threatening to bomb New Haven, they are now providing free lunches for black children in Berkeley...
...Cyrena, the Scatological Sculptress—who carried the scent of the sordid sculpture once paid for by THE GRANTSY...
...He succeeded...
...and "What kind of cereal do they eat in the morning...
...It's a foul and flip fast-footed foundation fillip, a flim-flam fleecing for the fulsome funds, the chance of a lifetime to turn the world of scholarship on its head...
...Take, for instance, the case of the Black Panthers...
...Watergate also helped the revolution, the disgrace of Richard Nixon giving all who opposed him an air of undeserved sanctity...
...Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers notoriety is living the good life in California, supported by thousand-dollar lecture fees...
...Bernadine Dohrn, who once said of the Sharon Tate murders, "Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach—wild...
...All those theatrics—nominating a pig for president, stitching bits of flag to the seat of their pants, stealing government documents—have spawned a successful moneymaking enterprise that would make the best graduate of Dale Carnegie proud...
...Most of the people who came to form SDS did so out of personal experience rather than a political background," he says...
...Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Teenie Weenie Deanie (the acid guru) are hard at work on autobiographies, immortalizing themselves in our pantheon of narcissists...
...Many of the sixties kids echoed those words...
...The sixties kids have become celebrities of sorts, rivals to Linda Ronstadt and Robert Redford for attention and quotation...
...Michiko Kakutani is a staff writer at Time...
...The Chicago 7, the Harrisburg 7, the Camden 17, the Seattle 7, the Kansas City 4, the Evanston 4, and the Gainesville 8 are all free...
...Warren Kimbro, a former Panther who admitted murdering Alex Rackley and was originally sentenced to life imprisonment, is Assistant Dean of Student Affairs at Eastern Connecticut State College...
...The painted faces, the shouted lim- ericks, the flag burnings have, mercifully, faded away...
...even Bob Dylan, according to his wife, was a wife-beater...
...Harris, the Hermaphroditic Historian—his poor past and impecunious present were all contained in his fecund future, with THE GRANTSY...
...Manson, it turned out, was not only a woman-hating tyrant, but a murderer and a nut...
...It's too bad he wasn't right...
...We were against Nixon, reasoned the kids, Nixon was bad, ergo we were right all along...
...Do your own thing" implied that one did not have to answer to someone on high, that one's own vision was clearer, better, more moral than others...
...THE GRANTSY...
...At a time when a New York Times poll tells us that two-thirds of all college students don't even know what Jacksonian democracy is, Chicago Seven defendant David Dellinger is teaching a course at Yale University on—what else?—sixties radicalism...
...Repackaged and resold, the politics and ethics of the sixties radicals are gaining wider acceptance...
...Who knew that he struggled to resolve the unbearable theological tension with the cold cash of THE GRANTSY...
...Still, the apparent metamorphosis from self-proclaimed socially-conscious idealist to narcissistic navel-gazer has really not been so abrupt...
...Anthony, the Androgynous Anthropologist—who went this way and that way, until he found the only way, to THE GRANTSY...
...People who experienced a profound disappointment trying to change the system are jogging and growing vegetables and concentrating on brightening their corner of the world...
...But the residue of those days is still with us: By their very extremism and vulgarity, the radicals made the likes of 24 The American Spectator April 1978 George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey seem positively stodgy and middle-of-the-road...
...the remaining members of the Boston branch split over the busing question—some supporting the blacks, others the white working class...
...Arthur, the Asexual Actuary—he knew all the hot numbers and always got them to add up, until the hot numbers were cooled off when he failed to win THE GRANTSY...
...The 1972 Convention of the Youth International Party expelled Jerry Rubin, age 34, and Abbie Hoffman, age 35, and the dwindling ranks of the still-young Yippies have turned to simple dada tactics—throwing pies instead of grenades...
...Bran Brenton, with two monotonous monographs to his mention, seeks to crash the big time, the world of the formless, fornicating, formica foundations, there to contest for the grandest of grand prizes, THE GRANTSY...
...Communist Angela Davis and rapist Eldridge Cleaver even made the 1973 Celebrity Register...
...Most of the sixties kids are over thirty now, and Amerika with its cries of "to the barricades" is no country for old men...
...It all sounds like a modest improvement over Charlie ("Greening of America") Reich's Consciousness III, but with Rubin and his girl friend incorporating themselves as a "Human Potential" movement, and Rennie Davis selling insurance while exalting in the "light and music and vibration" of TM, one is inclined to agree with Hayden's comment in Newsweek that the seventies have become "a very selfish decade...
...I celebrate myself and sing myself," wrote Walt Whitman a century ago...
...Gregg, the Gorgeous Geometer—who knew all the angles, and angled for the greatest angle of them all, THE GRANTSY...
...The group has recently come on hard times: Bernadine Dohrn's contingent quit, accusing the others of "male pig chauvinism...
...Lawrence, the Lecherous Linguist—who knew how to talk a great game of grantsmanship, but whose transformationalgrammar could not parse THE GRANTSY...
...The ceaseless struggle for THE GRANTSY...
...Nothing, not God, is greater to one than oneself is...nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself...
...Increasingly, the subversive acts of the sixties are glorified and spokesmen apologize for the system...
...The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out," lamented Oscar Wilde once...
...Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther turned preacher, is similarly employed...
...Always one for excess, ex-Yippie Jerry Rubin has finished his second autobiography...
...His compatriot, Erika Huggins, is a California school-board member...
...While many did oppose the war and fight for civil rights on moral grounds, many more joined the revolution for more pragmatic—one might even say selfish—reasons...
...As former radical Andrew Kopkind writes in the fifth anniversary issue of the Real Paper, "It was rock and dope and sex and Ho Chi Minh...
...Conditions on campus like standardized dress and foodand dormitory regulations brought it home...
...The new breathy, bristly, brash, brawny, bruising, braless novel by Harold Robbins—the book that lays open the busty, lusty world of scholar and patron...
...Reasons like: free welfare, free drugs, freedom from all those nasty little inconveniences of life like cutting one's hair, serving one's country by accepting the draft, or taking a jpb instead of collecting unemployment...
...What you dream about, they do...
...And doing it for you, like it's never been done, because nobody does it better, are: Henry, the Handsome Heuristic Hotshot—who was primed to push modal logic to the limits of lasciviousness, but who froze in the face of the existential predicaJohn Nollson The Grantsy ment, the competition for THE GRANTSY...
...In five years from 1971 to 1975, I directly experienced est, gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, rolfing, massage, jogging, health foods, tai chi, Esalen, hypnotism, modern dance, meditation, Silva Mind control, Arica, acupuncture, sex therapy, Reichian therapy, and More House—a smorgasbord course in New Consciousness...
...For the 1966 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Jerry Rubin dressed up in a Revolutionary War outfit, hoping to capture the media's and hence the nation's eye...
...Witness the case of the Weatherman organization, named after a Bob Dylan song, initiated with a chant in praise of Charles Manson, and dedicated to the proposition of equality...
...EMINENTOES by Michiko Kakutani Thanks to features in Newsweek and People and spots on TV, we have been treated, over the last year, to a nostalgic rerun on the sixties radicals: not only "Where are they now...
...Senate...
...All this in spite of the fact that the Panthers openly admit that they still believe in arming the black community against the police, that they are still committed to their old goals of "full employment first, socialism later...
...Sheldon, the Soporific Sociologist—too sleepy to shake up his discipline, too mesmerized by the fame and fortune of THE GRANTSY...
...In the tradition of Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy, these modern outlaws have been reborn as harmless, even respectable, curiosities...
...It's all me...
...Of course, these not-so-merry pranksters have been their own best PR men...
...It bids fair to lay bare the brusque burlesque of the dollared donors...
...The Harold Robbins people...
...And when they trimmed their own locks and put on neckties, a number of the kids themselves found acceptance in the system: Chicago Seven defendant John Froines is working for the government (appropriately enough, for OSHA), as is former campus activist Sam Brown...
...Never mind that they still cling to their leftist notions—the visible fact that Bill Kunstler now drives a CB-equipped auto or that Jane Fonda appears on the cover of McCall's is somehow soothing to the public...
...but "What kind of apartments do they live in...
...and Tom Hayden has just finished a moderately successful run for the U.S...
...has not been apprehended, but her pursuers, the FBI, are under investigation for illegally-used wiretaps...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
