Kids Today
Quinn, Patrick
KIDS TODAY by Patrick Quinn. Lawrence, Kansas You see a lot of tie-dyed T-shirts on college campuses these days. Psychedelia is hip again, lava lamps are back, and kids not old enough to remember...
...You don't have to be famous for anything to draw a college crowd anymore—simply being famous is enough...
...1=1 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...
...What the Class of '91 appears to be interested in is the Class of '91...
...I hate sequels," said the first, undeterred...
...That's not to say that the formerly notorious principals have slipped into obscurity...
...The audience clapped a lot that night, but they were responding to performance, not politics...
...Take that, Mortimer Adler...
...It had to be frustrating for the former outlaws, and at one point Leary even jumped to the microphone and boomed, "Are you asking me if I still do drugs...
...When you decide that you must break the law for the greater good, then you break the law, accept the consequences and don't snivel," Liddy snapped, and the same kids clapped...
...Today's college culture claims direct descent from that of the sixties and seventies, so you have to wonder: If pop history is so important to modern students, how come they don't know anything about it...
...It made for a pretty lame evening...
...G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary are hardly the stuff of serious textbooks, but they personify the cartoon version of history that is currently the received wisdom on most campuses...
...They know no more about Watergate than they do about Teapot Dome, and "Tune in, turn on, drop out" rings about as many bells as "Fifty-four-forty or fight...
...But none had any idea why the two could be expected to disagree...
...Ever since 1965, I have passionately believed that the individual can learn how to become divine," Leary gurgled, and the kids clapped...
...No one even asked either one of them how they justified taking money for a canned caricature of argument like the Great Debate...
...The moderator was a fortyish assistant professor of religious studies who clearly cut his political teeth around 1970...
...Count how many people have dyed hair," said one of the kids sitting behind me as he peered around the auditorium...
...But, of course, the kids weren't cheering the Dark Prince of Watergate, they were cheering a pop celebrity who had played a bad guy on "Miami Vice...
...Psychedelia is hip again, lava lamps are back, and kids not old enough to remember the Sex Pistols are flocking to Oliver Stone's movie about the Doors...
...Leary received a tremendous ovation as he took the stage...
...But the central irony of the Great Debate runs even deeper than that: most of the kids barely know who these guys are...
...A curious kind of non-specific name recognition now substitutes for fame in America, and nowhere is that better illustrated than on a college campus...
...Patrick Quinn is a writer living in Lawrence, Kansas...
...That generated the boos, hisses, and catcalls one would think he deserved for breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office...
...To judge from the comments in the lobby before the show, most of the attendees knew that Leary had done a lot of acid and that Liddy had been involved in "that Watergate-Nixon stuff...
...One student actually prefaced a question with a reference to Liddy's "Watergate testimony," which caused the tightlipped hard-guy to lift up like a bottle rocket...
...more than 1,400 people, most of them students, paid money to hear two ex-convicts lecture on the foundations of moral society...
...Malcolm X," his friend corrected him...
...The two kids behind me had been looking at a Student Union film calendar as we waited for the debaters to take the stage...
...Can it be that today's students aren't even knowledgeable enough to be obnoxious...
...Malcolm Ten," one of them said...
...I do...
...In fact, the only real emotion the audience exhibited all evening came when Liddy called classes in black studies and women's studies examples of "too much education and too little training...
...He was reverent while introducing Leary, reading from The Politics of Ecstasy and omitting any mention of the doctor's numerous career setbacks...
...Leary's condemnation of the Gulf War and Liddy's justification of the action received equally tepid applause—from the same students...
...No one asked Liddy if he really intended to whack Jack Anderson...
...No one asked Leary if he felt just a little bit responsible for the social climate that has led to the crack epidemic...
...This generation of students derives its knowledge of the sixties and seventies from "Doonesbury" and "thirtysomething," and that's not a curriculum that admits a lot of detail...
...Liddy rated no more than a brief recap of his criminal career and a stern glare, and the professor's dismay was visible when the students cheered as loudly for the Dark Prince of Watergate as they had for the Pied Piper of LSD...
...when in fact no one had asked any such thing...
...Both have been fixtures on the lecture circuit for years, and periodically the two join forces in what's billed as (brace yourself) The Great Debate—"an exploration of the dichotomies between the bureaucracy of higher education and the sanctity of the individual and his beliefs, and between the responsibility of the individual to himself and the responsibility of the individual to his society and his government...
...Liddy and Leary recently presented their dog-and-pony show in Hoch Auditorium at the University of Kansas...
Vol. 24 • May 1991 • No. 5
