Push Comes to Shove

...has any truthteller from the left so deftly probed the anguish, pomposity, and easy inhumanity of some of his fellow leftists...

...Now you may assume by the comments I have made that I consider Kelman some sort of saint...

...He does not attempt a political or historical explanation for the behavior of the extremists...

...But most of all he grieves for the idea of a university, "a community of scholars in which a realistic concept of academic freedom is the guiding principle...

...There is an undertone of tragedy throughout the book and it is a tribute to Coyne as a writer that the tragic vision comes through even when he is at his satiric best, for this is essentially a serious (though never solemn) book...

...The founders and early members of SDS saw themselves primarily as revivers of the democratic, libertarian radicalism which has always been native to this country and a central part of our national experience...

...In the case of students, however, we act and others suffer for our actions...

...They have come to project their own personal anxieties and fears onto the society at large, placing the blame for their own obvious inadequacies on the nation...

...He does have his minor flaws...

...From teaching assistants to computers, from bored lecturers to jargonmad administrators, the average student at a big university is, day by day, treated like an object It is, therefore, the supreme irony that in reaction to being treated like objects, many of the Berkeley students sided with the fanatics of the New Left--who, of course, also treated them like objects...

...His candor is revealing and instructive...

...They have been critical of author Steve Kelman because he has been highly critical of them ; throughout his book he pans faddish journalists and others who continue to praise as idealists those young people who are embarked on a crusade to destroy civilization...

...Actually, the Crimson reviewer had good reason to choke on this book...

...Students who are accustomed to functioning in a permissive vacuum naturally cry that no one listens to them--they cannot accept the fact that someone may have listened to them and disagreed, the political equivalent of a parent saying no...

...And, perhaps, most important of all, it is the introduction of a fine young conservative writer to the reading public 0 John Avey Our Eastern Fruits Push Comes to Shove by Steve Kelman Houghton Mifflin Co., 2.95~ape] If you are among the few people who, through the exercise of superior restraint, have been able to ignore the flood of books--I almost said literature-on the problems of our universities, I want you to take a simple_ test...

...During that bland decade only an occasional Norman Mailer and Irving Howe had attacked the complacency of Establishment liberalism...

...After the usual rhetorical excesses calling for an end to realism •'...the panelists sat down to a good-middle-class box lunch...

...These radicals--even those who in the twenties and thirties became entranced with foreign utopias--have maintained a tenuous link with the American system...

...He points an accusing finger at moderates of all ideological leanings who refuse to decisively confront the New Left...

...Kelman argues that New Leftists are products of the white, upper-middle class which has sheltered them from bearing the normal responsibilities of life: "...Harvard students are, in a literal sense, irresponsible That is, they are sheltered from facing the consequences of their actions...

...When Kelman gets started on the New Left, he refuses to let go...

...He is the former national president of the Young People's Socialist League (PSL--prounced "yip-sil ") He is currently in Sweden studying European socialism and its possible economic applications in this country...

...We are still living in a time when to encounter, ridicule and defeat ( veni, vidi, vici) a liberal or radical is the highest intellectual achievement...

...It is an idea he saw trampled upon, not only by raving fanatics of the New Left but by essentially decent professors and students who simply did not know what they were doing or why they were doing it because they had never, never stopped to think of what a university should be There is very much to praise in this book, not the least of which is Coyne's refusal to play Herr Doktor Philosopher...

...It is a frightening picture, something out of George Orwell with just a touch of Kafka for good measure...

...If you're not the slightest bit interested by now, you've flunked the test...

...As Russell Kirk has pointed out, a French Revolution will always end with a Napoleon...

...Further, Kelman relies too heavily on Marxian class analysis and psychological explanations for the behavior of today's radicals...

...Kelman also analyzes the cultural radicals, who have become associated with the political messiahs of the New Left out of their own need for self-fulfillment or pursuit of something to do: "...the fundemental reason the alienated have entered politics is simply because politics is in the air...

...Let us not fool ourselves: the corner revolutionaries may look and act like freaks but they are dead serious, and they are playing for high stakes...

...for once the issue is clearly between rationality and irrationality, without any political smog to cloud the conflict...

...As a Southern boy from a large, sprawling, football-dominated state university, my first reaction has always been a sort of reverse snobbery against our so-called elite schools...

...Kelman writes almost too personally...

...16 The Alternative January, 1971 When in the early sixties Tom Hayden and others founded the SDS and wrote the Port Huron Statement, they were attempting to rejuvenate a radical liberalism which had subsided in the fifties...

...Now suppose I told you that the above quotes came from a review of Push Comes to Shove by that venerable paragon of good sense, the Harvard Crimson...

...But if the attempts to construct political explanations for personal problems is only a disaster of intellectual dishonesty, the actual acting out of these personal problems threatens direct disaster for the millions of people in the world outside who are threatened by the backlash to New Left antics...

...Moderates have been "the key to SDS victory...

...Charlotte Rettig, 86, are married by Rev...

...Kelman outlines and explains the transformations which occurred in SDS and student radicalism during the latter part of the sixties, using Harvard as a microcosm of the national scene...

...I can well imagine that at the Second Coming liberal academics will greet the Lord with a panel discussion entitled, "Why is God Repressive" which will be topped off by a box-lunch...

...But Kelman does not concentrate so much on the radicals that he spares others from his sharp incisions...

...89, and bride, Mrs...

...This is merely a difference of opinion between Kelman and myself, and at this point it is a minor difference...

...he becomes involved in his subject to the extent that, by the middle of the book, one would like to ask him to maintain his composure and to preserve some sense of detachment...

...They berated it, and they worked through it...

...Of course, he was personally very involved at Harvard, and that makes writing about it all the more difficult...

...By Wick Allison o...

...It's not the same old carping between right and left, conservative and liberal...

...He tells his story more in sorrow than in anger (although he has his angry moments) because he loves the Berkeley area and he has sympathy for students who suffer the indignities of a multiversity education He knows that the big universities do not--and probably cannot-educate a person in any way recognizable as human...

...If one were to meet him in the street, he would be easily stereotyped as a radical, complete with long hair and dungarees But Kelman is not at all typical...

...What is psychologically very difficult to cope with is that our friends are potential executioners and commissars, or P-R men for the executioners and commissars...

...If he did, of course, he might find--as Max Eastman did in 1940-that whenever radicalism of any sort is carried to its logical conclusion, it produces the antithesis of its initial goals...

...But times have changed...

...He simply tells what happened and this telling, in lucid, unadorned, straightforward American prose does more to inform the reader of what is happening in America than a dozen essays on Consciousness One, Two and Three...

...My final criticism of Kelman is his commitment to socialism which seems to blind him to the historical indications mentioned above...

...Nevertheless, I am slightly surprised that his comments on the Harvard Crimson only elicited a castigating review and not a libel suit...

...But let's face it: as our oldest, most prestigious university, Harvard symbolically nurtures trends which sooner or later run through our entire educational system...

...Kelman's prose is arrestingly descriptive, lucid and precise, especially for a college freshman...

...Frank Bauer...

...Conservatives must join with others who believe in the preservation of restrained freedom and civilized order in a united front against the new barbarians...

...They are successfully challenging the deepest values of civilized society...

...Normally people can see if they've made a mistake in a pragmatic way by seeing the results...

...They prodded and cajoled, but very few ever tried force...

...For one thing, he is intelligent (summa cum laude graduate, Harvard's 1970 valedictorian), and that quality is all too uncommon among our youthful radicals...

...The radicals, he points out, having given up hope of gaining a majority of Americans, are now resorting to force as brutal and reactionary as the tactics of Hitler...

...He doesn't explain it as being "representative" of some spirit of the times...

...And he saves a few choice words for his brethren of the left: "In the romantic flush of our search for something better, we have been conned into becoming henchmen for cynical dictators...

...The Kumquat Statement is one of those rare books about the American campus: it is written by a man who is a conservative (and therefore is free of the superstitions that hamper liberals who write of campus life), an ex-graduate student at Berkeley (he saw it all at close range) and one hell of a good writer He is delightfully merciless in depicting the inanity of the liberal community...

...Rejecting reason and rational modes of behavior, they express themselves in terms of feeling and emotion (much easier for the undisciplined, uneducated or lazy mind...

...The Kumquat Statement is then an invaluable piece of reporting and an admirable work of personal history...

...These students, it would seem, exist only to be manipulated by those who either don't believe in anything at all (the liberals) or who do nothing else but believe (the New Left...

...Ilernert D. White...

...The first portion of Push Comes to Shove consists of unedited sections of Kelman's diary during his first year at Harvard, 1966-67...

...Steve Kelman has written a book that could have a momentous impact on the present struggle, and we should be thankful for the addition of such a distinguished ally...

...Suppose you heard a book described as "a travesty," "hysterical," "bizarre rantings," "tainted with personal bile," "disgusting," "improbable," and "whining...

...Reviewers across the country, speaking in solemn tones from their enlightened towers, have panned this unexpected attack on the Pepsi Generation by one of its most perceptive members...

...With soft drinks...

...Interested...

...Too often conservatives allow themselves to become intellectually sectarian so as to cloud their sense of perspective and cripple their political effectiveness...

...All I mean to say is that he has written the best book yet on student radicalism...

...I urge you to read this book, for as George Keller, former dean at Columbia, has said, "Not since George Orwell...

...This allows people to correct mistaken decisions...

...The Alternative 1971 15 from which to re-create the decline and fall of the American University Coyne, now an associate editor of National Review, was a graduate student at Berkeley during the late sixties when paranoid leftism, liberal schizophrenia, drug-induced frenzy, do-it-yourself fascisn, Marxist-Leninist ideology and oldfashioned incompetence and cowardice (on the part of the administration and faculty) combined to make Berkeley an intellectual and moral disaster area...

...Steve Kelman is a democratic socialist, in the tradition of Norman Thomas, Sidney Hook and his friend Michael Harrington...

...It is a fine example of honest, poignant writing which conveys to the reader an understanding of Harvard and its environment not easily apprehended by non-Harvard students...

...From the Port Huron Statement (which even many libertarian conservatives found acceptable) to the present totalitarianism of our part-time revolutionaries, there is a definable trend...

...The fallacy may not lie solely with the peculiarities of our generation, but with the original premises on which the radical movement is based...

...Kelman presents a concise, cogent argument against the logical fallacies of the New Left, its growing disdain for the American people, and its final rejection of democratic politics...

...Political action is a new sensation, a new substitute for the old routines...

...Radicalism in America has always walked the tightrope between respectability and social anathema...

...Without purpose or sufficient education, they attempt to rid themselves of their pervading boredom by finding some meaning in the slogans of revolution...

...One may justifiably ask at this point, why is Harvard so godawfully important...

...So the battle rages, and for once the lines are drawn on non-ideological grounds...

...He analyzes throughout the rest of the book the events which occurred at Harvard from the acceptance by the faculty of Social Relations 148 (a portent of the uneducational or antiintellectural courses so popular today on our campuses) to the McNamara fiasco (in which free speech became "counterrevolutionary"), to the take-over of University Hall...

...For another, he is an excellent writer, one of the best yet to emerge from Our Generation Most importantly, Kelman is a leader among a segment of the left which is rising in opposition to the unfounded premises, contorted reasoning, and vicious tactics of the political fanatics and cultural freaks who have taken claim to the title of "radical...

...Even twentieth-century figures like Eugene Debs, John Reed (the only American buried in the Kremlin), the early Max Eastman and his compatriots on the Masses have succeeded in gaining a place in the American Hall of Fame, largely through the victory of the labor movement and time's slow dulling of antagonisms...

...As Kelman sees it, the "Movement"-SDS, Progressive Labor, and other radical factions--has given up all hope for broadbased reform in a free-wheeling, sensation-seeking, hedonistic plunge...

...Ideological purity is a pleasure we can no longer afford...

...He doesn't try to fit the Berkeley catastrophe into a philosophical or ideological system...

...Kelman's delightful expos'e of his own naivete's, personal hang-ups and prejudices enables the reader to feel comfortable and familiar in reading his views of external events and personalities...

...With soft drinks...

...My favorite line in the book comes after a description of a workshop held by something called the Women's League for International Peace and Freedom...

...Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau -- considered extremists in their own time--have now been granted a place in America's social and political heritage...

...He grieves for himself and his children, for his crushed dreams of a scholarly life and for what his children will have to face when they go to college...

...Often they are simply unable to see that SDS means what it says: WOBURN, MASS...

...For the most part, we are still playing the little games which were so successful for William F. Buckley in the late fifties, puncturing the inflated balloons of liberal illogic...

...Coyne feels he has seen the educational future--and it doesn't work...