Streaking: A Revisionist View

...Ale, as all streakers know, is a marvelous lubricant for this nonlubricious form of nudity...

...I went to the March 7 streak...

...You is closer to the latter's...

...participating in group sex...

...Join us...

...They will see that it distracts one's attention from, say, the Farah over 1,000 streakers, although the Student Pants Company...

...For all his past prominence, John Foster Dulles is no easy man to rediscover, a fact which reflects in substantial part the confusion in arguments over recent American foreign relations as it does the undeniable importance of a writer's own prescriptive convictions about recent policy...

...But none of them will ever be able to kill the splendor of multitudes of people finding joy in running naked through the grass and thumbing their nose at the serious issues...

...And then, mirabile dictu, one of the tightly packed crowd of watchers turned around and pointed out that an equally large number of streakers was bypassing the main body of spectators and running behind the crowd...

...Malvolio is continually reproving the wastrels, Sirs Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch, for their frivolity...

...Excitement rose on the campus...

...It may be that those who remain fully clothed are the ones who feel slightly embarrassed...

...The strongest and best organized group on campus, in fact, is n0t~ Gay Liberation but Campus Crusade for Christ...

...So did 50,000 beer cans (my estimate after surveying the scene the next morning...

...A secret vote on any chairman can also be obtained at the request of ten members...

...The few resident radicals occasionally agonize that UGA students fall below national norms in such essential aspects of the collegiate Zeitgeist as _9 organizing civil rights marches...

...Eat your hearts out New Hampshire...

...One leader of the BSU pronounced streaking a "conspiracy" to distract people from the grievances of blacks...

...The seniority system has already seen major modifications during the last two sessions of Congress...

...I was wrong...

...Yes, there were some professional exhibitionists and perverts...

...streaked at Georgia that night...

...It does not call for collective action...

...Streakers poured by for perhaps fifteen minutes, greeted by a roar from the spectators (many of whom stripped and joined in) that was almost gladitoriaI...

...George F. Babbitt would love it here...

...And then they came in waves...

...Being a liberal she is, of course, for almost everything--even for me, whom she regards as a nice young man corrupted by bad reading material...

...Classical and streaking...

...So did 15,000 other spectators (police estimate...

...The opponents of streaking--a strange assortment of fuddy-duddies and liberalswith-a-cause--are really descendants of the puritan Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night...

...It does not require heroism...

...One cannot be a streaker and at the same time carry the weight of the world on his shoulders...

...After twenty years many of his phrases retain the power to summon images of conflict and consensus, the fantasies and realities of the middle and most intense era of Cold War...

...They, like the illegal liquor establishments that flourished before the city went wet, are good for business...

...Nixon, then the Congress (controlled by the Democrats as it is) must set the same standard for itself...

...tee hearings...

...In the popular mind, of course, Georgia is not number one in anything, save the number of obese deputy sheriffs and the production of moonshine whiskey...

...The campus police estimated slightly morous...

...Almost exclusively males, they gathered in groups of two or three, donned their ski masks (every such object Senator Claghorn: '~Even if we have to exin this snowless state has now been sold, poll a thousand students at the University my informants claim), raced around, and of Georgia to get rid of this, we should do titillated the locals...

...Well, the mayor issued various public statements, the essence of %Ve're just sitting idly'by and letting this ridiculous thing go on...

...Posters went up all over town encouraging students to break the national record, which was assessed rather arbitrarily as 500 streakers--the number that had cavorted earlier in the week at the University of South Carolina...

...Moreover, with hundreds of naked bodies in full flight around one there is a momentary moral reconstruction...

...Hundreds of naked people were going by...

...James "Sloppy" Floyd, a Georgia state when a dear, hard-working lady at the legislator, spoke in the great tradition of university spoke to me confidentially...

...Now Athens is a nice, sleepy Southern university town...

...This resolution provided that all committee hearings be open to the public unless a majority of the members voted to close a session because of national security, or the possible defamation of character...

...And then he added the immortal words: something else...

...After the Reorganization ACt of 1970, the House of Representatives authorized radio and television coverage of House commit- self can consequently accomplish little...

...advocating amnesty for all...

...Presumably these acceptable values do not include a proper reverence for the English language...

...Similarly, political commentator Elizabeth Drew has charged that regardless of how Congress may talk in its orotund fashion, it has lacked the seriousness of intent necessary to assert its constitutional responsibilities: "Congressional oversight of the executive is a function that is clearly within the grasp of Congress...

...After some nasty incidents on previous days (tear gas and mace used by the Athens police on spectators, rocks and beer bottles used by spectators on the police), the university administration capitulated...

...Such a majority vote required that a quorum be present and that a roll-call vote would be taken...

...I doubt if streaking will prove as popular in the North as it has in the South...

...It does not even demand determined nibbling at a dragon...

...Finally, Sir Toby turns on Malvolio, steward of the house, and asks: "Cause thou art virtuous dost thou think there will be no more cakes and ale...

...She said that while she approved of streaking, she hoped the phenomenon would not divert the students from the serious issues...

...I know, some gentlemen streakers have managed to carry the weight of lady streakers, but that is not the same thing...

...Which characteristic, that of representative or molder, makes him more important to the historian...

...The present mayor did not approve of streaking, although he has managed to suffer the existence of several locally famous brothels for decades...

...But all that is "changed, changed utterly," as Yeats said in '~Easter 1916," his poem about the great transformation brought about in the Irish people by the Easter Rebellion...

...House Republicans, for example, select their ranking minority members by secret ballot on each nominee submitted by its committee on committees...

...calls the "silly season"--spring Warm weather and the reports of the decriminalization of exhibitionism in other places had brought out local streakers...

...E:] Myth, Man, an d Statesman IN THEIR RECENT books on John F o s t e r Dulles, Michael Guhin and Townsend Hoopes have illustrated once again the perennial hardihood of a great puzzle for historians and especially for biographers: to what extent is an individual representative of his times...

...For one day (March 7) the campus would serve as a sanctuary for streakers...

...Or, vals and free-lancers, perhaps 10 percent of the student body (l~ies...

...If public whim is to be the barometer for determining the course of political action, if we are to go the course of Fourth Republic France with Mr...

...These critics argue that the "supercommittees" (Ways and Means, Rules, and Appropriations) still retain far too much power...

...The Black Student Union at Georgia, which had been doing its own things, like disrupting a speech by Nobel Prize winner William Schockley, found streakers to be bad nudes...

...By which she meant the presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy, war, racism, poverty, the lettuce boycott...

...Alas, I fear not...

...As I said earlier, Georgia is a conservative campus...

...Former University of Georgia Dean of Men, William Tate, a strong Southern traditionalist (he once said he got nervous every time he saw a Yankee light a match in Atlanta) provided a historical basis for streaking...

...But the Congress has a curious disinclination to do SO...

...I expected that all the publicity, coupled with the insistencies of the moment, abetted by great quantities of beer, would produce perhaps 100 streakers...

...Hair today, gone tomorrow...

...A few observations...

...Guhin begins his study challenge still unfamiliar to Americans with a chapter entitled "In Search of John The Alternative May 1974 17...

...The House Democrats also now permit the Party Caucus to consider separately each recommendation by their committee on committees...

...About this time I decided there must be something essentially healthy about which was, "Oh woe is us...

...As a result of this legislation almost 80 percent of all committee hearings were held in public in 1973...

...The first streakers appeared, running hard, not realizing perhaps that they had'a half-mile to go...

...Even Lester Maddox, who was "streaked, when he came to speak at Georgia found it hualternatively, "On streak...

...She not only reads the Nation magazine cover to cover but believes what she reads...

...Campuses where people worry about the serious issues, where the dominant expression is a frown, where students actually wear "Impeach Nixon" but' tons, will recognize "streaking" for what it is: a harmless activity that uses up excess time and energy...

...To what extent the molder of them...

...In March of 1973 secret committee meetings were further curtailed when Congress adopted H.R...

...Others, however, believe that if the Bolling proposals are accepted by the House of Representatives (and that still remains questionable) an era of postwar congressional giants will come to an end...

...But it is also, praise the 1970s, a protest against the Serious Issues of Our Time...

...The ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in the questions have manifestly troubled evaluations of John Foster Dulles and his influence on American foreign policy in the years since 1952...

...The House Committee on Administration was apparently extensively involved in matters of national security and defamation of character because it held eighteen meetings, none of which were open to the public, and it took no votes to close its sessions...

...The first one he saw at Georgia was in 1921, a hapless fraternity pledge fulfilling a command from the '%rothers...

...Other perennial reform issues in Congress have been the seniority system and committee secrecy...

...That Dulles did profoundly influence the tenor and course of American policy is agreed, but whether that influence was for good or for ill, whether Dulles determined policy in his time and fixed it for his successors or merely participated in and contributed to its development is hotly disputed...

...Blessed with a balmy climate, this state often witnesses an early advent of what William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Yes, yes, yes...

...On Thursday, March 7, 1974, Georgia earned a paragraph (well, maybe a footnote) in the Handbook of College Madness...

...But not all committees have abided b y the resolution...

...But Thursday was it...

...There were streakers masked and unmasked, streakers on bicycles and motorcycles, couples ("odd" and "straight"), even a blond girl on a white horse...

...favoring abortion on demand...

...Streaking, I then realized, may be a l o t of things, including infantile regression...

...It does demand an interest in doing the job, and in making the appropriate arrangements...

...His prestige and power within the Eisenhower Administration reached truly mythic proportions, and the force of his rhetoric carried him to the front of national and international attention time and again schooled in the rhetorical traditions of isolationism...

...SO, you might ask, how on God's green earth did the University of Georgia become the Streaking Capital of the Western World...

...Oh Freud, wouldst thou were living now and still compiling thy catalogues...

...After all, with all the boobs Christian society was doomed, he indicated, against it, the phenomenon could not be all Other opponents of the Big Streak came bad...

...Our administrators have learned the essential lesson of survival: talk tough and then give up...

...shouting down conservative speakers...

...0 Stephen R. Maloney Streaking: A Revisionist View THE TWESTY-TWO thousand students at the University of Georgia are basically a conservative group...

...Moreover, I detect very little outrage on the part of the supposedly uptight older generation...

...he said his generation hadn't indulged in the activity because they "didn't have as much to offer...

...he would probably be elected mayor...

...She 16 The Alternative May 1974 is a liberal...

...my own guess bareassed to the harassed), "Join us...

...and voting for George McGovern...

...Even to his contemporaries, Dulles John Foster Dulles: A Statesman and His Times by Michael A. Guhin Columbia University $12.95 The Devil and John Foster Dulles by Townsend Hoopes Atlantic Little Brown $15.00 seemed almost larger thanlife, one of those rare people who may have so imprinted his times as to have influenced a succeeding era...

...Counting late arri- have nothing to lose but your Farahs...

...One can leer at the girls in Playboy or the boys in Playgirl, each to his own, but not at a coed flying by...

...Structural .reform in itanswer to our political crisis depends on the quality of the individuals who make up the legislative branch...

...The "new look," "massive retaliation," promises of "liberation" and "rollback," the "domino theory," "more bang for the buck," and more---the catch phrases of Dulles' oratory became the clichds of his era, building blocks out of which myth was constructed and the real Dulles, as well as the nature as he addressed the issues and problems of of American foreign policy, concealed from American foreign relations in a time of view as by a wall...

...The sociologists and psychologists will banalize the phenomenon, trying to breathe the stale vapors of High Seriousness into it Ca protest against a conformist society"), Madison Avenue will Commercialize it (Streaker Ski-Masks from Pucci), athletic departments may institutionalize it ("Join the Streaking Squad...

...It is also, in the mass form, a surprisingly asexual event...

...A few dozen people went streaking around for an hour or so before the mass gathering in one of the dormitory quadrangles...

...the cheering started (it didn't stop until 3:00 A.M...

...The Act also required the As a result Sidney Scheuer, the Chairpublication of all committee roll-call votes, man of the National Committee for an It further provided that all committee Effective Congress, has argued that instihearings would be open to the public, "ex- tutional changes notwithstanding: '~ne cept when the committee by majority vote determines otherwise...

...Theretofore it could only be done en bloc...

...Streaking is a fad that will prove as ephemeral as any other...

...The Appropriations Committee reported nineteen meetings, but only one was open to the public, and the House Ways and Means Committee held forty closed and twenty-four open meetings...

...And if that is to be the case, come election time there can be only one course of action, and that is to throw the '~uggers" out...

...disbelieving in God...

...But, like the poor, they are always with us anyway, Ultimate Streak or no...

...About 90--100 were females...

...Somebody needs to bring us back to our senses and stop this cock-eyed thing...

...Streakers will reply (the Government claimed 1,500...

...At precisely 11:00 P.M...

...Not only the weather but the political climate as well is all wrong...

...After another big University of South Carolina "streak," their president showed that he could use words as sloppily as Representative Floyd: "It is time for the exhibitionist students and their cheering supporters of thousands to lay aside this flaunting of modesty and return to acceptable values...

...Hughes Rudd of CBS news chided streakers, albeit more literately, predicting that thumb-sucking would be big in 1976...

...The final step in my conversion came out...

...The crowd surged forward, allowing streakers to go through two-by-two, like Noah's Ark, I thought...