The Press: The Memory Thereof
Powers, Thomas
claptrap or the theoretical re-directioning of a man's mind. The steel blade in the gangleader's palm and the steel revolver on the guard's hip have been the only rehabilitation a majority of...
...The steel blade in the gangleader's palm and the steel revolver on the guard's hip have been the only rehabilitation a majority of America's imprisoned has been permitted to experience...
...It was always referred to in the upper case, as something specific and concrete, if hard to describe in a way which would include factional enemies...
...An unexceptionable argument...
...That's the only thing I can quote from memory but I remember the drift of the rest...
...Opponents of the plan felt it would destroy the historic integrity of the row of buildings in which the new structure would take its place, "a comment," Goldberger argued, "that would be more appropriate if [the new owners of the site] were proposing to bomb the old house, not replace it...
...But let's not pretend that our penal institutions offer anything else...
...Juan Gonzalez put the charge with unusually explicit force but I have heard the same thing, expressed in more guarded form, by retired officials of the CIA...
...Reporters never looked back...
...He was one of those people, not quite a buffoon, whose role in SDS when I knew him at Columbia was to be liked...
...The individuals whose history it records make use of it on their way up and cling to it on the way down, but the press at best is polite...
...Not angrily, but sadly convinced...
...What I remember is Juan's youth, his confidence in the imminence of the revolution, his conviction that SDS would fill a place in the history book on a level with the First International, and his scorn for the press...
...he thought Columbia was April, 1917, is not the Winter Palace-the reporters would all pack up and carry off the same trifling mental baggage with which they had arrived...
...Only the details go into the files, and are resurrected whenever a radical of the '60s surrenders or is captured by the FBI--most recently Phoebe Hirsch and Robbie Roth of the Weathermen, who surfaced in Chicago earlier this year, and before them Susan Saxe, Cameron David Bishop, David S. Fine, Pat Swinton, Jane Alpert, Dwight Alan Armstrong and others...
...Stories about them contain the dates of alleged crimes and a word or two Commonweal: 465 of ancient history about long-ago events like the SDS split in June, 1969, which led to the Weatherpeople...
...I 22 luly 1977:466...
...A pivoting wall sounds inconvenient to me, but it would have the virtue of marking the site in some permanent way, of reminding all future passers-by that something happened here, something abrupt, violent and upsetting...
...Reporters habitually missed the point...
...If punishment is necessary to curtail crime, be it so...
...His enthusiasm was so infectious, his faith in the revolution so untroubled and easy, that it was hard to believe the organization of which he was a member could contain within it anything ugly, sinister, or cruel...
...There were other reporters and students there but I've forgotten their names...
...I was reminded of this not long ago by a Paul Goldberger story in the Times under the jarring (to me) headline, "Taste in Replacing the House on 1 lth Street...
...If we grant that the press has the memory of a housefly, does it follow that this is a bad thing, a weakness or failing or error of shallowness to be corrected...
...Sometime in the late spring of 1968--I think it must have been in mid-May, between the first and second busts at Columbia UniversitymI spent an hour squashed into a booth in the West End Bar next to a young radical named Juan Gonzalez...
...Individual reporters may commit themselves but the press as a whole is unfriendly to commitment...
...It would not bother Juan to know that he has been forgotten, but I suspect he might have an ironic comment or two about the ease with which the press has forgotten The Movement...
...The revolution he wanted to make was in Latin America, starting with Puerto Rico although he himself had closer ties to Venezuela...
...The institutions are dormant, defunct or moribund, but the people who created and ran or were content simply to be represented by them will always draw much of their sense of who they are from what they were...
...So it is foolish to pretend that the row can be precisely what it was...
...One of the people the reporters hung about was Juan Gonzalez...
...Three of them died, including a friend of Juan Gonzalez named Ted Gold, a short, solid young radical with an excitable, engaging manner...
...Nothing will change that fact-even a reproduction of a Greek Revival design will not restore the row as if the new house had come from the 1840s instead of the 1970s...
...He had been all but living with reporters for a month and knew as many first names as a press officer on a presidential campaign plane...
...Insofar as reporters played a role in the historical dialectic it was reactionary, obstructionist, oppressive and counterrevolutionary...
...If it is alive, it is alive in the manner of the memory of childhood in grown men and women, a kind of anchor for identity...
...Goldberger's story was about a dispute concerning plans for the long-delayed construction of a house to replace the Greek Revival building destroyed in the explosion...
...It may have its little affairs of the heart, but the sentiment does not run deep, as Kennedy would have discovered if he had lived, and as Kissinger has...
...The last time I saw him he was sitting on a couch without legs in the decrepit office of the Young Lords in East Harlem...
...Reporters did not care about things...
...In its heart, if it has a heart, the press is glacially indifferent...
...You should be organizing to fight your own oppression...
...The forgotten are not likely to agree, but it seems to me the answer is no...
...Reporters were summer soldiers, with no commitment to anything but their paychecks...
...Now the Young Lords have gone the way of SDS...
...If it did anything else we would have to control it...
...This naturally involved a great deal of hanging about and idle chatter...
...But the movement of which they were the late efflorescence, that passionate mentality of protest which began with Mississippi and Vietnam and colored so much of what a whole generation thought and felt--all that is missing...
...No doubt there's something in the claim, if you stick to the details, but in a broader way I think Juan Gonzalez is right...
...It simply records--Hitler on the way up, Hitler on the way down, the beginning and end of depressions, the birth and death of movements...
...Gabe and Nick and Sylvan and Joe and Roy all wanted to know what Juan thought, and where he could be reached later in the day, and would he be free for dinner for a little talk on background, and was it true that Mark Rudd's reputation as a revolutionary swordsman explained the presence of all those terrific-looking Barnard girls making coffee and running the mimeo in the SDS office...
...With variations to suit the circumstances it is entertained, if not formally brought, by almost everybody who becomes the object of the press's fickle attentions...
...Whatever the movement was--a group of people, a climate of activism, a mood of outrage, protest and rejectionmit has disappeared all but entirely from the pages of the New York Times...
...In its heart it does not care...
...This leads to my second question...
...This was a finely honed thing...
...George Willig may take up sheep-ranching in Australia or retire to a monastery in Bhutan, but you can be sure he cannot die in conditions of such obscurity--and I wish him a long, happy lifemthat the New York Times will not take note, nor recall in his obituary that he once climbed the World Trade Center...
...Unfortunately, the house is already destroyed...
...The Movement was much more of a thing than the Fifties...
...A thousand years had passed since he had listed the sins of the press in the West End Bar...
...They stayed up there from morning till night, writing mood pieces and analytic pieces and personality pieces whenever they could put together a few anecdotes about Rudd or Josie Duke...
...Some community activists protested the design for the new building because it would include an odd front wall pivoting out from the facade...
...Columbia had a quasi-military atmosphere at that time...
...An illusion, alas...
...Reporters were not merely sent up to cover the revolution as it unfolded in its uneven way...
...Graduate theses have been written about the role of the press in egging things on--the Great Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Cold War, student activism, the riots in Newark and Detroit, the rise of John F. Kennedy, the fall of Nixon...
...This raises two questions...
...You shouldn't be writing for the press," said Juan in the West End Bar after the revolution had been called for the day...
...There were two camps--the administration and the SDS--and rumors of blow and counter-blow flew back and forth...
...Environmental activists, losing presidential candidates and Farah Fawcett-Majors all know in their hearts that reporters are only passing through...
...Columbia, in short, was a story...
...I'm on Goldberger's side here...
...Objectivity was a myth...
...Reporters had no memory...
...Juan's fate I don't know...
...This is probably the most common charge against reporters...
...The house on 1 lth street, you may recall, was destroyed by an explosion and fire in March, 1970, when some Weatherpeople in the basement crossed a wire while making bombs...
...the row is no longer extant...
...The press breaks cleanly and forgets and moves on, leaving the rest to history...
...He was through with SDS by then, convinced they were irredeemably white, middle class and North American...
...It had an internal growth in the way the Fifties did not, and it created and left a great deal behind, where the Fifties only passed...
...Demonstrations were almost daily, police were everywhere, kids with bruises and bandages from the first bust were conspicuous, and there was no telling when the next big push would come...
...I wonder if Juan Gonzalez saw that story and was reminded of the friend who had died there...
...When the story died at Columbia--in his heart Juan did not believe it would die...
...The first is whether the charge is right, and the answer is yes...
...If the press has any memory at all it is the memory of the idiot savant for nutty and irrelevant detail...
...Theirs was a star-crossed meeting, since the reporters were of course only passing through while Juan, by temperament a gentle soul, had the fierce commitment of a kid trying to prove that his parents, teachers and country were wrong when they suggested this was only a "phase," a sort of lateadolescent political equivalent to what Benjamin Speck so-rightly calls "the terrible twos...
...THOMAS POWERS Change of Address Please give four to six weeks' notice and enclose a current Commonweal label...
...It was that reporters were hirelings of the ruling class, a shallow and superficial lot who covered feast and famine with the same easy indifference...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 15
