ERASING THE SIXTIES - OR, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MARK RUDD?
Pinsker, Sanford
Americans do not meditate on History; they dream about fresh starts and wide horizons. We are an impatient people, pragmatic to our bones, eager to get on with the business of getting on. It is...
...I refuse to accept such gloomy logic...
...The House and Senate bills provided optional public financing, but only for general elections...
...Remembering the '60s, he oversimplified them...
...The reason for Republican opposition seemed to be that the Republicans are now having great success in raising money, and generally can count on outspending Democrats...
...Candidates who accept public funds would not be allowed to spend more than $25,000 of their own funds...
...Now, a decade later, no amount of juxtaposing the turmoil of "then" with the languor of now seems very consoling...
...1293 and 1294...
...But it was also five o'clock and the moderator felt duty-bound to call the proceedings to a halt...
...No doubt some members of the Class of '63 will feel cheated by the comparisons between Life and Art, but Animal House was not made for them...
...It also suggested that there was still some gold to be panned in the hills of Woodstock Nation...
...The photographs of the era make that very clear...
...Also in 1977, it was reported that the Maritime lobby had won a controversial decision from the House Merchant Marine Committee that would require a rising proportion of all oil imports to travel in American ships at rates several times as high as prevailing shipping costs...
...By that I mean, college life is seen as an endless round of toga parties and zany high jinks...
...Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976...
...4 "Filibuster Kills Carter Campaign Bill," Congressional Quarterly, August 6, 1977, p. 1634...
...Requiescat in pace...
...Other examples of campaign contributions distorting the policymaking process are glaringly obvious...
...Yet, it may well be the reverse...
...Those on the New Left reserved a special contempt for nearly anything that smacked of history...
...At one point a young man in the standard dress of the Great Outdoors (blue jeans, flannel shirt, hiking boots, bandanna) began to develop the sort of protracted "question" that apparently comes with this territory...
...Most members of the Class of '83 were born after President Kennedy's assassination...
...Vietnam continues to be especially galling...
...But whatever else the University of New Mexico might be, it is not Columbia, and 1979 is less than a shadow of 1969...
...There were "position papers," questions, flickers of debate, even some polite dialogue...
...Beth Mintz, "The President's Cabinet: 1897-1972," in the Insurgent Sociologist, Spring 1975...
...In 1972 the Federal Election Campaign Act was passed...
...One day is the same as the next...
...The late '60s were a hothouse for both points of view...
...After all, an entire generation has gotten the message about college being too much fun to miss...
...In short, what happened at Wisconsin, at Berkeley, at Columbia—and more important, what these disruptions of "business-as-usuarmeant—will grow ever fuzzier...
...Although debts would most probably already be incurred in the primary, this legislation did have a positive feature: a candidate's dependency on funds from interest groups and large donors during the general election would be considerably reduced...
...Since his heady days as a media radical, he has been a litmus test for the New Consciousness...
...The audience clapped and then milled toward the exits...
...When a dean was told about the "incident" at the American studies symposium, he had some difficulty placing Mr...
...One obvious barrier to public office is the high cost of a viable campaign—especially for federal office...
...Longer-range concerns feature the word "job," as in "Will I be able to get a job...
...Americans operate on the gut belief that men make History, that dreams set events into motion...
...Does this job pay Big Bucks...
...The Southern Democratic opposition, led by the late Senator Allen (D-Ala...
...Those groups and individuals who could not give their usual sums to presidential candidates tried to retain their influence by making large contributions to congressional candidates...
...Can you imagine anyone getting nostalgic about the '70s...
...To argue that versions of selfgratification (everything from belly-dancing to astrology) have replaced the responsibilities of History is rather like arguing that, because of Studio 54, decadence has replaced baseball as our national pastime...
...106...
...The members surely understood that if large givers were unable to make their donations to candidates during the general election, these funds would simply be shifted to the primaries...
...Animal House is, at best, an exercise in escapism...
...The pride at being neither exploited nor an exploiter seems to betray a deeper selfrighteousness hiding just underneath...
...The young man came forward to raise his query once again...
...the domino shut-down of college campuses) and agreed that the Kent State murders had killed the Movement...
...Before the formal welcome, much less the first speaker, there were good reasons to believe that the advance billing was going to be more "revolutionary" than the payoff...
...Many charged that the Maritime union had simply bought itself a bill...
...With the exception of professionals like Jerry Rubin, both sides of the generation gap agree that the late '60s were a dreadful time...
...the disruptions at the Democratic convention...
...All this fierce dedication must strike real deans as amusing, especially when they have spent a gloomy afternoon mulling over demographic projections for the 1980s...
...Now 20 moderate and liberal Republicans are co-sponsoring the legislation in the House...
...30,000...
...The Chamber of Commerce is lobbying against the bill and so is the National Conservative Public Affairs Council (NCPAC...
...In 1978 one Senator (Jesse Helms) spent $6 million in a successful reelection campaign against a poorly financed opponent...
...At least in those particular forms...
...In this film, heavyweight theories about narcissism are reduced to an old-fashioned, hedonistic burp...
...Enough was enough...
...Rather, the film caters to a decidedly younger crowd, one that sees History as both visual and vicarious...
...Twenty-six members of the House Merchant Marine Committee received a total of $823,263 (all but two of whom voted for the bill...
...Lasch is concerned less with selective forgetting than with the vision of a wholesale, national amnesia...
...Thus dozens of organizations and political-action committees could be counted upon to provide primary candidates (especially incumbents) with maximum donations...
...Thus, even 105 if the legislation is passed, politicians will continue to be bought, the balance of influence will still be biased by moneyed interests, and the door to public office will still be open only to those who can raise large sums for a primary contest—the uppermiddleincome class...
...The new law's most significant drawback was that the House and Senate could not agree on a public financing bill for themselves...
...Ten years ago Mr...
...The 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act was much more comprehensive, providing matching federal funds for presidential primary candidates, and voluntary public financing of general elections...
...In House races, incumbents outspent challengers by $12.3 million, a margin of about 1.7: I . • Wealthy candidates have a significant advantage because they can substantially finance their own campaigns...
...If they do, they will have modest positive consequences...
...Rubin seem an appropriate Lazarus "come back to tell us all...
...Some House races in 1976 and 1978 cost in excess of $500,000, and Senate races can cost over $1 million...
...Imagine a symposium announcing itself as "The Revolution in American Culture" and then imagine the University of New Mexico in 1979...
...Rubin must have worked as a marketing analyst for the House of Fads...
...In order to qualify for public funds a candidate would have to raise $10,000 from small contributions, and then would be eligible for matching funds for contributions of $100 or less...
...In this sense Animal House—and much 01 the rest of our popular culture—works to erase the more disturbing confrontations of the late '60s and to fill the historical vacuum with a more acceptable substitute...
...Rather, the 100 day-to-day anxiety is: Can I get a parking space...
...Republican National Chairman Bill Brock is leading opposition to the bill with speeches about the bill being proincumbent, anti-challenger...
...It was a predictable evening, one that made good on Saul Bellow's quip about History giving everybody a free ride and Andy Warhol's insistence that anyone in America can be famous for 15 minutes...
...Rudd and few, if any, undergraduate eyebrows would raise if it did...
...In urban and competitive districts, the cost is much higher...
...History per se becomes the casualty, and we are invited to mourn, if we will, at the wake...
...The list stretches on, until one becomes convinced that Mr...
...John Gardner, "Prospects Improve for Public Financing of Congressional Races," Congressional Quarterly, April 16, 1977, p. 707...
...Evidently people really did wear outlandish costumes, sport long hair, and wave their fists...
...There is a good-natured honesty about the lads who throw their beer cans on the floor and their food across the cafeteria...
...In 1976, interest groups provided congressional candidates with $22.6 million in donations, up from $12.5 million in 1974 and $8 million in 1972...
...In the nm decade our sense of "how it was" during that tin and in those places will not come from Arthur Schlesinger or Norman Mailer or Robert Lowell not from American Mischief or Mr...
...Aging revolutionaries always have a special fondness for the days when they grabbed the headlines, a time when they were younger and more outraged& Rubin was no exception...
...The spending limits set by the legislation also seemed reasonable...
...Going wild" is not on this decade's student 102 agenda...
...4 In 1978 public-financing legislation failed again because of continued Republican and Southern Democratic opposition, plus a partisan attempt by the Democratic majority to alter the bill to limit Republican party spending...
...Dressed in black trousers, a gray v-neck sweater, and open-collar shirt, he seemed more akin to Mort Sahl than an urban guerrilla...
...The Republicans fought the bill for the stated reason that it would protect incumbents...
...Notes See Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America...
...But the illusion that American history is written on erasable bond persists...
...President Carter backed the bill, even though his Secretary of the Treasury warned that it was inflationary, would create unemployment, would invite retaliation from other countries, and violated treaties with some 30 countries...
...Expensive campaigns rely more and more on slick media campaigns, emphasizing image rather than substance...
...As Rubin put it, with all the emotion and timing he could muster: "Those bullets said, 'You gonna protest, we gonna kill you.' And they did just that...
...The proposals for public financing of congressional elections met defeat in the Senate in 1977, leading the House to drop its consideration of the bill...
...Cultural narcissism becomes a dramatic way of focusing on lives out of touch with historical continuity...
...In 1977, it was revealed that six senators who were helping to write a compromise energy-tax bill 103 had received contributions from oil and gas interests in their last campaigns totaling $504,123...
...Contrast the limits listed on p. 1294 with incumbent and challenger expenditures on p. 1293...
...Rubin might have grappled with some of these vexing by-products of the counterculture, but he was clearly having too much fun cracking oneliners...
...The world has changed—and so has Mark Rudd...
...The money-heavy special interests couldn't buy themselves a President so they tried to buy as many members of Congress as they could...
...Animal House freezes college life at a moment when politics were bordered by Greek Row and social responsibility meant stuffing tissue paper into a Homecoming float...
...The campus newspaper contains nary a mention of Mr...
...There is, after all, a difference between the "interesting" and the central...
...Still, the middle-sized auditorium was packed as representatives from women's studies, Chicano studies, and American studies held forth...
...Unfortunately, I could...
...If Christopher Lasch is right about what he calls "the culture of narcissism," more than the '60s will be erased: ...Americans seem to wish to forget not only the sixties, the riots, the new left, the disruptions on college campuses, Vietnam, Watergate, and the Nixon presidency, but their collective past...
...It hardly stretches a point to suggest that a donation that large might influence his vote on matters affecting the AMA...
...He is still something of a political activist, especially where matters nuclear are concerned, but he insists upon a low profile...
...at worst, it will dominate the popular imagination's notion of the '60s...
...At best, we see the Old through a glass, darkly...
...H. John Heinz III contributed $2,466,910 of his own money to his successful Senate campaign...
...The chair of the Committee, John M. Murphy (D-N.Y...
...101 LARGER FORCES may be at work...
...Lasch's thesis disturbs me, not because it is wrong-headed, but because it cuts far too broad a swath...
...After warning others "not to trust anybody over 30," it was inevitable that, one day, they would turn thirty themselves...
...The plain truth is, students worry themselves sick about future careers and lobby hard for "vocational" courses...
...But to a generation not prone to taking History seriously, such is the stuff of which term papers are made...
...Bentsen could hardly be expected to reason objectively on matters affecting the energy industry, or to take actions that might lead to cutting off such funds...
...History is not this community's strong suit...
...I offer this thumbnail sketch of ahistoricity, American-style, less in a spirit of thrilling discovery than to suggest how potent the mythos still is...
...This would resemble the conditions that prevailed when presidential races were publicly financed, causing special interests and large donors to shift their funds to congressional races...
...This time, however, he introduced himself first: "Hello...
...retrospectives and documentaries, from assorted "novelizations" and comix and, of course, frotr rescreenings of Animal House...
...From the shambles of the Democratic convention and, indeed, of the democratic process, our country got Richard Nixon...
...At the University of New Mexico, the student newspaper billed it as a great chance to "find out what you missed...
...BY CONTRAST, images that erase the late '60s by constructing a less complicated alternative, at the moment just before all hell broke loose, can exert a genuine power...
...Granted, today's undergraduates are curious about the '60s, but with something of the same casual spirit that their parents stroll through the Smithsonian Institution or tramp across the Gettysburg battlefield...
...Rudd...
...As the archvillain of the piece, Dean Wormer brings all the administrative force he can muster against Animal House...
...Which also means that a certain number of them will get it wrong—some by a year some by a decade, some by a century...
...Rubin does not come cheap...
...The article also took pains to include enough pertinent biography and thrilling credentials to make Mr...
...In fact, Wormer has become so obsessed with shutting this eyesore down that he looks like Captain Ahab in hot pursuit of the white whale...
...Nor was Mark Rudd, who sat up front and watched an old buddy do his shtick...
...Certainly, lavish campaign contributions might have played a role...
...From the turmoil on the campuses, we now have "expanded collegial governance," a phenomenon requiring students to join with faculty members and administrators on wheelspinning committees...
...The nation watched the war on television, as its social fabric gradually pulled apart...
...Or, rather, they paid $2 a head to watch Rubin play stand-up comic...
...THAT MUCH SAID, let me hasten to point out that Animal House is everything its audience is not: anarchistic, libidinal, antisocial...
...But dollar signs were not the only source of Rubin's animation...
...In the 1976 House races, 10 candidates gave $100,000 or more to their campaigns, and 3 of these spent over $400,000 of their own money...
...Public financing of presidential campaigns, not House and Senate elections, caused an obvious problem...
...Most obviously, its members did not want to make it too easy for citizens to run for Congress...
...In Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, Rubin catalogues major landmarks toward Self-Fulfillment "...from 1971 to 1975, I directly experienced est, gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, rolfing, massage, jogging, health foods, tai-chi, Esalen...
...A film like Animal House is, regrettably, a case in point...
...Candidates who opted for public financing could spend no more than $250,000, plus a sum equal to 10c for every eligible voter in the state...
...One Senator from Texas (Lloyd Bentsen) received $265,181 from oil and gas lobbies...
...As the Congressional Quarterly said: 6...
...I offer an anecdote that puts our current situation into bold relief...
...In his case this has meant turning down offers to (a) write a monthly column for Hustler magazine, (b) publish a book about his underground experiences, (c) go on the lecture circuit...
...I'm Mark Rudd...
...During the Nixon administration, the Milk Fund, ITT, and Vesco scandals all involved influence-buying with campaign dollars...
...Rudd would, no doubt, have taken rather unkindly to the specter of being "cut off" in mid-paragraph...
...The Republicans' protests seem disingenuous, since they saw nothing wrong with limiting public financing to the general election and refused to support higher grants to challengers that would offset incumbent advantage...
...beneath the surface was the unspoken fear that the bill would encourage Republican opposition in states which had known one-party Democratic dominance...
...The Editors Harrell Rodgers The Barred Door: Money and Public Office There is overwhelming evidence that political power is a class phenomenon in America...
...They argued that even though incumbents and challengers would have about the same amount of money to spend, in the general election the incumbent would have the advantage because of name recognition, a home office, and more media coverage...
...In recent years it has cost an average of $80,000 to $100,000 to conduct a campaign for a House seat, and around $700,000 for a seat in the Senate...
...The campus has achieved some measure of national visibility by being featured in a series of Desenex ads, but nobody would claim it stood at the vital cross-roads of American education...
...THE POST-WATERGATE HUE stimulated support for some type of reform to control the most obvious problems caused by campaign donations...
...It is hardly surprising that our response to the cultural baggage of History has always been a preference for "traveling light...
...How does such a bill gain so much support...
...The bills also would have provided funds for candidates without cutting off private contributions— an important form of public participation...
...3 See "Money, Incumbency Failed to Guarantee Success in 1976 Senate Races," Congressional Quarterly, June 25, 1977, pp...
...Sammleñ Planet, Rather, it will come from television...
...the "old politics," the old left, the old classics, the old verities and, of course, one's Old Man...
...Some historians now have consigned the equation of America and Eden to the ashcan—as superficial, exaggerated, filled with more poetry than truth...
...The sweep of History is stuck at 1963 and confined to the idyllic campus of Faber College...
...Still, the bills may pass Congress in the coming months...
...Typically, the 24 Senate incumbents who sought reelection in 1976 were able to outspend their challengers by a margin of about 3:2...
...A meaningful sense of History is only acquired by hard work...
...Americans have never had any difficulty in remembering military victories, but since the Korean War we have been hard-pressed to develop strategies of forgetting...
...The result is a bleak assessment, precisely in the tradition of other American Jeremiads and exactly the sort of text that would appeal to President Carter's evangelical side...
...Especially by a faculty member...
...These bills spoke volumes about Congress...
...The unshaven brothers of Animal House are hardly an exception to the rule...
...A rebellion in fantasy is not the same thing as a rebellion in fact...
...The cunning of History had other ironies up its sleeve...
...He once had a thick, Puritan hide—fearful of the body, of glowing health, of material success, or Big Money...
...Which is to say, History has a cunning of its own: well-heeled fraternities do what they can to project a seedy facade and the widespread popularity of Animal House may end up saving an avatar of Dean Wormer's hide...
...Thus the legislation covered only general elections, not primaries...
...Nonetheless, everything conspires to make us cheer for this motley crew...
...Sic transit gloria mundi...
...That Rubin and others overestimate the real achievements of the Movement is understandable, but that they should ignore the costs—in liberality, in tolerance, in a humane spirit—is selective vision of a very different sort...
...The right wing of the Republican party and the Southern Democrats are still virulent in their opposition to the bill...
...There is, however, a subliminal message flashing just underneath—namely, that the late '60s simply never happened...
...Am I trained for that job...
...In this regard, a book like The Culture of Narcissism was unnecessary...
...2 PUBLIC FINANCING LEGISLATION, to deal with these continuing problems, was introduced again in 1977...
...In Senate races, 15 candidates gave over $50,000, and 9 of these donated over $100,000...
...ADD AN OLD-FASHIONED BRAND Of opportunism to this newly fashioned "nostalgia" for the '60s and the result is Jerry Rubin, an ex-Yippie growing as comfortable behind lecterns as he once was atop "the barricades...
...Moreover, because farce insists that everything be played larger than life, it is possible to cheer oneself hoarse on behalf of the "animals" and, at the same time, know full well that the days of three-piece suits and attache cases loom just around the corner...
...The obvious consequence is to make it increasingly difficult for the public to know the issues and vote intelligently...
...The legislation is now again before Congress, in substantially the same form as that of the 1977 bills...
...It insists that we live, albeit desperately, for ourselves and our moment...
...One thing is very clear: if people cannot give a mental design to the '60s, the media will...
...expressed strong philosophical objection to public financing—but this did not seem to be the real reason for their opposition...
...Indeed, November 22, 1963 has become one more historical date they are expected to remember and be examined about...
...Candidates who can raise the required sums are often compromised in the process...
...Congress has simply used the reform pressure to forumulate a bill that handles abuses poorly, threatens the members only mildly, and provides them with numerous benefits...
...Or put another way: why worry about competing notions on what the '60s meant when the deeper truth is that none of them matter...
...Neither one's predecessors nor one's posterity matter...
...Jerry Rubin responds to History by merchandising it...
...From the beginning of the Republic, federal officeholders and most state officials have been drawn from the professional upper-middle-income class of white, Anglo-Saxon males.' While the civil-rights and women's movements have modestly increased the representation of minorities and women in high public office, it is still the preserve of the welleducated and well-heeled...
...But there is something both poignant and sad about his recitation of the litany...
...This act placed limits on media expenditures (limits that were repealed in 1976) and required disclosure of campaign contributions in excess of $100...
...q To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...It was more an impromptu lecture than a genuine question: eloquent, intense, long-winded...
...The right-wing Republicans have enormous money at their disposal to finance campaigns, and they correctly see public financing as a threat to their advantage...
...The Government Accounting Office reported that this bill would cost consumers $240 million a year in unnecessary freight charges...
...By contrast—and to his credit—Mark Rudd has steadfastly refused...
...These massive increases provoked John Gardner of Common Cause to charge that A lot of congressmen were bought and sold in 1976, just like the good old days except that the going rates were higher...
...At times this makes for large ironies...
...Whatever their current differences, they both savored the Big Moments (Lyndon Johnson declining to run for a second term...
...THE IMPLICATIONS of these spiraling costs are numerous: • Anyone who cannot hope to raise large sums of money has little chance of winning a seat in Congress...
...Rudd and his compatriots have come to seem a quaint, even slightly exotic, lot...
...During 1974, the Senate twice passed legislation establishing public funding for congressional races, and both bills were rejected by the House...
...During the presidential primaries, the Maritime lobby gave Carter $100,000, and spent another $1 million on contributions to members of Congress...
...And in an irony that will probably set some of the grayer heads at Columbia wagging, he has chosen "education" as his undergraduate major...
...What seems more likely is that one set of images from the '60s will be replaced by another and that rather than concentrating on the angry, volatile days at the decade's end, these newer images will focus on the earlier, apolitical days...
...In the 1976 election, this legislation made it easier for candidates to seek the presidency, and it prevented a party from largely outspending the other (as had been the case in 1968 and 1972...
...In 1979 there are 15 women and 16 blacks in Congress...
...There, the brothers of Delta House wage a relentless fight against the forces of respectability, whether dressed in academic gowns, ROTC uniforms, or Ivy League collars...
...Once the primaries were over, public financing of the general election would be quite convenient for incumbents, freeing them from the burdens of fund-raising...
...received $9,950 in 1977, not an election year...
...Only the last constituency does this as a full-time, well-compensated job...
...Scholars will continue to poke at the library dust and to care, but the controversies that raged during the late '60s are over...
...But no longer...
...In 1976, for example, the American Medical Association gave one candidate for the House (Ron Paul, R-Tex...
...More important, notions about what was become confused with what is...
...It was the standard hype that preceded Rubin as he barnstormed across the mortarboard circuit...
...And, too, there are doubts—that when the book is finally completed, nobody will care and Mark Rudd will forever suffer the indignities of having to introduce himself...
...The candidates' indebtedness to donors certainly was reduced...
...Large campaign budgets cannot be met without large donations, which generally come with some strings attached...
...At the University of New Mexico, a hundred + students got it from the horse's mouth...
...In fact, concerning the general election and according to the data, if incumbent and challenger expenditures in the 1976 election are contrasted with the expenditures that would have been allowed under this legislation, public funds often would have reduced incumbents' expenditures and raised those of the challengers) Thus, to the extent that the bill protected incumbents, it did so because primary elections were not covered, an omission the Republicans supported...
...Senatorial candidates accepting public funds would be limited to spend no more than $35,000 of their personal funds on 104 their campaign, and House candidates no more than $15,000...
...As a laborer in the fields of est, Mr...
...of all officeholders less than I percent is black, and 8 percent women...
...Incumbents can raise large sums easier than challengers because they are in a position to do more for donors...
...But, basically, the legislation is flawed because it does not cover primary campaigns, an extension that neither party would support...
...The general scenario is familiar enough: we root for the underdog, the beautiful loser, anybody under Authority's thumb...
...Even his rambling monologue had a Sahlian flavor: "The '70s," Rubin hectored, "are like oatmeal...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...The legislation was defeated in the Senate by a combination of Republican and Southern Democratic senators...
...The Senate bill provided matching funds for contributions of $100 or less...
Vol. 27 • January 1980 • No. 1
