After the Gold Rush: A Nostalgic Retrospect of the Sixties
Berman, Marshall
Recent films about the 1960s belong to one of the basic romantic genres: nostalgic retrospect. The great pioneer of this genre in English was the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth gave us...
...And it destroyed the new freedom of the agora: in its place, it brought an atmosphere where it was possible (indeed, necessary) to make speeches, but not possible to talk...
...Savio tells the television news cameras he thinks the compromise is hypocritical...
...Then Kerr meets the press and explains: Mr...
...And after starting the decade with a new agora, where everyone could talk and listen, it ended with pseudo—court-martials (fortunately ineffective) where people condemned each other to death...
...Laughter through tears...
...people shout, "We want Mario...
...Culturally, it was part of the general opening up that America went through in the 1960s...
...Not only kept coming, but somehow kept smiling...
...And a third remembers this action as "a violent temper tantrum for the boys...
...In the last part of the 1960s, every place lost some of its aura: the same dreams and nightmares came to life all over...
...Frail but intense, he resembled the young Bob Dylan...
...But Berkeley in the Sixties is most exciting when it evokes the FSM's great journees, days when the kids in the crowd became the stars...
...Twenty years later, there are signs that the American left has grown more aware of the danger than it used to be...
...But the closer that system got to world class, the harder it was to keep it pure...
...This decree turned out to be a disaster for the authorities...
...One of the dreadful nodal points, left out here, was the national SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) split in early 1969...
...Intellectuals at home with the most complex ideas could suddenly speak only in Anglo-Saxon expletives: "Hate . . . burn .. . pig . . . kill...
...It was the most dismal and depressed public event I'd ever been part of...
...Mario Savio makes a speech, "In our leisure time, we make the social revolution...
...in retrospect I'm amazed I wasn't more scared...
...Suddenly, spontaneously, hundreds of people surrounded the car, and kept the police, and Weinberg, and themselves, pinned down all through the night...
...Kitchell shows Governor Reagan with the press, mugging for his fans, begging the Berkeley left to make his day, then turning on his heel and walking out, ready for action...
...whose drug traffic is millions of people's only connection to the world economy...
...Kitchen focuses on Sproul Plaza, just inside the university's main gate, where, in the late 1950s and early sixties, students spontaneously developed a kind of dream agora...
...Here people came together, made speeches, debated and heckled, distributed literature, raised money, recruited sympathizers for every imaginable cause and every experiment in living, or just hung out...
...Berkeley/ Oakland has the best weather in the Bay Area, and anytime it isn't raining it's warm enough to hang out...
...The kids hang out a lot, and they get beautifully tan...
...I remember picking up my old T.S...
...California Newsreel...
...First, that left was rarely able to break out of the cozy isolation of university towns...
...Pat Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon that said, "If we tear the country in half, we can pick up the bigger half...
...Featuring Jentri Anders, Frank Bardacke, Hardy Frye, John Gage, Jackie Goldberg, David Hilliard, Barry Melton, Mike Miller, Suzy Nelson, Ruth Rosen, Michael Rossman, Bobby Seale, John Searle, and Jack Weinberg...
...q FALL • 1991 • 545...
...After throwing up our hands in futility and feeling swamped by despair, we were forced to face the fact that our actions had actually accomplished a lot: you could even say that we had stopped the war...
...But now, finally, the movie is being honest about some of the radically different impulses and contradictory values that tore 1960s radicalism apart even as they helped it grow...
...for years it campaigned vindictively to break them...
...Instead, they seized the initiative and made troubles of their own...
...It wasn't easy to learn...
...My favorite speech is by a man (we see only his back) who expounds on Aristotle on beasts, gods, and citizens...
...The amazing thing is that, at the height of a great national consumer orgy, so many of these kids, who looked like the cast of some California beach movie, got so serious...
...It helps to remember a time when people could be just as critical and radical as ourselves—indeed, some of those people were ourselves—without drowning in bitterness...
...If Thomas Jefferson was one of its heroes, another was Lenny Bruce...
...the war just went on...
...we didn't get the flow right away...
...That first gold rush gave the place an © Copyright 1991 by Marshall Berman...
...The war created a sense of patriotism and civic responsibility just as intense in its opponents as in its supporters (though its supporters rarely grasped this...
...Once the war takes hold, Berkeley loses some of its aura...
...These old pictures can evoke a radicalism whose strength lay in its geniality and sweetness, in its intuitive sense of justice, in its faith that history wasn't over and people could make a difference, in its feeling of community—not a longing for community but a feeling that, just underneath our career aspirations and ideological conflicts, a vital community was already there...
...But in romantic literature, nostalgic vision is only the beginning of the story...
...Though the film still has two-thirds to run, from now on it will run downhill...
...The desire for wealth beyond dreams led it to seek out the most talented people it could find...
...Even when Berkeley's radicals were celebrating the Constitution, the powers treated Sproul Plaza like a launching pad for bombs...
...In the history of the decade, it looks like one more nodal point: the end of civility...
...Talking about illegal action is fundamentally different from acting it out...
...The culture hero for this form was Woody Guthrie, dream synthesizer of Dust Bowl Populism and New York Jewish Marxism...
...They didn't think knowledge was impossible...
...Every group and idea had a table, and dozens peacefully coexisted...
...For all our foolishness and self-destructiveness, it turned out we had gotten one very big thing right and played a historical role we could be proud of...
...A documentary film by Mark Kitchell...
...Then a sequence of pitched battles, teargas, army helicopters terrifying the crowds, thousands of troops tearing through the campus and the town, shots, screams, twisted bodies, ambulances, blood on the street...
...Narrated by Susan Griffin...
...Meanwhile, the Reagan vanguard took the country for a long ride...
...Savio had two basic raps...
...People on the left could stop killing each other and behave in simple human ways...
...But who knows if this self-awareness will last—or if it will be enough to make a difference—when times change and once more the left will be on page one every day...
...It's easy for a radical in 1991 to feel swamped by bitterness...
...A good book or film about the sixties should make us feel it was noble and beautiful, it was dreadful, it had to die, it can't come back, but it had a live core that will enrich our lives if we can incorporate it...
...Sometimes the talk catches on, the desire spreads, and the law gets changed, so the illegal becomes legal...
...544 • DISSENT After the Gold Rush But did they learn...
...Some of our close encounters with authority, especially in the Nixon years, were pretty scary...
...Just after the Sproul Hall sit-in, Kerr calls a convocation, in Berkeley's majestic outdoor Greek Theatre, to announce a compromise between the administration and the FSM...
...Then talk can change the world...
...The film's second half shows very clearly many of the ways the New Left went wrong...
...but couldn't answer...
...I finally reached California at another nadir, just after the campaign of 1972 and the "Christmas Bombing" of Vietnam...
...The movie's denoument, set in the spring and summer of 1969, is People's Park...
...Among the things they talked about were civil rights, mutual aid, the meaning of citizenship, the common good...
...but when the spill became a flood, they kicked him out...
...A chronic contradiction that gripped the California right was a clash between its desire for a docile labor force and its drive to get spectacularly rich...
...Clips of the USA doing horrible things to Vietnam alternate with clips of ever larger and more desperate demonstrations at home...
...But we were too deeply wounded to enjoy the brief peace or nourish ourselves on it...
...and where, even if we don't find somebody to love, we can learn to recognize each other...
...538 • DISSENT Mho the Gold Rush Mark Kitchell's film offers affectionate pictures of Berkeley's kids...
...But what did doing politics mean...
...To flesh out this environment, early in the movie, Kitchell offers long, languid glimpses of the campus as it was in the early 1960s...
...Nobody today seems to remember when, maybe because the values of the protesters just didn't seem to matter...
...The meeting is brief and dull...
...the very phrase, "Berkeley in the Sixties," still brings back that wild surmise...
...One of the FSM's best talkers was Mario Savio, son of an aerospace mechanic from Queens, a graduate student in philosophy...
...It stirred up depths of rage and hate, not only in our hawks but in ourselves, and made hate the driving force of national politics...
...What's shocking here isn't just the insensitivity...
...On Nixon's Inaugural Day, in January 1973, I went to a "Counter-Inauguration" in San Francisco's Delores Park...
...We hear Joan Baez tell the demonstrators, "When you go in, go in with love in your hearts...
...they used an underused public space to talk about how to live a public life...
...Nothing made much of a difference...
...That night, standing on the police car, using their mike, dozens of people, most of them anonymous, exhorted, denounced, pleaded, told their life stories, and sang...
...but you are enfolded by lush foliage that grows all year round, by landscape architecture that unobtrusively knits people, buildings, and trees together, and by the spectacular backdrop of the hills, the bay, and the San Francisco skyline rising like a vision from the mist...
...By then, the conflicting impulses had exploded and split the mass movement into grouplets that were fighting with classic * See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching, for a classic account of the process of collusion between many antiwar activists and our national mass media at the end of the 1960s...
...Even the ancient Greeks could come out of the closet...
...Yes, Mr...
...What they haven't said is that the real force of their discourse is to give a metaphysical gloss to "interest-group liberalism," that proud parochialism that makes American political culture go...
...One of the main things politics could mean, Savio said, was talking—talking about what you'd like to do—even if much of what you'd like was illegal...
...campus, one of the most gorgeous environments in the world...
...The next journie is a mass overnight occupation of Sproul Hall...
...As Kerr adjourns, we see Savio get up and try to speak...
...Even Chancellor Kerr, an authoritarian but a smart and honest man, went along (apparently without laughing), and, in September 1964, decreed the end of political talk on university grounds...
...The older, classic form was based on an idea of respect for ordinary folks and an understanding that the hardpressed bus drivers and postmen and housewives and secretaries—and their sons, the soldiers—were as human as ourselves...
...It refused to elect leaders, met all through the night, made decisions by consensus...
...The war in Vietnam overwhelmed the brightest hopes of the sixties...
...learned to build bombs, wrote broadsheets demanding the execution of their lifelong friends, took new names, disappeared, sometimes blew themselves up...
...I believe that the American left really did stop the war...
...And once the Nixon tapes were played back, they showed ** That month Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once was on the Late Late Show...
...What Kerr doesn't say is that this concept was a strategy to convince the state's ruling class to accept a high level of trouble, by assuring them that the university's complexity would keep the trouble from FALL • 1991 • 539 After the Gold Rush spilling over...
...aura...
...Post-sixties (and supposedly "postmodern") intellectuals, in Berkeley and all over, have insisted that this mine was played out: humanism was only a bad dream from which humans should awake...
...where extravagant and contradictory ideas can flourish peacefully, like Sproul Plaza's tables...
...The board of regents faced similar problems, which were aggravated as the state's prosperity, increasingly rooted in mass media and electronics, grew and grew...
...Add sun, trees, girls, plenty of leisure...
...In fact, the whole educational bureaucracy of California, including the superintendent of schools and the board of regents, lined up against these kids...
...Seeing it then on the evening news, I wondered what Mario had smoked for lunch...
...Facing up to our past—as Hegel said, "to look the negative in the face and live with it" —can give us strength to let go of our old life, and go on to build a new one...
...Viewing films about the sixties, and seeing some of those official faces close up, I'm scared now...
...How nice to see all the generations together, for once...
...Looking backward, maybe the best way to see Berkeley in the sixties is as a gold mine of humanism...
...We can't tell...
...what do they call it now...
...FALL • 1991 • 543 After the Gold Rush that continuing protests and resistance at home had made a big difference, first in limiting American firepower and finally in pushing the White House to pull out...
...American machismo entered radical politics through the idea of the heroic vanguard...
...Order from California Newsreel, 149 9th St., #420, San Francisco, CA 94103...
...Imagine the old, all-male City College of New York cafeteria...
...But there was something uncanny about those 1960s crowds that made us feel youthfully invulnerable, so that when police or soldiers charged, we laughed as we ran...
...Suddenly two enormous cops grab him, throw him to the ground, and, as the crowd shrieks, maul him like a drug dealer on a television police show...
...The FSM was one of the decade's most stirring adventures in mass mobilization, and probably Berkeley's one permanent gift to American political culture...
...It said that, in a mass society where people are separated from each other and alienated from their own activities, the right to engage in politics is a matter of life and death...
...The real stars of this movie, as of all movies about the 1960s, are "the kids": crowds of anonymous young people whom no one invited but who came and just kept coming, year after year...
...The post-Nixon years were a strange time for what I used to call the Slightly Used Left...
...But even if that never happens, the activity of talk can itself create a community that binds people together through their speech-acts, where they affirm shared fantasy and desire...
...The second, more complex rap blended Marx, Sartre, Hannah Arendt, late Wittgenstein, John Austin, and the Warren Court...
...For many years our antihumanists have done most of the talking...
...There seems to have been some sort of Gleichschaltung, enlisting all state agencies and mass media to get those kids...
...After many hours the police come, but no violence or rage breaks out on either side...
...Kitchell skips over 1968-69, one of the New Left's nadirs...
...After a quarter century, so much has changed but the aura lives...
...And the early-sixties community of talk gradually disintegrated, so that the FSM vision of dialogue among fellow citizens gave way to a radically different model of politics: a heroic "vanguard" deploying "the FALL • 1991 • 541 After the Gold Rush masses" for their liberation...
...Its heroes were Bogart, Dean, and Brando, "real" men who hated the establishment and would rather blow things up and die than submit and obey...
...Serious romanticism is addressed to people stuck in primal traumas...
...It's hard to know whether blacks listened to anything white radicals said in the late sixties...
...We see closeups of faces — Weinberg's, the cops, the crowd's: no one was prepared for this...
...But it was only after the sixties, and after the war, and after the sixties left's collapse...
...Nostalgic retrospect can put us—individuals, cultures— in touch with some of our lost and forgotten energies...
...Did we collectively learn or grow...
...Or did we all, Kerrs and Savios alike, short-circuit ourselves before we could make our connection...
...This had always been a hazard for Hollywood, which was finally emerging from its blacklist era...
...So in order to understand our radical achievement in the sixties, we would have to grasp the ironic wisdom of the hated fifties...
...Nobody breaks anything...
...hurt—at the decade's end some even got killed—and still kept coming...
...And I thought: What war...
...We see the kids ride their bikes to class, read paperbacks on the grass, stretch their limbs and smile at each other...
...Many people on the left kept thinking: if only somebody could find a way to do this today...
...Intellectuals who came of age then felt a special pride and trust...
...The one who finally did was Bruce Springsteen, in a series of brilliant records from "Darkness on the Edge of Town" to "Born in the U.S.A...
...Toward the end of the decade, the antiwar movement was numerically growing—it never stopped growing—and yet, inwardly, emotionally, it was coming apart...
...then her laugh turns sad: wasn't that a time, when you could make a militant protest and get dragged out like a lady...
...What happens next, what's bound to happen, is that the vision is lost: it fades or shatters, or gets twisted into a grim parody of itself...
...Some of this footage has the feel of a recruiting film made by the university itself...
...The newer form, which came into its own at the decade's end, was a feminist vision of nurturance and empathy for all, and peace and mutual recognition that could spring from "maternal thinking...
...His best views are on the U.C...
...Ironically, this violent outbreak triggered so much outrage that now, unexpectedly, the FSM won what it had been fighting for: the right of the agora...
...but the more it sought the best, the more it risked ideas and (as they say in Iran) uncontrolled associations...
...I was part of crowds like this...
...And she says, "I said, 'I want to get dragged out like a lady.' " She laughs and laughs...
...Pause...
...Clark Kerr, chancellor in the early sixties, was committed to intellectual excellence, and he seemed to understand that world-class minds thrive on conflict...
...They also seem to share with generals a readiness to sacrifice large numbers of people for the sake of tactical victories...
...it was uncanny for them all...
...It reminds us of a real life that rarely surfaces in Berkeley...
...Indeed, at first the war expanded and heated up public space all over the country...
...And yet, that very minute, unknown to us, Nixon's Ozymandias monument was crumbling—and crumbling not only because of Woodward and Bernstein, not only because of Judge Sirica, not only because of some people in Congress, but because of us...
...I asked myself, "Can these bones live...
...It believed we could and should say everything, that more openness, even bitter and angry openness, would be good for us...
...They were constantly seeking ways to screen "outside agitators"—in California this tended to mean New York Jews—out of their educational system...
...It looks like all you could wish for in a political space...
...The playfulness and irony that marked the decade's early militancy ("I want to get dragged out like a lady") gave way to eruptions of primal rage...
...three-year-olds have a ball...
...They were confident that, whatever they could learn about people and culture and society, there was a public that wanted to know...
...Politically, the FSM was fighting to expand and deepen a basic American liberal idea: the right to talk...
...Its people said and did many idiotic things in the sixties, but the pervasiveness and richness of dialogue there (even for people who adamantly refused to talk) made it harder to do them for long, and easier to come out the other end...
...trapped, knew their assertion of freedom would bring down some dreadful retribution...
...John Mitchell called it "positive polarization...
...Its first journee unfolded in Sproul Plaza when Jack Weinberg, in the act of making a speech on behalf of CORE, was seized by the university police...
...Here was something big that all Americans had to confront...
...It brought together young and old, beatniks and solid citizens, Goldwater Youth and the Young People's Socialist League...
...As the sixties went on, and the war escalated, the left came to identify more and more with the aggressor, and with the strident machismo that America has always celebrated in its Westerns and gangster films—and, ironically, in its war propaganda...
...they can't see the darkening green...
...The police violence that seemed so outrageous in 1964 became routine only a couple of years later...
...But it also forced a whole generation to use its freshest energies trying to STOP things, instead of starting new ways to live the good life...
...Jentri Anders recalls being asked, "Now do you want to get dragged out of here or do you want to walk out like a lady...
...They tried to take him away in a police car...
...And for once they could actually start something...
...It raised the consciousness of millions of Americans about imperialism— including Americans who hated words like consciousness-raising and imperialism—and their new self-awareness kept us from overtly invading Central America in the eighties and, if we are lucky, may keep us from even more disastrous adventures in the nineties...
...What makes this moment memorable is the pure thrill of free speech: a whole generation discovering that it is possible to say anything...
...one exclaims after a bloody "Stop the Draft" action that tied up downtown Oakland in the fall of 1967...
...And though it started with a genuinely integrated mass movement—the reality of "black and white together" is striking in Kitchell's footage — it wound up not merely being involuntarily separated (because blacks wouldn't work with whites any more), but actually celebrating racial polarization...
...All this is true, but Berkeley's radicals were among the first to see it and say it...
...State legal authorities developed the bizarre doctrine—something you'd expect to find in military Latin America, or communist Eastern Europe—that talking politics was forbidden on public property...
...But what about the soul count...
...Berkeley seemed to open up new ways for Americans to imagine and organize themselves, new forms of social poetry...
...The one hopeful thing anybody could think of—which actually meant more than we thought—was that we were still here...
...whose children increasingly lack the intellectual skills to even get into our knowledge factories, let alone organize and transform them...
...Running time 117 minutes...
...Then the self feels empty of life, thrown into dejection and anguish...
...For a little while, the Free Speech Movement offered an alternative model of political culture: expansive, alluring public space where men and women go (and want to go), to look and listen and talk in the open...
...but if they did, it was a world-class horrific mistake to offer not merely money and support but intense adoration to black men for, as it was said then, "picking up the gun...
...I said, Who could resist their sweetness...
...It was like learning to drive all over again, to get into the rhythm of the irony and absurdity that are the freeways of twentieth-century history...
...After this, a lot of smart and sane young people became grotesque parodies of themselves...
...We won, we won...
...Inside, people sing and dance (many do the hora), tell each other jokes, try in vain to get comfortable on the hard 540 • DISSENT After the Gold Rush floors...
...As Kitchell's many narrators describe their metamorphoses during and since the sixties, you can see how Berkeley's atmosphere enabled people, some people at least, to grow as wonderfully as the plants...
...They can't see us (and their own future selves) looking...
...Its ambience of unrelenting argument and criticism made much of its craziness self-correcting...
...Some of them describe demonstrations with all the relish of old generals portraying great campaigns...
...She was on her way home, one foot out the gate, when she heard Savio from the platform say, "Now don't walk away, we have to stop the war...
...Who can resist their sweetness, their radiant health, their innocent sexuality...
...All this meant our collective life was better, but weirder, than we had thought...
...The spirit of Berkeley in the Sixties can help us get our humanistic ideals out of cold storage, set up tables, give our vision a chance to thaw out and grow in the sun...
...Now Kitchell's format of many voices pays off, as his guides begin sharply to diverge...
...So where, finally, does Berkeley in the Sixties take us, and where does it drop us off...
...In the Park, Berkeley's popular democracy could spring to life again...
...Shown in New York and around the United States, Fall 1990, and on PBS, Spring 1991...
...Think now History has cunning passages, contrived corridors...
...Within a few months, page one and prime time were saying so much of what we had been saying for years, not only about the president and his dirty dozen but about America's whole being in the world...
...All reasons to be grateful...
...old people work and direct them...
...Clark Kerr, as deeply committed to vanguard politics as any Leninist, must have laughed...
...Savio was trying to speak without permission...
...The regents eventually realized they would never be able to screen troublemakers out...
...They could feel free from the frenzy of hate, orchestrated in Nixon's White House, that poisoned all American politics at the end of the sixties.* They could get back to the feeling for people that drew them to the left in the first place...
...For details, see Jonathan Schell, Time of Illusion, a book whose data are drawn largely from secret memoranda liberated by Watergate...
...Suddenly all the plaza's tables pulled together: the university's contentious political groups united overnight, and created the Free Speech Movement (FSM...
...Somehow or other, a flamboyantly freaky Dionysian culture and a critical, enlightened, Apollonian politics managed to intertwine...
...Somehow, this Chelm of nervous wrecks, who boasted of their mellowness till they keeled over, managed to mesh in a mass movement that was not only innovative and imaginative (which you would expect), but coherent and disciplined...
...And it isn't the kids who end it...
...This metaphor, drawn from the military strategy of Napoleon's day (and appropriated by nineteenthcentury avant-garde artists long before it was seized by radical politicians), was totally at odds with the vision of participatory democracy that distinguished the FSM and the New Left...
...Wordsworth gave us several luminous visions of his rural childhood and of his youth in Paris during the French Revolution...
...That moment turns out to be Kitchell's dramatic climax...
...Much of the poetry and power of 1960s feminism grew out of its feeling for the limits of a left to which it nevertheless belonged, and which it saw through from within...
...542 • DISSENT After the Gold Rush sectarian fury to destroy each other...
...Berserkeley radicals specialized in diatribes against liberalism, which—through the cunning of reason—blinded them to the dynamics of their own lives...
...In those days, democratic radicalism survived mainly in two forms...
...Savio had requested permission earlier in the day, but it was denied because the agenda was already set...
...But it looked sexy to our mass media, so hungry for "high concept" stereotypes and sensational headlines.* And it began to look sexier to more people as the democratic antiwar movement got bigger and bigger yet seemed to get nowhere, and the war just grew and grew...
...And add discretionary income: this was the peak of the greatest capitalist boom in history, and California, thanks to post–World War II aerospace and electronics, was the most prosperous place in the country...
...Much of our talk of "polarization" at the end of the sixties fails to grasp the fact that, in Nixon's and Reagan's California (as in much of America), the Right Pole was actively magnetic from the start...
...The whole point of "Berkeley in the Sixties" was to carry the good old liberal pursuit of happiness, and John Stuart Mill's "experiments in living," to a higher plateau: to create new public spaces, and new ways of being in public space, where Americans could "look the negative in the face" and learn to work their (and our) psychic, social, and cultural contradictions through...
...Gentle people took paramilitary training (in Berkeley, they had military exercises in Willard Park: they called it Ho Chi Minh Park then...
...Not right away...
...For awhile, grouplets seemed to preempt all other radical identity: the only question was, Which One Are You In...
...they thought it should be shared...
...Savio asked...
...For a few years, the board bought it...
...Did she say it that way in 1967...
...Ruth Rosen, who criticized the demo and "the boys," still knew that, for all the faults, she had to be out there on the fault line...
...Kitchell presents his last FSM crowd scene as the end of this golden age...
...It surely looks like we missed or lost it, if we look at the crumbling cities we live in now, whose streets are full of homeless and dislocated people, whose twelve-year-old boys get killed for their consumer goods (this year it's "pumps," sneakers that bestow the fairy-tale power to float through the air) and whose six-year-olds are picking up the gun...
...Actually, the university buildings are mediocre...
...The last shot is a funeral march, thousands of kids silently moving up Telegraph Avenue, drenched in tears, faces caved in, a hundred years old.** After we've seen Reagan rejoice in the bloodbath he's about to create, we can only be grateful the body count was so low...
...At a time when so many Americans are demanding rooms of their own where they can slam the doors, wouldn't it be nice, instead, to press for public spaces generous enough to hold us all...
...Jentri Anders remembers an FSM rally that was like a love feast to welcome the new freedom...
...There was no easy way to read it...
...though where everybody's got a tan, it's no big deal...
...Thousands of miles away, people— mostly, but not only, young people—could feel the rush of discovery...
...The first one took off on Kerr's own image of the "knowledge factory," and demanded basic rights for the students/workers...
...Where is our Wagner Act...
...Its last frames show young Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney in a flowery field, seen through a rifle's telescope sight while the state trooper (whom we don't see) waits and waits for his best shot...
...This collusion emphasized—and hence empowered— a macho style of leadership and a cult of personality that put the New Left in the headlines and assimilated it to conventional American mass culture, but helped to kill it by cutting it off from its roots in ordinary people's everyday lives...
...Yet even as they felt free —Kitchell's many narrators all say this—they knew they were * The eruptive rage and hate seemed to just grow, but it turns out that a great deal of it was orchestrated as a self-conscious campaign in Nixon's White House...
...Kitchell treats Kerr as a tragic figure, and gives him the film's longest speech, to expound his concept of the pluralist "multiversity...
...It taught large numbers of people that they had to organize, and forced them to learn how...
...In its year or so, it functioned as a genuine democratic movement, encompassing thousands of people...
...and whose teachers, instead of using their minds to create space where people can talk about shared troubles and hopes, generate postmod metaphysics and ontologies dedicated to the proposition that we can't talk, that we share nothing, that tribal solidarities and tribal hatreds are all there is, world without end, amen...
...Berkeley was the sixties' Sutter's Mill, the place where American students first discovered themselves and then, thanks largely to television network news (which was just beginning its own golden age), got discovered by the world...
...Eliot: After such knowledge, what forgiveness...
...It generated solidarity in many people who had grown up feeling like charter members of the lonely crowd...
...Pause...
...All over the United States, they sat down or marched in the cold and rain, stood still through endless speeches, went to jail, got BERKELEY IN THE SIXTIES...
...But Berkeley's agora had little chance to be the beautiful place it promised to be, because, once the pressure was off the university itself, people who came to talk were almost immediately swept away by world events far beyond their control...
...Students plant grass and shrubs...
...This synthesis, precarious and fleeting but real, engendered the myth of "Berserkeley," where you could become both wilder and more serious than you started out...
...Next, although it began the sixties with a demand to take American ideals seriously, it seemed to end in super—Third Worldism, embracing every despotic regime that denounced the USA...
...When was this great paradigm shift...
...What always amazed me about Berkeley in the sixties, as I looked on from three thousand miles away, was the way it could support both ecstasy and sanity...
...Five hundred of us dragged ourselves like zombies across town, helpless to even imagine anything we could hope for...
...But another guide regrets the way they tore up the front yards of postmen and bus drivers, just those people whose sons were going, and whose hearts and minds the movement needed to win...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
