THE WHELPS

...But intelligent or not, the revolution will be...

...and now it was my turn...

...But the honky from Watts had tried that line disastrously...

...Before he had an opportunity to open his mouth in behalf of our totally victorious President's total victory policy in Vietnam, the crowd (by this time I was thinking of it as a mob) was calling him everything it could think of— which wasn't much, but wasn't polite...

...I'm an old straight with an old straight doctrine to peddle—stolen from Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson—and I was afraid they'd tear me to pieces...

...So I hauled myself to the platform and got wired for sound—an infernal machine that would make a wrecker out of a white mouse—and said it straight...

...They are not to be bought off or sold out, or crushed with truncheons or washed away in Governor Reagan's bloodbath...

...They are not to be bought off with a twenty-four-billion-dollar flagpole on the moon...

...Why did they stand still for me...

...I thought I might save my skin and my money by proclaiming myself a friend of Tom Hayden...

...They were spread all over the grass— and you could smell the grass...

...I wished I were home in western— not eastern—Massachusetts where nothing is heard but the song of the bird, and the skies are not cloudy all day...

...being enlightened by them...

...Miserable young Americans, loaded to the gills with hatred and equipped with a set of expletives designed to prevent communication...

...It was a disheartening spectacle of the lights going out in America (where they never were very bright...

...It's too hard on an old man who ought to be spending his deliquescence at home trying to learn how to write...

...These prisoners of American sybaritism were at war, and the Amazonians of the species were especially bellicose...

...THE WHELPS by MILTON MAYER I hope I am recovering from what I hope is the last speech I ever hope to try to deliver on a college campus...

...In my time I've been heckled by little old ladies in tennis shoes—but these were bare-chested brawlers with no shoes at all...

...Squad cars of Governor Reagan's macemen rolled around the campus, and my hosts pointed out to me the genteel sprinkling of plain clothes dicks who, in California, are actually planted as students...

...This was his chance, and his Only chance, at an audience of a thousand people, and if he goaded them to riot against him and activate the police, he might, like Reagan, be elected...

...But he brazened it out until, in sudden short order, he finished and ducked...

...They know whether they're good or bad boys and girls...

...They are all dressed up and nowhere to go—but they are not disposed to follow you and me any further down the path to perdition...

...I knew that they wouldn't listen to me...

...A rock and roll band polluted the air...

...And I might not get off so happily next time...

...Their unmannerly tribe increases, and it will increase, cry up law and order how you will, and they are not the black or the poor (or the stupid...

...Or not so crazy...

...They don't like the world the way it is—though they have no inhibition against living off it...

...The wreckers were a minority—but not a minuscule minority...

...He was a darling of the Birchers and was running for Congress...

...They stood still, and shushed each other, and cheered me, and when I finished shooting my cuffs they grabbed my hand and some of them hugged me and some of the most Amazonian of the Amazonians insisted on kissing my weathered old cheek...

...They are not to be bought off with the right of eighteen-year-olds to vote for Nixon or Humphrey...

...that is, that it will be intelligent...

...It really happened, and it really happened the way I have said, and neither modesty nor immodesty helps me understand it...

...Maybe the most disheartening part of it was my own sinuous suspicion that if I were a young Californian I would be one of the wreckers...

...The first speaker was a middle-aged honky who was running a worthy project in Watts...

...I thought I might save myself by commending my gray hairs to the commiseration of the barn-burners...

...The Birchite speaker "blew his cool," of course, and the bloodlust of the wreckers was intensified accordingly...

...Of course they wouldn't stand still for the Birchite candidate for Congress any more than they would stand still any more—hear this now—for Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy...

...I thought I might save myself by using the argot of the young...

...First, there was the money—and, as Robert M. Hutchins said long ago, a businessman may have ideals, but a university professor will do anything for money...

...Whether the Apollo XIII got down interested them not at all...

...He had been inserted into the program at the insistence of the campus conservatives (ahem) and he was crazy enough to make the scene...

...MILTON MAYER is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and professor of the humanities at Windham College in Vermont...

...I tell you, my friends, that God in his mysterious way may be working his wonders through these implacable whelps in their a la mode rags and tatters...

...The young were there, in quantity...

...and if they tore me to pieces I'd never get my money...

...And lo!—they stood still for me...

...They mean to be revolutionary, and they should be, and the hope of the world (and a very slim hope it is) is that the revolution, whose barkers they are, will be a revolution and not a rebellion...

...But I thought that none of these credentials would save me from what the French call the enragees, and I might as well go down with my flag flying...

...I think they stood still for me because I told them, and meant it, that a world that spends more for war than it does for health and education combined is not susceptible to reform, but has to be revolutionized...

...The worst of it was that they didn't seem to be enjoying their own hijinks (certainly nobody else was...

...The kindest thing they called him was killer...

...I think they stood still for me because, contrary to their expectation, I talked to them as if they were educa-ble (not educated) persons whose distress, however deplorable its vocalization, was justified...

...It was a disheartening spectacle of the lights going out in America . . ." They listened reverently to Tom Hayden—I forgot to say that he spoke before me—because they took him for one of their own, and they will revere no one else...

...I was now terrified in spades...

...And unlike the little old ladies, they ought to have been on my side, and I knew they weren't...

...He is a consultant to the Great Books Foundation and to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which recently published his paperback, "On Liberty: Man v. the State...

...I don't want to do it again...

...They jeered and cursed him down— calling him their four-letter names and a liar besides—and I learned later that part of the wrecker technique is to interrupt the speaker with false accusations, rattle him, and break up the meeting...

...But I'm glad I did it this time, and I think I learned something which I want (as we stuffed shirts say) to share with you...

...Second, there was Tom Hayden, to whom I'm attached...

...I even thought I might save myself by telling them that my very own little boy was the manager of a San Francisco acid rock band called the Grateful Dead...

...I think they stood still for me because I told them that it was I who made that world the way it is and got fat in it as an always constructive critic...

...They are obnoxious to us, but we were obnoxious to them, to life itself, before they became obnoxious to us...

...They are not to be bought off with tricks designed to give them still more goodies and keep them quiet in the world the way it is...

...Just before the student strike last month, I highballed it out to San Fernando Valley State College in California to participate, I was told, in a forum with Tom Hayden of the Chicago Seven...

...And the nine hundred, as everywhere, didn't know what to do and did nothing...

...even though they, too, will be its victims if, like their unintelligent elders, they put their faith in the American virtue of violence...

...He tried to persuade what he mistakenly thought was his audience to join his ghetto crusade...

...They're past all that...

...They would not, and will not, stand still for do-gooders like the middle-aged honky working in Watts— because they smell the Establishment repair man in him...

...My hope lay in the next speaker...

...I began to be worried...

...I said that what the young needed was intelligence to save themselves from the pit into which their unintelligent elders had fallen...

...They were miserable...

...I think that they stood still for me because I didn't try to tell them that they were good or bad boys and girls...

...I couldn't resist the invitation...

...And the fact that it's always been that way does not divert them from the view that it never should have been that way...

...They may not have noticed that Tom eschews obscenity and abuse and urges them to act intelligently...

...All at once I was tired of trying to figure out gimmicks to save my skin from people who wanted my skin no matter what I said and did...

...They were perhaps a hundred out of a thousand...

...And third, there was the vestigial hope of enlightening the young or (who knows...