REFLECTIONS

Bessman, James

REFLECTIONS The war is over James Bessman Unlike the other 10,000 or so toga-clad revelers at the University of Wisconsin's biggest ever Toga Party, I donned my white sheet with a nagging sense...

...the Vietnam war...
...Urgency (both private and public) has been deflated by the reality of rising prices...
...In addition to all those young outside agitators, though, there was a recognizable if small contingent of that vanishing breed, the student activist of the 1960s — though by now, of course, he '...we all know where lerry Rubin and Eldridge Cleaver are today' is no longer a student but a professional like everyone else...
...In fact, I'm still angry at CBS for canceling the Smothers Brothers...
...Once again it was hard not to have a good time, what with the rally organizers lobbing lids of free pot like hand grenades into the crowd...
...REFLECTIONS The war is over James Bessman Unlike the other 10,000 or so toga-clad revelers at the University of Wisconsin's biggest ever Toga Party, I donned my white sheet with a nagging sense of irony tinged with regret...
...And it was a black and white world in which I beat out what should have been the happy days of my youth...
...And it seemed to be an exercise in college nostalgia, so successfully exploited in Animal House, that these relics of a forgotten era now attempted to revive the political passions of yesteryear...
...A great crowd," the friendly officer — then I would have called him "pig" — told me...
...As I walked sadly home and out of the self-imposed timewarp, the sweet taste of pot in my mouth slowly dissolved, along with the lingering memory of tear gas in my eyes...
...But as sure as Paul McCartney has Wings, it seems the only things left to get upset about in this country are high prices and getting high...
...Are there any others here, I wondered, who can look off into the distance and see where the Army Math Center was bombed into oblivion on August 24, 1970, taking the entire antiwar movement with it...
...And John F. Kennedy has been dead for fifteen years...
...Surely the virtues of drug-related stupor could not be extolled with the same fervor they once applied to denunciations of racial discrimination and military savagery...
...There were professional hippies, yippies, smokers, sellers, even politicians, all identifiable by their incongruous appearance...
...How old are you," I asked, seeking a reassuring early or mid-twenties...
...And Richard Nixon did resign in 1974...
...And I understood that I had finally outgrown the urgency that was my youth, that was the war...
...And along the same Willow Drive where I once dodged national guardsmen and police out hunting for student protesters, an unending line of cars now circled around the huge Toga Party, their occupants gawking as incredulously as when they drove down State Street to view all the trashed storefront windows...
...But then that nagging sense of irony tinged with regret that I had originally felt barely twenty-four hours ago flared up strong and hot as one of the speakers sought to immortalize a handful of Memorial High School students busted for smoking dope in school that week: "We will give away a free bong to anyone here who is part of the 'Memorial 14,' " he announced...
...None besides one big one — me...
...as loud as I used to yell "Hell no...
...And he was almost right...
...We won't go...
...Later on, when one of the party's emcees called on the young Romans to chant the night's only word for the benefit of CBS cameras, I felt guilty as hell for yelling "To-ga...
...I haven't read Gail Sheehy's popular Passages, but I need no book to tell me what stage in life I — or this country, for that matter — have passed through...
...Once there was a war to keep you young and alive...
...And now 1 finally realized just how long a decade is, just how old I really am...
...For there is no passion left in the America of the late 1970s, just Happy Days...
...It's amazing to think that the Beatles' last song came out in 1970," Dennis said as we both struggled to remember that no-longer-recent year...
...We were right about civil rights, we were right about Vietnam, we were right about Richard Nixon and we're going to be right about marijuana laws," one of them said...
...And after eleven hours of sleeping it off, 4,000 survivors took it up again on the steps of the State Capitol, the big occasion, excuse, or whatever this time being a rally for the legalization of marijuana...
...Oh, brave new Madison...
...It was also the year I flunked out of James Madison Memorial High School after having been suspended with the rest of the "Memorial 101" for disrupting classes after the Kent State killings...
...Everything was either as black as the armband I wore at antiwar protests or as white as the cloths I wrapped over my mouth and nose to filter out tear gas...
...So I recalled, that night last September, how clouds of pepper gas, softly glowing like fading Fourth of July fireworks, billowed over the Wisconsin Memorial Union barely a decade ago and only half a mile away from where I now stood, near the edge of picturesque Lake Mendota on the far west end of the sprawling University campus, stoned senseless in my modified bedsheet...
...The Toga Party broke up around 1 a.m., leaving behind mountains of empty beer cups but little damage...
...Eighteen," they chirped...
...The "Memorial 14"\ Goodbye, my long-lived adolescence that was supposed to die naturally with the 1960s...
...I didn't eat much in those years...
...I walked across the street to talk to a bicycle cop...
...For where were the life-or-death issues...
...And to compound my feelings of self-rejection, I was unable to restrain my own beer-and-dope-induced excitement when they played a taped greeting from none other than John Belushi, an obnoxiously poor substitute for the Abbie Hoffman I remembered as being truly funny...
...A couple of reporters from the Badger Herald, a student newspaper, came up to me in the middle of the "toga fashion show" and almost caught me ecstatically applauding a betogaed adult wearing antlers on his head...
...1 don't belong here...
...No problem whatsoever...
...Yes, Dennis, the Beatles did break up in 1970...
...I don't like Henry Winkler or John Travolta...
...Indeed, compared to the mass of stoned-out, clean-cut 1970s types they addressed from a sound stage between bands, they seemed like Neanderthals...
...I didn't talk or smile much in those years...
...from school...
...For me too, Dad...
...Yet here I was, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, ready to indulge myself in an equally mindless celebration with members of a college population worlds apart from the one I might have been a part of had it not been for — does anyone remember it...
...I don't even like Animal House...
...I could only hang my head in shame to hear speaker after speaker, even some I had helped vote into office, make a campaign issue out of pot smoking with the same urgency they once reserved for the holy crusade to end the war...
...And maybe not in Kent State or Cambodia, Watts or Watergate, Attica or My Lai, Dealy Plaza or San Clemente, but at the University of Wisconsin campus here in Madison, Wisconsin, the war is over...
...No problem whatsoever...
...Who would have thought then that the day would come so soon when 10,000 college kids could get together and have an old-fashioned good time like this with only two policemen in evidence at, of all places, the University of Wisconsin campus...
...He said it was a good party but observed that most of the smokers looked like high school kids from nearby towns out for a good time...
...I was too embarrassed to admit I was having fun, but I did want to say something to someone as a way of pinching myself out of my trancelike disbelief...
...And though I still don't eat much, I digest it all so much more easily...
...I'm from a different day and age...
...I can wear the toga of the 1970s as stupidly as everyone else and enjoy it just as well...
...1, too, worry more about where my next meal is coming from than about the fate of the boat people...
...Amidst a fog of marijuana smoke like the one that almost wiped me out a decade ago in high school, I couldn't stop thinking about the conversation my friend Dennis (age twenty-seven) and I had shared that morning, about whether or not today's kids, with all their Disco and Top 40, would ever fully appreciate the impact the Beatles had on their lives as well as ours...
...Perhaps I'm a bit too self-righteously smug in feeling contempt for today's college youth who care only about the bread and butter issues, for despite the bitterness I will hold forever toward all that was America in the 1960s, we all know where Jerry Rubin and Eldridge Cleaver are today...
...But you're letting this war destroy you...
...Nevertheless, I'm starting to get into this, in spite of myself...
...Only a few hours earlier I had almost walked out on National Lampoon's Animal House, disgusted by what I felt was humor at its most mindless...
...But in the Madison of the 1970s, the end of one party signals the beginning of another...
...All the others, all your friends will forget this and go on," my father said when he arrived to remove me James Bessman is a free-lance writer in Madison, Wisconsin...
...Black and white and red were on the color television screen every night when we watched the evening news before dinner...
...No sense in asking them if they remembered the war...
...Forget the cost...

Vol. 43 • April 1979 • No. 4


 
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