Still Crazy, After All These Years
Scrapbook Still Crazy, After All These Years Every now and then THE SCRAPBOOK is seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind—or at any rate, for our peace of mind—will be...
...Juliette Greco, desperately ill, nearly died when the ratio of red blood corpuscles passed the danger point...
...Fight Fiercely, Harvard...
...A Nobel Nomination SCRAPBOOK friend and occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Kenneth Anderson nominates the South African longshoremen’s union for the Nobel Peace Prize...
...At times Albert had to be tied to his bed...
...Writing at his blog (kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot...
...Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates— children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony—invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn...
...They gave local moral cover to regional African organizations, whose individual countries have not been critical of Mugabe, to make statements against the arms shipments...
...Paris is pleasure, particularly to Darryl Zanuck’s beaten ‘Roots of Heaven’ battalion...
...It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster: Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence...
...What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books...
...and others—to have bite with China...
...Oh, in the intervening years, you had forgotten about the Columbia strike, which began as a protest over the construction of a gymnasium in Manhattan’s Morningside Park...
...Once he ran out into the 134-degree heat and shouted for the snow...
...To wit, a recently republished June 5, 1958, item from Variety columnist Army Archerd...
...Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue...
...A Far Cry from ‘Oceans 11’ It’s a safe bet that for today’s actors, filming on location isn’t nearly as bad as it was 50 years ago...
...One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people—citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe—could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler...
...His sunstroke was so severe that at times he tried to eat dirt on the ground...
...He was helping to tear down the fence...
...Rockefeller’s is the largest gift from an alumnus in Harvard’s history...
...Sickness besieged them through the African location...
...By their own refusal to offload the weapons, and by encouraging their union fellows in other southern Africa countries to follow suit, they have done more than anyone else to stir up public moral outrage that has enabled the pressure of democratic sovereigns—the U.S...
...Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality— together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence—as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest...
...Scrapbook Still Crazy, After All These Years Every now and then THE SCRAPBOOK is seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind—or at any rate, for our peace of mind—will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation...
...But John Huston and Errol Flynn have so far shown no ill effects of the location.’ ” Adding insult to injury, the film bombed...
...The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode’s emblematic slogan: “Up against the wall, motherf—r...
...But when Columbia announced plans to build its new gym with a separate entrance for the general public—“the . . . plan was deemed to be both unjust and racist”—the quiet, bookish, nonviolent Paul Auster was suddenly transformed into somebody “crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs...
...He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act...
...Clearly you are either not a Boomer or, in April 1968, were working at a job/studying for exams/raising a family —perhaps even serving your country in South Vietnam...
...As for Huston and Flynn, Zanuck later told Archerd that the two remained healthy “because of their huge consumption of alcohol—no mosquito could bite them...
...Of course, life expectancy being what it is these days, we acknowledge that moment is years and years away...
...Good news from Cambridge...
...So crazy, in fact, that he joined his fellow undergraduates in sudden, violent protest, not so much against the gym but “to vent their craziness, to lash out at something, anything, and since we were all students at Columbia, why not throw bricks at Columbia, since it was engaged in lucrative research projects for military contractors and thus was contributing to the war effort in Vietnam...
...If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster’s tribute to the Columbia strike, written “alone in this room with a pen in my hand” as “I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever...
...com), he notes, In the past few days, the South Africa longshoremen’s union refused to unload small arms from a Chinese freighter being sold by a Chinese company to Zimbabwe, where chances are excellent the arms would be used against [Dictator Robert] Mugabe’s political opposition...
...You hadn’t realized that the anniversary was now upon us, much less worth four fat newspaper columns of reminiscence and analysis...
...David Rockefeller, Class of 1936, has “pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences and participation in the arts...
...but the prospect, no matter how distant, gives us hope...
...Much to my astonishment, I was with them...
...For its contributions to world peace by standing up against arms shipments by an amoral, rising power, China, concerned only with commercial advantage and currying favor [with] its fellow dictators worldwide, and standing up for the population of Zimbabwe when damned few in the rest of the world are willing to do so . . . give the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the South African longshoremen’s union...
...Case in point: Last week’s op-ed essay in the New York Times by 61-yearold novelist Paul Auster commemorating the 40th anniversary of the student strike/sit-in/vandalism/riot at Columbia University...
...For those keeping score at home, this will increase the $34 billion Harvard endowment by roughly onethird of one percent...
...Anyway, Paul Auster—who “was not a violent person” at the time— was, instead, “a quiet, bookish young man, struggling to teach myself how to become a writer, immersed in my courses in literature and philosophy at Columbia...
...THE SCRAPBOOK heartily concurs...
...Eddie Albert had been absolutely deranged for two weeks, Zanuck revealed...
...The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park...
...Zanuck, still recovering from malaria, “has come down with the shingles...
...Archerd met the Hollywood mogul for lunch, “where he was toying with a hamburger, the first food he’d touched in 40 hours...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 32
