68. Not Clowns for God but Real, Excrement-throwing Yahoos.

 

If you no longer believe that the side you joined is good you lose your starting sense of virtue.  By the end of 1968 the Yippie side — meaning sixties youth in rebellion against the establishment — was doing so much harm to the good cause of peace in Viet Nam that I felt like a sinner going to their meetings.

Those student meetings. At one of them there was a fellow ready to go to Washington in a football helmet, carrying a baseball bat, wearing a T-shirt that said "Free Manson."

Maybe it was theater. I don't know. My age group was slow. But whatever it was the students at those meetings were ignorant of power. They were blind to the fact that in a democracy it's not in the streets, it's in the ballot box, and in modern America what goes in the box depends on what voters see on screens. What were they going to see here? Not what I saw. Not clever actors in a street drama, not wise fools, not clowns for God, but Yahoos. Real, excrement-throwing Yahoos.

As for the student leaders at this time, they showed me what courage was — not! There was an easy thing you could call courage: standing up firmly to the establishment. This meant going along with the people on your side. And then there was the hard thing: standing up to people on your side. Like saying to that fellow in the helmet, "Nope, can't have people screwing up the revolution. You're outta here." It's exactly the courage we ask modern Muslim leaders to show in dealing with their extremists.

Intellectual leadership? That was found mainly in The Post, our excellent student newspaper, one of the best in the country (one of only three the New York Times kept on file). No matter how good the editors were, though, they couldn't control their letter writers, or, at times, their own instincts for solidarity. By the seventies the establishment not only couldn't punish students right, it couldn't even look at them right. After riots that brought the National Guard to patrol the streets the Athens Police Department put some officers on the roof of Marting's Department Store to watch for further trouble. Post editors were outraged by the insult. A letter-writer's word for it was "tyranny." Logan's Bookstore, after taking several bricks through its windows, put floodlights outside. More insult. They put up cameras inside to protect against shoplifters. The last straw. You cannot, said the intellectuals, insult our Yahoos.

Ohio University students were far from alone in this kind of admonishment. "You have broken some of the best heads in the country," said the Yale student president, wagging his finger at the commencement audience. (How he must cringe now remembering that statement, the pomposity of it. What mature boomer wouldn't be cringing?) As at a lot of Midwestern schools, Ohio University people had their eyes on the Ivy League. That included student leaders.

I have already given my view of what these students, Yale and OU, were doing: expressing (in Melville's terms) "the Republic's faith" that man is "naturally good, and more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged" (Post #32, "Mob"). and suggsted that they were responding to the tremendous flattery they had received in those postwar years. Commencement speaker after commencement speaker had told them how superior they were. They had come in with the highest test scores in history. They were going out in a blaze of achievement. They were the new best, the new brightest.

But there was a deeper flattery, generated first by America's immigrants. Though those immigrants were "wretched refuse" they had these boys (it was always boys) who were going to knock everybody's lights out. If you beam on boys their way those who "succeed," those who, bless the Lord, are in college, are going to have a pretty high opinion of themselves.

Some foreigners I've listened to say that what I was looking at was just another form of "American youth-worship," which they say has a long history. If there is such a thing, in the sixties America certainly paid for it. It produced behavior so ugly that it sent once-worshiping Americans, the majority whose backing was needed for peace, fleeing right back — for a while — to the ugly devils that were for war.

The price I and a number of professors paid was low. In the race to personal morality we'd backed the wrong horse. These kids weren't going to win anything for us. The price the country paid was another matter.