University of Virginia Library

A Parting Shot

'... And Some Young Ones Homesick For Infinity'

Beside me are two sheaves
of yellow paper. One is soaked
and covered with notes,
fragments of notes, and a few
well-turned phrases from
memory. Mainly, these bore
and confuse me alternately.

The second stack is virgin.
On its pages I'm supposed to
put the pieces together in a
way which is both charming
and sensible. My Life and
Times in Charlottesville. What
really galls me isn't my own
cynicism so much as the
harsher feeling among a good
many of us who in four years
have compromised with the
possibility that words indeed
may be futile or worse.

And history - which the
University regards as right,
sane, and sacred except to
rational scrutiny blah blah blah
- history may be wrong after
all, even insane. If so, then
cynicism seems a fair response
to the threat, a mask for facing
the absurd.

So this short memoir may
be cynical. It may fit
agonistically into the
"martyrdom motif" one
student applied with scorn to
the political autobiography of
the Class of 1972.

We came here many of us
angry about America's criminal
role in Indochina, in a war
planned by academic elitists
during a time when game
theory and counter-insurgency
were chic. The War, if fought
between armies of trained
baboons, could not have been
more filthy and insupportable.
Richard Nixon was then
running for President. His chief
promise: to get the U. S. out
of Southeast Asia. He won.

When I leave here in June,
Nixon will be seeking
re-election, this time with an
even more impassioned plea for
peace and withdrawal. He will
most likely win again, though I
find that fact less appalling than
my own inability to sustain the
rage.

Because there remains a
terrible problem, vividly
revealed by the fact that in
three years of de-escalation
Nixon has dropped many more
bombs on Vietnam than
Lyndon Johnson did in five
years of accelerating conflict.
If millions were not already
dead, the paradox in terms
might make an interesting
plaything for some of you
academic robots in Thornton
or Gilmer or the Physics
Building.

I was only slightly consoled
by a headline on the first page
of The New York Times in
early February: "Laws of
Universe Called Into
Question." Yes, and an army
of skilled technocrats standing
by to pick up the pieces. (I am
trying not to be cynical.)

This already has turned off
those of you so eager to be
entertained. I mean, well, the
War may have been good copy
two years ago, even as late as
the Pentagon Papers, but, my
god, it's winding down now,
isn't it? In truth, our bombing
now is heavier than ever. Only
recently Nixon cancelled the
Paris Talks. (Or does anything
matter anymore?)

I remember during the
strike in May, 1970 wanting
passionately to see some
discernible effect from all he
violent rhetoric reach those,
like Rubin and Kunstler, who
used it most freely. This was
essentially a rational desire
based in physics and notions of
causality. It was not granted,
and today I have a more
general sense that we've been
cheated. So much of what we
have said and tried to do has
dissolved without trace; old
ideas of consequence - good
and bad - are eroded along
with part of what we were.

Because we were unskilled,
because our tactics failed to
sustain our aims, and because
the state, like the University,
stays put while individuals are
mere transients, this sensation
of powerlessness has grown
intolerable.

Photo By Saxon Holt

I could talk about the
University - not the idea,
which at most is one man's
fantasy in a long siege - but
the place we came to in 1968.
If then we found a
self-satisfied, racist and boring
country club, then today
things are vastly changed: now
we have a self satisfied, racist
and only slightly less boring
amusement park. The hip
appearances are betrayed by
the knowledge that few of us
are so hip we'd hesitate to
trade in hipness and hair for a
new - or rather old - style
which promises something
tried and safe. Many will do
this. Others may regret not
doing so.

Four years ago the issues
were: whether to admit women
and blacks on an equal basis
with white males and whether
blacks were entitled to service
at a Corner barbershop. Today,
with more than 300 black
students on the grounds, our
attention is fixed in all
seriousness on the Security
Department and the
Administration. They are
studying the touchy matter of
allowing black people free
access to their own campus,
the right to walk around free
from official harassment.

Or ROTC. Or the
fraternities, which win my
everlasting contempt not for
what they are - which is no
worse than any other unnatural
and anachronistic case of social
voodoo - but for what they
preclude. Mostly I detest the
way fraternities trample on the
spirit of individual possibility,
the private as opposed to the
fraternal collective part in each
of us, the inexplicable rebel in
everyone, noble and numbed
into submission.

About fraternities, looking
forward to a day when atrophy
or official sanction has ruled
them out, I try to think and
say little because I made a few
friends there, too. My
predominant memory is the
sensation of my own sweet ass
painted with roofing tar and
cornflakes. (It took two weeks
to get completely clean again;
sometimes I think I never
have.)

"Some men," said
Aeschylus, "see things as they
are and wonder why. I dream of
things that never were and ask,
why not."

Yes, Right On, or whatever
dead-end of cliche seems apt
now, we've moved on beyond a
lot. I think Judy Garland did it
even better than Aeschylus:
confronted by an hysterical
fan, she screamed, "I've got
rainbows up my ass!"

And John Lennon, whose
music I love as much as any,
sang, "I've got blisters on my
fingers!" Which prefigured his
judgement that "the dream is
over. It's just the same, only
I'm thirty and a lot of people
have got long hair, that's all."

Reich's much-touted new
consciousness was a hoax, and
the latest schlock sociology
argues that the agony of the
rock culture was merely a
difficult adolescence, no more.
We are supposed to be relieved
that finally we can grow up
into an adult world where two
million dead Vietnamese are
explainable as bad statistics,
where every form of socialized
madness has its rationalization,
diminishing problems and
infinite answers.

In the 1950's a film called
"Blackboard Jungle" made a
strange sort of endorsement of
the teen-age cause, whatever
that is. Frank Zappa wrote,
"they have made a movie
about us, therefore, we exist."
Bill Haley and the Comets
lurched out "One Two Three
O'Clock, Four O'Clock
Rock..." and the music was
louder than movie audiences
had ever witnessed.

Peter Bogdanovich, who has
directed a brilliant film which
deals with the death of that
earlier part of American
culture in a small Texas town,
"The Last Picture Show,"
while making his movie said: "I
don't like the present. I think
anything in the past is better
than what's happening now." I
like his arrogance, because its
not so murderous as Nixon's or
Kissinger's.

I could go on indefinitely,
trying to put the fragments
together minus some of the old
stupidities and outrages which
ought by now to have died. I
think what we of the class of
'72 need are more cinema
verite artists like John Lennon
or Norman Mailer or Francois
Truffaut or Ralph Nader, or
(maybe) you or me. I'd most
likely get a kick in the head
seeing many many more of my
friends wake up to both the
horror and the infinite
affirming resonance of things
as they are, the fears and
possibilities.

Many of us soon to be
leaving already have spent too
much time and energy
deceiving ourselves with
complacent dope and a host of
self-indulgent fantasies. In the
course of this socially approved
charade there has been a
neglect of skills, which will be
needed in the coming struggle
with the technocrats. Worse,
we've heaped a lot of shit on
the vague though strangely
compelling ideals which
brought us here not long ago.
(Or was it my imagination?)

What seems most obvious is
that very soon we must stop
wondering, as Eugene Ionesco
has put it, about the future of
a past that can no longer be the
future. We need a new way of
experiencing the world which
will permit such luxuries as
peace and sanity without too
heavy a tax on freedom and
our need as individuals for
magic. We ought to
acknowledge the awesomeness
of the change, feel it palpably
in the air. Accept. And stop
fighting it and each other.

We've worshipped a mythical
future just as earlier people
believed in identities which
were constant and eternal. It is
our own fault then if the
future looks as bleak as the
past, a mirror image of the
same old systems and
barbarisms. I'd prefer magic,
which at least suggests that
each individual has a stake in
his own oblivion, a sort of
choice.

"I want some old violins old
wine old people old buildings,"
says Jill Johnston, "and some
young ones homesick for
infinity."

I think often late these
nights a lot of us do too.