University of Virginia Library

BOOKS

Lonely Preludes To Mass Response

DON'T SHOOT

We Are Your Children!

By J. Anthony Lewis

461 pp. $8.95

Random House, New York.

By Gregg Kilday
Special To The Cavalier Daily

DON'T SHOOT. - We Are Your
Children! Its title threatens to give
the book away. Its Random House
imprint and overlarge type lend
weight to the suspicion. So the
temptation is to simply abandon
the volume, to file it away on the
already overcrowded shelf of
revolutionary belles-lettres, to
condemn it to be read only by
confused, embattled parents in
fruitless attempts to discern some
sort of message from across the
barricades.

But don't. For the book's
author, New York Times reporter J.
Anthony Lukas, refuses to believe
in the barricades, and as a result, his
book confidently crosses and
recrosses generational divides,
geographical locales and political
boundaries to construct a thickly
textured facsimile of the beginnings
of the nation's present civil war.

By recording the growth of ten
lives. Lukas provides portraits of a
group of radical leaders as well as
a few less radical losers coming of
age in the America of the early and
middle sixties. His often disparate
material coalesces into a whole
because the events that keep
reoccurring throughout this series
of lives the '54 Supreme Court
Decision, the assassination of John
Kennedy, Mississippi Freedom
Summer, San Francisco's Human
Be-In. Vietnam Summer Project,
the March on the Pentagon,
Chicago - form the incantation
that called forth the radicalism of
the seventies.

But, rather than impose upon
the events to give meaning to the
lives, Lukas has turned his ten
character studies into ten distinct
views through a sociological
kaleidoscope. Individually, each
portrait is representative of nothing
but itself, but in chorus they sing of
a continuum between America's
individualistic, democratic past and
its children's' attempts to ward off
the uglier threats of its disputed
future.

"Like clay," Lukas writes, "the
past may be pulled and molded into
new shapes, but it is always the past
becoming the future."

*****

Eschewing the egocentric New
Journalism of the sixties, Lukas
himself maintains a scrupulously
low profile throughout. In a sense
his book is a journalistic analogue
to SDS's founding Ann Arbor
statement for the people are
allowed to speak for themselves,
their speech and memory becoming
the source of the book's authority
and success.

It's not always terribly exciting
- the chapter on Jim, a
Haight-Ashbury hippie, is made
tedious by its subject's now
conventional opinions - but when
the report breaks forth it does so
with an energy which approximates
the frenzy of good, crazy fiction.

"Groovy" Hutchinson, the
drifter who was murdered alongside
Linda Fitzpatrick, comes on like a
Ken Kesey hero, a con artist who
ultimately can't scramble back into
the society that has maimed him.
Jerry Rubin appears in a whole
series of guises - from young
Jimmy Olsen-type reporter to
revolutionary vaudevillian.

And, in what is possibly the best
piece of the lot, Lukas follows
young Watts poet Johnny Scott
into the streets where "dogs, strays
and wanderers, wild scruffy hounds
with yellow fangs and frothy lips,
lope in packs through the streets,
yelping at cars, overturning
trashcans, chasing little black boys
all the way home."

Lukas has a difficult time
extracting general conclusions from
such a wealth of highly
individualistic sources. His
suggestion as to how, following an
Ericksonian proposition, "the child
expresses openly what the parent
represses," are fairly anticlimactic.
Perhaps, more interesting, is how all
of the children interviewed, with
the possible exception of Linda and
Groovy, are as much in search of
an authentic past as they are
seeking for a viable future.

It is a purified radicalism that
each has attained, primarily because
lonely, personal struggles rather
than mass revivals seem to typify
the radicalizing process of the early
sixties - or, at least so one is
tempted to romanticize. And
because each has fought the battle
within himself, he searches in his
own past, his family and his home,
for sustenance.

So Sue discovers the strikers of
Harlan, Kentucky, while Johnny
finds Richard Wright and Leroi
Jones. There is a fullness and depth
in the majority of these lives that
goes beyond even the care that
Lukas has paid them.

And one begins to wonder if
those of us who reached
'radicalism' after 1968, when the
lonely experiences had given way to
mass response, have built on
foundations of the same solidity.

(Mr. Kilday, a sophomore at
Harvard, is Editorial Chairman of
the Crimson.)