Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [54]
As the 1960s gained momentum, parents of all houses noticed something terrible happening around the dinner table. Their kids were giving them contrary arguments to the conformist status quo, and were backing it up with the words of the intellectual masters, many of them American, from history. Young people were throwing what they perceived as their parents’ shallow devotions back in their faces. It didn’t set well. And as the political establishment became more and more right wing, the academic establishment was blamed for teaching this seditious rubbish in the first place.
This social dichotomy spilled over from the dinner table to the classroom. Teachers and administrators were just as divided as the rest of the country. Half of them wanted you to carry on a rigid social tradition and groom yourself accordingly—to go to Vietnam, if called, as they or their friends and loved ones had served in WWII and Korea. For them, supporting the government meant supporting your culture, your way of life—whatever that was. I remember after the famous first appearance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, dozens of boys at my Catholic grade school showed up the next day with their hair combed down over their foreheads. They were sent home, suspended, and, in some cases, expelled. Later, at college, having a draft board office on campus was considered by many in authority a splendid idea. The draft office monitored grade-point averages of the male students who enjoyed a deferment if they kept their grades above a certain level, and scooped them up if they slipped below the line. Now this is where it got sick and twisted. Many professors would grade you down if they simply didn’t like you, your style, who or what they thought you were. The military, they preached, would do you good. To counter that, other teachers, people of conscience, would try to lift you up, help you out with your grades, and shepherd you through the labyrinthine college administration. Both sides thereby created a totally adversarial and artificial environment. Not exactly the warm fuzzy place where you could curl up with Mr. Rabelais of an afternoon, but Mr. Nietzsche was always welcome.
Four years after I walked out of school, I was living in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., not far from the Georgetown University campus. I would stroll across campus like I owned the place, volunteer at the alternative rock radio station, scan the courses offered, and attend classes without ever applying or paying a dime. I was a phantom, losing myself in the throng of earnest faces, in the crush of preprofessional wannabees, future yuppies, young kakistocrats. If a professor looked out across his youthful charges and wrinkled his brow at seeing me nestled in the back of the class, when he looked again I would be gone. I took courses by Father Richard McSorely, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese for four years during WWII, was part of the radical Berrigan Brothers clan, and taught classes on the history of nonviolent activism. I took courses on Middle Eastern politics, civilian space exploration, the future of ground transportation, intelligence gathering, ethics, and literature. I even handed in final papers and, when I did, I signed them John Glenn, after the first American to orbit the Earth. School, I found out, can be a marvelous place if grades don’t matter, if you never have to deal with its administration, if all you want to do is learn.
The Nixon/Reagan/Bush crowd blamed the liberal arts schools for dissention against the war in Vietnam. And they blamed their failure in that struggle on that dissension. Theirs was a dystopian universe where learning the very principles of the founding of America and holding the establishment to those ideals was in and of itself seditious. The right-wing militarists still believe that liberal dissent is why their policies failed. The Second Iraq War proved that wrong. There was no meaningful intellectual dissent against