The Return of the IdiotsBack in the early 1970s I was a trendy radical with long hair, faded jeans and an army jacket. I hated Amerikkka, hated the Vietnam War, hated Nixon, hated capitalism... you get the picture.
I got over it. One of my strengths is that I'm willing to reexamine my conclusions based on new evidence. It's not fun at times, because I'm an opinionated guy and admitting being wrong on something that I held loud and vociferous debates on is never fun.
But as a result, I also respect a heck of a lot of people who've also been willing to reexamine their past beliefs, and disrespect a lot of the people who haven't. One who clearly hasn't
is Paul Krassner.
Get this bit:
We met in 1965 when I was invited to emcee the first Vietnam Teach-In on the UC-Berkeley campus. He was on the Vietnam Day Committee, and became the first activist to turn me on to marijuana, with Thai stick.Of course, Krassner's full of it; Thai stick was an early 1970s pot gimmick.
Krassner does point to something rather ominous:
When Stew heard about this, he made that question the title of his memoir. Previously, he had co-edited with his wife, Judy Clavir, "The Sixties Papers," a collection of documents behind the countercultural history of that era, from Tom Hayden's "Port Huron Statement"--the credo of Students For a Democratic Society, currently undergoing a rebirth on campuses--to Robin Morgan's feminist manifesto, "Goodbye to All That."The
Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, was one of the worst of the 1960s radical groups, where buffoons like Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin got their start. It also spawned the
Weather Underground, a group that specialized in bombing and bank robbery.
Here's a discussion of the
return of the SDS. However, judging by the lack of activity on SDS message boards at
Dartmouth and
Eastern Michigan, it look like this baby's having a tough time being born.
