Pretty good essay. I watched the DN on Aoki. Who knows really. Pretty thin shit.
I was here but out of school working on a campus building construction job a few hundred yards away from Stiles. I used to eat lunch on the roof and watch the noon battles. Aoki was fool if he thought they were anywhere near national guard action. I am glad saner minds voted him down. A big mutual aid cop formation would have blasted them out of Stiles. By the time of the Third World Strike it had been a very long trip from FSM and I was certainly tired of this. (I got here a year after FSM). Most of the students were sick of it, the faculty and administration were sick of it, the labor unions were worthless for any support... The moment was gone and there was not a fucking thing to do about. There were a few more high points over Cambodia and giant Moratorium marchs and that was it. I did not like Seth Rosenfeld on sight. His entire sensibility is complete unsuited to his topic and I wouldn't trust whatever he wrote even if it was factually correct. You have to have a feel for your material and he definitely had no feel. The video clips played on DN of the HUAC demo came from footage preserved from a John Birch Society propaganda film made with a voice over that completely reversed the meaning of the actual images. Maybe there was another source. The Birch Society version has narrations like this, `See this communist student strike out at the Peace Officer', etc etc. On the other hand J Edgar was right, there were a lot of leftist-quasi commies there. I knew two. I was down in LA and buddies with the younger brother of one of them. In retrospect I was lucky to have known that family even if I argued with them. They were nearly always right. It was already understood that communism as a movement was long dead. At best it was an historical study of labor and social reform actions thirty years before. At that point in time Hoover just appeared idiotic. I will give Rosenfeld some credit for linking Reagan the FBI and the Regents. That makes sense and that was not known, at least by me. The business over Clark Kerr was sad, but hell the bastard would not change the rules, which only illustrates you can't trust a liberal---a thought that was already in the air over the war. As for the general expose on FBI involvement, oh hum. The FBI had a basement temporary office in Sproul, or at least a desk, file cabinet and phone. They also used the mezzanine balcony of the ASUC build to photograph the speakers and crowds below. The truth is there are no good books on the 60s. I bought and read David Lance Goines The Free Speech Movement and it did capture the moment. But that is about the only book I've even scanned worth reading. And Vietnam was worse. The 60s tore open wounds that have never healed, and now in the dim future whatever was concretely meaningful for history to know will probably die with us old men and women who lived it. As for Hedges being the gatekeeper on the Black Bloc. I just remind myself that Hedges has seen a lot of very disturbing violence, war, death, and ruin. He over reacted because the Black Bloc stuff was nothing compared to some of the action going on in the past like Stop the Draft Week which I was in. Even so I see his point. You do want it clear the cops are the source of violence. And that message was pretty clear in the Occupy actions. Good read, lots of old thoughts. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
