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Thursday, October 7, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Old Man Hoffman
We read that hippie, yipple, freak third world, self-styled leader Abbie Hoffman has gotten a trim and decided to work within the system.
Probably a bit of both.
That makes me think that either the system is changing or Hoffman has tired of fighting lawsuits, warrants and writs.
Hoffman, sham that he is, during a recent speech whipped out a knife and symbolically cut a few of his own locks. It made good copy and the national press—the Kansan included—dutifully took note.
Unfortunately, people still take Hoffman seriously. They assume that now all the revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries across the land will quit making bombs and go out and register to vote.
The fact is, that any serious revolutionaries caught on to Hoffman a long time back and realized
him as the court jester and huckster that he is.
Hoffman made his appearance here, called KU a "drag" and said he was leaving. Probably because the only person on campus who could parrot Hoffman's rhetoric at appropriate times during his speech was George Kimball, who thought he was leader of the "street people." George, sure of his charisma, ran for Douglas County sheriff and lost.
There were people here looking for answers that Hoffman couldn't produce about social and political commitment and when they should take action, the commitment is the speed was a bad imitation of a slow Johnny Caron, monologue.
So now Abbie wants to work within the system.
He was funny outside the system. Inside he is just a sagging old man trying to hide his true self.
Tom Slaughter
To Speak of Lies
The following is the Valedictory address delivered last May at Notre Dame University by John G. Hessler, a Danforth Fellow and a summa cum laude graduate in English.
By way of prologue, I woulf to read to you a poem which I wore perhaps a month ago. I see the suffering of those who to say of the love, the hate, the hope, the fear, the sadness I feel over Notre Dame. It seems to me in place here. I have called it, Notre Dame. A defiance'.
the green shoots of willow bud early
water from rising streams stands in ditches in fields of coming wheat
as in the rice paddies of the Yangtze
in ancient China
in ancient China
men esteemed their men
they went at partings
wrote love poems in place of letters
among our people
in this time
in this country it is forbidden
to do either
There is so little I can say, that I can say truthfully. Words are treacherous things. All over the world we speak in a language, in every time, words have been the instruments of murder and violence and intelligence. Even as I stand here under this flag, even as I am speaking, people are dying at the hands of one or another of a whole series of people who have come to stand. The whole texture of we lice our way of life has killed thousands of people, worthless to countless more. If the words which stick in our mouths only employ that word, they are tangled with poison; they are lethal. There was a time, we are told, when this flag stood for a mouche. That dream has long gone rancid. There has since been the time of the stench of slaughtered animals wind across the prairie. There are now enuoilier stenes still in more recent fields. It does not matter if they play the national anthem
I am speaking to you of lies. It has become a commonplace to shudder at the profound astonishment of the masterful visions of our waver and loss and loneliness attend us everywhere. The proliferation of
urban concrete ugliness, the foiling of the environment, have led to urban planners' immanentation. Violence in the streets and campuses of our land is only the same, at last, a violence in the fields and hamlet was not so unseen, we have been burned away in heartbreaking games or conquest. Eighty years ago we found a continent, but we have not cease to seek new conquests with which to stuff our hollowness. We have chassed our lengthening shadow of the vain footprints on the lifelines shores of the moon. Even our vus system of highwayways, the triumph of engineering and anarchism, has pressured congressmen and businessmen and housewives, are only the externalization of our troubles of our being stretched to an awful pitch, we have strong out road across the continent and are bus racing up and down them, bacaliered by no eloquent, no silencer, a sadden witness, to the fruitfulness of our lives than the rusted frame, smashed glass vehicle, the automobile—multipled as this vision is, endlessly, in th
I am speaking to you of lies. In Washington the play-actors of our own ignorance and incompetence have failed, and on maintaining our glorious dream, our way of life. Few eyes remark the gathering darkness, few voices admit my nightmare heavy with a rhetoric of power, the barrenness of which no one seems to recognize. Yeats might have been speaking of us when, in The Second Coming, he said:
the best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate
intensity.
Shall we attribute our commitment to this course of world, national, and personal destruction to blindness, or to deprivation? Our leaders are only capable of demagogues or scapegoats.
Unconscious almost of alternatives, we live in a moribund culture. Disgust is our familiar companion *P* faced by the world today and the culture blares at us, and what we know even as we know
the blood which is dying in our veins, faced by this disjunction,
we are seized with fear, seek action, whatever it may be. Some of us cultivate God, a refuge of age, a shore against time.
We are using us as cling to our friends and to the church, finding strength in the touch of their bodies. Still others are forever implementing a drug-fed fantasy aesthetic. Some of us fund less satisfactory ordering activities even than these. Some withdraw into private drug-fed fantasy culture. Still others of us go mad. There is little wonder really that young people in their disaffection are able to try to offer any creative solutions of their own. Simple refusal to participate in the placid murderer’s power in powerful and construc- tion action. Some people may call this morbidity; I call it rape for the truth, unwillingness to look at a person who cannot and will not cast a rosey haze over the past, nor will I paint rose-colored pictures of the future. To live without hope is to die. But to live by false hope is to be a fool. I ask not for orientations, for compromises with life, for we go on living. I ask for vision.
I am speaking to you of lies. It is not sweet and just to die for the world we make. We make the world safe for democracy. We have not got to insure the self-determination of mankind, but we have not got to be murdering mankind in pursuit of crazy love and sweet and just to die for anything.
I cannot send you out with the usual blessings and good wishes I cannot tell you if you go out and make lots of money you'll be grateful for. You can't give all that way you will be happy. It is not our lot to be happy. Everything is falling apart. We have killed too much to get where we want, and there is no way back. I feel helpless and complession. I can only hope that somehow, somewhere, you will find some kind of help. I must learn humanism in your lives. I trust in, insanely. There is an animal hope beyond hope, and I have that in you. I only wonder, in what ways should we when children us see, as even as we are asking our parents now,
John G. Hessler
what we were doing while our government was carrying off this carriage, when, then none of the marching and burning and rioting and demonstrating will happen. We know what to do, then, when the world is so better, when they ask us what we did to stop the murder of innocent human beings, when we think of our years at Notre Dame, and of how we have courage to do, then when we have come to live by our own set of lies, excuses, extinctions, then, what will we say to them? I will ask ourselves ever why we did not stop this goddamned war?
I had thought I might end by singing a song with you, but I haven't the power or the voice to read to you a poem. The poem is about lies. It was written over fifty years ago by an Englishman in the trenches of the First World War. Owen Here, then, is his poem
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks.
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
Men marched asleep. Many
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shelis dropping softly behind.
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An eastasy of fumbling.
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.
out and stumbling
\and floundering like a man in fire or lime
but houndering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty pages.—
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light.
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we found him.
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face.
winning in his face. His handing face, like a devil's
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
his laughing race, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear at every
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.
Of vile, incurable sores on invasive lesions
make the coughes.
My friend, you would not tell
with such high rest.
If friend, you would not tell with such high zest. To children
To children ardent for some desperate glory.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
In the manuscript that poem is dated August 1931, over a year after it was killed in those same trenches by enemy fire. A bare wight thinned out and was signed Owen Kingen. Owen kingen saw the lie. But the lie was too strong. He was killed him. The man of England did not mark much his passing.
Garry Wills
Hypocrisy Over Busing
Readers Respond
NEW YORK—The busing dispute goes on with much hyper热力. For one thing, we have a neighborhood. The neighborhood school is untouchable—this in a society where the father comes to school and drives a second car to drive around shopping centers, friends and family are scattered all over the country, distances easily—to go purchase
More On Gay Liberation
To the Editor:
In response to Miss Wright's comments concerning Gay Liberation:
Since a referendum has as yet not been held concerning the Senate's allocation of funds to the student center, pointlessness to argue whether the majority of students do or do not condone the action. I should like to anticipate the student center's majorities and the majorities have quite often been wrong when asked to pass judgment on the justice of a minority demand. However I did not want to leave the general issues surrounding
Garry Wills sees hypocrisy in all of the excuses that are proffered against busing on "non-racial" grounds.
the controversy
a bargain, to have things delivered, to reach places of work or recreation.
Like it or not, homosexuality is present in our society. This is obvious. More importantly a case of homosexuality that has homosexuality is a normal, persistent, variant in human behavior patterns. Accepting the nature of homosexuality and cultural constant the important issue becomes a given culture's adaptation to its gay element. Does the culture accommodate it, does it encourage it, does America, attempt to repress it? History indicates that both courses of action can be successful—destroy civilization—neither does
The Student Senate by allocating funds to Gy Liberation has avoided passing a cultural law that would prevent members and has instead evaluated the request using what seem to me to be the only justices of the court who meet the needs of some element of the student body. Needs, I should add to counter fivoleous demands by offering Heterosexual Liberation Front.
heterosexuality. If homosex-
uality becomes more important,
and more importantly
"human" the question becomes
not one of sickness or health but
one of well-being.
Finally—in response to your drawing a parallel between Attica and K. U. I feel obligated to defend the University. I believe we are more flexible here than in many other institutions of administration was. Are you implying that should the Gay Liberation Front persist in voicing its demands they risk annihilation? If this is your goal in itself constitutes a radical criticism of the University.
—Tom Page,
Wichita Senior
which are not met within the existing framework of organizations.
1007
Some of the very people now insisting on enclosure within their neighborhoods about one of the major anomalies of our big cities—the fact that much if not most of the city police do not who even live in the city they protect. Why is this? Two things happened: whites moved to predominantly white departments and departments tried to remain predominantly white. Hardtai types made no protest then about a new nature, about living and working together. Apartness and travel were justified on racial grounds; the community are used, now, for the same reason. The only constant is prejudice: the rationalizing shift towards a barely existent "neighborhoods."
ASECOND HYPOCRISY hides behind the term "quality." We want a quality education, and any attention to social balance is an important goal. The funny thing is that this argument is now used by Right-Wing education critics like Max Rafferty and Russell Kirk, who have for years been telling us there is no quality in public education. But they do not want us distracted from a non-existent concern.
The whole argument is rickety. It is not a question of quality or social concern, as if educators were unable to entertain more students in a reason for poor quality is the apathy, aimlessness, and general "baby-sitting" nature of our education, which does much less than it could, and has to fill up with empty words. Engagement in real problems, a dose of actual life, would counter the apathy and improve quality, giving schools *some* aim and a self-questioning for the students.
A THIRD HYPOCRYSIENTS on the phrase 'fired' integrate anger with all right if it happened as an act of rebellion by courts. This argument brought by courts. This argument
But the situation we now have which calls for remedy, was created by force—force exerted on men's ability to travel, move, choose their local or habitat. A man who served on the Chicago Police Department board worked overtime to redistrict and gerrymander,
assumes that there was a prior freedom of movement, and travel, and habitation, suddenly briefed by the introduction of force.
creating arbitrary schooling units to preserve segregated schools Laws and 'gentlemen' in the economy economic pressures, have forced blacks into ghettoes, forced schools into a segregated pattern, and other each—not in natural and organic neighborhoods, but in unnatural and strained patterns of segregation. Ghettoes ghetto beat is not a "neighborhood cop," but a white suburbananic man forced to work at the local engine house is not a neighborhood fireman. And most of those on the faculty of ghetto teachers are supervisors and teachers. The whole ghetto is an artificial and exploitative arrangement adds to the abuse that teachers in public schools we owe it to ourselves to start break down the walls—and it will be with bombs.
Copyright, 1971, Universal Press Syndicate
Griff and the Unicorn
DEAR AUNT CREDO,
IN REPLY TO YOUR
RECENT LETTER. I HAVE
NOT SEEN UNCLE SEMESTER
SINCE THE MINE PIE
INCIDENT. RUMOR HAS IT
THAT HE HAS JOINED A
ROCK BAND IN BOISE
PLAYING TENOR SAX.
LAST WEEK I RECEIVED A COMMUNICATION FROM THE COLONEL REQUESTING THAT I SEND THE JEEBOK COOKIES BACK AS SOON AS THE POLICEMEEN LEAVE, UNFORTUNATELY, I BELIEVE THAT I LEFT THEM AT YOUR PLACE LAST HALLOWEEN. LOOK UNDER THE SOFA.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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