Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/01/25/students_for_a_democratic_society.php
Friday, January 25, 2008
Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Those who want to read previous installments will find them on this newspaper’s web site. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.
I mentioned the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) earlier, and now it’s time to focus on the organization as I knew it at Dartmouth. The two key SDS people there were Al Salzman and Bob Stone, whom I would characterize as number one and number two. Salzman was highly intelligent, even charismatic, with excellent leadership skills and the ability to relate to anyone who could get past his scruffiness. Stone was a plodder, with little sense of humor.
I knew them mainly because Stone was a member of the drug scene around Larry Burlingame, and I got to know Salzman through Stone. During the time I knew them, the SDS underwent a transformation. In the earlier year or so, around 1966, its agenda seemed to involve pointing out social inconsistencies with a sense of humor, something I couldn’t disagree with. If taking drugs gave you a perspective that made you see the conventional ambitions and diligent conformity among the mainstream student body as something comical, the social vision of the SDS wasn’t far from that.
In fact, reviewing the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the SDS (its official manifesto) even now, I can find little with which I disagree, leaving aside the cumbersome style (though this should perhaps have been a warning):
Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image o[r] popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.
I don’t see anything here that, if you take the words at their face values, would contradict anything in a university’s mission statement, then or now. Al Salzman especially struck me as someone who endorsed and embodied values like these, at least during the first year or so that I knew him. Bob Stone was more problematic. If he dropped by my room for a chat, I always seemed to be missing a favorite record album by the time he left, but it would have been bad form to make a point of it.
My inclination was to agree with the overall principles that people like Al were expressing, but not to take any of it too seriously. I had a good chat with Al about this one day, in fact. He said if you couldn’t approach things like politics with a sense of detachment and a sense of humor, it just wasn’t worth it. So I liked Al and tolerated Bob.
Unfortunately, over the two years or so that I knew Al and Bob, their views became cloudy instead of bright, and they began to focus on the ROTC. Since I knew the ROTC from the inside, I was always puzzled at their concern about it. ROTC officers were seen within the military as less suitable for careers than graduates of the academies or OCS, and ROTC officers who wanted to stay in the regular Army in fact had to overcome a stereotype of ineptness.
The activities in which we engaged—elementary parade ground drill, cleaning our obsolete M1 rifles, shooting them once or twice a year when they let us have bullets, polishing our shoes and uniform buttons, learning by rote the ludicrously basic elements of military doctrine—seemed to me innocuous except insofar as ROTC participants may have deceived themselves into thinking they were doing anything worthwhile.
How Al and Bob were drawn into the anti-ROTC agenda still puzzles me, especially when I think Al was smart enough to see the advantages of having ROTC around, rubbing everyone’s face in its skewed cross-section of military life. The SDS had a national organization, of course, and it appears that at least one SDS national representative traveled to Dartmouth now and then to confer with Al and Bob; I was there when they got him tickets to eat in the dining hall. Getting the ROTC off of college and university campuses, by means including violence, became the national focus of the SDS by the late 1960s. It seems to me that this was a largely counterproductive effort. Where is the SDS today, after all that work trying to get rid of the ROTC, after the useful idiots who were martyred at Kent State, and where are the Army and the ROTC?
But Al and Bob bought into this. In fact, every now and then the two of them reappear in Dartmouth alumni affairs, and the best paraphrase I can give of what they say is that the fight to get the ROTC off of the Dartmouth campus was the high point of their lives. Well, I’m glad at least a couple of the guys I knew then were having a good time.
Larry’s original position, as best I could make out, was consistent with the view in Buddhism that political arrangements were a distraction. If you were politically active, you were missing the point, which was the need to realize the truth. The personal, in this view, could never be political. But Larry, with Al and Bob, gradually bought into the SDS position. Most things didn’t matter to Larry, as most things hadn’t mattered to Bill McMann. But getting the ROTC to leave campus eventually did.
Larry’s position on what his version of Buddhism might require of him was always remarkably flexible, and given the ability of Japanese Zen masters to use Buddhism to justify Japanese militarism in the 1930s, I can’t say that his position lacked merit. One perhaps oversimplified version of Buddhist philosophy would be “nothing matters.” You might say that nothing matters except nirvana, but if you treat nirvana as a goal or a thing to be desired, then you’ve misunderstood Buddhism. So, in the end, nothing matters.
If anyone tried to address any potential contradiction in Larry’s thinking—or for that matter, anything Larry didn’t particularly want to think about—he could answer, “It doesn’t matter.” Since nothing mattered, whatever particular issue was under discussion was covered under that precept. It was also an implicit rebuke to anyone who seemed to care enough about a particular issue to take a side on it. If you cared, it showed you weren’t hip. Case closed.
On the other hand, there were issues Larry cared about. He was, for instance, a member of a fraternity. All anyone mostly seemed to do there was watch television, in some ways a good activity for Buddhists like Larry, since it involved sitting still and not quite focusing on anything. At the time, there were few television sets in Hanover outside the fraternity houses. If Larry cared about anything, it was going to the house and watching TV.
I might have made some kind of comment to this effect to him once. He was almost always a cheerful kind of guy. When I asked him if watching TV seemed a little too trivial a way to spend his time, a genuine frown, a genuine irritated grimace, crossed his face. “It doesn’t matter,” was his reply. One activity in Buddhism is as good as anther, one place is as good as another—rain, sun, hail, tornado, it doesn’t matter.
And over the months, Larry signed on to the SDS agenda. It was something I recognized, but I put it into the back of my mind. He was a friend; it was an area where we disagreed, though not strongly. One day in spring term of 1967, I was sitting alone in the dining hall, eating my lunch. Larry and Bob Stone came and sat down at my table. They didn’t have lunches. They seemed fidgety, too. Normally I would have been happy to see them and even a little flattered that they’d sought me out, but for some reason, I was on my guard.
Larry started things out. “We think there’s something important you can do,” he said. “If you think what we’ve been doing together over all this time is important, we want to talk to you about something you can do.” I nodded acknowledgement and let them go on. And both Bob and Larry were acting as if they were reciting lines. They’d rehearsed this.
“The ROTC is having its Armed Forces Day review in a couple of weeks,” said Bob. That was true, of course. The ROTCs everywhere had a fancy dress parade for Armed Forces Day on all the college football fields. If they could get the college presidents to review the troops, so much the better. It was, of course, the usual silliness. I was going to have to polish my shoes and my brass buttons and participate, but it was a waste of time as usual.
“Think what you might be able to contribute,” Bob said. “What if one of the cadets were to put down his rifle and walk off the field right in the middle of the review? Wouldn’t that be a statement against the war?”
“Wouldn’t that just blow people’s minds?” asked Larry.
I made some sort of non-committal grunt. Somehow Bob and Larry were thinking I hadn’t gotten the point. “What Bob means,” said Larry, “is that the cadet who puts down his rifle and walks off the field in the middle of the parade is you.” n