There are a lot of crazy, radicals at every college. It is a time for experimentation, learning, and fun.
At Northwestern in 1984, there was supposedly a holocaust denying professor and much protest. There were people throwing some type of animal blood on certain speakers. There were kids living in cardboard boxes protesting Apartheid, and calling their new dorm rooms “Shanty Town.” There were women loving Ayn Rand, which is a phase I have never understood.
I took a class called “Socialist Economic Theory.” The professor was an older, gentle man with legitimate union credentials on his resume and strong thoughts, especially on how to replicate the efficiency of capitalism with economics to make its outcomes better.
In his class were three or four students that should have never been in that class. They had an agenda and no need or desire to learn. They wasted tons of that teachers time bringing up complex Marxist issues and he would have to say over and over. “This is an introduction class. I can’t have a Ph.D. level discussion with you here when no one else would understand it and it would just muddle up the intent of the introduction material.”
One day they demanded that they be allowed to have a class of their own, and his answer was perfect. “Have your class, that would be great, but I won’t be there and I’m not going to require anyone in this class to be there.”
I lived in San Francisco in the ’90s. Berkeley was a great and odd place. They had many wonderful record and bookstores. I saw Spike Lee speak at the University, and I saw Wynton Marsalis explain Duke Ellington and play his music with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra that contained many of Ellington’s former musicians there.
A lot of silly things happened there most of them amusing.
There was a big controversy over a guy reading a Playboy magazine at a cafe even though he really was reading the articles.
There was a guy who insisted on walking around campus and going to all his classes wearing nothing but clogs. The “Naked Guy” wasn’t in school long before he flunked out.
I was at a riot! Here’s how it happened and what it was like.
There is a very small piece of land that is very sacred in Berkeley called People’s Park where many productive peaceful protests were held in the ’60s, which is why it was considered sacred.
By 1992, it was a revered eyesore. It was a small park with nothing in it, the grass was rarely mowed, and it wasn’t kept up well. Mostly, it was a place for homeless people to sleep. Drugs were sold there. It wasn’t much of a park.
The University wanted to do something better with it. I guess they could have just had a groundskeeper pull weeds and use a lawnmower, but different people have all kinds of agendas.
What happened was they built a nice sand volleyball court, which drove people crazy.
This led to much benign silliness, most of which was a day where a group of “Young Republicans,” (They existed with no hassles, and there were maybe 15 of them) who likely didn’t know how to play volleyball, much less well, did play there all day, while they were jeered by people who did not want a volleyball court there or anything there at all.
Sadly, there is always a really crazy person around somewhere and in this case, her name was Laura Miller, but she changed it to “Rosebud A Denovo” so her initials would be RAD.
She’d already been arrested for having explosives, crossbows, guns, and attacking policemen. She had a list of people she wanted to kill mostly over the volleyball silliness and other silliness.
On August 25th, 1992, she broke into a university chancellors mansion a little before 6 AM with a machete and evil intent. Totally insane and wrong, and she set off a silent burglar alarm.
She was a very tiny not very physically imposing woman.
She wound up barricading herself in a small bathroom with her machete and the police shot her dead. That’s kind of complicated. She was small, but she had a machete. She was enmeshed in a very small area making it hard to apprehend her safely. I have no idea what the ideal cop does in that situation. Is it worth maybe losing a police officer’s limb to keep her alive, probably not, but I don’t really know.
So there were riots. I don’t think I was at the first one, but the next day I went there to buy records thinking it had all died down, but it hadn’t. It was no big deal.
The streets were full of people. There were people with amplifiers saying that she shouldn’t be have been shot. There was no violence. It wasn’t even that big a deal to the business owners, they were mostly boarding up their businesses, but yawning as they did it because it happened all the time. They knew where their businesses were located!
A lot of it was sort of funny.
There were a group of men and women calling themselves “The Mud People” running around naked covered in mud and no one actually even knew whose side they were on.
It is always stupid to buy drugs from a street vendor, but that went on all the time. The way it would work was a guy would pass you and whisper “buds” or “doses,” and if you had interest you knew what he had to offer.
A guy that day passed me and whispered, “buds, doses, ….. rosebuds.” She did die, which was sad, but I did laugh, maybe I need to apologize for that.
When the Nazis planned a march on Skokie, Illinois they did so for a very specific reason. Skokie was predominantly Jewish and full of Holocaust survivors. The ACLU, including I think a lot of Jewish lawyers supported their right to march and won. People slur people as card-carrying members of the ACLU, I have no card, but I’ll gladly carry one if you give me one. I usually support the ACLU and did in that case then.
The Nazis chickened out and never marched.
The movie the Blues Brothers was very silly, this was silly, but there was a reason it was there.
Now the Blues Brothers probably shouldn’t have done that, but the Blues Brothers weren’t really role models, and mostly all they did was drive their converted police cruiser around and crash into tons of other police cars, malls, and anything else they could find to crash into and destroy. It is a fun, silly movie, but they did hate Illinois Nazis, who should be hated.
The first black basketball coach at Northwestern took his kids out jogging in Skokie one day and was shot and killed by a white supremacist in 1999.
The alt-right is appalling to me, they think they are much more clever than they are.
Their one sort of actual “clever” idea is to try to make people look like hypocrites over free speech.
So what they do is they bring famous speakers to places to hold huge speaking events where few people want to hear those speeches, often purposefully in Berkeley. Their intent really isn’t to be heard. Their intent is to cause something ugly to happen caused by those who oppose them and say “Look we were right, you guys do not believe in free speech.”
Now those speakers could have speeches in Berkeley at any time with little hassle and be heard by those who want to hear them and even those that oppose them peacefully, but the alt-right will pay people to demand hugely publicized rallies for these speakers whose only intent is to rile people up. It may or may not lead to violence, but it often costs tons of taxpayer money to pay for security to stop any chance of violence, which could otherwise be used to help those homeless people sleeping in that park.
Within the past year, Milo Yiannopoulos planned a “Free Speech Week” in Berkely, with all the usual subjects Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon etc, promising speeches and marches.
Few wanted to hear those people there. Milo paid people to make it seem like they did. Milo never actually got permits to have his speeches and march. His speakers backed out and the whole thing fell apart.
It was all unproductive nonsense. It was all meant to provoke certain people who are sensitive and passionate with little other reason than to provoke them to act badly to prove an obvious point violated much worse by other people in other places.
I have no doubt that if you walk up to someone whose mother died in the Holocaust and say, “I love Hitler. God bless him for gassing your mom” that you may be hit or worse. I don’t support that violence. I don’t support much of any violence.
I don’t like guns, but I’m not going to take a real looking fake gun into an armed friend’s house, come in through the window at three in the morning and wake him and his family up yelling stick him up and then as I bleed to death say, “Can’t you see I was joking and just trying to make a point?”
It’s all stupid.
At Northwestern, I was in perhaps the worst fraternity on campus. A friend and I were the only ones that could hold a conversation to try to save that place and get people to join it. There was one guy who didn’t really care about saving the fraternity, he mostly just cared about his standing in it. That was silly. My friend was president of that fraternity, but who really wants to be widely known as the president of the worst fraternity on campus other than to make it look good one day on your Linkedin profile?
And we did run that place like fascists trying to save it from itself!
One day that guy pointed out our fascist activities (honestly engaged though they may have been) and said he wanted to rewrite the house’s entire bylaws.
My friend’s first inclination was to fight them, but I had a better idea. By the time he rewrote everything, I told my friend he just wants to have a long ugly fight to make us look bad. Just tell him great job, thank him for caring and have everyone applaud him, which is what happened and nothing else followed.
We still ran that place like fascists with some successes and some failures, but when we graduated it did die. We should have never joined, but while there we tried to save it and knew we were the only chance to save it. The people who got us to join gave us special privileges because they knew we were the only chance to save it.
None of it was very productive, but it was the way it was.
So that’s how people should deal with the alt-right. Say, “Excellent idea” see if they can actually get the permits for their rallies and if they do either ignore them or hold your own rally like 10 miles away.
They just tried to have a white supremacist rally in Washington and 24 people showed up.
They think they are “clever,” deal with them by being smart.
Aretha Franklin died today so watch her sing “Think” in the Blues Brothers and remember my favorite part of that movie is Elwood’s love of plain, dry white toast and his dream of one day being able to afford a used toaster oven!
