The White Album Read Online Free PDF

something other than what I found there . In some not at all trivial sense, the set was wrong . The very architecture of California state colleges tends to deny radical notions, to reflect instead a modest and hopeful vision of progressive welfare bureaucracy, and as I walked across the campus that day and on later days the enti re San Francisco State dilemma— the gradual politicization, the “issues” here and there, the obligatory “Fifteen Demands,” the continual arousal of the police and the outraged citizenry—seemed increasingly off-key, an instance of the enfants terribles and the Board of Trustees unconsciously collaborating on a wishful fantasy (Revolution on Campus) and playing it out in time for the six o’clock news . ” Adjet-prop committee meeting in the Redwood Room,” read a scrawled note on the cafeteria door one morning; only someone who needed very badly to be alarmed could respond with force to a guerrilla band that not only announced its meetings on the enemy’s bulletin board but seemed innocent of the spelling, and so the meaning, of the words it used . “ Hi tl er Hayakawa,” some of the faculty had begun calling S . I . Hayakawa, the semanticist who had become the college’s third president in a year and had incurred considerable displeasure by trying to keep the campus open . “ Eichmann , ” Kay Boyle had screamed at him at a rally . In just such broad strokes was the picture being painted in the fall of 1968 on the pastel campus at San Francisco State .
    The place simply never seemed serious . The headlines were dark that first day, the college had been closed “indefinitely,” both Ronald Reagan and Jesse Unruh were threatening reprisals; still, the climate inside the Administration Building was that of a musical comedy about co ll ege life . “No chance we’ll be open tomorrow,” secretaries informed callers . “Go skiing, have a good time . ” Striking black militants dropped in to chat with the deans; striking white radicals exchanged gossip in the corridors . “No interviews, no press,” announced a student strike leader who happened into a dean’s office where I was sitting; in the next moment he was piqued because no one had told him that a Huntley-Brinkley camera crew was on campus . “We can still plug into that,” the dean said soothingly . Everyone seemed joined in a rather festive camaraderie, a shared jargon, a shared sense of moment: the future was no longer arduous and indefinite but immediate and programmatic, aglow with the prospect of problems to be “addressed,” plans to be “implemented . ” It was agreed all around that the confrontations could be “a very healthy development,” that maybe it took a shutdown “to get something done . ” The mood, like the architecture, was 1948 functional, a model of pragmatic optimism .
    Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exac tly right: Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games . Here at San Francisco State only the black militants could be construed as serious: they were at any rate picking the games, dictating the rules, and taking what they could from what seemed for everyone else just an amiable evasion of routine, of institutional anxiety, of the tedium of the academic calendar . Meanwhile the administrators could talk about programs . Meanwhile the white radicals could see themselves, on an investment of virtually nothing, as urban guerrillas . It was working out well for everyone, this game at San Francisco State, and its peculiar virtues had never been so clear to me as they became one afternoon when I sat in on a meeting of fifty or sixty SDS members . They had called a press conference for later that day, and now they were discussing “just what the format of the press conference should be . ”
    “This has to be on our terms,” someone warned . “Because they’ll ask very leading questions, they’ll ask questions .