If the hippies
Cut their hair
I don’t care
I don’t care
—Jimi Hendrix
Just heard that on the radio. Brought me back in time, to a place I’ve been going the last few weeks. Back to Boston, at the turn of the 1970s. Back to the streets. I look at the kids on the college campuses and think: That was us. Or was it?
Most of us were of honorable intent back then; some of us were fools. Some of us did violent, cruel, stupid things. I was too cowardly, or maybe too straight, to do anything egregious. I was never arrested, or beaten; I never did anything violent. But I was there, lending my body to the cause. I learned what tear gas smelled like and how convulsive it could be; I ran from the cops, at times—more often, I was just a foot soldier in the crowd. I didn’t chant, or call cops pigs, or denigrate the poor kids who were drafted into the Army to fight an immoral war. Sadly, I could be made to feel insufficiently militant by those who did so. But I was convinced of the righteousness of my causes—anti-segregation, anti-racism, anti-war. I still am. I don’t regret a thing I said or did back then. The war in Vietnam was an arrogant obscenity that wrecked American credibility for a long time—not just in the world, but at home. It damaged trust in the federal government, followed in short order by the Watergate scandal, which reinforced the prevailing cynicism; the corrosive impact still redounds. As for segregation, the very memory of it turns my stomach; I still aspire to live up to the moral standards of those who opposed it peacefully.
And now I’m looking at the kids on the quads, especially the boys—the awkward ones—those who might be me. I can understand why they’re there; real principle, and anger, and agony over the suffering in Gaza are involved. There are also, if we’re going to be honest, a lot of pretty young women out there in the encampments wearing keffiyahs. (One should never underestimate the importance of sex and springtime when it comes to campus protest.) Still…The Israeli counter-attack in Gaza has been a disastrous mistake. It should be protested. I understand those who go out into the streets and quads, and call for a cease-fire; I understand those who oppose the shipment of offensive weapons to Israel. I can understand the need to be part of these protests, even if the cause seems less clear-cut than mine were.
But there are bright lines: To support Palestinian statehood is just (though I’d be happier if I saw even one kid carrying both Palestinian and Israeli flags—a two-state solution, the only honorable solution); but glorifying Hamas and Iran is like supporting Weatherman or the Panthers in my day, an act of nitwit immorality. The spectacle of secular humanist, leftist children throwing in their lot with violent, anti-democratic religious fanatics is the height of puerility. The Jew-hating figleaf of “anti-zionism,” the ridiculous calls to “dismantle” the zionist entity—that is, Israel—are cruel and unrealistic in a way that our old goals never were. End the war, end the structural racism embedded in law: My parents, no radicals, were in favor of that. And the constant, sucking undertow of overt Jew-hatred, the physical harassment, the punching and shoving of Jewish students is disgusting and more than a little frightening. It smells of beer halls and putsches.
The language of the Pro-Pal movement has been sloppy as well: Not even the UN’s international court would say that Israel’s offensive in Gaza was genocide. It is an atrocity, but war is atrocious on its face. The definition of genocide is precise: the intentional and unrelenting eradication of a people. That is not what is happening here: A blundering and poorly planned attempt to defeat a terrorist enemy, with far too many civilian casualties. You can oppose the venture. You can condemn it. But you can’t call this intra-tribal dispute (we’re all Semites here) an act of racism. And you can’t call it apartheid when the majority of students graduating from medical school in Israel are Palestinian or Druse. There is a clear path to freedom and prosperity for Israeli Arabs who are willing to play by the rules—which is not to say there isn’t anti-Arab bigotry, especially in the outer reaches of the Netanyahu coalition. Genocide and apartheid are rhetorical exaggerations at a moment when accuracy should be at a premium. Sure, you have the “right”—well within our First Amendment rights—to use those words, but it’s not quite moral or useful to do so. It enables the bloating of an Israeli stupidity—the Gaza invasion—into a world-historic criminal act, which it isn’t. It oversimplifies the complexity of Israeli existence—which was partially a result of actual genocidal behavior by Arabs; the eradication of Jews from Iraq, for example—into the left’s faddish “oppressed v oppressors” matrix. It enables hotheads to stay hot, and endangers any Jewish student bold enough to wear a yarmulke, or belong to a Hillel Society, or otherwise advertise their Jewishness on campus. There is an intense, primal ferocity to Jew-hatred, as insane and brutal as the anti-black bigotry of some whites. It is not a force to be toyed with—and certainly not by coddled students who are not quite done playing with toys.
So there are parallels to the student movements of yore but not quite the ones that simple-minded leftists imagine. Nellie Bowles writes in The Free Press:
As Jeremy Flood, a union organizer and former Bernie Sanders staffer put it: “A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.” I’m not a historian, but I’m pretty sure Nazism was very popular among the youth. And the Cultural Revolution really took off with students. On the other hand, Jeremy Flood might think both of those were good movements.
But the left persists in its selective celebration of tortured idealism. Close to (my) home, we have Jamaal Bowman, an extremist incumbent running for Congress, saying the Israeli reports of rape and torture on October were “propaganda.” In the media, we have Bowman’s fellow-travelers in the Squad being supported, without much question as to their self-defeating extremism, by Mara Gay in the New York Times. The so-called Squad joined members of the so-called Freedom Caucus in opposing aid to Ukraine; hell, many of them opposed Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. A few of them are among the infinitesimal number of Democrats who actually want to “defund” the police. They are useful idiots to the Trumpist cause. And there is Charles Blow, another Times columnist, raising the ghost of the anti-war protests in Chicago in 1968—which may have given Richard Nixon the presidency—and hoping for similar pro-Palestinian protests in Chicago this summer. This is naivete reified. You want to scare the hell out of suburban moderates and reelect Donald Trump? Enabling a mess in Chicago is the way to do it.
So, there are mitigating circumstances in this case that prevent me from sitting back in my easy chair and saying, Ah, the romance of revolution! Or: It’s springtime and kids will be kids. One of those circumstances is that the Republic seems far more frail now than it did when we started challenging the notion of American perfectionism in the 1960s. There is a much greater threat to democracy now than there was then, though Richard Nixon was caught red-handed trying to mess with the 1972 election (which Nixon, accepting his pardon, never denied). And, at bottom, the current pro-Pal cause is too complicated to be as righteous as ending the war in Vietnam and ending segregation were. Gaza demands disentangling, and moderation, in ways those issues did not. From the safe distance of curmudgeonly age, though not of curmudgeonly disposition, I say to the protesters: Be very, very careful. You’re playing with matches.
Inflation Watch
A sucker for advertising, I was intrigued by the notion of “spiced” Coca-Cola. So I went to my local 7-11 to buy a 12-ounce can. It cost $2.14. For a can of coke. Last I checked, such items were buck at most. Now don’t get me wrong, I can afford it. But it’s annoying all the same…and probably more than annoying for people trying to make it on middle class incomes. Abortion may be a big issue in this campaign, but inflation is an open wound, encountered daily. (By the way, the Spiced Coke was interesting but not $2 interesting.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/23/south-africa-elections-nelson-mandela-anc-corruption/
Mara Gay
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/columbia-university-protests-palestine/678159/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The+Atlantic+AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/progressives-democratic-party-aoc.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/23/cornel-west-focusing-gaza-has-harsh-critiques-opponents-former
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/opinion/chicago-dnc-antiwar-protests.htmlies/
Watching the demonstrations at Columbia it’s difficult to avoid my clear recollection of the spring of 1968 as a graduate student at Columbia. While the underlying cause of the 1968 protests was just, the clear perspective of most of the Columbia community was resentment of the disruption of their expensive and hard won education. I was in Chicago for the 1968 convention as part of McGovern’s advance team. Those protests gave us Nixon. Similar protests this summer will likely bring another Trump term. True believers on the left occupy no higher moral ground than MTG and Matt Gaetz. Thanks for your thoughtful commentary.
These Soros backed, keffiyeh wearing protesters lose me with their support of Hamas, their wanton accusations of Israeli acts of genocide and the toxic "death to America" chants. The cynicism towards these people is aptly demonstrated by the prescient and arch John Lennon lyrics in the classic Beatles tune, "Revolution."