Spectacular Happiness by Peter D. Kramer

Author:Peter D. Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sukey was tempting me. The Harvard strike came in our glory days, your mother's and mine. Anais's particularly. Riffling through the papers in University Hall. Suffering arrest, but not before having passed incriminating documents on to colleagues on the steps, strategic plans for the university's expansion—evidence that the means of expansion, the method of depressing property values and buying buildings on the cheap, was calculated, not happenstance. I'll tell you who she was back then: Emma Goldman crossed with Greta Garbo, a revolutionary with a need to disappear from view.

Sukey was right. The substance of the strike proved unimportant. The university continued its expansion. A black studies program emerged—conservative, opposed to activism. Banning ROTC from campus had no effect on the military's willingness to send poor inner-city boys to fight poorer farm boys in Indochina.

Critics of the student strike complained it favored style over substance, but the styles had lasting value. A sexual ease and openness that mocked and questioned American conformity and repression. Hippie dress, the Dylan growl, the Ginsberg howl that stood in opposition to the American dream with its fatal flaws of production without meaning, emptiness amidst plenty. If the medium is the message, why is it apt criticism to say a political struggle favors style over substance? Here is where I agreed with Sukey, style matters. But there is something to be said for style that arises from the streets, not Madison Avenue, not marketing campaigns.

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