Annoying? But surely, comrade Chuck, if you're familiar with Bal'mer political mythology, you'd know that the CRs and YAFfies did us a terrific favour at Johns Hopkins, in April-May 1986. Our month-old anti-apartheid shantytown was suddenly, one spring morning, joined by a mock Gulag, which the young Right constructed to symbolise South Africa if the godless-commie ANC took power. They had nice little bits of wire twisted into barbed-looking shapes, and a watchtower with a mock mounted AK47 to watch over the inmates. We responded with another three shanties and a graveyard. The bottom quad -- which we renamed Jo'Hopkinsburg -- became a terrific site of relief from the dull Maryland redbrick architecture, and the entire campus bet on which team could liberate more physical space. The Washington Times gave it front page coverage with colour photos. The Left had about 300 supporters, and within a couple of weeks just overwhelmed the tiny Right's space with our funky student culture. They soon retreated and pulled down the structure. Two weeks later, some rightwing frat boys got to us at 2 in the morning with a molotov cocktail, injuring another of David Harvey's doctoral students (30% of his body had first and second degree burns). But even that helped the cause. Uni president Steven Muller responded in classical fashion, assuring all members of the community that such a disaster to Hopkins' soiled "reputation" -- the founder was a Quaker gunrunner -- would never be allowed to happen again, and henceforth therefore, shanty construction would be banned. That was a silver-platter organising gift.
But it's only a distant memory, of course. Each time I'm on the lower quad at JHU, I look hard in the grass for embers from that May 1986 night where I nearly burned up. No sign of anything, past or present, even though we had reached the point later that year where Muller muttered at a trustees meeting, on record (we got access to the secret minutes), "We may be in a nonsurvivable situation" after our comrades started putting up more shanties and faced time in the Baltimore city jail and in contempt of a court order. The molotov tossers were found guilty in court, got a felony charge, and did community service. Their frat was briefly expelled. We sued the little rich bastards and got some tends of thousands to launch "Books for the Struggle," setting up little lefty township libraries across SA during the early 1990s.
So, I have a lot of nice memories of YAF/CR, Chuck.