``Be realistic, demand the impossible.''
I only vaguely remember this slogan. Below is a Duke Uni article, by Jim O'Brien.
``Jim O'Brien - "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible": Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and a Committed History - Radical History Review 82 Radical History Review 82 (2002) 65-90 Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible: Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, and a Committed History Jim O'Brien [Figures] In the spring of 1968, a time of tumult on many American campuses, several hundred intellectuals, mostly younger faculty and graduate students, gathered at the University of Chicago for the founding meeting of the New University Conference (NUC). The Chicago meeting reflected all the ambivalence of people who were, for the most part, in an institution (the academy) that they saw as part of a corrupt American society. The two sides of this ambivalence were expressed most starkly by two New Left historians who had much in common but had drawn different lessons from their experiences. Staughton Lynd, in a keynote speech, argued that commitment to a university career and its upward scramble inevitably compromised a commitment to political activism. `You cannot work at a university as a factory worker labors at the bench. . . . Whatever we may think, or think we think, university life requires us to act as if our radicalism were episodic and of secondary importance.' Lynd acknowledged that not all left intellectuals should become activists, and he quoted approvingly Noam Chomsky's claim that the intellectual's first responsibility is 'to insist upon the truth,' 'to...
Several observations. Duke? Uni Chicago? It was evidently a French student slogan. That sounds about right. But the sentiment or asiration was misplaced in time and didn't reflect Berkeley 1968. By then we had already figured out that the whole system of higher education was part of the systemic oppression from black and brown students, to white progressives and radicals. We were already at war with these old gray bastards, their ideas, their ideals, everything about them.
Remember Salvio's main import was his oration four years before in Sproul Plaza at FSM. So us late arrivals like me in 1966 came to UCB and found an entirely different scene. My first semester Feburary `66, I heard there was an emergency ASUC senate meeting with the faculty and administration announced on KPFA. I got a ride to Bancroft and Tele about 7:00p and the lobby was packed with people inside and out. The cops had already lined up the black marias up Bancroft along the Sproul side and were controlling traffic. I didn't know this was a very bad sign that things were going to get ugly.
I can't remember what the meeting was about. Suddenly just what the old timers knew was about to happen, happened. Some faculty or dean jerk came out of a closed meeting inside with a bull horn and announced the ASUC building was closed for public safety reasons and we must leave now. There is an internal balcony that overlooks the main lobby. A god awful din came back in a roar. The UCB cops were trying to block the upper stairs and there was a lot of push and shove. Within moments the city cops in riot gear were outside forming up. A few people tried to organize a sit-in, but that was clearly not going to work. We struggled back and forth inside and then outside and ran off into the night to escape being beaten and dragged to jail.
So I tell this to define the state of affairs. It was already street war interrupted now and again with weeks of quiet or near quiet. That only meant I was actually studying and not following events in Oakland or San Francisco State or the rest of the country. We were way past the slogan stage. The days of sit-ins in dress cloths...I still dressed in a tweet sports jack and dress shirt that first year. Those days were closing. The dress shirt was getting changed for the blue work shirt---besides they were cheaper and better made. If you could afford a laundry, they looks better too. Back then some brands of blue work shirt were tailored with a double panel white button front. The symbolism should be obvious, students and workers together.
What I didn't know and found out in `68-69 was that each trade has it's own work cloths and outfits. The blue work shirt and jeans were characteristic of some industrial, steel, and plumbing trades and denium overalls were more common than jeans--basically machinists, mechanics, and metal trades. Safety work boots with steel toes and baggy cuffs to overhang these kind of boots were signature cloths of heavy industry. Construction on the other hand dressed in lighter colors like dull white and tan. The reason was the wood and concrete stains. So each sector of the production economy had its outfit and these also symbolized the work forces and its unions. Painters and plasterers wore all white overalls while steel workers wore black and blue. This symbolic-practice system of cloths is still going on. As a mechanic, I wore black heavy combo cloth of nylon and cotton pants which resisted mild acid, grease, and general metal shop grime---grimes ha, ha.
One great advantage to black pants and loose black t-shirts is how anonymous I looked on all black and latino streets and neighborhoods. People knew I was a worker and that seemed to be a good thing. Even the cops gave me some room now and again. I've had many fleeting moments of solidarity with many people in the grimy bowels of these once great industrial cities.
``It's really pretty disgusting to reduce such a huge and complex movement to the nervous breakdown of a lot of kids raised in the nuclear age.'' Carrol
Fine. So correct the record and stop with the insults. There is nothing served by calling list posts disgusting or insulting people. And try to remember we are all in different regions of the US and other parts of the world---I hope. Our age, experience, levels of consciousness, actions, struggles, immediate local conditions vary, and that is a good thing.
Then Dennis Redmond DRR writes:
``Second: Tahrir Square has demolished the ideological underpinnings of the Terror War. Suddenly, Arabs are people -- ordinary human beings, who want peace, democracy, a better life for their kids. The whole rationale for the $1 trillion military-industrial complex has just gone out the window...''
I can't explain why or how I instantly identified with the Egyptians. I saw them for the first time in my life. This has happened before, once I realized that Iraq was a working class country, that the guys building the IEDs were mechanics like me. They had spent their whole working life making rude tech, work. They could be building wheelchairs or IEDs or getting the Toyota truck running or the house wired for internet or just electric lights or getting a generator working. These are a people much like Mexican immigrants who know how to make things---yes! These are the mobilizing forces of society... Why is that so difficult to see?
Of course I fear for my own fate, but these are events that bring tremendous promise of redemption from the horrible silence of all the years of my days.