423: In the early 60s, protesters march to “ban the bomb”; the bomb is banned (partially) with the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. Protesters march, sit-in, and are beaten in pursuit of equal rights; discrimination is banned (partially) with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These are baby steps, but we're two-for-two. The antiwar (Vietnam) movement is taking shape as I enter college in 1965; the (partial) winning streak is about to end.
424: My freshman year at Union College, I attend an International Relations Club conference in Washington. I meet campus liberals and campus conservatives; the liberals are more fun. In the hotel lobby a long-haired kid sits at an unattended piano and improvises melodically; I ask if he's with the conference and he says no he's in a rock group called The Left Banke. I hang out with a kid from Afghanistan; he is proud that his country’s flag hangs first outside the State Department. We get a background-only briefing from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who says we have no plans to stay in Vietnam after we win. I ask him, “What’s to stop the Viet Cong from restarting the war as soon as you declare victory and leave?” The Secretary replies, “We can get back there faster than they can.”
425: Rich Balagur and I start an anti-war coalition at school, beginning with the lowest common belief: end the bombing of North Vietnam; 10% of the college community signs our petition.
President Johnson increases the bombing in response to the "Nervous Nellies"; escalation enters the antiwar argot. People may be dying because of the movement. I search for a silver lining in this cloud of horror, and find it when a local television station tapes an interview with me, which I watch in a dorm lounge. The me on the couch listens to the me on the screen say that even if the Vietnam War has too much momentum for us to end it, the antiwar movement will succeed in the long run: "If it starts happening again, people will say no before it is too late." The student sitting next to the me on the couch says to the me on the screen, “Good point.” I will turn out to be utterly wrong.
426: Our movement grows as we march, cajole, educate, and organize. The Committee Against Bombing becomes the Campus Action Committee, with an expanded portfolio including racism and economic oppression. And always I am doing the two-finger typewriter dance (Dylan may have gone electric, but we are still in the era of acoustic typewriters) for the college newspaper. (For more about my piece that was called "a slander of the whole College community," see: dangerous words.) My outlet is doubled when Rich Balagur and I concoct the Paper Highway, along with poet Carl Rosenstock and music critic Cliff Safane.
428: Time again for a name-change and paradigm shift. The Campus Action Committee will now be The Community, with even broader concerns: sexism, educational reform, expansion of the arts. We need a participatory spectacle to kick it off, and the freshman beanie is the ideal prop. Beanies are issued to incoming freshmen, who are instructed to wear them outdoors until the football team wins its first game; very few in my class lasted more than two weeks, and succeeding classes even less. But the beanies still exist as a way to identify the underclass (who must eat and live together), and we call for a Beanie Burn to smoke out the class system and shed light on The Community.
429: A group of high school students are suspended for publishing an underground newspaper called the Free Student. Balagur and I create a leaflet in support: “You have the power of numbers and the moral justification on this…You can’t discuss the issues raised by the Free Student if it isn’t published.” We show up before school starts and hand out the leaflets along with copies of Paper Highway, on the public (we thought) sidewalk. The assistant principal and the principal call in the police. Student journalist Scott Simons is on the scene and writes a piece called The Big Bust: "You with them? [the assistant principal says to me]. Well, I’ll warn you like I warned them. Get off school grounds or get arrested." Alan Ziegler starts asking what law says we have to get off school property. Cop says "The law is go!" The principal doesn’t want us to go. He points his finger at Ziegler and Balagur and says, "I want to proffer charges against these two." Ziegler replies that he wants to proffer charges of assault and battery against the assistant principal. The principal starts yelling, "I want them arrested." And indeed Balagur and I are arrested, driven downtown in a police car, and placed in adjoining cells, where we chant “Om” until we are bailed out with our rent money. Simons' account: Alan comes out first. Cop pulls out paper bag, hands Alan his belt, shoelaces, wallets, and an autographed copy of Alice’s Restaurant.
430: We become a big local story. “Principal Supported in Arrest of 2 Men” headlines The Schenectady Gazette, which identifies us by saying, “They told authorities they were students.” In subsequent articles, we learn that authorities say they will consult with the District Attorney to see whether “there is any involvement with pornography per se.” We are said to glorify “the use of language and thoughts reserved for amoral, indecent and morally corrupt individuals…” which would “easily shock the senses of all decent people.” We “contribute nothing of value” and law enforcement will “oppose this evil by all means available to us” to avoid “terrible consequences of the continued exposure…on the minds of our students.” I love the idea that we can be both amoral and morally corrupt.
431: Represented by an ACLU lawyer, we make our first court appearance before Judge Stroebel, who has a preceding proceeding: “George, you are charged with public drunkenness and falling down. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty, judge.” “Now George, I haven’t seen you here in a while. I thought you had a job. What happened? Now back to the same old thing?” “Judge, my wife left me again. She’s gone. But I want to get my life back again.” “Well, thirty days in the County Farm might at least get you cleaned up again.” County Farm? I imagine Rich and I goaded into violence by a mean warden (think David Landau in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and growing old breaking rocks and feeding chickens.
432: I am interviewed, live, on the local T.V. news. After the show, the weather girl says she can’t wait to go home and tell her teenage daughter that she met me. Police cars frequently park across the street from our apartment. As I am crossing a street, I am almost nicked by a car turning the corner; it’s the assistant principal. I ask a professor if he thinks our phone is tapped and he replies, "No need. They've probably bugged your apartment." I get involved in a fender-bender; the cop who arrives at the scene looks at my license and says, "Aren't you in enough trouble?"
433: At the trial, the assistant principal lies and says he never touched me, but the ACLU lawyer won’t let us testify because she wants to keep the case pure for appeal. We are convicted (by the judge), and the Albany Times Union describes me as sitting “poker faced” at the verdict. Our sentence is fifty dollars or five days. I’m tempted to take the five days but I feel a cold coming on. I am doing an independent study on Revolutionary Change in America, and my paper is egregiously late, but the professor says I won’t be penalized because I have been doing "field work."
434: I read Rollo May in my Humanistic Psychology class and am nervously excited at the reception following his campus lecture. I am trying to get up the courage to approach him with my many questions, when he walks straight to me and says, “So, you’re the radical around here,” and proceeds to pick my brain.
435: The snowy New Hampshire backroads of the McCarthy movement lead to the Memphis-motel and Los Angeles-hotel eradications of King and Kennedy, and the system-gone-berserk in Chicago. That long and winding road of hope, despair, and anger ends with Richard Nixon at the White House doorstep. I am asked to cover the antiwar Counter Inauguration for a makeshift network of small radio stations. I record each segment several times, inserting a local angle by attributing the same quote to a student from, say, Trinity College, Cornell, and Dartmouth. (Twenty years later, my broadcasting teammate, Richard Roth, will cover Tiananmen Square for CBS while I am writing and teaching poetry.)
436: I take notes as protesters chant “Up the ass of the ruling class” while some fling mud on the fur coats of guests arriving at a reception for Spiro Agnew at the Smithsonian; flee from a club-wielding cop on a horse after the cop decides I am among the mud-throwers; help a well-dressed elderly woman find her companions, and am pleased when they turn out to be on our team; and dance myself dizzy to a deafening rock band under strobe lights in a tent. I crash on a church floor among dozens of visiting dissidents, the air filled with incense and peace lullabies.
437: I wake up shuddering. We disarmed Johnson only to see Nixon loaded in his place. I have to talk to someone who can actually do something, and I remember Al Lowenstein. He was a leader of the Dump Johnson movement, and I met him a couple of times when he was running for Congress in my home district. Now he is my representative. I bee-line to his office, where he is hobnobbing with well-dressed constituents. I am wearing blue jeans and a cowboy hat. “Al,” I say, “I'm really bummed out about Nixon; I mean, it just hit me that he's the fucking president.” Lowenstein takes me aside and assures me that the movement is still alive, now with people like him in Congress. He will be gerrymandered out of office in two years.
438: Along the Inauguration parade route—Nixon is not due for a half hour—I spot a figure in a tree. He looks about 16, wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt in the chill. And he has a rifle. I approach carefully, in case it isn't Nixon he is after. “Hey, whatcha doing up there?” I shout, counting on my long hair to entitle me to an answer. “Waiting for Nixon.” “Gonna shoot him?” “Nah, it’s plastic, see?” He taps the rifle against a branch and tosses it easily into the air. “They’ll arrest you. If they don’t shoot you first.” “For what? Playing with a toy? It’s political theater." “The Secret Service can’t tell actor from assassin.” The kid climbs down and takes a bow as I applaud.
439: After Kent State, with classes shut down by a nationwide strike, Union students and faculty coalesce to form an alternative college. A philosophy professor and I teach a course on educational innovation, and I form the
Committee for Educational Research and Experimentation (I love naming things.) One of my proposals is for an educational commune: the College would provide housing for a group of students next year, and the participants would get a course credit for group living and curricular experimentation. The unit would be a hub for faculty talks, arts projects, and whatever else students can devise given the time and space. The proposal is accepted, but I am graduating and pass the torch to the next generation.
440: As in high school, bells signal the start and end of classes, and they continue to toll during the strike. We tell the Dean the bells are paternalistic, Pavlovian, and unnecessary. The Dean promises there will be no more bells. Small victory.
441: A friend is kicked out of the campus bookstore for being barefoot, and we decide to take ironic action, a mock cause to break the confrontational tension. Several of us return to the book store and ceremoniously remove our shoes and socks. We unfurl makeshift placards: Up With Freedom, Down With Socks; Free the Toes Ten; Don’t Tread On Me When I Tread Bare. The manager comes over and sprays the area with Right Guard: "more appropriate than tear gas." We all laugh. We’ve had our fun and leave, saying "We'll take this up with the Dean." I don't make the connection when the Dean asks to see me the next day. “We’d like to avoid confrontation and polarization, so we are prepared to offer a compromise: Students will be allowed to enter the bookstore with bare feet on hot days, except on weekends, when alumni visit.” I wait for him to burst out laughing, but he is serious, and a tad nervous. “Deal," I say, and we shake hands. Absurd Victory.
442: The night before graduation, I sit in one of the folding chairs laid out for the ceremony. A rent-a-cop approaches me warily and asks to see my student I.D. When I show it to him, he apologizes and says he’s been instructed to be on the lookout for subversives. I almost explain to him that if there were to be disruptions they would come from students like me, but I just assure him that no one is going to mess with graduation, and I walk to my off-campus apartment for the last time.
443: After the ceremony, my father points to the college president greeting parents and saying goodbye to students. "Does he know who you are? Is he aware that there's an Alan Ziegler here?" "Oh yes," I say, "he knows I've been here."
444: The following autumn, I return to campus to see how the experimental house is doing. A friend from last year's committee welcomes me, but most of the other faces are new. After a couple of days, I am thinking about staying for a while, but my friend takes me aside and says, "This is kind of awkward, but at yesterday's meeting they voted that only students should stay here, so you'll have to leave."
Amazing post. Thank you, Alan. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | July 12, 2020 at 10:39 AM