Maybe not a mirror
The current egregious mess on campuses is almost but not quite a mirror image of the 1968 egregious mess. There's a basic difference that I can't quite tease out. See if I can pull it out by writing.

In 1968 I was in the middle of the hippieshit side of an egregious mess at Bowling Green. In the previous year a general strike by faculty had led to the resignation of president MacDonald, a solid old-fashioned conservative who enjoyed touring campus at night, literally beating the bushes to drive out PDA. The faculty were not hard-left; they were pretty much normal LBJ Democrats.

MacDonald was replaced by a soft-left Ivy League type named William Travers Jerome The Third. Jerome The Third was a direct descendant of Churchill's nympho American mother. (Hmm. Seems familiar today for some reason.)

In my first year the draft came down hard, and hippieshits started demonstrating. Down deep the hippieshits were right. Vietnam was a total betrayal of American national interest. But we weren't interested in national interest, to put it mildly. Our demonstrations started AFTER Nixon was elected, because he promised to end the war. Everyone knew that Nixon was evil and LBJ was angelic because the war was evil and ending the war was angelic. Perfectly logical. We hippieshits didn't stop to think that we were simply serving the Democrat Party, which HATED HATED HATED Nixon more than anything else in the world because Nixon existed. Raw personal bitterness. Nothing deeper. We hippies were immersed in the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist HATED HATED HATED Nixon, so we HATED HATED HATED Nixon.

The soft-left Jerome The Third turned out to be just as conservative as Old MacDonald when the rubber hit the road. "I need some muscle over here!" He called out the Phi Delts (jock frat) to bash some hippie heads, and the Phi Delts happily obliged.

Okay, there's the confused sort-of-mirror image.

Try to condense it:

In '68 the Left was driving both students and faculty, and the admin was confused.

In '15 the Left is driving both students and faculty, and the admin is confused.

Well, maybe it's not a mirror at all. In terms of named participants, pretty much the same.

Within the university only the jocks have switched sides.

Outside, though the named sides are the same, the real alignment has changed drastically. In '68 the Left was anti-banker and pro-Russia, while the Right was pro-banker and anti-Russia. In '15 the bankers and Russia have switched, so the Left (rationally for once!) is now pro-banker and anti-Russia. Unfortunately the idiot Right is STILL pro-banker and anti-Russia, which means it's now identical to the Left.

So that's it. Inside the university, basically the same. Outside, the Left has consolidated its power and owns both "sides". A large part of the people are NOT owned, but they have no support or representation within the power structure so they don't exist.

= = = = =

Language note: Think about the evil "I need some muscle over here." Resorting INSTANTLY to raw force, and calling it muscle, is the habit of a Mafia executive or more likely a private security executive. Normal cops are accustomed to calling in extra force when they're in actual danger, but this wasn't actual danger. Normal teachers, even hard-left teachers, don't think or talk like this. You talk this way when you're accustomed to having a dozen thugs under your direct command, and when you're accustomed to protecting a politician or celebrity from prying eyes.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, switchover

  ¶ 6:01 PM