Smash, that quote from the Vietnam vets preparing to make a stand reminds me of Philip Caputo’s account of an Iwo Jima veteran’s “visit” to Northwestern University in the wake of the Kent State shootings:

The scene could have been lifted from a Delacroix painting of the French revolution. A young man stood atop a barricade of furniture and cars and saw-horses, his long hair tousled by the Lake Michigan wind, one hand grasping a pole flying a red flag and an upside-down American flag (a distress signal) as he exhorted some twenty-five hundred students massed behind him to “Strike! Strike!”

Suddenly, he was interrupted by a burly, black-haired, middle-age man dressed in a workingman’s khaki trousers and a flannel shirt. Mounting the barricade, he tried to wrest the flag pole from the student. “That’s my flag!” he yelled. “I fought for it. You have no right to it.”

The young man jerked it away and leaped into the crowd. The older man jumped after him and a tug-of-war took place, accompanied by shouts and epithets. Some dissenters threatened to break his jaw, others urged, “No, no. Don’t sink to that level.”

After some struggle, a few students managed to take the angry man aside to engage him in a dialogue. He said something about fighting on Iwo Jima and that he was an electrician. One undergraduate said, “We can talk to you, man. We can talk to each other.” It soon became apparent that they could not. The students argued that the man, as a member of the working class, was a victim of capitalism. Students and blacks were also victims of capitalism. Therefore, he should join their movement.

The Marxist language sounded incongruous, if not absurd in that setting – Northwestern was the most affluent school in the Big Ten, Evanston an aviary for capitalists – and the member of the working class was having none of it.

“The hell with your movement,” he said. “There are millions of people like me. We’re fed up with your movement. You’re forcing us into it. We’ll have to kill you.”

“Like they did at Kent!” screamed several students, almost in unison. “Like they did at Kent! You want to kill us all.”

“Kent is the logical outcome of what you’ve been doing for the last five years,” he shot back. “What else did you expect?”

I stood taking notes. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this bit of street theater, so illustrative of the passions dividing America, had been staged for my benefit.

The electrician put his hands on his hips, shook his head, and started to walk away. Then he turned abruptly, pointing his finger at the crowd pressing around him. “It’s time for action,” he declared. “I’m through arguing. I came here to resist your movement.”

One student opened his mouth to say something, but another motioned for him to be silent and cried out, “Oh, f— him. You can’t talk to him.”

“And I can’t talk to you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing the chance I never had.”

I think this is worth a read, and worth thinking about.

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