"Radicals"

DIETRICH WESSEL sat on the side of the stage in Lowell Lecture Hall Friday night smoking a cigarette, staring at the audience in disbelief. A leader in German SDS, Wessel had spoken for about an hour on his movement, its goals, its background, its accomplishments. Midway through his speech, the hissing had started. The people who had been talking in the back began to hiss. They didn't want to hear Wessel. They were bored, they held up watches to tell Wessel that he was taking too much time. This was his first encounter with a Harvard audience, and Wessel was unable to understand the hissing, the talking, the rudeness. Finally, he said, "What is it? Am I too long?" Then the audience, the sophisticated Harvard political-types who would hiss again when Mark Rudd characterized them as a "non-radical" group, cheered and applauded, and a guy in the back yelled. "We don't want to hear you. Why don't you leave?" I wanted to tell Wessel that we weren't all like that. I was embarrassed to go to Harvard.

Granted the people had come primarily to hear Mark Rudd and to see the movie on Columbia. So many of them saw little relevance in hearing about German SDS. But the rudeness and closed-mindedness that was displayed Friday night is representative of a mood at Harvard, a feeling among many Harvard students that they know all they want to know, that nobody can tell them anything. But, perhaps even more significantly--and this is what Wessel undoubtedly found so hard to believe--what happened Friday night showed that many people at Harvard like to consider themselves "radical" without doing anything about it. They like to be against the war, to talk about "radicalizing" people and confronting the University, without truly committing themselves to their politics or finding out what it really means to be "radical."

Of course, this is not true of a good number of people at Harvard--people who have read and thought and listened, and have then acted, by doing such things as draft counseling or resistance, developing new courses or seminars, or in some cases by actively working for McCarthy. But it is true of a good many others who see it as fashionable to be "radical," to criticize, to yell, to hiss, without thinking about what they are doing. Perhaps these are the people who are unwilling to make the complete break, and who will, for the most part, eventually "sell out" and find ways to spend their lives perpetuating the establishment and the materialistic good life that they now criticize because it fashionable to do so.

THESE PEOPLE are radical in name only. They are against the war--probably strongly against the war--but still they don't want to screw their chances of getting into Medical School. They want to have the best of all worlds--the excitement and fashion of being hip and radical plus the security of knowing that they have success assured if they don't do anything too serious. They will not let themselves take their politics seriously, and so they become rude and closed-minded.

Occasionally, some of them take the step. They become so disgusted, so repulsed by the repressive and racist system that they make the complete break. They become committed radicals. For some, the march on the Pentagon did the trick. For others, it was Chicago. For some of us, it was a gradual series of things. But for many, it hasn't come yet. They still sit back, worry about their grades, talk about how bad the system is and how against the war they are. Many of them belong to SDS and are the ones who help give SDS the cliquish and bombastic air that turns many Harvard students away. As with their radicalism, they are in SDS in name only.

Perhaps a truly radical college community is too much to hope for. Perhaps anything anybody does that can in any way be construed as being against the war is helpful. Perhaps, it is even a good thing if pseudo-radicals merely talk about the system and the war. Perhaps it takes people on all levels of commitment to bring about a truly radical movement. But it's hard for me to believe that radicalism is at all helped or strengthened by the kind of people who hissed Dietrich Wessel on Friday night. --ANDREW JAMISON -1-1