Books Do It!

MOST of my friends are political schizophrenics. They enjoy chanting slogans, running through the streets, watching others throw rocks, supporting the NLF and the Panthers, and wearing blue jeans and smoking dope. They are also perfectly able to wear a suit, pass courses, get jobs, and keep a balanced checking account. They fly to the Bahamas or Palm Beach for vacations before returning to Harvard to occupy buildings.

Jerry Rubin is the hero of the romantic side of many of these split personalities. In a classic libretto-radical transformation he changed from a normal, middle-class liberal student to the leader of the Yippies. As he says in Do It . "I dropped out, dropped out of the White Race and the American nation. I live for the revolution. I'm a yippie. I am an orphan of America."

Yet for all his talk of freedom and dropping out, Jerry Rubin is still very much a part of this country. He is still able to write a book, one that will sell. He is still able to be the leader of a movement which should have no leaders. He is still able to go to the Coop to promote his book and to wave that book in front of the television cameras. All the while he denounces capitalism and hawks the revolution.

Jerry Rubin's revolution is a revolution of theatre, with masks and costumes and props. In a way that is most unfortunate. This country needs a revolution and needs it badly. It does not need Jerry Rubin's revolution.

David Dellinger, one of Rubin's co-defendants at the Chicago trial, spoke at Tufts a couple of weeks ago. He spoke of his revolution, a political one. Dellinger, unlike Rubin, is not a product of the fifties. He grew up in the thirties and forties and has been fighting his battles for a long time. In a soft, experienced, but not weary voice, he told of the Chicago trial and how it fits into the movement. It is not a signal for revolution, or any kind of a spark. It is part of a long struggle which one day may bring the United States away from racism and war towards not a perfect, but a better country.

Dellinger's approach is the kind that is needed to bring any type of political change. Rubin's style, manic, egocentric, theatrical in the worst sense of the word, can provide entertainment, but not real change. He is looking for a brilliant, beautiful spark which will come only in fiction.

Rubin has said that his revolution is not only a political one. He speaks of a revolution of life styles and refers to the Chicago trial as a struggle between life and death. Yet a revolution of life style is perhaps the most difficult revolution to make. It requires a well structured philosophy and a true dropping out to make it work. People like Richard Alpert or commune livers are making a revolution of life style.

THE SADDEST thing, then, about Rubin is that he doesn't "Do It." If he believed in what he says he wouldn't run around the plastic society playing the role of bad guy. Bad guys are just as much a part of society as anyone else. He should be off in some corner of the country with his people making a new life, a better life which we could then adopt.

The book itself is funny. It is supposed to be. He advocates things like taking a shit in the main lobby of office buildings which have pay toilets. Right on.

Like James Kunen's Strawberry Statement, Do It is a disjointed collection of half digested thoughts. But unlike Kunen, Rubin expresses none of the doubts about the right course of action or the reasons behind the radicalization of students today. He says that students are the oppressed class, yet students, especially here, are the very ones who are being trained to lead American society. Their predecessors at Harvard are the ones against whom the revolution is being made. Rubin does not explain how students are repressed (except to say that they are forced to wear suits, again a theatrical example). Nor does he really say just why he ever became a revolutionary and why so many students today are following the same course.

If you have about two hours you might want to read Do It . On a plane or a bus it can fill time. The pictures, by Quentin Fiore, who did the same for Marshall McLuhan's works, may well be the best part of the book. As far as the prose is concerned, the best description is given on the jacket cover: "a comic book for seven year olds; a tribute to insanity." We are all older than seven and what we need is less insanity, not more.