Nonstudents lump one another -- and many students -- into two very broad groups: "political radicals" and "social radicals." Again, the division is not sharp, but in general, and with a few bizarre exceptions, a political radical is a Left activist in one or more causes. His views are revolutionary in the sense that his idea of "democratic solutions" alarms even the liberals. He may be a Young Trotskyist, a De Bois Club organizer or merely an ex-Young Democrat, who despairs of President Johnson and is now looking for action with some friends in the Progressive Labor Party.
Social radicals tend to be "arty." Their gigs are poetry and folk music, rather than politics, although many are fervently committed to the civil rights movement. Their political bent is Left, but their real interests are writing, painting, good sex, good sounds and free marijuana. The realities of politics put them off, although they don't mind lending their talents to a demonstration here and there, or even getting arrested for a good cause. They have quit one system and they don't want to be organized into another; they feel they have more important things to do.
A report last spring by the faculty's Select Committee on Education tried to put it all in a nutshell: "A significant and growing minority of students is simply not propelled by what we have come to regard as conventional motivation. Rather than aiming to be successful men in an achievement-oriented society, they want to be moral men in a moral society. They want to lead lives less tied to financial return than to social awareness and responsibility."
The committee was severely critical of the whole university structure, saying: "The atmosphere of the campus now suggests too much an intricate system of compulsions, rewards and punishments; too much of our attention is given to score keeping." Among other failures, the university was accused of ignoring "the moral revolution of the young."
Talk like this strikes the radicals among "the young" as paternalistic jargon, but they appreciate the old folks' sympathy. To them, anyone who takes part in "the system" is a hypocrite. This is especially true among the Marxist, Mao-Castro element -- the hipsters of the Left.
One of these is Steve DeCanio, a 22-year-old Berkeley radical and Cal graduate in math, now facing a two-month jail term as a result of the Sproul Hall sit-ins. He is doing graduate work, and therefore immune to the Mulford law. "I became a radical after the 1962 auto row (civil rights) demonstrations in San Francisco," he says. "That's when I saw the power structure and understood the hopelessness of trying to be a liberal. After I got arrested I dropped the pre-med course I'd started at San Francisco State. The worst of it, though, was being screwed time and again in the courts. I'm out on appeal now with four and a half months of jail hanging over me."
DeCanio is an editor of Spider, a wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and around the Berkeley campus. Once banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The eight-man editorial board is comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is dedicated, they say, to "sex, politics, international communism, drugs, extremism and rock'n'roll." Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R.
DeCanio is about two-thirds political radical and one-third social. He is bright, small, with dark hair and glasses, cleanshaven, and casually but not sloppily dressed. He listens carefully to questions, uses his hands for emphasis when he talks, and quietly says things like: "What this country needs is a revolution; the society is so sick, so reactionary, that it just doesn't make sense to take part in it."
He lives, with three other nonstudents and two students, in a comfortable house on College Avenue, a few blocks from campus. The $120-a-month rent is split six ways. There are three bedrooms, a kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace. Papers litter the floor, the phone rings continually, and people stop by to borrow things: a pretty blonde wants a Soviet army chorus record, a Tony Perkins type from the Oakland Du Bois Club wants a film projector; Art Goldberg -- the arch-activist who also lives here -- comes storming in, shouting for help on the "Vietnam Days" teach-in arrangements.
It is all very friendly and collegiate. People wear plaid shirts and khaki pants, white socks and moccasins. There are books on the shelves, cans of beer and Cokes in the refrigerator, and a manually operated light bulb in the bathroom. In the midst of all this it is weird to hear people talking about "bringing the ruling class to their knees," or "finding acceptable synonyms for Marxist terms."
Political conversation in this house would drive Don Mulford right over the wall. There are riffs of absurdity and mad humor in it, but the base line remains a dead-serious alienation from the "Repugnant Society" of 20th-century America. You hear the same talk on the streets, in coffee bars, on the walk near Ludwig's Fountain in front of Sproul Hall, and in other houses where activists live and gather. And why not? This is Berkeley, which DeCanio calls "the center of West Coast radicalism." It has a long history of erratic politics, both on and off the campus. From 1911 to 1913, its Mayor was a Socialist named Stitt Wilson. It has more psychiatrists and fewer bars than any other city of comparable size in California. And there are 249 churches for 120,300 people, of which 25 percent are Negroes -- one of the highest percentages of any city outside the South.
Culturally, Berkeley is dominated by two factors: the campus and San Francisco across the Bay. The campus is so much a part of the community that the employment and housing markets have long since adjusted to student patterns. A $100-a-month apartment or cottage is no problem when four or five people split the rent, and there are plenty of ill-paid, minimum-strain jobs for those without money from home. Tutoring, typing, clerking, car washing, hash slinging and baby sitting are all easy ways to make a subsistence income; one of the favorites among nonstudents is computer programing, which pays well.
Therefore, Berkeley's nonstudents have no trouble getting by. The climate is easy, the people are congenial, and the action never dies. Jim Prickett, who quit the University of Oklahoma and flunked out of San Francisco State, is another of Spider's nonstudent editors. "State has no community," he says, "and the only nonstudent I know of at Oklahoma is now in jail." Prickett came to Berkeley because "things are happening here." At 23, he is about as far Left as a man can get in these times, but his revolutionary zeal is gimped by pessimism. "If we have a revolution in this country it will be a Fascist take-over," he says with a shrug. Meanwhile he earns $25 a week as Spider's star writer, smiting the establishment hip and thigh at every opportunity. Prickett looks as much like a Red menace as Will Rogers looked like a Bantu. He is tall, thin, blond, and shuffles. "Hell, I'll probably sell out," he says with a faint smile. "Be a history teacher or something. But not for a while."
Yet there is something about Prickett that suggests he won't sell out so easily. Unlike many nonstudent activists, he has no degree, and in the society that appalls him even a sellout needs credentials. That is one of the most tangible realities of the nonstudent; by quitting school he has taken a physical step outside the system -- a move that more and more students seem to find admirable. It is not an easy thing to repudiate -- not now, at any rate, while the tide is running that way. And "the system" cannot be rejoined without some painful self-realization. Many a man has whipped up a hell of a broth of reasons to justify his sellout, but few recommend the taste of it.
The problem is not like that of high school dropouts. They are supposedly inadequate, but the activist nonstudent is generally said to be superior. "A lot of these kids are top students," says Dr. David Powellson, chief of Cal's student psychiatric clinic, "but no univeristy is set up to handle them."
How, then, are these bright mavericks to fit into the super-bureaucracies of government and big business? Cal takes its undergraduates from the top eighth of the state's high school graduates, and those accepted from out of state are no less "promising." The ones who migrate to Berkeley after quitting other schools are usually the same type. They are seekers -- disturbed, perhaps, and perhaps for good reason. Many drift from one university to another, looking for t
he right program, the right professor, the right atmosphere, and right way to deal with the deplorable world they have suddenly grown into. It is like an army of Holden Caulfields, looking for a home and beginning to suspect they may never find one.
These are the outsiders, the nonstudents, and the potential -- if not professional -- troublemakers. There is something primitive and tragic in California's effort to make a law against them. The law itself is relatively unimportant, but the thinking that conceived it is a strutting example of what the crisis is all about. A society that will legislate in ignorance against its unfulfilled children and its angry, half-desperate truth seekers is bound to be shaken as it goes about making a reality of mass education.
It is a race against time, complacency and vested interests. For the Left-activist nonstudent the race is very personal. Whether he is right, wrong, ignorant, vicious, super-intelligent or simply bored, once he has committed himself to the extent of dropping out of school, he has also committed himself to "making it" outside the framework of whatever he has quit. A social radical presumably has his talent, his private madness or some other insulated gimmick, but for the political radical the only true hope is somehow to bust the system that drove him into limbo. In this new era many believe they can do it, but most of those I talked to at Berkeley seemed a bit nervous. There was a singular vagueness as to the mechanics of the act, no real sense of the openings.
"What are you going to be doing ten years from now?" I asked a visiting radical in the house where Spider is put together. "What if there's no revolution by then, and no prospects of one?"
"Hell," he said. "I don't think about that: Too much is happening right now. If the revolution's coming, it had better come damn quick."
The Nation, vol. 201, September 27, 1965
Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines. . .
Ain't What They Used to Be!
Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final. Look at Joe Namath, they say; he broke all the rules and still beat the system like a gong. Or Hugh Hefner, the Horatio Alger of our time. And Cassius Clay -- Muhammad Ali -- who flew so high, like the U-2, that he couldn't quite believe it when the drone bees shot him down.
Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over Russia, is now a test pilot for Lockheed Aircraft, testing newer, more "invincible" planes in the cool, bright skies above the Mojave Desert, in the Antelope Valley just north of Los Angeles. The valley is alive with aviation projects, particularly at Edwards Air Force Base, near Lancaster, where the Air Force tests its new planes and breeds a new, computerized version of the legendary, hell-for-leather test pilot. Air Force brass at Edwards is appalled at the persistence of the old "kick the tire, light the fire, and away we go" image. The key word in today's Air Force, they insist, is "professionalism."
This made my visit to the base a bit tricky. It was painfully obvious, even after an hour or so of casual talk, that the hard-nosed pros on the flight line resented the drift of my conversation -- particularly when I asked about things like "dueling societies." The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man's future just as surely as an LSD habit.
Test pilots are very straight people. They are totally dedicated to their work and not accustomed to dealing with slip-shod civilians who seem even faintly disorganized -- especially writers. My image was further queered by a painfully cracked bone in my right hand, which forced me to use my left in all formal introductions.
At one point, while talking to two colonels, I lamely explained that I break my hand about once a year. "Last time," I said, "it was a motorcycle wreck on a rainy night; I missed a shift between second and third, doing about seventy on a bad curve."
Zang! That did it. They were horrified. "Why would anybody do a thing like that?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sturmthal, who had just come back from flying the huge XB-70 acoss the country at the speed of sound. Lieutenant Colonel Dean Godwin, who is rated, along with Sturmthal, as one of the top test pilots in the Air Force, stared at me as if I'd just produced a Vietcong watch fob.
We were sitting in a sort of gray-plastic office near the flight line. Outside, on the cold, gray runway, sat a plane called the SR-71, capable of flying 2000 m.p.h. -- or about 3100 feet per second -- in the thin air on the edge of the earth's atmosphere, nearly 20 miles up. The SR-71 has already made the U-2 obsolete; the thrust of its two engines equals the power of 45 diesel locomotives and it cruises at an altitude just inside the realm of space flight. Yet neither Sturmthal nor Godwin would have balked for an instant at the prospect of climbing into the cockpit of the thing and pushing it as high and hard as it could possibly go.
The Air Force has been trying for 20 years to croak the image of the wild-eyed, full-force, "aim it at the ground and see if it crashes" kind of test pilot, and they have finally succeeded. The vintage-'69 test pilot is a supercautious, super-trained, superintelligent monument to the Computer Age. He is a perfect specimen, on paper, and so confident of his natural edge on other kinds of men that you begin to wonder -- after spending a bit of time in the company of test pilots -- if perhaps we might not all be better off if the White House could be moved, tomorrow morning, to this dreary wasteland called Edwards Air Force Base. If nothing else, my own visit to the base convinced me that Air Force test pilots see the rest of us, perhaps accurately, as either physical, mental, or moral rejects.
I came away from Edwards with a sense of having been to IBM's version of Olympus. Why had I ever left that perfect world? I had been in the Air Force once, and it had struck me then as being a clumsy experiment in mass lobotomy, using rules instead of scalpels. Now, ten years later, the Air Force still benefits from the romantic pilot myth that its personnel managers have long since destroyed.
Back in the good old days, when men were Men and might was Right and the Devil took the hindmost, the peaceful desert highways in Antelope Valley were raceways for off-duty pilots on big motorcycles. Slow-moving travelers were frequently blown off the road by wildmen in leather jackets and white scarves, two-wheeled human torpedoes defying all speed limits and heedless of their own safety. Motorcycles were very popular toys with the pilots of that other, older era, and many an outraged citizen was jerked out of his bed at night by the awful roar of a huge four-cylinder Indian beneath his daughter's window. The image of the daredevil, speedball pilot is preserved in song and story, as it were, and in films like the Howard Hughes classic, Hell's Angels.
Prior to World War II, pilots were seen as doomed, half-mythical figures, much admired for their daring, but not quite sane when judged by normal standards. While other men rode trains or chugged around the earth in Model-Ts, barnstorming pilots toured the nation with spectacular "aviation shows," dazzling the yokels at a million county fairs. When their stunts went wrong, they crashed and often died. The survivors pushed on, treating death like a churlish, harping creditor, toasting their own legend with beakers of gin and wild parties to ward off the chill. "Live fast, die young, and make a good-locJking corpse." That gag got a lot of laughs at debutante parties, but in aviation circles it seemed a bit raw, a little too close to the bone.
It was especially pertinent to test pilots, whose job it was to find out which planes would fly and which ones were natural death-traps. If the others took lunatic risks, at least they took them in proved planes. Test pilots, then and now, put the products of engineers' theories to the ultimate test. No experimental plane is "safe" to fly. Some work beautifully, others have fatal flaws. The Mojave Desert is pockmarked with the scars of failure. Only the new ones are visible; the older scars have been covered over by drifting sand and mesquite brush.
Each funeral means more don
ations, from friends and survivors, to the "window fund." The Test Pilots' Memorial Window in the chapel is a wall of colorful stained-glass mosaics, paid for with donations that otherwise might have gone into the purchase of short-lived flowers. The original idea was to have only one memorial window, but each year invariably brought more donations, so that now there are only a few plain windows left. All the others have been replaced by stained-glass memorials to the 100 names on the plaque in the chapel hallway.
Two or three new names are added each year, on the average, but some years are worse than others. There were no flight-test fatalities in either 1963 or 1964. Then, in 1965, there were eight. In 1966, the death count dropped to four, but two of these occurred on a single day, June 8th, in a mid-air crash between a single-seat fighter and one of the only two XB-70 bombers ever built.
That was a very bad day on Edwards. Test pilots are very close: They live and work together like a professional football team; their wives are good friends, and their children are part of the same small world. So a double fatality shatters everybody. Today's test pilots and their families live nearly as close to death as the old-time pilots ever did -- but the new breed fears it more. With rare exceptions, they are married, with at least two children, and in their off-duty hours they live as carefully and quietly as any physics professor. A few ride little Hondas, Suzukis, and other midget motorcycles, but strictly for transportation -- or, as one of the pilots explained, "So Mama can use the family car." The flight-line parking lot, where working pilots leave their cars, looks no different from any supermarket lot in San Bernardino. Here again, with rare exceptions, the test pilot's earthbound vehicle is modest -- probably a five-year-old Ford or Chevy, perhaps a Volkswagen, Datsun, or other low-priced import. At the other end of the flight line, in front of the test pilots' school, the mix is a bit livelier. Of the 46 cars I counted there one afternoon, there was one Jaguar XKE, one IK-150, one old Mercedes with a V-8 Chevy engine, one Stingray; all the rest were clunkers. A cluster of motorcycles stood near the door, but the hottest one in the lot was a mild-mannered 250 Yamaha.