Word: kunen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...NOBODY likes a smart-ass, remember that," someone over thirty told me last summer. I had doubts about the dogma even then, but now I'm certain that it's false. James Simon Kunen, 20 years old and a sometimes Columbia revolutionary, is a smart-ass if ever there was one, and Time, The New Republic, Newsweek, and the New York Times all love him and his first book, The Strawberry Statement...
...without reason. Kunen is funny, at times profoundly funny, and The Strawberry Statement is one of the easiest books to pick up and read through to come along in quite a while. A case in point is his comparison of the roaches in his apartment to the enemy in our current...
There is a certain savagery implicit in this word play with the rhetorical commonplaces of what President Nixon called the other night our most serious political problem. But part of Kunen's Statement seems to be that the Vietnam War is simply to grotesque to be taken seriously--it must be an outrageous hoax, perpetrated on everyone with sensibilities by some anonymous "Biggies." So it is also with the military-industrial complex, which Kunen can only talk about with the elaborate fantasy of "The Big Letter" which he expects may arrive any day -- "I wasn't sure what it would...
Ordinary Soldier. Like most young radicals, Kunen does not try to offer any systematic solutions; he just wants people to be good to each other. "We're all together in this thing, so we could say all right, we're all kind of weak and bad but we're going to do the best we can and try to muddle through together because there's nowhere to go and there's nothing else to be. That way everyone could be fairly happy because no one would hate anybody. But man, talk about unrealistic Utopian impossibilities...
Statement could easily become a cult movie about a sort of engage Graduate. MGM has already bought the movie option and production plans are under way. Kunen is in great demand for TV and radio talk shows and freelance assignments. But, as he told TIME Reporter L. Clayton DuBois last week, he skips them if they interfere with his duties as "one of the ordinary soldiers" among Columbia's warriors. He admits to some concern that "I occasionally get criticized for exploiting the movement and for allowing myself to spend time being co-opted by the mass media." What...