Word: kunen
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Cavett, and perhaps even the whole talk-show format, reached something of a high point last week when he set up a confrontation between Columbia University Radical James Simon Kunen, author of The Strawberry Statement (TIME, May 9), and Yale Student Tony Dolan, a conservative who occasionally contributes to the National Review. "I eat my share of apple pie," insisted Radical Kunen when he was attacked by Dolan for being something less than the all-American boy. And so the debate continued. Kunen: "There are no hungry conservatives." Dolan: Today's campus radicals operate with "noise instead of intelligence...
...WHILE Kunen must not be read as representative of student radicalism as a whole, he does speak for a significant wing within the movement. These are the people who were inside University Hall the night of the bust, not so much because they supported the six demands, but because they felt it better to be inside than outside, better to be with the people occupying the building than with the people outside scoffing at them. As a group these students are openly zonked out by the War and big business, fiercily skeptical about taking any part...
...Kunen's wit captures this shapeless but intense anger very lucidly, and while his book is far from the last word on radicals, it is as sharp a statement of radical disgust with liberals as one can hope to find. With great glee, Kunen relates second-hand The Ad Hoc Faculty Sandwich Decision -- a scenario in which votes have been taken, dissident factions reconciled and the body has determined how it will mediate the battle between jocks blocking off the entrance to an occupied building and any protestors trying to pass in food. Kunen discovers the trouble with the liberals...
...Kunen is not altogether qualified to act as a delegate from the disaffected of his generation to the outside world, and the great danger of The Strawberry Statement is that despite the author's disclaimers it will be read as a typical case of a phenomenon people are now desperately anxious to understand. Moderates will be reassured by Kunen's self-doubts--his hones confessions, for instance, that should the war end, he might have nothing left to hate. But this teetering, and essentially apolitical commitment to revolution, is by no means universal among radical students. Kunen doesn't know...
Liberals, of course, expect that they will often fail, but also expect that their earnest efforts will be properly appreciated. They cheerfully acknowledge that people disagree with them but cannot believe that they are being laughed at. If Kunen's Srawberry Statement encourages a few liberals to reexamine their reflexive rhetoric, to wonder if they are thinking in terms as large as are the radicals they feel threatened by, then the book will in the end be good for some education, as well as some amusement...