Word: statement
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...
...Strawberry Statement is, or a least tries to be, more than a collection of such deadly wise cracks. But as a book, it faces some formidable problems. The Columbia affair, in which Kunen was a front line-participant, is pretty well wrapped up by page fifty, and where the book will go from there is by no means certain. The rest can be read as a chronicle of Kunen's incestuous relationship with his Random House contract. He treats the book like a colossal term paper, trying to get started and finding ever-fresh devices for procrastination. Like Mailer...
...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...