Word: trillin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...JOURNAL by Calvin Trillin. 314 pages. Dutton...
...Armed Forces Day 1959, Calvin Trillin and 20 other men of the First United States Army descended by helicopter on Governors Island, then an administrative Army base in New York harbor. In a mock assault they liberated an incinerator from a contingent of computer clerks. Practically under the skirts of the Statue of Liberty, and with the Lebanon crisis undoubtedly fresh in his memory, Trillin fired blanks from his machine gun for the entertainment of officers and visiting Boy Scouts...
...Trillin relates his Army story as humorous counterpoint to his deadpan account of a violent peace demonstration that took place just outside Fort Dix, N.J., on Armed Forces Day 1970. Between the public relations game of a peacetime Army and the pitched battles of war-sick civilians, a decade of change is neatly revealed. Nothing cosmic, only a clear, courteous reminder of how much things have changed...
Throughout U.S. Journal, a collection of Trillin's New Yorker pieces, the author reportedly lands like a benign ordering presence-deus ex-machine gunner-amidst chaos, humbug and hoopla. Covering a great deal of ground, he is naturally sympathetic toward other traveling men. He writes about a Dow Chemical recruiter who in 1968 had to go from campus to campus, removing his shoes to step over antiwar demonstrators, and try to answer such polite undergraduate questions as, "I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or 15 years from now?" Elsewhere, Trillin...
...Indian activism is gradually beating its way into the nation's consciousness?and into its conscience. In ways both salutary and shabby, Indians are becoming fashionable. As The New Yorker's Calvin Trillin recently observed: "It is almost possible to hear the drums in the East Sixties...