Word: uncivil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...students barricading the Lowell House Junior Common Room would undoubtedly have received more due process had they been arrested on the spot then they are likely to receive from a body that has virtually no experience in handling civil and uncivil disobedience. But the University did not have the guts to defend free speech at Harvard by arresting the students, just as police have arrested activists at colleges and South African consulates around the country...
...perhaps covering himself as a patriotic infiltrator for the next Red Scare) that hides in the rear racks at Out-of-Town News and has a circulation which competes neck and neck with The Crimson's. Thus the great virtue, of this predictably superb sampling of his column, Uncivil Liberties: you actually get to read the pieces, rather than hear about them second-hand from a friend who managed to get a look at the Lamont copy before it was filched by an impoverished revolutionary...
Those who follow the column will rejoice at this second helping of Trillin's Nation material (the first collection of these columns, Uncivil Liberties, was published in 1982). But I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is reason to believe Trillin is becoming, as my mother used to put it, "a bit like Paul Revere's ride--a little light in the belfry...
There is a larger point to make here though and it's this: as Trillin feared, the absurdity of reality is catching up on him. In the introduction to Uncivil Liberties, Trillin explains that the challenge to an American humorist is to "concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses ... in other words ... when Ronald Reagan appointed as Deputy Secretary of State a man who could not name the Prime Minister of South Africa, some Sunday newspaper satirist somewhere in America was groaning at having his joke...
NONFICTION: Dorothy Day, William D. Miller ∙ The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Willard Gaylin ∙Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson ∙ Richard and Cosima Wagner: Biography of a Marriage, Geoffrey Skelton ∙Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate ∙Uncivil Liberties, Calvin Trillin