In the end, maybe we just went soft. The stakes were lower by the time we came along. We had missed, by a few years, the tear gas and truncheons. Though the 2-S deferment was gone, drafting and shipping off to the Southeast Asian meat grinder the sons of families that could pay for college, and during an election year, was seriously inconvenient to the powers that were – eventually.
Men of a certain age still recall, nearly four decades later, the number they drew on lottery night. On civil rights, the big battles were over; white and black students could politely ignore each other – each knowing what parts of Buffalo to avoid. As for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they had gotten the memo: middle-class kids with a modicum of discretion, and support systems to deal with any consequences, could go to hell in their own way. It was almost as if they were greasing the skids for a long slide into several low, dishonest decades.
We wouldn't admit it then, but we were never really in the fight. And the show wasn't going to last much longer, either. One thing I had figured out even then was that The Revolution Would Not Be Subsidized – at least not much longer. But while it lasted, The Spectrum's office, then on the third floor of Norton Hall, was the best seat in the house.
When, as a callow freshman, I offered my services, the campus news editor, Jo-Ann Armao, dragooned me into her bureau. Although I would have teachers I respected, and friends I loved, Jo-Ann would be the most important single person in my college life, turning me into a halfway decent reporter, licensed to wander into affairs that were otherwise none of my business, take notes, and crank out copy on electric typewriters that didn't even have correcting ribbons.
I would edit – directly on the hard copy – ruthlessly. Jo-Ann and others would do the same, though gradually they would need to do it less, as I began to learn my business. The bylines started coming. Production could hold space for late-breaking stories because I could write to a line-count. As a Spectrum reporter, and, later, editor, I learned the most important skill I would ever develop. As A.J. Liebling put it: "I can write better than anyone who can write faster, and I can write faster than anyone who can write better." I owe just about everything I've accomplished since to that.
It was quite a show in those days, and when I inherited the Wednesday op-ed column, which I headlined Outside Looking In, I had an even better seat. I did humor and satire in those days, before reality outran my ability to lampoon it. Nixon and company made it easy, with their up-front thuggery and creepiness.
The lines were clearer; the cards were on the table in those days. Nixon went down, of course, however little we had to do with it, but that was only an Indian summer, though we didn't know it then. Later they would get smarter and put up sunny pitchmen and genial frauds to front for the darkly competent men who did the dirty work. Nixon, at least, had the liar's wary respect for an objective reality he had to shape his lies around; his cheerful successors got over with the bullshitter's easy contempt for it.
Closer to home, I could recount the strutting and fretting of campus politicos, sometimes borrowing the gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson to chronicle the antics of our Norton hacks.
Campus politics was so vicious and so entertaining because so little was at stake.
And then the show was over. We slunk through the Disco Era and the '80s, about which the less said, the better. Then, for a while, it began to look as though things might be different. But we proved soft and undisciplined, unfit to deal with people who – mostly – weren't, and we got more smiling empty suits, and more men behind the curtain with the hammer. Every so often, I can't help wondering what it would be like to get my old seat back, front row center, recounting the latest outrages, reviewing the latest obscene farces – and with word processing!
But enough maundering from a cranky old fool reliving his youth. Let's just end this cleanly, the way we always used to: -30-
[Note to editor: In my day, we put a -30- at the end of our copy to indicate the end. I don't know if you still do that.]
Email: alumni@ubspectrum.com
