Maggie's Farm

Re this little Pledge of Allegiance story in California, I think it's a tempest in a teapot.

Why? Because these are kids. Like many (non-Asian) kids, they try to find their own way to stand out and be noticed, and being a young rebel is one way. (Of course, being good at something, achieving something, and getting decent grades in challenging courses, might be a bit more mature.)

On the other hand, getting your name in the paper about the Pledge could be the best way for an otherwise-undistinguished white boy with average grades to get into the University of Michigan Law School.

In my experience, campus radicals are the guys who secretly, or even unwittingly, wish they could have been on a team - preferably the ultra-hip Lacrosse team. Name me one guy who didn't want to be on the Lacrosse team.  Or at least the football... or any sports team. I know - I wasn't.

The "radical" girls were just dogs with an attitude, as I recall. Hated their mothers, or something like that. Nice. Wonder what they are doing today? Probably on play dates with other moms, or, at worse, valiant single mothers by guys who just wanted to get laid... or maybe working at Vogue. But there was a basic lesson for guys: don't get involved with gals who hate their mothers, because they will hate you, too, in time.

There was a line somewhere in The Strawberry Statement where someone - maybe the author James Kunin - confessed that he was attracted to radicalism to get dates, which he had trouble getting. That "statement" stood out as one truly human and humane statement in that book about that silly period. Kunin was nobody's fool and. like most Lefties, a closet capitalist - he sold a ton of books, and got a movie deal.

The Che t-shirts? Means no more than James Dean t-shirts used to mean. Which is: "I wish I were a tough SOB with an edgy, pointless mission in life instead of Mom and Dad's pampered college student with a BMW and a C+ in Rocks for Jocks, in comfy, decadent, free America."

Someday, these kids' kids will look at these old photos say laugh and say "Dad - I can't believe that was you!"

For some kids, being obnoxiously irreverent is good sport, and can turn a nobody into a somebody. It's tough, as a young person, to accept that we are all nobodys.

Does irreverence towards the things that I hold most dear piss me off? Of course. But I knew such kids in college: it is designed to have that effect. Let's not react like Moslems to foolish kids, or like our parents - or grandparents - did to the great Elvis! Or, God forbid, the Beatles. "Turn that crap down!"

The thing that cracks me up most about such stories is when the grown-ups admire them. That is a sure sign of arrested development, but many college faculty never fully grow up, due to insulation from hard knocks and ordinary reality in the ivory towers.

Not that I do not, in some ways, envy those who can devote their life to the world of ideas... Nice gig, but too political for me.