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That such an afternoon would now seem implausible in every detail—the idea of having had a “date” for a football lunch now seems to me so exotic as to be almost czarist—suggests the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.

- Joan Didion. Again. I know. I’ll try to stop. But “so exotic as to be almost czarist” demands to be blogged. Besides, the sentence is from a scene set at my college 37 years before I got there, 13 years before my dad left the East to go there for grad school. A scene set on “an early afternoon in my sophomore year at Berkeley, a bright autumn Saturday in 1953” is a scene tailored to fascinate me. The scene also gets my vote for how a hypothetical Didion biopic should begin. Maybe it should be the frame for the whole film, the basecamp for every flashback and flashforward:

I was lying on a leather couch in a fraternity house (there had been a lunch for the alumni, my date had gone on to the game, I do not now recall why I had stayed behind), lying there alone reading a book by Lionel Trilling and listening to a middle-aged man pick out on a piano in need of tuning the melodic line to “Blue Room.” All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played “Blue Room” and he never got it right. I can hear and see it still, the wrong note in “We will thrive on / Keep alive on,” the sunlight falling through the big windows, the man picking up his drink and beginning again and telling me, without ever saying a word, something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward.

One of my best friends has an album out. I don’t pretend to be objective about her, her voice, her music. I’m sure we’ll all feel better about this if you arrive at your inevitable decision to buy her songs without any undue influence from me. Here. Listen to a song. I’ll just be over here washing the dishes.

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I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

- from “A letter to my students” (8/24/10) by Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at Berkeley.

A friend and fellow Berkeley grad used Facebook to link to O’Hare’s letter. That’s how I saw it. The overall message makes me wish I could still vote in California. Things are bleak.

What moved me most, though, is O’Hare’s mourning over students being less and less equipped to “push back intellectually against me or against each other.”

Since it was just a couple of days ago that I used this blog to push back intellectually against another Berkeley professor, I want to give O’Hare props for craving students who can push back intellectually. (I write “props” even less than I say it, but it’s the only word I can think of right now. Not much sleep last night. Besides, “give O’Hare props” beats “I’d like to salute O’Hare” and the other feeble alternatives my brain is offering.)

Iran Election Protests: Berlin Wall or May 1968?

Amid the heady news coming out of Iran today, one of my favorite bloggers — Andrew Sullivan — wrote, “The last time a news event gave me chills like this was the Soviet coup. It ended the regime.”

I do not mean to imply that those two sentences sum up Sullivan’s thinking on the subject. He blogged exhaustively and intelligently about Iran, its elections, and the resulting street protests and crackdowns all day.

Rather, I quote Sullivan because what he wrote so neatly summarizes the sense of possibility inspired by footage of protests in a nation so many of us lazily imagine to be peopled entirely by obedient zealots.

Which brings me to the reason I’m writing this post. While I understand where Sullivan’s “chills” are coming from, where the aforementioned sense of possibility is coming from, I’m not feeling it myself. Instead, my thoughts keep drifting back to a term paper I wrote for an undergrad course at Berkeley way back in 1993. This surprises me. A lot. On the relatively rare occasions that my thoughts drift back to college, I’m not usually thinking about term papers. But today I am.

Why?

Because somewhere deep in my brain I remembered researching, thinking, and writing about the May 1968 uprisings in France. Specifically, I remembered writing this rollercoaster chronology …

May 13, 1968 — exactly ten years since de Gaulle’s rise to power — marked the transformation of May 1968 from a student movement to a mass movement.  Hundreds of thousands and possibly a million people took to the streets of Paris in support of the students.  Demonstrations spread to other French cities. The movement began to run on its own energy as the largest strike in French history spread across the country without anyone formally calling for it. Eventually, almost 10 million workers would take part and demand democratization of the workplace as well as higher pay and better conditions.  The strike ground daily life in France to a halt as garbage went uncollected, gasoline was no longer available, the mail was not delivered, and the metro stopped running.

On May 24, as France slipped further into paralysis, de Gaulle spoke to the French people to no avail — the strikes continued.  On May 29, the French leader left the country for an unknown destination.  In the face of the hesitancy and apparent impotence of their leader, the masses began to truly believe in their power to bring down de Gaulle’s government.

This elation was short lived.  De Gaulle, it turned out, had been in Germany to shore up the support of the French armed forces stationed there.  He returned to France confident and decisive.  He reasserted his authority via radio — the medium of communication he had used during the war.   He dissolved the National Assembly and called for new elections in late June. 1 million pro-de Gaulle Parisians took to the Champs-Elysées to show their support for the embattled president.  The reaction seized the momentum.

In the weeks that followed, the movement was forced to wind down.  Paris returned to normal as strikers returned to work.


Now, I do not pretend for even a millisecond to know enough to draw intelligent parallels between Tehran in 2009 and Paris in 1968. I’m not predicting anything. I’m certainly not suggesting that May 1968 means Iranians should roll over and give up on insisting upon fair elections.  Rather, I am — in the best and worst traditions of blogging — merely thinking aloud here. And mainly, I guess, I’m hoping that some smart, idealistic person in Iran already knows about all this and has devised plans for steering the protests safely around all the hazards that thwarted May 1968.