That summer I was clandestinely dating a medieval scholar who resembled Che Guevara, trying to avoid a diminutive librarian who didn’t, and recovering from 4 semesters at a stuffy liberal arts institution, whose idea of radical action was offering its seminal Margaret Drabble workshop. In choosing a summer class, I went with something a bit less buttoned-up at a school nearer home. But the class description hardly prepared me for what would become the most compelling hours of my week: watching the aptly named Ripmaster teach The Cultural History of the 1960s.
If ever a teacher defined enthusiasm, it was this guy. Despite some nasty rumors I’d heard, as a teenager I couldn’t yet fathom the degree to which my government was up to no good. I may have had an angry edge, but I didn’t yet have my facts. But Ripmaster had news for me—the reasons why the 1960s culminated in fits of violent revolution, why fires had been burning all over Newark and Paterson, NJ, why the FBI and CIA were hypocrites and liars.
A core group of us extended every class by inviting Terry to join us in the pub, where we sat around and talked about the ol’ days over pitchers. After a few suds had splashed his goatee, he’d get even more rambunctious, yell and pound the table even louder. And we ate it up because we were hungry. This was a class that was galvanized around a love of the era and a great desire to understand the meaning behind what we'd lived through as children. For 4 hours/week, we felt like we had gone back to our bellbottoms and were inhabiting those issues, taking the same stands our predecessors had, rebelling against the status quo, hitting the streets for justice, celebrating our collective triumphs.
Thirty years later, the world has thrown different kinds of nasty challenges our way, filled with the almost-daily horrors that I joke should be part of a card deck called “Deal a Disaster.” And while radicals of the '60s faced similarly hard times, their approach felt much more active. There was a sense that change could happen, if they worked for it. Today feels to me more like being ground into pavement by a steamroller. With Americans powerless to do much but buckle under, as protests fall on deaf ears.
Last week, in a fit of dejection-fueled nostalgia, I checked out a Jefferson Airplane CD, which sounded about as old as Alexander Graham Bell yelling, “Watson, come here!” into the phone. But Grace Slick’s voice brought back that summer when JA and CSN were the constant soundtrack, when “Almost Cut My Hair” actually felt anthemic. Wow, it’s been awhile. And while I sometimes snort a bit when I hear that song, I sure don’t laugh at the sentiment behind it and the young people who actually took to the streets in protest—something that would never happen in the US today. (Unless, of course, Michelle Obama removed kids’ Apple products and substituted them with the real thing.)
I’m glad my mind was still open to someone who had the power to do something that most teachers never did: to change my worldview, alter my assumptions, shift around some paradigms. Like any decent Weather Underground protest, he smashed the glass of my trusting innocence around matters of US policy. Made me realize how much Americans have been blatantly deceived by their own government. Gave me a sense of how much human-rights work was still left to do. And for that I tip my Howard Zinn to him, wherever he is.
[For more stories about Terry Ripmaster, see Scrap Paper Review #42, http://www.hourwolf.com/spr/spr0042.html]
