436
PETER BROOKS
day were utterly boring. Jean Genet's preposterous inanities, which
Big Man struggled through in translation, reminded me of the hope–
less superficiality of most French analyses of American society. But
they also brought home just how impossible it was to articulate to
the outside world what was going on. The rhetoric was occasionally
violent, but no one was knocking Yale in particular, which was en–
couraging. The best thing was just looking at the crowd, which was
the greatest assemblage of the counterculture I had seen.
It
was
es–
sentially different from a Moratorium or a Mobe crowd. It was war–
painted, half-denuded, Vietcong-flagged. Jerry Rubin in
his
Captain
Marvel outfit, the marijuana-sprigged Yippie flag fluttering
in
all
quarters, the YAWF shock troops
in
formation with small yellow and
black Bobby Seale pennants. There were many Blacks, most of them
young and elegant. Despite the dire warnings of violence, they had
come, and the center of New Haven was liberated territory that day.
It wasn't the Woodstock Nation, it was something more alienated
and more volatile, more forceful too. Any country that had brought
together so many people so totally in opposition to its consensus, I
thought, could not forever escape a reckoning.
I went back to the college and listened to Abbie Hoffman on
a transistor radio with the gate marshals. The rally ended early, and
quiet, orderly young people began drifting in the gate and lining up
for the Familia and brown rice.
That evening, I left the college and walked up along the Green
toward the Old Campus, where there was a rock concert. Across
on the other side of the Green, I could see a shadowy column ad–
vancing. They were police in new riot gear. Light glanced off their
plastic helmets. When I reached the gate of the Old Campus, the
marshals, harassed and in too small number, were working desper–
ately to get the milling crowds back through the high and narrow
gate into the campus. "The police say we have to clear the streets,"
one of them explained. The first confrontation - a minor one, as
they all would be - was about to take place, because, I later learned,
a provocateur had gone from college to college announcing that some
Panthers had been arrested on the Green, calling forth demonstrators.
When I got into the Old Campus, the rock music stopped and a
young Black man stepped to the microphone.
It
was Doug Miranda,
nineteen-year-old Panther captain, who proceeded to give an extraor-
