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ters and was pretty well in control of the situation for a while. But
heckling from the back of the roorn, from a group of Blacks and
mostly from a group of white radicals, was becoming more intense.
The motion to recommend a strike was passed, 33: 26, after much
procedural wrangling, but the vote almost seemed irrelevant in the
face of the attack on proceduralism iself, coming from the hecklers.
I remember the tense, angry face of one Black
girl
screaming at the
chairman,
"You're
out of order," then simply, "Bullshit, bullshit,"
as she moved toward the door. Then a Black student came down to
the front of the room and went up on the platform and told the
senators that they were pathetic, that he had never seen anything so
pathetic in his life. He went on to announce that the Blacks were
holding a press conference at 10 A.M. the next morning at which
they would call for a strike, and would introduce a little reality into
the university, instead of all this procedural bullshit. The senators
were
pathetic. They ended by voting themselves out of existence. Their
pathos came from trying to use classic parliamentary forms in a
situation that would not admit of such forms. The gap between the
"real country" and the "legal country" had grown too great; the latter
no longer had any purchase on the former. One could let one's
imagination free on a melodramatic flight to think of
Dix-huit Bru–
maire
or the Reichstag fire or any of the other collapses of procedural–
ism in the face of force.
Even without sacrificing to the melodramatic, I left the meet–
ing depressed, because it was one more example that we didn't possess
the forms for dealing with what we were facing and would have to
forge them anew. That was perhaps one definition of a revolutionary
situation. But there was no certainty of what new forms would suf–
fice. Whose would they be? Within the limits of preparation for
May Day, the students would create these forms, in the colleges, in
the perpetual participative forum they established, in the grant of
authority to ad hoc working groups. And the administration - most
pertinently, the college masters and the president - would ratify
these forms and let them exercise power. That
is
where the im–
mediate source of strength would come from.
When the Black students and faculty called for a strike,
it
did
in fact transform everything. Because what the strike now became
was a kind of minimum psychic demand on the rest of Yale to
