Why We're Against the Biggees

I HAVE surveyed the opinions of the well-intentioned American middle class regarding Columbia. That is, I have spoken to my mother about it. She’s been reading the New Republic, and is currently fond of saying that the Columbia rebellion was set up in advance by people who are not students at Columbia, and who do not have its interests at heart. This is entirely true.

The Columbia rebellion was set in motion by a nebulous group of outsiders who are variously known as the corporate power elite, the militaryindustrial complex, the Establishment. A friend of mine refers to them as the Biggees.

The Biggees are a small group of men. Little else about them is known. They are probably old. They possess wealth surpassing the bounds of imagination. They have no real needs or desires, but cultivate avarice as a sort of obsessive hobby. They sit in smoke-filled rooms, so it may be presumed that they smoke cigars. In the councils of the Biggees, one might hear decisions that one thought no one could make. Buy Uruguay. Sell Bolivia. Hold India. Pollute New York. The decisions are of incomprehensible variety, but they have in common the fact that they are swiftly implemented and invariably soak the Little Man.

Sometimes the Biggees slug it out with each other, as in the gold market, where they get down to the nitty-gritty of buying and selling money (a commerce that no one else can understand, let alone participate in), but more often they are after our coin.

The Biggees lie. They shout up and down that Vitalis has V7, but they don’t say what V7 is. They say that Arrid stops wetness, but they don’t explain why wetness should be stopped. (I can think of a lot of things that qualify for stoppage way ahead of wetness.) They lie about little things like that, and big things like Vietnam, the ghetto, Democracy. It’s all the same—truth in lending, truth in labeling, truth in government; none of them exist.

The Biggees control. I read a sixth-grader’s history paper about the Spanish-American War. The young boy, having put away his Mattel M-16 automatic rifle for the evening to do his homework, wrote that the 1898 war was fought by America to set the poor Cubans free from tyranny. He added that America traditionally fights on the side of right for justice and freedom and therefore always wins, “like in Vietnam today.” The Biggees have that kid right where they want him. They’ve got his mind; when he’s eighteen they’ll take his body.

Look around you. The Biggees are everywhere. Look in your driveway. They build cars that dissociate in three years, and they make everybody buy them, and they’re in on the gas biz too, so you can forget about mileage. And no one can make them change. You get organized and ask them to please just put all bumpers at a standard level so maybe a little less than 50,000 of us will die on the roads next year, but no, they can’t do it. They can’t do it because it will cost to do it, and anyway, if all bumpers were at the same height, then there wouldn’t be any choice, and that’s what democracy’s all about. If you didn’t know that that’s what democracy’s all about, there are frequent ads to remind you. It seems, for instance, that in socialist countries there are only three colors of lipstick, whereas capitalism provides forty.

And with these forty shades of lipstick the Biggees turn our women into nauga-babes (vinyl girls) who in pre-fab sexiness sit tracing cheap pictures in the air with cigarettes they never made up their minds to start smoking. And, arguing about what to-do to do next, one of these naugas might be heard to say, “It’s a free country.”

But it isn’t a free country. You can’t drop out of school because you’d be drafted, and you have to study certain things to get a degree, and you have to have a degree to make it, and you have to make it to get what you want, and you can’t even decide what you want, because it’s all programmed into you beforehand. You can say whatever you want, but you won’t be heard because the media control that, but if you do manage to be heard, the People won’t like it, because the people have been told what to like. And if they don’t like you, they might even kill you, because the government endorses killing by exemplification.

All of which brings us to Columbia, because at Columbia we’re all together and we teach each other and feel strong. The Biggees are killing people in Vietnam and keeping the blacks down at home, because they have to keep some people at the bottom for their system to work, or so they thought. Now they’re finding out that the downs can really screw them up bad, so they’d like to raise them just a bit, but that would certainly cost, so for the moment they’ll try to keep them down by promising them rewards if they behave.

So here we all are at Columbia not comprehending this great money motivation because we didn’t grow up in a depression and have always had coin and therefore don’t value it as highly as we might. We’re right at Harlem, so we see how it is. And we’ve got the draft right on us, so we know how that is. And we don’t like it. We don’t like it at all, because we’ve got a lot of life ahead of us and we’re for it. Killing and dying just don’t make it with us.

And lo and behold, right here at Columbia where all we young angries are seething, who should be president but Grayson Kirk, a Biggee if ever there was one. Consolidated Edison, IBM, Socony Mobil, Asia Foundation, I.D.A. — he’s got an iron in every fire that’s consuming us. And it turns out that Military Intelligence has offices at the university, and Electronic Research Laboratories is raking in about $5 million per annum on radar, and we’re in the Institute for Defense Analysis in a big way, and the School of International Affairs is hitting it off really well with the CIA. All the while the university is systematically desiccating the integrated community of Morningside Heights, and has its eyes on land all the way over to Seventh Avenue, so that some fine day there’ll be a nice white suburban buffer zone in the middle of Manhattan, which people will know, by the inevitable iron gates around it, to be Columbia.

Seeing all this, we decided to change it. Of course, if you don’t like it you can leave, but if you leave you’re going to run into something else you don’t like, and you can’t go on leaving forever because you’ll run out of places to go. So we decided to change it. We petitioned, we demonstrated, we wrote letters, and we got nowhere. We weren’t refused; we were ignored. So one day we went into the buildings, and one day somewhat later we were pulled out and arrested and many people were beaten. In the intervening days we were widely accused of having ourselves a good time in the buildings. We did have a good time. We had a good time because for six days we regulated our own lives and were free.

But Dr. Kirk and his associates saw that we were free and they knew of course that that sort of thing must not be permitted. They knew also that they could not deal with our demands, because that would mean a breakdown of their law and a violation of their order. So they called in the police. And they expressed regret that the police injured 150 people, and they really did regret it, because the brutal bust showed everybody how far the powerful will go to retain their power, how far they will go rather than answer a single question, rather than admit that questions can be asked.

As I write this and as you read it people are dying. So you see it isn’t really a topic for suburban conversation or magazine articles. It’s something that must be dealt with. That’s what’s happening at Columbia, not a revolution but a counterattack. We are fighting to recapture a school from business and war and rededicate it to learning and life. Right now nobody controls Columbia, but if we get it, we will never give it back. And there are 5 million college students in the country watching us. And a lot of them have just about had it with the Biggees.