Was David Susskind Right ?

[ed_getka]

Tom Paul,
 This is off the subject but occurred to me reading your last post. Do you think the average golfer (ie not very interested in golf architecture) would think Pine Valley was the best course in the world if he didn't know it was Pine Valley. I have never seen the course so I have no idea what the initial impression would be. Assuming the premise that the golfer doesn't know he is playing Pine Valley do you think he would think the course was too difficult and thus not that enjoyable? Or do you think someone without an interest in architecture would be unable to notice the brilliance of the course?

[TEPaul]

Ed:

It's hard for me to answer that and it would only be speculation so that's not worth much.

I'll tell you this though from what I have read in the chronicles of Pine Valley. The course was built as a championship golf course and intended very much to be that. In the beginning the founders of it did not really intend it to accomodate the average or poor player. But for many years, decades actually, the "play" there was far more "guest" play than member play. And the founders were quite amazed that the "guests", no matter how poor they were simply had a ball playing Pine Valley even if it was beating the crap out of them and running their scores way up.

That's the way it was so I guess that might say more about what the "average" player thought of Pine Valley than I could with your hypothetical. And of course that was decades before any of these lists or rankings proclaiming it the #1 course in the world.

[ed_getka]

Tom Paul,
Thanks for the reply. Another slant on my question is do you think Pine Valley has spurred interest in architecture in those who have played it? Are there any courses that seem to come up in conversation consistently with golfers as the springboard to an interest in golf course architecture?

[Matt_Ward]

I agree with Pat -- golf development needs more VISIONARY owners. It's the owners who ultimately pay the bills and decide what will work best for the type of audience they want to satisfy. Sometimes it pays to be both -- take the case of Dennis Ryder and his unique and wonderous creation of Wolf Creek at Paradise Canyon in Mesquite, NV.

The top tier names in the business can surely decline to do certain jobs for a number of reasons and as a result those less high on the totem poll of fanfare will usually take the work in order to keep food on the table.

Years ago a friend of mine said you can define America by one word -- "more." Give them "more" and for many Americans that's fine. Just look at the success of McDonald's!

Ed Baker was right on target about the key concerns that mass golfers have and their overall interest in the topic of course architecture is clearly quite low. Ditto what Tom Paul added about the American public.

If I ever had the $$ to move ahead with a golf course project I know I would certainly want my input to be considered and not just paid lip service given the bucks being spent. Any smart architect knows how important it is to build a final product that will initially satisfy the needs of the owner(s) and hopefully stand the test of time. But, let's be very realistic -- most golf course designs are built to handle the masses / rounds of play, to sell real estate, etc. -- they are not created to be shrines in the same league as PV, TOC, PB, etc, etc. If a course can reach that high altitude of greatness you are talking about a very long shot indeed given the mass number of courses in play today.

I salute architects in their ability to juggle the always difficult task in pleasing the person who pays the bills while at the same time trying to design a layout that offers a solid challenge for all types of players. Clearly, that balancing act is never easy.

I used to play frequently at Passaic County GC in Wayne, NJ and a very small group of golfers I played with would make a weekly pilgrimage to Bethpage Black because we so loved the course. This was back before the Black was restored and quite a few of the holes even had rubber mats. We would always come back to Passaic County and extoll the virtues of the course. Do you know how many more people actually joined us? Zippo -- nada -- goose egg!!!!

Most of those other players were more concerned about playing the same holes day after day. If you told them the post round beer would be dropped you would get a reaction. But, playing a different course? One that had at that time low green fees comparable to Passaic County -- not one person said "wow, I've just got to go see this Tillie masterpiece."

The folks on GCA represent a very samll percentage of die-hard folks who take their golf quite seriously and certainly watch closely the goings on within golf architecture. Most golfers are more concerned with who's on the tee and whether or not they're getting enough strokes in their respective matches.

One last thought -- America is built around name "brands." Whatever the industry the public generallly gravitates to the "brands" they've known for years -- i.e. familiarity, etc. Sad to say, plenty of today's golf designs follow that same concept and as a result you get many "brand name" courses that lack for many of the things GCA followers want but often are left out. I often wonder if the big name architects have "package design formulas" that they can easily superimpose on just about any terrain -- sort of like walking into McDonald's and asking for a happy meal #2 and getting it whether you're in Tulsa or Tacoma.  

[Gib_Papazian]

Tom,

I hate to be repetitive, but this subject has an internal autopilot that will eventually direct us back to the question of whether art can best be gauged by its longevity through many genres of fad and fashion.

Platform shoes vs. Penny loafers

The "A' Team vs. M.A.S.H

Shadow Creek vs. NGLA

Kubrick's 2001  vs.  Any Sci-Fi movie in the 1990's

The Roman Coliseum vs. The Astrodome and Multi-Purpose Stadiums.

Give the people what they think they want? Poppycock. Give the people something of lasting value and their aesthetic/strategic sensibilities will rise to the occasion.

Additionally, there is no reason in the world why all those gated Florida "Senior" communities with 6300 yard courses need to be out & back affairs that provide nothing more than the kind of mushy-headed crap that our grandparents watched like "As The World Turns" or those spooky androids who sang on Lawrence Welk.

All it takes to turn these courses into places with substance and personality is for all these hack designers to put some love, care and thought into what they are providing instead of looking at the whole exercise as designing a golfing Bingo Parlor to keep these people occupied until they croak and the government gets to loot their estates.          

It all ties together, don't you see? We feed the ignorant nothing more than the tiny scraps they can conceive and fairly soon they lose consciousness and sink into the abyss of bubble-headed mediocrity.

This is what the puppet masters want, don't you get it???
Pre-packaged fun, designed to appeal to the brainless former disco chick and her hopelessly shallow, retired middle-manager husband whose life's ambition was to wake up on Monday morning and not feel compelled to don his uniform of a short-sleeved white shirt, stained tie and ill-fitting polyester pants with a lunchbag of tuna and cheese, Coke Classic and ziplock of stale corn chips and Oreos.

They cannot help it, because nobody has shown them the light. They are intentionally kept ignorant so they will never demand more in life. Sure, it is all there for those who look, but what is the reason that Joe Six-Pack's muni does not have compelling golf holes? Does it cost anymore to design clever courses with strategic interest?  

No, of course it doesn't.

But they buy into it because it is all they know and their friends as a group are impossible to educate and cannot be reached. Therefore, to fit into the social-life of these communities, even the ones who have seen the light slowly forget and degenerate until all that is left is the one remaining brain cell necessary to correctly use a toilet after drinking a high-ball and remembering where the Viagra perscription is hidden.

These are the same dweebs who once went to Club Med and bought into that incredibly shallow and lame attempt at manipulation that requires the kind of suspension of disbelief endemic to those who paid lots of money and cannot admit to themselves they got ripped off, so they play along and pretend they enjoyed themselves. Or worse, they are so lost it is impossible for them to conceive of what is possible.

See 90% of the CCFAD's.

Don Ho, Foster Brooks managed to make a living just as Ted Robinson has - by providing comfortable, safe, predictable drivel.

But somebody had to hire them and when people don't know any better, they will pay. That is what happens.

Slowly this is changing though. Much of the crap of the 60's and 70's is slowly going away and like the cheap Tijuana art that hangs over the fake fireplace in America’s trailer homes, this too shall pass.

The rare thoughtful work of even the most horrible eras will be here in 100 years and the throwaway stuff will be long discarded and forgotten in the scrapheap of history - and there will be no Dan Wexler to celebrate their memory any more than musicians will look back 200 years from now on Snoop Doggy Dog as we do of Mozart.  

[Rich_Goodale]

Gib

Let's just imagine that it is 2050 and, thanks to advances in genetic therapies, you and I are alive and well and sitting in the magnificent Stanford White clubhouse that was moved clapboard by clapboard from Southampton in the 2030's when global warming finally swallowed up most of Long Island, and we are looking out across the rolling fairways of our beloved Boulder Ridge Golf Club and the southern Santa Clara Valley to a brilliant sunset over Mount Umhunum.  Driving up here we had passed and done our ceremonial piss on the CB McDonald gates that had been salvaged from NGLA just before the last tsunami, and we had marvelled at the most recent reconstruction of our course by that great American architect, Sarah Huckaby-Fazio.  All those original circular bunkers, that had morphed themselves with time into beautiful pits of possibility and despair were still there, but the fairways now stimped out at 13 and only the latest "Grip-Action" Mucci balls with 392 super-glue dimples would keep you on the short stuff.  Not that we really cared any more.

Over our 77-year old Talisker's the name "David Suskind" came up.  A little spark danced about each of our chemically charged brains, but then vanished.  We went back to looking at the sunset, looking down from time to time absent-mindedly at our Weejuns, and wondered--what would this world have been like if Generalissimo Naccarato had not been stopped by Buddy Marucci and his heroic dozer crew at the battle of Ardmore in 2005......

[TEPaul]

What good posts those last few are! Matt Ward, you summed many things up really well! Gib, beautiful! Rich, you must have gotten some really great Cabernet for Xmas, you're mind was flying and in a very special place!

EdG:

You asked if I thought many golfers playing PVGC would notice its architecture if they understood it was the #1 course in the world or not. I don't really think they would although most do feel something is special about the course. I think it is the architecture they feel, they just don't really understand how to put their fingers on the true and specific reasons all that well.

That was probably my own experience and sensation before I became interested in this subject. I knew it was special in an overall sense but not until years later (after getting interested in this subject) could I start to see how the pieces fit so beautifully into the whole (although it's only the overall that most can only sense)!

You asked also what courses really do inspire those who have some interest in architecture to talk about it and think about it. I haven't seen everything, for sure, but in my experience the courses that do that best of all are, TOC, NGLA, PVGC, Pinehurst and Cypress! Those would be the top five to me.

Not to say this means they are the very best although certainly all of them are probably thought to be! Off the top of my head I would probably say some of the next tier for discussion and interest of architecture (and over the ages) might be Shinnecock, Oakmont, Myopia, TPC Sawgrass, Hilton Head, Pebble, Shadow Creek, Stone Harbor, Sand Hills, GCGC, Banff or Jasper, ANGC, Pacific Dunes, Riviera, a few of RTJ's  and others. Later, those already there that were discovered for their architectural interest RCD, Portrush, Walton, Sunningdale, North Berwick and others.

All these generated interest and discussion on architecture because they pushed the envelope somehow and were the first to do it in their own particular way. This does not mean they were to have lasting respect just that they garnered interest and created discussion. Some will probably be admired forever and others won't. The former probably because they are based on sound principles in one way or another and the latter possibly because they aren't or offered something that was not to catch on. But all of them, as Coore would say, offered something "different", each in their own way!

One of the interesting undercurrents of this entire subject and discussion is the notion of "greatness". Some look at architecture only as a measure of that. That can sometimes be misleading. This I believe is the point that some like Matt, Jeremy Glenn and others are trying to make. All courses were not really designed to be great. Others were! Some that were didn't quite make the mark and others that were not can still be succesful if they accomplish what they were designed to be.

And what about the player, the golfing public? Many say he will accept what he is given if it's presented to him properly--and by that I mean if he's told that it is good and interesting. He will not accept things that he is told he will not accept as Tom Fazio is inclined to say about certain aspects of architecture!

And this brings up what Gib Papazian is saying. Will he accept what he is given if architects and most definitely their clients push the envelope a little more and give him new or even old and different things? I think he will, if it's presented to him properly. It's known though that he will accept courses and architecture that are standard, formulaic and safe, but after a while even that will begin to wear thin with the golfing public who doesn't even pretend to really have interest in architecture.

But it's good to push the envelope although some might miss in being considered enduring. Stone Harbor is the best example. An envelope pushing direction that was not to really catch on. But the course is still there and they are still playing it with regularity! That's interesting, isn't it!?

The most curious thing of all, to me anyway, is the direction that the creative and talented designers of the "Golden Age" expected the evolution of architecture to go in with what they could see was the onset and advances in technology. Almost to a man they expected that technology would take architecture to the point that their own creative hands would be almost indistinguishable from nature itself. In this way they were either very poor futurists or else those that followed them, to a large degree, let them down and failed to adhere to their hopes and dreams!

[Craig Disher]

Answering the thread question, sure but so what? I don't equate a bad audience with a mass audience. I think it was inevitable that as television (or golf course architecture, or painting, or auto design, or any activity that carries self expression to agrowing audience) increased its exposure and popularity, it fell out of favor with those who are more keen to the subtle pleasures the medium can provide. The giants of early tv weren't playing to a mass audience; they were creating shows primarily for themselves. What did Sid Ceasar or Ernie Kovacs know or care about nielson points? Their shows were memorable because the creators were damn funny guys who were allowed to put together shows exactly as they saw fit. Skipping ahead 50 years, that model just doesn't work anymore. TV has become mostly a marketing medium in which each show must deliver a large audience. Because of the wide variety of taste, experiences and expectations of the audience, shows must deliver that which is predetermined to minimally entertain and not offend casual viewers.

Is this so different from the evolution of golf course design? The old guys had no rules except for those that they made up for themselves. Their customers were a tiny minority, nearly all avid golfers whose expectations were in the process of being defined. Now, most golfers - at least in the numbers required to support the huge increase in golf course construction over the last 10 yrs- play a few times a year and are richly exposed via TV to a wide variety of golf courses thoughout the world. It isn't unreasonable to think they want a guaranteed satisfying experience. If the courses the pros play aren't avaialble to golfers willing to pay, why not build ones that look like them but don't result in double-par on each hole. This doesn't create bad designs, just designs that scratch the itch of a large audience but may miss the subtleties of classic architecture. On tv, ANGC looks like a wedding cake; PVGC looks like a golfer's worst nightmare.

I started this thinking about a description I read long ago about baseball and how it has evolved into a steady state without much variance in its performance statistics year-to-year. In its early days, there were "outliers", players and managers who redefined the game by inventing a new technique or way of playing the game. Pinch-hitting a midget, for example!  Each innovation was absorbed into the game in a way that reduced the randomness (an essential part of nature) and surprise that was previously available. Golf course designs can provide randomness and surprise. I just don't think that is what a large golfing public wants.

[Patrick_Mucci]

CDisher,

The reality was that the bad audience was the mass audience in Susskind's interview.  That's why he felt quality shows got cancelled, because, while they were good, they didn't appeal to enough viewers.

Gib,

I've been looking for someone like you for years.

Could you please explain the ending of "2001" to me.

[THuckaby2]

Damn am I glad I read this thread... I was avoiding it because I have only the most scance knowledge of who David Susskind is/was!

Sarah Huckaby-Fazio... I HAVE A DREAM TODAY...

At the time Rich describes, Sarah H-F has cemented her place in golf history as the driving force in the renaissance of golf course architecture, using their name and money combined with her charm and good looks to carry forth what comes to be known as the Doakian/Naccaratan School, taught to her  by Jedi Masters Goodale and Papazian, with reference to all things Doak.  Her Dad just stays out of the way and rides her connections to a lot of free golf. Dad, Rich, Gib each continue 20 year losing streaks to their off-spring in team and individual matches.

 

TH

[Gib_Papazian]

The greatest music, art and cinema that endures through the years is created when the artist expresses what is deep within them without regard to what is going to be well received.

Do you think Monty Python's Flying Circus was created with an eye towards commercial acceptance? 30 years later there are high school kids on my golf team that can still quote the lines from their skits just as everyone on the site knows the words to Johhny B. Goode.  

That is because - in reality -  the best creative minds are trying to please themselves. Any attempt at creating something to pander to the tastes of the masses is doomed as a sort of exercise in artistic sycophancy.

John Lennon wrote what emanated from the deepest, darkest places in his soul and therefore whether you liked it or not, the sentiment was genuine just as is any artisitic expression regardless of the arena it is being expressed in.

Does that mean Seth Raynor was a technician because his template was not completely original? No. He created his art within set parameters just as the author of a Haiku poem expresses a sentiment within a set of guidelines.

Both art forms can trace their "rules" back hundreds of years and perhaps some of the genius of their work can be found in the ability to arrange fresh and new creations while still remaining faithful to classic ideals.

StoneHarbor is a nice try -and I do not condemn it because if the envelope is never pressed than progress "outside the box" is impossible.

But just because something is "different" does not automatically legitimize it as the newest wave of avante garde architecture or Haiku poetry with a few too many syllables.

Some golf courses are created for the same reason that Howard Stern is successful amongst the lowest idiots in America - for shock value.

But shock eventually becomes schlock and wears off  just as Mario Savio and Jerry Rubin's rap did when the world saw that their "new ideas" were just the bubbling over of the underbelly of America's septic tank and the only ones who ended up being soiled were those that deserved to be exposed because they were just mirror images of the same empty-headed nonsense on the other end of the J. Edgar Hoover spectrum.

Juxtaposing animal feces and religious icons do not make for art any more than base television themes count as entertainment.

Patrick,

The 2001 discussion is a three tequila explanation - I wrote my thesis on it, However, the secret will remain with Kubrick and I until you venture across the country with your nephew for a round on the Lake course.
    

[Rich_Goodale]

Patrick

Just to give you some ammunition before your 3-tequila seminar with Gib, try out the following website, for one man's opinion as to what Kubrick (and Clarke) were trying to get at with 2001:

http://www.filmsite.org/twot.html

[THuckaby2]

Whoa!  Thanks, Rich.  And thanks also Pat - I thought I was alone in not getting that movie... that synopsis helped tremendously.

Forgive me though, my Dad made me see that movie when I was 5 and I haven't watched but small parts of it since.

TH

[Rich_Goodale]

Tom

I never "got" the movie either, and don't plan to add it to my DVD collection any time soon, even now that I know what it was all about.  I just looked it up on Google 'cause I knew that Senor Papazian would be cryptic in any response he made to Patrick......

[THuckaby2]

You know your Gibs well, my friend.

Any chance that what really went on here is that Kubrick convinced Clarke to take a long acid trip with him and then both laughed like hell as the literati read all this shit into their farce?

Gib's response to that ought to be interesting....

TH

[Gib_Papazian]

Brains, (note the addition of "s" - thereby reelevating you to your rightful place as resident GCA  Savant)
That was a remarkably accurate synopsis of what is also my personal analysis of what 2001. It does not surprise me that a genius like you did not "get it" because you have always struck me as the consumate empiricist.

That movie requires the same sort of stretch beyond the ordinary boundaries of reason as Clockwork Orange. For someone like you - both cursed and blessed with extreme reasoning power - the necessary suspension of disbelief crucial to drawing in the audience would be almost impossible to accomplish.

I'd be shocked if you believe in ghosts, space aliens or life after death  - or would even entertain the possibility without absolute undenyable evidence.

That said, I'd think the fact that Clarke was a scientist and constructed his tales of space travel without breaking any of the physical laws we understand to be true ("Warp Speed" for instance), that 2001 would be a scientific showpiece you would embrace.

Don't feel bad though, not everyone "gets" the Alps Hole either

Huckster,
You have said before that your father is an incredibly intelligent man with an insatiable intellectual curiosity. If he insisted you see the movie as a youngster, there might have been a reason. I've got to fess up that my mom and dad took me to see the opening when I was nine years old (1968) and even though it took seeing it a few more times as I got older to fully digest it, my immediate first reaction was awed astonishment. It was my favorite movie then - as it remains today at age 42.

But then again, I'm a Sci Fi nut whose life ambition - besides recreating "Lido GC" - is to make the movie version of Rendevous with Rama.          

[TEPaul]

The meaning of 2001? It was a snap, no problem at all! It was clear as day to me but then things sort of wore off and I forgot! I would love to explain it to you, it was so easy to understand back then but I'm old now, and I just can't remember anymore!

[Rich_Goodale]

Gib

I can't take all this rejection!

First Ran takes away my Godhood and now you take away all but one of my Brains.  Even Steve Martin had Two and now I'm only assigned one.  Sic tranist gloria Goodie.

Nevertheless, even while only running on one cylinder, as it were, I can still hold onto my belief that "2001" was just "mailed in" by Kubrick and had so many arsty fartsy containment mounds trying to keep the plot from oozing over the cutting room floor that you would have to be a founding member of the Keir Dullea fan club to overlook them.  And, there wasn't much golf in the film that I could see after that initial scene with the hairy guy swinging his mashie niblick at the wild boar......

Cheers

[THuckaby2]

Gib - there was always indeed method to my Dad's madness, and I am only learning much of it today at age 38.  He made me watch 2001, woke me up in the very early am to watch man land on the moon, took me to symphonies from age 8 on, made me read every classic book ever written (or so it seemed)...

So why was it that only space travel "took" - up until pretty damn recently, I hated the classics and read nothing but crap, listened to ELP and Genesis and The Doors and wouldn't be caught dead with any classical music anywhere near me, and had about as much interest in re-watching 2001 as I do playing cricket?

Something about fathers and sons, I guess.  I wish I would have seen the light sooner.

I'm gonna give 2001 another try.

TH

[Dan King]

I’ve always believed that the easiest way to make art popular is to make it crap. Art by its very nature is personal. Great art is normally despised by as many, if not more people than love it. But to reach larger than 50% of a population the artist needs to compromise, white bread the art to appeal to such a large group. Regardless if it is paintings, literature, poetry, music, movies, TV, etc… to reach a large audience requires mediocrity.

This doesn’t mean all popular art by definition in mediocre. There is art that allows a following to grow. They don’t compromise, but the great unwashed masses are given time to learn that this art is special. Many times what the artist is trying to convey is geared toward the critic because in that particular media the critic has a discerning eye.

Take for example television, the networks need a large audience within a few weeks. Rarely are they going to allow a show time to grow and find its audience. Be a hit in two or three shows or face cancellation.  But now cable networks such as HBO and Showtime are not so tied to ratings and can wait for an audience to come to it. They can create shows that appeal to critics and hope the audience will follow. Once again technology has allowed an art form to flourish like they couldn’t in the past.

The first question is: Is golf course design an art form? Rich may disagree, but I’d tend to say it is. Next, why can’t golf course owners/designers try to appeal to the critic rather than the masses. The problem with golf course critics (generally) are that they are mostly taking their  cue from the masses, not from a love of golf course design. They are not trying to teach their readers what is great in course design, but rather obsessed with giving their readers what they think they want.

We will always have a few architects/owners who will design courses, not for some audience, but for themselves. These are the courses that will usually be revered on this forum, as we are more discerning than the media brand of critics. The golf media also seems to be changing, slowly. There are now critics, (such as Gib) who aren’t in the business to play as much golf as possible, but to educate their readers. With the internet, and a wider audience than just their local paper can reach, these critics will become more important, as golfers come to realize they want to learn, not have things thrown back at them that they already know.

The following has nothing to do with golf or golf architecture:

After complimenting Gib, now it is time to strongly disagree with him. Dissin’ Mario Savio? The late, great Mario Savio is one of the unsung heroes of the 1960s. Movements gain momentum through charismatic leaders. Who knows where the 60s might have finished up without the Free Speech Movement. A line could be drawn from what happened to Berkley in the early 60s with the FSM to the anti-war movement in the late 60s.  FSM helped to topple LBJ and helped create the moral majority backlash that gave Nixon his power. Without Nixon, we might not have had Watergate – one of the more important moments in our countries history. Without the FSM, who knows how long we would have supported various generals and colonels in Vietnam.  Would we have propped them up through the 70s, still with no clear idea what we were doing there?

Maybe the FSM movement proceeds without Mr. Savio, maybe we would have been fed up with LBJ and the war in Vietnam without FSM. We won’t know.  FSM didn’t invent anything the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t already doing. But it made it fashionable for rich white kids at the best universities in the country to get involved. With the children of some of the most powerful people in the U.S. getting involved, it was only a matter of time that their parents began to question some of their own assumptions.

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
 --Mario Savio (December 3, 1964)

[Rich_Goodale]

Dan

I never meant to say that GCA was not an art.  Rather, I see it as other "architecture", something in the limbo between an "art" and a "craft."  Not as inspiring as the fromer and not as exquisite as the latter.

PS--As one who first set foot in the Bay Area in Sep. 1964 as a pasty-faced refugee from New England, 30-miles of distance and a million miles of ideology from Berkeley, you are right that Gib is wrong to dis Mario, Jerry, Abby, etc. al.  However, it is very much his right to do so--which was the whole point of the Free Speech Movement in the first place, wan't it!

To think that that was 37 years ago.........

[TEPaul]

Dan King:

Using the analogy of "The nail that fell out of the shoe of the King's horse", how would you categorize the FSM as truly effecting some of the significant events you mentioned that followed it?

Or in another context of FSM/those major events, do you believe in small increments of fate or large ones?

[Rich_Goodale]

Tom

Sorry to butt in here, but Dan forgot to mention the event which precipitated the events that led to the Free Speech Movement, which was, of course, the death of the Stymie......

[Gib_Papazian]

Brains,

You will note I rectified my error above, acknowledging you possess at least two brain cells - and perhaps even two complete craniums.

However, it still mystifies me how the genius of 2001 has escapes you. When you criticize the "plot" it makes me think of when Jean Luc Goddard stated his movies all have a beginning, middle and end - just not necessarily in that order.  

2001 is a combination of ballet, symphony, evolution, visual impact and science, all bundled together with complex metaphors and astounding special effects cinematography. It is not meant to be a Gidget movie for comsumption by the empty-headed masses.

Just think of it as a movie version of Sheep Ranch in Bandon . . . there is really no first hole or 18th and no fairways with containment mounds , just a pure expression of eternal truths without traditional boundaries.

What other movie managed a seamless transition of millions of years from primitive man's first use of tools to space travel - in a single shot?  

Dan,

I am not really dissing Mario Savio as much as trying to point out that in the end, everyone was guilty of hypocrisy whether part of the FSM or against it.

Yes, the movement might have been necessary, but to quote Woody Allen:

"After the revolution, things will be different. Not better, just different."

Let's start with Robert Kennedy - remembered as a hero and champion of this great new social movement. The truth is that he practically forced LBJ into escalating the war against his better judgement (I've heard the tapes - LBJ knew it was a disaster waiting to happen and was looking for a graceful way out). You knoe history better than I do.   Robert Kennedy portrayed himself as a Hawk on the Vietnam conflict when Attny General until it became advantageous for him to flip sides and come out on an anti-war platform during his presidential run.

But nobody seemed to notice. . . . hmmmmmmm.

Everybody hates Nixon - and for good reason - but "Peace with Honor" is still peace.  

You've read "Steal this Book" just like I have, and Jerry Rubin's cathartic tome too. Those aren't really about free speech, they are about collectivism and the overthrow of the government.

But the first thing totalitarian (read: communist) regimes do is take control of the press, outlaw dissent and free speech.  

J. Edgar Hoover and Sen. Joe McCarthy sought to control the people and outlaw free thought just as all these looney professors running around academia today seek to do the same by preaching the virtues of political correctness and hate crime laws that punish thought instead of action.

What hypocrisy! What began as simply reaffirming the right to of free expression - already granted by the Constitution - has been co-opted and misused by every nutbag special interest group since the 1960's.  

Don't you see? Both were just the Ying and Yang of each other - equally wrong!

[A_Clay_Man]

I wonder if this made the national news, but the other day there was a story of a priest here in Nm. that had a book burning. Yes, just before new years a priest in Alamagordo had a bunch of his parrishiners burn a big pile of Harry potter books. Siteing it endorses witchcraft "which is real" to quote him.