Dead letters

TODD GITLIN WANTS to build a slogan-free America. No kidding. It's a condition that must be met because he – Columbia professor, annoying contrarian, hater of confused picket signs – says so. Gitlin is famous for volleying self-serving invective at anyone and anything associated with activism. Except, of course, the early days of Students for a Democratic Society, when he was a member, and in 1963 to '64, the president. Then he came to his senses. Do you remember those dangerous radicals your parents warned you against falling for? Gitlin isn't one of them. He's the overinflated know-it-all your girlfriend said you were turning into just before she left you for a drummer.

"I spoke at an antiwar rally outside the U.N. on Sept. 12," he wrote in Mother Jones last fall. "The turnout was ragged, 300 or so. But the numbers weren't the most dismaying aspect of that gathering. The signs were. Most ... said 'NO SANCTIONS NO BOMBING.' ... They express a near-total unwillingness to rebuke Saddam Hussein."

Gitlin didn't just stick to his guns; he reloaded and went looking for Communist dupes and the leaders who love them – declaring that their presence negated everything the movement accomplished. In his eyes anyway.

What's really amazing is this: Gitlin, who deals with the present and future only to unload on the past, is widely considered to be a prominent antiwar activist. Why? For the same reason 75 percent of America believed Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center attacks – for no reason at all.

While the world threatened to plunge into crisis, Gitlin was busily red-baiting members of Not in Our Name and Refuse and Resist, the leading antiwar coalitions. He bonded with Salon.com writer Michelle Goldberg, who quoted him as saying the massive Oct. 26 demonstrations would be "a gigantic ruination for the antiwar movement." Millions of marchers later, one suspects he was disappointed.

Gitlin's new book, Letters to a Young Activist, is a one-way conversation with himself – he asks all the right questions and knows better than to interrupt. Armed with more straw men than Oz, he blasts away and rewrites '60s history in the process. The conversation is sincere and patronizing – read too long and the book becomes downright spooky. He damns his enemies like Captain Queeg, desperate for the spotlight that is rightly his.

"1968 was one of those years that doesn't come along very often, and it's probably a good thing," Gitlin is quoted as saying in a 1998 InterPress Third World News Agency article. "It was the year when the most benign hopes were ... obliterated."

That year was one for the books, the kind of year you'd never forget, like 2001. I sang Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" under my breath nonstop until a Jersey trooper mistook my head for a snare drum and I knew it was already here. 1968 was ground zero, the scene of a demolition derby in which warring ideas and armies collided at high speed, creating epic confusion and an information overload. When things slowed down, I looked back at King and Kennedy (R.I.P.), at Tet, at Paris and Prague, at dead G.I.s and dead Panthers, at the siege at Columbia and the riot in Chicago, at ghettos in flames, and at John Carlos and Tommie Smith in Mexico City and S.I. Hayakawa at SFSU – and did the math. The trip was long and quick. I was so consumed that when I heard Step-Granny Lil had shot Grandpa Zeke with a .38 at a posh yacht club, I forgot to tell my sister for weeks. "Dead?" she asked. "Winged," I replied. We had things to do.

The flash point was the Democratic National Convention. When Mayor Richard Daley ordered the police to attack, they waded into the crowd, slamming clubs against skulls until the air was pink, and chanting demonstrators added this to the evening news: "The whole world is watching." It wasn't true, but word got around, and America hasn't been the same since.

It was a moment of recalibration – call it accelerated learning – of activists' relationship to the political process, the future, and each other. Newly committed activists were short on experience, long on romance, and facing a thicket of political questions. But by the summer of 1970, after Cambodia was invaded and four student protesters at Kent State were murdered, many once tentative students saw themselves as part of an international alliance against imperialism.

Letters is an unwitting admission of guilt by a man unwilling to face the future. The book is Gitlin on Gitlin, the once ambitious leader, the contrarian, the activist who feels only his pain. Like all of us, he's afraid of what lurks at the dark end of the street.