Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (viii)

Around the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road there were at least three movie houses in the Spring of 1971. And it was in a movie house on the Grand Concourse in April or May of 1971 that I first saw the movie Catch 22. Around the same time, on a Saturday night, I also saw Costa Gavras’ Z movie and the movie about a police cover-up and police corruption in Italy during the late 1960s, Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion. Since the Bronx movie house was filled to capacity on the Saturday night I saw Z and Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion, and most of the audience consisted of culturally straight white working-class residents from the Bronx neighborhood who were over 50 years old, I mistakenly assumed that even the Hollywood film distributors were now going to be willing to market politically radical films in the 1970s; and that this was an indication that, if even Hollywood was recognizing how politically corrupt the System was, Revolution was still going to happen in the 1970s, as quickly as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had indicated it was going to happen.

Yet when I heard Jerry Rubin speak at Fordham University one afternoon before an anti-war student group in the student union building on Fordham’s Bronx campus in early May of 1971, Rubin seemed less upbeat about the prospect of Revolution happening quickly in the USA than he had been during the previous academic year—despite the fact that his follow-up book to Do It!—the book We Are Everywhere—had just recently been published.

Observing that, for the first time in four years, there had not been a “spring anti-war offensive” by U.S. anti-war students on U.S. campuses in the Spring of 1971, Rubin attributed the relative U.S. campus calm during the 1970-1971 academic year to “the four deadly bullets at Kent State.” In Rubin’s view, although anti-war yippies were “everywhere” in 1971, the realization that Pig Amerika was willing to kill its own white children rather than end its war in Indochina had scared large numbers of the rebellious white students of the 1969-1970 academic year from continuing their rebellious anti-war activism on campus during the 1970-1971 academic year, in the aftermath of the Kent State and Jackson State Massacres.