Or would you prefer to go to sherry in the JCR? or read that groovy advertising column in the Times? or discuss curriculum reform? or get drunk, or get stoned, or go skiing, or take a non-credit seminar at the CFIA?

How do you plan to kill this day while the killing goes on in Indochina? What guts have you found that meet MWF at noon? Who's on Dick Cavett tonight? Did you read the latest message from the Weather underground? When's your book coming out? Have you seen the new Chabrol flick? Isn't it wonderful that since I've been here we got rid of the coat-and-tie rule and parietals?

I think of Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, fighting her sleep disease and painfully, haltingly asking, "What kind of town is this? What kind of people are these?"

The war. Do you want some facts? How about these: It is worse than we can imagine. Hundreds of thousands are dead; we've dropped many more bombs to implement our policy of 'forced-draft urbanization" in Vietnam than we used on the Nazis. Noam Chomsky (one of the few for whom I feel no contempt) writes, "By March 1969 the total level of bombardment had reached 130,000 tons a month-nearly two Hiroshimas a week in South Vietnam and Laos, defenseless countries." "Go easy on words like genocide," Henry Kissinger told students who visited him in the White House. "It is not the policy of the United States to bomb people." From the Kennedy Subcommittee on Refugees staff report: the target of the bombardment of Laos is "the economic and social structure of the rebel-held areas of the country." None dare call it genocide.

Do you realize how easily your eyes slid through the horror in that last paragraph?

Another anecdote: I remember as clearly as a nightmare one winter night in 1966 when, after a bitter argument about Vietnam with the two pleasant men who owned the small town store where I worked, it came to me like a flash that I could spare my voice. Surely, I realized, in a year or two these men and the men like them all over America-the men who had saved us from the Nazis-would realize that the war was wrong, wrong, wrong. And then the war would stop.

But just as I learned that night one rationalization to permit me to ignore the war, those men found out ways, too. And all the nice men and women at Harvard found their ways. Look around you at all the ways-from macrobiotic food to student-faculty politics to acid.

THEN LAST SPRING. The damned thing just wouldn't fade away, so we made the ultimate sacrifice after Cambodia, and gave up our C's and A's for mere passes and credits. The faculty, also going the ultimate-sacrifice route, let us. Although very few of us did anything much to fight against the war, we at least managed to think about it a whole lot for a few days. We took some small pride in our shame.

Soon summer, working, lolling around, nothing to do, relaxing, no antiwar activity, no watching the papers for the latest horror story, and at the end of the summer a CRIMSON executive saw that I had planned to reprint our editorial in support of the NLF in the Freshman Pre-Registration Issue and told me not to: "I think a lot of people have changed their minds since we passed that." A quiet fall, punctuated by renewed bombing of the North. Law boards. "It-really-isn't-so-bad, maybe-I-can-find-a-way-to-have-a-decent-life." A friend of mine, a really decent kid, a Rhodes Scholar, told me one day after the first fall raids on the North: "Listen, you can make it matter. I told myself I was going to make it matter, and I did. I really cared." It happened also to be the day of the Yale game, and he wasn't talking about the war. So the jocks play around on Soldiers Field, and the Loebies play around the Loeb, and the WHRBies play around WHRB, and the academics play around Widener, and the Crimeds play around here, on this page, indulging their egos and their fantasies, trying to please the Big Boys who aren't hiring these days anyway.

And nobody talks about the war much, because it's depressing and boring and, well, the war was last year. Or the year before. And because we have to go on with our God-awful lives. You can't just sit around and mope, you know. What is this self-righteousness? Get on with your life and try to make your corner of the world a little better. Through poetry in the Advocate, or wit in the Lampoon, or good works at PBH, or scholarly works on German philosophers, or research in Mallinckrodt or the Hoffman Lab, or research on underdeveloped nations at the CFIA, so it won't be so messy next time.

Ah, the loss of innocence. I came here, very naively, to find a glittering community of moral (though perhaps misguided) men and women. I found a cesspool of egomaniacs who are far more interested in themselves, Art, Science, Zen, Catholicism or marijuana than they are in stopping the slaughter we are committing over there. And I found that I was one of them. I came to the right place. Not better or worse than other places, perhaps, but cosmically bigger. Other places aspire to produce Henry Kissingers; we did it.

But you know all of this. Maybe it's something like these thoughts that has made so many of you junkies of one sort or another. But you know enough to keep a stiff upper lip and go about your puttering. There probably isn't much we could do, even if we tried. Lunacy is very deeply rooted in this country, and I suppose in other lands too.

So, my friends, keep a stiff upper lip. You freshmen and sophomores, maybe even juniors, to whom all this sounds a little strange: you just wait. You can get through it. If a full professor ever warns you that he can screw you on recommendations because of a news story you wrote about one of his committees, you just smile and pretend you didn't hear. He's probably a pretty nice guy-almost every one is in one way or another. It's just that I came here from a small town where I somehow. very foolishly, got the message that things were better here. College kids used to raise a fuss about the war, after all.

I can't help it if I find the taste of sherry sickeningly sweet. But I like a lot of you, almost all of you that I know, and I wish you well if I don't see you again after next few months. I realize this whole piece sounds, as an old grad wrote about an article two years ago, like "a child's mudpie." But that's what Harvard is all about, isn't it? A wonderful chance to make all sorts of weird mudpies of words, arguments and lifestyles. It's just that sometimes those childlike constructions get translated into mass murder, and that no one seems to care.