I went to see Angela Davis, the symbol of revolutionary chic, the other night.
Angela used to be very, very cool. She had that great Afro and the Letterman-like gap between her front teeth.
And she wasn't just some UCLA professor that Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, got fired because she was a Communist and read too much Marcuse. She actually got mixed up with jail-house revolutionaries/convicted criminals and made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List.
That was, as we used to say late at night in dorm-room bull sessions, very heavy. It was also romantic. It was almost a game -- chanting "Free Angela" -- unless, of course, you were the one who was in jail.
If you weren't around at the time, you probably don't understand. Why should you? But it may be important to know that most students in the '60s were part of the counterculture. Even Newt Gingrich was. For college students, the counterculture was actually the predominant culture. You got to play at revolution. And then you got to grow up. If you think about it, that's quite a good deal.
Your basic college-student protester now owns his/her own house, several cars, an improbable number of telephones, a VCR, a CD player, an answering machine, a microwave oven and a color TV.
Nobody's talking about revolution, that's for sure.
It's 1994, after all. Eldridge Cleaver is a Republican. And Jerry Rubin just got run over while jaywalking.
Still, I couldn't resist seeing Davis. A professor again, now at the University of California-Santa Cruz, she was lecturing at Center Stage in connection with August Wilson's "Two Trains Running" -- a fine production of Wilson's play about the black experience during the '60s.
I wanted to see if she'd changed, too.
She spoke to an overflow crowd of believers. They were mostly black, many in their 40s and 50s. They came to hear the old songs.
Although she'd traded in her Afro for dreadlocks and looks like she walked out of a DKNY catalog, Davis, at age 50, seems to be much the same person. "I might be a dinosaur," she says.
And she is. Just listen.
"Fear of crime immobilizes us," she says. That sounds right for the '90s, except she means that it stops us from considering prisoners' rights.
She says the real criminals are in the board rooms. She points to the 10th anniversary of Bhopal and the Union Carbide chemical spill that killed thousands in India.
"In our society," she says, "the word criminal equals black male. You don't have to say 'black criminal'."
Davis says that's wrong. Everyone says that's wrong. But her solution is to abolish prisons, or certainly not to build more. "You can learn more in college than you can in a penitentiary," she says.
Listen to her speak, and it's "Free Angela" time all over again. That's not how Davis sees it. She complains that history has been reduced to nostalgia and revolution to fashion. She doesn't want to be trapped in the '60s, but then she goes on to talk about political prisoners. Has she changed? Well, you don't have to wonder if she belongs to a country club.
In the play "Two Trains Running," it is significant that any revolution takes place off stage. For most people, revolution is always something on the periphery. Paying the rent is the real struggle.
The play is essentially about hope and hopelessness -- and choosing between them. But hope is everyone's business.
It can be argued that hopelessness, even more than poverty, leads to crime. But the new social thinking makes a different argument. Read "The Bell Curve" and its message that biology is destiny.
"This is an attempt," Davis says of the thinking behind the book, "to dismantle the programs that we fought so hard and so long for."
Davis, true to her roots, calls for a new activism.
Don't forget history, she says, but also don't be awed by the '60s. The Panthers don't matter now. The Soledad Brothers don't matter now. It's a new day with new issues requiring new thinking and new leaders.
"I was taught that we are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us," she says. "We must have new, firm shoulders for those who come after us."
She says this to great applause. Just like the old days. Except I wonder if anybody really feels hopeful.