The Book of Changes (California Quartet)
When I went to Cal, there was no tuition. Education was free. You paid a $76.50 student fee, you paid for your books, your room and board. Anything that was left you spent on booze and motorcycles.Then Ronald Reagan was elected governor and the good times ended. Reagan fired Clark Kerr, president of the University. The first of many heinous acts culminating in Reagan's famous snarl about redwood forests--"A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?"The Free Speech Movement (FSM) came along and the rebellion that started in Sproul Hall grew into a firestorm of protests and death and destruction. Education took a hit, tuition blasted off leaving only the rich and well-heeled in the classrooms.Reagan hated Berkeley, he hated the offspring of the middle class. He called in the police in mass numbers and hundreds of students were arrested, hundreds sent to Santa Rita Prison Farm where those offspring were beaten, tortured, tear-gassed and hounded for the rest of their lives. Ronald Reagan was the catalyst for the cataclysmic dislocation of California education and the annihilation of the Middle Class that built the State Educational System.After Ronald Reagan, California was never at peace again. This novel,The Book of Changes,doesn't purport to be either a sociological thesis or a history of anything. It is a fictional record of a sort filtered through time and the consciousness of young women and men who were looking for a new definition of America, of California, of the world. We didn't succeed. On Page 131 ofThe Book of Changes, Charky tells Beast:"Okay. Look. Berkeley's changing. All this burning and looting and deathhave changed it. I hate to say it but Tim's right wing bullshit will be doctrinein a few years.""Far out," I said. "You're the last guy I ever expected to hear that from.""It's America. The socio-political pendulum swings to the left, then itcenters, then it swings to the right. In a few years SDS and SNCC and YPSLwill just be letters in the Berkeley political alphabet soup archived here so Iguess it doesn't matter what you do, you can't stop the pendulum. My advice?""That's what I came here for.""Get laid while you can, as much as you can." That's pretty much what has happened. Who could know that Ronald Reagan's legacy would be the complete gutting of America and a complete capitulation to the right wing haters and their abysmal ignorance of science, history, sociology, and politics? A little education used to go a long way.