17 College

In 1961, the year I graduated, the only war going on was the Cold War and at eighteen I registered for the military draft. Had I been drafted and inducted I would have served without a second thought. Though I considered myself like my parents an Eisenhower and Nixon Republican, the truth is that I had of my own not a single political idea in my head. I believed that the progress of the world depended upon its becoming exactly like the United States of America, prosperous and free, indeed I thought such a transformation was inevitable, and I can remember even fantasizing privately, wildly, about the possibility of the United States' simply annihilating all the people whom I considered the primary obstacles to this utopia, our enemies the Communists of the Soviet Union and Red China, by raining down upon their alien urban populations our entire arsenal of atomic and nuclear bombs. Why not just kill them all, I wondered, and be done with it? Utterly mindless, I recognized no connection between my idle fantasy and the Final Solution of Auschwitz and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nor any contradiction.  

All through elementary school, junior high, and high school I had been straight A.

Ha!

Straight A stupid.

In the spring of our senior year my girlfriend Leigh got pregnant.

No!

In the summer we married.

Oof!

In the fall I registered at ISU and we moved to Ames.

The draft?

Enrolled in college, married, baby on the way—

I was deferred.

At Iowa State University in 1961 I met John Ward and, after I had collected a number of Cs and Ds and I think even an F or two in my naive and half-hearted endeavor to become the mechanical engineer I knew my father hoped I would be, halfway through my second year I gave up. Nearly a straight-A student in public school grades 1 through 12, now after four full quarters of college math and science I was dragging behind me a cumulative grade point average of 2.32, a C minus. I switched my major from engineering to English, the only department in which I had so far seemed able to earn an A.

The path of least resistance.

Instead of physics, chemistry, calculus, and orientation to engineering I was now enrolled in the first half of the survey of American literature, in the first third of the survey of western civilization, and in introductory courses in sociology and philosophy. It was in the introduction to philosophy that I encountered the young doctoral candidate and instructor Richard Van Iten, for whom I read selections from the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Meno of Plato, Discourse on Method by Descartes, and the Dialogues of Berkeley. The subject of his doctoral dissertation, Van Iten told us, was whether or not the stain on his kitchen tablecloth really existed. Like Remmes, Van Iten strode back and forth in front of his class of forty students as he speculated on mind, reality, and morality, always interesting, stimulating, provocative.

One day he lectured on Socrates, Plato, and justice and then paused to entertain questions.

A young man sitting not far from me raised his hand.

"Yes?"

"I believe justice belongs only to God," said the boy.

Van Iten's reaction was instantaneous.

He took two steps to his chair, stepped onto it with both feet, and then leaped onto his desk and stood. He raised both of his arms above his head and shook his fists as he bellowed.

"Yes, damn it, but God is too slow!"