Rebel with a Sense of Humor

Who am I to write a book? I don't know. I'm just writing it. You're just reading it. Let's not worry about it.

James Simon Kunen is only 20, and the introduction to his new book, The Strawberry Statement (Random House; $4.95), sounds like it. The youthful don't give-a-damnedness is deceptive. Kunen is one of the student radicals who occupied the president's office at Columbia University last spring; his accounts at the time made fascinating reading in the Atlantic and New York magazines. Strawberry Statement covers much of the same ground but goes beyond Columbia. It is, in fact, the meandering but often perceptive journal of a young rebel with a sense of humor.

Kunen's reporting is no mere recital of grievances. His eye catches the wry side of things--including himself. "April 25. I get up and shave with [Columbia President] Grayson Kirk's razor, use his toothpaste, splash on his aftershave, grooving on it all. I need something morale-building like this, because my revolutionary fervor takes about half an hour longer than the rest of me to wake up." Arrested and riding to jail surrounded by deadly earnest radicals, Kunen busies himself trying "to work a cigarette butt through the window grate so that I can litter from a police bus." Whimsically, he records his dutiful trip to Washington in June "for the rich people's march in support of the Poor People's Campaign. You are supposed to come away from these affairs with a renewed commitment and a sense of purpose. I came away with two girls' addresses and a slight tan."

Such detachment in an angry young man is unusual enough to give special weight to Kunen's more predictable indictments of society. "Leave me and my friends alone, bastards," he warns. "You're up against something here because we're young and won't bend and we're against you. We need good schools and houses for people to live in and it could be done and we're going to make this country do it. I don't get mad easily but I'm mad now and I'm going to stay mad until things change. You change them, or we change them. I don't care. But the choice isn't going to be yours much longer."

With a certain desperation, he talks to adults about the rhetoric and euphemisms of Viet Nam. "People get shot every day, and bombed and burned and blown up. But no one cares about that. I mean they don't really mind, because anyway, people aren't really shot; fire is directed at their positions. And they're not really people; they're troops. They aren't even dead men; only body counts. And the degree of deadness isn't always too bad; sometimes it's light or moderate instead of heavy. We'll stick it out because it's a question of honor and thank God we only hear about it once a day, and then it's quickly followed by some broad telling you how groovy some gasoline is and how you can get laid practically as much as you want if you use it."

Ordinary Soldier. Like most young radicals, Kunen does not try to offer any systematic solutions; he just wants people to be good to each other. "We're all together in this thing, so we could say all right, we're all kind of weak and bad but we're going to do the best we can and try to muddle through together because there's nowhere to go and there's nothing else to be. That way everyone could be fairly happy because no one would hate anybody. But man, talk about unrealistic Utopian impossibilities!"

Statement could easily become a cult movie about a sort of engage Graduate. MGM has already bought the movie option and production plans are under way. Kunen is in great demand for TV and radio talk shows and freelance assignments. But, as he told TIME Reporter L. Clayton DuBois last week, he skips them if they interfere with his duties as "one of the ordinary soldiers" among Columbia's warriors. He admits to some concern that "I occasionally get criticized for exploiting the movement and for allowing myself to spend time being co-opted by the mass media." What if the system makes him rich? His usual grin, a shrug of the shoulders, pause: "Eh . . . there it is." He is confident that wealth will not blunt his outrage. "I'm not convinced yet that I'm even a writer," he says. "But if I am, hopefully, I can be more effective doing that than as one more kid picketing. And remember, the two aren't mutually exclusive."

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