Bill Mandel writes: "Wasn't Lerner a member of the Steering Committee? He was
certainly a member of the Executive Committee."
Lerner wasn't on the Steering Committee. I don't recall him as having been on
the Executive Committee either -- though if I did, vaguely, this would be no
more conclusive, since I have found that my memory at this distance has
conflated two things close together as often as it's neglected one. As I
noted, the only reference in Goines's voluminous account (or any other history
of the FSM, so far as I know) puts Lerner on campus in late spring of the
following year. I remember him from that period, particularly in connection
with the VDC. As I recall very dimly, a few years later when he was based in
the Northwest there was some question about his being represented or taken
there as having been a major leader of the FSM. If Lerner was in fact on the
Executive Committee, he was indeed among the "leaders" of the FSM, in a sense
applying as surely to the hundred-odd other members of its ExCom as to its
hundreds of organizers in graduate and undergrad departments, dorms, co-ops,
fraternities and sororities, and the dozens of "centrals" that formed the
movement's functional structure. In this deep sense, to which I incline,
leadership in the FSM was so widely distributed that it is misleading to
credit anyone -- even dear Mario -- as having been a Leader. In the ordinary
sense of the term, the histories of the FSM do not record Lerner as being
among its leaders, and it is probably misleading to refer to him so. Indeed,
such reference is pointless, and subtly degrading to the FSM; for one did not
have to be a "leader" to be touched by its spirit and carry this on.
Michael Rossman <mrossman@igc.org>
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