July 29, 2016:

One was wiry, white-haired, prim, Northern European Protestant. The other was tubby, bearded, brown-headed and very probably gay. One was math and science, the other literature and humanities, between them the right-brain left-brain split. One informal, the other insufferably effete. They were the elite in the 1970s and they were both ridiculous.

Neither supported me when they should have. The school authorities unjustly denied my diploma, where the assumption among the entire administrative and instructional cadre was that I must have done something to deserve it.

It's possible I had, but, not the thing I was charged with. By that time I was so alienated I practically dared them to do something. The particular form in which they did surprised me and offended my increasingly uncompromising sense of justice. The fact that they did something was hardly a shock.

These two should have been my advocates. They were not. They were not vaguely interested. They'd written me off and in their view I'd got what was coming. The white-haired wiry one made it plain he had no sympathy for rebels.