I just read in the morning papers that FAU’s Green Mann, student Michael Buoniato, an erstewhile “performance artist,” has been banned from performing on the FAU campus. Here is a kid who dresses up in an emerald green body suit and spontaneously breaks into dance at random times here and there on campus. Formerly banned from academic buildings after he was accused of disrupting classes, now he is banned from campus altogether. The reasoning? Security threat. It seems anyone at all could turn up in a green latex body suit, even a terrorist. (I hesitate to imagine where you could hide a bomb in an outfit like that but you never know…)
It got me to thinking how times have changed since my college days; in hindsight, my UF campus was a veritable hotbed of mortal danger. We had those wildly subversive Hare Krishnas everywhere, for starters, not to mention political dissidents like Allen Ginsberg and William Kuntsler holding rallies on the Plaza of the Americas. We had love-ins, for God’s sake, and we all know what that means. But this was just the lighter side of campus life. I remember the night after the shootings at Kent State University that a huge number of UF students tried to take over Tigert Hall, the Administration building. There was blood, tear gas, arrests, brute force-and there were hundreds of riot police. Still, it was not an unexpected event; on campuses throughout the country, students were protesting.
So when you compare that to a kid dancing in a green latex body suit, you have to wonder what people are thinking.
