Everything
that one feels about this country is, or ought to be, conditioned by the
awareness of American power: of
America as the arch-imperium of the planet, holding man’s biological and well
as his historical future in its King Kong paws.
Today’s America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy in California and John
Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland
that Mencken was describing. The main
difference is that what’s happening in America matters so much more in the late
1960s than it did in the 1920s. Then, if one had tough innards, one might jeer,
sometimes affectionately, at American barbarism and find American innocence
somewhat endearing. Both the barbarism
and the innocence are lethal, outsized today.
First of
all, then, American power is indecent in its scale. But also the quality of American life is an
insult to the possibilities of human growth; and the pollution of American
space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the
senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes
and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.
Gertrude
Stein said that America is the oldest country in the world,. Certainly its most conservative. It has the most to lose by change (sixty
percent of the world’s wealth owned by a country containing six percent of the
world’s population). Americans know
their backs are against the wall: “they” want to take all that away from
“us.” And, I think, America deserves to
have it taken away.
Three facts
about this country.
America was
founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of White
Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored
population in order to take over the continent.
America had
not not only the most brutal system of slavery in modern times but a unique
juridical system (compared with other slaveries, say in Latin America and the
British colonies) which did not, in a single respect, recognize slaves as
persons.
As a country
– as distinct from a colony – America was created mainly by the surplus poor of
Europe, reinforced by a small group who were just Europamude,
tired of Europe (a literary catchword of the 1840s). Yet even the poorest knew
both a “culture,” largely invented by his social betters and administered from
above, and a “nature” that had been pacified for centuries. These people arrived in a country where the
indigenous culture was simply the enemy and was in the process of being
ruthlessly annihilated, and where nature, too, was the enemy, a pristine force,
unmodified by civilization, that is, by human wants, which had to be defeated. After America was “won,” it was filled up by
new generations of poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the
good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have at the beginning
of the industrial era. And the country
looks it.
Foreigners
extol the American “energy,” attributing to it both our unparalleled economic
prosperity and the splendid vivacity of our arts and entertainment. But surely this is energy bad at its source
and for which we pay too high a price, a hypernatural and humanly
disproportionate dynamism that flays everyone’s nerves raw. Basically it is the energy of violence, of
free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations
which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has
mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most
spectacular of which was Prohibition.
Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into loquacity and torment of a minority of
gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into
self-punishing neurosis. But the naked
violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.
Needless to
say, America is not the only violent, ugly, and unhappy country on this
earth. Again, it is a matter of
scale,. Only three million Indians lived
here when the white man arrived, rifle in hand, for his fresh start. Today American hegemony menaces the lives not
of three million but of countless millions who, like the Indians, have never
even heard of the “United States of America,” much less of its mythical empire,
the “free world.” American policy is
still powered by the fantasy of Manifest Destiny, though the limits were once
set by the borders of the continent, whereas today America’s destiny embraces
the world. There are still more hordes
of redskins to be mowed down before virtue triumphs; as the classic Western
movies explain, the only good Red is a dead Red. This may sound like an exaggeration to those
who live in the special and more finely modulated atmosphere of New York and
its environs. Cross the Hudson. You find out that not just some Americans but virtually all
Americans feel that way.
Of course,
these people don’t know what they’re saying, literally. But that’s no excuse. That, in fact, is what
makes it all possible. The unquenchable
American moralism and the American faith in violence are not just twin symptoms
of some character neurosis taking the form of a protracted adolescence, which
presages an eventual maturity. Thy
constitute a full-grown, firmly installed national psychosis, founded, as are
all psychoses, on the efficacious denial of reality. So far it’s worked. Except for portions of the South a hundred
years ago, America has never known war.
A taxi driver said to me on the day that could have been Armageddon,
when America and Russia were on collision course off the shores of Cuba : “Me,
I’m not worried. I served in the last one, and now I’m over draft age. They
can’t get me again. But I’m for letting ‘em have it right now. What are we waiting for? Let’s get it over
with.” Since wars always happen Over
There, and we always win, why not drop the bomb? If all it takes is pushing a
button, even better. For America is that
curious hybrid – an apocalyptic country and a valetudinarian country. The average citizen may harbor the fantasies
of John Wayne, but he as often has the temperament of Jane Austen’s Mr.
Woodhouse.
But to
answer some of the questions:
1.
I do not think that Johnson is forced by “our
system” to act as he is acting: for instance, in Vietnam, where each evening he
personally chooses the bombing targets for the next day’s missions. I think there is something awfully wrong with
a de facto system which allows the
President virtually unlimited discretion
in pursuing an immoral and imprudent foreign policy, so that the strenuous
opposition of, say, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
counts for exactly nothing. The de jure system vests the power to make
war in Congress – with the exception, apparently, of imperialist adventures and
genocidal expeditions. These are best left undeclared.
However, I
don’t mean to suggest that Johnson’s foreign policy is the whim of a clique which
has seized control, escalated the power of the Chief Executive, castrated the
Congress, and manipulated public opinion.
Johnson is, alas, all to representative. As Kennedy was not. If there is
a conspiracy, it is (or was) that of the more enlightened national leaders
hitherto largely selected by the Eastern-seaboard plutocracy. They engineered the precarious acquiescence
to liberal goals that has prevailed in this country for over a generation – a superficial
consensus made possible by the strongly apolitical character of a decentralized
electorate mainly preoccupied with local issues. If the Bill of Rights were put to a national referendum
as a new piece of legislation, it would meet the same fate as New York City’s
Civilian Review Board. Most of the
[people in this country believe what Goldwater believes, and always have. But most of them don’t know it. Let’s hope
they don’t find out.
2.
I do not
think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. So
committed are only a minority of white Americans, mostly educated and affluent,
few of whom have had any prolonged social contact with Negroes. This is a passionately racist country; it
will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
3.
I think that
this administration’s foreign policies are likely to lead to more wars and to
wider wars. Our main hope, and the chief
restraint on American bellicosity and paranoia, lies in the fatigue and de-politicization
of Western Europe, the lively fear of America and of another world war in
Russia and the Eastern European countries, and the corruption and unreliability
of our client states in the Third World.
It’s hard to lead a holy war without allies. But America is just crazy
enough to try to do it.
4.
The meaning
of the split between the Administration and intellectuals? Simply that our
leaders are genuine yahoos, with all the exhibitionist traits of their kind,
and that liberal intellectuals (whose deepest loyalties are to an international
fraternity of the reasonable) are not that
blind. At this point, moreover, they
have nothing to lose by proclaiming their discontent and frustration. But it’s well to remember that liberal
intellectuals, like Jews, ten to have a classical theory of politics, in which
the state has a monopoly of power; hoping that those in positions of authority
may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if
cautious, allies of the “establishment.”
As Russian Jews knew they had at least a chance with the Czar’s
officials but none at all with marauding Cossacks and drunken peasants, liberal
intellectuals more naturally expect to influence the “decisions” of administrators
that thy do the volatile “feelings” of masses.
Only when it becomes clear that, in fact, the government itself is being
staffed by Cossacks and peasants, can a rupture like the present one take
place.
When (and
if) the man in the White House who paws people and scratches his balls in
public is replaced by a man who dislikes being touched and finds Yevtushenko “an
interesting fellow”, American intellectuals won’t be so disheartened. The vast majority of them are not
revolutionaries. Wouldn’t know how to be if they tried. Mostly a salaried professoriat, they’re as
much at home in the system when it functions a little better than it does right
now as anyone else.
5.
Yes, I do
find much promise in the activities of young people. About the only promise one
can find anywhere in this country today is the way some young people are
carrying on, making a fuss. I include both their renewed interest in politics
(as protest and as community action, rather than as theory) and the way they
dance, dress, wear their hair, riot, make love. I also include the homage they
pay to Oriental thought and rituals. And I include, not least of all, their
interest in taking drugs – despite the unspeakable vulgarization of this
project by Leary and others.
A year ago
Leslie Fiedler, in a remarkably wrongheaded and interesting essay titled “The
New Mutants,” called attention to the fact that the new style of young people
indicated a deliberate blurring of sexual differences, signaling the creation
of a new breed of youthful androgens.
The longhaired pop groups with their mass teenage following and the tiny
elite of turned-on kids from Berkeley to the East Village were both lumped
together as representatives of the “post-humanist” era now upon us, in which we
witness “radical metamorphosis of the Western male, a “revolt against
masculinity,” even “a rejection of conventional male potency.” For Fiedler, this new turn in personal mores,
diagnosed as illustrating a “programmatic espousal of an anti-puritanical mode
of existence,” is something to deplore. (Though sometimes, in his
characteristic have-it-both-ways manner, Fiedler seemed to be vicariously relishing
this development, mainly he appeared
to be lamenting it.) But why, he never made explicit. I think it is because he is sure such a mode
of existence undercuts radical politics, and its moral visions,
altogether. Being radical in the older
sense (some version of Marxism or socialism or anarchism) meant to be attached
still to traditional “puritan” values of work, sobriety, achievement, and
family founding. Fiedler suggests, as
have Philip Rahv and Irving Howe and Malcolm Muggerridge among others, that the
new style of youth must be, at bottom, apolitical, and their revolutionary
spirit a species of infantilism. The
fact that the same kid joins SNCC or boards a Polaris submarine or agrees with
Conor Cruise O’Brien and smokes pot
and is bisexual and adores the Supremes is seen as a contradiction, a kind of
ethical fraud or intellectual weak-mindedness.
I don’t
believe this is so. The depolarizing of the sexes, to mention the element that
Fiedler observes with such fascination, is the natural, and desirable, next
stage of the sexual revolution (its dissolution, perhaps) which has moved
beyond the idea of sex as a damaged but discrete zone of human activity, beyond
the discovery that “society” represses the free expression of sexuality (by
fomenting guilt), to the discovery that the way we live and the ordinarily
available options of character repress almost entirely the deep experience of
pleasure, and the possibility of self-knowledge. “Sexual freedom” is a shallow, outmoded
slogan. What, who is being liberated? For older people, the sexual revolution
is an idea that remains meaningful. One can be for or against it; if one is for
it, the idea remains confined within the norms of Freudianism and its
derivatives. But Freud was a puritan, or “a fink,” as one of
Fiedler’s students distressingly blurted out.
So was Marx. It is right that young people see beyond Freud and
Marx. Let the professors be the
caretakers of this indeed precious legacy, and discharge all the obligations of
piety. No need for dismay if the kids
don’t continue to pay the old dissenter-gods obeisance.
It seems to
me obtuse, though understandable, to patronize the new kind of radicalism,
which is post-Freudian and post-Marxian. For this radicalism is as much an
experience as an idea. Without the
personal experience, if one is looking in from the outside, it does look messy
and almost pointless. It’s easy to be
put off by the youngsters throwing themselves around with their eyes closed to
th near-deafening music of the discotheques (unless you’re dancing ,too), by
the long-haired marchers carrying flowers and temple bells as often as “Get Out
of Vietnam” placards, by the inarticulateness of a Mario Savio. One is also aware of the high casualty rate
among this gifted, visionary minority among the young, the tremendous cost in
personal; suffering and in mental strain.
The fakers, the slobs, and the merely flipped-out are plentiful among
them. But the complex desires of the
best of them: to engage and to “drop out”; to be beautiful to look at and touch
as well as to be good; to be loving and quiet as well as militant and effective
– these desires make sense in our present situation.
To
sympathize, of course, you have to be convinced that things in America really
are as desperately bad as I have indicated.
This is hard to see; the desperateness of things is obscured by the
comforts and liberties that America does offer.
Most people, understandably, don’t really believe things are that bad..
That’s why, for them, the antics of this youth can be no more than a startling
item in the passing parade of cultural fashions, to be appraised with a
friendly but essentially weary and knowing look. The sorrowful look that says:
I was a radical, too, when I was young. When are these kids going to grow up
and realize what we had to realize, that things never are going to be really
different, except maybe worse?
From my own
experience and observation, I can testify that there is a profound concordance
between the sexual revolution, redefined, and the political revolution,
redefined. That being a socialist and
taking certain drugs (in a fully serious spirit: as a technique for exploring
one’s consciousness, not as an anodyne or a crutch) are not incompatible, that
there is no incompatibility between the exploration of inner space and the
rectification of social space. What some
of the kids understand is that it’s the whole character structure of modern
American man, and his imitators, that needs re-hauling. (Old folks like Paul
Goodman and Edgar Z. Friedenberg have, of course, been suggesting this for a
long time.) That re-hauling includes Western “masculinity,” too. They believe that some socialist remodeling
of institutions and the ascendance, through electoral means or otherwise, of
better leaders won’t change anything.
And they are right.
Neither do I
dare deride the turn toward the East (or more generally, to the wisdoms of the
non-white world) on the part of a tiny group of young people –however uninformed
and jejune the adherence usually is. (But then, nothing could be more ignorant
than Fiedler’s insinuation that Oriental modes of thought are “feminine” and “passive,”
which is the reason the de-masculinized kids are drawn to them.) Why shouldn’t
they look for wisdom elsewhere? If America is
the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to
the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western
white civilization. This is the painfully truth; few of us want to go that far.
It’s easier, much easier, to accuse the kids, to reproach them for being “non-participants
in the past” and “drop-outs from history.” But it isn’t real history Fiedler is
referring top with such solicitude. It’s
just our history, which he claims is
identical with “the tradition of the human,” the tradition of “reason” itself.
Of course, it’s hard to assess life on this planet from a genuinely
world-historical perspective; the effort induces vertigo and seems like an
invitation to suicide. But from a
world-historical perspective, that local history which some young people are repudiating
(with their fondness for dirty words, their peyote, their macrobiotic rice,
their Dadaist art, etc.) looks a good deal less pleasing and less
self-evidently worthy of perpetuation.
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra,
Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the
emancipation of women, Kant, Marx and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this
particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is
the white race and it alone –its ideologies and inventions –which eradicates
autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological
balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of of life
itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten
is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his
idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his
world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens
to do.
This is what
some kids sense, though few of them could put it in words. Again, I believe
them to be right. I’m not arguing that they’re going top prevail, or even that
they’re likely to change much of anything in this country. But a few of them may save their own souls.
America is a fine country for inflaming people, from Emerson and Thoreau to
Mailer and Burroughs and Leo Szilard and John Cage and Judith and Julian Beck,
with the project of trying to save their own souls. Salvation becomes almost a mundane, inevitable
goal when things are so bad, really intolerable.
One last
comparison, which I hope won’t seem farfetched. The Jews left the ghetto in the
early nineteenth century, thus become a people doomed to disappear. But one of
the by-products of their fatal absorption into the modern world was an incredible
burst of creativity in the arts, science, and secular scholarship – the relocation
of a powerful but frustrated spiritual energy. These innovating artists and
intellectuals were not alienated Jews, as is said so often, but people who were
alienated as Jews.
I’m scarcely
more hopeful for America than I am for the Jews. This is a doomed country, it seems to me; I
only pray that, when America founders, it doesn’t drag the rest of the planet
down, too. But one should notice that,
during its long elephantine agony, America is also producing its subtlest
minority generation of a decent and sensitive, young people who are alienated as Americans. They are not drawn to the
stale truths of their sad elders (though these are truths). More of their
elders should be listening to them.
Partisan Review, Winter, 1967
