After the Tall Timber Page 2

  In a way, in culture and in politics, we are the last custodians of language—because of the books we read and because history, in our time, has rung so many changes on the meaning of terms and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them. Lacking slogans, we still have the private ear for distinctions, for words. I happen to know no one who regularly watches Another World (although millions of Americans clearly do), or who would watch it—except to do a piece on materialism, escapism, pop culture or something. But that is the point. I know of no one whose cultural and political experience I completely share. And yet there are elements of my soap hours that seem common to a particular, still unaccounted-for sort of activist in early middle years: on the set, a sense of the human condition and the rhythm of life, with endless recapitulations for those who have not been watching, going forward; in ourselves, the bouts of muteness, watching and inertia, the sense of work one ought to do in what is going on, the patience with continuity, even the nostalgia for a kind of corniness. And always a characteristic quality of attention, at a certain humorous remove from our own experience. Lacking an idiom entirely our own, we cannot adopt any single voice without a note of irony. (I can’t write about the soap operas, or anything that does not make specific, human claims for action on my part, with perfect seriousness.) A suspicion of glibness or fluency has made the generation immediately after us value the rhetorical and inarticulate. Not us. We all seem to view the world still in words, as writers, arguers, archivists—even, perhaps even especially, those who do not write. In strange times, we have kept our language, energies and heads. (It is no surprise that the disturbances at San Francisco State dissolved under police called in by one—albeit aging and not very profound—semanticist.) And we are here.

  I think the historical bridge and the moral limits of our experience—mine anyway—were defined in World War II, which most of us still remember as The War. Totalitarianism, freedom, genocide, courage, passion, gentleness, a community of decent men, most of my conceptions of idealism, the monstrous and the public world date from that war, in which we were too young to have a part. And the bland repressions and unacknowledged disillusion of the succeeding years. Everyone looked alike or tried to, every sort of maverick was cut off and lost. Art was the province of ladies’ painting and lecture clubs; intelligence was subsumed in the grand idea of American know how. The schools were levellers for the general mediocrity; unions, parodying their origins and aims, were becoming entrenched forces for corruption and reaction. Odd cliffs were papered over. When, on his birthday in 1956, Adam Clayton Powell announced his support for Dwight David Eisenhower for president, the Republican candidate sent a birthday present to the people of Harlem—white trucks full of black cupcakes—and the present was graciously received. The dream everywhere was going flat. Teachers, who had begun in the Depression when, on the basis of their regular salaries, they could afford maids and were considered rich, were now poorer, embittered and threatened by any sort of difference. In small towns, in a travesty of the New Deal dream of education, teachers had risen above their own class to the extent that their brothers and their colleagues’ brothers—contractors and factory workers—were no longer good enough for them. They seldom married. They subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and Reader’s Digest and shared the general passion for the ordinary. Our rebellions then, in the years when the sum of hope was to be adjusted and popular, when boys still broke themselves at team sports on a military model, which would never be of use to them again (when, in fact, people still spoke of the Army for anybody as making a man of him), were separate and one by one, and threw us back, unknowing, on the past. Some of us cut school and invented juvenile delinquency, others read.

  What I am trying to say is that if there is any age group that should loathe what is called the System in its bones that group is us. We had it, in spite of Korea, at its height—the years when society was going, to its own satisfaction, so extremely well; when telephones, neon signs, subways, Western Union worked, as they haven’t since; and when, through and after Senator Joseph McCarthy, the spirit of the redneck, the junior college and the drum majorette had spread so deep into the land. I think the first post-war jolt the System had in its complacency, in our time, was not social or humanitarian, but technological: in 1957, when Sputnik went up. After that, there began to be a little room for change and mavericks, who, when there is not a desperate community lie at the heart of things, are the rule. But in the interim, before the general boredom had begun to lift, we, one by one, had made some beginnings, some progress on all the public and private fronts that now exist—frontiers that polarization, paradoxically, obscures and language has to be hard won and individual to approach at all.

  Accessible, almost by generational default, to all the idioms of America, we also went overseas. We were the first non-military age group to travel internationally on an almost national scale. We knew, since we had been at the mercy of institutions so utterly, what institutions were like at home, and what American tourists were like, and were treated like, abroad. But there is a particular totalitarian lie at the heart of political cliché too, and the simplicities of “imperialism,” “genocide,” “materialism,” “police brutality,” “military-industrial complex,” “racism,” tossed about as though they were interchangeable, and as though they applied equally to anything with which one is out of temper, are not for us. Neither are the simplicities of anti-Communism, free world, “violence,” and “radicalism” itself. We observed in The War the literal extreme of violence that men have done so far. Since then, bombs dropping on villages, cops beating kids on the head, kids throwing bottles at cops, the violence to the spirit of the McCarthy years, the violation of human dignity in exclusion and poverty—there is a degree of violence in them all, but a difference of degree, an extent of metaphor, and we still distinguish among literalisms, metaphors, questions of degree. Or radicalism. A radicalism that draws its terms from the System’s violence in Vietnam, then claims to be driven to revolutionary violence of its own, and, as an act of revolution, turns upon the liberal universities has an inauthentic ring, a ring of sublimation, theater. If revolutionary outrage over Vietnam had had a substantive thrust of Guevara courage on the line, there would have been American brigades fighting for Hanoi—a disaster for the country, surely, but a disaster in authentic terms. (The white revolutionary movement certainly left the American South, where the physical risk was high, fast enough.) There is an authentic radicalism in this country now, but it does not abuse the metaphor of revolution. It is not the radicalism of rhetoric, theater, mannerism, psychodrama, air. And it is not paralyzed in its own unconsummated moral impulses by viewing every human problem at a single level of atrocity.

  I think what has muddled terms, what has emptied vocabularies into rhetorics and made generations out of what are only persons after all, is, in the end, a major implication of The War. Ours was the first age group to experience the end of the Just War as a romantic possibility. There are no justifications for group violence in this country any more—no outlets for aggressive physical courage, irrational fervors, the fraternity of the barricades and the decent human war. And there aren’t likely to be any. Technology has made the stakes too high. We knew that separately, saw the last great romantic group fight to the death, and knew we could never have one of our own. That sounds like a blessing, and perhaps historically it is, but it puts a tremendous strain on any generation of young. From now on, it is all patient effort, unsimple victories. In this, the Vietnam War was a hiatus in moral terms. The System lifted the vocabulary of the just war, in the name of the free world, to Vietnam, and found it did not work. Radicalism lifted essentially the same vocabulary and turned it, in the name of revolution, against the System, where it does not work either. The very fact that radicalism leans so comfortably, half-consciously, upon the System and its laws, goes on almost risk-free, beside Another World, confirms that the System’s thrust is sti
ll, on an unprecedented scale, democratic and benign. No famous or privileged white revolutionaries have gone to jail for long just yet. But obscure and black radicals have, in numbers—which raises questions, I think, not so much of politics as of fame, privilege and the inauthentic revolutionary.

  What these pieces, looking back, are about, if anything, is true radicalism as opposed to what I would call the mere mentality of the apocalypse. The apocalyptic vision has never been true to the America we know. By some accident of our size, our mix, our resources and the perfectibility of our laws, brinks vanish here and become frontiers, immense real tensions are resolved in a paradigm of the modern world, material resources make it possible to pose moral and social questions which have never been approached on such a scale before. I think that is where we are—we who have lived from The War till now—not too old or tired to give the whole thing up, not too young to remember a time when things were worse. And, through the accident of our span of years, not too simple in the quality of our experience to know that things get better (The War’s end) and worse (the succeeding years) and better again (the great movement of non-violence sweeping out of the South to move the country briefly forward a bit) and, of course, worse. But when a term like violence undergoes, in less than thirty years, a declension from Auschwitz to the Democratic convention in Chicago, from A-bombing even to napalm, the System has improved. Terribly and with stumbling, but improved. And there are characters in these pieces—mocked for their tokenism when they succeeded, claimed as radical martyrs when they failed or died—who burned themselves out over an inch of that improvement. Which is how the human condition, in its historical continuity, or real radicalism, in its social framework, works at all.

  But with the closing of The War option, with the loss of final and romantic victories, there is a tendency, particularly among intellectuals and the young, and oddly accelerated by an obscene confluence of psychoanalysis and the media, to think in terms of final solutions anyway. To use the vocabulary of total violence, with less and less consciousness of its ingredient of metaphor, to cultivate scorched earth madness as a form of consciousness (of courage, even), to call history mad, and to dismiss every growing, improving human enterprise as a form of tokenism, an irrelevance in which one has no obligation to take part. The System drew back from its apocalypse in Vietnam—always draws backs from brinks so far—restrained, in spite of everything, the full force of its technology. But the scorched earth psychology remains, particularly on the Left. I happened to encounter that psychology, long before Vietnam, first in the arts, when I was reviewing books. The professional alienist in fiction, the group polemicist in criticism, the unearned nihilist and overeasy breakthrough artist in mixed media, the blown mind vanguardist in the audience. Then (except for a few reviews of what I considered genuine, private innovators: “Conversations,” “Instruments”) I found I was doing a lot of overeasy polemic of my own, and I gave it up—except for one last piece on the breakthrough artists: “Selling an Enraged Bread Pudding.”

  Reporting was better, but somehow the apocalyptic sensibility had moved into politics too, into every part of life. Its earmarks were clenched teeth, personal agonies, rhetoric, the single plane of atrocity view of Western man, above all, a psychoanalytic concept of moral responsibility—based, not on conscience, which is exercised in substantive action, but on guilt, which is appeased in confession, sublimation, symbolic purge. Confessions were everywhere. The guilt became retroactive, vicarious, unappeasable: a country, incurably genocidal, and founded on a genocide; white Western man, blood insatiable, leaving nothing but war, exploitation and pollution in his wake. No matter that none of us (and few of our isolated, refugee fathers either) were here a hundred years ago to kill an Indian, that countless nations—India, for one—were founded by invasions that exterminated aborigines, that there have always been wars, within the limits of available technology, wherever man is (notably tribal slaughters in Africa, and in Vietnam ever since the Annamites), that Western powers have been the first to try to come to terms with an international responsibility for social, medical meliorism and military restraint. (With, of course, grotesque lapses. The question is whose mistakes there is time to be patient with.) Guilt, atrocity, the luxurious mystique of the everybody else, which liberates from responsibility for one’s own time and place. There was a special radical infatuation with religions of the Orient, notably Hinduism and Zen—which produced, as it happens, some of the most repellent, anti-humanist, repressive and belligerent social systems in man’s history. A let-them-starve-on-earth-Nirvana sensibility caught on among a Third-World-infatuated contingent of radicals.

  There was nothing to show for the apocalyptic sensibility on any front—not in art, not in politics, not in mind expansion (a ghastly misnomer), not even in the apocalyptic-pornographic view of sex—no breakthroughs, only gesture, celebrity quietism, rage, symptom, backlash. Not Rimbaud and Baudelaire, child mutations of John Dewey and Freud. Symptoms do have their real effects on the status quo (even Another World has its impact on the world out here), but the effects were mindless, random, dumb, a non-negotiable demand to dismantle the human experiment and begin again. A view of evil as banal was distorted into a view of banality as evil, and of all meliorism as boring and banal. Intellectual cartwheels, bad art, spite politics (I gave up reporting that after “Radicalism in Debacle” at the Palmer House), and a happy collusion, by default, with the worst elements of the System: pure huckster fashion and the redneck Right. (It is not unthinkable that, except for the broader evolution of America, we should all be called one day before an investigating committee composed of Strom Thurmond, Tom Hayden and some suitable representative of pop art and café society.) And fame: the cry of alienation made good fellows and good copy. The gesture and rhetoric of revolution were well suited to that natural creator of discontinuous, lunatic constituencies, the media.

  I think radicalism’s flirtation with the media, its overvalue on personal image, personal sensibility, pure air, was nurtured by the spirit of the Kennedys. Their beauty, promise, absolute lack of delivery, and their power—a power which found its major application, in the end, only in controlling the image that the country was to have of them. I don’t mean anything about the sincerity of the men themselves; I mean what they came to represent. The notion that you can love glamour and be concerned with grit, that you can promise in prose and never quite deliver in fact, that as long as power is wrested into the right hands (one’s own) good will follow in time, the gap between image and substance, impulse and legislation—the country was simultaneously overstimulated and corrupted by these princelings of the air. Working for Senator Joseph McCarthy, silent in the censure vote, wiretapping, Mayor Daley, segregationist judges in the South, the logic of the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam (if Cuban exiles couldn’t do it, American counterinsurgents could: win an easy, a “little war”), losing cufflinks simultaneously to blacks with hopes and white auto workers armed against the possibility that a black should ever live in peace beside them—none of it fit. It generated unreason and violence. All these disparities could be considered part of a personal process of education, or seem to be reconciled on some higher symbolic plane, but they were not true to the country, to the real balance and struggle of huge forces that is here. President Johnson, I think, delivered substantively on all that promise: the social legislation and, alas, the war. But Kennedyism, cut off en route, stayed in the air, style, media power, personal packaging. Suddenly there were too many stars, too many artists, too many who thought the world well lost for their own image and sensibilities. The new enemy was boredom, in the sense of lack of drama. The new currency was fame. With special implications for the intellectuals. Ours has not been a great thirty years for intellectuals. We saw, and survived, anti-intellectualism in this country, but we also saw a generation of intellectuals—Stalinist at the time of Stalin, quiescent in the McCarthy years, mesmerized by the power and beauty of the Kennedys, nerveless in the face of the radical red
neck young—always weak, always somehow lifeless and wavering in the face of force and violence. But through it all, we saw something infinitely fragile and viable in the System, in its accommodations with radicals, rednecks, soldiers, blacks, thinkers, visionaries, lunatics, the ordinary, getting better.

  I guess a radical middle, in age and in politics, acts out of a consciousness of how much has been gained, how far there is to go, and what there is to lose. It is content to be obscure—to measure and implement accommodations with the System: how many blacks and former poor in jobs, unions, polling booths, public office, neighborhoods, even in soap operas, how many soldiers withdrawn, how many arms unmade, how many material, aesthetic and technological advances applied to ameliorating the human condition, how to divorce liberalism from arrogance and violence. Not many advances, but some. Enough to stay aboard and to maintain distinctions on every side: to get the unpolarized student to his class without having him clubbed or teargassed by a cop—who is not too good at making distinctions either.