After the Tall Timber (3 page)

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 redneck 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.

We have lived after all through two sunny periods of lies, and seen some of the truth in both of them: the Eisenhower lie that the noble American experiment was complete, that all was well, that there was no need to move; and the Kennedy era lie that with glamour, image and the instantaneous application of power you can gratify immediately, totally, those human concerns that are, in reality, met by inches, by years of work and suffering. I believe that the generation gap is in part an almost meteorological collision of those airs, the two lies of those years. Some have moved and see no reason why anyone else should rock the boat: others, impatient with the slowness of motion, see no reason to move at all until the coming of the Word. We are between. Our heroes, I suppose, mine anyway, are both famous and obscure: Martin Luther King, Bob Moses, Charles Evers, Alvin Poussaint of the Medical Committee on Human Rights, John Doar, others. Our thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Richard Rovere, Bayard Rustin, Harold Rosenberg, Daniel P. Moynihan, others—write from an awareness of precedent, of what has already been said and done and what can still be said and done, without mixing artistic and political metaphor. (Everything that has been said has, after all, been said many times.) In this collection, even in the dated or term-paper influenced pieces, there ought to be a sense of tendency, despite a suspicion of groups, of that emergent “we.” We are not in the world for therapy. We are non-violent. Our values are corny ones, reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity, contact, the finest, broadest possible America. Some of us have despaired and, in the only indisputably sincere expression of the apocalyptic vision, immolated themselves. But somewhere there is a reconciliation of that auto worker and that black, not on a symbolic plane, but because history is irreversible and there is a real common interest in the rich, mixed quality of life. And three of us have just come back (substantively and yet with drama), from the way to perhaps other populations, outer limits, from the moon.

July 1969

THE THIRTY thousand people who at one point or another took part in this week’s march from the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama, to the statehouse in Montgomery were giving highly dramatic expression to a principle that could be articulated only in the vaguest terms. They were a varied lot: local blacks, Northern clergymen, members of labor unions, delegates from state and city governments, entertainers, mothers pushing baby carriages, members of civil-rights groups more or less at odds with one another, isolated, shaggy marchers with an air of simple vagrancy, doctors, lawyers, teachers, children, college students, and a preponderance of what one marcher described as “ordinary, garden-variety civilians from just about everywhere.” They were insulated in front by soldiers and television camera crews, overhead and underfoot by helicopters and Army demolition teams, at the sides and rear by more members of the press and military, and over all by agents of the FBI. Most of them were aware that protection along a route of more than fifty miles of hostile country could not be absolute (on the night before the march, a student who had come here from Boston University was slashed across the cheek with a razor blade), yet few of the thirty-two hundred marchers who set out on Sunday morning seemed to have a strong consciousness of risk. They did not have a sharply defined sense of purpose, either. President Johnson’s speech about voting rights and Judge Johnson’s granting of permission for the march to take place had made the march itself ceremonial—almost redundant. The immediate aims of the abortive earlier marches had been realized: the national conscience had been aroused and federal intervention had been secured. In a sense, the government of Alabama was now in rebellion, and the marchers, with the sanction and protection of the federal government, were demonstrating against a rebellious state. It was unclear what such a demonstration could hope to achieve. Few segregationists could be converted by it, the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be increased by it, there was certainly an element of danger in it, and for the local citizenry it might have a long and ugly aftermath. The marchers, who had five days and four nights in which to talk, tended for the most part to avoid discussions of principle, apparently in the hope that their good will, their sense of solidarity, and the sheer pageantry of the occasion would resolve matters at some symbolic level and yield a clear statement of practical purpose before the march came to an end.

From this point of view, the first few hours of Sunday morning in Selma were far from satisfying. Broad Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, was deserted and indifferent. At the black First Baptist Church, on the corner of Sylvan Street and Jefferson Davis Avenue, denim-clad veterans of earlier marches stood wearily aloof from recruits, who ate watery scrambled eggs, drank watery coffee, and simply milled about. On Sylvan Street itself, an unpaved red sand road dividing identical rows of brick houses known as the George Washington Carver Development, crowds were gathering, some facing the entrance to the Brown Chapel Church, others on the steps of the church facing out. Inside the church, more people were milling, while a few tried to sleep on benches or on the floor. For several hours, nothing happened. The church service that was to begin the march was scheduled to take place at ten o’clock, but veterans advised newcomers—in the first of several bitter, self-mocking jokes that became current on the Selma-Montgomery road—that this was CPT, Colored People Time, and the service actually began more than an hour behind schedule.