Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

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 still, 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 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.