A few minutes later, Roy Wilkins came out and escorted us into his office, at the end of a short corridor. He is a slender, soft-spoken man in his early sixties, and his eyes were shining. “If we seem very quiet for a revolutionary headquarters, you must remember that this is only a headquarters,” he told us, with a smile. “Some of the men you have seen—and, of course, we have women representatives, too—have come here from all over the country. We figure out what must be done, and then they go back into the field to a very different life. One of them, you know, was Medgar Evers.” Mr. Wilkins stood for a moment by a window that looked out on the Public Library, and then sat down in his chair. “I never doubted that someday it would come,” he told us. “But I also never dreamed that in my lifetime a President of the United States would stand up before the world and speak as Mr. Johnson did the other night. He didn’t say ‘Boys, you know how I feel’ behind his office door. He didn’t say ‘unless’ or ‘provided that,’ or engage in any other double-talk. He stood there before the people and put his role in history on the line. The completeness and warmth of his commitment! And in a Texas accent!” Wilkins shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe his ears. “I have been hearing from individuals all over the United States, and I believe that most American Negroes felt as I did,” he went on. “Oh, I know that a few leaders, when the words were scarcely out of the President’s mouth, were saying ‘Deeds, not words,’ or ‘Wait and see,’ and I understand this. We’ve been fooled, flummoxed, sold down the river so often in the past. And then all Americans today live in a climate of skepticism. How many times a day do we think, What’s in it for him? But it seems to me a sad thing that now, when we are given the great affirmation we have sought so long, some people cannot bring themselves to embrace it. To me, it was an exhilarating moment—the homecoming of all our hopes, of all we believe in.”
Mr. Wilkins paused for a second, and then went on, “A good many of the newcomers to the civil-rights movement are very young. They are energetic, imaginative, and fearless. In a crusty movement like this long struggle for freedom, an invasion such as theirs is a good thing. They have no use for the rituals, the traditional minuets of organizational behavior. They say only ‘Now!,’ just as Selma’s Sheriff Clark says ‘Never!,’ and they forge ahead. Most of the demonstrations they have led, with or without support from the N.A.A.C.P., have been useful to the cause. I gladly admit it. They have dramatized it as no tedious arguments before any tribunal could do. It is a difficult thing to dramatize disenfranchisement, for example, but what happened at Selma did dramatize it, so that no literate American could misunderstand the problem: we are denied the right to vote; we are denied even the right to protest this denial without endangering our lives. When you come down to it, however, the civil-rights revolution has been a revolution in the law. The turning point—forty-three years after the N.A.A.C.P. filed its first case seeking equal justice before the law for a Negro citizen—was the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown case, banning segregation in the schools. It defined, at last, the Negro’s role in American society: separate but equal was not enough. I’m not surprised that these young people in the movement, like young people everywhere, are inclined to think that nothing worthwhile was done until they came along. But how can you understand the importance of this moment if you don’t remember that in 1917 the N.A.A.C.P. was fighting desperately to persuade Woodrow Wilson, a good President and a good man, to say just one word against lynching? He would never say that word. Even Franklin Roosevelt, in 1940, wasn’t ready to denounce lynching in so many words. It’s been a long, bloody struggle, but now, extraordinarily, we find in the van of this citizens’ army the President of the United States.” He paused again. “Did you notice the date of his great speech?” he asked us. “The Ides of March! Beware, indeed! Rejoice!”
Lillian Ross and Jane Kramer
MAY 15, 1965 (“THE MCLUHAN METAPHOR”)
WHEN THE WESTINGHOUSE people announced that at the end of the World’s Fair they will again bury a Time Capsule filled with assorted cultural and technological mementos of twentieth-century man, a friend of ours suggested that they should replace the codes and artifacts with Dr. Marshall McLuhan, who could be counted on to explain us vividly to anybody digging around in Flushing Meadow two thousand years from now. Dr. McLuhan, a professor of English at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, is also the director of the university’s Center for Culture and Technology and the author of three startling books on Western civilization—The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and, most recently, Understanding Media, in which he joyfully explores the tribal virtues of popular culture, casts a cynical eye on the “classification traditions” that came in with print, and sees near-mythic possibilities in our computer age. He has compared the Bomb to the doctoral dissertation; discussed the “depth-involving” qualities of sunglasses, textured stockings, discothèques, and comic books; reported on the iconic properties of Andy Warhol’s signed soup cans; and predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information. In so doing, Dr. McLuhan has earned a reputation among the cognoscenti as the world’s first Pop philosopher.
Last week, Dr. McLuhan flew to New York to deliver a lecture at Spencer Memorial Church (which has its own reputation, as the world’s first far-out Presbyterian congregation), and we took the subway to Brooklyn Heights to hear him. At the church, an old, oak-beamed building that was bustling with young McLuhan enthusiasts, we found the Professor sitting quietly in the pulpit while a young man in a green corduroy jacket and narrow trousers propped an enormous Rauschenberg painting against it. The young man, who turned out to be Spencer’s minister, William Glenesk, explained to us that the poster was “left over from my Rauschenberg sermon.” He then told the audience that he had been a fan of Dr. McLuhan’s ever since 1951, when he attended the Professor’s course on Eliot, Joyce, and the Symbolist movement at the University of Toronto. Dr. McLuhan, a tall, steel-haired man given to twirling a pair of horn-rimmed glasses in appropriately professorial style, stood up, thanked Mr. Glenesk, and remarked that the warm May weather was certainly as depth-involving as a good Rauschenberg or a good elephant joke. The new art and the new jokes have no strict, literal content, no story line, he said, and continued, “They are the forms of an electronic age, in which fragmented, dictionary-defined data have been bypassed in favor of integral knowledge and an old tribal instinct for patterned response.” Several members of the audience nodded ecstatically, and Dr. McLuhan went on to tackle practically every cultural phenomenon from the tribal encyclopedia to the shaggy-dog story, from Shakespeare to Fred Allen, from the wheel to the electromagnetic circuit. He good-naturedly blamed Plato for writing down Socrates’ dialogues and thus inaugurating “codified culture,” and he praised the singing commercial for reinstating the old tribal institution of memorized wisdom. Every new technology, according to the Professor, programs a new sensory human environment, and our computer technology has catapulted us right out of the specialist age and into a world of integral knowledge and synesthetic responses. “The computer is not merely an extension of our eyes, like print, but an extension of our whole central nervous system,” he explained. He paused, twirled his glasses, and went on to say that every new environment uses as its content the old environment—“the way Plato used the old oral tradition of the dialogue for his books and the way television now uses the story form of the novel and the movies”—but that it is the technological nature of any new medium, and not its borrowed content, that conditions the new human response. Pop Art, he said, glancing affectionately at the Rauschenberg, is merely our old mechanical environment used as the content of our new electronic environment. “One environment seen through another becomes a metaphor,” he continued. “Like Andy Warhol’s Liz Taylor. Our new, non-literal response to the literal content of that blown-up and endlessly repeated photograph turns Liz into an icon. It takes a new technology like ours
to turn an old environment like Liz into an art form.”
Dr. McLuhan next suggested the possibility of a new technology that would extend consciousness itself into the environment. “A kind of computerized ESP,” he called it, envisioning “consciousness as the corporate content of the environment—and eventually maybe even a small portable computer, about the size of a hearing aid, that would process our private experience through the corporate experience, the way dreams do now.” Then he said, “Well, that’s enough pretentious speculation for one night,” and turned to Mr. Glenesk, who suggested that the audience have “an old Socratic go” at some questions and answers.
Mr. Glenesk thereupon introduced the Professor to some of the McLuhan disciples in the audience.
The first disciple told Dr. McLuhan that he had been amplifying several sounds in one room at the same time, to get the “depth-involving” sound that is part of Dr. McLuhan’s brave new world.
“Must make one hell of a racket,” Dr. McLuhan said approvingly.
A second disciple, a rather nervous woman from the neighborhood, announced that she could hardly wait to have an experience-processor of her own. “The way things are now, I never can remember anything,” she said, and was immediately interrupted by a third disciple, a bearded student sitting next to her.
The student expressed equal eagerness for computerized ESP. “Gee, just think!” he continued. “I could go to sleep a painter and wake up a composer!”
“Terrifying,” Dr. McLuhan said.
Kevin Wallace
OCTOBER 7, 1967 (“NON-VIOLENT SOLDIER”)
SPORADIC NEWS DISPATCHES from California over the past couple of years have kept us posted on the ups and downs, in the sedate Carmel Valley, of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. We read, for instance, of the failure of a zoning challenge brought by a neighbor who regarded the Institute’s afternoon sessions as “detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County.” The sessions, so the items informed us, involved twenty-five students at a time in a six-week curriculum of picnic lunches, silent meditation, and discussions of points raised in the writings of such thinkers as Henry Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. The Institute is supported and regularly attended by Miss Baez, and it is directed by a man from St. Louis named Ira Sandperl, whom Miss Baez discovered when she was sixteen, ten years ago, at a Quaker meeting near Stanford University, where her father was on the physics faculty. Roving along the West Coast on a recent rainy Saturday, and finding ourself in the vicinity of Carmel with an hour on our hands, we arranged to drive up the Valley and have a talk with Miss Baez at the Institute.
The Institute’s grounds occupy a grassy, oak-strewn expanse between road and river. Its plant is a former one-room public schoolhouse that has been stuccoed over, reroofed with red Spanish tile, cleared of school desks, and outfitted with lounging mats and a native chalk-rock fireplace; a small residential wing for Mr. Sandperl has been added. It was Mr. Sandperl, as it turned out, who was lounging in the schoolhouse doorway and greeting his arriving student body when we approached. The students, who included several couples trailing small children, looked and chatted with one another like young suburbanites getting together anywhere on a Saturday noon. Mr. Sandperl could have been their tennis pro. He is a sinewy man in his early forties, crew-cut, clean-shaven, very deeply tanned, alert of eye, and generally smiling, and he was wearing an open sports shirt, gray slacks, and clean green sneakers. He acknowledged the unusual weather wryly and added, “Joan’s supposed to be giving a benefit concert outdoors at the Monterey County Fair Grounds this evening, but this rain puts the matter in doubt.” He led us around a clump of chatting students toward the fireplace and a smaller group that included Miss Baez, who was wearing black pants and pullover sweater, and who struck us as startlingly more beautiful than any of her photographs suggest—features more delicately sculptured, expressions more luminously candid and humorous, hair only shoulder-length—and who, besides all that, was not behaving like a star whose concert was in imminent peril of being rained out.
“The dog is friendly, sweetheart—you can pat her,” Miss Baez was explaining to an ambulatory infant who stood eye to eye with a cloud-gray shaggy dog at Miss Baez’s feet.
Miss Baez invited us to follow her to Mr. Sandperl’s quarters for our talk. The shaggy dog, whose name proved to be Anathea, came along, too. We took a chair while Miss Baez arranged herself on a couch in such a way that Anathea could doze comfortably on her knee. Then Miss Baez told us, “I used to avoid interviews, because I hadn’t found out what I thought, or if I had anything to say, but not now. I’m interested in ending war. I’m not interested in gazing through a blue marble at Miss Baez. What I’m all about is that I’m a non-violent soldier. That’s to be distinguished a little from being a pacifist. It’s not just withdrawing and growing your own vegetables and not paying taxes. It means doing more than being nice to birds and small animals. I dislike the word ‘goal,’ but I suppose that’s what we have here—we want to let out the news that the time has come when killing in the outside world is no more proper than killing within the national boundaries. Not that absolutely everybody agrees yet that even killing within the nation is no longer acceptable. There’s still that cultural inertia left over from nearly three hundred years when it was the thing for us to carry guns, since there was always the chance we might have to shoot a neighbor. Today, there’s certainly enough proof around that violence can’t be appropriate anymore anywhere, but people want to hang on to that old feeling. You know—‘It’s a sunny day. Let’s go kill something.’ When the world was proved round, that news was evidently just as hard to accept. In spite of the disadvantages of a flat world—monsters at the edge, sailboats falling off—people hated giving it up. Right now, people hate to give up weapons. We’ve changed the War Department’s name to the Defense Department, but weapons are still made for killing, and boys are still trained to run bayonets through people, and the word ‘murder’ still doesn’t seem to ring a bell. I don’t mean to say that there may not always be barroom brawls and things like that—though among the Hopi and Zuñi, if you slug someone, it’s regarded as poor form and you’re out of it—but brawling is on a different plane from organized mass killing. And non-violence is—well, totally misunderstood. It’s not avoiding violence. It’s the opposite of running. It means confronting violence and having to come up with something more intelligent in response. Perhaps the only response that can possibly be effective today is refusing to cooperate, and going to jail. But we don’t go into tactics and techniques here. Dr. Martin Luther King’s movement has problems because its emphasis is all on tactics. At the University of California, the kids’ trouble was that they only had a technique: if the cops came in, they knew they were supposed to drop to the floor. However, if you’re rooted in the understanding that the Ku Klux Klansman and the Negro garbageman are both your brothers, then there’s a chance you’ll know the right thing to do.”
The door flew open, and Mr. Sandperl popped in, saying, “Please excuse me for breaking into my room, but can I ask just one question? What’s my unlisted telephone number?”
“I’ll write it down for you,” Miss Baez said, producing a pencil and a slip of paper and writing. She handed over the paper and said, “You can give me mine later.”
Mr. Sandperl left, and Miss Baez told us, “Unlisted numbers have a way of getting out, so we keep getting new ones. Anyway, about non-violence. There are certain pitfalls. There’s a Fort Ord boy who comes here with the schizo idea that he’s non-violent because he takes a supercilious view of the Army and can ridicule his job as a soldier. And I’ve been corresponding with a boy in Vietnam who thinks he’s eased his conscience because he managed to exchange his gun for a camera, and now he writes about the bizarre beauty of war. It’s so easy to kid yourself. Like believing that an Army ambulance driver’s first duty isn’t to get banged-up soldiers back to their guns as soon as possible. Not that one mustn
’t care for the hurt and dying—but for all the hurt and dying, on all sides. We don’t always like to notice what we’re doing. What people mainly do is to avoid boredom. We’d rather feel anything than boredom, and boredom is oneself. The meditation we try here means only that you stop doing the things you do all day long to avoid yourself—listening to the radio, making conversation, woolgathering—and after that it’s hard to define. It’s not concentrating on an idea. Krishnamurti gave a clue when he said, ‘If the interest is there, that’s a beginning.’ The interest turns into paying attention—trying to listen as though you’d never heard before. We all grew up learning to try and then to expect a result from trying, but here it’s not a result that’s the point but simply the trying. Krishnamurti also said that, as far as he could see—No, he didn’t say that; he’s never that modest. He said, ‘Creativity is when the mind is still.’ As to effort—well, there’s a kind of effort. For instance, I try to write, and if I sit at the typewriter and make the effort to start writing just a lot of ‘x’s, after a while something begins to happen. You know that song ‘Be Not Too Hard’?”
The 60s Page 45