Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  The Declaration goes on to enumerate the grievances of the colonies. It is a stirring catalogue, but it finally reduces to the matter of the source of power, i.e., who should rule? “He [King George] has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good ” said the Declaration. Who is to decide what are the laws most wholesome and necessary for the public good? Why, the people—the people who are affected by those laws. The American Revolution was about who should rule. Everybody? Mr. Jefferson, perhaps from a sense of tact—perhaps even from a sense of cunning—introduces into the peroration of his manifesto a subtle distinction. “We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the Good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare . . The good people of these colonies? A ritual obeisance? Or a sly recognition that there are plenty of colonials around who oppose secession? Bad people?

  Mr. Jefferson always acknowledged the existence of bad people, in a way that Oliver Wendell Holmes had difficulty in doing, so absolute was his relativism. But Jefferson's rationalist's faith in the inherent power of good ideas to defeat bad ideas in the marketplace was ringingly proclaimed in his later years. “Those who wish to dissolve the union or to change its republican form should stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it!' It isn’t of course suggested in this passage what is the indicated course of action if reason should fail in the performance of its delegated duty, but we know from Jefferson’s own autocratic habits that he often gave reason a helping hand; and we know from the Declaration of Independence that he dubbed some truths as self-evident; and, derivatively, that he judged those people who acknowledged those truths, as “good,” and those who did not—as something else. It was also Jefferson, presumably in a more skeptical frame of mind, who said, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution ”

  From all of which one infers that in Jefferson’s America, a) there is, on some very basic points, a right and a wrong position; that b) the probability is that the people will opt for the right position, prodded by reason to do so; but that c) it sometimes becomes necessary to resist the bad people, whether they are numerous, or whether they are, simply, the King of England. Abbie Hoffman is not the King of England, but the point of course is that he seeks a kind of metaphorical accession to the throne, by the use of any means, and the corollary point in our troubled times is: shall we restrain him, a); and if so, b), how; and c), how shall we protect not so much the White House from his occupation of it, but how shall we protect lesser folk than the President—you and me—from such a denial of our rights as Mr. Hoffman and his minilegions are capable of denying us, in their quixotic but not altogether toothless campaign for revolution. The Jeffersonian ideal continues to be exemplary: the Hoffmans and the Dellingers and the Cleavers should be laughed, or disdained, into impotence.

  Even so, there is a creeping difference between, for instance, the way in which the whole of the American public reacted against the white racists who assaulted the civil rights advocates during the sixties, and the way in which the community reacts now to the disruptions of the New Left revolutionaries. Mr. Allard Lowenstein recently told me that it is not a new experience for him to be silenced, and even threatened and clubbed down, by those who disagree with him. But when he was given such treatment by Ku Klux-types in the South, in the early sixties, the whole of America reacted in horror and registered its solidarity with him and the others who worked for a continuing attrition of the birthmark that the Civil War did not altogether succeed in erasing. A few months ago, addressing a university audience at Columbia, Mr. Lowenstein was hooted down and literally silenced for defending the right of Professor Herman Kahn to speak unmolested, and faculty members in that audience countenanced and even egged on the Jacobinical furies that ruled the crowd—who needless to say went unpunished, even unreprimanded, although they most indisputably conspired together to abridge the civil liberties of two men, Herman Kahn and A1 Lowenstein, who have never by word or deed disparaged the civil liberties of any American citizen.

  Proposition Four: So far have the professionally tolerant gone towards fantacism that we stand in danger of losing the salutary force of public sanction.

  It is always least desirable to have to write new laws, or even to have to invoke laws that have become flaccid from disuse. Consider a recent incident.

  If it blurs in the mind just what and who are the Black Panthers, why they are an organization founded a few years ago on the doctrine that the United States is a racist-oppressive country best dealt with by the elimination of its leaders and institutions. Suggestive of its rhetorical style is the front page of its house organ which featured on the day after his death a photograph of Robert Kennedy lying in a pool of his own blood, his face transformed into the likeness of a pig.

  Do you think Robert Kennedy was a pig? I asked Eldridge Cleaver a while ago. Yes, he said. Did Mr. Cleaver believe in the elimination of pigs? Yes, he did. Well, why not begin with Nixon; surely he is the chief pig? I observed. Mr. Cleaver, who has had intimate experiences with the law, advised me that he knew enough not to counsel directly the assassination of the President, but that if in fact someone did kill him, that would surely be one less pig in the world. Those who believe that Cleaver, and derivatively his followers among the Panthers, have mellowed may look at the introduction Cleaver wrote to Jerry Rubin's book, published last spring by the august house of Simon & Schuster—putting us in mind of Lenin's comment that when the last of the bourgeois is hanged, a capitalist will sell the hangman the rope—in which introduction Mr. Cleaver, an official of the Black Panthers, urges his disciples in America, black and white, to 4‘rise up and kill pigs,” and recalls as the most precious memory of his political experience in America a shoot-out in Oakland, California, at which he observed that after one salvo, “a pig white lay dead, deep fried in the fat of his own bullshit/'

  Mr. Cleaver is not in this country, his career as visiting professor at Berkeley having been interrupted by a parole court. We cannot do anything about him.

  So what do we do about the other Black Panthers, of which Mr. Cleaver is the spiritual leader? Well, that depends on who we are. If we are Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, we have a big cocktail party (a party about which Mr. Tom Wolfe has had absolutely the last say) to which we invite a local representative of the Panthers, and summon wealthy and artistic men and women, at which party money is raised for the Panther defense fund.

  Mr. Bernstein was modishly dressed, in turtleneck sweater and double-breasted jacket, and had obviously been studying up on the idiom of the times; indeed so thorough is Mr. Bernstein that it is altogether possible that he staged a rehearsal or two, because a dialogue with a Black Panther is every bit as difficult to perform as, say, a symphony of Schonberg. Anyway, the Black Panther, Mr. Cox, began by announcing that if business didn’t provide full employment, then the Panthers would simply take over the means of production and put them in the hands of the people, to which prescription it is recorded that Mr. Bernstein’s reply was, “I dig absolutely.”

  Mr. Cox told the gathering how very pacific he and his confederates are, that ultimately of course they desire peace, but that they have been attacked in their homes and murdered in their beds and have the right to defend themselves. “I agree one hundred per cent,” Lenny said, neglecting to ask Mr. Cox to explain to what defensive uses his confederates intended to put the hand grenades and Molotov cocktails that were discovered in the raids.

  I remember in the hour I spent with Mr. Cleaver the one thing I said to him that made him truly angry. It was that the Black Panther Party exists primarily for the satisfaction of white people, rather than black people. The white people like to strut their toleration, and strip themselves
of their turtleneck sweaters to reveal their shame. The Panthers have only a few thousand black members, because the mass of the black people are too proud, too unaffected, to join the Panthers, to attend Leonard Bernstein's parties. Meanwhile, that party will serve, for a long time one hopes—I hope—as the symbol of total moral confusion; as a black mass on the altar of toleration. It suggests at the very least the failure of even aristocratic public opinion to rise to the responsibility of elementary moral distinctions.

  Proposition Five: Although such as Eldridge Cleaver can be extremely specific (((kill the pigs the vagueness of the revolutionary program of much of the New Left is its most singular strength, confronting the republic with its subtlest extra-legal challenge.

  It is a commonplace to observe that those of a rebellious spirit in our midst do not know what they want. And even that they do not know by what means to achieve the conditions they cannot specify. I consider these data rather less reassuring than otherwise. If the revolutionists were committed to an identifiable program, they might be approached with demonstrations that their program, or any approximation of it, is not producing the goods (in Cuba, say, or in the Soviet Union). Curiously, the failures of Communism are more often treated as a joke than as a tragedy. (As in the current jollity: What would happen if the Communists occupied the Sahara? Answer: Nothing— for 50 years. Then there would be a shortage of sand.) But precisely the loose-jointedness of their mode—the de-ideologization of their movement— the disembodiment of the eschaton—leaves the revolutionists in a frame of mind at once romantic and diffuse, and the rest of us without the great weapon available to King Canute, who was able to contrive what would nowadays be called a Confrontation between—the ineluctable laws of nature and the superstitions of his subjects.

  So that the idea of revolution continues to excite the political and moral imagination. It is necessary, in making one's complaints against the society we intend to replace, to be vague and even disjointed. To be specific, or to be orderly, is once again to run the risk ofr orderly confutation. General charges are not so easily denied; indeed they are not really deniable. How do you deny, for instance, the sweeping charge that “all of politics is the organization of greed’? “Misery abounds” is a descriptive phrase which could accurately be used about every society that was ever organized on the face of the earth.

  What ails them? Or—if you prefer—us? I quote now not from any of the better known advocates of revolution. I reach instead for a stretch of prose unencumbered by sophistication of thought or of style; what one might call the Volkswagen of revolutionary manifestos. Here it is, from a professor of political science at Hunter College in New York City, published in Volume I, Number 1 of a “revolutionary” journal.

  The established system, he complains, “comprises elements of the archaic Judeo-Christian theocratic traditions,

  elements of the dark-age autocracy,

  feudalism,

  militarism,

  zoological capitalism [I am not quite sure what he means by that, but I have a feeling I am one],

  corporate monopolism and plutocracy,

  with an admixture of 19th century liberalism

  and trade union socialism.”

  Now there is no doubt that these are indeed some of the historical, cultural, and philosophical tributaries that flow into America. But hear what the professor says they have produced.

  They have produced to begin with an “antisocial orientation, based on the private profit motivations” This in turn “produced most ... of the evils of the present system. Among those evils are the following:

  the transformation of man into an instrument of production,

  an indiscriminate exploitation of natural and human resources,

  the promotion of vulgarity,

  an excessive consumption coexisting with poverty,

  the scarcity of housing,

  the pollution of air, water and food,

  unemployment,

  urban decay,

  the reduction of woman to a sex symbol,

  crime,

  racial discrimination,

  and the transformation of universities into an instrument of the military-industrial complex.”

  How can one argue with the man who holds America responsible for all the evils, all the ugliness, all the distractions we see, hear, and know about in America? It is not my purpose here to argue with the revolutionist the justice of his several indictments, or the merit of his “solutions.” It is all very well to take the revolutionists by the scruff of the neck and show them that, as Professor Toynbee preaches, revolutions historically have not brought about the ends explicitly desired, but something very like their opposite; but the success of such demonstrations presupposes a clinical curiosity on the part of the observer, and such is not the temper of those in America who are talking about revolution. The point to stress is that the allure of revolution, and the importance of revolutionary attitudes in contemporary political and social affairs, are bound to grow, in the existing climate, not only because the sanctions of stability are not being pressed, but precisely because every modern aggravation—as we have just seen—is nowadays transformed into yet another cause for revolutionary commitment; and the ideologists of revolution are careful, as in the passages above, to tread a line enough on the specific side of generality to describe a recognizably American situation, yet far enough short of specificity to permit them constantly to nourish the revolutionary imagination— to stimulate the confidence that liberation lies just over there on the other side of the barricades, even as Nat Turner dreamed that if only he could make it to the Dismal Swamp, the world would begin anew.

  There is very little hope in arguing with those who are attracted to the religion of revolution. James Baldwin, in his furious and moving polemic The Fire Next Time, argued that “the only thing the white people have that black people need, or should want, is power.” Power, that great amulet. Power to do what? As one observer forlornly asks, in an essay on Stokely Carmichael, “What makes Stokely Carmichael think that the Negroes will use Power to better advantage than the whites have been able to use it? I know there is no great point in describing the disappointments of freedom to the untutored [man]. But Stokely Carmichael is a tutored [man]. He may hope that the Negro would master Power rather than be mastered by it, but his tutoring must have acquainted him with the dictum of Confucius: 'He who says, “Rich men are fools, but when I am rich I will not be a fool,” is already a fool.’”

  Nor is that difficulty unique to the black revolutionists. The critic Professor John Aldridge has said of the young white revolutionists that one “become[s] aware of paradoxes and contradictions which suggest that their actions derive not from a coherent ideology or even a coherent emotional attitude but more nearly resemble a series of random gestures enacted in a climate of metaphysical confusion.”

  Professor Aldridge brings together a few of the relevant paradoxes and inconsistencies of the young revolutionists:

  —“their preoccupation with style and their boundless appetite for banality”;

  —“their indifference to standards of personal conduct when applied to them by adults, and their insistence upon the most exemplary standards of conduct when applied by them to adults”;

  —“their obsession with the nature and quality of university instruction and their [lack of] interest in ideas, imaginative literature, and the values of the humanistic tradition”;

  —“their passion for individuality and their belief in collective action and [their practice of] group conformity”;

  —“their mystical belief in the primacy of intense feeling, the soul-rejuvenating benefits of fresh emotional experience, and their deep fear of uncertainty, contingency, and risk—all those situations of adventure and test which give the edge of fatality to life.”

  “Although”—Professor Aldridge concludes— “they have more freedom of action, feeling and opinion than any generation before them in our history, they are outraged
by the existence of forces which in the slightest degree threaten to restrict or program or manipulate their responses. Yet if their dream of a problem-free society could ever be realized, it would very likely be a society in which the full horror of IBM-card anonymity had descended, in which all human responses would be programmed, probably at birth, the last hope of individual freedom of distinction erased by technocratic egalitarianism, and misfits and rebels, the scruffy, unwashed, and bizarrely costumed, would most certainly be the first to perish under the sword.”

  So that reason is not availing, not in the current mood. Reason cannot reach the revolutionary vapors on which the men and women we speak of are stoned. What is required, I think, is among other things a premonitory Sign; let's not say what it is, but let's hope that the academic community will help in devising it, in making it firm, yes, but humane; such a sign as Hamilton foresaw might from time to time need to be shown. A sign that suggests a corporate reaffirmation of the community's ideals, the most pressing one being its decision to survive—all this keeping in mind the words of Belloc, who, observing the rise of Hitler in Europe, wrote:

  “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

  And so, unsmilingly, we face the requirements of the current situation; and these are that we stand firm, and say No, our justification being that for all its faults, this is, and we pledge that it shall continue to be, a lovely country.

  There now, Number 3. I wish Mr. Levine had sat through it.

  The question period wasn’t long, and wasn’t particularly spirited. I had told my nephew that after it was over I would visit his freshman lodgings. Hunt is tall, handsome, courtly, and had the reputation at prep school of being the vaguest boy in the history of the world. In the months since graduating he has improved on the reputation. As a very little boy, blond, silent, unsmiling, appealing, he had been my father’s favorite; and after my father’s paralytic stroke, they spent very long hours together, happy in each other’s silent company. Hunt was taken by his parents to live in Spain, where he acquired a slight Spanish accent which even now is detectable. I remember visiting him and my son, at Portsmouth, a few weeks into their freshman term. I knew he would have special difficulty getting used to English, after ten years in Spain, and I asked, How are you getting on? “Fine, Uncle Bill,” he answered in his clipped tones. “Only I am having a little bit of trouble with orthography.”