Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  Everyone is in favor of seeing a different movie, but we are limited by the taxi strike to what is close by, and finally decide—much against Pat’s wishes because she-saw-Woodstock-and-hated-it—to see the documentary that opens today on the Altamont festival in California. I note sneakily that it is probably something I can do a column on; it is, and late tonight, in Washington, I write about it...

  In case you didn’t know it, the important event of 1969 in Kidworld was Altamont. Not because it was a spectacular, at which 300,000 young people came together to worship The Rolling Stones, but because someone was killed there.

  You see it all in a movie just out which they choose to call Gimme Shelter—which, for all I know, means something in Kidspeak. Briefly, when the estimates came in (it was almost exactly a year ago, on December 6), The Stones faced the problem that the crowds descending onto the Altamont Speedway would rival and perhaps even exceed those that came together earlier in the year at Woodstock, N.Y. Everyone went into a whirl of activity to put together the essentials for such a gathering. Melvin Belli, the lawyer, seems to have accepted the role of coordinator and there are bits and pieces of him strewn throughout the picture. He talks into a telephone, and mysterious voices come in from various parts of the world, as the problems are touched upon: how to look after so many kids.

  It isn’t shown just when or why The Stones decided to use the services of Hell’s Angels; but use them they did, and before long you see them there, arriving on their motorcycles, bearded (mostly), and beefy, Marlon Brando generation, looking old and jaded, as if they had spent too many years at one of Hitler’s torture gardens to take much pleasure in routine sadism. The juxtaposition of the Angels of Hell and the Flower People stays in the memory.

  Meanwhile The Stones themselves have arrived, by helicopter, and are shepherded into a trailer, whence from time to time Mick Jagger, who is the Chief Stone, emerges, to vouchsafe an autograph, to chat with the bodyguards, or merely to peer out at the brawly scene. Although there are extensive shots of the other Stones, Jagger is as much the center of attention as Bernadette would be in a movie about Lourdes. He is everywhere, and he is fascinating. Primarily he is fascinating because one simply does not know what it is that he does that is fascinating. He does not play a musical instrument. His voice couldn’t be better than that of, say, every fourth person listed in the telephone directory. His features— and indeed those of the other Stones—are composed as if they were practicing to make it easy for David Levine to draw them: angular, unanimated, droopy in the philosophical rather than weary sense; homely. He is always heavily costumed, with preposterous pants and shoes, and usually a drape trailing down from each arm. He is in constant motion, and here the movements are electric. He strides all over the stage, head jostling, hips vibrating, hand-mike up close to his lips, howling away at songs that are apparently well known to everyone in the audience, which is transported with pleasure, while the drums go crazy, the guitars feel out their dissonances, in search (futile) of Oriental resolution. That’s all; and to have one final look at him at the end of his American tour is what Altamont was all about.

  So there the Angels were, to keep order. Their principal instrument of discipline is the billiard cue, with which they whack to the right of them, whack to the left of them, attempting to keep the kids away from the hastily constructed stage that was set up in the middle of Farmer Brown’s spread, just out from San Francisco. It is mostly unavailing. The kids slurp up over the human barbed-wire, and it transpires in the consciousness that they are, at least a great many of them, stoned on drugs. Two or three times Mick is forced to stop the proceedings and plead with the audience to maintain a little order. “People!” he calls out. “People! Look, cool it! Come on now! Stop f this thing up! Otherwise we can’t play.

  We won’t play!” And then the direst threat. “We’re going to split! Unless you cool it we’re going to split!” And then a camera shot of yet another scuffle. Only this one has an air of finality to it and—flash forward—Jagger, viewing the rushes back in London, solemnly orders the director to run it again in slow motion. Because this is the scene in which one of the guardians of the stage, addressing a tall, slim, hopped-up Negro, brings down a knife, twice, into his back, and kicks him when he is down, and the Negro is dead. The Stones play on for a few minutes, and then they crowd, tightly, like members of their own audiences, into the helicopter, and fly out of the lonely crowd, leaving behind them the corpse of Woodstock Nation.

  We walk back to 73rd, the senses jaded by the music and the noise, the beatings and the killing. Peter, Bill Smith, and I walk on to St. Jean’s at 76th Street to hear Mass. The church is very nearly full, and I am reminded, as I am every Sunday, of what an aesthetic ordeal it has become, going to Mass, ever since the advent of the new liturgy: the dread vernacular, the conscripted congregational responses—to think that the architects of this profanation claim to have done it for us! At sermon time the priest announces that he will read a letter from Cardinal Cooke, which is being read at all Masses in New York City today. It is a flat condemnation of abortion, done through the device of a “diary” recorded by a fetus, which begins by chatting happily about its prospective entry into this world, then chokes off as it encounters the abortionist’s knife. The dramatic narrative is followed by an unadorned homiletic. It is the most emphatic denunciation of abortion I have heard, and I suspect I had something to do with its promulgation because a few weeks ago I wrote a column on the subject: “It has greatly surprised many non-Catholics, and for that matter not a few Catholics, with what ease the abortionists have succeeded in making their permissive laws . .. which permit, let’s face it, abortion-on-demand. It not only seems only yesterday, in fact it was only yesterday, that the accepted idea was that the Catholic political lobby made it impossible to permit the sale of contraceptives. To have proposed abortions ad libitum was, quite simply, unthinkable for a politician.”

  I offered as an explanation for the dispersal of this lobby the latitudinarian effect of Vatican II’s statements on pluralism, which was succeeded by “the strange indecision that is the condition of the Church ever since . . . When [in America] the time came to rally protests against permissive abortion bills, the troops were simply not there. It is very difficult for a Catholic fundamentalist to go on about abortion being tantamount to murder, while his Cardinal is photographed speaking amiably to the leader of the Assembly that passed the abortion bill a few months before. Catholic voters are confused. Their bishops and their priests are complacent, or if that is not the word for it, they are undecided about what ought to be the rights of others, in pluralistic situations.” I learned later that the Cardinal was startled by the column, and for reasons I did not intend. When I wrote that he had been “photographed” with the leader of the New York Assembly that passed the abortion bill, I had in mind the receiving line of the annual A1 Smith Dinner in New York City, at which the Cardinal is the host, and which national and state leaders regularly attend. I was not present at the most recent of these dinners, but I had been to enough of them to know the procedure; to know that almost certainly the leader of the Assembly was there, and that almost certainly he was photographed—as is every luminary—on passing through the receiving line. Evidently it was as I had surmised. The leader of the Assembly had indeed been photographed with the Cardinal (though it was at a subsequent function), who interpreted my column as a personal reproach for having permitted such a picture; which reproach I had not intended: How can a cardinal host a dinner as straightforwardly ecumenical as this one (the proceeds of the dinner go equally to Jewish and Christian charities), and decline to shake the hands of the elected leader of the New York State Assembly? The social problem frames the political problem exactly: if abortion is murder pure and simple, then those who directly expedite murder do not qualify as guests at cardinals’ functions. Surely, as John Noonan points out, even Catholics must begin to use a word different from “murder,” even as we use an assortment of wo
rds to distinguish between, say, what an assassin does to his victim, and what a drunken driver does to his.

  On this point I have become estranged from Brent Bozell, who founded a few years ago Triumph magazine, an organ of militant Catholicism which has elided now into an organ of militant anti-Americanism, reflecting the evolving intractability of its editor and his associates. The whole subject weighs heavily, and for once I find Catholics to the right of me, notwithstanding my own conviction that abortion is gravely, tragically, wrong.

  .. . During the summer the editors of Triumph organized an institute in Spain that held sessions over a fortnight which several dozen Americans of various ages attended. I read about the organization of the institute, but did not know the character of it; until, this past week, I had a letter, of striking literary ability, from a young participant who described the lengths to which a few dispirited American Catholics are driven ...

  I can only say it was grim, like the prose in Triumph—where every phrase is a funeral. And I don’t mean that to sound invidious. Just descriptive of their journalistic mode, the rhetorical ambiance of those who see the enemy everywhere. Any outfit of Americans at sword’s point with America will proceed with a certain grimness. And Triumph is, I most forlornly believe, as hostile to the American ethos as any revolutionary organ on the hard Left.

  Now, Mr. Buckley, I didn’t know this until after we reached Spain. I’m so dumb. I knew they were deeply orthodox, literate, activist Catholics. At that I rejoiced. Moreover, I even glimpsed, without flinching, a few dark intimations about the horrific character of our age and society. Nothing unseemly there. After all, it is the business of The Church to despise always the spirit of the age and I’m no Rotarian, so why shouldn’t things dangerously wrong with America be found, photographed and denounced? Your magazine has been doing it for years. Now we have Nixon. Not enough I know, but the indices improve. Your brother was just elected. (Quick obiter: at one melancholy conversation with an editor I sat transfixed as he poured out this achingly eloquent lament about the desert that was America and how soon the blood of Christian Martyrs would be needed to nourish the cactus. Well, I suggested, snapping the spell, [we have] an oasis or two already; and argued that any system amenable to James Buckley’s possible elevation into the Senate was not ready for the scrap heap. He smiled, then continued his dirge. It was depressing.) Of course, what I didn’t know was the extent to which the Institute people viewed such evils as do surface and spread, as being organic expressions of a heritage perniciously anti-christian. That was off-putting news.

  I even remember the moment, or rather provocation, when the warheads were fired. It was early into the first week, scorchingly hot, and a few of us were in the bar sipping beer and exchanging backgrounds. Somehow the Jesuits got conscripted as a conversation-piece and everyone allowed as to how wicked they were. I demurred. And as I opined modestly about their great learning, offering John Courtney Murray as Exhibit A, I felt the coldest fury since my last skirmish with a liberal, months before. I quite expected an auto-da-fe in the courtyard followed by interment in the Escorial cellar. Of course, the results were well short of ignominy. We had another beer and the talk turned to trifles. But that one scene managed to adumbrate a pattern of diatribe that would end only when we flew out in late August. I soon learned of other finks whose thought was proscribed. Willmoore Kendall, for instance. His sin? Why, naively supposing his countrymen decent and their nation’s patrimony properly Christian and constitutional. It is a myopia that soon afflicts all ex-residents of Idabel, Oklahoma [Professor Kendall’s birthplace], who grow up believing the one is a synecdoche for the other and then get seduced into seeing the Federalist Papers as a tract other than the one Ayn Rand would write in order to glorify private greed.

  And then, of course, pluralism was branded a fraud (I don’t think more than four people had read We Hold These Truths [Father Murray’s celebrated book], and those that did probably could not surmount their a priori hostility towards pluralism or Jesuits to plumb his argument); anti-communism an evil so long as atom bombs are stockpiled as retaliatory muscle, without which who would ever travel to Spain in order to denounce? Indeed the whole Conservative Movement was skewered day after dreary day. By late Aug. the debunking had reached a new level (one of tedium) when [one of] Mr. Bozell’s eager epigone flew in to profane the Constitution. But unlike Bozell and [Professor Frederick] Wilhelmsen, whose minds really are magnificent (as metaphysician the latter is almost without peer—I only wish he’d work more at St. Thomas than Torquemada), this fellow did the job so clumsily that even ardent iconoclasts were dismayed. Short-lived I’m afraid. However, there were very few switcheroos. The gang that flew out was almost as motley as the one that flew in. The party line could never inspire categorical support. Not even on the issue of dogmatic fidelity to The Church, since we had non-catholics and even, God forbid, one or two agnostics. There was political heterodoxy as well. The Birchite mentality was in evidence. I must say very quickly however, that virulent bigotry was only the work of one or two. But as far as I know these few were never rebuked or their moral idiocies officially rejected i.e. in the way America was rejected. Nevertheless, I can see their abstract point. It is redundant to come out specifically against, say, antisemitism when the whole thrust of your apologetic is The Church Thing, as Chesterton would say. Still, it would have been good to hear. Like so many other things.. . . But before I close I do want to make clear this much. Notwithstanding those troubling summer days it was never time wasted. I learned an incredible amount, not the least of which was a profounder confidence in National Review ...”

  We walked back from church. Pat has prepared sandwiches and iced a bottle of champagne. Peter and Bill and I continue discussing the abortion question. Peter’s first movie was The Prisoner starring Alec Guinness, a portrayal of the tribulation of Cardinal Mindszenty who was tortured by the Hungarian Communists in 1949 and force-fed through a show trial, in the fashion of Stalin-in-stride. Alec Guinness, absorbed by the experience, turned to Catholicism—he Poped, as they say in England —and Peter was his godfather, except that if the convert is over twenty-one years old you use the term “sponsor,” even as I was the sponsor of Brent Bozell, who joined the Catholic Church during our sophomore year at Yale. Peter’s orthodoxy, even commingled with my own, leaves us incompetent to answer self-assuredly the question: What is the proper role of the dissenting minority in a pluralist society when it finds itself face to face with laws that permit what in church a few minutes earlier we had heard described tout court as murder? Granted that the frame of the Cardinal’s letter was melodramatic, and that melodrama is inhospitable to distinction: even so—call it feticide and calliper as you will the differences exquisite between feticide and murder on the moral scale— what in fact do you do? I try out on Peter the arguments as distilled by Clare Boothe Luce in a manuscript I read earlier this week, which we will publish in National Review in January under the heading “A Catholic Looks at Abortion and the Pluralist Society.” Clare, I tell Peter, having reviewed closely the works on abortion by Daniel Callahan and John Noonan, makes most penetratingly the point that the definition of “killing,” notwithstanding the categorical, Mosaic proscription, has throughout post-Biblical history been explained politically. It has been (by and large) the civil authority that has distinguished between illicit, semi-licit, extenuated, and licit killing, ranging from first degree murder to war-making, with so very many shades in between, among them negligent homicide, the cuckold’s dispensation, self-defense— the lot. Now the question is raised, by opportunistic advocates of abortion: Whence the authority of the political “authority” to deny the authority of the mother: and that, I think, is a constitutional-political sequence that needs to be confronted—or is it as simple (I incline to the opinion that it is) as that the mother, while obviously she exercises de facto authority over the survival of the fetus, is nevertheless legally, and a fortiori morally, nothing more than the custodian of the fetus
whose insulation against abuse ought to be guaranteed by the state, to the extent—granted—that the state can ever serve successfully as a superintending custodian? This is Question No. 1, I insist to Peter; Question No. 2 being: Which, in the range of available responses by Catholic and non-Catholic anti-abortionists, is the appropriate response? They range, hypothetically, from: a forthrightly mutinous relationship between the dissenter and the state, such as we are generally encouraged to believe was appropriate— indeed, ideally, imperative—between the German citizen and the Nazi government; and, at the other, placid extreme, mere rhetorical dissent. The range is wide. For instance, any anti-abortionist might categorically refuse to vote for any legislator who had given his sanction to permissive abortion laws. There are many permutations, including, as we approach the drastic, a total boycott of the civil processes. And so on. I insist to Peter, and he agrees, that on such questions Catholics-at-large necessarily depend on the formal leadership of the magisterium. If Cardinal Cooke wishes to inform us—in such unambiguous accents as for instance were used by Pius XII against the Communists in Italy before the crucial election of 1948—that no quarter can be given, that ex-communication will inevitably apprehend the Catholic who voted for an abortion-licenser, then—then let the Cardinal so inform us. Is it appropriate for the individual Catholic, morally incensed, to prod the Pope towards moral rectitude? History adduces now and again a morally languorous pope who was awakened from his slumbers (and many more popes who slept through it all) by morally energetic laymen, preferably saints. Is this the current condition? Peter acknowledges the problem, Pat reminds us that the hour is late.