The Greening of America
Cooper, Doug
Awfully Green If you have a nostalgia for the Middle Ages, you'll really be enthusiastic about Charles Reich's The Greening of America. Wow! That was when your work really meant something, for...
...Reich is one of those liberals who is trying to figure out why the New Deal didn't bring heaven to earth...
...What bugs people like Reich is that there are fewer unspoiled beaches-but this is true precisely beacuse widespread leisure time and improved transportation allow more people to use these beaches than ever before...
...Right because...well, everyone still isn't happy...
...If the solution is to change ideas, it is because the problem is the holding of the wrong set of ideas, not the existence of the wrong structure...
...The problem with Reich's book is that he is continually trying to prove that Marx was really "right" about capitalism, even though, under America's semi-capitalism, everyone's prosperity has greatly improved...
...and rides off after it: advertising,competition, Nixon Vietnam, alienation, corporations, anti-communism...
...One can't become a doctor (or a stereo repairman) without disciplined training and long-range planning, so Consciousness Ill's are not going to become the cornerstones of a new society...
...It is almost worth wading through the book to have a Yale professor admit: "The State is the party that always accompanies its proposals by coersion, and backs them by force...
...Talk about the "good old days...
...The "common man" is making enough money to buy the things he enjoys, and liberals are climbing the walls...
...That was when your work really meant something, for crissake...
...Some individualists are short-sighted...
...Perhaps Reich will join Gold-water in Barry's next assault on Big Government, but that would be very radical in New Haven, very radical...
...What can one say about Reich's heroes, the waifs of the future, Consciousness Ill's...
...Calling them "Outlooks I, II, and III" would have been less pseudo-scientific, but would have sold fewer books...
...A major contradiction is evident in Reich's thesis...
...He thinks he's got the answer...
...Doug Cooper...
...he admits that by "Consciousness" he really means' something like "outlook" or "worldview" so that the image he gives of almost a new breed, akin to the children with strange powers in The Village of the Damned, is incorrect...
...Show me a hippy who has "transcended materialism" and I'll show you a $17 pair of real leather sandals and a set of stereo components...
...The Greening of America maintains that individualism ("Consciousness I" in Reich's terms) and collectivism-liberalism ("Consciousness II" have each failed to make America an inhabitable country, but that a new outlook ("Consciousness III") is arising among the nation's youth and will turn America "green" again...
...Reich admits that much of "Consciousness III" derives from drug use-his vision of the greening-to be is rather like pinning one's hopes on the insights of barroom drunks and calling it Consciousness IV...
...Reich is wrong: one cannot "make a living being a surfer" as he claims...
...many liberals are masked totalitarians...
...The first part of his book tries to show the structure of the society is causing our problems, but his solution is not to try to change the structure, but to change the ideas of the people...
...Some I's, IIs, and III's are moving beyond status-seeking, as a whole person must...
...He still thinks workers are uptight because of competition...this is a farce: instead of constant pressure to speed up, to compete, peer group pressure on the job runs more to taking it easy ("Slow down, you move too fast, / Got to make the morning last...
...some hippy-types are not calm merely because they are free-loading, but because they have pulled themselves together psychologically...
...Reich sees what is wrong with shortsighted, materialist individualism and criticizes devastatingly some of the liberal dogma, but just when he is saying some sharp things in praise of enlightened individualism, he catches sight of one of his bogeymen (or is it a windmill...
...In most cases, that is...
...The Round Table was real wood, not formica, and the leige lord's whip was real leather...
...Reich still thinks advertising sells us deodorants against our will...although the perfumed Cleopatra would have laughed at the notion...
...The term is a gimmick...
...Now the problem with America is supposed to be, not poverty, but "materialism...
...This is hardly an indictment of industrialization and capitalism, unless one wishes to return to the time when only the very few had the time or means to get to glamorous shores...
...He thinks workers worry all night about holding 40-hour-a-week jobs...
...Insights...
...like Marx, he seems to think that people are their jobs...
...That's the thing about Reich...in most cases he's wrong, but when he's right he has said it well...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
