How Green Grows my America
Brudnoy:, David
David Brudnoy How Green Grows My America? In the fall of 1970 Mr. Charles Reich's book, The Greening of America, descended from heaven and became instantly the most talked about thing in print...
...Reich's description at face-value, is that it is completely inward-turning, whatever rhetoric its exponents may use to make it seem otherwise...
...Marin pointed out how grim things still are...
...Making life...
...Everything goes, literally everything, in the -underground" press...
...While the student "anti-war" movement, and those other movements so omnipresent in recent years, have begun to fade out, an increasing number of students are holding on to their hope for a better America, and a better world, but deciding to some degree that more study, more collection of data, more reflection is needed before they can make the changes that they believe are necessary...
...Charles Reich's book, The Greening of America, descended from heaven and became instantly the most talked about thing in print since the Gospel...
...By that generation standing as a living reproach to the grasping, materialistic, death-dealing Robert Strange McNama-ras and Melvin Lairds of America...
...Those, that is, who've assumed that a whole generation can be transformed by what they wear...
...The New York Times Book Review assigned Greening to Peter Marin, director of an experimental free school...
...National Review assigned me to look at Greening, and I did so (December 15,1970), observing that Charles Reich-notwithstanding, what / saw around me was not so much a truly new consciousness as a dropping out glossed over with the pretense of being "into" something new and big and bold...
...Women's Lib has arisen in those fields wherein the Con III children frolic...
...The most preposterous exemplars of Consciousness III have not improved, either, in their mindless adoration of high-fallutin' rhetoric, their easy acceptance of the sorts of silly things Mr...
...Their crusades, however, have altered somewhat...
...Not because everything that Charles Reich saw in his giggly high was unworthy, but because, although the fundamental essence of Con III is grotesque, there are tendencies within it which are beneficial and which are infusing to some degree the lives of those people who are abandoning the utter selfishness and callousness of Con III but are holding on to the searching, the openness of it...
...Reich meant by his three levels of consciousness...
...The young Con III wants his stereo set, his Honda, his threads, his guitar, and-well, the point is clear...
...Reich's Consciousness III somewhat more apocalyptically tuned...
...But in fact, as Mr...
...Reich told us that -we seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants...
...Amidst the usual chatter about fascism across the land, with the predictable, requisite swipes at Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell, Daley, Rizzo and the rest of those troglodytes of Cons I and II, Mr...
...But they're absolutely callous about those souls of human beings on their way to birth - the fetuses of those "clogged up" women...
...Clearly, Mr...
...and all the other Bad Old Things...
...But just as the Rip-Off consciousness exists and holds sway over a certain segment of Our Children, so a better, more honest, more promising consciousness can be discerned here and there...
...From all sides came the closer look at that book which, when it first appeared excerpted in The New Yorker in the early fall of 1970, had caused such a sensation...
...The a-mount of space devoted to trying to knock Charles Reich into a cocked hat tells us something about the impact his Greening had...
...what they preach from their mouths filled with the righteousness of tasting Truth and declaring it Good...
...what they listen to...
...Reich's and Mr...
...Ripping off assumes that I (and by extension my brothers" and sisters" defined narrowly, albeit not familially - my buddies and fellow practitioners of the good third consciousness) am entitled to my possessions, but others are not...
...They want their brave new world now, and they'll be damned before they'll let anyone tell them otherwise...
...I" is the old invidual-ism that made America, that spawned Republicans, laissez-faire economics, the A.M.A...
...There is a new interest in their studies by students, not to get that "gentleman's C" my fellow Yalies considered adequate, but-and here maybe I'm too optimistic-to learn something...
...I know that Consciousness III, however defined, cannot and will not sweep the land...
...always arriving at amazingly erotic and unlikely conjunctions...
...Charles Reich did not spawn Con III...
...That speaks of the distance we have come...
...When we hear a constant refrain that "Women Must Determine Their Own Lives and Use Their Bodies As They Danm Well Please," we might ask which of those shrill criers of woman's rights gives a second thought to the rights of the as-yet unborn...
...Reich's book-the flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement bit...
...Anything to get with reality, they say...
...Abbie Hoffman is too grasping, too obviously a hypocritical user of the capitalist system for advancing his authoritarian, conformist ends, to be a real hero of Consciousness III...
...Reich said, and the silly sorts of things the Latter-Day Reichians say...
...The pied-piper of the Yale Law School painted his picture of a tribe of awareness-questers...
...So wrote Charles Reich...
...Stevens gives us just until 1976, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence...
...And yet, contrary to what Mr...
...Reich for telling us how his bones told him what they did...
...Galbraith, with his vested interest in Consciousness II, was naturally somewhat distressed by Charles Reich's cavalier dismissal of Con II and all its welfare works...
...Which also speaks of the distance "we" have come...
...From out of cuckoo-land came Herbert Marcuse, thrashing about in a corner of the Times' Op Ed page, searching for ways to insist that "violence is ingrained in this society," and so, to expunge Con I and Con II, the Reichian road-would never do...
...By that generation spawned out of Consciousness II, by the Love-Peace-Freedom-Happiness generation, the children in their multi-colored bell bottoms, eating their organic peanut butter, pawing each other's long, lovely locks, grooving on their socially-conscious music, reading their relevant, biodegradable pamphlets...
...III And yet, in some ways things are different, and better...
...The periodical journals went after Charles Reich with the old double-wham-my: how cool, how lovely his Con III, but how naive, how fanciful his analysis...
...I see around me an upsurge of interest in conservative and libertarian groups on campuses, an upsurge reflecting to a degree I did not think entirely possible just a few years ago, a desire to comprehend .the complexities of society and to arrive at conclusions based upon knowledge of the workable conditions of real life, not upon the fantasy world that Mr...
...Stevens' "non-linear Simulsense Movement" is Mr...
...Marcuse dismissed Mr...
...it is they who approve his ethic of taking from the "Establishment" because - because the Establishment is wicked, but Abbie and his dearies are nice...
...Reich for not understanding that there will have to be a degree of work and organization, "rules for the new game" as for the old, even in the perfect Utopia of the Third Green Reich...
...what they insist, with ever-increasing stubbornness, is Undeniable and hence must be proclaimed universally - these people are still with us...
...David Brudnoy is past chairman of the Massachusetts Conservative party...
...Marin whispered, by way of chiding Mr...
...As the former Chancellor of the State University of New York, Samuel B. Gould, observed: The brilliant prose styles of student newspaper columnists and editorial writers...
...Thus Time, thus Newsweek, thus most of the large-circulation periodicals...
...I cannot look at those young Con Ills nattering about me, and listen to their protests about "sexism," without wondering why they are so blithely unconcerned about the next generation...
...That isn't what's going on today...
...Caws grew testy...
...Sentimental sublimation" is the way Dr...
...Peter Caws, observed that the perceptive minority must influence those in power before anything meaningful by way of a consciousness alteration can occur...
...the "browning of America," meaning the turning sour of the Great Green Dream...
...Reich seemed for a season to have the monopoly rights...
...Conditions are by no means "beautiful" on American campuses today...
...He saw Woodstock but ignored nineteen seventy, which saw Altamont...
...Reich was too quick to assume that everything is "safe" so long as this happy, pacific "revolution" was on its way to sweeping the world...
...Reich found himself a culture-hero to the counter-culture, subject of innumerable articles in the New York Times, a rival even to his Yale colleague Erich Segal (of Love Story) for popularity on the TV talk-show circuit...
...ad nauseum...
...My bones and the lives of my friends tell me that we are already two steps into an ice age, a dark age of the soul, Mr...
...Nor do we create a better world by ripping-off, stealing prettied up by an ideology that Stealing is Right...
...The brilliant reformer Margaret Fuller, Emerson's dear friend, wrote in her 1845 book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, that half the souls of this world, women's souls, were clogged up by subjugation to the other half, men's souls...
...Fuller's spiritual descendants today say much the same thing, although with not half her style and grace...
...Now they have added "sexism" and have also gone off to save the environment...
...But with possessive conservatism, which we all manifest, comes a corollary: respect for the possessions of others...
...They found "ecologism" and it is good, and they never rest...
...Romantic-Utopian moods, illusions and hysterias of one sort or another" - that's George Kennan's evaluation of what America's students tend to yield to in times of stress like our own...
...Reich saw only the repression" against America's youth, her dissenters, her changers...
...In a new book, EST The Steersman Handbook: Charts of the Coming Decade, L. Clark Stevens hatches Son of Greening of America, filling his 154 pages with preposterous ex cathedra declarations of just the sort of which Mr...
...In their absolute conviction that because they are the manifestations of a new consciousness, they know best, in fact know all, they simultaneously proclaim their absolute reverence for all human life and show through their arguments that some human life deserves no consideration at all...
...Brewster's Negroes can get a fair trial nowhere in America, but reality's Negroes in Mr...
...Now, nearly two years later, I find things in some ways much the same, and in other ways very different...
...We either make it by then, or-or, end of the story...
...And so back to the womb of protected infancy...
...Kennan complained...
...Everybody is to that degree possessive, and to that degree, if conservative in no other way, everybody is conservative...
...Everybody knew who Charles Reich was, and everybody who mattered was trying to figure out how he could become Consciousness III - or, alternatively, what was wrong with Consciousness III and right about Consciousness II, no one, of course, having anything much good to say for wretched old Consciousness I. We hear less about Charles Reich these days, though his terms "greening of America" and "Consciousness III" have entered the language, sometimes in that most flattering way, through take-offs: the "blueing of America," to refer to the rise of the blue-collar working class into the academic ivory towers...
...My America does not grow green either as Charles Reich imagines it growing green, or as I would have it grow green...
...And now we are obliged to deal with it not just as a phenomenon but as a philosophy, not just as "what's happening, baby," but as what should happen, us an inevitability as rigidly determined, or so Mr...
...Not turning inward to discover themselves so as to build themselves into people worthy of acting amidst their fellow humans, for the good of society, for the weaving of a more just social fabric...
...Reich was saying, both Consciousnesses I and II were dreary...
...I see a commendable tendency to hold on to an image of what things "should" be joined now with a more realistic awareness that things as they "are" also deserves consideration...
...That to which I refer is not the banality of the rosy-tinted image of the greened Youth forming the peroration of Mr...
...Reich saw "America...
...I think it is losing...
...I do not want to brand them with him, but only to note that it is they who buy his little Gospel of Ripping - Off, steal This Book...
...Harvard Professor John Kenneth Gal-braith appeared one day on the Op Ed page and took on Mr...
...They are so immune to reason that they cannot even consider that perhaps enslavement is worse than war - that, to be specific, perhaps war in Indochina, or war in the Middle East, or war God knows where, might in fact be preferable to allowing people to be conquered by Communism, or destroyed by Ir-redentism, or oppressed by whatever new sort of fiendishness reveals itself on the horizon tomorrow...
...Maybe even more important than the franchise in bringing about this new civility, this new seriousness among that generation which Mr...
...Reich's, a picture of a revolution that would come about through a transformation of consciousness, not through guns, not through making war but by extending love to all corners of the globe...
...By just turning on, they're helping no one...
...The ex-diplomat and Princeton scholar George F. Kennan got in his licks on the Op Ed page - all of these Get Reich columns appearing within a matter of weeks - with some old fashioned Con II arguments...
...All around us we see Con Ills, or Simulsensualists, or whatever they'll be calling themselves tomorrow, grasping solely after their own well-being, catching the tails of passing fads and riding them for a whirl or two or three, playing monkey with hands over eyes and ears when shown or talked to about the death they deal to others (abortion, some aspects of the drug business...
...Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of Chicago...
...Reich so lovingly, earnestly drew...
...he just carelessly prettied it up, packaged it, propagandized it...
...So long as Mr...
...We see around us still, and not decreasingly, despite the sanguine observations of those who've told us that things are back to normal on the campuses - we see around us Consciousness III in its ugliest forms...
...II What was wrong in Mr...
...By the Youth...
...Reich would have had dancing in the streets with garlands in their hair, has been simply the pro pensity to doubt Revealed Truths, a propensity that American young people occasionally manifest...
...Fairlie quickly pointed out in Encounter, and as any check of the evidence confirms, just about everybody in America vxints precisely the middle-class comforts, standard of living, values, that this nation, better and more extensively than any other huge nation, has provided for nearly all its people...
...The liberal New Republic, through Mr...
...It is a consciousness encompassing a growing understanding of what "libertarianism" really means-the liberation of individuals within the context of a society in which other individuals have as much right to their own liberation-and aiming at libertarian ends through somewhat traditional means...
...But I-and many of rny colleagues tell me that they are experiencing this as well-walk today on campus with a sense of hope...
...And oh, how the Consciousness Us descended on Mr...
...Reich said that the Youth Revolution Is Trying To Make America Livable (that from the jacket of the book before he and his publisher put an even more long-winded revelation there...
...I do not see on the campuses a serious retreat to infancy, a Love Story inanity, a Howdy-Doody revival, nor do I regard this contemporary cooling-off as indicating some sort of retreat to 1950s "apathy...
...Reich's and Mr...
...Consciousness III does not permit such hang-ups...
...Reich was merely slashing his way through earlier American history, Peter Caws read contentedly, but as Reich meandered into that forbidden garden wherein one dares to find fault with too much of the Consciousness II paradise in which we live, so Mr...
...In a brilliantly devastating dissection of Greening in the August 1971 Encounter, Henry Fairlie, going no farther than page fourteen of Mr...
...Consciousness IV," the designation assumed by those who proclaim themselves beyond Charles Reich and his youth brigade, if that's possible;etc...
...reality, however, adds the greys and browns and blacks, the dark side of unrestrained experimentation with drugs...
...If anything, those who've swallowed the Reich hogwash are still gargling with it...
...We do not leap from one consciousness to another and instantly transform the muddy waters into sparkling springs...
...Making work "de-institutionalized" and "de-alienated" and hence relevant...
...If they can say Nixon's feeding us a lot of bull, they can say, and many have said, Reich is feeding us a lot of the same...
...Brewster's own city, New Haven, and elsewhere, are walking away from their trials free: viz...
...Hate appears less often on their faces, disappointment less often too...
...Reich noticed the happy children of Consciousness III but he didn't tell us about those killing themselves with heroin, or of those killing each other, for that matter, with their proselytizing for drugs per se...
...Many young people have caught the stench of Consciousness III in their nostrils, and they've decided that it smells too...
...Making life worth living...
...This brighter side of the situation is found in the increasing willingness of young people, at least some of those with whom I have daily contact at school and among various younger friends, to stand back a bit and look skeptically at everything they are told, not just at what they see in the "Establishment" that they still so often disdain in toto...
...By the beautiful kids, the truth-talking kids, the happy, free kids...
...His articles have appeared in National Review, the New Guard and the Fanny Farmer Cookbook...
...And "ripping-off...
...One does not have to refer again to Greening of America to see the same sorts of ludicrous remarks...
...Everybody is by now familiar with what Mr...
...Sometimes we can determine the immediacy of an idea by noticing the fer-ventness of the opposition to it...
...I see an upsurge of broadly-ranging skepticism in the college generation with which I work...
...Consciousness III in its vileness is around us, boring us silly and sometimes hurting us and them...
...But inward-turning to the exclusion of caring about anyone but themselves and those absolutely identical to them...
...The kids aren't doing anything to make the bright new world, Mr...
...And who bothers them...
...But in fact they do not...
...Last year they were convinced that "racism" and "fascism" stood as the predominant evils keeping this wretched country from attaining perfection...
...This too is what Con III has come to...
...Reich's picture of the Con III people is still wrong...
...By whom...
...I also know that the tendencies I see are only a beginning and may fade away tomorrow...
...More and More I see a willingness to investigate before pronouncing, to listen before speaking, to think before acting...
...Off we go to Repressive Tolerance, or whatever handy catchphrase the sage of San Diego is into these days...
...but the "movement" is not yet winning...
...It was a comforting picture, Mr...
...skillfully improvise on four-letter words, making every verb irregular, every tense imperfect, every noun peculiarly singular and possesive...
...Reieh says, as was that march to socialism that Karl Marx told a suffering world was dis-cernable in the distance...
...If a Con III is not actually himself ripping somebody off, is is at least lolling in the grass watching the ripping-off around him, damning the police for "persecuting" the innocents who run afoul of the oppressive Law...
...In discussing conservatism with my college American History students, I point out that to some degree everybody is at least a "possessive conservative," by which I mean that everybody wants to conserve, preserve, the things that are his...
...I regretted that a truly new consciousness doesn't exist to any very great degree, a consciousness embodying both the virtues of the old American spirit and those new virtues which here and there one sees about us among a few of our students and younger friends...
...He said it would take a while to arrive...
...Angela Davis, Huey Newton, et al...
...Then came "II," ushered in approximately with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: the New Deal statism that has expanded its tentacles to entrap us all, creeping on through the years presided over by That Man in the White House, Give 'Em Hell Harry, Dwight the Good, John the Bold, Lyndon the Uncredible and Richard the Sly...
...In short, the primary evil of Consciousness III, taking Mr...
...dealing death, not only to people in other lands, but to its own people," and observed that all the most thoughful and passionate of our youth" agree...
...Nineteen sixty-nine was the year of Woodstock...
...They are as divided among themselves about the meaning of Kent State, the Vietnam War, racism," and the like, as are the older generations...
...what noble thoughts they emblazon in their hearts and tack up on their walls...
...The young socialist Steven Kel-man, author of Push Comes to Shove, put it well from his perspective as a social activist: "Just as you don't end pollution by chanting Hare Krishna at a dirty stream, so you don't create nicer people merely by circulating the love poems of John Lennon and Yoko Ono...
...His canvas was all pinks and blues and greens...
...The essayist Marya Mannes crawled onto the Op Ed page to bitch a bit about the lack of "beauty" in the new youth culture's aesthetic, and then, shifting gears, to point out that amplified sound isn't "natural" - "naturalness" being a Reichian criterian for Con III - and in other ways to show in her alloted thousand words that Charles Reich pipe-dreams...
...Reich's book, showed how Reich's glibness utterly distorted reality...
...I notice among those young people with . whom I associate a gratifying searching quality that had begun to disappear from the campuses back in the late '60s...
...they had to be superseded...
...They are terribly concerned about all those women's souls clogged up by men...
...Marin loved the book but thought Mr...
...Reich and his college's president, Kingman Brewster, told us, protestors are freer today to protest than ever before, anywhere...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
