Current Wisdom

...deeper, traditional, colored with something that can only be called religion....It is not surprising that this Native American renaissance began with the exile of Indians to the cities: without the salt of forced change, these little nations might well have withered away under the weight of the Iron Age hordes from Europe...

...I had to learn the structure of government, the budgeting process...

...Burns: My guess is yes, that FDR was so resourceful, so flexible, and so sensitive that if he had been able to bring back full prosperity, which he lacked the economic tools and know-how to do—and if World War II had not intervened—he could have become, with Eleanor Roosevelt's help, a transforming leader instead of a brokerage leader...

...October 12, 1978] Mother Jones Mr...

...ctober 14, 1978] Newsweek Another glimpse into the tiny brain of our President: I had so much to learn when I first came here...

...August 28, 1978] Crawdaddy The scholarly speculations of another luminous reader of Crawdaddy: Regarding your Shortshots of June, '78 (Gazette): Very interesting...

...Like the ghostly Indians in Donald Barthelme's The Indian Uprising, they haunt our dreams...

...they rise, murdered, from suburban lawns and asphalt parking lots, bearing the secret names of the land on their lips, reproaching the pale and smoky world we have built around and over them...

...October 1978] The New Republic A gleeful passage spied in the redoubtable New Republic's recent "A Man on Horse-back Now More Than Ever" issue, an issue all about the exigency of delousing Teddy and crowning him President for Life: A Kennedy Presidency would be activist...

...October 14, 1978] The Nation An encore from Dr...

...they look like winos, bums, but who can really tell...

...When a public is frightened in this way, it often reverts to narrow, self-protective, "lower" needs...

...There are sweatlodges in the backyards of Indian tenements in Brooklyn, Chicago, San Jose, where the people sweat, and chant, and pray, to purify themselves...

...There are old-time wizards, they say, who look like tramps, but who can sing to the streams entombed beneath the sidewalks and call hummingbirds out of the night sky...

...August 1978] The New York Review of Books Mr...

...They are, these "Indians," after all, the original inhabitants, the spiritual custodians of this country we think of as our own...

...Driving on the freeway at rush hour, you night see a turquoise pickup truck with beads and feathers hanging from the mirror, a dark bronze man with black glasses' and a tall hat at the wheel...

...September 23, 1978] The Nation A transcription of Dr...

...Or perhaps not...

...Again, the resonances of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton ("Power to the People") would be ironically amusing were it not that European history casts a darker shadow on the road down which we can travel in the name of chauvinism, racial enmity and scapegoating the Left...

...We were not Luddites...

...Carl Oglesby, quondam Grand Kleagle of the Students for a Democratic Society and now apparently a somewhat bemused and petulant has-been: We were alienated (ah, how the old battle cries re-echo...

...Inquiry Another self-effacing reminiscence from Mr...

...Marshall Frady rises up from the Freudian couch, and lets out a howl bound to become obligatory reading for college sophomores all over the Republic: Whatever else it was, and however authoritarian it turned out to be, the Cuban revolution seemed the most original and dramatic political event to have occurred in this hemisphere in this century, with Castro himself an almost Tolstoyan figure in the profusion of his exuberance and imagination—Shelley, indeed Byron, could never have dreamed him up...

...But he also, along with his revolution, hugely traumatized the pioprietorial interests in the United States, as the weary and meager spirit of constricted self-interest is liable to be critically intimidated by the sudden advent of a larger vitality, and driven to extinguish it...

...It probably would be expensive...

...Indians Make Better Lovers," the bumpersticker reads...

...Are there any studies of this phenomenon in humans...

...Among all the premiers and statesmen over the globe, he was at least the one figure who seemed unquestionably, tumultuously alive...

...A lot depends on whether public opinion is wholesome or manipulated...

...Kearns: Do you think that FDR could have moved toward the satisfaction of those higher and more complicated needs if the diversion of World War II had not happened...

...Philip Green's hollering in his sleep: Yet for the New Conservatives, anyone who fails to prostrate himself or herself before the make-believe alliance of Commentary, the American Enterprise Institute and a few public opinion polls becomes a New Left "elitist," an enemy of "the people" to be scourged from public life like Ibsen's Dr...

...The New Left was not afraid of modern times...

...Burns: The brokerage type of leader approaches followers with an eye to exchanging one specific thing for another, such as jobs for votes, whereas the transforming leader en-gages the broader, more lasting, more authentic needs of his followers in a more interactive relationship, satisfying their present needs while at the same time making them conscious of their deeper needs...

...Rob Schultheis, the renowned author and philosopher, proffers an auspicious report of important cultural rumblings that may yet save the foul Yankee from himself: Politics can be the lowest form of human relationships...

...We were alienated from the men and the institutions we saw as shamelessly betraying the best of the American tradition...

...November 1978] The American Spectator December 1978 45...

...Alas, where is our Studs Terkel...

...If we sometimes seemed to assert a romantic nostalgia for the days of clean water and clean air, that was only in order to tell technology that it must carry out its agenda on strictly human terms...

...We aren't thinking so much about politics any more," a young Indian told me...

...Oh for a Harry Braverman...

...Jenifer Van Deusen Corte Madera, Calif...

...Perhaps a Lawrence Welk...

...They are at home never with people...

...Burns: First of all, no law or theory requires that the leader who appeals to the higher motives will win...

...How do you deal with a situation such as the Presidential election in the U.S...

...But what has grown out of the Indian exile to the city is something quite different...

...C U R R E N T W I S D O M...

...I had to do an enormous amount of background study just to learn where all the nations of the world were and who their leaders were and what their major issues might be on a bilateral basis with us...

...There is no way of proving it, and the cold-blooded Anglo in me recoils at the thought, but perhaps there is a kind of rough magic to these people we miscall Indians...

...And so we see them—somehow strong, somehow beautiful—on the back streets and skid rows and in the factories and offices and suburbs of the country we call America...

...Here he fevers over their inability to produce writers of sidewalk sensitivity...

...It would expand government's involvement in people's lives (though Kennedy favors deregulation and increased competition in transportation and other business...

...We want to get back to the ways of our grandmothers and grand-fathers, to the old religion...

...The same thing happened during Red scares when people's attitudes were distorted by an artificial and exaggerated perception of the Communist menace...

...in 1968 when the leader who won—Richard Nixon—seemed to appeal to a baser class of wants and needs, and prejudices and fears, while the leader who lost—Hubert Humphrey—seemed to be more in touch with genuine needs...

...even in the perjured heart of our blackest city...

...Kearns: What is the difference between a transforming leader and a brokerage leader...

...These spokesmen for "the real majority" have not, in fact, produced a single work that is sensitively descriptive of American life, no works like those of Harry Braverman, Studs Terkel, Patricia Cayo Sexton, or Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb...

...As a person who spends about six hours per day under fluorescent lights, I wonder if they do not account for my recent weight gain...

...from racism, militarism, imperialism, and domestic repression...

...Brokerage leadership is more common in Western, bourgeois, trading democracies, while transforming leadership is more often found in countries like India or China...

...That is where the real power lies...

...In 1968, for example, a lot of people were frightened by an artificially distorted image of Yippies and hippies taking over the country...

...Philip Green, still ranting and sweating over the New Conservatives...

...May 29, 1978] Psychology Today A sampling of the reassuring sough that is produced when Miss Doris Kearns interviews Dr...

...The existence of a competitive situation doesn't mean that followers will never make mistakes...

...James MacGregor Burns, both ardent revolutionaries of the Hammacher Schlemmer wing of the Camelot camorra: Kearns: Let's turn now to democratic leaders...

...Stockmann...