Among the Intellecrualoids / Babies in High Places
Starr, Roger
A f g h a n i s t a n : It seems that the mediocre epic of Gunga Dan Rather was sufficient for the American media; there has been no further first-hand coverage of the Afghanistan resistance....
...This would b e n e f i t both parties...
...The poor, alas, need far more help than mere possession...
...You are going to the Olympics...
...In swearing to convert the monuments of our civilization instead of levelling them, Miss Piercy follows the 18th-century painters and engravers who recorded their visions of shepherds, goatherds, and maidens relaxing among the ruins of Rome, the long-collapsed Colosseum, the tumbled aqueducts, the rubblestrewn Forum...
...Both of these systems are dependent on electric power, which suggests that Con E d i s o n ' s present headquarters building will not be available for day-care or hospice use...
...office buildings are characteristically designed with far less exterior perimeter in relation to their floor area than apartment houses...
...The historic mission of her revolution is to push them out of power...
...Miss Piercy revealed her views publicly some months ago in the course of...
...They will be inside a s t r u c t u r e whose windows cannot be opened...
...It is not clear that Miss Piercy's stint in the SDS New York office adequately honed them...
...Call or Write Christendom College Route 3, Box 87 Front Royal, Va 22630 703-636-2908 0 0 0 0 O Internships with P.A.C.'s provide first-hand political experience in Washington On-campus Practica with nationally known political leaders Classical and Catholic courses in Political Theory Five half-tuition Grants for junior transfers A Major Program, leading to the B.A...
...We learn that Russian wives are afraid to go shopping in some of the major cities, because snipers operate at all hours of the day and night...
...No vine or fig tree can force its way up between non-existent paving stones...
...And a burgeoning number of backpackers would in the normal course of events stimulate increased demand for such products of the corporate world as aluminum tubing and nylon...
...But the word hospice offers up tantalizing possibilities for group utilization of space, if I understand what Miss Piercy means, a subject that need not be explored more deeply...
...The day-care centers could centralize and expand, at least in theory, while the automobile executives, stuffed into corners where they would not be so visible and forced to use tiny day-care center chairs, would at least be kept restless and innovative...
...Assuming 200 square feet per occupant, the hospice would hold about 6,000 hikers and t h e i r backpacks...
...We...
...In the name of humane possibilities, Miss Piercy and her friends could pin 15,000 day-care kids in a permanent traffic jam engineered by "organizers" determined to show that there's a better use for office buildings than the one for which they were built...
...The specific suggestions offered by Miss Piercy for day-care and hospice creation have tended in this analysis of post-revolutionary life to overshadow the somewhat more portentous suggestions encompassed in her phrase about what "beautiful places people could finally live [in], when you didn't have the best part of Manhattan occupied by corporate headquarters and the houses'of the wealthy...
...Naturally, Con Edison would no longer be called Con Edison, and it would no longer belong to a corporation, although Miss Piercy is vague on the nature of the organization that would replace it...
...They fill the ground or lower floors of buildings that are either quite low in profile or occupied with other tenants or enterprises or government offices...
...Did Miss Piercy and her fellow organizers consider what would be required to turn the General Motors building on 58th Street into a revolutionary clay-care center...
...Are the parts that they occupy intrinsically better, by reason of location, view, centrality, and access to institutions and public improvements...
...They pictured grass, even vines, growing in the cracks between the stone blocks of the Caesars' architects...
...But we who find the characterization of the enemy uncomfortably applicable to ourselves can take solace from imagining that just as she will not destroy our buildings, she may spare us any revenge more drastic than having our French cuffs ripped off...
...On the southern route between Kabul and Kandahar and Herat], if a collaborator with the regime sends a cargo shipment of merchandise to Kabul, it will be burned and the driver captured...
...know what Miss Piercy and her fellow organizers mean to do with the corporate headquarters, but she becomes rather vague after suggesting that the wealthy now occupy the best parts of Manhattan...
...Yet in the mid:~ une L 'Express, which is probably the finest weekly newsmagazine on the Continent (and vies with the Economist as the best in any language), devoted six full pages to Afghanistan, complete with photographs of extraordinary beauty and interviews with Russians and all manner of Afghanis...
...Miss Piercy's "rich alternatives" do not emerge any more plausibly on a micro-economic scale...
...Considering Manhattan's newest buildings beautiful, she disavows a campaign to demolish them...
...Can it be enough to call on nuttiness, age, avarice, and sex to explain why the world she wants to change lacks the compassion she claims to seek...
...Someone Will have to keep the elevators in repair and the air conditioning operating...
...Or would they be dispersed to some outlying location to be recalled when it comes time for the children to return to their homes...
...There are, however, exceptional revolutionaries whose urge to communicate exceeds their capacity for discretion...
...Where, in midtown Manhattan, could the buses be stowed until the end of the day-care day...
...If Miss Piercy thinks that by turning over the houses of the wealthy to the poor she will be helping the latter to live better, there is some evidence that she is mistaken...
...But a friend will pass...
...They resemble lovers who, in the heat of remembered passion, write letters their associates later regret, but letters that enlighten pedestrian spirits who never shared their moments of enthusiasm...
...How many of the 50 floors does she intend to use for the day-care center...
...Does this mean the rest of it will be empty and useless...
...But supply tends to create its own demand, and the very availability of the space might stimulate a far greater number of young people to buy backpacking equipment, young people who would then visit New York and other cities distinguished by the number of corporate monuments now available for rich alternative use...
...But some kind of syndicalist committee would certainly be necessary to keep it running, seeing to it that its workers get paid and have fuel enough for the boilers...
...So far as I know, there is not a single shower or bathtub in the General Motors building,, unless General Motors has considered these the inalienable perks of those with the rank of senior vice-president...
...Maybe it's worse...
...The story (again written by the omnipresent Jacques Buob) ends with a quotation from a schoolgirl: "The meeting in Warsaw between Giscard d'Estaing and Brezhnev greatly depressed the Afghan people...
...Miss Piercy lacked the time and space in her interview to explore the significance of the disappearance of corporations...
...At Miss Betsky's request, Miss Piercy elaborated on the frame of mind that had been hers in the days when, as an organizer in the New York office of the Students for a Democratic Society, she dreamed of a world perfected by revolutionary change...
...We learn that many are speaking about a possible return to monarchy...
...Surely she means to cut the rich back, but it is not clear on what basis she decides that they occupy the best parts of the borough...
...being interviewed by Celia Betsky for the New York Times Book Review...
...Surely Miss Piercy does not wish backpackers to be seduced to Philadelphia to cook out in the South Street Station courtesy of Conrail (a corporate subsidiary of the United States Rail Association, in turn a corporate subsidiary of the United States Government...
...If it is to be completely emptied of General Motors and turned into a multi-story day-care center-cum-hospice, its systems must be kept running...
...Miss Piercy has divined that the avenues of Manhattan will not provide hospitality to goatherds and shepherds in the natural way of the Forum Romanum...
...Fifty floors would take 15,000 children...
...They do not symbolize the world she hates...
...Unfortunately, the office buildings offer even greater obstacles to revolutionary alternatives used as hospices than as day-care centers...
...We expected a lot from France...
...They have no doubt been waiting for a chance to use these, if only to lighten their packs a little...
...On more practical reconsideration, however, problems arise...
...The postrevolutionary inheritors of Miss P i e r c y ' s manufactured ruins will not, like s h e p h e r d s , be picnicking on softened pieces of stone...
...they need the income to run expensive buildings properly...
...You run and jump while your hosts are killing us and depriving us of freedom...
...They may be equally old, greedy, and nutty, but at least they have escaped the fourth and fatal flaw of malehood...
...that it does seem a bit difficult to discover just exactly what Miss Piercy has in mind...
...Even if she and SDS found a magic formula for continuing the human race without the qualities, including maleness, that Miss Piercy would dispense with, they would then find that compassion without calculation is just about as bad as calculation without compassion...
...Most present day-care centers are in the neighborhoods where mothers and children live...
...If the General Motors building were turned into an apartment house, for example, a significant number of the rooms would be windowless...
...In fact, she does not hate the modern world...
...And Harlemites often express fear that the wealthy aim to take over Harlem because it is potentially more desirable as land than many parts of the city now occupied by the wealthy...
...If we use the bottom eight floors of the General Motors building for day care--having, of course, altered the toilet facilities to fit little bodies and installed (without corporate assistance) kitchens, pantries, napping cots, and building blocks for the little ones to play with--we are left with more than 40 floors for our first New York hospice...
...As she makes clear to Miss Betsky, in a later passage of the same interview, she merely detests the fact that the modern world has fallen into the hands of "nutty and greedy old men...
...Of course, one problem with the use of the General Motors building's upper floors for a hospice is the rather long distance that will separate most of the guests from the windows...
...I f we find that no bus transportation system can possibly deliver and collect more than 2,500 children from the General Motors building every day without stopping traffic dead, we will not be able to use more than about eight floors of the building for day-care purposes...
...She is probably willing to go on record with her vision of post-revolutionary "rich alternatives" simply because she is too busy to examine the political economy of the world she wants to help destroy...
...Hence the prices of rugs in Kabul are skyhigh, because the rug-makers demand a high price in order to pay those who take the risk of transporting their products...
...Not having, myself, any clear idea of what Miss Piercy means by a hospice, but having observed some of her contemporaries in the subway and elsewhere, with their backpacking racks on their shoulders and their brightly colored nylon pouches neatly laced to aluminum frames, I assume she means to provide places for weary wanderers of the road to bunk down in reasonable comfort and security...
...If Miss Piercy means, on the other hand, that the wealthy occupy too much space for their number, and that the poor would live better by demolishing the houses of the rich and turning the recaptured land over to them, she grossly overestimates the land used by the rich in Manhattan and the other boroughs...
...Or are they better because they are occupied by wealthy people who are able to pay for private services to assist in cleaning them up...
...In much the same way, China's current leaders send their resistant intellectuals to the manure piles, so their brains can be softened and reshaped...
...Even this indignity might be avoided if we turned over our stocks, bonds, and political offices to our wives...
...But land shortage is hardly the crux of the housing problem for the poor in New York City...
...under new management, of course) to keep the hospice guests close to ~odliness...
...The main difference between Central Park North and Central Park South ls not to be tbund in their views of the park, roughly similar, but in the means of the people who live in these two places...
...Assuming that good day-care center planning dedicates 100 feet of floor space to each child, an average floor of the General Motors Building, containing 30,000 square feet, would house 300 children...
...First off, one must assume that General Motors has been sent packing from its head26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 quarters...
...Here again Miss Piercy and her fellow organizers will have to do some simple calculations...
...If she likes river views, incidentally, far more of Manhattan's water front is devoted to public housing and other subsidized types of units than to apartment houses like River House, the setting for Sidney Kingsley's old-time protest against class distinctions in America, Dead End...
...Another parameter would be set by bus dispersal and garaging possibilities...
...Does she mean, for example, that no more automobiles will be manufactured in the United States, or only that they will not be made by a "corporate" entity called General Motors...
...Miss Piercy describes that heady period as full o f " rich alternatives, of Roger Starr is a member of the New York Times editorial board...
...While I have sat next to an occasional backpacker in the crosstown bus who aToused in me some suspicion about the infrequenc 9 with which he makes use of these frivolous substitutes for crystal cold creeks and natural hot springs, most urban backpackers have seemed to me well-coiffed and spotlessly garbed...
...What marvelous day-care centers and hospices they would become, what beautiful public places you could have, and in what beautiful places people could finally live, when you didn't have the best part of Manhattan occupied by corporate headquarters and houses for the wealthy...
...She should concentrate on the detailed problem of planning the adaptive re-use of the General Motors building...
...Now we're . . . cold...
...Another by analysis of the traffic problem caused by bringing any stipulated number of buses to the General Motors building presumably during working hours, when the streets are already crowded...
...And she'd have to reserve the Chase Manhattan building (re-equipped of course) to house the foreign fellow travelers who would come here and write books about her social triumph...
...The answer depends on calculations...
...I gather that most were on their way from home in Jamaica Estates to their boarding schools in Riverdale, and are accustomed to piped water...
...Miss Betsky wanted, as they say, to flesh out the real Miss Piercy, whose newest novel, Vida, was reviewed in the same issue of the same publication...
...not enough people could be found to occupy space in such a shelter...
...After all, if the children are not to be taken care of during working hours, so that their mothers will be free to work themselves, what is the purpose of day-care centers in the first place...
...Incidentally, Miss Piercy assures her interviewer that one of her two major current issues is "no nukes," a decision that may make electricity more difficult to generate in the future...
...BABIES IN HIGH PLACES Most revolutionaries fall silent when asked for details of the future they hope to make...
...The streets below are solid sheets of asphalt laid over reinforced concrete...
...With a word to the wise, we may prepare Miss Piercy to develop syndicalist management for Alcoa and DuPont so that these enterprises can continue to serve worthwhile ends without corporate distortions...
...And there was even a little lesson for the rulers of France...
...An analysis of the possible size of the day-care center would surely establish one limit on the number of floors of the building that might be dedicated to it...
...Cooking presents another problem...
...Grace, Inc...
...We hear that even some of the major roads are controlled by the mujabidin: "They know, it is said, who is who...
...one has only to look at the open spaces left after abandonment...
...Their nostalgic art implied that time erases the bombastic structures of even the most imperial state, humanizing them so that they may be enjoyed over the centuries by simple rankless mortals...
...Then they'd call it visionary...
...They leave its precise specifications to people they call Utopians, a label pronounced with a thin cu?l of scorn...
...To collect and disperse 15,000 children a day in buses holding 50 children each (plus one or more matrons) would require 300 buses...
...possibility," continuing as follows: "I remember walking around with other organizers and fantasizing about what we would do after the revolution with all the buildings, what human uses they could be put to...
...The General Motors building is 50 stories high...
...Perhaps General Motors could continue its present function (though no longer, of course, as a corporation) if its employees and officers were stuffed into the spaces now used by local day-care centers in the city of New York...
...Or should the space be hospicized...
...An initial response might be that this is too high a number...
...So Miss Piercy better be prepared to install equipment from American-Standard and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 27 Crane Co...
...All such rehabilitatiort efforts require mightly administrative skills...
...Someone in the SDS Central Committee will have to figure out a way to come up with the payments the oil exporting countries will require in exchange for their precious fuel...
...And so let us join in thanking Miss Marge Piercy, a radical novelist, who has painted for us in a brief sentence or two some details of the world she expected her revolutionary colleagues to bomb, or cudgel, into shape...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...
...Thus, Miss Piercy and her co-organizers will have to mobilize purposive acts to reshape our cities in the forms of the future, the humane forms, the rich alternatives...
...Those of us who study the doctrines of revolution, hoping to glimpse the new and future world in the way of which we may be innocently by-standing, can derive some satisfaction from Miss Piercy's words...
...The view from Edgecombe Avenue (Sugar Hill) is vastly more interesting than the view from Park Avenue (Lenox Hill), so Christendom College is a Four-year, co-ed, solidly Catholic liberal arts college located in Northern Virginia, with a 74-acre campus on the Shenandoah River...
...To be sure, there is the occasional wire-service story, but not a single newspaper--so far as I know--has sent a full-time correspondent (or even a special correspondent) in the direction of Kabul...
...Miss Piercy would then have to calculate whether the routes necessary to collect 50 pre-school children per bus could be covered within a period of time that would not seem taxing to the children and their parents or guardians, or to the noncorporate government department that the SDS would establish to regulate child busing...
...A city of glass exteriors may get dirty and the windows may crack at last, but nothing will grow in spaces that do not soften and erode like the stones of Rome...
...I t begins to look as though Miss Piercy opted for her revolutionary change before getting an accurate view of the world against which she is aiming...
...In fact, they live at a rather high density...
...Since the General Motors building is fireproof, or is alleged to be, an interesting feature in its conversion might be the installation of fireplaces on every floor so that the backpacker would have a chance to experiment with the freeze-dried foods (paging General Mills) that they bought at Herman's Sports World (a corporate subsidiary of W.R...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
