The Second American Revolution

...Would a Senator Vidal rise above the rabble...

...Under such circumstances, Hollander's calm pessimism has the paradoxical quality of being--at least intellectually--reassuring...

...There is an essay on Christopher Isherwood in which the subject of homosexuality is treated gracefully and intelligently, without the propagandistic humbug that characterizes "Sex Is Politics...

...He refers to "Banksman Henry Kissinger" and "Banksman Jimmy Carter" and argues that the dying Shah of Iran was admitted to this country for medical treatment solely because "Banksman Carter" feared that the.Shah would close his American bank accounts if denied entry...

...Essential Products Co., Inc...

...Is Vidal saying that the lives of David and Jonathan preceded the life chronicled in Leviticus...

...what might have been " a n alternative to alienated labor" became "a revivifying hobby for the affluent' t--woodworking tools in every bourgeois garage...

...They came to think that faith in progress was stultifying, that American culture was thin and impoverished, that dominant Protestantism was vague and unhelpful, and that nineteenth-century positivists' conceptions of reality were narrow...

...Since the parliamentary system works reasonably well in other industrially developed countries there is no reason why it should not work for u s . " The only other country Vidal considers in this book is Italy, where he has maintained a home for several years and on which he meditates in "'Sciascia's Italy...

...Obviously not...

...The exile ended when Persia's Great King Cyrus conquered Babylon...

...There is an essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald which actually manages to say something fresh about F. Scott's brief but infinitely belabored life...

...It is one of his most peculiar performances-not because homosexuality is unworthy of intellectual defense, but because of the way Vidal goes about it...

...The Bank prefers to keep the brightest Americans bidden away in the branch offices...

...with a renewed concern for childhood itself and wi~h David Herbert Donald is Chairman of the Graduate Program in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University...

...90 Water St., Oept A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Servmg Wall Street area since 1895 abomination would be news to Jonathan's father, the late King Saul, whose disapproval is registered right there in the Bible, and can be read by everyone able to grab hold of a Gideon...

...He thinks, for example, that we should switch to parliamentar)' government...

...In an essay called "Sex Is Politics" he undertakes an intellectual defense of homosexuality...

...The arts and crafts movement, for instance, resulted in no change in the system of American mass-production...

...In either case, this is news to me, and it must be news to an awful lot of Biblical scholars, too...

...One thing about Vidal: He is consistently most dubious when he is most preachy...

...Is Vidal inventing history here...

...It is to be hoped that in future books Lears can discipline his energy with self-restraint and will come to recognize that the historian's task is to understand as well as to judge...

...Essayist Vidal, I fear, offers little encouragement...

...Vidal...

...The result was not intended, Lears insists...

...seat now occupied by S.I...

...Lears's conclusion is both obvious and correct: Whatever antimodernist thinkers intended or hoped, their movement did not cause most Americans to make their own furniture or pottery, to imitate the alleged innocence and childishness of medieval folk, to worship at the shrine of either Henry Adams's Virgin or his Dynamo, or to escape into Nirvana...

...Instead of examining~ for example, what advocates of physical fitness, the strenuous life, and militai'y discipline sought to accomplish,: he announces that Theodore Roose.velt's "cant anticipated Nixon's,~' which in turn led to " t h e 'nuclear superiority' cant of Reaganite Republicans" and of"George Will and other present-day militarists...

...On top of that, Vidal's confident assertion that the love of David and Jonathan was "obviously not" an SAVE UP TO 90% ON PERFUMES We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Rent& 1000, L'Air du Temps, Chloe, Shalimar, Norell, Halston Night, etc...

...Vidal is a champion of many causes...

...Vidal declines to share his sources of information with us, and so I am doubly baffled to read, in the following paragraph, "In earlier days, Jonathan and David were much admired...

...But it was also not unpredictable, since antimodernists were psychologically ambivalent: " t h e y often idealized premodern thought (especially its 'unconscious' dimension)" but "they remained committed to nineteenthcentury values of autonomous achievement and conscious control...

...The dull and the docile are sent to Congress and the White House...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUNE 1982 41...

...NO PLACE OF GRACE: ANTIMODERNISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, 1880-1920 Jackson Lears / Pantheon Books / $18.50 David Herbert Donald What do Henry Adams, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Adams Cram, Elbert Hubbard, Jane Addams, and Frank Norris have in common...

...Was their celebrated love for each other an abomination...

...Indeed, says Vidal, the mediocrity of American politicians is mainly due to the machinations of the Chase Manhattan Bank...

...Whatever doubts one might entertain about him, one must recognize his talent...

...What links American interest in Oriental religions, the "invention" of adolescence, the rise of militarism, an obsession with genealogy, and the revival of arts and crafts...

...Indeed, with the exception of Henry Adams, the antimodernists, in Lears's view, were much like the youthful protesters of the past decade, "whose 'revolution' was rapidly transformed into a consumer bonanza of stereos, designer jeans, and sex aids...

...I say this because the material he examines could easily have lent itself to more alarmist, if not directly' apocalyptic, treatment...

...For that reason I find myself finally wishing him well in politics...

...Similarly, other antimodernist movements "preserved an eloquent edge of prot e s t " even while they "promoted accommodation to new modes of cultural hegemony," so that, in the end, antimodernism "eased adjustment to a streamlined modern culture even as it sustained protest against that culture...

...During these decades, Lea~rs~writes, "many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims...

...Matched against Jerry Brown and other beauties, Vidal will contend for the United States Senate Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...

...Lears argues that the antimodernist movement brought about a transformation of American Culture--but not the transformation that the antimodernists consciously hoped for or expected...

...Hayakawa, who is retiring in order to devote more time to his naps...

...All, according to Jackson Lears, were part of the broad movement of antimodernism that surfaced in America during the 1880s and that by the 1920s had transformed American culture...

...G. Stanley Hall's identification of _9 adolescence as a distinct period in human life...

...and with the quest for Nirvana in the religions of the Orient...

...plus $2.00 delivery charge first bottle, 50 cents each additional one...

...Men's colognes too...

...D e s p i t e Lears's intrusive commentary and his anachronistic evaluations, No Place of Grace is an important and exciting book, perhaps the best study we have of late" nineteenth-century cultural history...

...No Place of Grace brilliantly depicts the severe cultural crisis of late nineteenthcentury America...

...There are charming pieces on screenwriting and on Frank Baum's "Oz" books...

...If his book adds little that is new on any one of these developments, it juxtaposes and : connects: these movements in a fresh and illuminating way...

...In "The Real Two-Party System," he confesses that he does not vote, and in the book's title essay Vidal forthrightly states what he believes to be the Senate's purpose: "The Senate should be kept as a home for wise men, much like England's House of life-Lords...

...The shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic basis of capitalist cultural hegemony" was "an unforeseen, unintended result of the efforts of individual men to locate meaning amid cultural confusion...

...Less obvious, and less justifiable, is Lears's judgment that the movement failed because antimodernists sought "moral reform within existing frameworks of bourgeois values and organized capitalism" and n0t--as he clearly would p r e f e r ~ " r o o t and branch institutional change...

...Unhappy to find that the thinkers he has studied were not radicals like himself, Lears rushes to attack and ridicule them...

...V i d a l entertains other statesmanlike notions...

...Vidal- the politician has always been Vidal at his worst, and the present collection of his essays offers additional evidence of this...

...He writes: "Leviticus was written either during or shortly after the Jewish exile in Babylon (586-538 B.C...

...At first glance it would seem that we have here a source of sorrow...

...In "The State of the Union Revisited," for example, he reiterates his thesis that every President of the United States is, in fact, a retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank...

...Against the "evasive banality" of "official modern culture in industrial America," these antimodernists took 'up arms...

...On the other hand, a spell on Capitol Hill might serve in the long run to improve Vidal's writing by rendering him so weary of public affairs that politics would never again pucrify his prose...

...with a search for form and meaningful ritual in Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism...

...Although Lears repeatedly warns his reader--and perhaps himself--that "antimodern dissent was too complex to be fully explained by invoking class and cultural determinants," "in the end his Marxism wins Over his Freudianism and he concludes flatly that antimodernism reflected " a particular class and power position" "of its advocates...

...According to Vidal, "Italy's two great unloved political parties" operate in a society based on "moral anarchy," which makes me wonder if our would-be senator has thought his proposal through...

...Even Carl T. Rowan can do better than this...

...If elected, he could talk nonsense to his fellow senators, and, having got that out of the way, he could speak more sensibly to his readers, who, after all, cherished him first, and will cherish him last...

...This is the first time I have seen it argued that one of the original five books of Moses was written in the Sixth Century B.C., rather than several centuries earlier, as is commonly assumed to be the case...

...Over this broad range of cultural and intellectual developments Lears, who teaches history at the University of Missouri, moves with knowledge and assurance...

...Or is he saying that the lives of David and Jonathan preceded the composition of Leviticus...

...at $15.00 per oz...

...Is this good news or bad for fans of Vidal's writing, among whom I count myself...

...Similarly, Lears labels G. Stanley Hall's studies of adolescence and his call for "healthy personality" as "fatuities," which "anticipated those of William Reich, Hugh Hefner, and the more deluded among the countercultural radicals of the 1960s...

...Since it was thought that the disasters of 586 might have been averted had the Jews been a bit more strait-laced in their deportment, Leviticus was drafted...

...His intent is to "connect psychic with social change," to show "a link between Freud and Gramsci," but the two approaches are never fully integrated...

...Here in this book there are essays that are as fine as any written in recent years...

...THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION Gore Vidal / Random House / $15.00 Mitchell S. Ross Word comes from the great state of California that Gore Vidal, literary politician, has once again transmogrified into Gore Vidal, professional politician...

...And how is parliamentary government faring there...

...And there is a superb meditation on Edmund Wilson where we find the following observation, so wise and true that it ought to be carved into Wilson's gravestone, with copies distributed to every aspiring author in America: "To the end of a long life, he kept on making the only thing he thought worth making: sense, a quality almost entirely lacking in American literature where stupidity--if sufficiently sincere and authentic --is deeply revered, and easily achieved...

...In defense of his point of view, Vidal traces antihomosexual sentiment back to Biblical times, in particular the book of Leviticus...

...L ears seeks the sources of antimodernism through a combination of psychoanalytical and Marxist analyses...

...A biographical appendix listing sixtysix antimodernist leaders, with basic facts about their lives, leads to the judgment that they were mostly from " t h e better educated strata of the old-stock ruling class...

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...He is a very odd fish, this Mr...

...Tolerant of all religions, Cyrus let the Jews go home to Jerusalem, where they began to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed in 586...

...with the revival of interest in physical fitness and military discipline as antidotes to racial and class impotence, an impulse best illustrated by the career of Theodore Roosevelt, with the awakened interest in medieval art and culture, as products o f " t h e childhood of the race...

...In other words, Senator Vidal would in all likelihood see it as his primary responsibility to stand up and say wise things about the Chase Manhattan Bank's all-powerful role in American politics...

...At a time when intellectual history in the United States seems moribund, work with such range, power, and enthusiasm is especially welcome...

...This would render it possible for the United States to have, for the first time in two centuries, real political parties...

...After all, it is likely that a victorious Vidal would proceed to dissipate his energies in debates over tax cuts, anti-abortion legislation, and sub40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 sidles for farmers, these high-minded concerns being, of course, a senator's lot...

...No Place of Grace examines and judges numerous aspects of this antimodernist impulse, Lears deals with the arts and crafts movement, which followed the inspiration of John Ruskin and William Morris in rejecting the impersonal perfection of assembly-line products...