The Great Relearning

...It was instead the Soviets' peculiarly twentieth-century notion that they could sweep aside not only the old social order but also its religious ethic, which had been millennia in the making ("common decency," Orwell called it) and reinvent morality . . . here . . . now .. . "at the point of a gun," in the famous phrase of the Maoists...

...The twentieth century began with the formulation of Marxism, Freudianism, and Modernism in the late nineteenth...

...Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their NeoLouis bergeres, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century's Hangover...

...They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself—but also the capacity to escape to the stars on space ships if it blew...

...The story of how the Bauhaus...

...And now the twenty-first begins with the Great Relearning...

...But above all they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean hubris, to defy the gods and try to push man's power and freedom to limitless, god-like extremes...

...The real issue in Alaska is whether or not America should maximize its, economic domestic oil and gas production to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil and its negative balance of payments—and do so in an environmentally acceptable manner...

...Inside the Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are the abandoned styles of the past...

...People of the next century, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with a ghastly awe upon our time...

...T n 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement...

...His conclusion, according to the Senator: If oil development were to occur near their usual calving grounds, the caribou would simply move a mile or so away...

...Prudhoe Bay itself, the largest field in the U.S...

...Up on the shelf in the den, next to the set of, The Encyclopedia Brittanica and the great books, one now finds the cassettes: Shanks Akimbo That Thing with the Cup...

...They will look back in awe . . . without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero...

...Quite the opposite...

...It is currently producing at a peak rate of about 1.5 million barrels a day—about a fifth of U.S...

...In politics the twentieth century's great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism...

...One of the latest salvos fired by the anti-development forces came in the form of a letter to an influential newspaper by a spokesman for an environmental group...

...The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero...

...without using any sheets at all or that you and five other people shouldn't drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take token from the same cigarette...

...But in the sexual revolution, too, the painful dawn has already arrived, and the relearning is imminent...

...The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant...

...The nineteenth century began with the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth...

...cedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of our current interlude, here in the dying years of the twentieth century...

...But I. should mention .the soaring spiritual duher- ance with which.the movement' began, the passionate conviction Of the Bauhaus's leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture anddesign man could free himself from the dead hand of the past...

...Can the caribou adapt...

...Moreover, the Interior Department's coastal plain estimates are for recoverable oil...

...By the late 1970s, however, architects themselves were beginning to complain of the dead hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, which leaked from rain and collapsed from snow, the tiny bare beige office cubicles, which made workers feel like component parts, the glass walls, which let in too much heat, too much cold, too much glare, and no air at all...

...The old strike hall poster of a Promethean worker in a blue shirt breaking his chains across his mighty chest was in truth the vision of ultimate human freedom the movement believed in at the outset...

...to raise them now is really to raise non-issues...

...Up until two years ago pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the Seven-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight storeys high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside...

...Today the relearning has reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China have begun to wonder how best to convert Communism into something other than, in Susan Sontag's phrase, Successful Fascism...

...c tart from zero" was,the slogan of the Bauhaus School...

...The energy and economic future of the nation are too important to be sidetracked by rion-issue,s., Oil exploration in Alaska should pro- ceed...

...the cities of 2007 will look more like the cities of 1927 than the cities of 1987...

...The great American contribution to the twentieth century's start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called "the sexual...

...Dubious quibbles aside, the basic argument for development remains cogent, simple, and pressing...

...Mobil® ©1987 Mobil Corporation THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 15...

...The architects are busy rummaging about in what the artist Richard Merkin calls the Big Closet...

...Still, the acreage under discussion does include the calving grounds...

...In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt back-lit plastic sign: TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON ENCOUNTER SESSIONS INSIDE...

...What about the environment...

...at 10 billion barrels, has been producing for 10 years...

...And how was it that they had now returned...

...There is no law of history that says a new century must start ten or twenty years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way...

...fields are yielding more and more of the oil as technology advances...

...T he Great Relearning—if anything 1 so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not as the end of the twentieth century but the prelude to the twenty-first...

...In fact, within the context of risks the oil industry usually faces in wildcat areas, those odds are actually rather attractive...

...At one point Ken Kesey organized a pilgrimage to ,Storiehenge with the idea of, returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization's point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do', it better...

...With the school's blessing, she intended to take the signed copies back to the campus and hold a public auction...

...The current favorite rediscoveries: Classical, Secession, and Moderne (Art Deco...

...Any .oil found .in the coastal plain, or anywhere else in the U.S., would be;more than welcome...

...The relearning is now underway in earnest...

...all the oil in any field is never fully iei.,uvered...

...as Progress, to use an old word...

...The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental at-mosphere...

...At the HaightAshbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot...

...Much of this controversy has centered on whether a. relatively small portion of these lands-1.5 million acres along the Beaufort Sea Coastal Plain, out of a total of 19 million acres—should be opened to oil exploration...

...First, the writer states that there is "only a 19 percent chance of finding any oil at all in the Arctic refuge:' But even at those odds—and taking risks is what the oil business is all about—the coastal plain represents 'the best hope for a major onshore oil strike in the United States...

...Relearning on the wing, the architects are off on a binge of eclecticism comparable to the Victorian period's a century ago...

...Solzhenitsyn insisted that the villain behind the Soviet concentration-camp network was not Stalin or Lenin (who invented the term concentration camp) or even Marxism...

...The letter also argues that if oil is discovered in the Arctic refuge, "we will not be able to extract all of that oil, given current technology...

...imports are rising and domestic production is falling...

...We had hoped these questions were settled once and for all...

...The coastal plain site is less than 100 miles from the Prudhoe Bay field...

...Senator Murkowski has discussed the issue with a university scientist who has been working with caribou herds for many years...

...My favorite moment in Jessica Hahn's triumphal tour of Medialand this fall came when a ten-year-old girl, a student at a private school, wearing .a buttercup blouse, a cardigan sweater, and her school uniform skirt, approached her outside a television studio with a stack of Playboy magazines featuring the famous Hahn nude form and asked her to autograph them...

...And constant improvements: are being made in secondary and tertiary recovery methods...

...Would it truly be despoiled, as the environmentalists state, if drilling were to take place...

...The arguments against development, when considered against the nation's needs, seem to fall under the weight of both past experience and expert scrutiny...

...And now, in 1968, they were relearning .. . the laws of hygiene . . . by getting the Mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot...

...The controversy over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge fills us with feelings of déjà vu...

...Indeed, the caribou herd thrives in the area of the pipeline, in spite of dire warnings to the contrary...

...Two years ago the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought into any home...

...But Senator Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska has pointed out that the caribou herd has, in fact, quadrupled at Prudhoe Bay during the oil development years, and since construction of the Alaskan pipeline...

...The proceeds would go to the poor...

...It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the-most extraordinary religious experiments of all tinie...

...revolution...

...All may be summed up in a single term, requiring no amplification: AIDS...

...It is already clear that the large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new...

...If oil is found in the plain, according to Interior Department data, it could represent between 600 million and 9.2 billion barrels...

...For intellectuals in the West the painful dawn began with the publication of the Gulag Archipelago in 1973...

...A major issue environmentalists raise concerns Alaskan wildlife...

...a tiny artists' movement in Germany in the 1920s, swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created glass-box face of .the modern American'' ccity is:: a familiar one, and I won't, retell it...

...The same anti-development arguments were raised in the '60s and '.70s, first over drilling at Prudhoe Bay, and later over the construction of the pipeline...

...The point is, we'll never know unless we drill...

...Drilling would never occur anywhere if it became conditional on whether 100 percent of the oil could be produced...

...Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes', swept aside—quite purposely—wete those that said you shouldn't use other people's toothbrushes or sleep On other people's mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely...

...The letter makes a couple of statements worthy of examination...

...That's got to be the silliest anti-development argument ever raised...

...The non-issue in Alaska Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has in recent months been much shrouded in controversy...

...production—but will' soon enter its inevitable period of decline...

...This process, namely the relearning —following a Promethean and unpreTom Wolfe is author of The Right Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House, and, most recently, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar Straus Giroux...

...Given that system's bad reputation in the West today (even among the French intelligentsia), it is instructive to read John Reed's' Ten Days That Shook the World—before turning to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago...

...Of all the animal species in the area, Secretary Hodel cited the caribou as the most likely to be affected...

...because the national interest requires it...