Bombs, Beards, and Beads
Shorey, Kenneth Paul
Book Review: Bombs, Beards, and Barricades by Anthony Esler Stein and Day, $8.95 The New Totalitarian by Roland Huntford Stein and Day, $10.00 Who will buy these books? Who will read them? The...
...whether it is an artistic revolution in turn-of-the-century Paris, or a sexual revolution in mid-century America-the basic pattern remains the same...
...Huxley's Brave New World is called to mind, and we are told of a land where nothing much really matters to anybody, including the young...
...And the dictator-unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories-will do well to encourage that freedom...
...We would all be better off if we could face the next generational upheaval with drier eyes and fewer heartburnings...
...In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate...
...The kids, the man says, have been in revolt for 150 years-because (now get this, and get it good), because kids are "congenitally more open to the winds of ideology than their more settled elders...
...While it certainly is true that most young people have energy and passionate enthusiasms, only rarely are original ideas, much less rationales for revolutions of various kinds, hatched in the brains of the very young...
...Perhaps Esler and Huntford have things to say to each other...
...it is, in fact, a little symphony to young ideals, to what are called "the dynamics of generational conflict...
...Neutrality, it seems, has become a Swedish watchword...
...Esler writes of Germany in 1815, France in 1830, Austria in 1848, Russia in 1881, and then slips and slides around awhile until he hits "The World-Wide Youth Revolution, 1960 and After...
...Chapter Two of this account is entitled "Everyone Believes in His Youth that the World Began with Him-and It Did...
...Whether it is nationalism in Germany in 1815, socialism in Russia in the 1870s or Freudianism (?) in America in the 1920s...
...All the babies that come into the world every day are starting from scratch, and we would do well to listen to them, take them to our bosoms and try to understand their desperate need to rebel...
...I guess I must have been out to lunch, because I missed it...
...Political and religious neutrality, coupled with a kind of intellectual and emotional neutrality, has given rise to a breed of men and women who say they are perfectly happy, yet who move through life (in Robert Louis Stevenson's phrase) "like smiling images pushed from behind...
...mores are determined "by common consent...
...He claims that all this jumping around in the world trying to do stuff (William Saroyan's delicious phrase) is part and parcel of a great Movement-a sort of Youth vs...
...Surely if someone were anxious to put together a modest private library, $18.95 could be spent on other, better books-though these two aren't altogether worthless...
...At least he is acquiescent, and he has his compensations...
...One thinks of Woody Allen's routine: "Sweden is like a wild, swinging country: everybody scores-you don't have to be tall...
...Age thing, surely one of the more spectacularly fatuous observations of 1972...
...continued on page 27) BOMBS (continued from page 25) "Whether the Swede is happy in his Utopia is a moot point," Huntford concludes...
...Maybe he's right...
...Gosta Rodhe calls "a lack of tension" in Sweden...
...Actually, it didn't, but let that pass...
...The book hums this tune on every page...
...He would certainly not want to change his condition...
...if the apparatus of the state fails to function smoothly at all times, there is a general belief that it will in due course...
...The bland dictatorship is horizontal, not vertical...
...I always get the impression the American cops are going to knock on the country and say, 'All right, Sweden, we know what you're doing in there.' ") Sweden, Huntford says, "has pursued sexual emancipation with indefatigable tenacity...
...He lives as a consumer...
...and the point is clearly made that Swedes tend to link the concept of freedom with sexual activity, while regarding the sex act itself "with a certain pagan insouciance...
...Kenneth Paul Shorey Kenneth Paul Shorey has written for National Review, Modern Age, Rally, The University Bookman, The Intercollegiate Review and the New Guard...
...I think I have to go with Saroyan, though, when he steps back and says, "The trouble with people is, they're alive and don't know what do do about it...
...Huxley's preface to Brave New World is quoted ("As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase...
...Sweden is a spiritual desert, but that seems to have no ill effect on the Swede...
...The theme is stated at the beginning, taken up and orchestrated, then allowed to swell into a hymn-like paean to Youth...
...Anthony Esler asserts that "tomorrow's youth will be up in arms against today's realities," whatever they are, and that "he (the youth) will have his way with history," whatever that means...
...Practically everything is seen to...
...He presently works for J. B. Lippincott Company...
...Marshall McLuhan has told us that books are going out of fashion...
...Just so...
...The kids try it first...
...The publisher is asking $8.95 for the first, $10.00 for the second...
...there is what Dr...
...His contentment depends entirely on material possessions...
...Perhaps a lack of tension in America (or Germany, or France, or Austria or Russia) might make for drier eyes and fewer heartburnings...
...Roland Huntford's book is about Sweden today...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
