Great tumult of print

...Let me step back a bit here...

...The world calls forth an amplitude of comment each week, argument over the issues of the day, warnings of disaster, testy criticism of the nation's rulers, analysis, denunciation, celebration—a great tumult of print churning up like foam in the wake of public events...

...As a result, Kennan said, our response should be both resolute and moderate in scope, an attempt to contain Russia within its postwar borders while we trusted to time to ameliorate the character of the regime...

...In truth the exercise has more in common with keeping a diary...

...But in fact one reads very little political journalism written in such a tone...

...Just about everybody has opinions, which suggests that just about everybody is trying to figure things out, some deliberately, an some without quite knowing wha they're about, but all trying...

...It would probably be fair to say that nothing published by Macdonald during a long life devoted to political journalism had a greater impact than that one review...

...But in both cases a largely fortuitous factor of timing—an audience's unpredictable readiness to hear that message on that subject— explains why these two articles, on their surface indistinguishable from countless others just as germane, managed to escape the common fate...

...They make sense...

...The rise of Hitler, for example...

...The road from the spinning jenny to the computer is clear enough, but where does it go from here...

...Things are not arbitrary...

...The form ol political journalism—its public charactei as a message to the President—is illusory, a convention of genre...

...Perhaps the world will pay attention...

...His career—the circumstances which allowed him to rise, what he did at the height of his power, and the causes of his downfall—can be seen as a single event, a thing with its own inner significance...

...But other guesses are equally reason able...

...Why do we write it...

...On its surface the intent of political journalism—the sort of writing I am talking about here in the first instance...

...Ir is hard not to wonder, going through a pile of more or less current magazines, trying to keep up, just who reads all this stuff...

...The attempt to figure it out and put it down strikes most of them as reasonable enough...

...The scribbling instinct is too strong to be explained as a calculated form of self-advancement, and the chances for success too slim for a rational man to bet his future on it...

...The thing which draws one on is a sense that the logic is there, if one is only smart enough to recognize it...

...To the colonization of this galaxy, as a base for the leap to others...

...But our fate a individuals is not necessarily the sam thing as our fate as a community, as culture with a history...

...The stance is one of engagement...

...This was sensible advice, clearly aimed at policy-makers in the Truman administration who had not yet quite decided whether to treat Stalin as another Hitler, or as an apprehensive and misunderstood Friend of the People to be tamed by trust...

...You're bound to get an argument when you try to say just what the significance is, but that's only because historians are contentious...

...The logic in that case fairly grabs the observer by the throat...

...Containment has been our policy ever since, and Kennan won that special aura of authority reserved for those who are not only wise, but attended to...

...We live in history...

...The desire runs deep...

...perhaps not...

...The writer has got something very much on his mind...

...Sometimes I am gloomy on thi point: the love of war and weapons seem to be the central passion of our history and it is in our nature, where the reall...

...but the question might be asked of any sort, from poetry to autobiography, which addresses the common experience of men in history—is clear enough...

...What is it for...

...if no one will pay he will write for free, and if no one will publish he will write for the drawer...

...Others are obscure, like the industrial revolution...

...Another example would be Dwight Macdonald's review in the New Yorker of Michael Harrington's book The Other America, an account of the (at that time, and now again) all-but-forgotten poor of America...

...We go on writing long after we learn all that is up in the air...

...Public questions are like chunks of history in this regard...

...One can imagine political journalism written in a spirit of warm detachment, like a scientific diarist, say, describing for his own pleasure some wrinkle in the life of the honey bee...

...We might take the disturbance of Europe by Napoleon as a paradigm...

...Everything reaches back into the past...

...important things are involved, to be trui till death...

...Most of it has the urgency of unsolicited advice...

...Just about everybody—and certainly every political journalist— sounds as if he were pretty sure he has got things just about right...

...I read quite a lot of political jour nalism, trying to keep up, and then seems to be almost as many opinions a: writers...

...The subject is one of pressing public importance, at least in the writer's view, and the message is directed to the men with the power to decide...

...We are too cussed, or nimble, to agree why things are as they are, but no one seems to argue they are incomprehensible...

...Once in a great while it does...

...But that isn't the 29 August 1980: 457 common fate and writers are smart enough to know it...

...Samuel Johnson somewhere describes the delusion of the young writer who imagines, waking on the day his first book is to be published, that all London will be talking about it, and pointing him out on the streets...

...The tone of most writing suggests it is the most natural thing in the world, as if the finished piece were eagerly awaited and certain to be handsomely rewarded...

...If the point of political journalism is to join the history of one's time, "to make a contribution," then Kennan and Macdonald have certainly succeeded, and we can stop wondering why men write the stuff, because we've got the answer...

...It would be nice to think so, but a lot of sensible people think a great industrial crash is at least as likely...

...The most frequent remark a writer hears about his book is regret the speaker hasn't had a chance to read it yet...

...Harrington's book was on the verge of being forgotten, too, when Macdonald's review rescued it, gave it a vogue in government circles, and helped spark the social activism and antipoverty programs of the 1960s...

...Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty did not simply spring from nowhere, but had partisans, opponents, a history and reasons for being, just like the war in Vietnam, which eventually absorbed all the funds that might have allowed the poverty programs to work...

...The trouble with the answer is that it subjects the rewards of writing—the things men do it for—to a process almost as arbitrary as a lottery...

...X", was that it actually reached and convinced its intended audience...

...The torrent rises from quite a different spring, a conviction that if we only approach it rightly, we can figure this thing out...

...Figuring these things out—like philosophy, chess, pure mathematics, painting, writing poetry, acting—is poorly paid as a rule, and rarely has noticeable consequences, but people do it anyway...

...They are not writing for me, and ] am not writing for them...

...One of th things which separates men from othe animals, we are told, is the foreknow ledge of death...

...Like most people, I've got a sense that history is heading somewhere, that big chunks of it—and perhaps even the whole of ithave the roundedness of small chunks...

...That we don' know, although we can sense it unfold ing...

...What happens to the initiatives of government is not arbitrary...

...We can sense the logic unfolding all around us, in the big things as well as the small—the rise of the car-makers and the oil industry, the collapse of the passenger railroads, the flight to suburbia and disappearance of the family farm, the federal program for Aid to Dependent Children and the death of the central cities, the unification of Germany in the 19th century and its dismemberment in the 20th, the invention of the nuclear bomb and of the missiles to carry it, the collapse of currencies and the rise of gold, the web linking shopping centers, supermarkets and hard tomatoes...

...He is driven to tug on sleeves...

...Whether animals are re ally ignorant I can't say, but it's clear w base our humanity to an important degre on knowing our fate...

...Quite the contrary...

...the discussion simply continues internally , with opponents of our own imagining...

...Some writers make a million dollars, some capture the public's fancy and become figures of almost mythic appeal, and some take the establishment by the ears and set the parameters of debate on a subject of importance for years to come...

...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 458...

...We write to learn what we think, tc make sense of the inchoate strands of out future, so we may comprehend the nature of our fate, not for any practical purpose—although we contribute what we may, and get from it what we can— but in accordance with our desire to know...

...Some chunks of history announce themselves clearly, even when you're in the middle of them...

...His own sensibility doubtless had something to do with its effect, just as Kennan's knowledge of the Soviet Union was partly responsible for his...

...We live in meaning as fish live in water...

...A little fame and ready money would be okay too...

...Other chunks of history have a similar roundedness—the division of the Roman Empire, say, or what Spain did with the gold of Mexico and Peru, or the consequences of introducing slaves into the New World...

...Whatever his subject— large in the manner of war, or small in the manner of farm parity—he is goaded forward by the desire to understand in the round what he senses going on around him...

...Not knowing the men in charge he addresses himself to the general public, in the hope the message will get through...

...The future is implicit in the present...

...He can't help himself...

...they unfold as they do for reasons, in accord with an inner logic...

...But it isn't that way...

...Who reads this mighty torrent...

...things may turn out very differ ently...

...But in truth the writer is driven...

...Such events have something more than a narrative line...

...Back in 1947 George Kennan published an analysis of Soviet foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, suggesting that Russian probing of the West was the result of politics in the Kremlin, not part of a fabulous master plan for the conquest of the world...

...The whole process grows warmer when someone cares enough tc protest, amend, refute or clarify, but the silence of the audience doesn't stop us...

...Here I go, tossing in another bucketful of a thousand words or so, as if there weren't enough already, as if something vital was still unsaid, when the truth is no mortal could possibly get through it all...

...It is the thing which sustains us, and I think it suggests why we write...

...The fact so many of them go on writing anyway suggests they have got another, better reason for what they do...

...The remarkable thing about Kennan's article, signed only "Mr...

...In the back of every writer's mind, at least when he starts out, is the secret hope lightning will strike: he'll find it in him to say the right thing at the right time, and from then on the world will listen...

...The thing we all agree uponimplicitly, as suggested by the fact w< are writing at all—is that we are goinj somewhere, things have meaning, oui fate is in large measure our doing, and i will all make much better sense in retros pect...

...One week's wave has hardly ebbed before the next rushes in, scores of periodicals full of the stuff, not just magazines of opinion like Commonweal, but scholarly journals, fat Sunday papers, general interest magazines and the news weeklies...