Troubled Journey

...The series of six tickets is $20.00 and may be reserved by sending a check.payable to "Seminary Lecture Series" to Seminary, West Neck Road, Huntington, New York 11743...

...The essentially liberal discourse of the academy seems to stutter into incoherence before, the specter of the sixties' illiberal eruptions in its midst...

...Prance, a no-nonsense woman doctor', Miss Birdseye, a Boston do-gooder who keeps her humor about her...

...give other persons and movements their But there was something else at work due --so long, of course, as they attract in these lines besides a cold, empirical his broad curiosity in the first place...

...He knew that all black kids did not steal bikes, but he also knew that, in his experi- ence, the kids who stole bikes were black...

...But if Olive was to be this important, she should have been more complicated from the beginning of the film: we should have seen more internal conflict, and less obsession...

...Morris documented the villainy of unscrupulous private provid- ers who bid up costs to the city (in health care, for example...

...anger: the confidence of a writer raising The title of Morris's 1980 book, The his family in integrated, even "chang-Cost of Good Intentions, a study of the hag" neighborhoods and schools, and failure of New York City's liberal exper- standing without sentiment on the authoriment during the sixties, primed many to ity of his experiences as a Trenton state think of him as a neoconservative...

...Early on, Matusow iden- tifies but then abandons a potentially revelatory fissure within postwar liberalism itself: the Kennedy intellectu- als fled a profoundly challenging liberalism of mixed existentialist and old republican pedigree, embracing instead the almost manic optimism and glorified pragmatism of Camelot, with its gov- ernment of charisma (a parody of existen- tial heroism) and its mad-rationalism as elaborated by Robert McNamara (a per- verse caricature of traditional Yankee ef- ficiency...

...And, once again, he is even harder on self-righteously pas- sionate liberals than on radicals, whose foibles are so painful and obvious in hindsight...

...It's as much a narrative of political theater as of actual policy, for the underlying trends toward a corporatist welfare state seem to have their own momentum -- Morris's "long waves" ? Nevertheless, political theater runs deep, as our musings about the move- ments of the sixties have suggested, and Siegel's account of the whole postwar period is compelling: Republicans, inconsolable over the loss of China and bereft of alternatives short of nuclear war, poured vitriol over Acheson, the man they loved to hate...

...Similarly, Morris stands his ground as a veteran welfare administrator when he scores liberals for their role in killing Nixon's Family Assistance Plan --"an absolutely direct approach" to getting people out of poverty, "both conserva- tive and radical at the same time...

...About half his playmates and best friends were black [one won- ders how many of Morris's detrac- tors could make that statement] so he wasn't a racist...

...TROUBLED JOURNEY...

...With RIGHTS & RESPONSIBILITIES OF INDIVIDUALS & COMMUNITIES: REFLECTIONS ON HAVING REACHED 1984 The Seminary of the Immaculate Conception announces six lec- tures on the relationship between the individual and the commu- nity from the perspectives of philosophy, economics, and theol- o...

...Though it might not have admitted it, this stark, demanding liberalism fed on American cultural residues --the lean, rambling virtues of the old republic, the musical solidarity of the black church and other religious and folk traditions, grass-roots populist revolt, urban immig- rant labor organizing -- and these in turn gave it its 'special moral resonance in its encounters with its regnant, errant Camelot cousin...

...He argues, for example, that liberals mounted hysterical denuncia- tions of Nixon's shabby but ultimately cannier approach to ending their war primarily to displace their own gnawing guilt as architects of the anti-Communist crusade in Southeast Asia...

...In one sense, Morris does little more than demonstrate the irreducible "complex- it),," as he calls it, of all the central challenges, from racism to militarism, and invoke "maturity" as the only ap- propriate posture before the intractables of demographics, natural cycles, eco-nomic development, and, ye s, human na- ture as he has found it among inmates, bureaucrats, investors, and the unem-ployed...

...It was this twilight liberalism, conceived in the shadow of the Holocaust, "on the other side of despair," with its resistance to "atomized" mass culture, which found its way from Lionel Trilling's darker musings into Norman Mailer's thirst for the "hip," and thence, by a curious turn, into some of the early forms of cultural and political protest against bureau-cratization and the corporate state --by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Dylan...

...I suspect that it was from this older postwar liberalism, exiled, outraged, vi- olated, that the movements of the 1960s drew their first, best strength...

...in another sense, though, as Morris fills out such abstractions in his grounded, luminous prose, he brings to life that strain of existential and republi- can liberalism which Camelot so cavalierly suppressed and which Matusow leaves submerged in his narra- tive of clashes between the liberal elitists and the "radical" extremists...

...espe- cially searing is his description of the Kennedy/Johnson intellectuals' "psy-chological" approach to the Vietnam War, which traded blood for appear- ances in ways that make one wonder anew why the grand strategists of that effort are still at large in our universities...

...The most interesting characters in The Bostonians, the only life in the party, are Dr...

...and he insisted on the necessity of provid- ing more public services (more thorough education, for example) in a complex urban environment...

...The very writing of liberal history like Matusow's presupposes the values, character type, and ethic he tells us are gone...

...Much of Redgrave's performance simply consists in long shots of her sitting by a window, mournfully waiting for Verena to return...

...What sense can it make, then, of the illiberal currents of the decade...

...We respond to God in work running a challenging prep school, serving in pastoral work and other ministries...

...Morris knows he's going to come up with better arguments than the various radical movements did for their own causes, and he does...

...And so on, through Nixon's comeback, the liberal Watergate coup, and Ronald Reagan's return to Main Street...

...At least until now: the first camp (and many upwardly mobile escapees from the second) is passing into a white collar professionalism increasingly distinct from the second camp, which is rapidly becoming a hapless army of the working poor and unemployed...

...What those movements really were, however, and what they revealed of the fault lines in the dominant liberal dispen- sation, went largely unexplained...

...Like Redgrave, the movie just sits there, with the implication that all this is somehow worth our interest, and maybe even noble.9 Nothing like James's irony lightens this heaviness, certainly not Red- grave's apparent zeal for the role of social crusader and martyr...

...his sheer imaginative honesty, grounded in experience as a 1960s front-line adminis- trator of urban programs, lets him dissect the period's "excesses" with a wry, classical stoicism and a slightly mis- chievous moral edge that retains its op- timism within a sense of its own limits.9 Better, finally, the longer, postwar view taken by Frederick Siegel, a young histo- rian who construes the past forty years of American history as a contention among deeply rooted political mythologies thrown into conflict by an emerging cor- porate politi.cal economy...

...Was there actu- ally something of a suppressed, perhaps more authentic strain of Americari liberalism in the eruptions of the late six- ties...

...please include a stamped self-addressed envelope...

...And Morris essentially affirms the con- nection the New Left always made be- tween the multiversity's bureaucratic "dehumanization" and the bureaucratic banality of the war, spotlighting the worm (or Leviathan) in liberalism itself, the mad-rational gangsterism anticipated by Max Weber and Franz Kafka and evoked in anti-war mythology...

...But the ques- tion I think he really wants to pose to liberals and the left is, what does it cost us, politically and programmatically, not to admit the evidence of our senses and work from there...

...Come and serve the Lord as a monk of the Benedictine Community of Saint Louis Priory I~r more i~formation about our monastery write: t Saint Loala, MO ~141 Similarly, in A Time of Passion, Mor-ris almost flaunts his lack of sentimental- ity about the hard problems he lives with by choice, both personally and profes- sionally: The great majority [of Ameri- cans] most parted company from the liberal elite in their view of blacks and civil rights...

...But it is pre- cisely in the depths of that recognition, I hear Morals saying, that quintessential liberalism regenerates itself...

...The irony here is that Morris's un-flinching realism about the disappointing conditions and consciousness of the op- pressed gives him both the perspective and the credibility to develop indictments of the postwar liberal dispensation that really stick...

...But once again, as the book's title at le~t faintly implies, Morris's targets are less the obvious villains identified by the rebels than the rebels' own histrionics, which led so inevitably to incapacitating distortion and despair...

...We respond to God as brothers as we support each other in our common life...

...The Cost of Good Inten- tions, even as it overdid just a bit its author's delight in skewering liberal mystification, purveyed in the sheer hon- esty of its reportage a ringing defense of the public sector...

...Some-thing extraordinarilypainful and promis- ing animated millions of Americans, and one sometimes suspects that we as a na- tion haven't resolved the sixties' wrench- ing dilemmas as much as we've fled them...

...The illegiti- honor, community, and progress he macy,, venereal disease, child manages to evoke and sustain...

...He knew that white kids didn't steal #our lunch money, but he learned the hard way to be on his guard when he met black kids he didn't know on his way to school...

...He says he's on a "personal exploration" of those "momentous changes" between 1960 and 1980 which happen to interest him...

...For almost a decade following the appearance of naive celebrations like Charles Reich's The Greening of America, neoconservative revisionism roundly condemned the New Left, the counterculture, black power, and third world insurgencies, subjecting those movements to standards their dwindling defenders rejected as hypocritical and "bourgeois...

...If there is anything upon which Morris casts a cold eye, it is the left's perennial anticipatory'flutter -ings over every real or imagined stirring among minorities and workers, followed by convoluted explanations of why the stirring failed to become a progressive movement, why the subject poplllation failed to break through one or another layer of false consciousness to perceive its "true" class interest...

...It is probably symptomatic that Allen J. Matusow, professor of American his- tory and dean of humanities at Rice Uni- versity, the most "established" historian THE UNRAVELING OF AMERICA: A HISTORY OF LIBEI~ALISM IN THE 1960s Allen J. Matusow Harper & Row, $22, 542 pp...

...The broad, permeable "working-middle class" of the postwar years no longer buffers --and joins -- the top and bottom of society in the old fitful American consensus of aspirations...

...He had worked out a rather careful set of distinc- tions...

...The New Deal legacy undergoes its own permutations, too, as its neolib- eral critics have been quick to note, but the essential themes of jobs and justice remain...

...In this he abuse, broken families, and is the quintessential liberal of the kind the juvenile delinquency that Camelot men were not, wearing his no- swamped the city social agencies tions, if not lightly, then at least not pon- were concentrated in black and derously, and finding it within himself to Puerto Rican families...

...TOM O'BRIEN (Beginning with this issue, Tom O'Brien will serve as Commonweal's regular movie critic...

...He knew that some of his black friends were smarter in school than he was, but he also knew that the disruptive kids, and the kids who couldn't or wouldn't do the work, were black...

...It was a corporate liberalism that eviscerated them, draining their myths and rites of passage in its structural transformations of our political eco-nomy, misdirecting young people's valor and hopes, that so many young Ameri- cans then struggling to come of age came unstuck from honor and community in- stead --b!tterly, often violently, ir- redeemably...

...Most drug they would never have denied...

...Is it possible that she identified too closely...

...he pointed out that "efficiency" in public services could mean increased, not lessened, costs ("more efficient garbage collection is no saving, if the cit~ would have otherwise merely left the garbage on the street...

...It is surely one of history's harshest ironies that so much courage and carnage are demanded of us for so little gain...

...Alan Gewirth October 14th at 4 p.m...

...John E. Smith September 30th at 8 p.m...

...For forty years, however, the two older camps were locked in struggle for control of the American consensus, each wreaking revenge on the other for its moments of eclipse: McCarthyism is the revenge of the fast camp for its twenty years of impotence under Rooseveltian tyranny...

...These roles are played respectively by Linda Hunt, Jessica Tandy, and Nancy Marchand, three professionals who know how to take a back seat when they see one...

...In Siegel's panorama, defenders of small-town Jeffersonian virtue, precari- ously allied with elements of big business under the banner of free enterprise, are arrayed against patrician cosmopolitans like FDR and Dean Acheson, who in turn allied themselves with immigrant labor- ing masses craving opportunity and jus- tice through government action...

...Morris's chastening empiricism about "the achievable" drives him to some philosophical reflections, and here he surely transcends Matusow's deferral of great questions for "future historians...

...If public housing proj- horizons are actually bro, der than ects were increasingly unlivable Matusow's...

...Better Midge Decter's cut-and-slash polemics...

...Better the soundings of Hunter Thompson or Joan Didion, reporting candidly from within the "unraveling" which Matusow pretends to survey from a vantage point unwashed by the period's high tides...

...C HARLES MORRIS throws one such lifeline out to those who know how to grasp it...

...and Mrs...

...and crime-ridden, it was because A non-academic --in fact, an im-of their new black and Puerto pressive autodidact with broad govern- Rican tenants.., firemen wasted ment and banking experience, Morris has their resources chasing false no obligations in A Time of Passion to alarms set by black and Puerto anything ,except whatever notions of Rican children...

...John Coleman November 11th at 8 p.m...

...Burrage, a New York matron who pat- ronizes feminism in an 1870s version of ~adical chic...

...We never learn...

...Among the Camelot men, only Robert Kennedy seems to have become troubled by that flight as he confronted real heroes like Martin Luther King and the best republican traditions of the anti-war movement...

...In the long run, though it proved ephemeral, the hippie movement was profoundly significant, portending as it did the erosion of liberal values that has sustained bourgeois society, the I character type that had been its foundation, and the ethic that had undergirded efforts to accomplish its reform...

...Whether or not one accepts Mor- ris's portraits of complexity and of his- tory's long, majestic waves of demog- raphic and economic change, impervious to political will, it is impossible to close this book without rueing what the move- ments of the 1960s became, a clashing of ignorant armies by night...

...Nor poverty-program staffer, Washington was that expectation dispelled for some state prison administrator, and New York readers of paragraphs like this one about City welfare director, who worked with New York City in 1966: minority professionals in cinder-block Crime and violence . . . were offices on problems whose seriousness overwhelmingly black...

...Books: UNRAVELING AMERICA'S WAY B ENEATH THE crosscurrents of learned conjecture that are the writing of academic history, the movements of the 1960s still surge like dangerous undertows...

...The neoconservatives did manage to convince most of us that the upheavals of that fateful decade weren't mere consequences of, and certainly not effective responses to, the "oppression" the rebels claimed to find all around them...

...Not only are these wooden cadences ineffective...

...What brought on the establishment's betrayal of liberalism...

...John Kenneth Galbraith October 28th at 8 p.m...

...T HE IRONY is that academic liberalism like Matusow's isn't entirely without resources to account for its own de-legitimation...

...What adherents do we gain, and whom do we help, by fudging the empirical truth...

...Along the way, the small-town "America-firsters" become internationalist anti- Communists and corporate bureaucrats, but the dream of eventual return to a safer, simpler America still animates them...

...Nicholas Lash November 4th at 8 p.m...

...Benedict We respond to God in prayer to know His presence and to pray for the world's healing...

...Vanessa Redgrave either doesn't know such restraint or wasn't directed toward it...

...Matusow concludes his book with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the White House: Whether Reagan's victory made permanent the trend away from the liberalism of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, whether his conservative policies could weave together the unraveled fabric of the old America, even whether the old America was something that ought to be recovered --these questions were bound to engage historians far into the nation's future...

...The Seminary of the immaculate Conception Huntington, New York...

...Jim Sleeper of the writers considered here, does a competent job of lracking the sixties' reg- nant liberalism by its own articulated standards, but he loses course and heads for trouble when he tries to take the measure of profoundly illiberal rebel- lions with the equipment at his com-mand: .9 Critics had attacked the hip- pies as hedonistic and narcissistic...

...And much-better, surely, the saving irony and, one suspects, profound faith of non-academic Charles Morris...

...What regenerative power can it offer, what searchlight into the post-Enlightenment mists...

...His argument is that the long struggle between partisans and oppo- nents of the New Deal and its wrenching changes in the fabric of American liberalism is just now coming to an end, as basic shifts in our political economy undermine the broad American middle ground over which the battle has been fought...

...A Time of Passion carries these hard lessons into the national arena, testing the sound and fury of the sixties' move- ments against them...

...F I REDERICK SIEGEL'S Troubled Jour- ney comes as close as anything I've seen to tracking this theme of submerged traditions in conflict, though the writing is rather more punchy than poignant,~ a salutary corrective, perhaps, to twilight musings...

...The absence of addicts were Puerto Rican and grand pretense is refreshing, though his black...

...I learned to appreciate the gap between liberal doctrine and reality about 1970 --from my oldest son, who was then six or seven...

...the rebellions of the sixties are in part the revenge of the New Dealers and their children for McCarthyism, Nixon, Eisenhower's amalgam of Main Street and the board rooms...

...The result is bathos...

...Johann Baptist Metz All lectures will be delivered at the Seminary...

...How quickly those wellsprings spoiled and ran dry...

...FROM PEARL HARBOR TO RONALB REA- GAN Frederick F. Siegel Hill and Wang, $17.50, 289 pp...

...The Lord calls out: "Is there anyone here who yearns for and desires to see good days ?" I I I I St...

...By the 1970s social discipline was eroding so rapidly that fashion condemned the whole of middle- class culture as the "culture of nar- cissism...

...A TIME OF PASSION: AMERICA, 1960-1980 Charles R. Morris Harper & Row, $17.50, 270 pp...

...Those of us whose fate it is to live in the present, and who suspect that conser- vative revisionist wisdom is more de-structive of our future than the admittedly ambiguous, unresolved legacies of the sixties, will have to turn elsewhere for a lifeline from that decade to the years ahead...

...there is something eerie about their detachment...

...Morris is quick to acknowledge that the key variable behind these distinctions was class, not race --the white kids in this, as in many integrated neighbor- hoods, tended to be middle class, the disruptive black kids poor...

...September 16th at 8 p.m...