LETTERS

...they are confident of their intuitions, but not altogether sure what they mean...

...The inconsistency between what we feel and what we know would than be not so much an embarrassment as a source of insight .. I do not suggest that the "Senior Radicals" (Mayfield's term) depoliticize themselves and become philosophers...

...The fact is, there is nothing much to be done in the way of highstyled political action in the United States at our moment in history...

...What we are left with is a tearing dilemma...

...Julian Mayfield is still stiff-necked as ever, in spite of his metaphorical selfhanging...

...The trouble is, where does this leave us...

...Concretely, in terms of the dilemma I have just noted, this could mean that we should affirm both and deny neither...

...To act with confidence on the left, now, it seems necessary to have been born yesterday...

...Honest they are, if by that we mean that their political intuitions are real and sincerely felt...

...We are sure of the correctness of our analysis, but not so sure of its relevance...

...derfully hopeful" in China, and find little to complain of in the actions of Nkrumah and Tour...

...I submit that the content of the existential exploration Mailer hopes will supplement the programmatic criticism of the liberal establishment in the pages of DISSENT should be directed as much at our exasperation as at their inability to get the lessons of history straight...

...The category of the political is not limited to the devising of programs and of tactics for realizing them...

...casts one in the role of a fingershaker...

...Somebody has to concern himself with the question of what the programs are for...

...Who knows, except artists themselves, especially "action" artists, what artists will not do to sell their paintings, win prizes and commissions, and publicize their art-personalities and careers...

...To argue the reverse is to fall into the error of a historically misplaced, misunderstood, and misapplied Leninism...

...Coser was right, in the formal sense, to rest his case...

...We may hope, though this, to get a better sense of what socialist ideals mean in the modern world, and what socialist political action in the best sense entails...

...Nonetheless, the political bent continues: there is the sense of injustice in the world and the will to do something about it...

...Who has not suffered from "secret sympathy for Nasser"like Al Capp's character-at times...

...Those on the left who say, "Yes, but . . .", and raise questions about the one-party, implicitly totalitarian character of these regimes get a reaction in which they are accused, in substance, of being wise but irrelevant...

...But there is another way, which I think is implicit in Norman Mailer's hope that DISSENT will choose a role for itself in the future that includes "existential exploration" as well as programmatic comment on the performance of the Kennedy Administration...

...Most of the bright young left militants who contributed to the symposium are soft on Castro, show more than a passing sympathy for Nasser, see "something won...

...Julian Mayfield's letter rebutting Lewis Coser's assessment of his piece in the "Young Radicals" symposium was printed without comment, I suppose, on grounds that it damns itself...

...A humanly understandable, if intellectually and morally deplorable response is that of the late C. Wright Mills: deny what you know, affirm what you feel -act-If the alternative is simply the reverse, deny what you feel and affirm what you know, the young radicals are going to continue to prefer the brand of myth to the stone of what they characteristically call a sterile intellectualism...

...What are artists' crimes as artists...

...I submit that the role of the veteran radical in relation to the new man should be neither to chastise him (Coser) nor to endorse his mindless militancy (Mills...

...For an action painter, what is a myth if it's not as good as a pile...

...Nor will it do to take the position that the Mayfields are honest but misguided...

...And where they want to go, or think they want to go, the seniors will not and cannot lead them...

...What artists are for murder...

...We cannot lead him, since what he wants is a grand, revolutionary goal and we have none to offer...

...In this functional complementarity of two aspects of the political intelligence there ought to be the basis for a cooperative and mutually respectful inquiry into the content of contemporary political experience...

...Isn't all that we know about David Alfaro Siqueiros what we read in the publications of the Museum of Modern Art in New York...

...In any case, the "Juniors" of the new left will not be taught by the "Seniors...

...Instead, we should make a greater effort to take him and his political intuitions seriously, to try to understand him in his own terms...

...But how can their "guidance" be improved as long as we do not know what to guide them for or lead them to...

...The protean richness, the immediacy of the younger man's experience could then be set against the intellectual thoroughness, the quality of organization in the older man political intelligence in fruitful counterpoint...

...He is exasperating, but he is there...

...One hates to fall back on labels, but the fact is it takes a powerful self-restraint to stop mumbling "neo-Stalinist" in the reading of it...

...If Siqueiros is not a "persecuted artist and a champion of school teachers and of popular freedom," what is he...

...Perhaps our role (and of course I zoo am thinking of DISSENT, as the acknowledged forum and in some sense the senior spokesman for the independent left) should be something like that of the Zen master: respond to the neophyte's question with another, better question, and thus engage him in a dialogue...

...What artists will serve on the Museum's...

...Last year at the College Art Association Convention, at a symposium on the "Environment of the Artist," I made a suggestion, in relation to this particular problem, that space be provided in the Museum of Modern Art's New Building Program, for an Artists' Prison, which would take care of all artists who are guilty of being not "mere artists" but "living myths" of one kind or another...

...Their thoughts are vigorous but not always vigorous...

...We can continue to try to educate him, but broadly and indirectly, more by asking questions than by supplying him with correct answers to questions he never asked in the first place...

...It must be conceded that the leftist tyrants have a certain appeal...

...What do the protesters against the protest of Siqueiros' imprisonment want "done" to him, if he is what they think he "infamously" is...

...To have lived through a political war or two...