On Those Who Burned Themselves

...They have taught him in the past, abstractly—why don't they take action in the present to lead him, or at least to show that they share his outrage...

...A Negro who may have been frustrated in his desire to become a lawyer or a banker, finds himself sitting nervously at a lunchcounter— flaunting trespassing laws, risking beatings or jailings—to get a hamburger which his stomach is too knotted to digest...

...Who has been taught in his history classes that past wars, like World War I, were both unnecessary and unreasonable...

...I think the writer who would have best understood Roger LaPorte's suicide is Andre Mairaux...

...One realizes that thoughts of salutory suicide might, like all efforts of single men to impose their wills upon a nation, reflect authoritarian impulses...

...How else can he make his plight visible, how else can he reach the public with his doubts...

...Beyond this: there is a generation of young people now coming of age in America that has consciously set out to serve others...

...Their acts have been seen largely in terms of individual psychology, when in fact they might serve as metaphors for a sense of frustration which is rather widespread...

...Some of us who reached consciousness when atomic war was an accepted fact of national life have shared fantasies of a salutory suicide...

...The monks who burned themselves in Vietnam may have suggested the form of Laporte's act—but the idea had spread through part of a generation long before the present war...

...Most of the reactions to the self-immolations of Roger LaPorte and Norman Morirson have been fatuous defensive, or at best, beside the point...

...But he sees that spokesmen for the government are often unwilling to debate, even as he hears the teach-ins described as one-sided...

...His words make a deeper impression upon the coming generation than upon his contemporaries...

...Perhaps we are deluded...

...A man sits in New York writing essays on the immorality of segregation...

...or to remarks about the way his choice of a street in front of the United Nations reflects our national mania for public relations...

...There must, therefore, be long and painful debates between people who should naturally be allies...

...They have been expressing their private, midnight emotions through constructive work...

...When they create a slogan like "build not burn," asking to be exempted from the war so that they can continue to serve creatively, they are regarded as cowards, draft dodgers, or Communists...

...But now, faced with the demand that they join the army and kill the sort of people they have wished to help, they are becoming distracted, desperate...

...The ideas he acquired in his youth now explode into actions which are mediated neither by a group of sympathetic friends nor by the possibility of success...

...A child does not have to read Dostoevsky in order to ask himself whether he would consent to die if he knew that his death would bring about another's salvation...

...Think of Che'n in Man's Fate: a man whose imagination was fixed upon the sheer facts of suffering, who grew weary with intellectual hair-splitting and organizational strife...

...To limit speculation about LaPorte's suicide to questions of the relationship between his act and a Catholic pacifist's moral code...

...involves himself in a democratic, educational form of action—the teach-in...

...Both of these metaphors, once selected, relate to tangible, immediate situations which a certain amount of physical suffering and a considerable amount of patience and intelligence will eventually ameliorate...

...The arguments they are supposed to set forth become obscured by the participants' sloppy dress, unruly behavior, defiant language...

...So the young man, largely misun derstood in his desire to serve, unable to find answers to his democraticallyexpressed questions about the war, turns to something called direct action...

...Yet, so far as the young man can see, if his teachers are at all disturbed about the war in Vietnam, their anger is diffused into insubstantial organizational debate and not directed to the situation itself...

...The few defenses he hears of the government's position seem closer to propaganda than logic...

...The war itself continues to accelerate, and the government is shown to have frequently lied...

...It is possible that all political expressions and actions are in fact vague metaphors for stronger, more submerged feelings...

...So the young—energetic, unattached, in search of their identities and their nation's—set out to realize the literary views of their elders...

...but as one grows older in America one comes to accept the argument that change must be brought about democratically, through reasoned discussion and temperate action...

...No longer is the war in Vietnam discussed, but instead the teach-ins: the debate is about the debate...

...But is there any metaphor through which a man can directly express his opposition to a distant war unswervingly supported by the most powerful government iii the world, his own...

...What they do is not always rational—sometimes they behave impulsively, immaturely...

...In any case, Roger's suicide, and Norman Morrison's, horrible and apocalyptic as they were, represent an extreme version, yet also a faithful one, of the frustration and loneliness some of their contemporaries feel...

...A young student from a Northern college whose politics began with a self-interested fear of nuclear war might find himself teaching school in a small Mississippi town because there seems no better way to express his feelings...

...Could a man in possession of his faculties be so depressed about the war in Vietnam, so driven and so lonely, that suicide —as a final act of commitment, of solidarity with the suffering—might come to seem as rational as, say, the publication of an anti-war advertisement in the New York Times, or a march down Fifth Avenue on a sunny afternoon...

...Now that the reality matches the descriptions, where are the authors of the books...

...The vague questions he began with are sharpened, reinforced...

...But the protest actions are not effective ways of drawing attention to his dilemma, he realizes...

...He marches down Fifth Avenue, attends rallies, watches draft cards being burned...

...Most people are not like Roger LaPorte: we can live with our despair and hope that tomorrow our voices will be heard, that the suffering will end...

...But by now they have the power that is acquired through collective action, while their elders have a different sort of power, gathered after years of thought and writing...

...Their plight is almost universally misunderstood...

...Of what community can the young man feel himself a part...

...Actions bred by ideas have consequences beyond what the authors of those ideas may have imagined...

...More removed than ever from power, the movement he joined turns in upon itself...

...goes to lectures, perhaps delivers a few...

...He reads articles, perhaps writes a few...

...Suppose a young man wants to bring to the war in Vietnam the tools of analysis he acquired in college...

...or to tactical considerations of whether self-immolation is the best way to oppose the Vietnam war is to avoid the most troubling questions which his suicide raises...

...If they were to work in Mississippi, to join the Peace Corps and spend a few years in a developing land, they would busy themselves assisting the same kinds of people—the women, the children, the peasants— whom they would be forced to shoot in Vietnam...

...What about the young man, however, who has taken seriously essays written by his elders which describe America's inability to deal with Communist countries...

...He had to act, desperately, on his own...

...In many papers he reads that all of this is subversive...

...A child or an adolescent may see his own martyrdom as the sole way of ending the war, bringing about disarmament, halting a national outrage like McCarthyism...

...He has been taught by his professors that independent thought is an important human value and now he applies what he has learned to a subject that happens to be controversial...

...Although their ideas of service were influenced by professors, writers and politicians who had bewailed the apathy of a previous generation—who had told them that social action reflected the best of the American tradition—now, in time of war, there seems to be no room for them, or what they represent, in their country...

...The young man who has read and believed books which detail the horrors of nuclear war...

...At least these debates are about manageable subjects, about actions and alliances which can be realized...