SHORT SHOTS
H., I. & M., L. & R., H.
THE LATEST INTELLECTUAL FAD, certain to last almost six months, is The Greening of America by Professor Charles Reich of Yale University. It is an eyes-wide paean to Consciousness III, that...
...He ravages his own environment...
...R. n Who's More Radical — You or Me...
...Because he is so tolerant and loving, Professor Reich urges his readers to be equally tolerant and loving toward American workers—the teamsters and mechanics whom his young friends sometimes aren't sufficiently tolerant and loving toward...
...He has had very little of love, or poetry, or music, or nature, or joy...
...So, tell me: who's more radical, you or me...
...Means, that is, a state of being, a condition of intransigeance, rather than a politics...
...In case the author of these lines should be the same Mr...
...To these remarks Mr...
...He has been dominated by fear...
...You can say so if you wish: it's a free country...
...But perhaps it is unfair to identify him with III, since, as a friend has remarked, Professor Reich's is really Consciousness IX—Consciousness III squared...
...in his agony he has recoiled upon himself...
...Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, however, included the controversy in their popular reader, Mass (continued on page 100) 98 SHORT SHOTS Culture—The Popular Arts in America (Free Press, Glencoe, 1957...
...As to the logic of Mr...
...H. 101...
...For the truth is that the two (or more) lines in question are not crossing on the same political and moral planes...
...Anders, I extend my hand to him, saying: welcome to the low-brow culture of mass consumption...
...For the famous painting was prepared by Rembrandt himself for home delivery—he made an etching of it, assuring it the widest mass distribution then available through mechanical means...
...It touches on the root emotion, so deep in radical environ100 ments that have been confined to powerlessness, that to be radical means to be . .. more radical...
...and when we pay for having it delivered to our home [in Europe, TV-owners pay a monthly fee], it becomes a commodity...
...Is this a sign of being "less radical...
...But to say that is unfair to Marcuse, who by comparison to Professor Reich seems to be overflowing with affection for his fellow-creatures...
...Sometimes, too, radicalism is seen as a token of integrity or even virtue, akin to chastity...
...He has fled all his life from consciousness and responsibility...
...In the Marxist world, the ideological stepbrother of chastity has always been "correctness...
...He is angry, envious, bitter, self-hating...
...But when you say it, you're masking a political disagreement with a quasi-moralistic accusation...
...I know what you're going to say, and let me tell you...
...Today we believe that, if there is a significant choice between candidates, we ought to vote for liberal as against conservative— without thereby supposing our socialist virtue to be threatened...
...Since this transforms radicalism from a politics into a mode of private salvation, it becomes disingenuous, or even dishonest, when those who cling to such a radicalism attack others on political grounds...
...Anders's reasoning, I wrote: "If I buy a print of a Rembrandt etching, not the meeting of Christ with his disciples is reproduced but its likeness...
...Anders wrote a reply so unprintable that the editors broke all principles and refused to publish it...
...It is an eyes-wide paean to Consciousness III, that superior state of love and freedom which "the young" are said to have reached, as against Consciousness I and II, the benighted conditions of ordinary slobs...
...Because once we were pure and now are fallen...
...Who is it that "has fled all his life from consciousness and responsibility"—the millions of American workers who organized trade unions which won this country social benefits from which we all profit, or Yale professors myopic with elitist fantasy...
...How radical your radicalism...
...as a political goal, or if you come to feel that those who proclaim "revolution" would upon gaining power institute a regime not very different from that of counterrevolution, then it's pointless to be told that one doesn't have the "correct line...
...neither the event nor Rembrandt's conception of it has become a commodity...
...But better yet: the beginning of a serious radicalism might be to brush aside this dormitory-and-cocktail-party game as unworthy of serious people...
...Who can describe my amazement when I read in the August 1970 issue of the German magazine Merkur a lamentation by Gunther Anders, concerning a wooden hand created by Donatello that was being eaten by the worms: "Maybe it is time for us esthetes to abandon our conceit and to admit that there is something to be said for mechanical reproductions...
...That younger New Leftists find gratification in making charges of virtue abandoned, indicates that, no matter what their number, they are still caged into the life of the sect...
...Then we changed our views (and some saw this too as a retreat into being "less radical") to allow for support to an (alas) nonexistent labor party...
...He has been condemned to narrow-minded prejudice, to a self-defeating materialism, to a lonely suspicion of his fellow men...
...or I believe they should do X and Z. Maybe I'm wrong, that's not the point...
...How round your bell bottoms...
...HAVE JUST READ, for the 439th time, an attack on myself charging that I am "Iess radical" than I was at some point in the past...
...Let me be honest enough to admit that when the charge of "less radical" is made, it can sometimes still carry a sting...
...No number of worms in the world will be able to eat all copies of this statue...
...From rectitude to righteousness—you need to be very agile morally to avoid the latter once you've slipped into the former...
...I took the liberty to remark that Mr...
...But what's even less to the point is whether in so believing I'm either "more" or "less" radical...
...For once the politics of the Left has been reduced to impotence, there is little it can do but maintain the sincere stance, or vain posture, of rectitude...
...How many discussions I have sat through as to whether "the line" was "correct," and how few about what we could possibly have meant by being "correct...
...Gunther Anders wrote a strange piece in which he argued that—to take one example —Rembrandt's superb painting of Christ's meeting with the disciples at Emmaus was a unique event, but "when the event can be reproduced virtually any number of times, it acquires the characteristics of an assembly-line product...
...M. • Fourteen Years Later BACK IN 1956, when it was everybody's pride to look down on "mass culture," we had a little controversy in the pages of DISSENT and elsewhere...
...How sharp are your pants creases...
...That Mass Media wiseacres indulge in the same sort of talk indicates something still more depressing: the way, in America, left-wing politics has become assimilated to popular entertainments and styles of cultural marginality...
...And to do that is to muddle thought and assuage emotions in about equal degree...
...It's been a long time since anyone, let alone a self-announced agent of Superior Consciousness, put into print anything so snobbish, so ridden with contempt for the plebes, so ready to dismiss the Iives of ordinary people as beneath contempt, so smug in its dime-store (or Random House) version of Marcuse-ism...
...Anders failed both as an art historian and as a philosopher...
...And just as you can't divide chastity into portions, so presumably you must preserve your radicalism in its state of original purity...
...such a thrust can still carry a sting precisely because it isn't really a political criticism at all but is an implied personal accusation...
...So—I believe socialists should vote for certain oldparty candidates...
...Twenty years ago, for instance, most socialists thought it was wrong in principle to vote for a candidate on any old-party line...
...And here, please read Professor Reich: Look again at a "fascist"—tight-lipped, tense, crew cut, correctly dressed, church-going, an American flag on his car window, a hostile eye for communists, youth, and blacks...
...In behalf of our goals—say, a democratic socialist society in the long run and reforms stretching the welfare state right now—there may be good reason to be "less radical" than before...
...He is what the machine left after it had its way...
...I think we remain as devoted as ever to the socialist ideal, and the evidence for that is that we have actually tried to think about it and thereby have changed our conception of it...
...Reading this passage in Professor Reich's book, one feels that almost any "Consciousness," I, II, IV, VII or XXXVII, must be better than his "III...
...I think not...
...This is a very old notion and usually it flourishes in countries where radicalism itself does not...
...He is turned against his own nature...
...One premise behind such charges is that radicalism is a quantity: the more, the better...
...For what they really mean is that I or Mike Harrington or X isn't as virtuous as they: a proposition all just men will immediately take to be self-evident...
...If, say, you think it makes no sense to speak of "revolution" in the U.S...
...How bushy your Afros...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
