REVIEWS
Robbins, Richard & Kohák, Erazim V. & Himes, Joseph S. & Grossman, Edward & Eckstein, George & H., I.
The rise, fall, and further fall of Students for a Democratic Society during the sixties is more than another melancholy footnote to the failed radical movements in America. While it lasted,...
...WHAT IS MISSING in this book is Dylan's essence, which can only be apprehended by listening to him sing...
...The exiled Czech philosopher Erazim Kohak, who teaches in this country, has contributed some valuable chapters on the political misfor...
...The final blow came when the singing of "Solidarity Forever" was interrupted by the chant "Defeat False Unity...
...IN THE SECOND PART of his book, Barnet examines the "political economy of expansionism," and the question whether and to what extent "the evolving American economic system— late twentieth-century capitalism—is responsible for America's expansionist foreign policy and wars...
...The secondary literature has been combed, and there are sharp portraits of the leaders—Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby, Rennie Davis, Bernardine Dohrn, and others...
...The conflict with PL had produced an organizational shambles...
...When it comes down to what is possible, Barnet's propositions are rather modest, too: reduction of military bureaucracy, reassertion of congressional prerogatives in foreign affairs, limitation of presidential power to commit troops abroad, opening the process of decision-making to public scrutiny and debate, redirectibn of investments toward social tasks, gradual redistribution of incomes and wealth...
...Professor Sowell's other difficulty is a double restriction of attention...
...Throughout the land/And don't criticize/What you don't understand/Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command/ Your old road is/ Rapidly agin'./Please get out of the new one/ If you can't lend your hand/For the limes they are a-changin...
...Now he reconsiders: In a sol dier's stance, I aimed my hand/At the mongrel dogs who teach/Fearing not that I'd become my enemy/In the instant that I preach/My pathway led by confusion boats/Mutiny from stern to bow./Ah, but I was so much older then,/I'm younger than that now...
...Unfortunately, after Stalin died, the Soviet Union fell prey to "a new capitalist class," but for this Stalin cannot be held responsible, since Mao has praised Stalin as a "genius" and that settles it...
...BOOKS "The Times They Are A-Changin' " is typical of what Dylan has called his "fingerpointin' " songs...
...And with the advantage of hindsight, we can draw some lessons from the experience of SDS and all the other New Left groups of the sixties...
...the Port Huron Statement, a brave vision of a new community inspired by "participatory democracy...
...He argues that this policy of containing Communist power and securing regimes friendly to American economic expansion grew out of the tremendous accretion of American power that occurred during the two World Wars and that contains ever-present "roots of war...
...But if we dis engage from our personal response to Sowell's unembarrassed egotism, his account of attend ing big-city schools and great universities can say something to us about the nature and qual ity of prejudice in American society...
...p BOOKS Erazim V. Kohak A Superb Mind COLLECTED ESSAYS, by George Lichtheim...
...This is a wildly inflated claim, confusing SDS with the protest movement as a whole...
...Most of all they deserve to be read for the clarity of perception that was characteristic of this superb mind...
...Here we have in one place the raw material for a later history—the early alliance with SLID and the gradual disengagement from the liberal and "tired old radical" movement...
...This reflects something of the shallowness of ideology and aesthetics in America during this time, perhaps, or it demonstrates the pluralistic easy-going ability to get a charge out of quite different, even logically antagonistic materials simultaneously, as for an obvious and no doubt actual example someone living in a cabin in the California hills, and seriously worried about the pollution of the environment, might swallow chemicals wholly synthesized in a laboratory to hallucinate, without thinking twice...
...Society has become an act rather than an event...
...This is one of Sale's characteristic asides, misdirected at a humane and able liberal who was tough enough to get reelected several times before he was defeated by Nixon...
...it has also driven a rift into the black community...
...Undoubtedly, American policy all too soon became frozen, and therefore could not explore alternate opportunities...
...This inbred circle of men (hardly a woman among them) has tended to co-opt only minds that will not seriously question their basic concept of the national interest...
...then, having achieved that in a rush, of hiding out from an adoring and rapacious world...
...338 pp...
...Lichtheim himself places the fall from grace between Marx and Engels—Marx is the visionary, Engels the vulgarizer...
...As acts of Reorganization and Reform, however, no socialist should reject them for reasons of "purity...
...How, then, can Sale possibly conclude that SDS "shaped a generation, revived an American left, transformed political possibilities, opened the way to changes in the national life that would have been unthought of in the fifties...
...New York: Atheneum...
...In this context he assigns, I believe, too important a role to the "American Business Creed," the mythology still based on old entrepreneurial concepts...
...Perhaps an awareness of this factor could be the first step toward mutual understanding...
...It takes a child of extraordinary insight and strength (like little Sowell) to perceive, oppose, and overcome these obstacles...
...At the end of the decade nothing was more antithetical to the Port Huron Statement than SDS itself...
...the future of the unendowed, private black colleges...
...1' the union halls...
...At the same time, a curious offshoot of this myth is to equate intellectual competence with middle-class status...
...Barnet is more persuasive than some of his revisionist colleagues when he states his case for the proposition that the war in Vietnam, while not the result of a "conspiracy," is not simply the result of a "mistake...
...The idle drones and righteous toilers of yesteryear's rhetoric, together with their dialectical conflict, become the object rather than the subject of history...
...The book is written lucidly and concisely...
...Recognition of intrinsic, meaningful structures in experience, I suggested, can be a source of categories that are empirical without being reductive...
...No Class Rule Tomorrow...
...ONCE I had occasion to challenge that dichotomy with the suggestion that men like Masaryk, Husserl, or Weber provide an alternative...
...from the University of Chicago, to teaching at Howard, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis, and UCLA...
...His persistent search for the once and future Marxism is based on a clear recognition of the inadequacy of positivism as a tool of social analysis...
...More recently, the "mature" Marx has been charged with muddying the unsullied idealism of the "young" Marx...
...There is another contradiction in Barnet's recognition that, on the one hand, "sheer power and size [give a country] enormous advantages in dealing with weaker countries"—and, on the other hand, his pooh-poohing the fear of power vacuums into which the Soviet Union might have rushed if unchecked...
...Boots of Spanish Leather" (1963) is in much the same mode as the deceptively simple, more conventionally "beautiful" love songs of Dylan's latest albums, recorded, significantly, in Nashville, not New York...
...On the other hand, the very fact of McGovern's nomination has revealed that such a realignment is not altogether impossible...
...the fumbling, eventually disastrous effort to organize the poor in the cities...
...At one point, commenting on the student movement of the thirties, the ASU, he observes that among its members was Jerry Voorhis, who went on to liberalism, was elected to the House, and subsequently lost this seat to Richard Nixon...
...and ultimately an inevitable turning inward, away from any significant links with students or workers, with the predictable fantasies of "bringing the system down" by "trashing" downtown Chicago or Harvard Square in glorious "days of action" and by mindless "invasions" of local high schools...
...The sole effect of revolution is to bring managers to power by brute force and thereby render them as irresponsible as the barons who claimed to rule by right of conquest...
...Never mind...
...In American society black education is the setting of a series of myths and tragedies that help to keep blacks locked into minority status...
...In the end, bereft of most of its student support, bypassed in the national student strike over Cambodia/Kent State/Jackson State, alienated from the black militants, riddled by a factional war with the Maoist young ideologues of the Progressive Labor party (PL), exhausted organizationally, and hounded by public hysteria and the Nixon-Mitchell spies and informers, SDS went down...
...315 pp...
...He believes that Stalin's Marxism and Linguistics is a "major theoretical work...
...I n his latest book, Richard Barnet, codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies, continues his examination of U.S...
...Steven Kelman The Washington Post $8.95—at bookstores or from HORIZON PRESS 156 Fifth Avenue New York 10010 BOOKS ographies, are beginning to come out, indicating that inexorably he is being put in his place—the past...
...This might, he concedes, be the result of brain-washing, "except that the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, who knew Stalin best, share this view...
...For Sale the democratic Left is a joke, the word "liberal" a synonym for "hypocrite," the trade union movement George Meany, the whitecollar population a blank...
...draft resistance as prelude to a politics of the streets...
...When someone started singing "The Worker's Flag is Deepest Red," the student worker alliance side of the room came up with "Don't use the red flag against the red flag" and "Defeat SDS's Khrushchev...
...he is a wholly admirable philosopher-exponent of democracy as a living, ethical ideal...
...Nor does Barnet accept the simplistic application of Leninist theses on imperialism...
...Sale writes realistically enough about specific aspects of the SDS program...
...Even more than the Moscow trials of the 'thirties, the infamous event known to history as the Slansky trial, staged in 1952, marks a turning point in the story of revolution...
...but /they've been...
...350 pp...
...Barnet makes some valid observations about this "need not to know" disagreeable matters—a phenomenon that, incidentally, should make Americans more cautious when condemning all Germans for "not knowing" about the extermination of the Jews (an action that was far more thoroughly hidden from public knowledge through terror and information control...
...while members are emptying their pockets of cash...
...dropping out and destroying universities...
...Not owners and toilers, but technicians who neither toil nor own now manage both toil and ownership and constitute its pivot...
...All copies will be returned...
...Aided by a "cover language" used to conceal unpalatable facts and methods (e.g., "pacification," "protective reaction," "defoliation") or to manipulate public opinion, the bureaucracy ends up in self-delusion and increasing estrangement from reality...
...SDS ALSO LACKS sophistication about the structure of American society...
...Thus Dylan was on time with what was taken for his message, if not a little ahead, as in the political, cynical songs of his next period...
...wished I'd lived/in the hungry thirties/ an' blew in like Woody/ . . . makin' the rounds...
...BOOKS Black Education starts with an autobiographical sketch, from its author's humble beginnings in Gastonia, North Carolina, through graduation Magna cum Laude from Harvard, then a Ph.D...
...For several years, he worked diligently at making himself "interesting," inventing a fabulous autobiography to go with his assumed name...
...This probably brings him no great joy, though it is impossible to be sure and not essential to know...
...the fate of the average graduates of these colleges...
...The main argument of this book is that everywhere blacks are badly educated...
...Sowell then explores, and hopes he explodes, three education-linked myths about blacks...
...Professor Sowell attended black schools in his native Gastonia, North Carolina, until he was nine, when his family moved to Harlem...
...With Lichtheim we return to the classical question—shall the managers be responsible to those in whose behalf they ostensibly manage or only to their own ideological conscience...
...Later, under the pressure of exposes and his own evolving maturity, he partly renounced this self-made myth, turned his back on the political concerns that had informed the early songs that had made him famous, abandoning (seemingly) one style of music and sensibility for another, and then still another, meanwhile disturbing and fascinating a lot of people, and always getting richer and more famous...
...The former—the lyrics and liner notes from his ten albums and numerous "singles" from the early sixties to the early seventies—have been collected in a handsome book with Dylan's doodles and drawings...
...And it makes no sense to write off a large proportion of the population that is supposed to form the very foundation of the new society...
...Here, however, at the end, is a comment by Carl Davidson on the SDS-PL conflict made in Ann Arbor in December 1968...
...The "myths and tragedies" of black education are not, indeed for a long time will not be, restricted to the plight of the bright black student in the northern white university...
...but in his zeal to attack "Camelot," he gives insufficient credit to John F. Kennedy's attempts to listen to other voices...
...And the answer is not Sowell's version of DuBois's "talented tenth...
...The ironies that he employed, these paradoxes, turnabouts, fibs, and changes are supposed to be the genius's prerogative: they force his audience to dig deeper, help the genius himself to survive...
...On balance, Barnet seems to see today's economic expansionism primarily as a strong supportive factor in foreign policy, and major military and foreign-policy decisions as mainly dictated by strategic considerations, erroneous interpretations (the domino theory), and fallacious historical parallels (Munich...
...6.95...
...This would imply a changed concept of growth—growth no longer seen exclusively in terms of production of goods and personal services, but also in what Barnet calls "human growth...
...SDS fell apart not only because of savage repression, but also because its leaders were unable to convert a Marxist critique of the new industrial state into an organization with sufficient power in the universities to build a student base, with sufficient power to attract at least some strategic working-class and whitecollar support...
...Raymond Rosenthal, c/o Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 Union Square West, New York, New York 10003...
...We discarded Stalin in the name of Leninism, only to discover that Lenin had already transformed Marxism into the orthodoxy of an empire...
...1.95...
...The first impression, on flipping through these pages, is of how prolific and various Dylan has been in so relatively short a time, and of the long journey he has made from his first accusatory songs, based on the headlines, to the apolitical, very personal and romantic ballads of his latest period...
...Dylan might be long dead by now, and it would have meant the loss of a master of song, if he had not, with a realistic sense of humor and of self-preservation, put himself in his place: In times behind, I too...
...Switch on the stereo, and it is, in more than one sense, like turning on a current that transforms the words drastically into something that, even nine years after Dylan recorded it, is musically hard to resist and intellectually sufficiently complex...
...To attack the black middle classes becomes a way of demonstrating that one is on the side of the "authentic" poor...
...Dylan, once only the darling of bright collegians and hip street people, whose rumored appearance could fill the Berkeley football stadium or Carnegie Hall (or, more recently, Madison Square Garden for the Bangladesh Concert) as if he were a domestic Yevtushenko or Voznesensky, has arrived by a march that does not seem unnatural or forced to a record studio in the country-and-western capital, sweetly crooning for the rednecks, having "sold out," some might say...
...And if mainstream politics might make some difference, even if without producing those profound changes we would all want to see, then dismissing the trade unions and congressional elections is self-defeating...
...THE FAILURE of conscience or nerve implied here can be rejected...
...These put the finger on and squelched parents, teachers, generals, bureaucrats, politicians, the police...
...For what it is worth, however, one of the more innocent remarks attributed to him, which he has not retracted, is to the effect that more than anything else, he wanted to be "bigger than Presley...
...It is easy to be sanguine about these matters after the fact, especially if one has not actually experienced them...
...Yet this kind of black success story can have unanticipated and unfortunate consequences...
...This is an extraordinary memoir, so heartbreaking that I have reread it for months, unable to rise to the business of `reviewing' less a book than a life repeatedly outraged by the worst totalitarians in Europe...
...For college students who swarmed into chapter meetings ready to take on their administrations for any number of grievances, SDS provided an analysis which emphasized...
...Written by an articulate and competent black economist, it draws heavily on his limited experiences as a student in a few black schools and as a professor in one black and several white universities...
...Mismanagement and exploitation result, avers Sowell, from recruiting and admission policies that discriminate against bright, in favor of "authentic ghetto-type" black students, and thrive upon campus intrigue, manufactured myths, current fads and white sentimentality...
...Some people may simply dub it a selfserving fairy tale and dismiss it...
...Now grant immediately the obvious: the degree of corporate power, the corruption of the war in Vietnam, the frightening position of the military elite, and the 484 BOOKS erosion of civil rights and civil liberties...
...The upshot is that Dr...
...In the end, Sowell's personality (as it comes through in his pages) may make a stronger impression than the facts and arguments that he marshalls...
...It is a moot question whether such a critique can be sought in Marx, but the quest itself is legitimate and urgent...
...This book is a highly personal critique of black education in the United States during recent years...
...New York: David McKay...
...With a history, too, of saying, writing, and singing the opposite of what he means, or not quite what he means, and sometimes not even knowing what he means, yet always, presumably, pledged to a species of truth-telling...
...After that, everyone went home...
...He turns to Marx specifically in the conviction that in Marx German idealism provides an alternative to reductive positivism...
...Yet it is written with so much quiet respect for the minutiae of justice and truth that one does not know where and how to specify Heda Kovaly's splendidness as a human being...
...One of the authors, Heda Kovaly, a survivor of Auschwitz, was the wife of Rudolf Margolius, a dedicated young Communist whom the Czechoslovak Communist Party placed in a high government position only to execute him as a conspirator, and finally a decade later to declare him innocent...
...Yet here, too, Lichtheim, articulates a common experi ence...
...Sowell doesn't really know very much about black education, except as he has read about it...
...Dylan's voice, nagging and jerky, stressing unexpected syllables, in the refrains more pure and free-flowing, announces that he has left behind, gone beyond the selfrighteous, cruel, and arrogant view of the world that had given his best-selling songs their cutting edge only a year before, because .. . I was so much older then,/I'm younger than that now...
...Paper, Pelican...
...The editor of this volume, a Maoist of the California school, announces that the people of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Albania "consider Stalin one of the great heroes of modern history...
...Professor Kohak is a superb analyst of Communist pretense...
...Lichtheim turns to German idealism not out of love for holism in the 19th century but in the conviction that social phenomena must be not only explained but also understood in terms of meaning as well as cause...
...And on the other, he is talking about northeastern universities— Rutgers, Cornell, Columbia, Brandeis, and Harvard...
...This condition harms not only blacks but the nation as a whole...
...IN THE FIRST and perhaps most interesting part of his book, Barnet examines the rise and BOOKS the composition of the national security bureaucracy, its recruitment from and interchangeability with a small circle of (largely WASP) Eastern and Midwestern corporation executives, top military brass, foundation heads, and faculties of a handful of universities...
...Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" came from the national collective supporters, answered by "Mao Mao Mao Tse-tung" from the other side...
...For example, the Crimson flames image, among his most egregious, serves for the first line of "My Back Pages," one of his most interesting and winning songs, and also, in the context of the quick and crowded, hopeful and pathetic history of the youthful so-called counter culture of which Dylan has been a reluctant hero, one of the most important...
...Raising the minimum wage and voting down the lunacy of a supersonic transport scarcely involve Resistance, let alone Revolution...
...While it lasted, as the centerpiece of the New Left in the universities, SDS played a catalytic role—though never a central one—in the resistance to the criminal war in Vietnam, in the civil rights struggle, in the defense of the ghetto poor, and in the attack on the evils of corporate capitalism...
...The ridicule, irony, and sarcasm are biting, but usually manage to avoid the vindictive exhibitionism that sometimes disfigures this kind of book...
...Lichtheim's Collected Essays deserve to be read, not only as a key to Lichtheim's thought, but as a key to Lichtheim's quest...
...No revolution is needed to bring about a planned society-technology is doing that in any case...
...In "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," Dylan does achieve a repetitive, incantatory poetic drive, coupled with strangely allusive, appropriate images (I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin')—but this is rare, and nearly lost among the lyrics looking forlorn and disappointing in naked print, and the word-jags that read like logorrhea...
...But precisely because the undeveloped countries, formerly the major objects of U.S...
...All this takes wing from a symbolic prefatory note on the explosion on West Eleventh Street in 1970 when three young SDS-Weathermen "marked the end of an era" by misreading their technical manuals and blowing themselves to pieces...
...That recognition is most direct as Lichtheim hammers away at our fundamental experience and his fundamental insight, the rise of the managed society, which no longer happens in the margins of productive processes but rather is done...
...A year previous he had threatened in a song, Come mothers and fathers...
...Now the anthologies devoted to him, the unauthorized and semi-authorized bi e VICTORS and the VANQUISHED by Heda Kovaly and Erazim Kohak 1 his moving book is the result of the experience of dialogue in which foes discover their common humanity...
...there is no way for someone who does not know him well to be sure, and again, it does not seem important to know...
...One of his major premises in attacking the containment policy and the Cold War ideology is his low estimate of Russian expansionist potential after World War II, and of West European weakness at this crucial time...
...On the one hand, he is concerned mainly with bright black students in northern white universities...
...The necessary redirection of resources, while requiring a further increase in public functions, could be effected by a reform of taxation and similar measures "theoretically possible within the framework of the present American economic system...
...Such a shift toward social services would absorb substantial capital investment at home and also employment for many who have been displaced by agricultural and industrial technology...
...Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books...
...One cannot read the autobiographical sketch without being thrilled by its account of de termination in the face of what for a lesser per son would have been insurmountable obstacles —or without being turned off by its persistent flavor of self-righteous heroism...
...foreign policy, specifically "the roots of a generation of war" and the forces in U.S...
...492 pp...
...Indeed, he views the most recent form of American economic expansionism, the multinational corporation, with surprising benevolence as a powerful counterforce to the government, and as a potentially positive force toward an international organization of the world...
...and' those union halls...
...WITH BARNET (and others before him), I believe that a redirection of investment, away from the production of goods and toward the improvement of social services and the quality of the natural and the human environment, would go far toward blunting the expansionist tendencies of American capital...
...This is the total of his experience in black education, save for the year he taught at Howard...
...Husserl and his followers, he said finally, were simply not available because they had never explicated the sociological applications of phenomenology...
...But rereading his brilliant, perceptive thrusts in this book, I cannot escape the impression that in his reinterpretation of Marx, Lichtheim sought to achieve precisely a social critique that would retain the particularity of the human subject without falling into a reductive positivism...
...q 486 George Eckstein Road to Vietnam ROOTS OF WAR, by Richard J. Barnet...
...One result is that his conclusions about black education, while in the main correct and often insightful, tend to be either marginal to major issues or based on narrow perspective...
...A man, no longer young, with a history of having wanted to be famous...
...Sometimes it is difficult, if not im possible, to see the "myths and tragedies" ex amined in this book as relevant to southern public schools and black colleges...
...A vast amount of material from the chaotic SDS files, saved from the FBI at the last minute by the Wisconsin Historical Society, is deployed in alliterative categories: Reorganization (1960-62) , Reform (196265) , Resistance (1965-68), Revolution (196870) . Each of the four R's subdivides into chapters titled after the four seasons...
...But the meat and strength of SDS are the hundreds of pages on virtually every meeting, manifesto, march, and mobilization (to continue the alliteration) ever conducted by SDS...
...We have all been nurtured by the Marxian age, half unwilling and half unable to break its spell in spite of the cairn of corpses rising on the Master's grave...
...The unprepared ghetto students flunk out and the bright ones are neglected and unsupported...
...Barnet recognizes in particular the folly of those neoMarxists who explain the Vietnam policy by citing the business interests of Coca-Cola, construction companies, and oil...
...The rest of his education occurred in white institutions, elite New York high schools, Harvard College, Columbia, and the University of Chicago...
...The high school politicization program (No Class Today...
...And whatever the truth of this notion is, whatever parts of wisdom or naiveté, it gave pain to the leftists, of both the "Old" and "New" varieties, who had thought Dylan was their boy, in much the same way that the folk purists squirmed when Dylan switched from the acoustical to electrified guitar...
...q BOOKS 490 Edward Grossman Dylan's Odyssey WRITINGS AND DRAWINGS, by Bob Dylan...
...BOOKS actually one of the most brilliant strategic moves of Stalin's life...
...Apparently he did not make a "survey" of black public schools and colleges as preparation for writing this book...
...The question "Who shall be educated...
...After high school he spent one year at Howard University...
...Without the music, lacking the powerfully distracting sound of Dylan's voice, his harmonica and guitar, the mass of his words on paper conclusively prove that, contrary to reputation and claims, he is 492 no poet...
...In the different climate of present-day managerial capitalism it is not so much greed as overemphasis on unlimited growth that leads to expansionism...
...In the first place, assessing the "legacy" of SDS, he argues for the centrality of the organization in the tumultuous social changes of the sixties...
...Lichtheim's keenly honed critique of the prophets of revolution "from Lenin to Mao Tse-tung" articulates our own uncomfortable, groping awareness that in the new context the revolt of the toilers becomes largely irrelevant...
...can you see em...
...Barnet recognizes this possibility, and it is largely a question of semantics if elsewhere in his book he sees no chance for significant change in foreign policy without "structural change" in the American society...
...The last two chapters present conclusions and proposals...
...El Uncle Joe's Nephew THE ESSENTIAL STALIN: MAJOR THEORETICAL WRITINGS, 1905-1952, edited by Bruce Franklin...
...By 1970 neither the band of underground guerrillas, the Weathermen, with their pathetic effort to bomb "Amerika" into submission, nor the public shell, the hybrid PL–SDS, with its ideological lock-stepping, mattered one way or the other...
...This is a valuable text in social journalism...
...He then proceeds to trace the policy to specific influences within American society—notably the establishment of a national security bureaucracy, the expansionist tendencies inherent in a capitalist economy oriented toward unceasing growth, and the need and growing possibilities for the manipulation of public opinion...
...This time the two opposing camps delivered volleys of chants back and forth...
...6.95...
...A reader could well emerge from this book with a picture of SDS in one corner and the military-industrial complex in the other—and nothing in between...
...The magnitude of McGovern's defeat, of course, has shown that even such a modestsounding program implies a rather profound realignment of power in our society...
...seventy of the ninety-one people who have held the very top jobs—Secretaries of Defense and State, Secretaries of the three services, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Director of the CIA—have all been businessmen, lawyers for businessmen, and investment bankers...
...The other implication is that Dylan, although he sang, Don't follow leaders, welched on a responsibility to the people who took him for their spokesman, hero, mouthpiece Messiah...
...This is no effortless task in America, where genius is confused often with celebrity, and celebrities make young suicides...
...Barnet is vaguely aware that this trend partly invalidates his arguments connecting the "roots of war" with the economic system...
...For this reason, whatever its shortcom ings, it is worth reading...
...Sowell also discusses black high schools, black colleges, and the testing bureaucracy as other agencies in the underand inappropriate education of blacks...
...One may read Black Education and still be tormented by such issues as de- or re-segregated schools...
...This book aims to expose and explode some of them...
...At most, such critics as George Ball and, in his later years, George Kennan were "assigned the roles of devil's advocate...
...In light of Lichtheim's pragmatic, antidogmatic stance, his preoccupation with Marxist ideology might well seem puzzling...
...On some occasions when Dylan has sung what he means straight out, he has later retracted it and disabused many who thought they understood what he had in mind and were pleased by it...
...society that have pushed this country into a series of military interventions...
...As Sowell points out, the stereotype of the selfish, insensitive, and snobbish black middle classes has made it fashionable in some quarters to attack black professionals, business leaders, and intellectuals...
...He also declares that "the nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany was...
...Barnet's analysis of the theories of imperialism by Hobson, Lenin, Kautsky, and Schumpeter is first-rate...
...He avoids moralizing and cheap polemics, and he usually stays away from sweeping simplifications...
...But the handling of the Tito defection suggests that this rigidity was not inevitable...
...Professor Sowell cannot speak with personal authority about education in a big-city black high school in the Deep South or about growing up educationally in one of the black colleges...
...New York: Knopf...
...His songs linger on the radio and the juke-box, his face is on the posters, so famous that identification would be redundant, he has appeared in movies, and a new generation of the really young hum his tunes, recite his lyrics from memory like texts...
...The leaders of SDS wanted to banish history, to make a revolutionary "fresh start" in the style of Castro...
...Then comes a section entitled "Special Problems and Special Myths," dealing with the education of blacks in public schools and "black" colleges...
...It is from this closed circle, centered around the Council on Foreign Relations, that the top managers of our national security establishment have been recruited: Between 1940 and 1967...
...Dylan has gone through a number of changes...
...the rising tide of higher educational expectations in the black world and the shrinking base of public support for poor students in poor black colleges...
...Lichtheim's response surprised me...
...Had he been more adept at conventional mainstream politics [he] might have spared us the presidential fate we now endure...
...Likewise the last few youngsters who finished off the New Left in a grim fit of self-destruction chose blithely to misconstrue Dylan, picking the name of their sect out of a metaphor (You don't need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows) in an anarchistic song ("Subterranean Homesick Blues") that is only curious on the BOOKS printed page but comes across like a burst of joyous energy when Dylan sings it...
...He sees it, rather, as the logical outcome of the principles of an interventionist foreign policy initially developed under Truman-Acheson, and continued with varying degrees of intensity by the four succeeding administrations...
...Dylan's prime responsibility as an artist (a word he has spat out, yet the thing that he is) must have been to himself, first to keep alive, second to write and sing songs...
...needin' me/for a song/or two...
...tunes of Czechoslovakia...
...We, the bystanders, are lucky to have such survivors to teach us our only future—if we are to survive .. . Heda Kovaly describes, unrelievedly and unrelentingly, the horrors of living under the bestiality of the Nazis and the brutal hypocrisy of the Communists...
...I. H. q Joseph S. Himes A Black Critique BLACK EDUCATION: MYTHS AND TRAGEDIES, by Thomas Sowell...
...Better to go to the source, Dylan's own words and music...
...This bureaucracy, moreover, prefers to deal in so-called facts and to work with mechanistic motivational theories—facts and motivations that can readily be computerized for the "games of options," which then form the basis of concrete decisions...
...You cannot write a history of SDS in which the organiza tion is hermetically sealed off from the society, simply because you believe the society is not really worth writing about...
...Professor Sowell's treatment of the racial myths is more cogent...
...This predominantly conservative group has only narrow international contacts and little understanding of other classes and of the forces of rebellion and revolution in the world...
...like the cio/ an' the nmu/ come now...
...New York: Viking Press...
...Still, it would be small-minded not to pay tribute to the generous spirit that informed the radicalism of the young people of SDS, at least in the early stages...
...But if they were looking for a buffoon to praise one of the two greatest mass murderers of our century, they found their man...
...The rise, fall, and further fall of Students for a Democratic Society during the sixties is more than another melancholy footnote to the failed radical movements in America...
...It takes a shattering event such as the Tet offensive of early 1968 BOOKS to break through this protective screen...
...Sale knows better...
...But it is sheer abdication to think that the System is impregnable, that totalitarianism (Amerika) is already fixed in place...
...Solidarity has thus been weakened and an important leadership resource wasted...
...on the contrary, he has increased it cumulatively while apparently abandoning old ground and staking out new...
...If Dylan today is not as rich as Elvis Presley, he is at least as well known...
...The task, Lichtheim insists is, to forge the practical means of making managers responsible...
...To students just beginning to be aware of their own radicalization and their potential role as the intelligentsia in an American left, SDS offered the wisdom that the only really important agents for social change were the industrial workers, or the ghetto blacks, or the Third World revolutionaries...
...remodeled...
...Here we come up against the fact that, to some extent, each successive generation is a prisoner of the key experiences during its politically formative years, such as the trauma of Nazism and Stalinism for some and the 488 trauma of Vietnam for others...
...Not Revolution but a revolutionary fervor in behalf of a democractic ethos directed, at least in part, toward "mainstream politics...
...Still, unintentionally Sale demonstrates my point...
...Barnet gives vivid examples...
...2.95...
...Dylan has contrived to survive success...
...There he attended a local public school for a few years before getting transferred to one of the city's elite schools...
...PAUL GOODMAN: any information, especially letters and personal memories or stories, for a biography...
...SDS contains all the details and has all the events...
...This desire, expressed when Dylan was a complete unknown from Hibbing, Minnesota, is revealing of the dream life of an American boy, entranced by legendary fame as much as, per haps more than, by money...
...In this subtle labyrinth of half-concealed hostility and discrimination, many a minority child, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Italian as well as black, has been lost even before he got started...
...Messianic leaders in these last years in America have fared poorly: the luckiest have escaped assassination...
...It was not self-assured and unambiguous, but almost groping...
...With hindsight it seems not surprising that Dylan rapidly won a larger audience for himself with these songs, no longer limited to the folk purists in the coffee houses, but among that war-baby generation of students who were starting to fill the campuses to bursting, tended to talk about politics and civil rights more than their immediate predecessors had, and some of whom were getting ready, whether they knew it or not, to foment trouble, even if the mass media did say so...
...But, with few recent exceptions, no one was heard who questioned the basic assumptions of this foreign policy...
...Black Education is well written, well reasoned and well documented...
...All vital information reaches the president through the screen of the national security managers, who filter out unpleasant facts or dissident thoughts...
...Alfred Kazin The New York Times Book Review "Their hauntingly written account deserves to become a classic statement of modern men's encounter with revolution...
...the latter were committed to protest and change but not necessarily to SDS's version of what was to be done...
...Writing of "Marx and Beyond," Lichtheim traces a slow, groping retreat...
...Between overblown preface and thin appendix, Sale provides a crisply written, month-by-month description of SDS...
...He knows that during Stalin's forced collectivization "needless violence" occurred, not, however, as a result of government policy but because "it was the hour of Russia's peasant masses...
...He defends the Moscow trials "by facing the facts that an anti-Soviet conspiracy did exist within the Party...
...the gradual "radicalization" of SDS as the war intensified...
...This dynamic organization was able to command the support of thousands of students outraged by the garrison society and disenchanted with liberal reform—though in between crises the national leaders floundered and the "masses" of students fell away...
...KIRKPATRICK SALE'S SDS is a meticulously detailed and thorough account of SDS's transit from a civil rights, antiwar, reform group of students to a beleaguered and isolated revolutionary sect...
...but journalism is not history, text is not context, and Sale's book is deficient in general interpretation...
...Others may see in it an exemplar of the new spirit of "selfreliance" being fostered in the land...
...The accusation implies that Dylan is venal...
...If "mainstream politics" were nothing but a national charade behind which the power elite remains entrenched, then it would presumably make no difference whether we were spared Nixon or not...
...Professor Sowell proposes precollege training centers, which would overlap both high school work and the work of special remedial and compensatory programs in college, and a special institute for advanced study, which would feature "intellectual excellence" for black people...
...His rhyming is crude, the lines do not scan, signify or move (in either sense), and many of the images are arbitrary, if not impossible: The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face...
...How ironic that SDS, which prided itself on contempt for "tired old radicals" assertedly obsessed with an "exclusionary" policy of containing the Stalinist threat from within, should retreat in panic from a comparable assault from within by the PLers, the Stalinists of the sixties...
...As usual, Lichtheim was right...
...The discussion here is about black students in white universities...
...There are no/politics, he wrote in one of his self-explanatory liner notes, . . no right wing/or left wing .../there is only up wing/ an' down wing...
...SDS vyas not the shaper and shaker of the draft resistance movement...
...It is easier and finally more important to explain Dylan's hold on a couple of generations of the record-buying young than it is to understand Dylan himself...
...His premise is that only deeply entrenched forces would make the country persist in the disastrous Vietnam policy long beyond the point when it became evident that the economic, social, and moral costs far outweighed any possible advantage in international power relations...
...Tough-minded as he is in describing the internal life of SDS, he then takes over uncritically SDS's view of the world around it...
...An assurance as to the people's opinions in the five above-mentioned countries that rests on the Bruce Franklin Opinion Poll...
...In fact, if Dylan's collected words prove he isn't a poet, the entire body of his songs so far, listened to patiently in a long sitting, suggests that, from the beginning, he had a calling foremost as a musician, and even when he sang with bitter, cruel, or cynical words, in a wilfully "ugly" voice, he expressed a swinging joy distantly removed from the dry, perhaps equally necessary, duties of the political life...
...When it comes down to what we now need— a reorientation from the values of blind material growth to those of "quality of life," and a shifting of resources and of power in the society—the generation gap becomes less significant...
...The myth has not only militated against bright young blacks who were also poor, it has not only supported sundry frauds in the name of liberalism...
...511 pp...
...is described as an "abject failure...
...Still others may see Sowell's triumph as proof that blacks possess the resources to "cope" with their problems, and that therefore massive public support is no longer needed...
...The fact that he got what he said he wanted without killing himself—that he has become a "living legend," as the cliche goes (in contrast with his dead contemporaries in music, Janis Joplin, Jimmi Hendrix, Jim Morrison)— may give him satisfaction...
...He was, gen uinely, a writer: one of the rare breed whose craft is saying forth, transforming unwieldy reality into the freedom of the word...
...His oc casional essays are the essential Lichtheim: brilliantly, often scathingly evoking a shock of recognition...
...all the first- and second-level posts in a huge national security bureaucracy were held by fewer than four hundred individuals who rotate through a variety of key posts...
...Nevertheless, Dylan, lucky or shrewd, does not seem to have alienated his audience permanently for either ideological or aesthetic sins...
...investment abroad has lately been going into the industrialized countries of the Western world as a safer and in the long run more profitable place...
...10.00...
...His critique of the paired myths of "the black middle classes" and the "authentic poor" is significant...
...If the people at Anchor Books had wanted a reputable scholar to edit Stalin's works and not commit the blunders and idiocies of the present volume, there were hundreds of people, along the whole spectrum of political opinion, who could have done the job...
...That demanded—it still does— not a renunciation of socialist integrity but of sectarian "purity...
...Crimson flames tied through my ears...
...George Lichtheim fitted ill the technological age whose coming he augured...
...q...
...Davidson, one of the last of the "prairie power" radicals to be swept aside in the SDS-PL debacle, might almost be writing about 1938: The chairman than moved into a fund-raising session, traditionally a time of merrymaking and song...
...And at the end there is an appendix, "The Roots, 1905 1960," a sketchy and superficial summary of the line of socialist youth groups, from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society through the American Student Union to the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), to which SDS fell heir...
...Sale is acute on SDS's miscalculation of its student constituency...
...The flurry of biographies that promise inside information and the complete picture of the hero only deliver more or less on the first promise...
...expansionism, have in the course of their decolonization become both extremely unstable and more impoverished, the greater part of U.S...
...is still crucial in the black community...
...the assault on university structure as agent of the corporate elite and the "busts" at Columbia, Harvard, and other campuses...
...At the age of 32, he has been in the glare for a decade and may be considered an old man by the standards of his profession...
...The major object of attack is the mismanaged special programs (particularly so-called black studies programs) for black students in northern white universities...
...On closer reading, this impression must be modified and added to...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
