The Disappearing Underground

...Possibly a naked selfishness is the last frontier of counterattack...

...Is it republicanism to say, that the majority can do no wrong...

...It is not the appreciation, but the abuse of liberty, to withdraw altogether from the polls, or to visit them merely as a matter of form, without carefully investigating the merits of the candidates...

...The effects of this democratization of surface have been a moral and political disaster...

...Its members while it lasted could materialize almost anywhere—the queue for a movie by Renoir or Truffaut or the knot of persons under a particular placard at an antiwar rally...

...The underground carried the weight of global reform when it reasoned about the futility of nuclear war...

...Nobody knows where the ability comes from...

...Now that the middle class has surrendered its belief in all distinctions save those of property, nothing separates a well-off boy or girl from one lower down the ladder except the quantity of money in easy reach...

...A college doesn't feel itself a proper college unless it has every student room wired for accessibility to cable television...

...and an inward ideal of consistency or integrity, which naturally shuns certain actions as base...

...King replied, I'm a clergyman...

...The change of mood will not come from below or from above...

...It wasn't brightly lit, and the absence of glare, the occasional phone calls, the aroma from many cups of tea lent the place a disheveled intimacy...

...The messages of the song and the Web site are not really so different—most of the listeners who admire the style of the first would probably want to be banked by the second...

...Not the deepest but the first motive of an underground is an almost physical recoil from the lives and sayings of the lukewarm...

...How dare you say my behavior's unacceptable,/ so condescending, unnecessarily critical" (as a current heavy metal lyric has it)—the grownup is seen as unnecessarily negative because the teenager only wants what the grown-up has...

...Last year, I heard an undergraduate reply to a friend's question about meeting in the library: "Well, the next two hours I have to be at my PlayStation...

...American society today affords the young no visible front on which to mount resistance...

...But is not self-respect also known, early and unmistakably, by a feeling that one must resist a particular worldly claim, a claim that one interprets as a trespass against oneself...

...Any reader over forty can pretty much guess the rest—Kenneth Patchen, Alan Watts, Petronius—writers, as they all seemed then, attractively disreputable in their profile...

...They carried books of a certain kind—the City Lights poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Corso in those pamphlet-like, unglossy volumes...

...We prate of integrity, and virtue, and independence, who sell our birthright for office, and who, nine times in ten, do not get Esau's bargain— no, not even a mess of pottage...

...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere...

...DAVID BROMWICH is co-editor of the Yale edition of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty...

...Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd and Utopian Essays...

...At a different hour of the day, the same rebel may find himself on a Web site that claims "the largest database of the world's most good-looking, rich, and superficial people" (superficial having become synonymous with sparkling...

...Secondly, it would be foolhardy for me to work for integrated schools or integrated lunch counters and not be concerned about the survival of the world in which to be integrated...

...The Dialogue Book Shop was its name...

...The proliferation of transgressive styles, very visible on the Internet and in shopping mall holes-in-the-wall that sell advanced sex equipment and twelve dozen varieties of PlayStation games—all this has made every competent young consumer the virtuoso of a contour-built self-image...

...and an array of left-wing magazines4 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 Ramparts, the Realist, some wilder ones whose names I've forgotten...

...Who could say how far such a counter-current might not come to matter...

...The owner was a man in his late twenties, darkhaired, bearded, scholastically gaunt...

...American society was and was not free...

...Is it aristocracy to say, that the people sometimes shamelessly abuse their high trust...

...and this man who has run the gauntlet of a thousand miles for his freedom, the statute says, you men of Massachusetts shall hunt, and catch, and send back again to the dog-hutch he fled from...

...It will come out of odd corners, a few more than anyone guessed...

...Dissidence had a character then, familiar to its initiates, a style not a lifestyle, appropriate to a moment of hope that had not given way to fantasies of salvation...

...We talk of free agency, who are the veriest machines—the merest automata—in the hands of unprincipled jugglers...

...Perhaps, first, one says No to oneself...

...The young today have been robbed of that provocation...

...We have less actual censorship today than we did when Marcuse offered his clue to the totalitarian character of American culture...

...We consoled ourselves with the thought that we were a generation...

...Yet the availability of everything muffled the impact of anything...

...Every protest is local at first, compared to what it can become...

...Garrison must have angered many, even as he roused new numbers to his side, when he gave up colonization and went for complete emancipation, of women as well as Negroes, as the only remedy for a false democracy...

...yet the eloquence of someone saying No makes a memorable proof that resistance can be more than a gesture...

...and there must have been a dozen like it around Los Angeles...

...Yet it is part of living memory and should be part of living speech...

...In a press conference in July 1967, King was asked about this by one of his followers, who believed he was neglecting the cause to which he owed an undeviating loyalty...

...Sentiment and opinion had created this dissident party of the mind as a placeless underground—emergent in the late fifties and appearing to grow stronger until the youth culture killed it in the late sixties...

...42 n DISSENT / Winter 2004...

...It will, because there is so much to protest...

...Most often, he sat reading a book on a stool by the cash register...

...The successors of the underground, in the early 1970s, were gnawed at by a fear of growing solitude...

...You may sham a sympathy with the slogans or icons of the mass culture where the latter seem to "gesture toward" political reform...

...This is not meddling with other people's affairs: this is hindering other people from meddling with us...

...Uncensored persons are rare, but in the early sixties some people got some important things right, through speaking the apparently unspeakable...

...Yet it is a matter not only of public confidence but private confidence...

...It can seem strange now and almost exotic that an American, in the ranks of dissent, could summon an audience responsive to such eloquence, an audience that would grow and that, over time, would carry its convictions all the way into action...

...Justice is indivisible...

...Yet the wish for approval, or for something to approve of, is numbing...

...We have lost the word...

...When, by contrast, the established culture of America in the 1950s clenched its fist and uttered its watchwords, the strength of the display hardened those in opposition...

...This must have been in 1967, and I read it, a book "in an unknown tongue,/ Which yet I understood," with the attention one bestows on a proof that solves the problem of the world...

...It will not come in the form of a referendum, a Web site, or a sequence of court decisions...

...When the society demands only consumption, what do you resist with...

...This is not one of King's best known utterances...

...We certainly have not lost the thing...

...And I happen to think war is one of the major evils facing mankind...

...The test ban treaty was one result—an unimaginable fulfillment until it happened...

...Yet the people who recognize the thing and protest, for example, against G-8 meetings, seem to have no point of contact with liberal lawmakers or with the people who read or write the news...

...Much of black and white hip-hop music is new in its assertion of selfishness...

...The experiment—his younger readers must have tried it often enough—did really suggest what he said it would...

...Sometimes when he was gone his wife minded the shop, or else his mother—a friendly woman with a Russian accent and proud of her son...

...It should have been at the Dialogue Book Shop (I don't remember if it was) that I picked up a copy of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man...

...And this filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write...

...Marcuse explained why articulate dissent could be tolerated in America on terms that assured its sinking impotently into the secondary decor...

...The path that turns a stammering dissatisfaction into organized protest is always littered with false starts...

...Third, I have worked too long now, and too hard to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to turn back to the point of segregating my moral concern...

...Then I am not a republican...

...We boast of our freedom, who go shackled to the polls, year after year, by tens, and hundreds, and thousands...

...You can get every kind of jolt, and not only will no one bother you about it, nobody so much as looks up...

...Then I am an aristocrat...

...Perhaps the most telling evidence can be obtained by simply looking at television or listening to AM radio for one consecutive hour for a couple of days, not shutting off the commercials and now and then switching the station...

...But even here the grounds for a contest are dubious...

...What made it richer was that those who possessed the clue were known to each other without external marks...

...And wherever I see injustice, I'm going to take a stand against it whether it's in Mississippi or whether it's in Vietnam...

...Unimpressed by the empirical literature of opinion surveys, he proposed that "left to speak for themselves, the conditions speak loudly enough...

...And yet I think the underground will return...

...How long has it been since a journalist or a satirist mentioned "the Establishment...

...Emerson wrote in his journals about the coming into force of the Fugitive Slave Law, after the compromise of 1850: We are glad at last to get a clear case, one on which no shadow of doubt can hang...

...The availability, to them, of almost all the goods makes every higher aim harder to imagine than before...

...I was a clergyman before I was a civil rights leader, and when I was ordained to the Christian ministry, I accepted that as a commission to constantly and forever DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 41 UNDERGROUND bring the ethical insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage to bear on the social evils of our day...

...To see these books together, to imagine the people who read them, was to feel oneself obscurely pledged to a society within the society...

...The family could be overheard talking on the phone once in a while, about books and music and other things (what were "Provos...

...Self-respect emerges in children when they learn to make discriminations all on their own...

...Here, too, were books by social critics: C. Wright Mills's White Collar and The Power Elite...

...Few things, Marcuse conceded, were banned or censored...

...I will not obey it, by God...

...This is not going crusading into Virginia and Georgia after slaves, who, it is alleged, are very comfortable where they are:—that amiable argument falls to the ground: but this is befriending in our own State, on our own farms, a man who has taken the risk of being shot, or burned alive, or cast into the sea, or starved to death, or suffocated in a wooden box, to get away from his driver...

...a lot of titles from Grove Press and New Directions, including some of the famously banned (Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn), alongside European authors who still seemed esoteric (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Lorca, Celine...

...the society, after all, openly fosters a genteel selfishness...

...Why, then, does his description seem truer now than it did thirty-five years ago...

...Shame undoubtedly plays a part, and shame with a complex source: the dread of disappointing an external authority that one has learned to admire...

...William Lloyd Garrison began his Fourth of July Address of 1829 as follows: I speak not as a partisan or an opponent of any man or measure, when I say that our politics are rotten to the core...

...We do not say what we think, and then we forget to think what we think...

...It is not imaginable that any of these shops exists today—for reasons I think are worth going into...

...One never saw more than two persons there at a time, and people came to converse as much as to buy or browse...

...Martin Luther King did something similar when he broadened his view of the civil rights movement to include a protest against the injustice of the Vietnam War...

...Emerson's hatred of the Fugitive Slave Law was partly a hatred of the people who would comply with it, people whose "every truth is not quite true...

...Many expressions and practices that were frowned on were also counUNDERGROUND tenanced...

...But why is being a generation any better than being a majority...