America, America

...This is most clearly evident in painting...

...America still produces, and rejoices in, citizens of independent spirit and almost Roman devotion to the Republic...

...Nothing seems to me more troubling than the growth of a vast and secretive bureaucracy that has increasingly pre-empted control over the day-to- day conduct of foreign affairs...

...THINKING ALOUD America, America- Reflections on Going Abroad By Karl E. Meyer A mid the upheaval of moving and packing—I am about to take up new work in London—I find myself reflecting about my nine years in Washington and 36 years as an American...

...This is not to wink away the blunders of American foreign policy, yet the very reproaches levelled at Washington have derived their weight from an appeal to the principles that America herself has invoked...

...If there is a case, it rests on the civic virtues that animate and ennoble American life...

...At the grosser level, there is the shared love of good plumbing, the weakness for grandiosity, the vulgar architecture...

...It is difficult for a member of Congress to trace the tendrils of power within this apparatus...

...There is a certain validity in the familiar comparison of America and Rome— both inheritors and imitators of prior civilizations...

...This is a familiar paradox...

...Journalists like these occupy a central and insufficiently acknowledged role in American life...

...The artists have come to expect credit for being way-out with cash for being acceptably In...

...A recent survey published by Newsweek contained some startling statistics that suggest the mood on the American campus...

...One must begin by acknowledging contradictions...

...Sitting in Washington, one is continually impressed by popular perception of the broad lines of foreign policy, a feeling that was resoundingly confirmed in the last election...

...But large principles do not produce specific policies...

...It is doubtful whether at any time in the past America has had a more brilliant and consistently interesting group of political journalists than that which now includes Lippmann, Alsop, Kemp-ton, Rovere, Reston, I. F. Stone, Childs, Theodore White and Mary McGrory...

...But that the country is sound at the core, I cannot doubt...

...the playgoer gets the sensation of peeping into a world as constricted and contrived as a Faberge egg, where a private sick joke is being acted out...

...A national magazine commented that for avant-garde artists "the money rolls in" and tax headaches mount...

...When an American is crowned Queen of Sikkim, the TV camera is there, poking between the robes of Buddhist monks...

...But on a more elevated plane there is also a devotion to law, a capacity for politics and an acceptance of the rigorous responsibility for using power wisely...

...Two or three years ago, Pop Art started to replace it as the 'in' thing...

...An equally impressive array of literary journalists brightens the cultural firmament...

...Yet it is a curious truth that America has failed to produce a single truly important novel about Washington, the seat of an empire...

...Madison Avenue is a greater force in the world than Wall Street, because even Leftist countries that profess disdain of financial capitalists borrow—in their propaganda— from the hucksters' bag of tricks...

...One is not surprised to read that a pirate television station has been bombarding the Netherlands with the ultimate cultural missile—American television serials, complete with commercials...

...American television is truly a Fourth International...

...In both political and literary journalism there is a verve, a panache, and most of all a relevance missing in fiction...

...This is not to say that it is the function of the novelists to provide mental health therapy or a current events quiz...

...It is difficult to find a comparable instance in history in which a country with so preponderant a military power has behaved with such relative restraint over so long a period...

...A strong case can be made for this view, at least in America today...

...The 19th century was the era of the novelist," James Reston, with his customary shrewdness, has remarked...

...Not far behind are enterprising journalists confecting The Making of a Prime Minister in the mode of Theodore White...

...One feels profoundly that the words of Tom Paine in 1776 retain the force of truth: that "the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind...

...I would also put Art Buchwald in a special niche...

...Most of the literary journalists—an honorable phrase that Wilson uses to describe himself— were radical in the '30s, and the iconoclastic stance remains...

...The principles for which the country stands—belief in law, the equality of man, and the integrity of democratic institutions—are more relevant than ever in a disordered world...

...No doubt this activist spirit creates perplexities and extravagances, but it seems to me that the country is in far better shape worrying about the excessive zeal of the young rather than excessive indifference...

...Forty-three per cent said they would, while 56 per cent said they would join a picket line...

...Nor do I find myself stupefied with awe at the works of the literary imagination...

...Though the passions and the follies of the '30s have long since vanished, the critical intelligence that the era encouraged remains alive, purged of arid dogma, in this group...

...One thinks of Edmund Wilson, Walter Lippmann, Dean Acheson, Senator Fulbright, Justice Black, George Kennan, A. Philip Randolph, Robert M. Hutchins, Robert Oppenheimer—Americans who disagree on many things, but with whom the Founding Fathers would surely feel at home...

...Yet on balance the case for America cannot be sensibly based on artistic achievement...

...Looking at the world from Washington, one is continually aware of the saturating force of American civilization...

...Entire novels are navigated within the wet, warm world of the placenta...

...I would venture the opposite conclusion—that what is happening in American public life is far more interesting and significant than anything that is happening in the arts...

...Violence scars the American past and blemishes the country today—more persons are murdered annually in Baltimore than in the entire United Kingdom, in part thanks to the wanton proliferation of lethal weapons...

...One is too often put in the position of accepting on faith the claims of a bureaucracy that has often been fallible, and which only grudgingly yields up facts that do not fit the official line...

...There is hardly a domestic problem that the country has not debated in a meaningful way...

...Our schools, health care system and public services may all need drastic infusions of new ideas and more money, yet broadly speaking the popular response to these problems has confirmed the soundness of the national mind and heart...

...Culturally, the telling phrases are anti-art, the pseudo-event and the non-hero...

...Yet the crimes of Caligula did not invalidate the precepts of Roman Law, and the Dacian Wars did not cancel out the benefits of Pax Romana...

...The divorce of power and literary sensibility is an appalling circumstance of our life...

...Seldom, surely, has so much first-rate prose been expended on so many third-rate characters...

...Students were asked whether they would go to jail if they felt strongly enough about a cause...

...Poverty may still blight a fifth of the population, but the poor are no longer politically invisible...

...We have, I would contend, a curious condition today in which writing about literature is often more interesting than the literature itself —the spirited assault on the New York critics by Renata Adler last year suggests that subject has more blood in it than the embroidered cobwebs of our Herzogian novelists...

...In foreign affairs, the Republic is enduring difficult times...

...Yet if there is any hope in achieving true world order based on a tolerance for diversity, that hope lies with the United States...

...A recent newspaper headline proclaimed, "In painting the profits are forever...

...More novel is the new attitude found among some Left-wing intellectuals, who combine detestation of the American economic and political system with a shameless delight in such excreta as Batman comic books and Jean Harlow movies—one might say that they are eagerly taken into Camp...

...One sometimes gets the impression in reading American fiction that awareness of the external world has vanished and that the only permissible attitude to life is sustained nausea...

...Abstract Expressionism is no longer regarded as an exciting, vital painting style out of which exhilarating things may come, and which, therefore, must be represented in an au courant collection, if only by works of young artists who may one day become major...

...Edmund Wilson is the doyen, a unique and precious national resource...

...This is especially apparent among the young...

...What the School of Paris once was to art, the School of New York has become to Mass Culture...

...But there is the nagging sense that the very premises on which that policy rests (the connection of Hanoi and the Viet Cong, the military situation on the ground in the South) are almost impossible to verify by independent analysis...

...Yet the frustrations of Vietnam must be set against the overall performance of American diplomacy since the War...

...The world of the galleries has become inseparably fused with the worlds of high fashion and high finance...

...The courts, the Congress, the Presidency are a credit to the country, though all have had ignoble moments...

...Now Op Art is coming along...

...Karl E. Meyer, a native of Wisconsin, last month became the Washington Post's London correspondent, after serving as a member of its editorial board...

...it is impossible for the citizen...

...The narcissicism of American fiction has not infected these youngsters...

...It seems a good time to attempt to strike a balance...

...A century after Appomattox, the Negro may still be fettered by custom, but there is no other nation—I would argue— that is doing more to attack frontally the problem of racial bigotry...

...Almost in equal measure, as cultivated Europeans denounce American culture, their sons and daughters ingest larger and larger doses of the same ubiquitous import...

...What has impressed me most during nine years in Washington is the extent to which a cumbersome system of self-government actually works—not perfectly, not swiftly, but surprisingly well nevertheless...

...When a reform-minded government is elected in a democratic state, the First Hundred Days is de rigeur...

...the views of a Lippmann and a Joseph Alsop, when they collide (which is often), provide the country with the nearest thing to a parliamentary debate...

...In Vietnam, President Johnson may be right in his general approach to the crisis—one must pray that he is...

...The growth of military-diplomatic-intelligence behemoth, coupled with the strain of violence in American life, must temper any blind optimism about the future...

...The 20th is the era of the journalist...

...To a dismaying extent, it seems to me, the cultural life of America is shot through with pretentious humbug and clever commercialism...

...They take as their text Camus, or enough of them do to color the attitude of a generation...

...Whatever pleasure one may get from the innovatory boldness of the artist is wholly chilled by the knowledge that the new works are promoted with the same slick skill that fashion magazines lavish on the House of Dior...

...This is not the language of esthetics, but of merchandising...

...To my mind, the founding of the New York Review of Books, for which most of the group writes, has had more cultural import for America than the opening of Lincoln Center, that unspeakable ziggurat...

...The dream of a warless world, in which the restraint of law checks the violent impulses of sovereign states, may be just that—a dream none of us will see fulfilled...

...This is borne out in surprising ways— every status-seeking country seems determined to boast a Hilton hotel, a jet airline with ovoid-breasted stewardesses, a news magazine that apes Time, and now even a peace corps...

...As Emily Genauer wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: "There is a definite leveling-off underway...

...The country with the oldest written constitution has also seen six Presidents assaulted, four of them fatally...

...Hence the art world, or part of it, was pitched into gloom by a January 27 auction in New York at which certified masters of Abstract Expressionism saw their works knocked down at discount prices...

...Others who occupy the first rank include Trilling, Macdonald, Hyman, Howe, Fiedler, Kazin and Mary McCarthy...

...seldom has the debate over ideas found so feeble an echo in American fiction...