A Plea for Sanity
TYLER, GUS
THINKING ALOUD A Plea for Sanity By Gus Tyler Permit me to enter a plea for sanity. I shall try to keep it pianissimo, to hold the decibels down in the crescendo of hysteria that has followed the...
...It surely is not a cause for indulging in a new orgy of hate turned against the "sick society" or the momentary symbol of its "sickness...
...Should some new fanatic with a zip gun commit still another assassination in response to this indictment in order to eliminate that responsible "highest authority in the nation," the authors of the telegram would be shocked but not shamed...
...in the dark ghettoes and in the ivy-clad groves of academe...
...Consensus has become a dirty word...
...If it turns out to be part of a conspiracy (and what assassination has ever escaped that suspicion), then other personae may be added to the drama...
...in Great Britain, the Scottish Nationalists reawaken...
...Here Sirhan Bishara Sirhan becomes all too relevant, like the mystic meaning of some scene in the Theater of the Absurd...
...Now, if ever, the family of man must act like a family...
...But it will remain only a scene in a violent play that stalks the world as its stage...
...Persons and people are whirled in a gigantic centrifuge...
...Nationalism and isolationism are rising...
...If the upsurge of violence were limited to America, it would be logical to examine the peculiarities of this society to uncover the causes...
...And ironically, against this ugly fact, Sirhan Sirhan becomes relevant—not as a commentary on the United States but on the state of the world...
...Yet a huge chunk of articulate America has seized upon the event to beat up on the civilization of the United States and, especially, on the other guy...
...France is in shambles, although de Gaulle pulled out of Vietnam and Algeria as well...
...American society is no sicker than the world, and the symbol of our society is any transient who appears to have or to demand the trappings of authority...
...I shall try to keep it pianissimo, to hold the decibels down in the crescendo of hysteria that has followed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy...
...young revolutionaries were becoming presidents and premiers...
...The Red Guard runs its bloody course over China...
...So they told off LBJ and pointed the finger at him...
...Now that the Kennedy symbol is gone, new symbols will be found by those who need someone to hate...
...Law resting on wide consent is immoral and the only true morality is the passion of the narrow new...
...To pin all this on Vietnam or permissiveness, on mail order guns or Communist conspiracy, on calloused capitalists or stupid students, is to confuse symptom with cause...
...One group of highly respected intellectuals sent a fierce telegram to President Johnson asserting that the cause of the assassination "is a national policy of massive violence at home and abroad directed by the highest authority in the nation and always against disadvantaged and relatively defenseless people...
...and the USSR as industrial societies whose innately oppressive institutions had to be torn apart before men could breathe freely again...
...in Japan, the long dormant Etas disrupt the homogeneity of the islands...
...Here is a loner seeking entrance into some Islamic heaven by avenging the insults and injuries inflicted upon his people...
...The idealogues added fuel...
...Ghettoes are turning to separatism...
...On the classic island of Cyprus, smoldering ethnic wars leep into flames...
...And men of "reason" will find reasons for their unreason...
...In the non-permissive empire of the Soviets, student and national rumblings come from Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia...
...At this hour, however, the winds of violence sweep the world...
...he was clearly neither the product nor symbol of American culture...
...As an explanation of what is wrong with America, he and his deed are almost irrelevant...
...The Zeitgeist of conflict entered everywhere: in the democracies of England, France, Germany and Italy and in the dictatorships of Poland and Red China...
...Many dedicated liberals like to dislike...
...When Daniel Patrick Moynihan appeared before ada to advocate "The Politics of Stability" (see NL, October 9, 1967), his associates suspected a premature hardening of the arteries...
...The earth explodes...
...where settlers resorted to the swift "retribution of individual gunplay, or of mob action and lynch law, for from taking the law into one's hands when it did not function, it was but a step to taking the law into one's hands when it did not function as one wanted it to...
...Whatever was new was good...
...In LatinAmerica, guerrilla warfare pockmarks virtually every sovereignty...
...In this hubristic nation, the individual qua individual has long taken the law into his own hands...
...To quote Yeats: "Things fly apart, the center will not hold...
...Too much of the breast beating is a public proclamation of self-righteousness, intended partly to indict others and partly to cop out of the hard struggle to move ahead with moderation...
...Look where one will, there is no peace...
...Reason demands reason, a sifting of the passing from the perennial, of the trivial from the vital...
...in the Sinai Peninsula and in the Indochinese Peninsula...
...Regis Debray spelled out the technics of goading the Establishment into tighter tyranny as a prelude for the "final conflict" to utopianize the human race...
...Reason is read as sophistry...
...new nations were aborning...
...in Canada, the French seek separation...
...He is, in the depths of his tribal rage, part of one world—that is one before it is whole...
...He fantasizes the enemy: a prince in a royal family, reaching for power in the great and powerful nation that represents the world establishment to the young, the weak, the small, the angry antis...
...Responsible leaders must be able to qualify differences and compromise conflict...
...But is their charge the truth...
...not Jr...
...The ancient tie that binds—tradition—was torn easily as technology and the media turned dramatically neo-philiac...
...Yet, most ironically, this is also the moment when men are turning away from the universal to the tribal...
...The death of Robert F. Kennedy should be a signal to rally around reason...
...Out of tyranny has issued revolution, and out of these same revolutions have arisen new tyrannies...
...In America today, he has a model by which to go: Dallas and Memphis...
...Reason demands that we do not allow the mad act of a man to become the excuse for a nation to commit suicide...
...Universities are being torn apart according to their academic sub-cultures of trustees, teachers and students...
...The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy was the act of a loner so far as the evidence reads...
...And so it was...
...The pendulum of history was swinging from one prefix to another, from "con" to "dis," from consent, conformity and consensus, to dissent, disobedience, and disorder...
...Empires were changing...
...A free society must assume mature minds that can live simultaneously with freedom and organization, open to dissent and closed to disorder, encouraging debate but discouraging destruction...
...Herbert Marcuse lumped the U.S.A...
...When President Johnson stepped aside last March 31, I wrote in The New Leader (April 8) that "hostility toward LBJ [will turn] into hostility toward RFK...
...We were—we are—viewing "the tragedy of a world that somehow became one before it became whole," to quote Norman Cousins' apt phrase...
...he was not a member of the Klan or the Rams...
...Cold war goes hot, non-violence goes violent, dissent turns to disorder, democracy falls into anarchy...
...Nor does reason demand that we indulge in a national carnival of meaculpism that grants license and logic to the unprogrammed angry-ones who would tear down social institutions slowly built up over generations...
...The young rebel against the old, the colonial country sides against the imperial cities, the dark races against the whites, the poor versus the rich...
...in Belgium, the Flemish and the Walloons prepare to riot...
...Over the centuries, social orders have swung from one extreme to the other...
...We are," he said, "at the end of the age of purely national or even regional problems...
...Young men and young nations were growing up side by side in the agonizing syndrome of the adolescent tearing violently at the umbilical cords...
...A native underworld out of Nairobi terrorized a whole nation...
...He was not raised in the permissive environment of middle-class American suburbia...
...Tribal wars tear Africa apart...
...The conflict between authority and anarchy is as old as man...
...Thanks to the media, where one picture is still worth a thousand words, the spillover was instantaneous, lighting prairie fires of conflict...
...Everywhere inter-generational struggle found social sustenance in class, racial and national struggles...
...Four revolutions run side by side, reinforcing one another...
...whatever was old was bad...
...In the sub-continent of Asia, where the good Gandhi was assassinated before LBJ took office, the ancient rivalries of Indian, Pakistani and Sikh take their annual toll of thousands in uninterrupted sectarian slaughter...
...In the Near East, Israel and the UAR stand at sword's point...
...Let's begin with Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the presumed killer...
...The Scots, the Flemish, the Walloons, the Biafrans, the Etas, the French Canadians, the New Left, the Old Left, the Hippies and the teeny-boppers are moving toward separating themselves out in distinct cultures, warring with words and weapons...
...At such a moment, a grave and solemn responsibility falls upon men of reason, especially if they are gifted with speech to influence the minds of their fellow men: It is to begin once more to restore the center that holds...
...among liberal Democrats in the United States and among black terrorists in the Congo...
...German youth and Italian students shake their nations...
...in Dallas, Memphis and Los Angeles...
...It is inherent in a species that yearns for freedom yet, as a social being, cannot live without organization...
...They would, if charged as co-conspirators, take refuge in—the truth...
...Unity—above the tribal level?sounds like a mockery, some old-fashioned tripe voiced by a mealy-mouthed politician...
...Franz Fanon saw violence as a force to liberate oppressed people from their rulers and to cleanse the souls of men...
...It is part of a frontier heritage, pointed out Arthur M. Schlesinger (Sr...
...The fecund years following World War II gave us a new and numerous generation that turned teen when the world turned in-between, when views and values were changing...
...The riots run deeper...
...Each little conflict spilled over, inciting, inspiring and imitating the others...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 13
