View from the Campus-II

...Acker, to find out where tons of meat and canned foods have been disappearing to Basically meek, the harassed Acker turns mto an accuser obsessed with Supplies, examining faces, watching every gulp of milk with suspicion, and prying into places where he is not wanted He sneaks mto the laundry room and up to the seventh floor, the alluring hive appropriated by the help The air is thick with cigarette smoke, rattling ice-cubes and wicked laughter His favorite bus boy, loungmg in bed with the Negro maid, disdainfully shrugs off responsibility for the missing food And finally Acker, unnerved by the general derision, gives up the whole search and collapses mto the comforting arms of Nurse We never find out where the food has gone, but surmise that the situation is much the same as m psychological profiteering No one knows where it began or who is responsible But the corrosive effect is visible and so is the inability of the participants to extricate themselves Acker is like a thousand supervisors who transmit the pressures they feel on themselves, and sacrifice their natural inclinations He sees life through the next expected reprimand, and some of the images Kessler attributes to him are positively gorgeous m their antagonism Gruber the manager's "sport shirt prmted with orchids and flamingoes loosely covered the vast, boiled pulp of his upper body, from which stuck two short borscht-pink arms Dark aviator's glasses obscured the terrible eyes of that buttered smoldering visage " Despite its gloomy outlook, "The Detective" is fascinating because of the genuine hotel atmosphere, the dancing sunburnt couples outside, and the sweaty mysterious apparatus within—dumbwaiter shafts, tired waitresses, breath of red wme and secret revelry m the night This is the gross and unromantic summer face of the beaches around New York Several of Kessler's stones take place in summer, the in-between season meant for visions and revisions "Fat Aaron and the Night Rider" is about the hours a boy spends in the company of a cherub-faced bawdy baker who delivers pumpermckels and cinnamon buns to the bungalow colomes m the CatskiUs every morning The prurient ladies in their aluminum curhng pms cluster around him, "their strong bonyknuckled, longnailed, fishchopping, meatslapping, carrotscrapmg, redpainted fingers" patting and poking him as he calls saltsticks "Wednesday-husbands," and invites them to visit him if they cannot sleep The boy goes to see Aaron in his bakery, helps him pour batter mto a lmen bag, and goes along for a drive m the delivery truck through valleys with trees that look like patches of black broccoli Aaron gives him his first swig of whiskey and tells him to look into the hotel windows for naked gnls combmg their hair Finally, he takes him to "Miriam's," where the boy is gathered unto a voluptuous bosom cased m green satin, and staggers into the morning sunlight exclaiming "So this was Canaan1 The green flesh of the world was mine " In comparison with "The Detective," this affirmative story is a real pleasure dome, but what is it domg in our tune of fictional resistance, self-denial, and grotes-querie...

...View from the Campus—II The Sky Is Falling By Elliott Abrams As President Johnson steers his great ship through troubled waters, more and more young people to follow the image of TRB m the New Republic, are rushing to the rail to throw up The President is unaware, it seems, that this is happening, perceptive adults realize it, but fail to understand why All too often young people are handed copies of Childhood and Society and told not to take themselves too seriously, that their "restlessness" is only the product of their identity crises Such responses miss the pomt, though not supnsingly Our parents, as adolescents, lived through the Depression and also criticized a great deal Many claimed capitalism had gone as far as it could go, depression was its final condition This has been proved untrue The business system can produce fantastic prosperity, nor is it mconsistent with various forms of a welfare state That we are still complaining should therefore suggest something to our parents We are talking about problems that even prosperity cannot solve We are voicing more subtle objections, I suppose, than are convenient They concern the "invisible," while bread lines were quite visible Rob"View from the Campus," a series designed to present at first hand the thoughts of college students around the country on the issues of greatest concern to them, began in The New Leader of January 1. The opening article, by John Kyper of the University of Vermont (''Vietnam and Beyond"), criticized U.S foreign policy as a defense of The American Way of life ('loot a genuine belief but an excuse for a lack ot belief...

...It deals with initiation mto experience, and here the reverse of Tolstoy's remark about families is true Unhappy initiations are astomshmgly similar, each happy one engagingly different But currently we do not lmger over initiations at all, preferring to beheve...

...Here Elliott Abrams, a sophomore at Harvard University, continues the discussion ert Heilbroner, m The Limits of American Capitalism, explained that "We live m a civilization m which the limitations of a society built on the struggle to amass private wealth are never mentioned " Now we are mentioning them, and our parents are not listening They thought m the '30s that the sky was falling, when they hear us say the same thing they are skeptical This is only natural, yet it is unfortunate For today, after 20 years of prosperity, we think the true limits ot our system are becoming apparent Soon we will have a Gross National Product of a trillion dollars Isn't it clear that whatever cannot be bought for a trillion dollars is simply not for sale7 To be specific, what we object to are not simply conditions (poverty, slums, poor schools, unsafe cars, misleading ads) but attitudes There is, for example, a general presumption in this country that if something is not profitable, it is undesirable New Towns tie up money, so they aren't even experimented with Good low-cost housing isn't a moneymaker, so it isn't built Even when we are faced with a problem that obviously cannot and should not be a source of private profit, our immediate response is to attempt to make it just that by enticing companies into the field with all sorts of subsidies and supplements Witness Senator Charles Percy's heralded housing plan, not to mention Senator Robert F Kennedy's slum redevelopment proposals On a more fundamental level, we object to the country's competitive and overly materialistic outlook Cutthroat competition was perhaps inherent in early capitahsm, but today, when big business practices collusion, the compeutive society should no longer be our model The effect of this competitiveness can be seen among the Jews Despite a tradition of devotion to learning, and the present-day rejection of materialism's excesses in Israel, Jews in this country—generally considered one of the most successful immigrant groups—are increasingly acceptmg the cult of the dollar Many members of the New Left, especially Jewish students, consider this a characteristic Jewish trait But there is nothing Jewish about it, as history and the character of Israel demonstrate It is very American, indeed, it is the price of becoming successful in America To succeed in our society means to fight and win If American Jews can be criticized for acceptmg the need to fight and then seeking to maximize and enjoy their winnings, the criticism must be directed toward the values of then country and not those of their religion Now these objections to attitudes engendered by the American economic system are very basic We are realistic enough to recognize, however, that deep-seated positions cannot be changed overnight Students are out in the streets over other issues, namely Vietnam and race relations I think that lying behmd our activities in these areas is a different set of calculations What we are af-fraid of here is that our parents will lose for us some thmgs we can never gam back, in all our lives Commentators who claim we hate our parents because they are leaving us a terrible world usually cite World War II, the Bomb, poverty, and so on This is garbage Much, like poverty and the war, is not our parents' fault And the progress their world has made including both the purely good (such as medical advances) and the potentially bad (atomic power), should be their pride In these ways our parents have opened up the future for us We will blame them only for closing it off—which is what race hatred and Vietnam are doing If they do not solve the problem of air pollution or car safety, we will, later But if they do not face the Negro's claim for a just place in America, we will not have the chance This is an issue that will not wait, that must be faced now, and if our parents choose the road of repression, we will not have the opportunity to make amends An America m which the Army must be used to keep order would truly be an inheritance we could hate our parents for Similarly in Vietnam, our future is being foreclosed The war is changing the meaning of the word America, perhaps for all time Since the Revolution, each generation has bequeathed to its children the gift of reputation America has been a synonym for liberty, democratic government, humanitarian concern Ours is the first generation to whom this gift may not be left About this we are bitter A reputation, once lost, is almost irretrievable How will we convince young people in the rest of the world, now watching films of the bombing of North Vietnam, that America still deserves the love their parents gave it m 19459 What could we do to rebuild America's image, which suffers new damage each day the war goes on9 This is unfair to me and to my generation Destroy the irreplaceable and you deprive us of our birthright There are adults who understand this, though they are not those running the country Dean Rusk thinks 20-year-old thoughts, and President Johnson mouths 20-year-old slogans They are, as we say, "out of it," but it is not a question of "style " There are riots m our cities and 10,000 boys a year dying m Vietnam, and people have the nerve to tell us we object to the President because of his "style " It should be obvious that if we young people have given up on the country's present leaders, we have not given up hope, for otherwise we would not be as involved as we are Ironically, too, the very danger we face, the knowledge that this is our last chance, may well prove our salvation In a sense, except for slavery, this country has until now never faced a problem so grave that tune or money could not solve it The frontier was an early escape valve, the prosperity with us since the Depression has likewise served to take the pressure off Perhaps this explains the lack of political realism among American intellectuals, exemplified at present by the New Left and its adult cohorts Problems frequently solved themselves in the past, or were soluble without essential social changes Thus intellectuals were more attracted to utopianism or purely academic pursuits than to political organization, the hard work involved did not seem necessary But this has resulted in our retaining social attitudes that other industrial nations have outgrown, attitudes that see profit as the true test of worth and competition as the best basis tor social organization Now we are confronted by a different set of problems These will not go away, nor will money solve them adequately To provide housing and jobs for Negroes, to deal with the technological unemployment of the future, the urbanization of the country, increasing corporate power responsible to no one—to cope, in short, with the injustices of the past and the demands of the future, our reliance on competition and profit will have to tall by the wayside Our 19th-century attitudes have hung on like vestigial organs only because we have never taced a challenge they prevented us from meeting Today, for the first tune, they are really in the way and they must go The substance of laissez-fau e capitalism was eliminated m the '30s Young people hope that the urgency of the country's needs m the '60s and the evident dangers of not satisfying them will force the casting off of its remaining harmful and outdated social attitudes My generation is already beginning to suffer from our parents' mistakes We fear that their continued adherence to old theories in the struggle with new crises will deprive us of the opportunity to correct these mistakes This, I think, is why we are in the streets The stories in Jascha Kessler s collection, An Egyptian Bondage (Harper and Row, 213 pp, $4 95), read as if they were out of an earher era, and a luckier one Frank, subjective, bristling with provocation, they are quite unlike the dim and arbitrary cavalcade of fiction that glides through the quarterlies Though their style is luxuriant, it remains m service to the plot, m contrast to the language of the '60s which, no sooner liberated, starts possessing its creator hke some whirling dervish Jascha Kessler's subject is often work, as it loomed in our anxieties in a period when a good job was hard to find and usually desperately needed, even by teen-agers The more we prosper and assume the availability of jobs, the less attention our fiction directs toward this absorbmg segment of life But these stories involve us from the start by their curiosity about it, especially about the middle-echelon service jobs that ferment discontent from above and below Caddies, dehvery-boys, hotel stewards, fund-raisers?these men-between make up the cast of An Egyptian Bondage In "The Detective" the bullying manager of the Hotel Metropole m Long Beach orders his steward...