Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Words Words Words FROM TIME TO TIME, if we are to make head or tail of the public drama, it becomes necessary to reassess certain words that have become the mighty...
...The Internationale has been overthrown by a jingle for the Pepsi Generation...
...This fellow might have no brains...
...To be sure, they might know what they liked, but no one felt it was desirable to build a curriculum on that fragile foundation...
...Or the word might evoke small bands of fanatic and bearded plotters huddled around a kitchen table—conspiracy and bombs and the fate of millions...
...Say, Sis, can I borrow your nuclear-powered spray deodorant...
...But there is hope that if only the System does not impinge, an entire generation will grow up quite free of any sense but the commonest...
...and most likely he would have little good will...
...It's an inbuilt security apparatus...
...For they are no longer meaningful...
...No one was surprised that many students liked the Rolling Stones and pizza, but in most places courses on these subjects were not thought indispensable to the development of the mind...
...It is in the nature of things, of course, that the student does not have a lot of facts at his fingertips, so his courses must be arranged to respect his limitations and protect his self-esteem...
...Everyone knows that there has been a revolution in his sex practices, for instance —at least as these are exposed along West 42nd Street and similar streets across the land...
...It was believed, slanderously perhaps, that given a choice, the student would gravitate toward those courses which caused him the least strain and burdened him with as little new information and as few complicated ideas as possible...
...Until quite recently, it was taken for granted that because young people came to college in a reasonably uneducated state, they had no means of knowing what was relevant to their own lives, to the lives of their fellow men, or to the ongoing life of their nation or the world...
...any sour note from the adult population jangles the kid's nerve ends...
...Intellectual effort (sometimes known as a hassle) is a sure sign of irrelevance...
...Honor HONOR is a counterrevolutionary word...
...Indeed, the word revolution has quite collapsed under the pressures of commercial exigencies and youthful enthusiasms...
...Politicians find it difficult to project an image of honor...
...But that word no longer means what it once meant...
...By the time he enters college, every one of his other faculties has been bludgeoned into insensibility by dumb teachers and brutal administrators, but his nose for sorting out what is relevant from what is irrelevant remains acute...
...A generation or two ago, revolution was connected with the guillotine or the storming of the Winter Palace or, less commonly, with the Boston Tea Partv—cataclysm and high policy and the fate of millions...
...Further, before one can prove himself truly honorable, he must show a capacity for dishonor, lest his noble gesture be laid to some constitutional weakness...
...Twenty or 30 years ago, common sense was understood to be the inalienable property of the common man, regardless of race, religion or mental stability...
...As a side effect of demolishing large sections of Vietnam, the U.S...
...The mystical knack of being able to separate the relevant from the irrelevant is pretty much reserved to persons of 20 and under...
...Honor, like charity, goes with power, for the powerless are rarely in a position to exercise such virtues...
...Common sense is still with us, of course, but it has lost a certain cachet now that it is being claimed for George Wallace's people instead of Henry Wallace's people...
...And then there is the big bloodless revolution in music which, like the sex revolution, has been' cold-bloodedly turned to profit by the exploiting classes...
...To reconcile the Honorable Lyndon Johnson's use of the word with the information available in the Pentagon Papers is rather more of a duty than a citizen should be called on to perform...
...Speaking of meaningful...
...In fact, our capitalists are the great propagandists for revolution these days...
...Today, it is a poor week that passes without a revolution...
...To know something of the career of the Honorable Richard M. Nixon and to hear him utter the word "honor" over television every few weeks is cause for either hilarity or despair...
...As a matter of fact, it was considered prudent, in view of the degree of undergraduate ignorance, to permit a student little choice as to what he might study, especially in his freshman and sophomore years...
...But democracy, too, plays tricks with words...
...they maintained that worldly knowledge usually had a debilitating effect on religious perceptions...
...The advertising copy writers are faced with the problem of making events of little pith and no moment seem world-shaking...
...They are all driven souls, and we can no more expect them to take notice of the words in their way than we can expect speeding drunks to avoid knocking over little old ladies...
...But when it came to common sense, he was full of it...
...In short, it was felt by educators that young people were in college to remedy their ignorance, rather than guard it against infiltration...
...The consistently honorable man is probably a sissy and assuredly a bore...
...Today, when the word "gentleman" is more often than not used as an insult and the best one dare ask of businessmen is that they be "responsible," the ideal of honor is left entirely to the warmak-ers...
...Honor has turned out to be the last refuge of a scoundrel who is embarrassed to resort to patriotism...
...he would certainly have no information...
...Through continuing instruction by several Presidents and their accomplices, the lesson has been imposed on the nation that to fight is honorable and to stop fighting is not honorable, unless your enemy is on his knees...
...They keep making revolutions in razor blades and waxed paper, in the length of ladies' skirts and the length of cigarettes, in the cut of men's trousers and the cut of their hair...
...but let some battle-scarred major step forward to prevent his troops from raping an 11-year-old, whose family has just been wiped out and whose village has been destroyed, because he has a young daughter of his own back home, and we recognize that honor is at work...
...With the Age of Aquarius, however, has come relevance, and it is now widely appreciated that just as the common man of the 1940s knew better than the big shots what life was all about, so the student of the 1970s knows better than the professors what education is all about...
...Common sense could not, granted, build a bridge or compose a symphony, but its power was constantly being acclaimed by campaigning politicians...
...The gift of being able to distinguish relevance from irrelevance is the uncommon man's common sense...
...A similar argument, by the way, was advanced in the great religious era of the 1950s by both Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale...
...Indeed, war is so inherently honorable an activity that to fight dishonorably is more honorable than not to fight at all...
...If tomorrow a bomb is dropped on the Presidential palace of an underdeveloped country, and the entire royal family and all the ministers and most of the concubines perish, and the government is taken over by a coalition of university professors and Air Force generals, and Gulf Oil properties are confiscated, and 100,-000 reactionaries are executed, and another 500,000 are sent to reeducation camps, and land is distributed to the peasantry, and the surviving concubines become the property of the state—if such things should happen and a newspaper editor were to announce them as a revolution, what sophisticated reader would bother to go past the headlines...
...Since George Orwell helped us understand the technique, everyone knows that totalitarian regimes exercise their despotism over language as well as over men and institutions...
...Relevance The concept of relevance, for example, is related to the concept of common sense much as the snappy little Volkswagen is related to another age's snappy little Chevy...
...Madison Avenue, which ravages language the way strip miners ravage the countryside, is in league with the Youth Cultists who object conscientiously to employing a modest word if an immodest word is available...
...It was his forever, like his big toe...
...For an earful of common sense, one had only to drop in on one's neighborhood bar or bowling alley...
...Revolution NOTHING is more relevant than revolution...
...has quite demolished the word honor...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Words Words Words FROM TIME TO TIME, if we are to make head or tail of the public drama, it becomes necessary to reassess certain words that have become the mighty weapons of our day...
...ulterior motives keep obtruding...
...Survival demands not only that we think the unthinkable but that we speak the unspeakable...
...Our educational reformers have taught us that the public schools teach nothing, and in particular, nothing relevant...
...The easy riders are determined that every swing of taste or fashion be seen as a flowering of awareness, of sensibility, of consciousness...
...They assured us that the common man's common sense might lie passive for a time, but unless its wellsprings had been dried up by too much Eastern learning, it would burst into life in the pinch (known today as the crunch) and would save us all...
...Yet try though they may, the schools have been unable to stifle the student's God-given instinct for relevance...
...The lyrics mav be radical as anything, but they feed the capitalist maw...
...It has always been the property of the established classes, and most notably the warriors among them, those Honorable and Gallant Gentlemen...
...Honor, relevance, revolution?once useful words, good now only for a laugh...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
