Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Coalition Blues On a recent trip to California I had occasion to visit Telegraph Avenue, the main street of the Berkeley campus that in other times (was it a few years...
...the uptight Catholics...
...The street is not classy...
...Are they ready and able to stand together...
...Today, however, unions have become vested interests in their own right...
...We must watch politely and try not to be embarrassed for them...
...it shows the wounds of rampages and rip-offs...
...The liberal's choice was made for him, and post office walls around the country would commemorate it...
...We had best keep faith, lest after more of the hapless Ford and a blustering, directionless Congress, numbers of Americans again grow skeptical of coalitions and become susceptible to the appeal of spreading out a blanket and smoking quietly on Telegraph Avenue...
...it is more like magic...
...But here we find that decades of success have had a price...
...We are bedeviled by issues, from busing to pornography to punishment of criminals, which do not draw people into the categories we remember, with affection, from the '30s...
...were they ever students...
...That a nation of down-and-outers would come together in a coalition is not remarkable...
...Who, after all, were the young to coalesce with-their middle-class parents, those sell-outs...
...From this company of drop-outs, rejects and misfits the Youth Culture was prepared to learn...
...This Carey, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn who has produced more children than legislative accomplishments, is now to put on the mantle of Al Smith or FDR or Herbert Lehman and call into being a mighty gathering of the clans which will bear the liberal standard, revive the liberal cause...
...What is widely craved, for purposes of morale if nothing else, is a sign of leadership...
...served as a center of exceedingly extracurricular student activity...
...From an auto worker's perspective, it must be difficult to discern the charm in attacks on the internal combustion engine while car sales are taking a dive and plants are being shut down...
...The fate of our liberal coalition, after all, may hinge on their efforts...
...Whether it can survive a recession is an interesting question, to which we may have some answers quite soon...
...A broad affiance can probably be organized for national health insurance or for closing up some tax loopholes or for economic controls...
...It was easy enough for the liberal community of the '30s to celebrate the embattled unions...
...recline on the sidewalk, playing instruments, smoking, hugging, just lying there...
...The ecological movement, a great favorite among liberals, gathered force in a time of prosperity and growth...
...Union Blues At the center of any Left coalition, unless we are prepared to indulge in a replay of the McGovern adventure, must stand American labor...
...Thoughts of Telegraph Hill-what it was once and what it has come to-were with me when I returned to New York to find Hugh Carey, victor in a landslide for the state governorship, being acclaimed as the white hope of "coalition politics...
...The education establishment has not delivered on its promises, and in these pressing times even citizens who instinctively support aid to education at every level have come to view teachers with some skepticism as just another pressure group...
...One must hope, but one can hardly be optimistic...
...some are identified with resistance to technological innovation and a penchant for featherbedding...
...A few may be veterans or remnants of the heady era of the Youth Culture rampant, and will perhaps pass the remainder of their lives in the mists of what was or what might have been...
...On the campuses, there was nothing but disdain for coalition...
...But we shall be going sadly astray, I think, if we view our present condition in terms of the 1930s...
...fat cats...
...Perhaps one or another of the contenders will be transformed on the road to the White House...
...Liberals find themselves dug into positions that do not seem quite as defensible as they once did...
...the vanishing wasps...
...They take positions that appall many liberals...
...In some places, on some matters, yes...
...In the coming months, Democratic hopefuls, from Carey to Henry Jackson to Morris Udall to Lloyd Bentsen to George Wallace, and to persons yet unsung, will be doing their darndest to come on as forceful, dynamic, statesmanlike, and otherwise irresistible...
...Now, where is the leader...
...The coal miners' union, lately cleansed of its most unsavory elements, shows itself no less determined than the mine owners to dig some profit out of the energy shortage...
...They are tied intimately to defense industries, to industrial polluters, to lobbyists for highways and other unpublic-spirited combines...
...the company resists...
...Why should they be less selfish than the rest of us...
...Leadership Blues Still, coalitions can exist and even prosper regardless of internal strains in periods when we are confronted by an overriding issue or rallied by a special sort of political figure...
...the public pays...
...It is not easy for the principled opponent of censorship to know what he ought to be doing about pornography, for the champion of integration to concede that buses will not transport children to salvation, for the peace marcher to face up to the realities of Middle East power plays...
...The President, may he live out his term in peace, just does not have it in him...
...Who can blame them...
...the farmers, who existed out there somewhere in a remote world...
...Once again blacks will walk with whites, hard-hats will lie down with soft-hearts, hacks will make deals with idealists, the young will embrace the middle-aged...
...But the divisions that have split these groups in recent years run deep...
...Now only a score of people (are they students...
...When teachers decide that the time has come for them to strike, they are hard put to persuade the affected community that their cause is invariably the children's cause as well...
...the company succumbs-and instantly raises its prices...
...misery loves coalition...
...they can only simulate a scene that they have glimpsed at second or third hand...
...its great days are behind it...
...the union demands...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Coalition Blues On a recent trip to California I had occasion to visit Telegraph Avenue, the main street of the Berkeley campus that in other times (was it a few years ago or a lifetime ago...
...Is it possible that even the sainted Nader, like seat belts and buzzers, is becoming a nuisance to the very people he has dedicated himself to serving...
...some have benighted records regarding minority hiring...
...Remembering this period, what liberal can fail now to succumb to the charms of coalition...
...The main ingredient is not intellect or integrity...
...And what of the other elements in our coalition-the Catholic ethnics and the blacks, the black parents and the white teachers, the Jewish Zionists and the Quaker pacifists...
...Some unions have connections with criminal elements...
...The lines then were clearly drawn-workingstiffs vs...
...Despite a grand publicity campaign-library shelves are filled with the works of the Youth Culture's cheerleaders, intellectuals happy to set aside their intellects for the pleasures of the sport-it took but a modest acquaintance with the workings of American politics to understand that the most visible manifestations of the Youth Culture could only be a boon to the Right...
...they have to do with class and family relationships, with cherished collective values, with behavior that is considered within the bounds of propriety and behavior that is threatening...
...it is a luxury industry...
...Or consider the teachers' unions, those bastions of liberal sentiment...
...There are severe strains between even the most progressive unions and the liberal constituency at large, including fans of Ralph Nader, members of Common Cause and contributors to the Sierra Club...
...the upwardly mobile Jews...
...The prospect has much appeal, particularly for those of us who cannot shake off the experience of the '60s, when liberals were battered not from the...
...the workers, whom they scarcely knew and secretly feared...
...Will any of the contenders turn out to have that certain something, the mysterious recipe that produces a Franklin Roosevelt or a John Kennedy...
...Others are too young...
...The vote for Hugh Carey, though, represents less a clear unity of interest than a generalized distress over the way things are going...
...Right but from the Left, when on Telegraph Avenues around the country the young proclaimed their rejection of politics-as-usual, of compromise and accommodation...
...Or so we must hope-for the alternatives have mighty little appeal...
...Yet which of them causes the heart to leap...
...In our biggest industries, collective bargaining has become a kind of charade: The union demands...
...No, the only welcome allies for the Youth Culture came from the underclass, the unfortunate, the addicts, the thugs, the lunatics...
...Instant coalitions, like other fast-cooked dishes, may be tempting, but they can leave a bad aftertaste, as well as a touch of indigestion...
...Yet the liberal Left, bowed under the burden of Vietnam and hamstrung by its ties with the young (the concern and affection of parents for children), could do scarcely more than click tongues and trust that it would all work out for the best, that the oats would be sown and not too many people would be hurt or killed in the process...
...I don't know anyone who demands or expects a sure-proof program for meeting a damnably difficult set of problems, the total solution of which may not be within our national capacity...
...Indeed, a municipal employes' strike is one of the surest ways yet devised to turn an entire city to the law-and-order Right...
...The issue appears to be upon us, our worsening inflation-recession...
Vol. 57 • December 1974 • No. 25
