Waiting for the Bloodless Revolution
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union WAITING FOR THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Thoughts while waiting on a station platform for friends from New York: The train is late again. If Mussolini had...
...Nowadays who doesn't...
...We heard similar pleas in the '50s, from persons opposing antilynch laws...
...But now that she had heard Ms...
...The trouble is that in his zeal to enthrone the individual, the ex-NAM achiever would actually dismantle some of the very institutions that have made individualism in the United States possible...
...One advertises "Transcendental Meditation" under the tutelage of Mahari-shi Marash Yogi...
...Of course, with James I on the throne, who had the heart to venture forth...
...Some people keep talking about another kind of revolution, one that is bloodless and boneless, and can be neither perceived nor appraised...
...Expand your consciousness...
...Is it possible to maintain schedules and sustain order without inadvertently opening the door to Fascism...
...Lindfors' recitation) that she was not alone...
...They are forever in pursuit of new themes and fresh obsessions, of plausible ways to account for the general unhappiness...
...Most of the questions, and most of her answers, pertained to her struggles-her acting career, her marriages, her gradual enlistment in the Women's Movement...
...You'd think, to listen to President Ford these days, that "regulation" was a synonym for Fascism...
...Without missing a beat they have glided from the polity to the psyche...
...I am getting carried away...
...into a huge and perpetual revival meeting, a place where each citizen concentrates on working toward personal salvation...
...And only a few years later the Puritan Revolution started...
...It will be purely a phenomenon of the heart, they say, and will occur inside millions of individuals...
...Its citizenry tends to be rich and restive...
...TM," it says, "expands consciousness, develops clear thinking and perception, provides deep rest . inspires creative intelligence and more dynamic activity...
...Where's that damn train...
...If Mussolini had had the Penn Central to contend with, there would have been nothing good to say about him, not even that he made the trains run on time...
...The White House sings the praises of privatism...
...The other night Viveca Lindfors came to Westport to do her one-person show, I Am a Woman...
...It was a time, I suspect, when the stagecoaches were always late...
...A bide with Me in the private sector...
...The sole hope for revolutionizing society, says this disillusioned liberal, "does not lie in its institutions but in revolutionizing the hearts of men...
...Be thou thine own home, and in thyself dwell," John Donne advised a friend...
...It is an appealing thought, though hardly a new one...
...He has no faith in politics, and quotes with approval a newspaper account of a "disillusioned liberal activist" who has "passionately repudiated all the familiar liberal engines for creating a just society-legislation, politics, programs...
...It also promises an all-vegetable dinner in Westport, Connecticut, the town next-door to mine...
...Give us this day our daily bread from the private sector, and deliver us from regulation...
...Along with Gerald Ford, Cornuelle wants the government to recede from view, letting people and private business do the job...
...Meditate...
...Lindfors sat on the edge of the stage and fielded questions from the audience...
...The rich are different from you and me...
...He pronounces the term "private sector" with a profound reverence, as if it were a line from a hymnal or part of the Lord's Prayer...
...One way or another, everybody appears to be cultivating his garden, and liberals and radicals are not excluded from the general retreat...
...Westport is worth meditating on, with or without the aid of a spiritual master...
...We're tenting tonight on the old campground,/Give us a song to cheer/Our weary hearts " Even the Wall Street Journal has been thumping for this (cardiac...
...They see this revolution turning the U.S...
...How is it that so many of us inveterate outgoers have suddenly become pious indwellers...
...All aboard...
...You couldn't legislate morality, they said...
...Besides they seem more carefully regulated by the Feds, a circumstance that keeps them hopping if not happy...
...Lindfors she felt much better about her life, and would like to thank the actress by giving her a hug...
...the only way to bring about social change was to transform the hearts of citizens-one at a time...
...I watch them, with a touch of unexpected fondness, as the day's last train finally arrives...
...Well, the airlines are on time more often than not, but then they are younger and richer, and therefore less sclerotic and cranky...
...Ordinarily, Westport is meat-eating country-always plenty of fillet and tenderloin there...
...my new-found land...
...She said she too had suffered, and was cheered to learn (from Ms...
...Near the close of the evening a young woman in the front row stood up and made a declaration...
...He has written a book called De-Managing America: The Final Revolution, in which he envisions a nation cut loose from corporate regimentation and governmental authority, a nation of individuals rather than of bureaucrats...
...The moneychangers may start throwing themselves out of the temple...
...After the performance Ms...
...The man who has given us a song to cheer our weary hearts is Richard Cornuelle, a former, and reformed, executive vice-president of the National Association of Manufacturers...
...New Dealers retort, "The only thing we have to fear is laissez faire itself...
...And there, at the far end of the platform, against a darkening sky, I can see them all...
...It was very hard, she explained, to grow up in Westport, to be rich, to go to an Ivy League school, and afterward to come back, get married and continue to live in Westport...
...Yes, they have a lower threshold of pain...
...revolution...
...The other poster offers "Inner Peace" and "The Joy of Meditation," blessings bestowed by Spiritual Master Sri Chontana...
...Apparently, he wants to deregulate everything-industry, government, the stars in heaven...
...Look at those two posters over there on the station wall...
...Why all this soggy solipsism, this fascination with the juice of one's own glands...
...But if for the nonce it is deemed chic to be vegetarian, then a predictable percentage of its residents will eagerly eat greens...
...They are grouped in triumphant tableau, meditating, suffering, hugging, de-regulating, de-managing, swilling carrot juice...
...O my America...
...Better to lock the door and put another log on the fire...
...Many have effected an astonishingly swift, post-Vietnam withdrawal, deserting the political arena in favor of a chatty and modish narcissism...
...So-while passenger trains limp eastward from Grand Central, and impatient friends pace empty platforms-a vast and mysterious confluence appears to have taken place: between transcendentalists and vegetarians, outgoers and indwellers, disillusioned liberals and die-hard conservatives, John Donne and the Wall Street Journal, the public sector and the private sector, hymn-singers and speechifiers, Gerald Ford and Richard Cornuelle, the people of Westport, Connecticut, and Sri Chontana, sufferers and entertainers, Viveca Lindfors and everybody...
...The two women hugged while the crowd, in perfect understanding of what it means to be a sufferer, applauded enthusiastically...
...The job for America, in the end," declared a recent Journal editorial, "may be to replace the idea of success with the idea of the soul...
...All's laissez faire in love and war," the President seems to be saying...
...The theater was packed...
Vol. 58 • October 1975 • No. 20
