Holding Nothing Sacred

...Of the "Willkievelt campaign," he tritely observes: "Roosevelt and Willkie stand shoulder to shoulder on all important issues because the bourgeois interests which use them indifferently as mouthpieces arc similarly indivisible today...

...One reason for this, of course, is that the book is an anthology of articles on diverse subjects produced over a long career...

...I've never been in or even near a revolution before...

...Still less do I get a whiff of the anarchist's sulphurous world when, in "Our Invisible Poor," I read: "The Federal government is the only purposeful force-I assume that wars are not purposeful-that can reduce the number of the poor and make them bearable...

...Succumbing to a taste for politics as street theater, Macdonald defends the "liberation" of the seven university buildings, seized for Humanity by the politically besotted kids, as the exercise of "a moral right, from concrete use and interest, that they successfully asserted against the abstract ownership of the trustees...

...Applied to matters literary and cultural, however, Macdonald's conservative anarchism does suggest a coherent general view...

...There is little anarchism behind these pronouncements, merely pessimistic hauteur...

...The issues that divided the emergent nonentities, he opines, were either phony or of no consequence: On the only domestic question of any importance, civil rights, the commitment of both sides was roughly equal...

...Because vulgarity affronts him, it inspires in him a wicked lust to strike back, and since he is an erudite man of eclectic intellection, his aggression bulges forward on a multiplicity of fronts-political, literary, cinematic, and cultural...

...His bloody work has no grand design...

...and so, in "Those Mad Germans" (1941) Young Dwight proclaims that "one way of looking at fascism is as the systematization of the brutalities, contradictions, and lunacies of monopoly capitalism...

...Yet a more fundamental cause is at work as well...

...The only virtue of these essays is their display of a consistency that Macdonald later lost-proving that ideology has some advantages...

...Or, in Macdonald's critique of the Warren Report: A "nation of almost 200 million cannot be governed democratically...

...Even when Macdonald identifies "the real political issues" as those "which, except in some local elections, are not touched at all...

...Why, then, does he persist in his gabble about conservative anarchism...

...In his article "The 1960 Campaign: An Anarchist's View,'' Macdonald explains why he refused to vote that year, citing e. e. cummings' lines: "a politician is an arse upon/which everyone has sat except a man...

...Politically, though, Macdonald is often confusing, and at times downright contradictory...

...Macdonald clearly understands that while the Establishment is in many ways answerable to the arts and sciences, and responsible in part for a climate where they do or do not thrive, those same arts and sciences owe the Establishment nothing whatsoever...

...Macdonald's main objection to John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was "personal"?Each of them seems to me to have allowed his handlers to 'build him up' into a candidate by rubbing off all the rough edges that make a Somebody out of an Anybody...

...Would Macdonald, one wonders, console the psychologically traumatized Daniel Ellsberg with this argument...

...Perhaps because, to a former Trotskyite, the phrase "old-fashioned liberal" delivers about as much of an emotional jolt as an HHH campaign button...

...Sadly, the kind of literary demolition at which "Old Dwight"-as Arthur Schlesinger fils calls him-excels is currently thought de trop by journalists (were another scrivening bad boy, H. L. Mencken, writing now, much of his stuff would not get printed...

...Of all the essays presented in this collection, whether political or cultural, the least interesting date from Macdonald's radical youth...

...similarly, diplomatic affairs, largely unintelligible, as always, to the average citoyen, yielded "no detectable difference between the parties.' Lastly, Macdonald remarks that in a country the size of the United States, "the scale is so large that nobody really knows what will be the effect of any political action...

...But] government is made up, in overwhelming majority, of honorable and well-meaning people charged with preserving the intactness of our national life, without which it is hard to picture any national life at all...

...This makes all the more bracing Macdonald's stout declaration that violently destructive criticism is worth 10 times its weight in mindlessly positive offerings...

...in his rejection, as a writer, of the sacredness of any assumption, and his sense of the artist as an utterly free agent in rebellion against his environment, he is, as indeed he must be, an anarchist...

...And among pedagogues, it has forever been considered felonious to treat even the most baldly stupid phenomenon on terms other than its own, or without the utmost gravity...

...and he approves of such voluntary groups as taxpayers' associations, farm cooperatives, the PTA...

...He scornfully quotes George Kennan addressing the intelligentsia assembled at President Johnson's White House Festival of the Arts in 1965: "The worker in the vineyard of the arts has, God knows, no obligation to agree with the government in matters of political policy, or to conceal his disagreement...

...There was an atmosphere of exhilaration, excitement-pleasant, friendly, almost joyous excitement...

...The Democratic and Republican aspirants were but two arses more...

...Rather am I put in mind of that confirmed Tory, Mencken, laying on with his seltzer bottle and bladder-on-a-string, belaboring the cloddish boobus Americans and all of his comic institutions...

...In the end, there is no pattern to the depredations of this Ripper...

...For if the workings of the adjective can be discerned in his writing, the noun appears to have little relation to his particular political prejudices...

...I mean issues like sitting down at lunch counters or, in New York, the successful efforts of that great planner and public servant, Robert Moses, to destroy such slight remnants of community life as remain in this urban wasteland," I fail to detect the specter of black anarchy standing off his left shoulder as his typewriter rattles and shakes...

...Anarchism, or only sloppy thinking...

...national elections are essentially a form of mass escapism...

...They are, in the main, upholstered in the style of the period...

...Or, again: "'Mass democracy' is as much a contradiction in terms as was Hitler's 'national socialism.'" Yet whatever may be meant by conservative anarchism, Macdonald avers it "has more to tell us today than does Marxism about what's wrong with our overcentralized and overorganized society and about what steps might be taken to improve matters...

...He favors the free market system ("insofar as it still exists") as "an admirably anarchist device for distributing goods...

...He describes himself as a "conservative anarchist," but exactly what this says about him I don't know, and I don't believe he does either...

...A second is that many of the essays-particularly those written for the author's now-defunct Esquire column-are faultily designed...

...To this Chamber of Commerce preachment Macdonald flings a raspberry, throwing a second one out to Helen Hayes for her speech praising the role of Art in "helping people to understand themselves...

...A friend persuaded him to take a ride uptown to the Columbia campus in April 1968, there to witness a bona fide revolution...

...For all the sharpness of his critical attacks, Macdonald's victims here, as throughout his oeuvre, seem almost randomly chosen, like those of a psychotic murderer...

...Contributor, "National Review," "Nation" "I've always specialized in negative criticism,' writes that stupendous fire-eater of belles-lettres Dwight Macdonald, "because I've found so few contemporary products about which I could be 'constructive' without hating myself in the morning...

...Nonetheless, when he describes Norman Thomas as "a liberal, but a real, old-fashioned liberal who believes in freedom and justice for everybody," I suspect Macdonald also describes himself...

...Taken as a whole, Discriminations is a somewhat fragmentary tome...

...The invasion of a professional office, he argues in an exchange of letters with Professor Ivan Morris of Columbia, is a less dastardly, because a less personal, act than the invasion of a home...

...Unfortunately, the idealistic student jamborees of the 1960s apparently sparked in Old Dwight infelicitous reminiscences of the past...

...In the breadth of his learning and the depth of his sympathy for the intellectual tradition in which he is steeped, Macdonald is profoundly conservative...

...I guess I like them...