Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Goodbye to All That I spent a couple of hours the other day doing one of those book-reshufflings that are required every few years in the interests of safety and...
...He attracted attention initially as an organizer in the ghettoes of the Northeast, the Franz Fanon of Newark...
...might have been their slogan—except that, for all its charms, the id is not much good when it comes to uniting...
...There they all were, within biting distance of the New Society or the New Liberation, and all at once they found themselves chomping on air...
...Enough daydreaming...
...Guests at the Party Tom Hayden was one of the New Leftists...
...As for those middle-aged celebrants of Youth like the unhumorous Charles Reich, it was enough that the kids dressed right and had long hair...
...Ids of the world, unite...
...A few rock performers and some of their lyrics still hearken back to those exhilaratingly rowdy times...
...In a world reorganized to the specifications of Herbert Marcuse, where freedom was carefully allocated to those who deserved it, Hayden would probably have proved a first-class allocater...
...would have to contend first with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and then with a courtroom presided over by Judge Julius J. Hoffman...
...Casting about for a batch of books that might, without present distress or later inconvenience, be consigned to the basement, I lighted on volumes about the 1960s, in particular those announcing the coming or arrival of a revolution of some sort—social, political, cultural, spiritual, extraterrestrial...
...of popular culture spoon-feeding pap to the people...
...All in the shadows, yet they have left their mark on this society, on the disarray of our politics, on the way some of us dress, on our language, on our attitudes toward and practice of sex...
...And people without power are more free to go their own ways than those who must exercise it...
...Scarcely what the Movement's movers and shakers hoped for, but in these matters who gets what he hopes for...
...In particular, it had an infallible capacity for stimulating the worst in our keepers of order...
...There are communes that owe their origins to the Movement...
...There are office holders around the country who first smelled political power at an anti-Vietnam rally...
...Farewell to the whole counterculture, which promised to rejuvenate or deafen us and to the entire New Left, which promised to redeem us or wipe us out...
...The Next Morning One of these days, the sharpest teeth on the cutting edge of the 1960s, slightly decayed, will no doubt come together in a conference on the theme of what went wrong...
...The point was the demonstration, the kick, the high...
...For a brief time, the whole nation, to judge by press and TV coverage, was fascinated with them—what they said and smoked and wore and didn't wear—then it was abruptly over, like other fashions in popular entertainment...
...Charles Reich and Herbert Marcuse have subsided back into Academe, the former with scarcely a disciple to lead into Consciousness III or IV, the latter represented by Angela Davis, who although distinguished by her bravery and her looks is a true daughter of her mentor, possessing the tunnel vision of an ideologue and a deadening writing style...
...they were not organizable...
...Tom Hayden, running for the Democratic nomination for Senator from California, is attempting to persuade middle class voters he really doesn't despise them or wish to blow them up or expropriate their second cars and distribute them among the residents of Watts...
...Whereas Hayden was promoting Power to the People, they were mocking and befouling the People's most cherished precepts...
...Today's political dissidents of all sorts must still work to shed that image as they seek to convert Middle America...
...He had evidently come across excerpts from the works of Karl Marx somewhere and was ready to recite them upon little pretext and with no mercy to anyone who made the mistake of asking him a question...
...Benjamin Spock and the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, only had to come to grips with the divisions within their ranks on special occasions and for tactical reasons...
...No, the Yippies could never have been counted on to attain their quotas on Tom Hayden's collective, and purges, or at least re-education, would have been required...
...Marcuse could never figure out what to make of the counter-culturists, and they for their part could not raise much affection for the ultrapolitical New Leftists...
...of mindless affluence for some and a state of unbenign neglect for others...
...That decade was widely viewed on the Left as one of Communist-hunting at home and bomb-rattling abroad...
...Now Abbie Hoffman, wanted on a drug-related charge, is hiding from the law...
...The more respectable figureheads of the Movement, such as Dr...
...Though groups formed around them, they were not organizers...
...Whereas Hayden was out to revolutionize the society, they—although no less revolutionary—were bent on liberating the psyche...
...The dissidents of the 1960s differed among themselves in many particulars of outlook and style...
...Now I have an emptied shelf to fill...
...There were a lot of them, and the space they occupied would help relieve the existing strain on window ledges, the air conditioner and odd bits of furniture...
...Jerry Rubin is writing his confessions, consisting of his continuing search for the sustained high, through meditation and massage, that politics even in its odder forms could never afford him...
...Timothy Leary is informing on his onetime pals in the drug culture...
...I think I'll give it over to books about the American Bicentennial...
...But they constituted a vital segment of the leadership, and it was the image of a Hoffman or a Hayden rather than that, say, of a David McReynolds, that came to stand for the Movement to a large part of the nation...
...Farewell, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and all the Yippies...
...Whereas Hayden was busy laying down the proper line at meetings, emphasizing the need for discipline by the underclass in pursuit of clear political and economic goals, they just wanted to let it all hang out...
...Quite enough to bring together an alliance of alienation...
...it is dark there, and you can relax and let the 1970s devise and promote bromides more suited to the time...
...Their public lives—and, for all I know, their private lives as well—were composed entirely of demonstrations, whether for the right to use four-letter words on campuses or the right to fornicate in city parks was not the point...
...Though their names tended to be lumped together in the press and in the public mind, their visions of salvation were in fact irreconcilable...
...Farewell, Charles Reich, with his brave new consciousness...
...Its nominal leadership—carried along by the momentum of events it had little control over?was split at its extremities into two sects, the militants of the New Left and the spirits of the counterculture...
...Farewell, Tom Hayden, who discovered rebellions of the underclass wherever he looked and celebrated homemade weapons as long as they were made in ghetto homes...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Goodbye to All That I spent a couple of hours the other day doing one of those book-reshufflings that are required every few years in the interests of safety and domestic tranquility, and simply to keep the shelves from overflowing...
...Yet from its beginning to its dispersion, the Movement was about as unified as the Democratic party between elections...
...Still, except for the hours when they were in the dock together or demonstrating together, the Movement's incompatible spirits stayed out of each other's paths, one group getting off on drugs and the other on doctrines...
...Had the likes of Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman turned up on Tom Hayden's collective, however, they would have had to be brainwashed...
...Beyond that, between demonstrations the various elements each went their own way—the great majority of them back to conventional college life—for despite all the dreams and all the commotion, the Movement was never in danger of attaining continuing power...
...What they shared—leaving aside Vietnam, the issue that built and sustained their movement and gave them not only an importance they could never have earned on their own but notions about their future that could never be realized—was an aversion to and rebellion against the 1950s...
...Since the heralded revolutions either had not arrived or had triumphed so decorously that they escaped my notice, I undertook to lug the guts to the basement...
...The Movement as a whole, it must be emphasized, was significantly greater than these parts and decidedly more attractive...
...When a mass rally was planned, deals had to be worked out beforehand to keep the wilder spirits in control, to keep window-breaking and bad language to a minimum...
...Rennie Davis, a fellow defendant in the Chicago conspiracy trial, has become a publicity man for a guru...
...Farewell, Herbert Marcuse, who sought to take vengeance on the English language, after finding it intractable and leaving it even more so, by calling for its ban in instances when it displeased him...
...May you all gather dust peacefully in the basement...
...of a self-centered, career-oriented, up-tight, blandly unadventurous college generation entering a world dominated by big and stuffy corporations...
...of a Federal government where big business hobnobbed with small intellects...
...The spotlight moved on...
...With hard work, determination and an imagination that never got out of hand, he would have made, nay exceeded, whatever norm was set him...
...It was ordained that Rubin, Hayden, et al...
...Lyndon Johnson could have testified on that point...
...That is not to suggest that the Movement was without influence...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 8
