ON GROWING UP ABSURD
Kempton, Murray
On Growing Up Absurd by MURRAY KEMPTON New York City Our half-educated young have the habit of falling upon this city like wolves upon the fold. The beats began here, slouching towards Monterey...
...But, with luck, they may become administrative assistants to especially futile Congressmen and, with time, even especially futile Congressmen themselves, or commentators on news programs sponsored by furniture stores in small towns...
...New York, from the stance of this manifesto, is the capital city of the infidel...
...But, even with this limitation, what is saddest about Young Americans for Freedom is its acceptance of most serious general evils of our social order...
...What concerns me is the state of his juniors...
...The loss is damaging especially in growing up, for it deprives outgoing growth, which begins with weaning from Mother and walking out of the house, of the chance of entering upon a great and honorable scene to develop in...
...That generation is not young but middle-aged...
...The current radical affirmation is anti-government...
...Young Americans for Freedom ascends on the campus because campus politics are no longer important...
...But there is a new spirit...
...Francis of Assisi...
...There are few journalists to interpret the young except those themselves middle-aged...
...This was the style of their tributes: To Taylor Caldwell, for writing: "Long after the puerile purveyors of pornography, etc...
...Another illusion cherished by Buckley and Sokolsky is that Young Americans for Freedom represents a return to forgotten values of the intellect...
...The radicals of the Thirties were most conspicuous and least attractive when they denounced their parents...
...Henry James caught it in his description of Hyacinth Robinson's conversion to the anarchists...
...No director of Young Americans for Freedom can be told from any other...
...The social fabric has seldom been torn by young men who revolt only upon the instruction of their parents...
...Our rejection of false patriotism is, of course, itself a badge of honor...
...YAF's reverence for constituted authority turns out to be less absolute than Fulton Lewis III would have us believe...
...history has seldom been made by men who consciously dressed either well or badly...
...But the positive loss is tragic and I cannot resign myself to it...
...Such displays have brought Young Americans for Freedom its putative status, not merely as a renaissance of the conservative temper, but as the dominant youth movement of the Sixties...
...This was a muster which impressed the New York Times MURRAY KEMPTON ii « featured columnist and roving correspondent for the New York Post...
...Kirk had the mischance to be the first in line of those honored...
...Criticism of this style is irrelevant, except as evidence of how far YAF has been captured by the institutions it goes forth to destroy...
...But Young Americans for Freedom could well be without strenuous competition on the campus precisely because the creative minority of students is anti-political and anti-institutional...
...George Sokol-sky, as an instance, never spoke to a college audience without observing that he most missed there the spirit of revolt which had swept his generation, a handsome bit of nostalgia in Sckolsky's case since, as a student, he was an anarchist agitator against war...
...By his philosophical standards, self-service is the highest form of national service...
...Hyacinth felt too that a flood was rising all over the world—the tide image again— "and, whatever it might fail to bring . . . it might be trusted to look after its own...
...YAF thus seems consequential to the degree that it imitates the Thirties, a decade when youth sought expression through institutions...
...As Leonardo said once, it is a poor disciple who is not better than his master...
...Lewis Strauss won the award for science...
...It shows itself in demonstrations against the Un-American Activities Committee or in marches for a nuclear ban or in sit-downs against Southern segregation laws...
...There is a certain careerism in all movements of an evangelical sort, even in parody like this one...
...One's assumption has to be that any serious expression of youth in the Sixties would be political...
...One director is the son of Willard Edwards, Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, whose orthodoxy is tempered only by his amiability...
...Buckley has always had a certain temptation to be led astray by paper...
...A career in the Republican Party seems to be a common outlet for YAF leaders...
...They will be permitted to cherish him until 1964, until the professionals blow the whistle and force them to accept some other knight, in armor so tarnished as to seem indistinguishable from the black of the enemy...
...Amstine opened his acceptance speech by announcing that he had not been in Albany and thus could not be blamed for igniting Governor Rockefeller's mansion, which had burned down the day before...
...I could imagine Goldwater reading her novel:: but hardly Kirk and Buckley...
...The top button of his jacket is always buttoned as a conscious badge of his difference with all that is Bohemian or even casual...
...But, even so, the standard here seems directly borrowed from the Soviet Writers Union...
...For the first time in recorded history, the mention of country, community, place has lost its power to animate...
...Trained as they are to acceptance, they will make the transition dutifully and, dulled as they are by our educational system, they will not even know enough to understand that such absurdities are not only undignified but unnecessary...
...For Young Americans for Freedom is not a revolt but the final development in a minority of full conformity with that prosperity which, I am both glad and sorry to notice, began its steady course before many of its members were born...
...Caddy had not even been born when the first Mrs...
...YAF's laureate in education was Dr...
...The young man in the twelfth row of Manhattan Center, wearing a "Repeal Income Tax" button and holding a banner demanding "Conservatism Now," is thus to be described not as an artifact but as a symbol of the avenging future...
...A man has only one life and if, during it, he has no great environment, no community, he has been irreparably robbed of a human right...
...its script writers are products of an educational system whose most signal achievement over twenty years has been to teach its students to write English as though it were a foreign tongue...
...The same apathy afflicts government...
...So here is a movement back to first principles which seems unable to produce one spokesman qualified to be anything except a syndicated journalist or an administrative assistant, two job descriptions invented by the century they profess to detest...
...Young Americans for Freedom is no older than last September, and it already claims 30,000 members, enough to impress journalism, if not history, that it is the dominant organized expression of the spirit of American youth...
...But then too, YAF must rebel against its time in the language of its time...
...The Young American for Freedom seems to be notably without passion and is carefully polite to his enemies, without whose notice he would not feel himself in business...
...enough to give the occasion front page space, a tribute to the consequence of the far right it has not rendered since the Madison Square Garden rally to succor Senator Joseph McCarthy more than six years ago...
...Miss Taylor Caldwell, YAF's laureate for writing, occasionally indicates in the pages of National Review that she is better educated than her novels would lead one to expect...
...The road of the radical minority is not to power but to jail...
...Russell Kirk, caretaker of Edmund Burke's shrine...
...Their efforts at humor, the last defense of the individual, indicate that they have managed to conquer the impulse at the source...
...The highest calling is to be assistant to the President of Timken Detroit Axle...
...The beats began here, slouching towards Monterey to be born...
...The young Republicans cherish Goldwater above all prophets...
...Young Mr...
...Young Americans for Freedom is an action group...
...In the same spirit, Fulton Lewis III, as master of ceremonies for Operation Abolition, YAF's main celebratory rite, habitually observes that the San Francisco students were demonstrating against law and order and that respectable persons do not conduct themselves in this fashion...
...The tide of conservatism is rising all over the United States," the New Guard goes on, "and we will rise with it, leaving behind those unfortunates still chained to the rotting posts of 'liberalism,' collectivism, and statism...
...Its greatest pride to date was its dispatch of two busloads of young patriots to Washington in January to picket in support of the Un-American Activities Committee, then surrounded by Representative James Roosevelt...
...If they wish to sacrifice themselves for a lost cause, let them do so...
...We shall, in the wake of this movement, at least be spared the sight of the wrecked apostate...
...A Young American for Freedom may be further excused from the complaint that he serves himself first...
...Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd heard the first one from his father, and that he is therefore engaging in a ritual of ancestor worship...
...his concerns are generally aesthetic and quite often even moral...
...Any organization of Americans who picket to keep other Americans in jail rather than to get them out starts with certain handicaps as an expression of creative dissent...
...Nevertheless, we offer them the pincers o? liberty, individualism, and initiative to free themselves of chains as rusty as the shibboleths which undoubtedly our opponents will attempt to wrap around us...
...He accepts everything the beats reject...
...YAF even has a Demonstrations Committee which sends pickets to scenes of crisis...
...YAF, for example, seems to have carried our time's particular contempt for the intellect even further than would seem absolutely required by patriotism...
...The YAF director is less a rebel against our time than one of its ultimate products: the young man who was taught inquiry and self-expression in a school system which allots $10.54 a year per pupil for physical education and eighty-four cents per pupil per year for library books...
...Its literature pulses with the drum beats of the counterattack which means to become the offensive...
...And now there has marched upon us the direct opposite of the beat, the Young American for Freedom...
...Even Buckley, who is most engaging on the platform when he embodies the wry conviction that for him there is no earthly triumph probable, seems to have been moved by this spectacle...
...It is only natural to notice the complete adjustment the YAF member represents...
...Through all their quarrels, the left and right in America have shared an annoyance at the apathy and conformity they found in the American student of the Fifties...
...Our children will remember Young Americans for Freedom, if at all, as part of a time sadly deficient in opportunities of self-expression for ordinary young men...
...Real revolt has always been a species of parricide...
...Caddy opened the ceremonies with a jocular reference to "Eleanor," presumably Mrs...
...Once again paper and rhetoric have deceived him into thinking that Young Americans for Freedom represents revolt where the students of the Fifties represented conformity...
...Author's Note: I have borrowed the title of this piece and more of its notions than I can remember from Paul Goodman, whose Growing Up Absurd (Random House, 1960) is an extraordinary comment on the effect of our society upon its children...
...The directors of Young Americans for Freedom paraded to the microphone, one after another, each to present an honored elder and each under some arrogant compulsion to speak longer and more soggily than the person he introduced...
...We have the dismal sense that some publisher will issue a "React Anthology" to replace those beat anthologies whose fashion has withered...
...They outpicketed the Communist and Leftist pickets two to one—a smashing defeat for the Communist propaganda apparatus...
...a director of Young Americans for Freedom seems to walk towards an appointed and comfortable destiny...
...The source for this stuff is not Edmund Burke...
...To act otherwise is to betray principle...
...To call this a sudden development would be to scant William F. Buckley's extensive missionary efforts in the academies...
...one director even started as Barry Goldwater's page...
...The loudest impact young Americans for Freedom has made on New York came the night of March 4 when it filled Manhattan Center with four thousand members for a ceremony of awards to Senator Goldwater and twelve other of its elders who had held the door open for the new conservative generation for so many long and lonely years...
...This has been the tone of sweeping political manifestoes, right and left, ever since the anarchist Michael Bakunin first made his unconscious discovery that a certain element of incoherence is essential to any proper exhortation of the disgruntled...
...His recollections of the moment when he accepted YAF's award to National Review for service to youth might have come from the distinguished Western observer describing in Soviet Russia Today those children of the workers who gave him the bouquet the day he first saw the Dnieper Dam...
...Yet Young Americans for Freedom has made itself comfortable here...
...We are told, for example, that Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative is the current sales leader among college students, which, if true, is one more proof of Buckley's sound complaint that American education elevates current topical opinion above ancestral wisdom...
...YAF's predecessor, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, which felt lonely, defensive, and under siege, confined itself to discussion...
...Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sr., who is, while not constituted authority, a great-grandmother who might expect some respect from an acolyte at the worship of traditional values...
...Young Americans for Freedom has a certain importance, not for itself, but for the generation it reflects...
...This recognition, more than anything else, defines his difference from the radical of the Thirties, beside whom he is a professional wrestler...
...Roosevelt joke was told, a grisly thought until we reflect that he must have "Our case is astounding...
...This judgment is not expressed as criticism...
...He had to sit on the stage all through the Manhattan Center rally and thus to endure a special torment for any instructor in English literature, two hours' exposure to the prose style of the American college student, beside whom Raul Castro sounds like Stendhal...
...YAF is against it...
...But the revolt here would be more serious if it were not so plainly a submission to parental authority...
...This notion of leadership may explain the exaggeration of YAF's importance which has impelled Time to assign a reporter to study it "in depth...
...its slogan is, "The tide has turned...
...One advantage of having no ideals to betray is that you escape a middle age where your conscience keeps saying that you have sold out...
...Douglas Caddy, YAF's national director, delights in citing the college instructor who noted with pleasure that its members always wear neckties and suits that match and are conspicuously cleaner than liberals...
...To be middle-aged is to remember oneself as young in the Thirties, which means to remember oneself as formally political...
...As Young Americans for Freedom laureate for journalism, Sokolsky was cheered loudest of all, and he came as close to tears as a political realist can get...
...Young Americans for Freedom was organized in Sharon, Connecticut, the Buckley land-grant, on a statement of principles which its journal, the New Guard, defines as "brief and to the point: it upholds and affirms 'certain eternal truths' among them . . . the efficacy of the market economy...
...At the Coldwater rally, there were tentative boos for President Kennedy and fully-developed ones for President Eisenhower...
...William F. Buckley, Jr.: "The crest upon which young America is riding...
...He exalts a gratified Barry Goldwater where the beats exalted a somewhat embarrassed St...
...But the young, in all sincerity, particularly deceive those of their elders they choose to echo...
...The President is unlikely to attract hordes of his juniors pressing to work in the paymaster's office of the soil conservation program...
...The "youth leader" they chose to honor was James Amstine, state chairman of the Indiana College Young Republicans and "author of various manuals and instruction pamphlets dealing with campus politics"—an educational activity which must have rejoiced Professor Kirk...
...There is even a Greenwich Village chapter, which made its debut in February in an off-Broadway cellar showing of Operation Abolition, the House Un-American Activities Committee film glorifying the repression of the demonstrations against its San Francisco hearings...
...the best I could attempt is an inferior substitute...
...I describe no particular disaster...
...there is even a sort of career here for him...
...it is a caretaking job...
...YAF, for instance, is not indifferent to the Peace Corps...
...YAF's detestation of statism does not, of course, include disgust at the sight of four policemen carrying away a limp and dripping woman...
...Another is Herbert V. Kohler, Jr., of Kohler, whose father was honored by YAF for his services to youth in labor-management relations, a citation roughly equal to giving General Patton the Nobel Peace Prize...
...these are not children who, if they had not taken the wrong road, might have been poets or priests...
...The passion of its rhetoric does not mean that Young Americans for Freedom encourages any passionate individual rebellion in action...
...Young Americans for Freedom waits for Goodman...
...This promise could hardly survive exposure to the sound of its voice...
...This was, for one thing, a peculiar choice for libertarians, since government control of science is one of the most unfortunate aspects of the state capitalism under which we seem condemned to live, and Strauss is not even a scientist but an administrator, and, in extreme cases, a policeman over scientists...
...For example, almost no young man of spirit would think of going to work for a union any longer...
...Young Americans for Freedom, in contrast, seems a model of filial piety...
...It seems in fact to be limited to policemen...
...Buckley has raised a crop of of disciples most conspicuous for that entire disregard of the fundamentals of personal taste which best describes conformity...
...The audience applauded the hydrogen bomb, among other things, and not to give an award to Edward Teller argues nothing so much as a rooted dislike for any sort of scientific inquiry...
...The main response of the young to the Kennedy Administration is to its Peace Corps —whose horizons are as far as a young man can go from the center of the illusion of power...
...Organized middle age seems always to overlook the really important young because they have no recognizable echo and little organized voice, being originals and not copies...
...Eugene Pulliam, for publishing: "An unwavering beacon of light in a sea of darkness...
...This is enough in itself to discourage hopes or fears that YAF needs to be taken seriously...
...I would not tax Buckley with distaste for serious intellectual effort...
Vol. 25 • May 1961 • No. 5
