The Educated American
Mayer, Milton
The Educated American by MILTON MAYER When the cannons speak, the voice of reason falls silent; or so we are told. And now Secretary Rusk tells the Los Angeles Town Hall (according to the...
...But how many...
...The one element common to all our dissensions is anti-intellectual-ism (as it always has been in Europe...
...The demonstrators speak with human tongue and that their own...
...How many of us ever shared or now share the Founding Fathers' doctrine that our government must not be entrusted to the fighting men...
...Some of us had supposed that it was different here...
...In the Civil War we were divided by two questions, sovereignty and slavery...
...The "coon-skin-on-the-wall" man may not have had far to go...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do?," includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...
...The Educated American by MILTON MAYER When the cannons speak, the voice of reason falls silent...
...Our country is getting ready to cut its own head off...
...The Secretary of State had farther, but he is now gone all the way...
...Under daily increasing duress we are discovering that nothing really reaches most Americans except the raw shibboleths of totem and taboo, "Come alive with Pepsi," and "My country, right or wrong...
...The fighting men speak from the mouths of their cannons, and they are either conscripts or lifelong cannoneers...
...As our national agony escalated, President Johnson's simple-mindedness tempted him to beg for the voluntary totalitarianism of consensus...
...The Germans of 1933 were universally literate but almost universally anti-intellectual...
...His course has long since driven him to anti-intellectualism...
...Our society is torn to pieces...
...Certainly not Mr...
...Now that he has total dis-sensus on his hands, he has quit begging...
...MILTON MAYER is a staff member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts...
...We are now divided on every public policy, even (as regards public housing and poor relief) in the one area where we thought we were closest to unity, namely, the welfare state...
...And now Secretary Rusk tells the Los Angeles Town Hall (according to the Associated Press) that "it is not the demonstrators but fighting men in Vietnam who speak for the American people...
...After more than a century of compulsory public schooling of eight to twelve years, a majority of schooled Americans think with their blood...
...As the national situation approaches cataclysm, we have got to expect that men like Secretary Rusk will reprobate schooling for what proves to be the American, no less than the Russian or the German, faith in big battalions abroad and at home...
...Schooling does not seem to touch it...
...Rusk in Los Angeles...
...Unlike Dean Rusk, Lyndon Johnson was a non-intellectual at best...
...He turned away from them...
...But he is understandable...
...A year or so ago Secretary Rusk was hurt when he found that he was hated on the campuses...
...We think with our blood," said Goeb-bels...
...It will not have been the first...
...It is under tyranny that it is not the demonstrators— who are shot—but the fighting men who speak for the people...
...The chasm between town and gown (in Northampton, Madison, Berkeley, everywhere) seems to be as unbridgeable as if public schooling had never been...
...In the college town of Northampton, Massachusetts, hecklers set upon silent demonstrators, while the police and the townies stood by...
...The city clerk (who doubles as chairman of the draft board) said of an injured student, "Too bad they didn't break his damn neck...
...They are met with gross vilification...
...Whatever else he may be, he is no longer simple-minded...
...The Secretary of State may be deplorable...
...Whoever has participated in the present demonstrations knows that the participants—who want to argue—are not argued with except on the most primitive level (and even that rarely...
...Now he has turned against them...
...The division in Washington between eggheads like Senator Ful-bright (a former university president) and his Southern (and most of his Northern) colleagues has long been plain...
...They do not appear to have read or heard the daily news reports or even to have seen the pictures in Life...
Vol. 31 • December 1967 • No. 12
