Turning On to Life

...It is not just middle class boredom of the American marketplace that is revealed by this awakening...

...We have become the witless victims of the self-serving corporate establishment, which can produce only compromises for the human spirit, and are left in a mono-tonic state of bewilderment, never far from a bottle of aspirin...

...The psychedelic drugs have sharpened sensitivities to such a point that there can be no return to the alienating conditions of middle class life, even after one stops taking them...

...So they are going back to nature and learning how to live and love...

...The world of their parents is like a giant vacuum cleaner waiting to suck them up into a disposable bag...

...They hate their toys for what love they fail to replace...

...that is the point that the radicals have missed...

...Our national distress is deeper than dulled sensitivities, although we should not underestimate that...

...After all, that is what it is all about...

...Reich's admonition of the New Left radicals is a tragic retreat from principle : "They are basically believers in structural change before a change in consciousness . . . They seek to create change by self-sacrifice, by going to endless dull organizational and ideological meetings, and doing endless unrewarding work, by getting arrested, suffering prison sentences, even by the terrible risks of fighting in the streets...

...The children of affluence have discovered a communal life style which has made them better people and more deeply integrated human beings than is possible under the bu-reaucratized conditions of the corporate state...

...In this sense, the turn-on is a put-on...

...In fact, Reich makes it sound as if "the truth" will be found in real, unhomogenized peanut butter, which he mentions repeatedly as an indication of the awakening from our plastic sleep...

...Heads get busted for hair alone, not to mention the life style that is implied...

...Social relations have become ritualized in the idiom of corporate competition so that we now see each other as social functions and dysfunctions, husbands and hippies, rather than as people...

...One of my difficulties with this book was Reich's somewhat depressing exuberance about this new age of joy, because it is so much about the "trip" and things to do, the sensual side, and not about the realities of social migration into such a world, with its disengagement from old attachments and subsequent insecurities about one's place in the new community...

...But Reich should not assume that this new consciousness about the human community is the simple result of an acid trip and a spinal surrender to rock music...

...a little too settled for my liking...

...In the loneliness of such a world, we strive for wealth and social achievement which deprive us of a sense of what we are really like as people...

...However, radical politics is changing and spreading into the kitchens and bedrooms of America where corporate power has its real focus, as well as to the larger institutions of the system—for example, the Army...

...Thus, it is not just a phase that kids are going through, and Reich, a professor at the Yale Law School, is convinced that some of us are already on another plane of consciousness and are getting settled in...

...The unhappy offspring of this situation are not so accepting of such a fate...

...He takes as his sign the culture of the new generation, which has found itself unable to submit to a life of fringe benefits and has dropped out of the at race in search of a better world...

...Moreover, the young's awareness of social exploitation in American society has been sharpened by this experience, and they have come to realize that people cannot allow themselves to be used for external and extraneous purposes without giving up their minds and often their sanity...

...They would rather run naked in the rain than make the kind of down payments this world requires for its canned happiness...

...And who can blame them...

...Stop being consumers, goes Reich's thesis, and turn on to the personal dimensions of the inner life...

...The experiment of simply spreading joy has already failed...

...One must have politics in order to survive with the new consciousness or else one ends up as a "freak" (the mystics I do not count...

...These children of disaffected affluence have been learning about human integrity and the meaning of community from coal miners in West Virginia, migrant workers in California, and black people everywhere from Natchez to South Chicago...

...The book is too long for what it does not discuss about life...

...I suggest that Reich use his legal talents and his corporate rep-uation to liberate a few who desperately need his help instead of rhapsodizing about peanut butter...

...Instead they catalyze fear and aggression, as in the film Easy Rider...

...Re-form on the basis of human value and the corporate state will wither away...

...This has come about insidiously as Americans sold themselves for the necessary bread in an increasingly impersonal way, which ultimately resulted in the eating of that bread alone...

...They have traveled and worked throughout the Third World in the Peace Corps and the Venceremos Brigades and have been awakened by the technological horrors of corporate indifference in Vietnam...

...Hippies, who are the vanguard of the greening process, are also the corporate scapegoat, and this has pulled many back into politics...

...One final word: I recommend this book highly for what it says about turning on to life and kids...

...But what about the rest of the people in this unhappy land who are too old or too poor or too black to open their cages and walk out into the sunshine...

...The problem with Reich's thesis is that even exemplary communal values in corporate America are such a threat to its need for loyalty that they do not act like the "yeasting" he describes...

...But, in a general way, Reich lays out the situation we face: the humanistic individualism of colonial America was lost in the struggle for survival, and we became a nation of power-hungry paranoids who cannot share our garden tools on a permanent basis...

...Reviewed by Peter Weiss We are, Charles Reich tells us in The Greening of America, entering a new age of revolutionary consciousness, a new age of conservation and creativity born on the wings of the liberated human spirit...

...The human void created by this is then filled with consumer products, toys for our unhappiness, which keep us grinding away at their production...

...Bob Dylan did what he wanted to do, lived his own life, and incidentally changed the world...

...They are locked in and someone threw away the key...

...And he should take a few of his Yale law students with him when he goes to get George Jackson out of jail...

...Thus, despite their bravery, they fail to offer an example of an affirmative vision...

...Were it not for those tiny particles of lycergic acid that split the mental atom and send a shaft of recognition all the way to Olympus, this greening process might be just another phase in our chaotic race against 1984, a bo-hemian shift back to art to be swallowed up by the corporate establishment...

...But, beyond that, these young adventurers have wandered into the medieval gardens of social taboo and have discovered that there really is an Eden and that we were talked and not driven out of it...