DISENCHANTED REBELS
WHITMAN, CHARLES
BOOKS DISENCHANTED REBELS armed love, by Elia Katz. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 216 pp. $5.95. a name for ourselves: feeling about authentic identity, love, intuitive politics, us, by Paul...
...Potter is analytic, somber, and sometimes brilliant...
...Like Potter, I was at the Battle of Balbo in Chicago in 1968, and I appreciate his analysis of its incommunica-bility to those who were absent...
...Potter exemplifies, sadly, the romanticized New Leftist notion of politics that called power dirty, evil, taboo...
...At the book's end is Potter's "Postscript," where he shares gutsy day-today happenings and maintains love if possible...
...Disenchantment with the political scene was inevitable, and it is genuine...
...Where are his experiences that show the impossibility of love...
...Here is the emotional man, the struggling man, the confused man...
...If Potter had written with more of her gusto, his book would have been improved...
...His blind contempt for power politics in the name of an ulterior quest for love is a cop-out...
...But this insight does not obviate his generally sordid recollections...
...Although Potter's uto-pianism rankles, he is politically astute, and some paragraphs are polished enough to be prose poems...
...Preferring instruction that is "intuitive, not academic," he writes off rationality to the point of obscurantism...
...Elia Katz, a Johns Hopkins graduate, is twenty-two, and Paul Potter, national president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1964, is just past thirty...
...He repeatedly writes, "Let me try to explain what I meant to say...
...Potter's book, A Name for Ourselves, is a premature autobiography...
...dissenters are simply wrong...
...She spews: "What is the most real in my life is my anger and pain at men—all men...
...The title derives from his disenchantment with love as a communal ideal, for he found it more ephemeral, selfish, and assertive than he had hoped...
...Wildflower's invective does not fit...
...reviewed by Charles Whitman No two books could be more different and still discuss the same subjects...
...At the opposite end from this jarring but provocative postscript is a foreword that is merely jarring...
...However, in discussing "poorer freaks" who "hold radical beliefs and feel more strongly and deeply than college students a desire for total equality among the people in the world," and who "are also more honest dealing dope, more honest talking, less grotesquely dressed than richer freaks," Katz writes: "I did not know this was true, but now I have learned that the very ones who are called freeloaders, ripoffs, lazy hippies, and useless acid heads, the ones that all the advertisements for new communes in the underground papers ask not to come around, are the unbelievable sweetness of travel in America and the home of what spirituality there is in the country that has no laws...
...here he looks more like Katz...
...Although Katz and Potter differ in style and temperament, their verdicts are nearly identical...
...Foreword by Leni Wildflower...
...a name for ourselves: feeling about authentic identity, love, intuitive politics, us, by Paul Potter...
...it is incongruous, cloying, and detrimental to Potter's own work...
...I disagree that "love is impossible," yet our disagreement may be verbal because his chapter on love is obscure...
...Whitman is a free lance writer and photographer whose autobiographical narrative, "Turning Thirty," will be published later this year...
...My love for Paul...
...This was especially true where guns had to be stored for self-protection...
...His criticisms of youth culture echo Katz's cynicism about faddism and superficiality...
...It shows a fundamental unwillingness to accept power relationships not only as social realities but as natural enterprises...
...Using the faulty rationale that power-grabbers turn to politics because they lack fulfillment in love, Potter reverses the formula...
...Both berate nearly everything they dissect—love, politics, communes, straight society, and even freaks...
...This, he believes, is because "there is a salutary effect on people when, even for six months, they do not have things and money in their possession...
...But Ms...
...If their perceptions are to be trusted, Theodore Roszak's "making of a counter-culture" hasn't a chance, and Charles Reich's "greening of America" is pure satire...
...Having convinced himself that politics is a bad scene, he justifies his renewed search for love through a series of casuistic non sequiturs and concludes with the fatuous statement, "The fact that love is impossible, makes love seem closer to me...
...But despite his professed rediscovery of words, Potter is semantically sloppy...
...But the relationship is not explored in his pages...
...238 pp...
...Wheeler's anarchic ranch, open to anyone to live in as he wishes if he doesn't mess up others, comes off best...
...He recites the often pathetic attempts of members to relate to one another, and he summarizes their oppressive clashes with police, courts, and paranoid neighbors...
...Both books are chronicles of sadness, and it is sobering to read them in tandem...
...Potter says in his acknowledgements that his book "took root in the reality" of his relationship with Leni Wild-flower...
...Katz is reportorial, ingenuous, and occasionally witty...
...In his 1969 junket across America, Katz explored rancid milk-and-honey communalism from Heathcote commune in Baltimore and The Family near Taos, New Mexico, to Wheeler's Ranch in California's Sonoma county...
...Eschewing such midwifery, she agrees that she sets the wrong tone but proceeds to beat the drum for women's liberation like a minor Major Barbara...
...6.95...
...Not here...
...It was, to use his helpful term, a "break-away" experience...
...She concludes none too soon on a note of "the anger for men...
...but it is disenchantment over false hopes and self-delusions...
...Leni Wildflower begins: "I will not write an introduction for this book...
...Her message, and women's lib, should be heard, but her tone is too abrasive for my taste...
...Little, Brown...
...Everywhere, Katz found total sharing of selves and possessions less than a total success...
...I also like his distinction between mass culture and middle-class culture and his chapter calling for a "revolutionary separatist church...
...All we have is a dissertation on the inclination of Americans to fulfill their unsatisfied needs to love or be loved through power, promotions, and Pontiacs...
...It presents not the development of an individual, however, but the rather formal, intellectual conclusions he has reached about life, love, politics, and the Movement...
...Armed Love summarizes Katz's reactions io communal life as he saw it in a half-dozen widely scattered experiments...
...All he gives us is a smooth chapter on "Why I Like Women's Liberation...
...Potter's tendency to intellectualize his experiences without describing them or explaining how they provoked him often makes him seem to speak as if his is the final word for everyone...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
