MILTON MAYER: 'CYNICAL IDEALIST'

...Hope without expectation, self-knowledge without suicide, and understanding with emotion...

...the state—though my sputum is uninfected—arrests me on its 'clear and present danger' doctrine and calls my claim to conscience self-evidently false...

...Too late to be firm...

...Mayer calls himself an unemployed newspaper man, and so does undeserved honor to those of us who practice the boom-daddy-oh of journalism...

...he was a conscientious objector in World War II...

...Mayer doesn't concern himself with minor mechanical difficulties of the two-party system...

...Mr...

...None of that is any help, but he does supply us with a way of recognizing our permissive faults without saying what Spiro Agnew does...

...He did right long ago, deducting the armament portion of his income tax in the late 1940s...

...With all the bloodiness and despotism, have any of these Communist societies moved toward the giving birth of the new socialist man who was once promised us as a sort of .materialist messiah...

...But it is not an absolute gulf...

...He is a serious man...

...I love them not, because their insolent feet are dirty...

...Here we have, if not the believing socialist, at least a hoping one making ethical comparisons between life, East and West, that we are not used to reading...

...The last paragraph of the last essay in the book is written about the young, but it also tells us how he looks on the world more broadly, how to affirm by denying, how to say yes by saying no: "I love them not...

...These are questions worth propounding to Americans who live in a country where a man recently highjacked an airliner to pay for a sick child's medical bills...

...He knows they are ignorant, tatter-brained, and bleary-eyed, but as he points out, we don't beat our kids the way the English do, and we're not like the Italians who don't love their children but "love their bambini and turn them loose as soon as they can forage...

...The timeless Chinese custom on celebrative occasions—to wish the celebrant a happy death—would ruin the party anywhere in the Western World...

...Such discussions won't tell you who to vote for or whether to work for George McGovern...

...Instead he gnaws on the ancient dilemmas: "Today my conscience compels me to spit on the sidewalk...

...We have not yet a treatise entitled 'Dying Can Be Fun' . . . and we still are afraid to die...

...Lovelessly I love them not...

...These days we may die happily forever after, under constant, increasing sedation...

...Now he is polishing the grain of his soul to bring out the wisdom therein...

...This book of essays, some of which originally appeared in The Progressive, addresses itself to our prevalent preoccupations: man, liberty, life, death, and this generation of youth...

...A difference in degree, however, does not constitute a difference of kind...

...I yield my conscience to the state —and tomorrow it arrests me for refusing to pay my war tax...

...When you read a paragraph like this you ought to think about it for a spell...

...This, then, isn't a book for reading through...

...He's bitter and he's sweet, but always humane, as when he suggests that we "pray that they will live, however disgracefully they live, however demeritedly they live, until they have outlived us...

...We want to catch crooks and institute reforms for we are idiot, moralizing optimists...

...Such is the wise attitude of Milton Mayer...

...When I asked a Christian pastor in Rumania what he could say for Communism in his country, he replied, 'One thing: We still lie, of course, but we don't lie as much for money as we used to.'" Which is not to suggest that Mayer has seen the future and is announcing to us that, if it doesn't work, at least it fails on a higher plane...

...They are calculated to the discovery of who we are as individuals and where we are in history...

...Mayer is very good writing about the young...

...He has contributed to many periodicals, and his books include "Mississippi Notebook" and "We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against...

...So much of what we get is social science-ish, manic, methodical empiricism that asks no very important questions and gets no very important answers...

...Rampant are short-weighting, shortchanging, corner-cutting, quality upgrading, quota-faking, smuggling . . . and, above all, small time bribery and commercial favoritism and chiseling...

...The painless extraction of teeth has been extended to the painless extraction of people...

...I love them not, because they are right...

...If you have to be turned on again when you're twenty—as you do when you're nearly dead at forty—you must have died somewhere along the line...

...This is a way of thinking about politics we seldom read any more...

...Mayer decided what he was going to do many years back...

...The customary view of life is that you're turned on when you're born and you're turned off when you die...

...That may not appeal to those of us splashing around trying to decide what to do...

...I know of no penalty imposed upon deviation by one modern state or society, legally or customarily, that is not imposed by another to some extent upon some segment of its citizens, with an inexorable tendency toward closer resemblance as 'prevailing conditions' approach identity...

...Too late to keep them lovable...

...Mayer stays away from those familiar, and therefore dreary, measur-ings of which system is more efficient or productive, and instead inquires into what you might call the ethical content of life on the far side of the curtain...

...I love them not because they love not the loveless...

...reviewed by Nicholas von Hoffman "I went to Russia," Milton Mayer once wrote, "because I never knew what to say when people got up in the audience and said, 'If you don't like it here, why don't you go to Russia?' Now I can say, 'I did go to Russia and I don't like it there either.' " That's Milton Mayer for you—always he has a sardonic, intelligent twinkle about what he writes, and always he regards the world with a unique heterodoxy...

...Mayer is too wise a man to come to hard conclusions, but he does write of the East, ". . . there's a built-in ceiling on stimulation when, instead of fifty-seven varieties, there are two or three or one—no bargains, closeouts, midsummer clearances, or January white sales...

...E. Pluribus Einheit, out of many comes Hitler's oneness, he tells us: "The gulf is immense between Western democracy and the overt tyranny of, say, the most liberal Communist regime...

...He has even found a page in the 1957 edition of Spock where it says we may have gone too far, where it says, "firmness keeps them lovable...

...Too late...

...von Hoffman is a featured columnist of The Washington Post...

...He is a man doomed to be unfashionable, for even when he shares other men's conclusions, he has his own ways of arriving at them...

...The French love to keep the business in the family, and the Germans love to break somebody's spirit...

...In yielding today, in the matter of expectoration, I have yielded the principle that would alone protect my liberty tomorrow . . . If a man cannot confer his conscience upon the state, and the state cannot permit him to do whatever his conscience dictates, the two can abide together only by happy accident, like a Hatfield and McCoy who do not happen to meet on the street...

...is petty corruption of the traditionally incorruptible civil servant in societies all of whose members are now civil servants...

...But Mayer is looking for something else among the people who live in a society which, as he puts it, misuses the principles of Christian Communism which the West fails to use at all...

...Too late to unspoil the child by unsparing the rod," Mayer writes not in despair, but in soft amusement and in the hope that comes from the contemplation of the failure of ancient truths and beauties to materialize...

...It is moral and philosophical, and until I read it I had forgotten how long it has been since I had encountered a political writer who proceeds this way...

...we are not...

...If he says you're infinitely safer on the night streets of Moscow than of Washington, he also tells us, "What is certainly prevalent under Communism...

...No, because after quoting a man in Budapest as saying the difference between East and West " 'is that we know we are brainwashed,' " he writes that the signs point "not forward to Superman, not backward to Subman, but to Man where he is and to man what he is: the Old Man, chained by the marvels of his mind to progressive self-enslavement, the dream of freedom slipping from him...

...I love them not, because I forgive them not, and I forgive them not for their reminding me that I was young...

...He is not ecstatic...

...What, he'd like to know, comes of "eliminating the acquisitiveness which, in the Marxist view, is imposed on man by his lifelong dread of unemployment, by the necessity to provide for his children, by the prospect of catastrophic illness, and by the economic unsup-portability of old age...

...So this man who can't write a bad English sentence, this man who is wise but not clever, this cynical idealist, as his old friend Saul Alinsky calls him, will never be popular, and that is a shame because not enough people will read his newest book, If Men Were Angels...

...Mayer doesn't do that, any more than he spends his energies digging out scandalous inside pooperies that absorb so much attention and tell us so little...

...It's an important question for Mayer because, as he writes, "To say that the New Man has never been—even to say that he can never be—is not to say that we can do without him...

...Take the titillation out of the caveat emptor, take the charm out of shopping around, and you've taken away a good deal of temptation—and, I suppose, a good deal of virtue in resisting it...

...He has the melancholy that derives from thought: ". . . the physical pain of dying is minimized...

...But if the subject matter is familiar, the attack is Mayer's own as when he writes about Russia and the other Communist lands...

...as a volume of aphorisms and epigrams it is best appreciated a taste at a time...

...Somebody — or something — killed the young...