The Libertarian Review March 1980 - Libertarianism.org

6of which Taraki and Aminwere members, was generallyseen as more independentthan.the Parcham, ofwhich Karmal was amember.Moscow certainly hadconnections to the PDP, butit did not initiate the Aprilcoup. In fact, Western diplomatsreported that theRussians were genuinelyalbeitpleasantly - surprisedby it. Perhaps it wasbecause the PDP's entirebase of support at the timeof the coup consisted ofabout 5,000 urban intellectualsin an overwhelminglyruralcountry of 27million. Why did the PDPmake their move with sucha narrow base of support?Essentially, they wereforced to by PresidentDaoud. In the Spring of1978, Daoud started tocrack down on oppositionparties. In April, a majorParcham figure was assassinatedby the government,and leaders of the PDP werearrested en masse. In orderto save their own necks,thecommunists were forced tooverthrow Daoud and assumepower, with littlepopular support. The prematurityof the PDP's "revolution"is central to theevents that followed.As soon as they tookpower, the PDP movedquickly and brutally to staffthe state apparatus of Afghanistanwith its owncadre. Major opponentsand most of the large royalfamily were executed,ousted officials were jailed,and the Army purged fromthe rank ofWarrant Officeron·up. Amin established anetwork of informers andsecret police. For its part,the Soviet Union was happyto have a dependent andideologically congenial neighboron its border, while theTaraki regime, because ofitsweakness, was eager to winaccess to more Soviet aidand support. Soon Afghanistanand the USSR signed a20-year Treaty of Friendshipand Cooperation,'whichestablished new economicand military ties. Severalthousand Soviet advisers arrivedin Kabul, the capitalcity, shortly after.Yet, from the very start ofits premature "revolution,"the communist regime wasplagued byinternal factions,opposition and intrigue.After the "revolution" thecountry went through threepurges in five months. Themost serious took place inJuly - only three monthsafter their rise to powerwhenthe old struggle betweenthe Khalq and theParchamresurfaced. Taraki,Amin, and otherKhalq leaders succeeded inelbowing Parcham membersout of positions ofpower. Babrak Karmal,who had been the secondhighest figure in the regime,was demoted to Ambassadorandshipped off toCzechoslovakia, where hewent into exile. In the end,only three people with tiesto the Parcham remained inhigh posts. It was not thelast· we would see of Karmal,however.While the purged Parchamfaction was closer tothe Russians, the USSRseems to have favored thetwo factions reaching anagreement and working together,so as to consolidatethe newly establishedcommunist regime andmaintain its hold.. Like theu.s. in Southeast Asia andLatin America, the Russiansuperpower attempted tojuggle competing factions,being concerned primarilywith "stability," so that itsown interests would be secure.After purging its opponents,the Taraki regimeembarked on a series of revolutionaryreforms in thebackward country-not allof them undesirable from alibertarian standpoint. Butthe reforms were alwaysundertaken in a centralized,authoritarian manner thatfueled resistance. The Tarakigovernment initiated aland reform program giving240,000 families full ownershiprights to a piece ofland. (Libertarians, ofcourse,support land reformin feudal countries, as anatural outgrowth of oursupport for the acquisitionof property rights throughhomesteading.) Yet, whileturning the land over to privateownership, the governmentdid nothing tosupply seeds for the harvest,a service traditionally offeredby the feudal landholders.Instead of a revolutionaryreform, theland program ended up adisastrous disruption of thecountry's harvest, and hadto .be suspended. The regimehad not earnedenough support to challengethe power of thelandholders. The government'sattempt to improvethe status of women raninto equally difficultrealities. A worthy attemptto eliminate the bride price- essentially a form ofchattel slavery for women---'"-became a severe blow tothe monetary income of the,male-dominated Afghanitribal families. The Islamicmullahs, moreover, brandedthe emancipation ofwomen a violation of Islamicprinciples.Seeking to create the masssupport it so desperatelyneeded, the communist governmentinstituted compulsoryeducation, includingadult programs, for Afghanisof both sexes. ConservativeMuslims, whowere highly suspicious oftheregime to begin with, rejectedthe attempt at indoctrination.Many Islamicmales revolted against theconcept of educated womenand mounted expeditions totake back their wives fromthe government schools.The government also .triedto impose economic controlsof various sorts on thenation, despite its long traditionof smuggling.The typically Marxist attempttoimpose a new socialorder from the top downalso necessitated a policestate, which weighed heavilyon the entire country andcost the regime much support.Travel, was strictlyregulated, trade was subjectto harsh military controls,and curfews were imposed.In the' army encampmentsaround Kabul, soldiers andgovernment officials wereslapped into jail at themerest suspicion of disloyaltyto Taraki and Amin.Amin's secret police packedthe cells of the terrible PoliSharkiprison with tens ofthousands .of prisoners.Three thousand of themwere said to have been executedsince 1978.This combination ofpolitical repression, Islamicreaction, and the widespreadperception that Tarakiwas "selling out thecountry" to the Russiansfueled rebellion in Afghanistan'scountryside.Afghanistan,the only country in theregion that could never hesubdued by .British imperialismin the nineteenthcentury, drew upon its longtradition of resistance to__ foreign domination andtook up arms. ByAugust of1979, substantial resistancehad spread to 24 ofAfghanistan's28 provinces. Taraki'sdrafted army began to suffermutinies, desertions anddefections, while Tarakihimself and ForeignMinister Amin saw fit tosleep in different houses inKabul every night and shiptheir families to Russia.Soviet advisers, meanwhile,were often attacked andgrotesquely mutilated in thecountryside.Then, on August 5, dissidentelements in the armystaged a full-scale mutiny inthe capital city of Kabul.The mutiny was successfullyput down, but theSoviet Union became concernedabout its client· regime,and urged Taraki andAmin to broaden theirpopular base. What hadseemed like an easy opportunityto expand their influenceover their smallneighbor was turning sour,THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

Watchful, armed Soviet troops fix a flat tire on a Kabul, Afghanistan stre~t.and the example of Khomeini'sIslamic revolutionnext door was enough todemonstr-ate what wouldhappen if things were allowedtoslip ourof control.Rumors began to circulatethat the Soviets were cast...ing about for a successor toTaraki, one who could putthe house of their troublesomenew satellite in order.In September of 1979 a beleagueredPrime MinisterTaraki visited the SovietUnion. It is possible that theremoval of Foreign MinisterHafizullah Amin was onthe agenda. Amin wascommonly held to be responsiblefor much of thetorture and repression carriedout by the regime, andboth Taraki and the USSRmay have decided that suchtactics were losing themsupport. Amin was also amore doctrinaire: andhard-line Marxist thanTaraki,willing to push aheadwith his programs no matterwhat the consequences,despite Soviet advice togoslow and play it safer.WhenTaraki' returned,Amin beat him to thepunch. He sparked abloody shoot-out betweenhis supporters and those ofTaraki in the old PresidentialPalace. When the smokecleared, sixty people weredead, and one of them wasNoor Mohammed Taraki.Amin went about erasingall traces of Taraki - onbillboards, monuments,newspapers. Afghanistanhad gone through yetanother coup.The Soviets dutifully telegrapheda message ofsupport to Amin, but hisaccession to power wasclearly a setback to them.No one believed in his abilityto put down the rebels­Moscow's main priority.Immediately, Amin chartedan independent course. Herejected Soviet advice tobring a negotiated end tothe guerrilla war. He oncerefused to come to Moscowfor talks. He demandedandgot-a different Sovietambassador in Kabul.The communist regime inKabul was on the run. Eversince the April1978 coup, ithad been in acceleratingturmoil; it had had to facethe split between the Khlaqand the Parcham, plots andmutinies from the army,armed rebellion in the provinces,andfinally, a bloodyconflict between Tarakiand Amin, the two lonesurvivors of the April "revolution."The regime wasdefinitely weakened by thenewest coup. The army'smorale,. already sapped bythe never-ending politicalpurges, began to deteriorate.The conscripted armysuffered enough desertionsand casualties to leave itstroop strength at roughlyhalf its original 100,000men. Only Soviet arms,money and advisers keptthe regime in control of theurban areas.. The Russianshad committed themselvesto something they couldn'tget out of. As reporterGwynne Dyer of theChronicle Foreign Servicewrote,Afghanistan is not Egypt orUganda. It is a country alongthe Soviet Union's most sensitiveborder. This time the Russianscannot simply write offtheir gamble and leave (as theydid in Egypt and Uganda), forthe spectacle of Soviet powerbeing expelled by Islamic revoltcould have a terrifyinglydangerous effect on the stilldevoutMuslim millions ontheir own side of the border.The Soviets moved to putan end to the mess. OnChristmas day, they beganto airlift 5,000 combattroops into Kabul. Twodays later, the coup wascomplete: Hafizullah Amin,his brother and a nephewhad been summarily executed,and Babrak Karmal,the Soviet puppet purged byTaraki inJuly of 1978; hadtaken his place. With thisaccomplished, Moscowbegan to march tens ofthousands of ground troopsinto Afghanistan.. The Soviets,with at least 50,000troops in Afghanistan, wereready to replace the desertion-decimatedAfghaniarmy and fight the rebelsthemselves, if necessary.Hawks in the U.S. haveportrayed the Soviet actionas an act of ironwilled efficiency,a model ofresolve tobe juxtaposed against the"weakness" and "wavering"of a Vietnam-wearyU.S. This, as a careful lookat the progression of eventsshows clearly, is flatlywrong. The Soviet invasionofAfghanistan is not an actof strength, but a costly resortof desperation andweakness. It was the shakyMARCH 19807

succession of client regimesinKabul-not a plot to takeover the oil fields-that ledthe Soviets down the slipperyslope to full-scale war.The risks and·costs of thatwar are very great-there isthe blood shed, the moneyexpended, the danger ofsparking an Islamic reactionwithin their ownborders,and the complete alienationofotherIslamicstates in the region. TheUSSR is not boldly callingthe shots; on the contrary,events are controlling themin the classic imperialistpattern. As a former U.S.Ambassador to Afghanistan,Robert G. Neumann,said, "They literally had nochoice except to take overthe country or let it go.There was no middle way.", Let the Ambassador'sstatement ring in the ears ofthose who call for a"bolder," more interventionistU.S. posture in theMiddle East. If we intervene,we too will almostcertainly be faced somedaywith that same terriblechoice: either take over acountry, or let it go. Acountry that plays the gameof imperialist dominationmust be willing and able toassassinate foreign leaders,pump·in· billions in aid toprop up client regimes, andultimately, to send in troopsand commit mass murder toimpose its will. There is nomiddle way.Have we forgotten, sosoon, how much blood andoppression both sides oftheinterventionist dilemmaactually entail? We tried to"take over" Vietnam- dowe need to be reminded ofthe results? And we wereforced to "let go" ofIranafteryears of meddling intervention.Shouldn't theseexamples be enoughto dis:­suade us from shoring upU.S. intervention capabilitiesin the Middle East? Ordo we'need to view' thebodies of mutilated Soviet'advisers and smell the napalmedAfghan rebel encampmentsto be convinced?Ominously, a survey ofthe u.S. government'smoves in response to theSovietintervention makes itappear as if we are preparingfor our own version ofAfghanistan. The U.S. iscultivating client regimes inTurkey, Oman, Somalia,and Egypt in search ofmilitary bases. It is shippingmillions of dollars worth ofarms to Pakistan, and armssales to Communist Chinaare, one· official said, "onlya matter of time." The U.S.defense budget is being increasedevery year by 5 percentplus inflation.' Moreand more politicians are becomingimpatient with therecently enacted curbs onthe CIA: in his State of theUnion address, PresidentCarter told Congress that"we need to remove unwarrantedrestraints on ourability to collectintelligence."The draft has raisedits ugly head once again,and a special "quick strikeforce'" for unilateral interventionis in preparation.Apparently, despite its expressionsof shock and outrageover Afghanistan, theAmerican government is soimpressed with the operationthat it wants toimitateit.Of course, long after theflag-waving and chestbeatingis over, the pitfallsthat snared the Russians inAfghanistan-and the u.S.in Iran- will still be there.Oman, where we may soonestablish abase, is a feudalmonarchy that could soonbe overthrown; will theU.S., like the Russians, getcaught there in a long processionof client regimeswith no' popular support?Somalia is in the middle of aborder war against neighboringEthiopia- which isbacked by Moscow. Pakistanis a repressive dictatorship,and any u.S. supportfor it will not only prop upits strongman, but is alsolikely to alienate Pakistan'sancient enemy, India. U.S.reliance on Israel as thebase'lIbertyRPS5Ube~lasSlCSWhat Should Economists Do?By James M. BuchananThis collection brings together Buchanan's important essays on method, many of thempreviously unpublished. Such a volume, note H. Geoffrey Brennan and Robert D.Tollison in their preface, "provides relatively easy access to a group of significantpaperson methodology in economics, written by a man whose work has spawned amethodological revolution in the way economists and other scholars think aboutgovernment and governmental activity. "James M.· Buchanan is University Distinguished Professor and General Director of theCenter for Study of Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.As a founder of the burgeoning subdiscipline of public choice, and as a public financetheorist and father of a modem school of public finance, Buchanan's work has hadworldwide recognition.Hardcover $8.00, Paperback $3.50.We pay postage, but require prepayment, on orders from individuals. Please allow fourto six weeks for delivery. To order this book, or for? copy of our catalog, write:LibertyPress/LibertyClassies7440 North Shadeland, Dept. F35Indianapolis, Indiana 462508THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

for military operations iscertain to enrage the entireArab/Muslim world ... andso it goes.All these elements of resurgentmilitarism - thedraft, the strike force,budget increases - werebeing actively consideredlong before the Russians invadedAfghanistan; one ismoved to suspect that thedesperate Soviet interventionis being used as a pretextto bring out themilitarists' heretofore hiddenagenda.The real issue in the MiddleEast is clear: how willthis country react to the unavoidabledecline of itspost-World War II militaryempire? Will we disengage,relinquish the use of militaryforce, and rely insteadon free trade, open borders,and neutrality? Or will werepeat the mistakes of thepast and push the worldinto war? Whatever happens,it was naive to think,as some of us did, that amachine as vast, powerful,and entrenched as America'smilitary empire wasgoing to slip away afterVietnam and Iran without along and arduous struggle.The libertarian response tothe growing threat ofmilitarism must no longer beconfined to single issues likethe draft, orIran, orAfghanistan.The times call for nothingless than the arduousconstruction of a new peacemovement, a movementthat can confront the issuesof the draft, Americanforeign policy, skyrocketinggovernment spending, thedesperate need for a freemarket in energy, free trade,and arms control in an integrated,politically potentway. It is the tasks oflibertarianseverywhere - of theLibertarian Party and itsPresidential candidate, EdClark, of Students foraLibertarian Society, and ofeveryone else-to lead thismovement.Milton Mueller andRoy A. Childs, Jr.Guest EditorialGold feverIN THE DEPRESSION OFthe '30s, gold buyers wentdoor to door offering to buyjewelry. Each buyer carrieda bottle ofacid and a file. Hefiled a nick in each piece ofjewelry and applied a dropof acid. If it turned green,it wasn't gold. If it was,he'd pay $20 an ounce. Andpeople were eager to sell.$20 was $20. Now, those$20, are worth about five,and the ounce of gold isworth about $600, a curiousfact.Why in the modernworld, feeling itself terriblysophisticated about economics,is gold so enormouslyvalued? Perhaps becauseit is the world's onlyconvenient unit ofvalue thatcannot be manipulated bygovernments and politicians.Ifthe prime minister isshot and a foreign puppetinstalled in his place, andgovernment collapses, itsmoney may be worthless thenext morning; while gold isthe only truly internationalcurrency, beY9nd the reachof governments and thusthey cannot declare itworthless. Its price is setonly by buyers and sellersand is subject to no law inany country.Other properties such asreal estate can be taxed orseized, but gold is easy tohide and hard to tax becauseit is hard to find. Around theworld, it might be called theonly real people's currency.And they see it as protectionagainst disorder, worthlesspaper, government upheavalsand political treachery.Probably gold now is over$600 an ounce because intoday's world there is plentyof all of that.-David Brinkley(Reprinted by permissionofNBC News.)© NBC NEWS, 1980.A sane look atthe 'SovietThreat'As Alan Wolfe argues inTHE RISE AND FALL OF THE 'SOVIET THREAT',unrestrained war hysteria threatens ourfreedoms and livelihood.InstitutefurI\)]icy StudiesTheRiseand Fallofthe'SovietThreat':DomesticSourcesoftheColdWJrConsensusAlan\\blfePlease send me the following:o Payment Enclosed 0 Charge to my:o American Express 0 Visa 0 Master ChargeAddressThese IPSpublicationsseparate themyths from therealities of theU.S.-Soviet armsrace, and providea reasoned antidoteto thehysteriaepidemic.Choose twopublications andreceiveRESURGENTMILITARISMby Michael KlareFREE.THE RISE AND FALL OFTHE "SOVIET THREAT': Domestic Sourcesof the Cold War ConsensusAlan Wolfe, $3.95.Newly Revised!DUBIOUS SPECTER:A Second Look at the 'Soviet Threat'Fred Kaplan, $2.95.Newly Revised!THE COUNTERFORCE SYNDROME: A Guideto U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Strategic DoctrineRobert C. Aldridge, $3.95.MYTHS AND REALITIES OF THE'SOVIET THREAT'IPS Conference Proceedings, $2.00.THE GIANTS: Russia and AmericaRichard Barnet, $3.95.THE DAY BEFORE DOOMSDAY:An Anatomy of the Nuclear Arms RaceSidney Lens, $6.50.Please add 75ft per item for postage and handling.Account Number_o YES, I have Bank Number_ordered twopublications. Send Expiration Date _me my FREE copy ofRESURGEMT Signature for Charge _MILITARISM. Name _Mail to: City, State, Zip _Institute fur R>licy Studies1901 Que St., N.W., Dept. AFI. Washington, D.C. 20009 A-014_MARCH 19809

~\~~,{AP!10Of windfallsand bailoutsBRUCE BARTLETTIN A REMARKABLE EXampleof irony the u.s. Senatevoted within the space ofthree days during the weekofDecember 17, 1979 toimpose a $178-billion taxon the oil industry for the"sin" of having made profits,while also voting to giveChrysler Corporation $1.5­billion in Federal loan guaranteesfor the "virtue" ofhaving lost approximately$1-billion in 1979.The Senate was, in effect,telling the American peopleand the world that profitsare Dad and losses are good.It was telling businessmeneverywhere not to make investmentswhich might reapthem large profits or itwould tax them away. Itwould be better for them tomake bad investmentswhich caused them to losemoney, for then the governmentwould come totheir aid.'Such actions show an incrediblemisunderstandingof the nature of profit andloss in our economic system.When individuals makeprofits everyone prospers,for this means that they havefound a better way to satisfyour wants, to supply us withnecessary goods and services,and to make efficientuse of scarce resources. Inotherwords, the existence ofprofit is proof that morewealth has been createdthan consumed, and societyas,a whole is better offfor it.It is only the prospect ofprofit that gives people theincentive to find bettermethods of production andbetter products which canbe sold for lower prices. Andit is only the prospect ofmaking large profits whichencourages people to makerisky investments in newtechnologies, to look fornew supplies of scarce naturalresources in unexploredareas, and to make largecapital investments whichmay not payoff for manyyears.On the other hand, losseshurt everyone, because thismeans that capital has beenmisallocated, that scarce resourceshave not been put totheir best use, that someonehas misunderstood the public'sdesires by producinggoods it did not want atprices it would not pay.Losses indicate that errorshave been made.The market today is tellingus that profits are to bemade in producing oil andthat little or no profit is to bemade in producing the kindsof cars Chrysler produces.This means that peopleshould be encouraged tofind and produce more oil,while Chrysler shouldchange its operations toproduce and market differentkinds ofcars atprices thepublic will pay.Congress is moving in theopposite direction. It is actingto discourage the productionof oil, and it is actingto keep Chrysler in operationdespite its errors. TheTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

esult will be less domesticenergy production, greaterdependence on unreliableforeign sources of oil, andhigher prices, which in turnwill exacerbate the presenteconomic slowdown andreduce auto sales, making italmost certain that Chryslerwill not survive even withfederal aid.The opponents of awindfall profits tax and aChrysler bailout have failedas much as anything becausethey could not bring themselvesto believe that suchlegislation was totally unjustified.Quite apart from thepolitical pressure, manyconservatives believed thatChrysler had a case for aidbecause the Federal governmenthad so greatly contributedto its problems withirresponsible regulatory andtax policies. And they didnot really believe that the oilcompanies "deserved" themassive profits which wouldaccrue to them from oil decontrol.Because of theirambivalent attitudes theconservatives were unwillingto fight to the bitter endand caved in after exactingonly minimal concessions.Indeed, the votes againstboth measures came asmuch from extreme liberals,who hate big business andthought the tax was too low,as from conservatives, manyof whom ended up votingfor both measures.It is the final irony thatChrysler, of all companies,should have come to thegovernment for aid. Formany years it has been oneof the very few big corporationswilling to speak outagainst government policieson something approximatingprinciple. Likewise, it isironic that ultimate responsibilityfor the windfall profits·tax probably belongs toour last Republican president,Jerry Ford, who hadthe power to decontrol theprice of oil before he left office.Like so many Republicans,Jerry Ford knew theright thing to do but justdidn't have the guts to do it.BECAUSE SOME THINGSARE WORTH READING AGAIN...TheCatoPapersHAYEK...BROZEN...MORGENSTERN...ROTHBARD...EPSTEIN...RAVENALIconoclastic scholars, theseseminal thinkers and their workdeserve your critical attention once more.Now, the Cato Institute makes it easy andinexpensive through the Cato Papers-acontinuing series ofreprints ofimportant~orksin the social sciences.~/'r1)\~t\'~ ~~!~~~~=~~::::Z::EE31l~~lB.Ji.11CA10INSTITUTE1. Left and Right, by Murray N.Rothbard. A probing analysisand reassessment of thepolitical spectrum. $2.002. The Fallacy of the MixedEconomy, by Stephen C.Littlechild. An examination ofthe inherent instability ofthe government-business"partnership." 4.003. Unemployment andMonetary Policy, by Friedrich A.Hayek. A telling indictment ofthe use of inflation as a "cure"for unemployment. 2.004. Individualism and thePhilosophy of the SocialSciences, by Murray N.Rothbard. An exposition of methodologicalindividualism andits implications for thesocial sciences. 2.005. National Income Statistics,by Oskar Morgenstern. Whymacroeconomic data areoften erroneous. 2.006. A Tiger by the Tail, byL- i.....-.i...........l.22...2s..:.=~==rFriedrich A. Hayek. What hathKeynesianism wrought? 4.00To introduce yourself to these papers,simply fill in this handy order blank.Cato Quantity Cato Quantity Cato QuantityPaper Paper PaperNumber 1. __ Number 5. __ Number 8. __2.__ 6.__ 9. __3.__ 7.__ 10. __4._·_NameAddressTotal Amount Enclosed $___________-'--ZipMail to:Cato Papers Dept. CLRCato Institute747 Front StreetSan Francisco, CA 94111____7. Strategic Disengagement andWorld Peace, by Earl C. Ravenal.Answers the vital questionssurrounding a rational Americanforeign policy in thenuclear age. 2.008. A Theory of Strict Liability,by Richard A. Epstein. Calls fora reformulation of tort lawand argues for the simple"causality" torts model. 4.009. Is Government the Source ofMonopoly?, by Yale Brozen. Ananalysis of market structureand the competitive process. 2.0010. A Property System for MarketAllocation of the ElectromagneticSpectrum, by De Vany et al.Argues that governmentregulation of broadcasting isunnecessary and harmful. 4.00MARCH 198011

12JEFFREY SANCHEZ& ROYA. CHILDS,jR.AS THE 1980 CAMPAIGNheats up, and the Republicanand Democratic partieshold their first primaries, theLibertarian Party has scoreda major triumph in the keystate of California. On December28, 1979, CaliforniaSecretary of State MarchFong Eu announced that theLP had finally qualified forpermanent ballot status inthat state. After more thanfive months of work, hundredsof men and womenacross the state succeeded inregistering more than92,000 voters as Libertarians,giving them a cushionof 21,000 over the required71,000 registrants. Threeof the most successful countiesin the state were SanDiego (4300), San Francisco(15,900) and OrangeCounty, which brought inthe astonishing. total of52,000. Special cheers fromlibertarians across the countryshould go to Jack Sandersin San Diego, JamesSkalican and Bob Costello inSan Francisco, Jack Deaneand Dyanne Petersen inOrange County, and to asingle dedicated activist,Eileen Langenfeld, whobrought in an astounding5000 registrants on her ownin San Francisco.The success of this hotlydisputed race for ballot statusin California marks animportant milestone for theLibertarian Party, and maywell mean the end of ballotdrives in one ofthe nation'smost influential states.Henceforth, the LP onlyneeds to receive two percentof the vote or better in anystatewide race once everyfour years to stay on the ballotpermanently. But Californiaisa pivotal state forlibertarians in another way:in 1978, Ed Clark, now theLP's candidate for President,ran a well-managed campaignfor Governor of Californiaagainst one ofAmerica'smost popular politicalfigures,Jerry Brown (and hisinconsequential Republicanopponent, Evelle Younger),and piled up nearly 400,000votes, more than 5.5 percentof the total votes cast. Thatgave the LP visibility in Californiaand across the nation,for it became clear that theLP was soon to reach balance-of-powerstatus in electionsacross the country.With this threat in mind, thepolitical establishment inCalifornia made every effortto block the LP from gettingballot status. It had forcedEd Clark to run officially onthe ballot as an "Independent,"despite his LP affiliation,and subsequently usedthat fact as an excuse toplace the California LP in aCatch-22 situation: the LPcouldn't claim ballot status,the Secretary of State said,because Clark had not beenon the ballot as a Libertarianand, in turn, Clark couldn'tbe on the ballot as a Libertarian,because the LP was notballot qualified! A veritablemaze of court battles resulted,with every legal trickbeing used against the LP.California libertariansdecided then to confront theproblem head on: to get the71,000 registered Libertariansthey needed to put anend to the manipulations ofthe State government. But asthe registration drive woreon, the government showedthat it was not finished withits harassment. One or twohired workers around thestate had turned in fraudulentregistrations and hadbeen duly reported by theLP. The government sawthis as a golden opportunity:it began leaking informationto the media about allegedLibertarian "voter fraud,"attempted at one point tocall a halt to the drive completely,and, when that dirtytrick failed, began threateningthe libertarians 'Yho ranthe drive with legal action.But they refused to cave inbefore these threats, and thecontinual harassment onlyincreased their determinationto shove more and moreregistrations down the government'sthroat. This theydid in style.The result is almost certain;the LP will soon be perceivedby the national mediaTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

to be just exactly what it is:the biggest threat to the twoparty monopoly in a generation.LPC Executive DirectorEric Garris is soberinglyrealistic about the meaningof this for libertarians, however.He points out that theLP could easily decline unlessthe party grows substantiallyin grassroots communitysupport."What isneeded is to increase dramaticallythe level of commitmentto activism on thepart of Libertarians everywhere,"he says. Garrispoints out that the LP hopesto field as many as 100 candidatesin California in1980, and that these campaignscould serve as an excellentmeans toward thatend, if Libertarians will dothe hard work that isneeded.While the excitement ofthe registration drive's successin California dominatedthe news for Libertarians atyear's end, several otherstates had also achieved ballotstatus. By the end ofJanuary,16 states had met ballotrequirements: Hawaii,North and South Carolina,Idaho, New Mexico, Vermont,Nevada, Alabama,Utah~ Michigan, Kansas,Iowa, NewJersey, Kentuckyand Wisconsin. In otherstates registration drives arenow underway, and it is expectedthat the LP will ultimatelybe on the ballot in asmany as 45 states-far morethan any other "minor"party. Most of these statesalready have plans to runfull slates of candidates forstate and local offices as wellas for the House and Senate.Many of these local electionswill have a significantimpact by exposing the publictolibertarian ideas for thefirst time. The growth potentialof the LP during thenext year is great indeed.The crisis in Iran has stirredup harsh anti-Iranian feelingsin much of the Americanpublic. There have beencries for war ("nuke Iran"has been seen on more thanone banner) and calls for theexpulsion of Iranian studentsfrom the UnitedStates. Libertarians acrossthe country have leaped intothe fray, opposing suchblatant jingoism.In Virginia, Republicanlegislator Warren Barry hasproposed that all Iranianstudents attending all publiccolleges and universities besuspended. Fellow Virginianand veteran libertarian EricScott Royce has respondedto Barry, accusing him ofengaging in "the worst sortof racial stereotyping," andpointing out that many Iranianstudents are membersof ethnic minorities withinIran which are very muchopposed to Khomeini andthe embassy seizure.The' major libertarian organizationfighting Carter'sorder to deport Iranian studentsis Students for a LibertarianSociety, under the directionof National DirectorMilton Mueller and Eastcoast field coordinator JeffFriedman. SLS has formedcoalitions with a wide rangeof groups, including socialistsand pacifists, and hasworked to keep the Immigrationand NaturalizationService (INS) off campuses.Libertarians, who believe infree, movement of peopleseverywhere and opposeboth immigration and emigrationcontrols, have thustaken the lead in dramatizingthe cruelty of such arbitrarygovernment power.Jeff Hummell, SLS coordinatorat the University ofTexas, has written three articlesfor The Daily Texandiscussing the United States'responsibility for the Shah,and opposing both militaryintervention in Iran and thedeportation of Iranian students.With other Universityof Texas groups, SLS hasformed CRIME, the Committeeagainst Racism andIntervention in the MiddleEast, and has sponsored arally against the INS.The Board of Supervisorsat Louisiana State Universityhas considered a resolutionto expel all Iranian students.But SLS coordinatorDavid Cole has successfullylobbied the Board againstthis resolution and contrib-'uted several importantanti-deportation articles tothe student newspaper.At Stanford University,, Libertarians have mountedpressure which resulted inthe campus administration'srefusal to allow the INS toconduct interviews on thecampus.These and other peopleworking on college campusesaround the countryhave helped quell the racistand bellicose hysteria surrounding,this unfortunateCrISIS.SLS is stepping up its actionsagainst the Carter-INSassault on Iranian students.The current issue of its studentnewspaper, Liberty,devoted largely to Iran, isnow being distributedacross the country. Copiescan be obtained from Studentsfor a Libertarian Society,1620 MontgomeryStreet, San Francisco, CA94111. Tel.: (415) 781­5817. The cost, in quantitiesof25 or more, is 5¢ per copy.Our readers might be interestedin knowing thattwoimportant periodicals haverecently become available inbound editions. Ayn Rand,now virtually retired fromwriting, has over the pasttwo decades edited threepublications, largely centeredaround her own politicaland cultural views. TheObjectivist Newsletter haslong been available in abound volume ($12.50),and most of the issues ofThe Objectivist have beenavailable individually aswell. But Ayn Rand's thirdpublication has, until now,been difficult to obtain. TheAyn Rand Letter was publishedfrom 1971 to 1974, afour-to-six page fortnightlywhich in the main consistedof "letters" from Rand oncurrent events and importantissues of the day. Sheeviscerated B.F. Skinner,pummelled John Rawls,pounded away at the NixonAdministration (all' thewhile, strangely, endorsinghim for reelection and callingherselfan "anti-Nixonitefor Nixon"), resoundinglyupheld the "Americansense of life," and in generaldefended her views like aswashbuckler. While someof these views will infuriatemany libertarians and en~chant others, all 81 newslettersare now available in abound volume from PaloAlto Books, 200 CaliforniaAvenue, Palo Alto, CA94306. The price is $29.9~.The other bound volumebrings us the first full year ofInquiry magazine, publishedby the!Cato Institute.That magazine began incontroversy in 1977, andhas since developed arichly-deserved reputationas a journal of high·quality.Its overall quality andoriginality are more evidentthan ever in this bound volume.There are articles onhow the International MonetaryFund underwritesApartheid, the secret diaryof a Polish dissident, andwhy people secede from thepublic schools; there are defensesofProposition 13 andassaults on government regulationsand spending.Never before have these issuesbeen looked at as Inquiryhas looked at them.It's a different perspectiveon the political world, and itdoesn't always work. Butwhen it works, it makes Inquiryone of the best politicalmagazines in the country,especially in the area offoreign affairs, where itscoverage and insight havebeen matchless. The boundedition ofVolume 1 is availablefor a mere $25 fromInquiry, 747 Front Street,San Francisco, CA 94111. Itis a veritable reference workon political events. DMARCH 198013

JEFF RIGGENBACHThere is a serious problem here. Its outlinesfirst .became prominent on the intellectualhorizon about two years ago,'when JohnGardner announced in his then newly publishedOn Moral Fiction that "we are living,for all practical purposes, in an age 'of'mediocre art.""When one talks with·editors of seriousfiction," Gardner charged in April of1978,"they all sound the same: they speak oftheir pleasure and satisfaction in theirwork, but more often than not the ,editorcannot think, under the moment's pressure,ofa single contemporary writer he reallyenjoys reading. Some deny, even publicly,that any first-rate American novelistsnow exist. The ordinary reader has beensaying that for years."By the end of 1978, Gardner's lamehthad found its way intothe magazines. "Noprevious decade in this century," HenryFairlie declaimed in the pages of The NewRepublic, "has been so barren of anything14 in art and literature to which one mightthink of attaching the Jabel of greatness." And as·the lastyear of the '70s wore on,more voices were added, andmore: "Traveling to Washington several months ago witha literary and theatrical agent who had left Germany in the1930s and who hadknown both Brecht and Mann, I askedhim why no American author in the past thirty years hadwritten a major novel or play." Thus Lewis Lapham inHarper's. "We no longer live in a time of great writers....When instead of Joyce and Mann and Proust and Faulkner,we have in our midst John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet,Gunter Grass, and-at best-Saul Bellow, it is understandableand not necessarily reprehensible that bothreaders and critics should turn to the literary past with acertain degree of nostalgia." Thus Robert Alter in Commentary."Thereisn't much to read these days, and whensomething even semiliterate comes along, a kind of panicsets in." Thus Bryan Griffin in the Atlantic, in a piece'on"the malaise of the novel" and how "some of us want desperatelyto be living in a great literary age" but are stuck insteadwith the one we're in. Even the dead have been joiningin the chorus, with Lionel Trilling's newly reissued TheLiberal Imagination in the forefront. "It is now more thantwenty years," Trilling wrote nearly 25 years ago, "since aliterary movement in this country has had what I have calledpower. The literary movement of social criticism of the1920's is not finally satisfying, but it had more energy to advanceour civilization than anything we can now see, and itseffects were large and good. No tendency since has had anequal strength. The falling off from this energy may not bepermanent. Itcould, of course, become permanent."And to look around ourselves and survey the literarylandscape is-howcan one avoid it?-to agree. For who areBeginning with Edgar Allan Poe at bottom, and circling clockwisearound MarkTwain: Henry Miller, Henry David Thoreau, UrsulaK. LeGuin, Walt Whitman, Samuel R. Delany, Joan Didion, H.L.Mencken and Raymond Chandler.THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

16our novelists who fare so poorly under the critical eyes nowtrained on them? A mediocre and undistinguished lot, to besure: Saul Bellow, our latest Nobel laureate, goes on yearafter year passing off garrulous monologues ,(and an occasionalbarely retouched biography) as novels, and nevermanaging to convey much of anything very definite ormemorable except, perhaps, what it is like to be, all one's lifelong, a querulous, vaguely intellectual, prematurely oldman. John Updike writes book club novel after book clubnovel, dressing up the monotonous unimportance of hisstories in would-be fine sentences. Bernard Malamud musesinterminably on what it is to be Jewish. Phillip Roth goes oninterminably telling 200-page tasteless jokes. Truman Capotehas become a professional talk show guest. And NormanMailer has served up yet another generous slab of hisidiosyncratic and ingenious journalism and seen it climb thebestseller lists in the "fiction" category by the simple expedientof asserting that it is a novel.Our leading critics present no fairer spectacle, however.In the wilds ofNew Haven, Harold Bloom grinds out unimaginativegloss after unimaginative gloss on the idea (derived,it would seem, though without,acknowledgement,from Ortega yGasset) that young writers have to struggle todevelop their own distinctive voices and avoid the pitfall of,merely imitating those who have most influenced them. InHollywood, Gore Vidal· thunders curses upon all thosedangerous novelists who seek to challenge their readers toactive intellectual involvement with their fiction, rather thanlull them with safe, predictable stuff like Mr. Vidal's ownvery popular novels-stuffwhich, like TV, requires no intellectualeffort whatever to get through. And in New York,Irving Howe goes on ... the only word is pontificating. Hislatest book, Celebrations & Attacks, like each of its dozenweary predecessors, is fairly representative ofhis mind. Andit may surely be said ofit without fear of exaggeration thatof all the unimportant literary events of 1979, the publicationof this retrospective collection of Howe's pretentiousdiscursions on diverse matters and occasions over the past30 years must be counted one ofthe least memorable. Howeis the Irving Babbitt, the Stuart Pratt Sherman, of our day.Like Mr. Thompsonin Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, he becomesindistinguishable in any group of three and when allby himself seems to evoke a group of his own, composed ofthe countless critics he resembles.Itis surely a measure ofHowe's remoteness from his owntime thathe devotes ten essays and more than a third of hisbook to the literature of the'60s, an4 expends not a word,not the barest passing reference, to Ken Kesey orTom Wolfeor ] oanDidion or Donald Barthelme or William Gass orSylvia Plath or Kurt Vonnegut, ]r.-not so much as a passingreference, that is, to a single one ofthe writers who madethe '60s the most fertile and exciting literary decadesince the'20s. One writer ofthat earlier period,]ames Branch Cabell,used to refer jokingly to writing as "spoiling paper." InHowe's case, the joke is literally true. Yet Irving Howe iscommonly held, by those who concern themselves with suchmatters, to be our most eminent critic, as Saul Bellow is heldto be our most eminent novelist-for all that it may be saidof them both as H.L. Mencken said of their counterparts of60 years ago (and with "equal justice) that "one never remembersa character in the novels of these aloof and de­Americanized Americans; one never encounters an idea intheir essays."The fact is, however, that we have agreed too soon withthe fashionable literary doomseers whose pronouncementsopened our discussion. Surely for any "common reader"THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEWwho approaches our contemporary American literaturewith a mind free of preconceptions, the literary situationmust appear altogether otherwise. For not only has the yearjust past seen publication of important new works by someof the leading.writers ofour era-new essays by Didion andWolfe, new fiction by Barthelme, Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le­Guin and Samuel R. Delany-but the past two decades havefairly surrounded us withfiction and essays ofwhat wouldappear to be permanent importance. One thinks of MotherNight and Cat's Cradle and One Flew Over the Cuckoo'sNest and Omensetter's Luck and Dhalgren and The'Dispossessedand The Word for World is Forest and The DeadFather and Play It As It Lays and The Fifth Head ofCerberusand' The Underground Man and Naked Lunch andPale Fire and OrsinianTales and In the Heart ofthe Heartofthe Country and Advertisements for Myself and Geniusand Lust and Against Interpretation and Fiction andthe FiguresofLife and The World withinthe Word and Zen andthe ArtofMotorcycle Maintenance and Slouching TowardsBethlehem and The Female Man and Mauve 'Gloves andMadmen, Clutter and Vine and On Being Blue and theDiaries ofAnais Nin and the list could continue for a whilelonger, but the point's made.Or is it?For while any modern day "common reader" who setabout compiling a list of notable contemporary workswould probably end up with a list not unlike the one I havejust offered, anyone associated with the current literary aristocracyof Howe and Gardner and Alter and Lapham andGriffin would raise very serious objections indeed to mymodest list. Such a critic would very probably begin by disqualifyingthe entiresecond halfofit as beside the point. Theessay, he would pointout, has been moribund, as far as anyreal cultural influence is concerned, since the days ofCharlesLamb. He might even flatly assert, as Leslie Fiedler does inhis well known study of Love and Death in the AmericanNovel that "our nationalliterary reputation depends largelyupon the achievement of our novelists." And as for thenovels on my list, fully half of th~m are the work of sciencefiction and detective novelists, a fact which speaks for itself.The. tale is told that after the publication of SlaughterhouseFive, his first successful book outside the science fictionfield, KurtVonnegut attended one of those New Yorkliterary cocktail parties from which he'd ordinarily havebeen excluded before, and there met]ason Epstein,.1ongtimeRandom House editor, founder of Anchor Press and cofounderof the New York Review ofBooks., It is said thatEpstein listened to Vonnegut's name, frowned for a momentas though trying to place it, then, brightening, said simply,"science fiction" and turned, and walked away.And hasn't Ken Kesey been consigned permanently to oblivionby Morris Dickstein's finding that he is "offensive andoverrated as a writer" and by Norman Podhoretz's descriptionof One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in .BreakingRanks ,as a "popular novel" of "mass appeal"? And surelyeveryone knows that one can't look for permanent importancein a Hollywood novel, even one as inspired as TheDay ofthe Locust, much less one as popular as Play It As ItLays? This leaves us with a handful of more or less avantgarde pieces by Gass, Barthelme, Nabokov and Burroughs,books which are, in varying degre~s, either difficult or simplyinaccessible for the common~eader.Not much to showfor two decades of writing in a nation whose literary reputationdepends largely on her novelists, eh?In the face of such an argument, what is one to say-exceptthat apparently it is not American literature which is

~nwdrl~~O/hood [which] implies an antipathy not only to the idea ofgovernment but to the very nature and necessary inconveniencesof liberal government" is not unique to Thoreau. "Asomewhat similar pattern," he writes, "can be seen in majorfictions written by Americans in the nineteenth century:Cooper, Twain, Melville." These fictions, Howe argues,concern "not the usual struggle among contending classesnor the interplay and mechanics of power, but a politicsconcerned with the idea ofsociety itself, a politics that daresconsider whether society is good and-still more wonderfulquestion-whether society is necessary. These are the questionsultimately posed by the stories of Natty Bumppo andChingachgook, Huck Finn and Nigger Jim, Ishmael andQueequeq.... A literature that on any manifest level seemshardly to be political at all, becomes the one to raise the mostfundamental problems in political thought: what is therationale for society, the justification for the state."And if we agree for a moment so to regard nineteenthcenturyAmerican writing," Howe continues, "we discoverrunning through it a strong if subterranean current ofanarchism. Not anarchism as it is known in Europe, butanarchism as a ... community of autonomous-one mightalmost say, Emersonian-persons, each secure in his ownself .... [a community in which] the oppressive system oflaws, oppressive because they are laws, gives way to a selforderingdiscipline of persons in a fraternal relationship."Yet uncontroversial though it may be to propose such aradical individualism as the sine qua non of American letters,to pursue that proposal to its ultimate conclusions forAmerican literary history and for contemporary Americanliterary criticism will prove controversial indeed. Howcould it be otherwise when such a pursuit of ultimate conclusionsmust lead to a dethronement, as it were, of certainwriters we have all been taught to regard as Great AmericanAuthors, and to a promotion of certain other writers fromtheir present status as popular hacks to a new status asmajor literary figures?The first of these dethronements, properly enough, belongsto Cooper. For tho~gh Howe is exactly right in hisidentification of the essential spirit of nineteenth centuryAmerican literature, he is, typically, wide of the mark in thegroup ofwriters he adduces to represent it. Twain representsit, and admirably, as we shall see. And Melville represents it-with reservations, as we shall also see. But Cooper? Farfrom being a distinctively American writer of distinctivelyAmerican books, Cooper was merely the best known andmost popular of the numerous imitators of Walter Scottwho labored on this side ofthe Atlantic during the '20s and'30s of the last century. If today we remember James FenimoreCooper when we have forgotten John Pendleton Kennedyand Robert Montgomery Bird, it is not because thesaga ofNatty Bumppo is any more finely crafted than thoseof Kennedy or Bird, or any more novelistically ingeni0us orintellectually meaty; but merely because it is more "accu-18 rate" in its local color-and, to that extent, cleverer in itsadaptation of the Waverly formula to the setting of theAmerican frontier.Yet 'there is more to national character than geographyand scenery, as we have seen, and geography and scenery isall James Fenimore Cooper has to offer us that is distinctivelyAmerican. With regard to every essential ofhis art as anovelist, save only setting, he was a thoroughgoing anduncompromising Englishman. As Frank Norris remarked ofhim in 1903, "his heroes and heroines talk like the charactersout of Bulwer in their most vehement moods, while hisIndians stalk through all the melodramatic tableaux of Byron,and declaim in the periods of the border nobleman inthe pages of Walter Scott."Yet in this Britishness Cooper was quite typical ofhis age.Those of his fellow novelizers who were not busy imitatingthe historical novels of Scott were busy imitating the sentimentalnovels of Richardson or the gothics of Horace Walpole;and the best the fledgling Republic had managed tocome up with in the way of a poet or belletrist-WilliamCullen Bryant on the one hand, Washington Irving on theother-were equally busyimitating still other English models(in Irving's case, stealing from his Dutch models outright)and laboring to build a literature which can only be called,not American, but Colonial English.And the reason for this state of affairs was not far t6seek.As far as the rest ofthe world was concerned, where culturalmatters were concerned, America simply didn't exist. AsVan Wyck Brooks writes, "How much the state of Germanliterature before the Napoleonic wars resembled the state ofAmerican literature before the world-war epoch! Hear whatCarlyle said a hundred years ago: 'During the greater part ofthe last century, the Germans, in our intellectual survey ofthe world, were quietly omitted; a vague contemptuousignorance prevailed respecting them; it was a Cimmerianland where, if a few sparks did glimmer, it was but so as totestify their own existence, too feebly to enlighten us. TheGermans passed for apprentices in all provinces of art; andmany foreign craftsmen scarcely allowed them so much.'"So Americans were regarded only the other day. Therewas a sounding-board behind European writers that carriedtheir voices across the ocean, while American writers, facingthe other way, faced a keen east wind.""In the four quarters ofthe globe," Sydney Smith asked inthe Edinburgh Review in 1820, "who reads an Americanbook? Or goes to an American play?" Even in Americathose of cultivation and learning displayed their good tasteby preferring everything as European as possible and ~yleaving the unmistakabty American to those too besotted towant anything better. This prejudice was systematicallytaught in the schools, both the lower schools and the leadingcolleges, both here and in Europe, throughout the last century.Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who attended Bryn Mawrat the turn of this century, has written that "Americanliterature had no place in the Bryn Mawr curriculum-noMelville, no Hawthorne, no Poe, no Dickinson, no Whit-THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

man. Henry James and Edith Wharton were the only modernfiction writers; expatriates, you see; and we read themfor pleasure, not for study. When, ten years after my graduation,I told one of my English professors thatI had discovereda genuine first-class work of American fiction, ... shelooked at me skeptically."Commenting on this passage in 1958, Van Wyck Brooksexclaimed: "How typical that was not only of Bryn Mawrbut of Harvard and all our colleges fifty years ago!" But itremained typical far longer than that. Norman Podhoretz,the enormously powerful and influential New York criticwho attended Columbia in the 1940s, reports in his 1967memoir Making It that "in the context of the idea ofWesternCivilization to which I had been converted at Columbia... America was definitely a minor province and definitely tobe treated as such. Thus only one small survey course inAmerican literature had been offered at Columbia when Iwas there, and I had not even taken it.... Why bother withthings inferior, things parochial, when there was so muchelse of greater significance to learn?"The situation in European schools was better-they beganoffering courses in American literature as early as the 1850s.But predictably, the only American writing they deemedworthy of serious study was that writing which imitatedEuropean models. "Washington Irving was used for languageexercises in British schools," writes Sigmund Skard inThe American Myth and the European Mind, "as he waseverywhere in Europe: in 1855 the boys at Harrow decidedby a formal vote that Longfellow was the first poet of theage. But these Americans were read as 'English' authorsanythingelse would have been regarded as ridiculous." Similady,the young American collegians of Elizabeth ShepleySergeant's day considered the English Colonial HenryJamesand his disciple and imitator Edith Wharton the foremost"American" writers of their time. And the highschoolers ofthe same period were encouraged by the same parents andteachers who advised them to read Kipling and A. ConanDoyle to avoid Mark Twain, who was regarded as "vulgar."For the greater part of its history as a nation, the UnitedStates has been, as Poe called itin the early 1840s, "a literarycolony of Great Britain."And, as Mencken argued 60 years ago, the plight of thegenuinely creative writer in such a colony leaves much to bedesired. "Looking within himself, he finds that he is different,that he diverges from the English standard, that he is authenticallyAmerican-and to be authentically American isto be officially inferior. He thus faces dismay at the verystart: support is lacking when he needs it most. In themotherland- in any motherland, in any wholly autonomousnation-there is a class ofmen like himself, devoted totranslating the higher manifestations of the national spiritinto ideas-men differing enormously among themselves,but still united in common cause against the lethargy andcredulity of the mass. But in a colony that class, if it exists atall, lacks coherence and certainty; its authority is not onlydisputed by the inertia and suspiciousness of the lower orders,but also by the superior authority overseas; it is timorousand fearful ofchallenge. Thus it affords no protection toan individual ofassertive originality, and he is forced to go asa suppliant to a quarter in which nothing is his by right, buteverything must go by favor-in brief to a quarter where hisvery application must needs be regarded as an admission ofhis inferiority. The burden ofproof upon him is thus madedouble. Obviously, he must be a man ofvery strong personalityto surmount such obstacles triumphantly. Such strongmen, of course, sometimes appear in a colony, but they alwaysstand alone; their worst opposition is at home."So it was, certainly, in the United States in the fourth andfifth decades ofthe last century, when, in the work of Emerson,Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and Whitman, anational literature first began unmistakably to emerge fromthe surrounding sea of epigones and hacks. The new literaturewas not entirely unwelcome, ofcourse. Emerson hadexcited considerable sympathetic agreement all around thecountry when he had argued in 1837 in his famous lecture"The American Scholar" that it was high time "our day ofdependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning ofotherlands, [drew] to a close." There was even, here and there, acritic like James Russell Lowell, who not only went on favoringthe new literature even after it had begun to emerge (as inhis famous 1845 essay on Poe), but actually demanded moreof the same. In his notorious "Fable for Critics" of 1848,Lowell excoriated the American literary public for displaying"the gait and the manners of runaway slaves.""Though you brag of your New World," he wrote, "youdon't half believe in it;/ And as much ofthe Old as is possibleweave in it;/ You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen'sthoughtJ With their salt on her tail your wild eagleis caught;J Your literature suits its each whisper and motionfTo what will be thought of it over the ocean."But most critics and educated readers of the American1840s and '50s couldn't have agreed less with Lowell. Iftheyhad agreed with Emerson in 1837, their agreement had beenpurely theoretical; and it evaporated very quickly once theliterature Emerson had called for began to materialize. Mostironic of all, but needless to say, they found the new literaturewanting precisely in the degree ofits failure to faith-MARCH 198019

20fully reflect the old-the English. "Neither Poe nor Whitman,"says Mencken, "made the slightest concession towhat was the predominant English taste, the prevailingEnglish authority, of his time. And neither yielded in theslightest to the maudlin echoes of English notions that passedfor ideas in the United States.... What happened?Imprimis, English authority, at the start, dismissed themloftily, they were, at best, simply rare freaks from the colonies.Secondly, American stupidity, falling into step, camenear overlooking them altogether."Poe, of course, never really ran any risk of going entirelyunnoticed. But as Mencken argues, though "itis true enoughthat he enjoyed, during his lifetime, a certain popular reputation,... that reputation was considerably less than the fameofmen who were much his inferiors.... Not many native criticsof respectable position would have ranked him clearlyabove, say, Irving or Cooper, or even above Longfellow, hisold enemy. A few partisans argued for him, but in the main,as Saintsbury has said, he was the victim of 'extreme and almostincomprehensible injustice' at the hands of his countrymen.It is surely not without significance that it took tenyears to raise enough money to put a cheap and hideoustombstone upon his neglected grave, that it was not actuallyset up until he had been dead twenty-six years, that no contemporaryAmerican writer took any part in furthering theproject, and that the only one who attended the final ceremonywas Whitman."Whitman himself met with little better. "Nothing, indeed,"says Mencken, "could be more amazing than the hostilitythat surrounded him at home until the very end of hislong life. True enough, it was broken by certain feeble mitigations.Emerson~ in 1855, praised him-though later veryeager to forget it and desert him.... Alcott, Thoreau, Lowelland even Bryant, during his briefBohemian days, were politeto him. A group of miscellaneous enthusiasts graduallygathered about him.... But the general tone of the opinionthat beat upon him, the attitude of domestic criticism, wasunbrokenly inimical; he was opposed by misrepresentationand neglect. 'The prevailing range of criticism on my book,'he wrote in "A Backward Glance on My Own Road" in 1884,'has been either mockery or denunciation-and ... I havebeen the marked object oftwo or three (to me pretty serious)official buffetings.' 'After thirty years of trial,' he wrote in"My Book and I," three years later, 'public criticism on thebook and myself as author of it shows marked anger andcontempt more than anything else.' "And the story was not far otherwise with Hawthorne orMelville or Emerson or Thoreau. Everyone of these menconsciously confronted the issue of literary nationalism, theissue ofwhether it was wiser to court popularity and criticalacclaim by slavishly imitating the English·or to risk literaryignominy by trying to capture a distinctively Americanflavor in his writing, and every one ofthem lost by his choice.Hawthorne endured penury and neglect for 20 years whileproducing, in certain of the short stories collected asTwice-Told Tales (1837, 1842) and Mosses From an OldManse (1846), a distinctively American and original fiction.When, at the age of 46, finally, belatedly, he began producingnovels in the approved English manner(s) - the first ofthese, a gothic historic with an American setting called TheScarlet Letter (1850) made his name and his fortune and thesecond, a gothic called The House of the Seven Gables(1851), made both all over again-it is not difficult to guesshis motives. He had been denying himself too long. Melvillelaunched his career with a series ofseafaring adventure talesin the approved English manner- Typee (1846), OmooTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW(1847), Redburn (1849), and Whitejacket (1850)-and hadachieved a not inconsiderable criticaland popular followingwhen, in 1850, he read Hawthorne's Mosses from an OldManse and became converted, so to speak, to American literature.The fiction he wrote after this conversion-including,of course, his great transitional work, Moby Dick(1851), although Pierre (1853), Israel Potter (1856), ThePiazza Tales (1856) and The Confidence Man (1857),are insome ways even more genuinely American-destroyed hiscareer in the space of a mere seven years. He who had beenan established and popular professional writer found himselfunable to support his family by his pen; he who had wonthe praise of all the critics saw his books go unnoticed andunreviewed. "Seldom," says Willard Thorp in his article onMelville in the Literary History ofthe United States, "has asuccessful author dropped so suddenly from his pinnacle offame."The case of Emerson and his protege Thoreau is a morespecialized one, but no exception to the rule. It is specializedchiefly in that it presents us with two bodies of work whichmust, for certain historical purposes at least, be thought ofasone. Emerson himself did not want for popular or critical acceptance.As has been noted, he made a sensation in 1837with his demand that America free herself from cultural andintellectual bondage to England; and from that time on, hisfame and influence only grew. Yet, as Mencken has argued,his "reputation, to the end ofhis life, was far more that of atheological prophet and ethical platitudinarian, comparableto Lyman Abbott or Frank Crane," or, we might say today,Norman Vincent Peale or Billy Graham, "than that of a literaryartist, comparable to Tennyson or Matthew Arnold."

This is partly because Emerson found it most congenialandmostprofitable--to cast his ideas in the form oflectures,which he later reworked into essays; and it is difficult tothink of anyone-save, briefly and meretriciously, RobertIngersoll-who ever made a reputation for himself as a literaryartist by lecturing. And, as we have seen, it is certainlycharacteristic of the American reading public of the midnineteenthcentury that it should have seized upon the strainof pious, moralizing English Puritanism in· Emerson's workas its distinguishing feature and ignored the thoroughgoingindividualism which made it different from anything beingwritten in Europe. But if Emerson never did make a name forhimself strictly as a literary artist, it is probably due atleast asmuch to his actual defects as a literary artist as to his predilectionfor lecturing or to the superficial and Anglicizedtastes of his audience.Emerson lacked, above all, originality. There was a certainoriginality to his thought, to be sure, but it was intertwinedand admixed to such an extent with the contemporaryEuropean ideas he turned to for inspiration thatit is still difficultnearly a hundred and fifty years after the factto clearlyseparate his own ideas from his inspired borrowings. And asa stylist he was, simply, undistinguished; for all their originalityof structural conception and prose style, Emerson'sEssays might almost have been written by any educated Englishmanof the period. Almost. The Comtesse MarieD'Agoult said ofthe Essays that they were "not yet art," butadded that "the mingling heretofore unknown, ofthe protestantspirit ofindividualism, or self-reliance, with the pantheisticspirit which inspires this book, the combination andharmonizing ofthese two antagonisms in a superior intellectforms, incontestably, a new element from whence may beborn an original art." It remained for Henry David Thoreauto actually createthe original art which lay tantalizingly nascentin Emerson.'Thoreau was twenty years old in 1837, when, as. amember of the Harvard graduating class to which Emersondelivered his famous remarks on "The American Scholar,"he first met the 34-year-old sage ofConcord. He was alreadybookish, already independent-minded, already bent on writing.Buthe was yet unformed, and Emerson set about forminghim. He moved Thoreau into his home, turned him loosein his library, introduced him to his circle of intellectual andliterary friends, published him in The Dial. And though itwasn't long before Thoreau was being publicly dismissed asa mere Emerson imitator, he proved otherwise with his firstbook, A Week on the Con,cord and Merrimack Rivers(1849), and rubbedthe lesson in with his second, Walden(1854). Though he had learned his master's lessons well,Thoreau was his own man. He was a greater prose stylistthan Emerson, a profounder thinker and a more original artist.In the Week and in Walden, the only books he publishedduring his lifetime, he invented a new and distinctivelyAmerican hybrid ofthe English essay form and establishedone of the four main currents or traditions in our nationalletters. ,In the English essay from Bacon through Addison andSteele and Dr. Johnson to Lamb, Thoreau's,contemporary,the emphasis is never on the essayist himself, always on hisostensible subject. It is the sine qua non of the essay as aform, of course, that its subject is always, if only implicitly,its author, his mind. "A person~lessay," says Edward Hoagland,"is like the human voice talking, its order the mind'snatural flow, instead of a systematized outline of ideas.Though more wayward or informal than an article ortreatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center,even ifthe point couldn't be expressed in fewer wordsthan the essayist has employed. A personal essay frequentlyis not autobiographical at all, but what it does keep in commonwith autobiography is that, through its tone and tumblingprogression, it conveys the quality of the author'smind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are directlyconcerned with the mind and its idiosyncrasy, the very freedomthe mind possesses is bestowed on this branch of literaturethat doeshonor to it, and the fascination ofthe mindis the fascination of the essay." But the mind in the Englishessay is typically outward-looking, extrospective. It not onlyavoids autobiography, it avoids even introspection; and it isreally personal, idiosyncratic, individual, only incidentally,only in passing, only in the characteristic attitude-whichnever itself becomes an object of scrutiny-which it adoptstoward whatever happens to be its subject matter.The American essay created by Thoreau is another kettleoffish entirely. Itis frankly, even relentlessly autobiographical;its subject matter is the mind of its author-its adventures,its experiences, its ruminations. Always the essayingself is the center ofattention. The American essay created byThoreau mightwell be described, in fact, as a kind of selfportraitin prose-exceptthat one ofits greatest and earliestpractitioners, Walt Whitman, has demonstrated that it mayjust as well be crafted in a kind ofprosy and loose rhythmedverse. And whatmore appropriate vehicle than this new kindofessay to give literary form to thatindividualism which is ofthe essence of Americanism?Yet, as we have seen, Whitman found no favor by writingsuch verse essays instead of imitating the officially admiredEnglish models, as Longfellow did. And Thoreau fared no 21MARCH 1980

22better with his essays in prose. "Thoreau's first book," saysTownsend Scudder, "fell stillborn from the press. Of thethousand copies printed, most werepresently returnedto theauthor as unsalable." Because they were unsalable, his secondbook, Walden, went five years in want ofa publisher.And when finally it was printed it was derided by Lowell,then the most influential native critic of letters, as the workof a man who had "so high conceit of himself that he ac-_ceptedwithout questioning, and insisted on our accepting,his defects and weaknesses of character,as virtues and powerspeculiar to hilnself," a man who made "his own whim thelaw, his own rangethe horizon of the universe."As -we have seen, similar incomprehension greeted thework of Poe, when first that work saw the light of day inAmerica. Yet, in his Poems (1831), TheNarrative ofArthurGordon Pym (1838), Tales ofthe Grotesque and Arabesque(1840), and the assorted poems, tales and essays he puhlishedbetween 1840 and his death in 1849, pieces like "TheMurders in the Rue Morgue," "The Masque of the RedDeath," "The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar," "The Raven"and "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe toocreated a new and distinctively American literature. Indeed,the remaining three ofthe four main currents in Americanletters may be traced directly to Poe: the science fiction tradition,the detective story tradition, and the symbolisttradition.To begin with the last of these,. it is widely acknowledgedthat Poe's writings were instrumental in launchingthe Symbolistmovement inFrance-"FrenchSymbolism....began,"saysF.O. Mathiessen, "at the moment when'Baudelaire recognizedinPoe's logical formulas for a. poem his own halfdevelopedthoughts 'combined to perfection'''; "Poe's criticalwritings,"says Edmund Wilson, "provided the firstscriptures of the Symbolist Movement"- but itis not commonly:realized 'how- great a role American writers haveplayed in the subsequent development ofthe symbolist tradition,orhow deeply and fundamentally American that traditionis. It is commonly believed that Poe gave the French theidea,whereupon Baudelaire, Mallarme, Gautier, Huysmans,Rimbaud and Valery carried out the rest ofthe necessaryworkfor themselves - with a little help from suchIrishmen and Englishmen as Oscar Wilde, George Moore,Walter Pater, Aubrey Beardsley and their various colleaguesofthe Yellow Nineties.But the facts-were farotherwise. Not only did Poe virtuallyfound the Symbolist Movement, his American'followers remainedamong its leaders from thatpointforward. The NewYorker Stuart Merrill and the Virginian francis Viele­Griffin, both lyric poets, emigrated to France and assumedpositions of Symbolist eminence in that country alongsideMallarmeand Valery. They are regarded as important writersin France to this day. Merrill also produced one of thefirst English translations ofthe work ofhis French comrades,Pastels in Prose (1890). His classmate at Columbia LawSchool, Edgar Saltus, author ofone the most genuinely '90sflavoredof the various personal memoirs ofOscar Wilde,remained in America for thegreater part of his life (thoughhe also traveled extensively in Europe), living sometimes inNew York, sometimesin Los Angeles; his more than 30books include novels ofcrime, luxury and decadence in amanner'which derives about equally from "The Fall of theHouse of Usher" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue",and impressionistic, poetic essays on mostly historical subjects,which derive perhaps most obviously from pieces like"The Domain of Arnheim." As Harry Levinhas written ofhim in the Lit~erary History ofthe United States, "WhenSal-THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEWtus is recollected, he is sometimes regarded as an Americandisciple of Oscar Wilde ... Actually he parallels, rather thanemulates, the English aesthete, who was his junior by a year.In Love and Lore (1890), a year before the preface to ThePicture ofDorian Gray, Saltus defended fiction against theprudishness of Anthony Comstock by recognizing only twokinds: 'stories which are well written and stories which arenot.' Two years before Salome he had touched upon thesame subject ..."He paralleled Wilde too in his cultivationof the art of the epigram.AndSaltus was by no means alone in thus remaining inAmerica while carrying forward the symbolist tradition ofPoe. He had his forerunners in the weirdly ornate fables ofthe early Hawthorne andthe later Melville, and his contemporarycounterparts in Ambrose Bierce of San Francisco,who combined a passion for epigram and paradox with azest for telling tales ofstrangeness and murder; in LafcadioHearn of New Orleans, for whom exotic places loomed aslarge and as central as theydid for Rimbaud; in the Chicagobased editors and publishers ofThe Chap Book, which anticipatedthe better known English Yellow Book in most of itsfamous symbolist heresies; and in his, fellow New Yorker,James Gibbons Huneker, whose critical essays on the arts forvarious New York newspapers won-him the friendship andprofessional respect of the greatest of French symbolistcritics,Remy de Gourmont.Andto say all this is to say nothing of the role played byAmericans, in the -Yellow English Nineties of Wilde,Beerbohmand Beardsley. The doctrine ofart for art's sake whichvitalized that famous decade was definitively formulated,notby Wilde or his Oxford mentor Walter Pater or even by

Arthur Symons, but by the AmericanJames McNeill Whistlerin his "10 o'Clock" lecture of 1885. The Yellow Book:Jwhich launched Beerbohm and Beardsley and ultimately lentits name and color to the entire decade, was edited by theAmerican, Henry Harland. Even moreimportant than Harlandhowever, was Frank Harris, the American who went toLondon and became, in John Dos Passos's words, "the centerof the literary nineties." As editor of The Fortnightly Reviewand The Saturday Review:J "he discoveredH.G. Wells... launched Shaw as a drama critic ... encouraged MaxBeerbohm ... published Swinburne and.Oscar Wilde and,Beardsley."But showing that symbolism was invented by an Americanand that its subsequent development was undertaken oroverseen in the main by Americans is not the same as showingthat symbolism is an American tradition in the sense withwhich we began: it is not the same as showing that symbolismis an individualistic tradition. In the case of theThoreauvian tradition ofthe confessional essay such a demonstrationis presumably unnecessary. The Thoreauvianessay is, as we have seen,preoccupied with the self of its author,with the qualities in virtue of which he is unique andindividual; this is evident in Thoreau himself and in such ofhis best known successors as. Whitman, Twain, HenryAdams, Mencken, Henry Miller and Joan Didion. But theindividualism of the Thoreauvian tradition also extends beyondthe purely personal to the level of more or less explicitsocialphilosophy. One of Thoreau's most famous essays isthe one on "Civil Disobedience" in which he declares his ac...ceptance ofthe slogan, "That government is best which governsnot at aV," and further asserts that "we should be menfirst and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate arespect for the law, so much as for the right." For "governmentnever ofitself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacritywith which it got out of its way. It does not keep thecountry free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate.The character inherent in the American people has done allthat has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhatmore, if the government had not sometimes got in itsway." Twain sneeredthat "there is no native American criminalclass except Congress." Mencken asserted that all formsof government are "inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest,... all alike are enemies· to laborious and virtuousmen." And Didion was recently (and not unjustly) labelled a"libertarian" bY' a seemingly shocked Time magazine reviewerbecause she devoted an essay in her latest book, TheWhite Album, to the government "Bureaucrats" who take itupon themselves, out of an "impenetrable sense of highersocial purpose," to rearrange other people's daily lives forthem.Obvious though it may be that the Thoreauvian traditionin American letters is individualistic, however, it is perhapsless than obvious that the symbolist tradition of Poe and hissuccessors is equally individualistic-individualistic to itsvery core. Yet listen to Remy de Gourmont: "What doessymbolism mean?" he asked in 1896, and answered himself:"individualism in literature, liberty in art, the abandoning ofthe formulae ofthe schools, the tendency toward whatever isnew, strange, even bizarre." And what do tendencies towardthe strange and bizarre have in common with individualism?Simply this: the symbolist writer, like the confessional essayist,is preoccupied with his unique self as the basic subjectmatter ofhis work; and the more unique and individual hiswork is, the better it can serve to symbolize his own uniqueness."The capital crime in a writer," says Gourmont, "is conformity,imitation, submission to rules and teachings. Thework ofa writer should be not only the reflectionbut the enlargedreflection of his personality. The only excuse that aman has for writing is thathe express his own self, that he revealto others the kind ofworld that is reflected in his individualmirror; his only excuse is thathe be original. ..." Or, asPoe putitin his 1847 essay on Hawthorne, "in one sense andin great measure, to bepeculiar is to be original, and than thetrue originality there is no higher literary virtue."In pursuit of such originality, not a few writers havegravitated toward science fiction-a genre characterized bythe freedom ofits writers to dream up literally anything theylike in the way of fictional worlds and fictional events. Thescience fiction writer, like the symbolist writer, is unconstrainedby the facts of the real 'world. He is free to create aworld of his own, a world which, like his individual self, isunique and unprecedented.According to H. Bruce Franklin, Poe was first called "thefather of science fiction" in an unsigned 1905 essay in TheSaturday Review. And he has been called it many times ­since. The only writer who might reasonably seem to have aprior claim is Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein (1818)preceded the earliest of Poe's science fiction tales by morethan fifteen years. Yet· the Shelley book is less a breakthroughinto a new genre than an ingenious insertion ofpseudo-science into an old one-namely, the gothic novel.In tales like "The Unparalleled Adventures ofHanns Pfaal,""The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "Von Kempelenand His Discovery," and "Mellonta Tauta," Poe inventedsomething altogether different-a sort of pseudo-scientificromance which owes little or nothing to Horace Walpole 23MARCH 1980

and Ann Radcliffe. And, as was the case with his poems,tales and essays in the symbolist manner, he created an importantAmerican literary tradition in the process. H. BruceFranklin has shown in Future Perfect that science fiction, aswe now call it, is "somewhere near the center ofnineteenthcenturyAmerican literature." Hawthorne wrote it; Melvillewrote it; Twain and Bierce and Jack London wrote it. Andwell they might have, for science fiction was uniquelyequipped among literary forms to dealimaginatively withthe principal fact ofnineteenth century Americanlife-theindustrial revolution.Uniquely equipped as science fiction was, however,another distinctively American genre-the detective storyundertooka related task: the imaginative depiction of thequasi-ommipotent scientist-inventor who made the industrialrevolution possible. As D.F. Rauber has observed in hisrecent essay on "The Role of the 'Great Detective' in IntellectualHistory," "the 'great detective' can be seen as a vulgarizationof the scientist, a popular surrogate for the lessglamorous figure of the austere investigator of nature. Likethe scientist, the detective collects data, forms hypotheses,checks these by the equivalent of experiment, and reachesconclusions through a combination of observation andlogic. Indeed, at bottom the 'greatdetective' is a fantasy figureof the perfectly functioning mind, pure intellect proceedinginexorably onward, indifferent to, or rather obliviousof, emotional consideration. But on a larger culturalscale this is also the ideal ofthe scientist, partially as viewedby the scientists themselves and partially as the scientist isapprehended by the outside world. This type of fantasy figuredoes not appear in literature until after the emergenceof modern experimental science...."As everyone knows, Poe was the inventor of the great detective(in his famous tales of the exploits of AugusteDupin), and itshouldtherefore come as no surprise that thedetective tradition is no less inherently individualistic-albeitfor a different reason- than those other children ofPoe's, the symbolist and science fiction traditions. The differenceis that while symbolist works and works of sciencefiction are inherently individualistic in virtue·of their stresson imaginative uniqueness, detective stories are inherentlyindividualistic in virtue ofcertain oftheir basic plot conventions.These conventions are apparent enough in "TheMurdersin the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," but theyare particularly obvious in the later "hardboiled" detectivestories of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Thedetective in such stories is almost always an individualoperative, almost never an employee ofan organization. Hesells his services, if at all, to individuals, not to organizations.He confronts, typically, not counterfeiters or corruptpoliticians or corporate embezzlers- criminals whose victimsare groups (stockholders, taxpayers, or society as awhole) - but rather murderers, whose victims are, inevitably,individuals. He is is invariably aneccentric, highly individualpersonality-fromPoe's Dupin, who never openshis shutters and goes outonly at night, to Conan Doyle'sSherlock Holmes with his cocaine and his violin, to JohnD. MacDonald's Travis McGee with his houseboat and hiscalculated effort to work as little as possible, so as to enjoyhis retirement while still young enough to do so. And thepolice in these stories are often portrayed as bumblingfools, often as dedicated professionals hamstrung by regulations,often as criminals in their own right-but almostnever as capable enough to solve the murder without the24 aid of the individual detective.Detective fiction, science fiction, symbolism and theconfessional essay - these are the main currents inAmerica's national literature. All distinctively Americanfiction writers derive from Poe. All distinctively Americanessayists derive from Poe and from Thoreau. And all distinctivelyAmerican writers have, from the time of theirfirst appearance nearly a hundred and fifty years ago downto this very day, met with incomprehension and neglect atthe hands of native critics and professors of literature; forthese latter have always been convinced that Europemaintained a kind of monopoly on excellence in the literaryarts, and have always judged all American writing byEuropean standards.Perhaps the most representative case of this problem inall of American literary history is that of Mark Twain.Twain invented no genres, but tried his hand at everyoneofthose created by Poe and Thoreau- the confessionalessay in Life on the Mississippi, RoughingJt and his travelbooks; science fiction inA Connecticut Yankee in KingArthurs's Court; detective fiction in Pudd'nhead Wilson;symbolism in The Mysterious Stranger and in his masterpiece,The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn. Twain's greatoriginality as an American writer lay in his perfection of anew prose· style, a style at once colloquial, plain spokenand magnificently expressive. And his great contributionto the development of American fiction lay in havingproved, with Huck Finn, that a symbolic fantasy as sensuousand strange and individual as anything by Poe himselfcould be made to look on its surface like a straightforwardrealistic novel. Twain showed that the supernatural-oreven the atmosphere ofthe supernatural-was no more es-THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

sential to the symbolist writer than was an elaborately ornateand "literary" prose style.This is no small achievement. It might even reasonablybe argued that in demonstrating the possibility of a realistic,vernacular symbolism, Twain launched one of themost important subgenreswithin the American symbolisttradition-the hardboiled fantasy of crime, violence, andlife under primitive conditions. The first masters of thiskind of writing after Twain were Stephen Crane, FrankNorris and Jack London; its most important later masterswere Hemingway, Horace McCoy (author of They ShootHorses, Don't They?) and James M. Cain. And forlaunching this subgenre, how did Twain fare at theohandsof native critics and professors of literature? At this pointin the argument, I trust there is no longer any need to answerthe question explicitly.Yet one answer needs to be made, if we are to see whyTwain's case is such a representative one: his books, andthose of almost all of his followers from Crane to Cain,were not rejected by native critics and professors on theopen and clearly specified ground that they were insufficientlyEuropean, but rather on the ground that they wereinherently sub-:literary, that they were not serious books atall, but merely works of "popular entertainment." NoAmerican writer has ever been shunned explicitly becausehe was too American in his manner: other, more publiclyrespectable rationalizations have always fallen easilyenough to the hands of our critics and professors. Thoreauwas not called to task for being too American, but forbeing too self-centered; and this has continued to be thestandard charge levelled against Thoreauvians from WaltWhitman through Henry Miller to Joan Didion (who wasattacked only the other day in The Nation because "hersubject is always herself"). The charge ofcommitting merepopular entertainment when one ought to be doing serious(which is to say European) work has been much morewidely used in American literary history than the charge ofself-centeredness, however. It has been used from the daysof Poe himself to discredit the work of science fiction writersand detective story writers, and also, as we have seen, todiscredit the work of the hardboiled symbolists. It istherefore worth digressing for a few paragraphs to cast thisdistinction between the "popular" and the "serious" in literaturein a somewhat clearer light.Until around 1750, there were two kinds of imaginativewriters in Western Europe. There were court poets, bywhich I mean that entire class ofwriters who lived on pensionsgiven them by members ofthe upper class, which is tosay, the nobility, the State. And there were, the mostlyanonymous authors of what we know today as ballads,folktales and Mother Goose rhymes-they didn't make aliving doing that, of course; they were farmers and blacksmiths,and, common sense might seem to suggest, a goodmany, perhaps even a majority, were housewives. Some ofthem, the unknown authors of "Cinderella" and "TheSleeping Beauty," for example, were creative geniuses. Butthey were also members of the lower class and as such, inthe eyes of the upper class, they were inferior-inferior inevery respect, inherently and inescapably inferior-and sowere incapable of producing literature which was not inferiorto the literature produc.ed by their betters.But by 1750 the phenomenon known to history textbooksas the "rise of the middle class" had pretty welltaken place. In the mid-eighteenth century there were nolonger only,two social classes; there were three. The oldupper class had dwindled sadly in both size and realwealth and political power. And the new middle classfound itself in the position of chief patron of the literaryarts. Moveable type was by then a several hundred yearsold invention, and specimens of a new literary form calledthe novel, invented to utilize the mass production possibilitiesof Gutenberg's miracle, had begun to appear.Now the new middle class tried to equal or surpass theold upper class in every respect-wealth, "conspicuousconsumption," political power, patronage of the arts, andexclusivity. As the old upper class had dismissed folk literatureas "vulgar" and for centuries had refused even toread literature written in the language of common people,so the new middle class sought a method of justifying contemptfor the literature ofthe still existent, but increasinglyliterate and monied lower class. In the just pre-modernworld of 1750, books were becoming available to elementswhich had never seen them before, and the new middleclass ran the risk, so to speak, of liking the same books asthose liked by literate servants and laborers. And this riskwas a particularly real one in the case ofthe novel, that newform which seemed to win favor among readers ofall sortsand to be written by writers of all sorts, even those whohad previously had no recourse to print and therefore toldtheir stories. It was becoming impossible to distinguish thework of these writers from the work of their betters. AsLeslie Fiedler writes in his 1975 essay, "Towards a Definitionof Popular Literature," "Believing in the division oflabor in all fields, [the bourgeoisie] appointed experts totell them (to 'brief' them, we would say these days)whether novels were O.K. in general; and if so, which weremore O.K. than others. 25MARCH 1980

"Obviously, they did not always take the good advicethey. sought. Quite often, in fact, they continued to readwhat their critical mentors had taught them to regard as'trash.' But they did snatch such work from the hands oftheir children, especially their daughters, when they caughtthem reading it. In the light of this, it is clear that the functionof modern critics and schoolmasters whose subject isliterature was from the start rather like that performed bythe writers of Etiquette Books, Dictionaries and Grammars.Like the latter, the former responded to the culturalinsecurity of the eighteenth century middle classes by providing'rules' or 'standards' or guides to 'good behavior.'The new rich wanted to know which fork to pick up; howto spell things 'right;' when, if at all, it was proper to say'ain't'; and also what books to buy for display in their librariesor on their coffee tables."Of course, the advice they got from their experts variedas the experts themselves varied. Some announced thatonly the books of morally good men were O.K. Others recommendedonly books whose authors were dead orwhose authors were living imitators of the dead. Stillothers advised against all novels, a form which they consideredinherently vulgar. (And all these standards have enduredinto our own era. It is only a few years since the lateYvor Winters was arguing that only books whose implicationsare morally good may be considered artistically successful.It is only since World War II that a majority amongcritics and professors of literature have come to regard thenovel as an artistic genre with as much potential as poetryto be "serious" and "important" and "elevating." A significantnumber still believe otherwise.)In America, as we have seen, the critics and professorshave traditionally advised against books which did not resembleEuropean ones; and they have thus dismissed as"popular" all of the most distinctively American books inthe history of our national letters. Yet, as Fiedler argues,"popular literature is not, as a category, a type, a subgenre,the invention of the authors of the books which wehave been taught to believe 'belong' to it, but of certaintheorizers after the fact. It exists generically in the perceptionof elitist critics-or better, perhaps, in their misperception,their-usually tendentious, sometimes even deliberate-misapprehension.Itwill, therefore, cease to exist asa category when we cease to regard it in the way we havebeen misled into doing. Clearly, what we consider 'seriousnovels' or 'art novels': works, say, by Henry James orMarcel Proust, Thomas Mann or James Joyce, are indistinguishable,before the critical act, from 'best-sellers' or'popular novels' by JacquelineSusann or John D. Mac­Donald, Conan Doyle or Bram Stoker. Despite peripheralattempts to sort them out before the fact by invidiousbinding or labelling, by and large, they are bound in thesame boards and paper; edited, printed, distributed, advertisedand peddled in quite the same way."26 Of course, Fiedler's argument is not persuasive toeveryone. American critics and professors of literature arehelplessly bound by tradition, and tradition demands thata clear, unequivocal and unbridgeable distinction bedrawn between the serious and popularin literature, andthat the latter be firmly and unequivocally rejected.America's critics and literary pedants have done this traditionally,and they are doing it today. Norman Podhoretz,who was named a few years ago by Richard Kostelanetz asone of the four most powerful members of the New Yorkliterary aristocracy, made his early reputation with essayslike "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," in which he excoriatedthe Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg-arguably the most important American literary figuresof the'50s, creators of a uniquely twentieth century versionof the Thoreauvian-Whitmanesque confession-fortheir "self-centeredness" and "self-indulgence.,,1 Now,from his pinnacle ofinfluence, he tells us out of one side ofhis mouth that Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo'sNest is merely popular entertainment, and out ofthe otherthat the critical tradition to which he conceives himself asbelonging takes "its bearings not from any American traditionof letters ... but from heavier modes of critical discoursewhich could be traced to France or Germany orRussia."This quotation is taken from Podhoretz's 1967 memoirMaking It, in which he thus further describes the intellectualtradition he considers his own: " ... it was mainly onEurope that the family [the New York literary aristocracyofthe 195Os] had its eyes. There were so many people therewho would in the coming years be revealed as relatives­Orwell, Koestler, Spender, Merleau-Ponty, Silone, and adozen others-and so few outside the family proper inAmerica itself. The terms in which the family discussedthings, the language it spoke, was a language that seemedto make more sense to European than to American ears;the books which were the family's touchstones and the issuesit considered relevant all had greater currency inEurope than in America; and the ideas and tastes to whichthe family was attached constituted an ambience suggestingParis rather more than it did New York (New York,appropriately enough, was the New Yorker crowd at theAlgonquin Round Table, with one·foot on Broadway andanother on the best-seller lists). Thus, when the familyspoke ofitself or was spoken ofas 'alienated,' the referencemight be to any number of things, but the deepest thing ofall was this; They did not feel that they belonged toAmerica or that America belong to them" (emphasis in theoriginal).Podhoretz tells us that he himself felt this way, as a studentin the '40s, as a journeyman writer in the '50s, andeven in the early'60s after he had become one of the leadersofthe establishment. "UponJohnson's accession to thePresidency," he writes, "I was asked, as one of six 'intellectuals,'to write a letter outlining the things I would liketo see him do. I have never had so much trouble writingTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

anything, and in the course ofworking on the letter I cameto realize that the trouble stemmed from feelings of alienationfrom the country of my birth so deep that I could noteven overcome them when they were decreed away fromme personally by the President ofthe United States himself.By 'alienation' in this context I meant simply the feelingthat this was not my country; I was not really a part ofit; Iwas a citizen, and a highly interested one, of a small communityin New York which lived by its own laws and hadas little commerce as it could manage with a hostile surroundingenvironment."Podhoretz's colleague among the top leaders ofour currentliterary aristocracy, Irving Howe, who discussesAmerican writing of the'50s, '60s and '70s without asingle referente to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bradbury, Heller,Vonnegut, Didion, Barthelme, Kesey, or Tom Wolfe, andwith only one, mildly disparaging, reference to J.D.Salinger, (and one, patently dismissive, to Ayn Rand), hassimilar confessions to offer. "Young would-be writersgrowing up in a Jewish slum in New York or Chicagoduring the 'twenties and 'thirties," he writes of his ownboyhood in Celebrations and Attacks," found the classicalAmericans, especially Emerson and Thoreau, a little wanand frail, deficient in those historical entanglements we feltto be essential to literature because inescapable in life."For example, says Howe, there is the issue ofthe Family.Where is the family, he asks, "in Emerson, or Thoreau, orWhitman? Even in Melville the family is a shadowy presencefrom which his heroes have fled before their storiesbegin. And where is the family in Hemingway or Fitzgerald?With Faulkner, despite all his rhetoric about honor,we might feel at home because the clamp of family whichchafed his characters was like the clamp that chafed us.When we read Tolstoy we were witnessto the supremacyoffamily life; when we read Turgenev we saw in Bazarov'sparents a not-too distant version ofour own. But in American.literaturethere were all these strange and homelesssolitaries, motherless and fatherless creatures like Nattyand Huck and Ishmael. Didn't they know where life camefrom and returned to?"Moreover, "what could we make of all the talk, bothfrom and about Emerson, which elevated individualism toa credo oflife? For most of us, individualism seemed a luxuryor deception of the gentile world. Immigrant Jewishculture had. been rich in eccentrics, cranks, and individualistdisplay; even the synagogue accepted prayer atpersonal tempos, coming to a conclusion with about thesame nicety of concord one finds in certain American orchestras.But the idea of an individual covenant with God,each man responsible for his own salvation; the claim thateach man is captain of his soul (picture those immigrantkids, in white shirts and middy blouses, bawling out, '0Captain, My Captain'); the notion that you not only haveone but more than one chance in life, which constitutes theAmerican version of grace; and the belief that you rise orfall in accord with your own merits rather than the will ofalien despots-these residues of Emersonianismseemednot only strange but sometimes even a version ofthat brutalitywhich our parents had warned was intrinsic to gentilelife. Perhaps our exposure to this warmed-over Emersonianismprompted us to become socialists, as if thereby tomake clear our distaste forthese American delusions andto affirm,instead, a heritage ofcommunal affections andresponsibilities."This distaste also drove the young Jewish literary menand women of Howe's generation to embrace another nationalliteratureas their own. "The dominant outlook ofthe immigrant Jewish culture" Howe writes, "was probablya shy, idealistic, ethicized, 'Russian' romanticism directedmore toward social justice than personal fulfillment."The literary heroes of the young Irving Howe andhis friends were not Poe, Thoreau and Twain, but rather"Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov.."With men like this sitting in judgment on Americanwriting from the time of its first appearance, is it any wonderthat our native literary traditions should have encounteredsuch incomprehension and neglect? To the contrary,the wonder ofthe matter is that some ofthe works in thesenative traditions have actually, in the face of this criticalobtusity, been able to establish themselves as popularand,in a few cases, literary-classics. The great irony ofthe matter is that so many of those American writers whohave (often posthumously) won official recognition intheir own country have done so by first winning itabroad.Poe, as we have seen, first became a celebrity in France,through the translations of Baudelaire and Mallarme. Hethen, as Mencken says, "began to win a slow and reluctantrecognition in England (at first only from rebels andiconoclasts), and finally [once it had been established thatthe Europeans, the arbiters of all taste, had given them officialapproval, designated them as O.K.,] even in America."In our own century, the French were the first to recognizethe genius ofMiller and Faulkner, as well as the importanceof McCoy, Cain and Dashiell Hammett. Hammettwas a great favorite of Andre Gide. Camus was inspiredto write The Stranger by his reading of Cain's ThePostman Always Rings Twice. And Sartre was astonishedto learn during an interview with an American reporter inFrance in 1947 that his interviewer had never heard ofMcCoy. The New York Herald-Tribune Weekly Book Reviewreported in that same year that McCoy was "the mostdiscussed American writer in France."Another of the great ironies of American literary historyis that the word "popular" should have been so widelyused to denigrate and dismiss the work of American writers.For, thanks largely to the efforts of our critics andprofessors, it was a long time before American readers feltany interest in the work ofAmerican writers-before, thatis, the work ofAmerican writers could by any stretch oftheimagination be called "popular." As Montague Slaterwrites of nineteenth century America, "American bookpublishingfrowned on American authors-they wereunpopular American authors kept alive by taking officialor academic jobs."But as European critics and readers began"discovering"the genuinely American authors the United States wasproducing, American readers began coming 'round-eventhough, as we have seen, American critics and pedagoguesnever did. Eventually, these newly re-Americanized readersbecame so numerous and so indifferent to the views ofthe European-minded critics and professors they found allaround them that it became common to hear talk ofthe declineof literature and how our best writers were unable tofind an audience and how our brightest young people wereno longer interested in the national letters. In fact, ofcourse, our young people are reading more books thanever before, and our best writers are reaching more readersthan ever before, more readers than Poe or Thoreau wouldever have dreamed possible. It's just that these readers havefinally learned to disregard the witless prattle ofour criticsand professors and to leave the writers these worthiesnominate as our best to the oblivion they deserve. 27MARCH 1980

Let us con'sider, briefly, one case in point. Samuel R.Delan;r is a 38-y;ear old black American novelist, shortstory writer and essayist whose first genuinely major work,the novel Dhalgren (1975), was preceded by fourteenyears of mostly undistinguished science fiction and pornography.It might in fact be said of Delany, as it was oncesaid of George Moore, that he has conducted his literaryeducation in public. He published his first novel, TheJewels ofAptor, in 1962 when he was nineteen years old,and he continued to publish at the rate of about a novel ayear for the next seven years thereafter- The Fall oftheTowers (1965), The Ballad ofBeta-II (1965), Empire Star(1966), Babel-17 (1966), The Einstein Intersection(1967), and Nova (1968) - steadily and impressivelygrowing in sophistication and ambition and dexterity frombook to book to book, but never until the very end of thisfirst period, 1967 and '68, writing anything really distinguished,anything that mightn't as easily have been writtenby anyone of a number of other clever young men.Then, from 1968 to 1975, the flow of books slowed almostto a stop. There was only a pornographic novel, TheTides of Lust (1972), a collection of short stories,Driftglass (1971), and a handful of critical essays latercollected in TheJewel-HingedJaw: Notes on the LanguageofScience Fiction (1977). But a very great deal of importantconsolidation and growth was obviously going on behindthe scenes. Certain ofthe short stories, notably "Aye,and Gomorrah" and "Time Considered as a Helix ofSemi-Precious Stones," were brilliant achievements, betterthan anything Delany had done up to that time (exceptpossibly for the author's journal entries used to introducethe larger sections of The Einstein Intersection). Thesestories proved that Delany was more than just a cleveryoung man; they proved that he was an important literarytalent.And the essays which occupied his time during thesesame years-essays on science fiction, writing, reading,language and, inevitably, himself-could only add furtherconviction (if any were needed) to the proof. In the earliestof them, "About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and FiftyWords" (1968), he argued for the Poe-esque doctrine that"put in opposition to 'style', there is no such thing as 'content'."In "Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction" (1970),he touched on the important and usually overlooked connectionsbetween science fiction and symbolism. And in"Shadows" (1973-4), he produced a long (almost booklength)confessional essay in what can only be described asa clever {and entirely successful) blend of the manners of,on the one hand, Thoreau and his fellow plainspoken autobiographers,from Twain to Miller to Didion, and, onthe other hand, Poe and his fellow aesthete-impressionists,from Huneker to George Jean Nathan to Susan Sontag.Then, in January of 1975, came Dhalgren, a nearly900-pageJoycean tour de force of a novel which still seemsto me,after five years and two thorough readings of its entiretext, to stake. a better claim than anything else publishedin this country in the last quarter-century (exceptingonly Gass's Omensetter's Luck and Nabokov's Pale Fire)to a permanent place as one ofthe enduring monuments ofour national literature. Dhalgren is a novel which is atonce rooted firmly in the American tradition ofsymbolismand caught up inextricably in the events and passions ofitsown time. And this is very nearly unprecedented (outside,perhaps of the now forgotten novels of Carl Van Vechten)in the entire history of our national letters. Even the hard-28 boiled symbolists, who habitually make their fables out ofimages drawn from the life they observe, have stoppedshort of actual social criticism. The dance marathon inThey Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the seamy SouthernCalifornia landscape of The Postman Always RingsTwice, the prep school vision ofNew York in The Catcherin the Rye-all these are merely settings; their importance(as in all symbolist fiction) is entirely as symbols of "theworlds reflected in the individual mirriors" of the authorsand their character stand-ins. At no time in these novelsdoes McCoy or Cain or Salinger seek to make his settingsymbolic ofthe whole ofAmerican society or culture; at notime does any of these authors seek to make his book a descriptionor protrayal of anything other than his personalvision of the human situation.Dhalgren incorporates such a personal vision, ofcourse,but it also incorporates what will surely come to be seen asthe definitive symbolic portrayal in fiction of the alternativeculture of the '60s and the relationsin which that alternativeculture stood to the rest of American life duringthat wild and woolly decade. And these are only two ofthemany different but interrelated levels of meaning-sociological,political, aesthetic, psychological, philosophical-which are woven into the warp and woof of this greatbook. This tale of Bellona, a Midwestern American city ofmore than two million which has been transformed bysome catastrophe into a blazing ruin inhabited by about athousand scavengers and adventurers, is, as Edmund Wilsononce wrote of Joyce's Ulysses, "animated by a complexinexhaustible life: we revisit it as we do a city, wherewe come more and more to recognize faces, to understandpersonalities, to grasp relations, currents and interest. [TheTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

author] has exercised considerable technical ingenuity inintroducing us to the elements of his story in an orderwhich will enable us to find our bearings: yet I doubtwhether any human memory is capable, on a first reading,ofmeeting the demands ... and when we reread it, we startin at any point, as if it were indeed something solid like acity which actually existed in space and which could beentered from any direction."Since Dhalgren, Delany has published two more novels,Triton (1976) and Tales ofNeveryon (1979), and two volumesof nonfiction, The American Shore (1978), a criticalstudy of the contemporary American writer Thomas M.Disch (written largely during Delany's term as visitingButler Chair Professor of English at SUNY, Buffalo, andhis subsequent term as a fellow at the University of Wisconsin'sCenter for Twentieth Century Studies), andHeavenly Breakfast (1979), a personal memoir of '60scommune life which shades offinto general speculation onthe issue of social order. Each of these books is distinguishedin a way that little of Delany's work was beforeDhalgren. Each is the product of a mature and originalcreative vision. One at least-Tales ofNeveryon-is, likeDhalgren, a major new work of American fiction. (Alsolike Dhalgren-which has sold nearly 100,000 copies ayear for the past five years-it is finding read~rs.)And what sort of critical response has this impressivebody of work provoked? Exactly none. You may look asyou will through the periodical indices in your favorite library:you will find no essays on Delany in our majormagazines; you will find no author interviews with him;you will find not even so much as a single review of a singleone of his fourteen books. Instead what you will find is thewhining and fretting of such critics as those with whom webegan our discussion. You will find John Gardner explainingthat the English (notably John Fowles) have amonopoly on good fiction today, and that all Americanfiction is either immoral or fraudulent. You will findHenry Fairlie, an Englishman, lamenting the total absenceof greatness from contemporary American writing. Youwill find Robert Alter bemoaning the passage of greatnessin the novel and offering the names often Europeans(Woolf, Proust, Mann, Flaubert, Conrad, Stendhal, EmilyBronte, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, and Dostoievsky) and onlyone American (Faulkner) as examples ofwhat he means by"greatness." You will find Lewis Lapham wondering"why no American author in the past thirty years ha[s]written a major novel or play." You might even come upona news item on the most recent presentation of the annualNational Book Critics Circle Awards and learn that as faras theNBCC board ofdirectors is concerned, the most outstandingbook-length work of American fiction of 1979was not Vonnegut's Jailbird or Ursula LeGuin's Malafrenaor Donald Barthelme's Great Days or Eve Babitz'sSex and Rage or Delany's Tales of Neveryon, but ratherThe Year of the French, a painstakingly scholarly novelabout an incident in 18th century Irish history. Just asMencken observed sixty years ago, "the United States remainsalmost as much an English colonial possession, intellectuallyand spiritually, as it was on July 3, 1776."Have these members of our literary aristocracy-Gardnerand· Fairlie and Alter and Lapham andrhe directors ofthe National Book Critics C'ircle - not read Delany andLeGuin and Gene Wolfe and the other distinctively Americanwriters who are now doing important work in fiction?Or have the foolish prejudices in which they were soenergetically tutored by-rhe literary pedagogues of a generationago rendered them permanently incapable ofpassingreasoned judgment on a book because it is published as apaperback original by a mass market house like Bantam orBallantine or Fawcettor Ace, or because it is called "sciencefiction" by booksellers?Like Mencken six decades ago, I must end my inquiryinconclusively-and with a word or two (which may bequoted verbatim, so similar has my own task been to hisearlier one) of special pleading and self-justification. "Ihave described the disease. Let me say at once that I haveno remedy to offer. I simply set down a few ideas, throwout a few hints, attempt a few modest inquiries into causes.Perhaps my argument often turns upon itself: the field isweed-grown and paths are hard to follow. It may be thatinsurmountable natural obstacles stand in the way of thedevelopment ofa distinctively American culture, groundedupon a truly egoistic nationalism and supported by a nativearistocracy."One thing at least is certain: the literary aristocracy withwhich we are presently saddled is not supporting Americanliterature, but rather European colonial literature,and only "an under-current ofrevolt, small but vigorous,"signals the possibility of any happier state of affairs in thefuture. The Anglophiles and Europhiles of American lettersremain firmly in control. "Today, as in the day ofEmerson, they set the tune.... But into the singing thereoccasionally enters a discordant note. On some dim tomorrow,perhaps, perchance, peradventure, they may bechallenged." 0Jeff Riggenbach is Executive Editor of LR. 29MARCH 1980

30Norman PodhoretzMarchinginstep'ROY A. CHILDS, JR.Breaking Ranks, by NormanPodhoretz. Harper andRow, 375pp., $15.NORMAN PODHORETZ,the editor of Commentarymagazine, is oneofthe mostinfluential intellectuals inAmerica, and has for the lasttwo decades been· in themidst of most of today'smajor cultural and politicalbattles. When such a manflirts with radicalism, andthen moves· (together withsuch figures as NathanGlazer and Irving Kristol) tolead a host of prominent intellectualsdown the path towhat is now called "neoconservatism,"wehave theright to ~xpect somethingimportant in his "politicalmemoir," as BreakingRanks is subtitled. We expecta penetrating look atthe political landscape overthe pastseveral decades, andsome sort of sustained argument,an accounting·ofhow Podhoretz came to flirtwith radicalism, and how hecame to his present views.And that indeed is preciselywhatwe are promised.The memoir proper issandwiched between a Prologueand a Postscript, bothof which· are letters to hisson, John. Podhoretz tellshis son that yes, he really didbelieve "all that stuff," as hecalls his radical views, andpromises him a full accountingof how he came to hisVIews.I therefore leaped at thebook, fully prepared to seizePodhoretz's argument andeviscerate it, or at the veryleast, tosubjeet it tothe kindof scrutiny I didIrving Kristol'sTwo Cheers for Capitalism(LR, November 1978).No such luck. The plain factis that there is scarcely a sustainedpoliticalargument inthe book, and even fewercomplex·ideas.Instead, what we getis agossipy book in the traditionof Podhoretz's earlier memoir,Making It, rehashingyet again the battles betweenthe Jewish intellectuals ofthe 1930s, '40s and '50s,and parading before us onceagain all those now agingfigures who,apparently, arestill at the center of Podhoretz'sworld-Lillian Hellman,Lionel Trilling (nowdead), Sidney Hook, N ormanMailer, Jason Epstein.The disputes between theStalinists and the Trotskyists,between the .liberals ofthe 1950s who were anticommunistand those whoweren't, between, in fact,one host of rude, nastybackstabbing, pretentiousnarcissists and.another, arerecounted in full, completewith juicy anecdotes, asthough all ofit mattered. Asself-centered gossip lacedwith ethnocentrism, thebook makes it; as a politicalmemoir, it fans on its face.If one were to take thismemoir at face value, itwould put Podhoretz inrather a bad light. For ifanythingemerges from· itspages, it is that NormanPodhoretz lives in a tiny littleworld of other (mainlyJewish) intellectuals, andthat the· political world ofevents and actions is not realto him. He reacts not topolitical events, but to theintemperate behavior ofJason Epstein, not to theVietnam War, but to thesnarling of trendy New Left"intellectuals." When heflirted with radicalism, itwas a "narcissistic" culturalradicalism, not really a polit-THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

ical one, and he adopted itoutof boredom with mainstreamAmerican life ratherthan as the result of intellectualeffort. When he"broke ranks" with this radicalism,it was mainly a responseto the behavior andvehemence of language ofthose others who hadadopted the ITlantie of radicalism,rather than an independentreaction to an, objectiveset of political circumstances.The story goes like this:Podhoretz was born in NewYork City, raised in aJewishfamily and tradition, and hisearly politics were, as werethose of most Jewish intellectualsat first, largelysocialist. "When I arrived atColumbia College in 1946,"·he writes, "I was not quiteseventeen years old, and tothe extent that I cared aboutpolitics at all ... my viewswere the standard views ofthose American liberals whowere suspicious of Americaand sympathetic to theSoviet Union. That was onlynatural: where 1 came fromand went to school that kindof liberalism was the dominantorthodoxy." Butby thetime he graduated, he had"been converted into a passionate·partisan.of the newliberalism - the kind thatwas at once pro-Americanand anti-Communist."He fell in with a lot oflike..minded intellectuals,most of whom were at leasta bit older, and many ofwhom, like Irving Kristol,had been Trotskyists andhence bitter enemies of Stalin.Hestudied literaturethroughout the fifties, wrotesome literary pieces, workedon a few magazines andwith a few publishers, andby 1960, atthe age ofthirty,took over the editorship ofCommentary, the prestigiousmagazine published bythe American Jewish Committee.By that time he hadgrown bored with Americanlife and' began flirting withthe cultural radicalism ofsuch figures as Norman O.Brown and Paul Goodman(whose Growing Up Absurdwas partially serializedin the first three issues ofCommentary under Podhoretz'seditorship). His newfoundradicalism led him topoke around the fringes ofthe peace and disarmamentmovements, and when thewar in Indochina began toheat up in the early 1960s,Podhoretz found himself inopposition to it-but not,you understand,in' any particularlypassionateoragitatedway, rather in an almostdisinterested fashion,as, well, you know, the"wrong war in the wrongplace at the wrong timewrongnotmorallyhutin thesense of being an. impossiblewar to win." That kind of"radicalism."As the radical movementof the 1960s got underway,Podhoretz began to shakehis head in dismay. Thingssimply got out of hand.There was the civil rightsmovement, with its violencejust beneath the surfacesometimes breakingout intothe open. There were allthose odd'people experimentingwith different lifestyles,even homosexuality,finding themselves hostile tomany American institutionsand traditions. There werethe students'protesting thegigantic, usually State-runmultiversities, which theyperceived to ·be moldingthem for purposes'of whichthey disapproved. Andmostof all, perhaps, there werethoseJor whom the militarydraft and the war in Vietnamwere not merely inconvenient,but flatly and simplyevil. This, to Podhoretz,was "anti-Americanism,"and he would have none· ofit. He became more andmore suspicious of the.motivesof his fellow intellectualswho had fallen in·with this new radicalism,and began to break ranks,converting both himself andCommentary into bitterenemies ofthe "New Left"and the counterculture, assailingtheir values acrossthe board. By the end of the1960s, he had published amemoir, Making· It, calculatedto enrage the literaryestablishment, by celebratingwhathe calls the "dirtylittle secret" of the intellectuals:that they, too,10ngEor success.For thus "breakingranks" and celehratingthis "dirty little secret,"'Podhoretz relates his treatmentatthe hand ofthe NewLeft mob: he faced what hecalls the "terror." And whatdid the "terror" amount to?To the fact that his bookreceived bad, even nasty, reviews,and he didn't get invitedout toJunch any more.In one particularly heartrendingscene in the book,he recounts the "bigparties"he us.ed to throw (for "Iknew and was on goodterms with 'everyone' inNew York and I gave andwent to large parties all thetime").They were big parties, sometimesrunning to 150 guests ormore and including manypeople of an older generationwho had not seenor spoken toone another since the politicalwars of the thirties and forties,and· many who would soonbreak off relations because ofthe politicalwars ofthe late sixtiesand seventies. (Once at theheight of those later wars, mywife and I and our daughterRuth visited the Moynihans,who were then living in Cambridge,and who invited somepeople over to see us. Ruth,then about· nine years old,looked around the room andsaid wistfully' to Maura Moynihan,also about nine, "Weused to have parties like this inour house too, but that was beforepol'tics.")It's enough to leave thereader in tears.But Breaking Ranks isnot merely a bookfilled withgossip about people whostopped speaking to eachother because of heatedpolitical conflicts (this sortof thing, of course, is hardlylimited to the New York intellectualsoEwhom Podhoretzwrites). It also toucheson some of the most importantof Podhbretz's views inthe area of foreign policy.And while Commentary hastaken the lead in a greatmany cultural and politicalbattles over the past decadeand more-it has opposedthe "new equality," opposedbusing and quotas,promoted nuclear power,defended economic growth,opposed "the populationcontrollers," and debunkedsome of the myths of solarpower - more and moreover the years, it has assumedthe mantle of leadinghawk journal of the day, assailingisolationism andnoninterventionism, and defendingan actively interventionistforeign policyfranklymodelled after the global"idealism" of WoodrowWilson.As the Vietnam War drewto a close, Commentary becamethe leading journal ofopinion to oppose the movetoward isolationism on thepart of the American public.And its assault onthat tendencywasrelentless. A few ofthe pieces Commentarypublished over the past fewyears have included: "Is IsolationismPossible?" byRaymond Aron (4/74),"Was Woodrow WilsonRight?" by Daniel PatrickMoynihan (5/74), "Detente,"by Theodore Draper(6/74), "Oil: The Issue ofAmerican Intervention,"and "Further Reflections onOil and Force," both byformer isolationist RobertW. Tucker (1/75, 3/75),"The United States in Opposition,"by Daniel PatrickMoynihan (3/75)-a piecewhich saw Moynihancatapulted to the UN Ambassadorship,a symposiumon "America Now: A Failureof Nerve?" (7/75), "TheWest in Retreat," by WalterLaquer (8/75), "Appeasementand Detente," byTheodore Draper (2/76),"The Greening of AmericanForeign Policy," by Peter·Berger (3/76), "Making theWorld Safe for Communism,"and "The Abandonmentof ,. Israel," byNorman Podhoretz (4/76and 7/76), "Eurocommu-31MARCH 1980

32nism and Its Friends,"by Walter Laquer (8/76),"Anglocommunism," byRobert Moss (2/77), "Whythe Soviet Union Thinks itCould Fight and Win a NuclearWar," by RichardPipes (7/77), "Africa, SovietImperialism and the Retreatof American Power," byBayard Rustin and CarlGershman (10/77), "Vietnam:New Light on theQuestion of AmericanGuilt," by Guenter Lewy(2/78), and an interminableseries of articles on Israeland the Middle East.The overall thrust ofthesearticles is that Americanforeign policy is in retreat,and that this retrenchmentof American powerthreatens Israel. And that,unfortunately, is the keywhich unlocks the whole ofthe foreign policy of theneoconservatives. For in arather large book whichcomplains constantly aboutthe diminution of "standards"on the Left, this bookactually articulates only twostandards to be used in judgingevents-beyond vagueendorsements of democracy,an undefined "freedom,"and the like - andthose two are, oddlyeriough, at odds with oneanother.The first, which is used inopposing quotas, is franklyindividualistic: that everyindividual should be judgedon his own merits, not as themember of any group. Thesecond, used in evaluatingall sorts of social programs,and especially in evaluatingAmerican foreign policy, isnot individualistic at all, butfrankly tribal, to wit: "Is itgood for the Jews?" (p. 334)Podhoretz frankly urges theJewish community to act onthe basis of this question. Itseems never to have occurredto Podhoretz that inan era of increasing tribalismand ethnic rivalries, topose so blatant an ethnicstandard ofevaluating politicalevents could in factharm the Jews, and serve to /undermine their actual, THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW"Just as tnost liberals want tosolve problems caused by thewelfare state by throwing tnoretnoney at.thetn, Podhoretz wantsto solve the probletns caused byour foreign policy by throwingtnore weapons at thetn."interests as individuals. Yetit is this very ethnocentrismwhich has led Podhoretz andCommentary to find inevery move toward a noninterventionistforeign policya threat to Israel. Podhoretzhad earlier taken it uponhimself to exhort the intellectualcommunity that"intellectuals as intellectualshad a far greater stake in themaintenance of a liberaldemocratic order than theyhad ever realized...." meaningby this the modern liberaIestablishment, the Welfare-Warfaresta'te, underwhich the intellectual communityshould fight for "thefinancial support it neededto exist," yet "would alsohave to fight against thegovernment's use of thissupport to interfere withcultural and academic freedom."But Podhoretz realizedthat this "need" forsupport from government,combined with a fierce resistanceto government control,was not merely true ofthe intellectual community,It applied with perhaps evengreater force to the other communityof which I was amember, the Jewish community.AsI now felt obligated todeclare my interest as an intellectual,I also felt obligated todeclare my interest as a Jew;and as I tried to persuade myfellow intellectuals that radicalismwas their enemy and· nottheir friend, I tried to make thesame pointin addressing my fellowJews.Referring to the "hostilitytoJews and Jewish interestswithin the Movement,"Podhoretz writes that,By 1970 almost everyone knewthat the radical Left was antagonisticto Israel; and eventhough opposition to the stateof Israel was in theory notnecessarily a form of anti­Semitism, the "anti-Zionism"of the radical Left was becomingincreasingly difficult to distinguishfrom anti-Semitism inthe more familiar sense.This tarring with thebrush of anti-Semitism ofanyone who did not backnearly unlimited and unconditionalsupport ofIsraelhad indeed become commonplacein Podhoretz'scommunity: opponents ofan interventionist foreignpolicy were seen as opponentsof Israel, and opponentsof Zionism were seenas anti-Semitic, regardlessof the fact that there areno necessary connectionsamong any of these. But itwas the perceived connectionsamong them which ledPodhoretz and his communityto "face up to the factthat continued Americansupport for Israel dependedupon continued Americaninvolvement in internationalaffairs-from which it followedthat an Americanwithdrawal into the kind ofisolationist mood that hadprevailed most recently betweenthe two world wars,and that now looked asthough it might soon prevailagain, represented a directthreat to the security of Israel."And so the isolationistmood which followed in thewake of the Vietnam debaclewas seen as something tobe fought, and its perpetratorswere, more often thannot, branded anti-Semites.Needless to add, this wassometimes true. But if it wassometimes true, it was not atother times. The tendency ofthose closely associated withJewish traditions to identifyany criticism of Americanintervention in the MiddleEast, any criticism of Israel,or of unconditional Americansupport for Israel, asbeing "anti-Semitic," is similarto the way in whichStokely Carmichael hadtried years ago to intimidatePodhoretz with the epithet"racist," and the partisansof American intervention inWorld War II had labelledall opponents of Americanintervention "fascists."In Podhoretz's case, theclear intent of the attemptedintimidation, which in hiswritings took the form ofhistwo classic articles "Makingthe World Safe for Communism,"and "The Abandonmentof Israel," (Commentary,4/76 and 7/76), hasbeen to silence effectivelyany attempt to question orto oppose America's foreignpolicy of global interventionism.That is why any attemptto disengage from ourworldwide military andother foreign policy commitmentsis portrayed in thepages of Commentary as theresult of a "failure of will,"of American· "weakness,"and the like. All of this hasbeen intended simply to haltthe debate over our foreignpolicy goals and strategies,and to portray noninterventionismas a weak, procommunist,anti-Semiticand generally vile'foreignpolicy.But let us use Podhoretz'sown ethnic standardin judgingthe wisdom ofthis-is itgood for the Jews? Nothingcan be more obvious as the1980s dawn' but that, afterall, an American foreign policyinterventionist andstrong enough to buy Israel'ssecurity, is a foreignpolicy strong enough to sellIsrael's security. And that isprecisely what is happening.Podhoretz is anything but

naive on this score, andclearly understands the stateof affairs which has led ourMiddle East foreign policyto center around guaranteeingour access to oil from theregion. His answer to thegrowing instability of theregion is the opposite ofstrategic disengagement; hefavors a stepped up tniJitarypresence. He does not considerwhether or not this willmerely make matters moreunstable. As a supporter ofthe Welfare State, in the traditionof Roosevelt, Truman,Kennedy and Johnson,Podhoretz still does notrealize that the welfare stateis in practice achieving theopposite of its intended results;as a supporter of thewarfare state, he does notrealize that the same is truein foreign affairs. Thus, justas most liberals want tosolve problems caused bythe,~elfare state by throwingmore money at them,Podhoretz wants to solve theproblems caused by our interventionistforeign policyby throwing more weaponsat them.But the plain, unvarnishedtruth is that the Israelishave gotten themselvesinto a no-win situation,unless they can maketheir own accommodationswith their Arab neighbors,most of whom are not toofriendly, to put it mildly.When the Zionists set up aJewish state in what hadbeen Palestine in the late1940s, they were in effectsetting up a Jewish refugewhich was surrounded bytens of millions of hostileArabs. They have exacerbatedthe problem since, byseizing more and more landbelonging to Palestinians,and generally treating thePalestinians in a shabbymanner. Golda Meir actuallywent so far as to denythat there were any Palestinians:"There was no suchthing as Palestinians ... Itwas not as though there wasa Palestinian people in Palestineconsidering itself as aPalestinian people, and we"An American policy of openborders, free immigration, andstrategic disengagetllent frOtll theMiddle East would do far lnorefor this explosive situation than atarring of anti-interventionistswith the brush of anti-Setnitistn:'came and threw them outand took their country awayfrom them. They did notexist." This rather breathtakingclaim, ofcourse, is farfrom the truth - and topoint that out, let us note,does not constitute an endorsementofthe murderousPLO, or the dishonest claimthat Palestinians are, in general,treated any better byother Arab nations thanthey are by Israel.Over-burdened by thebone-crushing level of taxationand inflation-a recordone hundred and eleven percentfor 1979 - which financestheir military, surroundedby hostile neighbors,having produced hundredsof thousands of Palestinianrefugees, and findingthemselves in an unstabledemographic situation-thebirth rate of Palestinians inIsrael far exceeds that of theIsraelis, and the number ofJews leaving Israel now exceedsemigration to Israel,so that within a few yearsthe Israelis will be greatlyoutnumbered- the Israelisare in fact in a dangerouslyunstable situation. Noamount· of American militarypresence in the MiddleEast is going to do anythingbut harm in the long run. Itcan only lead us into a warwhich will most assuredlynot be good for the Jews. AnAmerican policy of openborders, free immigration,and strategic disengagementfrom the region would dofar more to help this explosivesituation than an unthinkingtarring of the opponentsof American interventionwith the brush of"Munich" or "anti-Semitism."But Podhoretz over theyears has not been contentmerely to label any movetoward noninterventionism"pro-communist" or "anti­Semitic." He has also managedto find a disparagingcultural root for this disengagementfrom irrationalforeign policy commitments.As far as he went in"The Abandonment of Israel,"in making the claimthat the survival of Israelshould be "the primary aimof [our] policies and theprimary wish of [our]hearts," a little more than ayear later he was to go evenfurther, following in the besttradition of the "Jewbaiting"of the 1920s. In anarticle in the October 1977issue of Harper's entitled"The Culture of Appeasement,"Podhoretz blamedWorld War II-and, by extension,any possible futurewar-on homosexuals. Inthe interwar period, in thewake of the slaughter ofWorld War I, British homosexuals,itseemed, wormedtheir way into the fabric ofBritish society, into educationand the arts, and therespread pacifism so. as toavoid in the future the killingof beautiful young lads.(Apparently the pointlessslaughter hadn't botheredtheir heterosexual parents.)This atittude of "appeasement,"nurtured by gaypeople, made it impossibleto stand up to Hitler, andWorld WarIIwas the result.All in all, "The Culture ofAppeasement" was the performanceof a desperateman. Not only are the historicalassumptions it madeabout the origins of WorldWar II shockingly naive andsimple-minded, resting almosttotally on the myths ofcourt historians, but there issomething outrageouslyitntnoral about a Jew -member of one of the mostscapegoated minorities inhistory - stooping to theshabby scapegoating ofanother, the homosexuals,thinking all the while thatthis is "good for the Jews."And the scapegoating didnot stop there: In BreakingRanks, Podhoretz touts hisown courage in questioningthe "moral and medical"aspects of homosexuality,claiming that those who donot produce children-lesbiansand gay men, onepresumes - are filled with"self-loathing," and are rebellingagainst their veryidentities:The same spiritual illiteracythat made it so easy for so manyto mistake the self-hatred intowhich their own children orthey themselves had fallen inthe sixties for political idealismnow makes it easy to misreadthe female self-hatred so evidentin elements ofthe women'smovement or the male selfhatredpervading the gay-rightscampaign.... Yet there can beno more radical refusal of selfacceptancethan the repudiationofone's own biological nature;and there can be no abdicationof responsibility morefundamental than the refusal ofa man to become, and to be, afather, or the refusal of awoman to become, and be, amother.That such a claim can bemade seriously is indeed asymbol of how low intellectualstandards have fallen.Would Podhoretz makethis claim about PopeJohn-Paul II, or the entireCatholic clergy, or of allthose others whose personalchoices and career goals donot allow for the responsibilityof parenthood? Thissort of "courage," whichPodhoretz showed again inJanuary 1979, by publishinga33MARCH 1980

in Commentary one of themost loathsome pieces ongay people yet to have seenprint- Samuel McCracken's"Are HomosexualsGay," which presented theseediest aspect of gay life asthe norm (tacitly contrastingthe worst in the gay worldwith the best among heterosex~alfamily life) - isindeed, in the age of AnitaBryant and John Briggs, theage of scapegoating, beatingsand murders of openhomosexuals, fully comparableto the "courage" ofthat tiny band who "brokeranks" in the 1920s to questionthe "moral and medical"aspects ofJewish life. Itis a disgusting spectacle, andis one of the clearest examplesin our time of the pointmade by Thomas Szasz thatthose victimized as scapegoats,once they havepower, often turn to victimizingothers.(There is a certain doublestandard and shabby use ofeuphemism here whichshould be pointed out aswell. Why is it "anti­American" for some Americans,acting in the glorioustraditions of this country, tooppose the actions of theAmerican state, as the NewLeft did during the VietnamWar? Why is it "self-hatred"when some Americans despiseothers, such men asJohnson, Nixon and Kissinger,who violate importanthuman standards in theirconduct? Why is it "selfloathing"for some individualmen and women tohave different views of theirown identity than those ofPodhoretz, and to acceptdifferent lifestyles as pathsto self-fulfillment and individualhappiness? Why is it a"rebellion against one's nature"to choose to do withone's life perfectly respectablethings that do not involveraising children? Andwhy, when women, blacksand gays and others whohave suffered oppression,rise up to demand to betreated with dignity and to34 have their individu,al rightsTHE LmERTARIAN REVIEWrespected, is this a "cultureof appeasement," fatheringa "failure of will,"ratherthan the social self-assertionof individuals which it soobviously is? And why is itnot therefore a positive,rather than a negative, socialphenomenon? Is ourcultural critic blind to theseobvious alternative explanations?)The problem with BreakingRanks is that NormanPodhoretz didn't. He beganas a supporter of establishment,'anti-Communistliberalismin the tradition ofRoosevelt and Truman, anadvocate of governmentregulation and redistributionofwealth, ofsocial welfareprograms and a globalpresence for America in theinternational arena, an ar-'dent Zionist and culturalconservative. He ends in thesame place, his flirtationwith radicalism having beenonly shallow and derivative.In short, he began and heends as an ordinary establishmentliberal.In a recent symposium inthe January 1980 issue ofCommentary, a group ofJewish liberals- past andpresent-gathered to considerthe relationship between"Liberalism and theJews." A great many oftheseJewish intellectuals findthemselves uncomfortablewith liberalism, but thecommon complaint is ­where else is there to go?The world of Jewish intellectualsin which NormanPodhoretz was raised was asocialist world, in which tobe Jewish was, virtually, tobe socialist. But Podhoretzhas for too long lived in theconfines of that narrowworld. There is another traditionwhich has in commonwith the liberalism of thepast the conviction that everyoneshould be evaluatedon his or her own merits asan individual, that the individualis responsible for hisor her own life, and shouldbe free to live it as he orshe chooses - with norestrictions save one, that noone initiate coercion againstothers. This sort of ideal ofindividual liberty was theideal of classical liberalism- the classical liberalismwhich helped the Jews of the19th century to be emancipatedfrom their ghettos.This tradition is alive today,in the modern libertarianmovement, and it has incommon with socialism thatit, too, was founded byJewish intellectuals. If onewere only to name a handfulof the intellectuals whostruggled to found liberterianism,one would surelyinclude Ludwig von Mises,Frank Chodorov, AynRand, Murray Rothbard,Milton Friedman, NathanielBranden, Thomas Szasz,and Robert Nozick. Therehave been others, too, includingsuch non-Jews asLeonard Read, Robert Le­Fevre, Rose Wilder Lane,and F.A. Hayek. But if anythingis clear, in readingNorman Podhoretz's BreakingRanks, it is the extent towhich most establishmentJewish liberals really neverhave broken ranks, the extentto which they have, fordecades) been bogged downin assumptions and premisesnever questioned orrevised.If liberalism is indeed at adead end, we can only pointJewish intellectuals, and indeed,everyone else interestedin a new political direction,toward the libertarianmovement. Foundedlargely by heroic Jewish intellectualsand by other individualistswho, facing themost obnoxious pressure,the most scandalous treatmentat the hands of the intellectualestablishment, facingsmears and vindictiveasasults and virtual intellectualostracism, had thecourage and the independenceand the vision tofound a new movement, libertarianismoffers by far thegreatest incentive-and re­\vard-to those interested intruly "breaking ranks."Roy A. Childs, Jr. is The Editorof LR.Clerks'confessionsJOAN KENNEDYTAYLORThe Brethren, by BobWoodward & Scott Armstrong,Simon and Schuster,467 pp., $13.95.THIS BOOK, WHICH HAS'variously been described as"irresponsible journalism atits best" (Robert Sherrill,New West), "a worm's eyeview of the Supreme Court"(George F. Will), and "themost comprehensive insidestory ever written of themost important court in theworld" (Jethro K. Lieberman,Business Week), maywell be the Star Wars of thebook business this year. Itwas obviously planned to bea best-seller, and it is. Onsale well in time for Christmaseven though it was notofficially published untilJanuary, it has been excerptedby Newsweek and TheWashington Post, distributedas a Book of theMonth, and reviewed byalmost everyone. The authorsreceived paid leavesfrom The Washington Post(where Woodward is ManagingEditor for metropolitannews and Armstrong areporter) and a $350,000advance from Simon andSchuster. They spent twoyears interviewing morethan 200 people, includingJustices, present and pastCourt employees, and "morethan 170 former lawclerks," all of whom spokeoff the record. They alsomanaged to obtain eight filedrawers full ofdocuments­"memos, notes, diaries andother documents from thechambers of eleven of thetwelve men who have servedon the Burger Court." (Theone exception is the Court'snewest appointee, John PaulStevens.) As the movie industryhas discovered, youhave to spend money tomake money, and it looks as

(left to right) Supreme CorirtJusticesJohn Paul Stevens,Harry A. Blackmun, William H. Rehnquist, Thurgood Marshall, WilliamJ. Brennan,Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Potter Stewart, and Byron W. White.if The Brethren will makeback much more than its initialinvestment.Like the vogue for sciencefiction, detective stories, andcrossword puzzles, the popularityof The Brethrenshows that the Americanreading public is basicallyintellectual. This book is ascandal story without sex,violence, or venality, a storyin which the titilating revelationsare of attempts tosupport a vision of the goodin a legally unsubstantiatedway, of Justices conspiringtogether, not to gain power,but to correct a colleague'sphraseology or citation ofprecedent, of legal slipshoddinessand wheeler-dealingin matters of principle, andof reluctance to retire despitestrokes and evenblindness.TheJustices seem to agreeon little besides the importanceofthe Court's continuingcredibility and of thecontinuity of its decisions.This consideration makesthem careful in picking whatcases. they will hear. Theymay refuse to hear a particularcase because they knowthey cannot agree on thereasons for an opinion, orthey may refuse to hear acase because they know thedecision will be narrow,with elder Justices in themajority, leading to the possibilitythat a new majoritymight overrule the decisionin the next term ofthe Courtshould one of them retire ordie~Woodward and Armstronglist seven steps thateach case the Court hearsgoes through, and the firstdecision-making step is thedecision to hear the case atall" called granting certiorari(or cert for short). At leastfour Justices must vote to dothis, at a conference fromwhich all spectators, includingtheir clerks, are excluded.The second step isfor the lawyers on both sidesofthe case to present writtenbriefs and oral arguments.Then the case is discussed atanother closed conferenceand a preliminary vote istaken. Fourth, at the caseconference, a Justice is assignedto write a majorityopinion. The assignment ismade by the seniorJustice inthe majority-if the ChiefJustice is in the majority, healways assigns the opinion,as he is considered senior toall the others. At the sametime that the majority opinionis being drafted, otherJustices may be writing dissentingor concurring o­pinions. All of these draftsare printed in the Court'sprivate print shop and circulatedamong the Justices-aprocess that can takemonths, during which time agreat deal of horsetradingmay occur. Sometimes a dissentis so persuasive that itpicks up enough support tobecome the majority opinion,and sometimes elementsofa dissent or a concurrenceare incorporated in a majorityopinion in order to winsupport. It is not unknownfor the writer assigned amajority opinion to totallyreverse his argument inorder to keep the opinion inhis hands. The sixth step isone in which previously uncommittedJustices formallyjoin one of. the circulatingopinions, and the last step isthe announcement and publicationof the final versionsof the opinions - the onlystep which is public.The fact that dissents andconcurrences are publishedas well as majority opinionsgives future Justices accessto constitutional argumentsthat may well prove to bepersuasive at a later time.Justice Hugo Black, for instance,who served on theCourt for 34 years until hisresignation in 1971, sawsome of his early dissentingopinions become the basisfor later majority opinions; 35MARCH 1980

36and Justice William O.Douglas took great care inlaying out all the elements ofeach case in his writtenopinions in qrder to reachthe general public, althoughhe rarely tried to persuadehis colleagues in conference.The Brethren takes thereader through the firstseven terms of the BurgerCourt (a term begins in Octoberand runs through thefollowing spring) but discussesthe deliberations surroundingonly a small numberof the more than 1,000opinions issued by the Courtduring that period. What aperiod it was! The Court issuedcontroversial opinionson abortion, the death penalty,antitrust actions, busing,women's rights underthe Fourteenth Amendment,obscenity, campaign financing,prior restraint of publications(the Pentagon Paperscase), and executiveprivilege (the Nixon Tapescase), among others.The case involving campaignfinancing, Buckley v.Valeo, which came beforethe Court in the 1975 term,is the case in which the LibertarianParty joined severalother representatives ofminority political viewpoints,including SenatorJames M. Buckley andformer presidential candidateEugene McCarthy, inchallenging the 1974 federalcampaign law, which providedfor the financing ofmajor presidential campaignsfrom tax money,mandated public reportingof expenditures and of contributors'names, limitedpolitical contributions to$1000, and also listed theamounts that candidatescould spend on their campaigns.At conference, Burger acceptedthe challengers) arguments thatthe law, masquerading as a reform,really struck at the heartof First Amendment freedoms.To limit contributions and expenditureswas to curtail politicalactivity and speech. To forcedisclosure of contributors)names was a violation of theirprivacy and their right ofpoliti-THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEWChiefJustice Warren E. Burger with former Supreme CourtJustice Tom Campbell Clark, who retiredfrom the Court in 1967 when his son, Ramsey Clar~, was appointed Attorney General.cal association. Public financingof presidential campaignswould open the door to governmentinterference in thepolitical process. Burger said hewould vote to strike the entirelaw.The other seven Justices[William O. Douglas had justretired and had not yet been replaced]seemed to favor majorportions of the law, thougheach had a reservation aboutone or more of the provisions.But the majority upheld most ofthe law including the section onpublic financing of presidentialcampaigns.A committee ofthree Justices(William J. Brennan,JL, Potter Stewart, andLewis F. Powell, JL) wasformed to collaborateIon anunattributed opinion inorder to get the case decidedbefore the first scheduleddisbursement of public moneyto candidates, which wasabout six weeks away. Itupheld every provision ofthe law except the limits onwhat candidates couldspend. But Douglas, whohad been a member of theCourt when the oral argumentshad been heard on thecase, decided that he too wasentitled to write an opinion.He came back to his oldchambers and circulated' athirteen-page memorandumwhich discussed both theFederal Election CampaignAct cases and his right tocontinue to participate inCourt decisions under thelaw that provided for retiredJustices, telling one of hisformer clerks that he intendedto publish the memoas a dissent. It was printedand circulated to the otherJustices, but never releasedto the public-the final decision,"with separate concurrencesand dissents byeveryone except Brennan,Stewart and Powell," wasreported as the work of aneight-man Court.In this memo, Douglasagreed with those who hadchallenged the law (andalso, for a rare time in hislife, with Burger) that p rd~viding public money topopular candidates helpedkeep the incumbent party inpower. He also was concernedabout the spendingand contribution limits. In apassage that could havebeen referring to the LibertarianParty itself, he wrote,History shows that financialpower and political powereventually merge and unite todo their work together.... Thefederal bureaucracy at the presenttime is effectively under thecontrol of the corporate andmoneyed interests ofthe nation.A new party formed to oust thehold that the corporate and financialinterests have is presentlyby the terms of this actunqualified to get a dime.It may interest libertarianreaders that in their accountof this challenge to the FederalElection Campaign Act,Woodward and Armstrongnowhere mention the LibertarianParty.The book is harshest in its

Bob Woodward, now managing editor of The· Washington Postand co-author with Scott Armstrong of The Brethren.picture ofChiefJustice WarrenBurger. The authors employa fictionalized form ofnarrative in which they attributethoughts and reactionsto all the Justices, includingBurger, whom theydefinitely state they never,interviewed. There is no wayforrhe reader to disentangleinformation they gained offthe record from the authors'personal evaluations - orfrom the evaluations of abiased employee, for thatmatter. Whatever the sources,Burger is presented as astupid, incompetent, uninformed,highhanded man,with an almost paranoidfear that the confidentialityof the Court will be violated(Not so paranoid, as theexistence of this book attests).Business Week summarizedthe impression thebookgives by illustrating itsreview with a cartoon thatshows all the Justices readingcopies of The Brethren,but Warren Burger is holdinghis copy upside down.Sometimes the anecdotesthat illustrate this view ofBurger seem to have a ring oftruth to them, as whenBurger is described as respondingto the news fromthe Court carpenter that thechair being preparedfor JusticeJohn Paul Stevens won'tbe ready for his swearing:-inceremony by saying, "I haveruled that it will be done ontime."On the other hand, manyof them are examples of thepresumption of the authorsin going inside their subjects'heads: Thurgood Marshall"had always seen Burgeras an inappropriate caretakerof a seat that had belongedto a man of the statufeof Earl Warren." Douglas"despised" Burger. In theeyes of Potter Stewart,Burger"was a product ofRichard Nixon's tastelessWhite House, distinguishedin appearance and bearing,but without substance or integrity.Burger was abrasiveto his colleagues, persistentin ignorance, and, worst·ofall, intellectually dishonest."And "It was not just theChief's intellectual inadequaciesor his inability towrite coherent opinions thatbothered Powell. There wassomething overbearing and'offensive about the Chief'sstyle."It is clear that the bookhas somewhat of a doublestandard in Chief Justices.The liberal Earl Warrenemerges as a man of "stature"who "led a judicialrevolution that reshapedmany social and political relationshipsin America."While Burger's "intellectualinadequacies" are reportedby the authors as botheringhis colleagues, Earl Warren'sdeficiencies are reportedin quite a differentway: "Warren was not anabstract thinker, nor was hea gifted scholar. He was·more interested in the basicfairness ofdecisions than thelegal rationales."And whereas Burger's"inability to write coherentopinions" is repeatedlystressed, it turns out that therevered Earl Warren hadavoided such criticism bynever writing the opinionsthat appeared under hisname-he delegated that jobto his law clerks. "Warrentold them how he wantedthe cases to come out. Butthe legal research and thedrafting of Court opinions-even those that had madeWarren and his Court famousand infamous-weretheir domain."Similarly, much is madeof Burger's attempts to controlthe assigning of opinionsby making sure that heis on the side of the majorityin the case conferences.This, it is indicated, is anunworthy way of influencingthe direction of theCourt. But under Earl Warren,"It had been Brennanwho had sat each Thursdaywith Warren preparing anorchestration for the Fridayconference." 'Well, guys, it's all takencare of,' Brennan often toldhis clerks after the sessionswith Warren. With votesfrom Fortas, Marshall, andusually Douglas, Brennanrarely failed to put togethera majority." The view is attributedto Justice John M.Harlan that, as a result ofthese strategy sessions, therewas a sense "at times underWarren, that the debate wasa sham."One of the most interestingand little-known aspectsof the functioning of theCourt which is revealed bythis book is the role of theJustices' clerks. It is rare fora Justice to delegate as muchto his clerks as Warren reportedlydid, but it appearsto be routine for clerks towrite the first drafts of theopinions which the Justicescirculate among themselves."We may have to dissent,"Stewart tells his clerk."Your thing may be publishedyet" Harlan's clerksnormally wrote his firstdrafts, although he wasknown in his day as "theCourt's most prolific writer."Byron W. White raceshis clerks to see if he or theycomplete a first draft. Oneof Burger's clerks in the1972 term is described as "atalented translator of theChief's visceral reactionsinto reasoned legal positions"(Note the differencein tone between this descriptionand the description ofWarren and his clerks citedearlier). Only Douglas appearsto have written everythinghimself, and even toldEric Severeid in an interviewthat the Court doesn't needlaw clerks- he would bewilling to do all the lookingup of precedents himself, astatement much doubted bythe tired clerks workinglate in his office. Once, whena clerk reorganized one ofhis drafted opinions, Douglascalled him in and said, "Ican see you've done a lot ofwork, but you are off basehere. If and when you getappointed to the SupremeCourt you can write opin-MARCH 198037

38ions as you choose."The statement is· not assarcastic as it might appear~n the present Court, threemembers, Byron White, WilliamRehnquist, and JohnPaul Stevens, all onceheld Supreme Court clerkships.The Court's clerks arerecent law school graduateswho·graduated near thetopof their class. They are chosento be, for a year, "confidentialassistants, ghost writers,extra sons and intimates."More recently,there have been some extradaughters, too, as Justiceshave been willing to pick anoccasional woman for thejob. Often clerks are chosenby a clerk selection committee,although some Justices,like Lewis Powell, prefer tointerview "the two dozentop applicants" themselves.Once hired, the clerks oper""ate as an informal networkthat transmits informationfrom chamber to chamber.They eat together in a clerks'dining room, discuss andargue current cases, get informationfrom each otherabout how willing their bossesmight be to modify anopinion- even sometimesgive each other helpful suggestedwordings for opinionsthat are being drafted.All of this helps to expeditethe business of the Court.According to Woodwardand Armstrong, the clerksare generally more liberalthan the Justices whom theyserve. During the VietnamWar, for instance, most ofthe clerks,. but not the Justices,were sympathetic tothe anti-war movement.Often Justices seek out liberalclerks. Justice Powell,for instance, chooses liberalclerks for their ability tochallenge him, telling them"that the conservative sideof the issues came to himnaturally.'" And JusticeRehnquist, who once wrotea critical article about theliberalism ofSupreme Courtclerks and was at first concernedthat he would be tooinfluenced by them, wroteall his first drafts himselfwhen he came to the Court.Halfway through his firstfull term, he realized that"the legal and moral interchangesthat liberal clerksthrived on were good for theJustices and for the Court.Rehnquist grew to trust hisclerks; they would not be sofoolish as to try puttingsomething over on him."Like other Justices, he letthem draft his opinions: "Itsaved him time, and helpedfocus.his own thinking."Most of the reviews ofThe Brethren have registeredsome degree of surprisethat Supreme CourtJusti

Frances FitzGerald, author ofAmerica Revised-"a succession ofsallies into the chaotic jungle which is the American common school andtextbook scene"-and the best-seller, The Fire in the. Lake.riography such as that ofMichael Kraus, and shemight have obtained someinsights into the whole businessof writing history froma woman with vast talents inthat industry, Cicely VeronicaWedgwood, in herTruth and Opinion. There isnowhere nearly enough attentiondevoted to collegelevelhistory books and theirtrickle-down impacton thevolumes intended foryounger readers, or on therelated cases in which schooland college histories havethe same authors. (These lattercan provide enchantinghis"toriographical adventures,especially for those interestedin hypocrisy and patronization.The·multipleauthordevelopment is aploy to maximize adoptions,not to produce more preciseand "objective~' textbooks.)FitzGerald has, in fact,hardly stumbled across thematerial available on the lasttwo decades, the area of herprimary interest and concentration;one might sayshe has only attempted tobring together the minutesof the last meeting. The materialavailable on the continuousrewriting of historysince antiquity is massive.Such rewritingis expectablewhen new facts and sourcesare uncovered, resulting inexpanded and richer accountsof the past. But thekind FitzGerald is most concernedwithis revision incorporatingnew interpretationsof earlier material. Ithas been understood for avery long time that every livinggeneration feels a stronginclination to restructure thepast for its own comfort, entertainmentand sentimentsof security. As the famedCarl Becker put it in aMarch, 1944 essay in theYale Review, "each succeedinggeneration necessarilyregards the past from thepoint of view of its ownpeculiar preoccupations andproblems." Since these differfrom those of the peoplewho preceded them, the pastis very likely to take on constantlydifferent significances.But when the contemporarygeneration beginsto tamper with or "fiddle"with the past, as A.].P.Taylor would put it, droppinginconvenient facts andblurring over jagged and uncomfortableaspects, we arriveat one of the confrontationpoints of history-making-and-writing.Though the jacket flapstell us that FitzGerald haswritten this work "from nopolitical point of view," itssolidly establishment-liberalflavor is transparently obviousthroughout. She includessufficient disclaimersof the nuttier liberal extravagancesto give her bookat least an appearance ofimpartiality-not that someof the "right wing" hysteriais any more respectableandshe makes the point thatboth have done measurableharm to history and havelent much assistance to makingthe subject dull, boringand seemingly of no consequenceto the young, a terribleresult in the main. Butone thing she fails to getacross at all is that the fabricationof school textbooksin history for her entireperiod of major concern(and well before it, for thatmatter) has been a nearly 99percent liberal monopoly, ifnot racket. It is the liberals'collective excesses, lunacies,idiocies and profound ignorancewhich dominate thecontent of these textbookswhich FitzGerald criticizes.America Revised 'thuscould have been madestronger with atleast a briefdiscourse on the evolutionof the modern nationalstate, and the school historyclass and textbook as ameans of inculcating nationalisticsentiments. Afterall, we are living in a periodwhich roughly correspondsto the bicentennial of thisnational state. It was duringthe period between theAmerican and French Revolutionswhen we see the originsof things like nationalflags, national anthems,conscription, "citizenship,"and compulsory schoolingand voting. The recent glutof nationalistic emotion inthis country, spurred by theevents in Iran, and its exploitationin the carefully orchestratedexacerbation ofAmerican indignation.bytelevision, suggest thatthough history via schooltextbooks is a caricature;still, unmistakably, primitiveas it is, exposure to itcan instill "enough residualspinal cord reaction potentialto produce these reactionswhich must beheartwarming to politiciansresponsible for contemporarypolicy. The system isstill a resounding success, isit not? It is, in fact, littlechanged from what has: 39MARCH 1980

40gone on for generations, asthe following news itemfrorn over 60 years ago attests:"German text booksand everything that savorsof Fritz will be barred fromthe Colorado Springs HighSchool and all the publicSCh091s during the ,comingyear. The students have refusedto have anythingfurther to do with the Germansor anything that pertainsto them." (ColoradoSprings Evening Telegraph,August 7, 1918, p. 10.)It has seemed to me for along time that there are severalreasons for the persistenceof school historytextbooks, among them notonly the drive among the eldersofschoolchildren toseeto it that a particular versionofthe past is fed to them, butalso on the part of the childrenthe desire to be toldpretty stori~s which containdirectives for their presentor future behavior. It haslong been observed that onlya handful at any time are interestedin the truth aboutthe past, but a great manywant ideas and recommendationsfor how theyshould act. C.V. Wedgwoodtalks about the "old fashionedwriter for the young,forever pointing out the lessonas well as telling thestory." With all the frenziedand continuous experimentationand faddish castingabout with wondrousgimmicks a large part ofthisis really still with us. Fitz- 'Gerald's cultivated horrorstory about the continuingdegeneration of Americanhistory textbooks I am surecould be outmatched bywhat the young are beingexposed to with respect toworld history. But it all mayalso be seen as a reflectionand commentary on certaininternal American. socialconditions.rThere is, first, the immensemultitude ofthe clinicallyor functionally illiterate,the ones who remain inthat condition no matterhow many diplomas theycollect along the way. See-THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW"The aitn ofthe indoctrinationis that those exposed to it derivethe proper attitudes and theproper conditioned" reflexes. Thusthe closing chapters ofschoolhistories are cratntned with nonhistoricaltnanipulative tripe."ond, there are the many boilingethnic and racial minorities,recognized inthese daysas quite "unmeltable"in the"melting pot" which Americandemocracy and itsschool system were meant toachieve three generationsago. FitzGerald finds theschool histories mindless,and subscribes to the Hofstadterthesis about a growinganti-intellectualism (aswell as non-intellectualism)which is allegedly responsible.Yet one is led to wonderwhat percentage of thepresent-day multitudescould handle abstractionseven if they were exposed tothem, since so many cannotread. A recentFord Foundationstudy indicates thatnearly 64-million Americansare illiterate and thatone third of them are socrippled in this respect thatthey simply cannot cope inthis social system. PhilDonahue on a recent TVtalk show had as guests twoyoung people of about 15who appeared to be reasonablybright; neither of themknew the sum of 6 x 7, whothe Vice President was, orhow many states were in theUSA. Can young people inthis condition comprehend amore intellectual school historybook?This leads directly to theother issue mentionedabove, the issue of minorities.FitzGerald dwells forsome time on the tailoring ofrecent editions of schoolhistories to the politicalpressures being applied byminorities. Textbook publishers,like the SupremeCourt, follow election returns.This results in trendyexperimentation with textbookcontents, experimentsin which people disappear,to be replaced by "problems."This depersonalizationof history then becomesa tool toward the resolutionof conflict, and thus bringsabout the familiar textbookphenomenon, of causelesswars and other ghostlikeunmotivated confrontations.A second consequence, ofthis "problem" approach isconcentration on non-essentials.For example, in onesuch text, one gets a pictureof Cesar Chavez and somemigratory field workers in asection on agriculture, butabsolutely nothing aboutLuther Burbank, whose horticulturalexperiments producednearly a thousandnew plants or varieties ofplants, resulted in the productionof many billions ofdollars of added world agriculturaloutput, andpresumably contributed tothe improved nutrition ofmillions. Is the contributionof Cesar Chavez even remotelycomparable?Insofar as FitzGerald describesthe disorder thus' enteredinto school historybooks by minority grouppressures, it seems to causeher no discomfort, and shefails entirely to identify thereason for it. The minoritypolitical game of one-upmanshipin the HistoricalAtrocities, Mistreatment &Abuse department has muchto do with it. Once a grouphas won a high rating intheresentment~of-past-grievancesindex, then presentadvantages can be more resolutelypursued, one of thefruits of which is distortionof history by' the inclusionof exaggerations in theachievement and significancesectors. But sometimes,the textbook makersdo not include genuine at-,tainments in lieu of the pursuitof tried and true traditionalploys; they prefer,for instance, to run stillanother bleak photographof a depressed black familyleaning on the walls of,awretched tenant farm shack,rather than run a picture ofone of the 300 black millionairesPaul Harvey hastold us are now a partof theAmerican income picture.Another serious difficultyarises when these tumultuous.minority additions'crowd forward to be includedin the narrative. Thecollators of textbooks thenhave to face the problem ofgetting various irregularitiesreconciled, much as Rubenshadto do withhis portraitofthe Gerbier family after severalmore children wereborn following the paintingof the original. When textbookcollators try to reconcileirregularities' they typicallyfail to do it properly,and their product reflects it,becoming more and more anindigestible and jagged collage,beginning nowhere inparticular (some of FitzGertextbooks'attempts to incorporateminority backgroundsare utterly hilarious),ending nowhere inparticular, and going nowherein between.Furthermore, it is obviousthat only certain minoritiescome out well in this melange.Most'ofthe bewilderingspectrum of ethnic andracial entities which actuallymakes up the Americanpopulace remains unrecognized.The journalist JosephSobran has commentedamusingly on this phenomenon,entering a mock-complaintabout the slighting of

the minority from which hestems, the Ruthenians.FitzGerald's repeated citationsof the imbecilities oflocal political interference orattempts at same, and the relatedbubble-headed capersof school authorities andother elected, non-electedand appointed boobs calls tomind the conviction ofMark Twain that the firstdivine assay at creation producedidiots, and the second,school boards. And tothe continuous adulterationof school histories by authorsand publishers whoare frightened by aggressiveminorities and pressuregroups (and the thought ofdiminished sales) into infiltratingsuccessive editionswith chapters of trivial fillermasquerading as substanceand coming out with increasinglyunreadable, dreary,boresome, bound wastepaper- well, it is perhapsinstructive to recall the observationof a quarter of acentury ago by William H.Whyte, Jr., in The OrganizationMan: "By default, theanti-intellectual sector ofeducation has been allowedto usurp the word 'democratic'to justify the denaturingof the curriculum,and while liberal arts peoplemay win arguments on thisscore, the others won thewar long ago. Once the uneducatedcould have thehumility of ignorance. Nowthey are given degrees andput in charge, and this delusionoflearning will produceconsequences more criticalthan the absence of it."What FitzGerald is actuallydocumenting in herbook is the collection of 25to 50 years ofnegative intereston this educational counterfeit.The debacle of thepublic schools has been takingshape for some time,though its accelerated pacein recent years has misledsome into thinking that ithas come about suddenly.But, as Whyte saw, the assumptionofthe helm by theignorant - from the Ivyschools and the crossroadsleaky-roof hayloft seminariesalike - well before theimmense flood of the marginally-educablehit theschools in the late'5Os, wasthe central factor. The ensuinghistory schoolbooks~half pictures, larger type,briefer sentences, simplerwords (predominantly fromthe most common 900 usedin the English language),and even simpler ideas-reflectedthis new shallowpatededucational "leadership."The schools are mirrors,not beacons.The final quarter ofAmerica Revised is hardlyconcerned with historybooks at all, but with a surveyand analysis of thechurning of educationaltheory among the peopleand organizations trying toestablish what the schoolsshould have been doing overthe last 90 years. Included isa treatment of the branchesofignorance camouflaged as"reform" of both texts andclassroom procedures, andthe pernicious influence ofsomething called "social science"upon history. ("Thoushalt not commit a socialscience," W.H. Auden saidsomewhere.) FitzGeraldtreats this welter of trendyexperimentation engaginglyand intelligently. And someof the people covered remindedme faintly of thosewhom I encountered in a jobas an attendant in a mentalhospital during 1936-37.Perhaps we might be betteroff without school historybooks. But there is littlelikelihood that the centralizingforces in the modernstate would be content topermit "free enterprise" inthe study and learning ofhistory-even though that iswhat is really going on,years after school has ended,for many. The state's common-schoolsausage-stuffergenerally exposes the youngto at least some sentimentsrelating to whathappened inthe past, and therefore to ahazy vagueness as to whatAmerica "has been allabout," as the cliche goes.And the political establishmentat any given momentneeds emotionally-basedapproval in order to function.That few if any everemerge from this indoctrinationwith even a rudimentaryunderstanding of historyor even with whatHenry James called "a senseof the past" is not consideredof any real import; thefundamental goal of the indoctrinationis that thoseexposed to it derive thep roper attitudtj and theproper conditioned reflexes.Thus the closing chapters ofthe school histories arecrammed with non-historicalmanipulative tripe. Studentsare assured of havingthe desired views, thoughthey may never have understoodchronology and mayhave not even the faintestidea ofwhathas taken place,even on a century-tocenturybasis. I often findpeople who haven't thedimmest notion as towhether Lincoln precededWashington or vice versa,and friends who are still inthe eraser pits tell me thateven recent events such asWorId War II are as remoteto most college youth asAgincourt.In view of these and fartoo many other issues to listin any space short of an encyclopedia,it -is hard towork up a sense of agitationover what Frances FitzGeraldtells us in America Revised.If you mistake a zincrainspout for a hollow tree,and you are a woodpecker,you have a fundamentallyflawed conception of thetotal situation. The samething can be said for thosewho think that school historybooks are primarily intendedto assist the young inappreciating and understandinghistory.James J. Martin is the author ofAmerican Liberalism andWorld Politics, RevisionistViewpoints, and various otherbooks. He has taught history atthe University ofMichigan, andis a frequent contributor toLR.Fear andloathingin retrospectJACK SHAFERThe Great Shark Hunt, byHunter S. Thompson, SummitBooks, Simon andSchuster, 602 pp., $14.95.HUNTER S. THOMPSONgave birth to gonzo journalismin 1970, but thefather was a deadline (thegreatest muse). Scanlan'sMonthly had dispatchedThompson and British illustratorRalph Steadman tocover the Kentucky Derby.In prototypical gonzo fashionthe race itself only meriteda short one-paragraphdescription, which it eventuallygot. The real story layelsewhere - over 50,000ravers lined the infield ofthetrack, enjoying acute alcoholtoxicity - white-linensuited members of the HonorableOrder of KentuckyColonels busied themselvesby barfing into urinals­Steadman drew hideousportraits of bystanders andthen made gifts of them tothe subjects, a practiceThompson was quick to discourage.beforesomebodytook the gift as a "brutal, biliousinsult" and horsewhippedSteadman - andThompson pumped maceinto the governor's box.What a story!But Thompson couldn'twrite. The entire issue ofScanlan's was set in type andready to roll, waiting forThompson's story, the coverstory. As Thompson laterrecounted, "...I was havingat the time what felt to melike a terminal writer'sblock, whatever the hell thatmeans." He had himselflocked up in a sensory deprivationchamber (a NewYork hotel suite), but nothingmore came of his isolationthan a couple of pages."They were sending copyboys and copy girls andpeople down every hour to41MARCH 1980

42see what I haddone, and thepressure began to silentlybuild like a dog whistle kindof scream ... You couldn'thear it butit was everywhere... Finally I just began to tearthe pages out of my notebookssince I write constantlyin the notebooks anddraw things, and they werelegible. But they were hardto fit in the telecopier. Webegan to send just tornpages."Thompson sat back andwaited for his editor's wrathto upchuck the whole messright back out of the telecopier.No such wrath came.Thompson ventured a cau-. tious call to his editor. "Ohyeah. It's wonderful stuff ...wonderful," the editor said.He was keen for more ofthesame. Like any good writerThompson took his editor'sadvice and fed the rest of hisnotebook to the insatiabletelecopier. Editor's ink andSteadman's own pen andink resulted in "The KentuckyDerby is Decadentand Depraved," a gonzotribute to our "wholedoomed atavistic c;ulture."Gonzo. It ain't in Webster's.The gonzo method ofparanoia, exaggeration,black humor, fantasy,vengeance, violence, largeborerevolvers, squealingtires, and a devotion totwisting reality to suit hispurposes, be it with an IBMSelectric or ingested chemicals,has served Thompsonwell. Out of gonzo Thompsonhas fashioned a literarystyle which rings as unique anote as Dashiell Hammett'shardboiled style or HermanMelville's metaphysicalstyle. As with Hammett andMelville, Thompson's successhas spawned imitators,but none of them write withthe sheer imagination ofthe originator. Thompsonwrites like a runawaylawnmower. Gas him up onWild Turkey, mescaline,­and speed. Nudge him in agenera} editorial direction.Like a renegade Toro he willdown hedges, prematurelyharvest the garden, and de-vour the neighbor's poodle,slapping guts and bonesplinters into the air.Sports Illustrated oncegave such an editorialnudge, requesting a 250­word caption for a LasVegas motorcycle race. InLos Angeles Thompson andhis "300-pound Samoan attorney"ladened a ChevyImpala convertible withether, Budweiser, LSD, heroin,weed, cocaine, andadrenochrome extract fromlive human adrenal glands,and aimed it at Las Vegas("what Berlin would havelooked like if the Nazis hadwon"). The caption nevergot written -Thompsonand his attorney were toobusy fending off attacks bywinged lizards in the Mohavedesert, battling druginducedpsychosis, gladhandingnarcotics officers atthe national narcs convention,and evading bills andarrest. That adventure,"Fear and Loathing in LasVegas," came out of thegonzo funnel as a dementedHuck and Tom storydark,dangerous, sardonic.The American PoliticalExperience came next, withThompson warming up forthe big leagues by runningfor Sheriff in Aspen, Colorado,on the Freak Powerticket whose platform promisedto sod all the streets,change the name ofthe townto "Fat City" (to "preventgreedheads, land-rapers andother human jackals fromcapitalizing on the name'Aspen' "), erect a bastinadoplatform and a set of stocksto punish dishonest dopedealers, and use wild wolverinesto help keep thepeace. Landslide defeatwhetted Thompson's appetitefor the Big Cakewalk,the 1972 presidential campaign.He tore through thecampaign like a golf cart racingthrough hell, divorcinghimself from the Pack Journalists,and throwing-inwith the "Acid, Amnesty,and Abortion" McGoverncampaign. His biweekly reportsfor Rolling Stone re-Hunter S. Thompsonspected none of the off-therecordcourtesies professionaljournalists mustmaintain to keep theirsources flowing. Thompsonpurposely burned bridgesbehind him - he only intendedto take this ride once.In the course of the campaignThompson renderedsuch valuable public servicesas describing Hubert H.Humphrey as "a gutless oldward-healer who should bepacked into a bottle and sentout with the Japanese Current."He also lent his pressticket to a spasmodic drunkwho boarded the MuskieFlorida campaign train andunhinged Big Ed. Untaintedby modesty, Thompsonbragged of being the first topublicly compare RichardNixon to Adolf Hitler. Andthe limits of libel law weretested as Thompson allegedthat he and John Chancellordropped acid together andthat Walter Cronkite dealtin the white slavery market.Between gonzo outburstslike this Thompson gotcloser to the mechanics ofthe nut-busting, 18-monthlong, cross-continent, idiot'smarathon of presidentialcampaigning than anyone,dispensing enough hard reportageto earn the praise,envy, and hatred of most ofthe press corps. The campaignwas a big stakes gamefor Thompson as he won allbut two of the fifty bets' hemade between February andNovember, betting againstMcGovern in New Hampshireand for him on N 0­vember 7. Fear and LoathingOn the Campaign Trail'72 made it to hardcover,and with its publicationThompson became the mescalineTeddy White, crankingout history which wasnot always accurate but wasalways true.The Watergate Summerblessed Thompson with thematerial to finish the CampaignTrail '72 story. Gonzoain't gonzo without revenge,and Richard Nixon ("aCheapjack Punk," "a congel1italthug," "a fixer,""a Lust-Maddened Werewolf")gave Thompson thatTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

opportunity. He had beenkicking Nixon long beforehe was down ("a walkingembarrassment to thehuman race"), and now thatDick was down, "lashingaround in bad trouble,"Thompson took stilettobootshots at the "frightened,unprincipled littleshyster." The Doctor ofGonzo wrote,Six months ago Richard Nixonwas Zeus himself, calling firebombsand shitrains down onfriend and foe alike-the mostpowerful man in the world, fora while- but all that is gonenow and nothing he can do willever bring a hint of it back.Richard Nixon's seventh crisiswill be his last. He will go downwith Harding and Grant as oneof America's classically rottenpresidents.Which is exactly what hedeserves-"Fear and Loathing at theWatergate: Mr. Nixon HasCashed His Check." Morelike bounced his last check,but the distinction i~ a fineone. Ironically, the declineofRichard Nixon was paralleledby the decline ofHunter S. Thompson. Aftersingle-handedly hounding aPresident out of the WhiteHouse, what subject couldpossibly be worth Thompson'stalents? A goddamnfishing contest in Mexico("The Great Shark Hunt")?An obituary for his 300­pound Samoan attorney("The Banshee Screams forBuffalo Meat")? The endorsementof a grinningairheadTrilateral Commissiondelivery-boy for thepresidency ("Jimmy Carterand the Great Leap ofFaith")? Noooooooooo!Garry Trudeau got the wiseidea first, transformingHunter S. Thompson intothe fictitious Uncle Dukeand sending him off toAmerican Samoa as Governor,China as Ambassador,and Iran as bag-man.Thompson gotthe wise ideasecond. Weary or perhapsbored with living fantasies,he has turned Hollywoodscreenwriter and a moviestarring Bill Murray as aThompsonesque journalistis due for 1980 release.Thompson is cashing thechecks now, and they aresigned by Universal Pictures.Pay me to fantasize, Thompsonmust be thinking, and letsome other pitiful geek livethe twisted things. Here'shoping the checks Thompsonis cashing don'tbounceon his readers.So Simon and Schusterhas published the Hunter S.Thompson Omnibus, HisGreatest Hits, whatever youwant to call it. They call itThe Great Shark Hunt andhave seen fit to putit in bindingthat would shame eventhe Book-of-the-MonthClub. There is just oneRalph Steadman drawingand that's on the dustjacket.Not a single Steadmandrawing from the originalmagazine publications is included-whichis like publishingthe definitive Alice inWonderland without theJohn Tennie! drawings.But what the hell. There isplenty of Thompson's pregonzoapprentice work fromhis National Observer days,stuff that proves that he canwrite traditional journalismwith either end of the pyramidturned up. Thompson'sart has always been guidedby the principle that thestory of getting the story isalways more important thanthe story itself. Not one ofthe 50-odd entries betraysthat principle.For Thompson enthusiastsThe Great Shark Huntwill be a true feeding frenzy.But let the non-initiated beforewarned: Hunter S.Thompson considers JosephConrad as one of literaryhistory's great humorists. Itis the darkness of the soul,the evil joy of the Hell'sAngels, the mad dog ethicsof politics and pro football,and consciousness stretchedlike taffy by drugs, pain,and death that Thompsoncovers. It's a tough beat.Jack Shafer writes frequentlyfor LR.Militarist'sdaydreaOlKARL E. PETERJOHNThe Third World War, byGeneral Sir John Hackett,Air ChiefMarshall, Sir JohnBarraclough, Sir BernardBurrow, Brigadier KennethHunt, Vice Admiral Sir IanMcGeoch, Norman Macrae,and Major GeneralJohn Stawson. Macmillan,368 pp., $12.95.THE FUTURE IS ABOUTas clear as fog rolling in fromthe ocean. Human fascinationwith what will he, orwhat may be, has opened upwhole new vistas in literature;and science fiction,an often denigrated literaryform, has recently becomealmost acceptable amonghighbrow critics. Creatingan entirely new society andestablishing unique valuesfor it, while weaving a plotinto this mosaic has becomean appreciated art, aftery.ears ofneglect and opprobrIum.An abbreviated version ofthis kind of futurologicalspeculation has now developed.Instead of creating anentirely new society, the authorbegins with a premiseof "what if?" Len Deightondid this with his novel,SS-GB, based upon a successfulGerman invasion ofEngland during World WarII. Instead of looking at thepast and postulating from it,General Sir John Hackettand his military co-authorsfrom Great Britain have exploredthe not too distant future,close enough so that itsalready bestselling messagewill be bandied about as theSALT treaty takes over centerstage in the public'sawareness.The Third World War isnot a novel in the conventionalsense (after all,how many novels have anindex?). Rather, it is apolemical argument for highdefense spending and internationalcontainment by theUS. Accordingly, I wouldlike to leave literary considerationsaside for the momentto examine the worldscenario which is presented.The world is not a pleasantplace when the bookopens in 1984. And then itgets worse. The Russians areback in the catbird's seat inEgypt. The leader of thecommunist states in theCaribbean is Jamaica which,with Cuba, is fighting for theliberation of South Africa(Rhodesia is now ruled bya black despot). Conflictsbetween Arabs are increascreasinglypossible as arethreats to Middle Easternoil. India, Pakistan, andBangladesh may go at oneanother at any time. TheRussian satellites of easternEurope are restless, particularlythe Poles.It is an interesting scene,andin many ways not unlikemany of the events whichhave occurred in the past.The only area where Hackettand company go astrayis in assuming that the ShahofIran would still be in controlin the '80s. The startingpoint where borders arecrossed occurs, just as it didin World War I, in the Balkans.Yugoslavia is invadedby the Russians. AlthoughTito is never mentioned, andhas presumably passed fromthe scene, this is straight outofa post-Tito scenario manyconservatives have mentioned.The invasion becomesthe first action ofWorld War III. Americansare brought into the fightingthere. Russia issues an ultimatumto West Germanyand backs it up with thepromise that Warsaw Pactforces will enter the countryto prevent the Germansfrom gaining nuclear weapons.Italy too is told that itwill be neutralized. TheRussians promise not to usenuclear weapons in theirdrive into western Europe,so the main battle groundbecomes West Germany.After fixing the scene forthis confrontation, the au- 43MARCH 1980

44thors have a serious problem.Can they let the Sovietsand their allies walk all overNATO? Can they showNATO easily repulsing theSoviets? Would a stalematebe acceptable to the readers?The answer to all three questionsis no. It puts the authorsin a curious position,since as advocates of higherdefense spending, more soldiers,the draft, and newweapon systems, they haveto face the dilemma of aplausible plot. First, ifNATO is walked over by theWarsaw Pact, it not only reflectson the military andtheir equipment, but goesagainst their pride. But evenifthe authors were willing tolet this happen it puts themin the position of having theWest use nuclear weaponsfirst, which is unacceptable.If NATO wins easily, thequestion could easily become,why do we need todevote all these resources fordefense? Why would theRussians be foolish enoughto attack when they arefaced with unrest in thesatellite states? Why indeed?The stalemate option on aconventional battlefieldleads to escalation, and ultimatelyto nuclear exchanges.Actually nuclearexchanges would be led toalmost inevitably if any ofthese scenarios were closelyexamined.So what can the authorsdo? Hackett et aL need tocombine enough action,suspense, and success for thegood guys with the basicpurpose of the book, whichis to increase military spending.So they add a little Warsawwalkover, with an eventualstalemate, a couple ofnuclear detonations (but notenough to blow up theworld) and an internal Russiancoup d'etat. The goodguys win, but only aftermuch struggle, and the vitalassistance of new weaponssystems developed in the late1970s and beefed up NATOmanpower.Obviously the premise theauthors start from is flawed.But, part of the scenarioleading up to the Soviet invasionis more plausible: "Inthe USSR the harvest wasexpected to be even moredisastrous than those of theprevious two years and criticalfoodstuffs were knownto be scarce. The measureswhich, in the recent past,had produced waves of unrestin Poland and Romaniaand even in parts of theSoviet Union itself-in theUkraine, for example, and inGeorgia...,...-were likely to berepeated." Unrest is widespreadamong the Asian republicsof the Soviet Uniontoo. This is hardly the primetime to strike, but under theplot the authors have developedthe Soviets do so.No one doubts that theSoviets try to take advantageof any situation which occursaround the world; theyhave been unceremoniouslybooted out of many countries.Where they remainthey are often hated, such asin most of eastern Europe,and the countries beingaided, like Cuba, are a constantdrain on the USSR'soverextended economy. Inother words, the authorsmix up their premises toCOMINGSOON IN LRBill Birminghamon the Ruins ofSaltJoel Spring Interviewreach a satisfactory conclusion.This is not surprising;politicians do it all the time.If they did not provide sufficientreason for this shakeup in the Soviet power structurethey would have noway of resolving the scenariowithout a massive nuclearexchange, where an overwhelmingpercentage ofthese "limited war" scenariosend.As literature the book isalso flawed. There reallyaren't any memorable characters.One is given glimpsesof particular individuals, agood-guy German tankcommander, an Americanmerchant marine sailor, anAfrikander, all briefly takecenter stage, and in a page ortwo are gone. The Presidentof the U.S. is just a name.The faceless troglodyteswho rule the Kremlin remainobscure even as theyare deposed. Reader interestis sought by rushing fromparticular event to eventusing the reader's generaldisposition to root for hisfellow countryman and theirallies the way you root forU.S. Olympic athletes. Theindividuals, the destruction,the chaos of war becomeobscured by this intenselyimpersonal approach.However, these flaws areirrelevant to the book's success,which will be measuredin its ability to mobilizemore tax dollars for MXmissiles, XM-l tanks, additionalanti-tank weapons,more divisions, more ships,more anti-submarine planes,etc. etc. And judging fromthe rave reviews from Englandcontained on thebook's jacket, the authorswill be successful. What willbe completely overlooked isthe likelihood that any conflictsuch as the authors havedesigned will ultimately endin a massive nuclear exchange.the result of suchan exchange is not givenin this book. Or even considered.Karl E. Peterjohn is a free-lancewriter and a former newspaperman.AdolescentdystopiaMICHAELGROSSBERGAlongside Night, by]. NeilSchulman, Crown, 181 pp.,$8.95.HERE IS A BOOK THATseems to have everything, ascience fiction disaster novelwith an important, original,and timely subject: the de-,struction of America byrunaway inflation. It isacclaimed by leading authors,from Poul Andersonto Anthony Burgess. Moreover,it has an explicitly libertariantheme: the inevitablydetrimental effects ofstatism. Unhappily, whatAlongside Night, by J. NeilSchulman, does not have iscredible characters or a convincingplot. It may be goodpropaganda, but it is badmelodrama.Science fiction, at its best,is a literature of idec;ls. Alltoo often, it consists almostexclusively of ideas: as if amad scientist designed thehuman body, giving it abrain (theme), but no skeleton(plot) or heart (flesh andblood characters). Like toomuch bad science fiction,Alongside Night has imaginativeideas, inadequatelyfleshed out.Schulman envisions a futureNew York in which inflation,wage-price controls,and the collapse of governmentservices have led to thedevelopment of a burgeoningcountereconomy. It is a1999 filled with Blues,brownies, vendies, tziganes,Gloamingers, Tasers, ProjectHarriman, and the GenghisKhan-that is, respectively,(1) hastily engravedNew Dollars resembling,and worth about as muchas, Monopoly money; (2)Harry Browne-outs whohead for the hills with theirrifles and survival foods; (3)federal tokens replacingdimes and quarters thatTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

"To applaud a work offictiononly for its libertarian values is tobetray those values by swellingthe sphere ofpolitics until itengulfs the sphere ofesthetics."have been "greshamed" outof exchange; (4) gypsy cabdrivers; (5) religious fanaticswho believe that God is ahuman, on earth "at thisvery moment," but unfortunatelysuffering from amnesia;(6) nonlethal, purelydefensive, electrical-dartparalyzers; (7) a black marketlunar mining venture a laHeinlein; and (8) the latestrage in New Barbarian fashion:a coat of metallic-silverleather, trimmed with longblack monkey fur.Some of Schulman's bitsof fancy are refreshinglywitty, but one suspects this"novel of1999" just may bea parody of contemporarysociety. Cinema cabaretsshowing continuous-runHumphrey Bogart or MarxBrothers movies have replacedmost dinner theatres,stand-up comics, and dancebands, thanks to the nostalgiacraze and the proliferationof videodiscs and wallscreens.Popular televisionseries include PresidentialHealer, about a Presidentwho cures his subjects byfaith-healing, and Hello, Joe-Whaddya Know?, the adventuresof a gorilla namedJoe-the product ofprimateeducational research- whobecomes a philosophy professor.But Schulman's greatestflair is for the creative projectionof future libertarianinstitutions. He imagines ablack market so diversifiedthat an entire chain of secretshopping malls-variouslystyled Aurora, Autonomy,Auction, Austrian School,Aum, etc. (AU being the acronymof the Agorist Undergroundas well as thechemical symbol for gold)­has grown, forming, quiteliterally, an undergroundeconomy. These hiddenagoras, or marketplaces,offer a bustling labyrinth ofunusual facilities wherecountereconomic tradersmeet to do business: No­State Insurance, The ContrabandExchange, Identitiesby Charles (makeupand disguises), The AmericanLetter Mail Company(Lysander Spooner, founder),and The G. GeraldRhoames Border Guard andKetchup Company (a "cannabist"or marijuana salesman).Unlike the very worstsort of polemical novel, inwhich the action freezeswhile the characters expoundupon the author's philosophy,Alongside Nightpresents its libertarianismembedded in the very fabricof daily life:Fifth Avenue at night was evenbusier than in daytime.... Eachnight ... the avenue was closedoff to all motorized traffic exceptthe electric patrol carts ofFifth Avenue Merchant Alliance-andFAMAS had justifiedthe privilege. By totallyignoring any nonviolent, non-'invasive behavior-no matterhow outrageous or vulgarandconcentrating exclusivelyon protecting its clients andtheir customers from attacksand robbery, FAMAS madeFifth Avenue a safe haven fromthe city's pervasive street violence.Anything else went, fromsexual displays of every sorttothe street merchandising ofneo-opiates or - for severalhours, at least, your own personalslave....Nor was this discouraged bythe avenue's property owners.They knew it was precisely thisatmosphere that attracted theircustomers. Neither did the citygovernment interfere; its ownOTB gambling casinos on theavenue were one of the city'sfew remaining reliable sourcesofrevenue-and more than onecity council member had secretbusiness interests in the enclave.... As a result, Fifth Avenue hadevolved into the center of thecity's nightlife.Yet Schulman's libertarianlandscapes remain onlypainted backdrops since thehero of Alongside Night, ElliotVreeland, fails to cometo life. And a multitude ofingenious little touches, nomatter how imaginative, donot add up to one absorbingtale, when the story itself isinherently· implausible. Sadto say, as an aspiring, futuristicpolitical adventurethriller, Alongside Night is abeautiful still life.For one thing, Elliot is atwo-dimensional character.We don't know more, orcare more, about him atnovel's end than at its beginning.Schulman shamelesslymanipulates his hero,resorting to that tired old sftrick of making him anElliot-in-Wonderland: aconveniently wide-eyed, wetbehind the ears innocentthat hack authors use toShow and Tell the ABC's oftheir illusive worlds. Believeit or not, the son of a worldfamousfree market economist,a student to whom"economics is ... a hobby,"doesn't seem to know the'first thing about elementarylibertarianism! Sophisticatedscience fiction tries tomake the· familiar strangeand the strange (to the readers)familiar (to the characters).By contrast, AlongsideNight is a doubtful world inwhich the natives act liketourists, shocked by thefamiliar institutions andcustoms of their own timeand place!We are also expected toswallow a storyso contrivedit depends on a series of unlikelycoincidences. Elliot, asenior at a classy Manhattanprep school, is catapultedinto the forefront of a revolutionaryconspiracy whenhis family disappears, abductedby the State, and Elliotsets out to find them.One day he's turning inhomework assignments on"The Self-Destruction oftheCapitalist System;" overnighthe's transformed intoa savior of free enterprise.He's inallthe right placesat all the right times. Thrustby "accident" into a Citizensfor a Free Society rally,Elliot becomes the catalystfor a riot that prompts EU­COMTO (the new laissezfaireEuropean CommonMarket) to stop the exchangeof New Dollars foreurofrancs, a move which inturn ushers in the fall of theAmerican State. If only currentlibertarian demonstrationshad such impact!In short, Alongside Nightis impossible to take seriouslyas adult literature. Butwait. That's it! An adultcouldn't take this melodramaseriously ... butmaybe an adolescent can.Put yourself in Elliot's placeJor a moment. Imagine.Your own high school is ex:posed as the national headquartersof an anarchistconspiracy! Your hatedteacher is unmasked as agovernment agent, sent especiallyto spy on you! Yourbest friend proves to be theson of the guerrilla leader ofthe Revolutionary AgoristCadre! Your girlfriend­Lorimer, the very firstwoman you met inthe AgoristUnderground-turns outto be the daughter ofthe villainouschief of the Americansecret police! To top itall off, your own father isacknowledged by the wholeworld to be the Last BestHope for Mankind - andyou are his LastBestHope!!What we have here is atypically hyperinflated adolescentwet dream. Elliotacts out a Walter Mittywish-fulfillment fantasy easilyshared by today's generationof latently libertarianteenagers: young people fedup with compulsory publicschools and a corrupt government,suspicious.of· theestablishment, and lookingfor answers. AlongsideNight is an unconsciouslywritten juvenile science fic-45 ,MARCH 1980

46tion novel, .an attempt toportray that archetypal riteof passage, in which a boybecomes a man~ Only thiscan make sense of the adolescentcharacterization, themelodramatic plotting, thesophomoric humor, theawkward, embarrassed sex~It is just the kind of trulysubversive, socially redeemingliterature that youngpeople - the younger thebetter-need.Alongside Night also hasthe dubious honor ofbeingthe libertarian movement'sfirst roman a' clef. Elliot'sfather is a Nobel Prizewinningfree market· economistand staunc~supporterof a not-very-limited government,famous for an unreadabletechnical treatiseon 1920's economic historyand notorious for his monetarytheories, who persists inholding radical libertariansat arm's length while naivelyadvising the State in adoomed attempt to reformit. In fact, Dr. Martin Vreelandbears such a shspiciouslyclose resemblance toa certain real-life economistthat Schulman finds itnecessaryto disavow any such resemblancein his preface.Coincidentally, I shouldnote that Milton Friedman'shigh opinion of the book isprominently featured on itsback cover, along withlavish acclaim from JerryPournelle, -Poul Anderson,Thomas Szasz, and AnthonyBurgess. Reading betweenthe lines of their praise confirmsthe' novel's defects;more important, it reveals amajor deficiency in recentlibertarian literary criticism.What they don't say is atleast as significant as whatthey do say.Forexample,Szaszsuggests:"It might be, and ought tobe, the AtlasShrugged ofthe80's." Here is an intriguinglyambiguous statement.Is it an esthetic commentor a political endorse...;ment? If the first, it is difficultto surmise Szasz'smeaning,since he has never toldus his- opinion of AtlasShrugged, or for thatmatter,any ofRand's works. To besure, the two novels can beequated. Both dystopiaspresent the collapse of civilizationand demonstrate itscollectivist cause. Eachnovel contains a Galt'sGulch or Agorist Undergroundto which hardcorelibertarians can repair. Finally,of course, both novelsare libertarian. I suspect itwas this latter similarity thatcaught Szasz's attention.Certainly, he could not havebeen making a literary comparisonof the two novels. Ifhe had, Szasz could havecome to only one conclusion:Atlas Shrugged will bethe Atlas Shrugged of the80's.Burgess's reflections areeven more revealing: "It is aremarkable ... story, and thepicture it presents of aninflation-crippled America... is alJ too acceptable. Iwish, and so will manynovelists, thatI, or they, hadthought ofthe idea first." Ialso wish Burgess hadthought of the idea first.Judging from. A ClockworkOrange, his superbly styl~ized and brilliantly plottedclassical liberal/humanistmasterpiece, Burgess,unlikeSchulman, has the artisticgenius and maturity to takethe original idea and libertarianideology of AlongsideNight and fashion somethingwonderful from it.Let us not confuse a goodidea-or a good ideologywitha bad novel. The criticsof Alongside Night have lettheir enthusiasm for thepremise and polemics ofSchulman's novel carryaway their objectivity. Intheir haste to encourage anysign oflibertarianism, howeverremote, in the popularculture, they have only succeededin confounding estheticsandpolitics.This novel is being acclaimednot for its artistry,but for its ideology. It isbeing recommended not becauseit is literature, butbecauseit is libertarian. Surely,the concept of "libertarian"art is as wrong-headed as theconcept of "libertarian"checkers or "libertarian"physics. There is only winningat checkers or losing atcheckers, reasonable scienceand pseudoscience, good artor bad art. Alongside Nightis bad art, a failed sciencefiction novel which threatensto come to life, but neverquite succeeds.Conversely, the criticalresponse to this novel is aliving horror story, atrue Frankenstein hauntingthe libertarian movement.There is something monstroushere, something morethan the usual libertariansplaying literary politicswhatJeff Riggenbach hasdescribed (in the March, 78LR) as the inevitable tendencyof any movement toengage in "the publishing,reviewing, promoting andadvertising of each other'sbooks." No, the FrankensteinI fear is the politicizationofart-what I once disdainfullydescribed (but nomore!) as the Marxist dis...;ease.If libertarianism is anything,it is the stubborn refusalto submitto that mostpervasive and destructivetrend of our time, thepoliticization of society.Libertarians, of all people,oughtto be extraordinarily /sensitive to the truth thatonce politics becomes themeasure of all things, thennot only art, but all valueslibertyalso-suffer. Henceto applaud a work of fictiononly for its libertarian valuesis to betray libertarianvalues, becauseit is to swellobscenely the sphere ofpoliticsuntil it engulfs thesphere of esthetics.In our pursuit of one necessaryvalue-hum·anfreedom- we should not disownour need-not as libertarians,butas human beings- for personal. and socialvalues beyond politics. Wemust grant art its own termsand its own standards, neverimp.osing on ita narrowlyconceived political standard,libertarian or otherwise.Libertarians mustvalue art, if they value it atall, for the delightit(potentially)offers, never using itmerely as a means to the endof our own ideologicalgoals. To vindicate art forour own sake is not to vitiatelibertarian politics or thevalue of libertarian revolution.As Herbert Read,anarchist and art critic, explainedlong ago:It is not that art is incompatiblewith revolution- far from it.Nor do I suggestthat art has nospecific part to play in a revolutionarystruggle. I am not defendingart for art's sake.... Artas I have defined it is so intimatelylinked to the vital forcesof life that it carries society to­\\-Tard ever new manifestationofthat life.... Art is revolution,and art can best serve revolutionby remaining true to itself.This is the decade libertarianismwill become a popularfad. F. Paul Wilson endshis Reason review of Schulman'snovel with the hope itsells 20 million copies. Itmay well happen, but I hopenot. In the long· run, badmelodrama makes for poorpropaganda. Indeed, Schulman'simplausible plot andunconvincing characterscould have the unintendedeffect of confirming theAmerican public's worstmisconception of libertarianism:that it is a utopia thatcan never be brought downto earth as a practical way oflife for real people.Yet Schulman, a 26­year-old longtime libertarianactivist, does have talent.For a first novel, AlongsideNight is impressive andimaginative, if inadequate.Schulman's second novel(now in progress) is TheCarnal Commandment,about a future draft 6f wo..men. Here's hoping itwill beof such literary worth thateven if it weren't libertarian,it wbuldmerit recognition inthese pages.Michael· Grossberg is a Friendof' the Prometheus AwardsCommittee- which judges thebest libertarian science -fiction'of the year.THE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

(j)tn~a:« owl:::z:::>Peter Sellers, as the "guileless, unacculturated" Chauncey Gardiner, who inadvertently becomes famousin Hal Ashby's Being There, with Shirley MacLaine.On ViewLast ChanceDAVID BRUDNOYYOU KNOW THAT GUY,the great conversationalist?The one who listens so well?Still waters run deep. Thestrong, silent man earns myvote. Clothes make the man.It's not what you know, it'swho you know that matters.While you're up, get me aGrant's. Those long, pregnantpauses speak volumes... and with a face as honest,with eyes as clear, with asmile as innocent as that,he'll go as far as he likes.Being there, he belongsthere, and from there, thesky's the limit.Hal Ashby's Being Thereoffers as its hero. a man sosimple, so guileless, so unacculturated,so much a productof what he has seen ontelevision, the only worldoutside his (literal) gardenthat he has known, so littlethe sum of a normal man'sparts, that he must be takeneither as moron or genius.Since the subject of JerzyKosinski's novel, closelytransposed to the screen, isin fact the nearest. thinggoing to moronic, to takehim as such wouldn't makemuch of a story. Unless, likethe title character in Charly,he's somehow souped up tothe genius range. But that'sbeen done. What hasn'tbeen done, recently, is whatBeing There does so remarkablywell, with a deftbalance between the comicand the poignant. This is thestory of a gardener namedChance, who has lived all hislife, for reasons never quitegiven, within the house ofanold man, tended nicely bythe black maid, unleashedupon a garden to make itbloom, and presented by hiskeeper, or master, or employer,with hand-medownTV sets, throughwhich he experiences life.And knows the shame ofring around the collar.Chance the gardener isturned out of his pleasanthermetic world when the oldman dies, and·wanderingthrough the streets of anow-ghettoized section ofWashington, DC, .he fallsquite by accident into thepath of a nice lady with alarge limousine, a dyinghusband, and a mansion asbig as Rhode Island. Thelady, Eve Rand, asks Chancehis name, as he watches. TVin her car. She gets it justslightly off, thinks that shehas heard "Chauncey Gardiner"- he has told her,quite truthfully, both hisname and his trade-and inChauncey Gardiner, dressedto the nines in one of hislate employer's immaculatesuits, there is born a sage.Because he· has absolutelynothing to say, except aboutgardening, Eve's husband,Benjamin Rand, takesChauncey Gardiner to hisbosom, introduces him toPresident Bobby, which encountermakes of ChaunceyGardiner the latest rage ontelevision and at the embassyparties and leads himin short order to the verythreshhold of greatness. Orat least celebrity. DanielBoorstin once defined celebrityas the quality of beingknown for being known. Allgood things come to those/who appear to deservethem: renown, love, adulation,everything. ChaunceyGardiner, being there, belongsthere.Being There is a one-jokeitem thatstretches, withoutseeming to do so, to justslightly over two hours, andPeter Sellers manages soconsistently to maintain hischaracter's one~dimensionalitythat everyone swirlingabout him, and all that landsupon him, and everythingthat is assumed to be the realityof him, appear as natural,as inevitable, as hissimplest forecasting of theturning of the seasons. Foras Chance tells Benjamin,and as he tells the Presidentof the United States, and ashe tells Ambassador VladimirSkrapinov of the Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics,and as he tells all Americaon a close approximationof Johnny Carson'sshow, after spring comessummer, and then, in theirtime, autumn and winter,too. Read into that a cheeryanalysis of economic recovery,read into that a merryendorsement of detente,read into that anything, andeverybody does just that.Chance is absolutely literal.He has been tutored by"Road Runner" and taughtthe values of America bysoap flakes commercials,and his instinctive reactionto anything said to him, anythingasked of him, is takeneither as metaphor or as exquisitelyhoned subtlehumor. A chap brought toMARCH 198047

48the Russian Embassy by thewife ofAmerica's most influentialzillionaire, whosmiles when the Ambassadortosses off a phrase inRussian, obviously mustknow Russian perfectly. Aswell, of course, as eightother languages. A man whotells that same lady, whenshe comes to throw herselfat him and asks what helikes, that likes to "watch,"which means to him watchtelevision, must surely meanwatch her masturbate..Andshe does, while he watchesmore television. Such alover! A man who talks toAmerica in the vocabularyofa twelve-year~old througha medium allegedly gearedto the twelve-year-old mentalitymust be the ultimate,the consummate master ofpopular communication,and if that, why not the greathope for his country?And what if this Mr. Gardinerhas no past? If his pedigreedoesn't pop out of thepresidential computers?Rank incompetence on thepart ofthe intelligence agencies!"What do you meanhe's got no background? Iquoted him on national televisiontoday! He's a verywell known man!"Being There slid intoNew York and Hollywoodat the tail end of' the year,only now landing in theprovinces, thus too late to fitinto most of those requisitebest-of-the-yearlists. Butthefilm bursts·with merit. ShirleyMacLaine and MelvynDouglas are, respectively,sensuous and outrageouslyopinionated as the Rands;and Jack Warden's PresidentBobby, who can'tperformwith the First Lady, soexcited ishe by his brilliantnew find, the economicswizard Gardiner, carries satireas far as it can go beforethe characterization lapsesinto buffoonery. Atthe centerofthis world ofmistakenidentity stands, barely movingexcept to switch channels,scarcely modulating anemotion except as he mighthave seen it portrayed on thetube, Peter Sellers's Chance,a.k.a. Chauncey Gardiner.Sellers never misses a,beat.He has nowhere to go, nothingto do, no wants except anice garden to tend, no experiencesto draw on to dislodgehis equanimity: thisChance passes leisurelythrough life, and BeingThere accommodates itselfto his· pace.The movie is funny becauseof what happens toChance; it is often heartrendingbecause of whatChance happens to be. PeterSellers, liberated at lastfromPink Panther sequelitis,shows here his mastery ofpersona. He must at once actlike a dimwit and inspire inothers the belief thathe is astoundinglycomplex. Sellersmust put before us a manwho has enough holes in hisbackground to run Amtrakthrough, while never causingus todoubtfor an instantthat his wholly unintendedcharade could go on forever.The universe out there, outof his garden, never bothersto listen, at least never staysput long enough to interpretwhat is manifest: that asimpleton is a simpleton.But is the success of ChaunceyGardiner really so impla~siblein a country thattook Jimmy Carter straight?All That Jazz is fabulous,too, a fable for our time aswell as an astoundingly finemovie. Joe Gideon is Mercuryhimself compared toChance's stately calm, andthis thinly disguised- hell,virtually undisguised-BobFosse autobiography is, likeBeing There, entirely out ofthe stream of conventionalcinema fare these days. It isan'extended flashback fromdeath, of the over-working,over-playing, over-extendingof a monumental ego.Told through dance, song,dialogue, spectacle, allegory,the swift decline of abrilliantly talented manfrom vigor to rigor mortisbecomes in Fosse's hands anexhilarating excursion intoprecisely the other side ofthat make-believe worldJessica Lange as Angelique and Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon, the"scrappy, funny and graceful" anti-hero of All That Jazz.that has formed all, howeverlittle there is, of Chance thegardener. Image is all,hoopla is king, glitter bedecksplaster, and there's nobusiness like snow-job business.You can imagineChance casually flipping thedial with his remote controlgizmo, coming at last to aJoe Gideon production, andsettling in with it for theevening. The films havenothing whatever in common,other than their excellence,but the worlds theydepict are impossible withouteach other. Chancecouldn't thrive without JoeGideon, Joe Gideon couldn'ttriumph in a spectaclestarvedAmerica withoutChance and all the Chancesout there, glued to whatthey're witnessing, absorbing,admiring, emulating.Joe' Gideon is everythingBob Fosse is, except, at leastas ofthis writing, dead. He isendlessly re-editing a filmabout a night-club comic(Lenny), he is casting a newshow by winnowing out thedross (Chorus Line), he isrehearsing a magnificentnew stage production andhorrifying the stuffy moneymen with his' erotic numbers,he is driving his mistressnuts and fitting hisbrief affairs into the slots betweenthe rest of his doings,he is trying to be a goodfather to his daughter and apleasant ex-husband to hisex-wife, and he is keeping allhis balls in the air simultaneouslyby popping uppers.Dexedrine, something forthe hang-over, drops for redeye, and a masochistic leapinto the cold shower: thedays begin alike. They endalike. He ends.All That Jazz reachesfarther than it can grasp, buteven in the lapses it thrills bydaring. We are at one momentwith the teenage JoeGideon in white tie and tailsin'a sleazy club, tap dancingto drunks', teased by chippies;in the next minute weare furiously rushing to keepup with the adultJoe Gideonas he races through hisTHE LIBERTARIAN REVIEW

Ben Vereen as O'Conner Flood, in Bob Fosse's autobiographicalfilm, All That Jazz.twenty-eight-hour days; weare suddenly with him and agorgeous lady dressed all inwhite, a lady who may beDeath or may not be Death,but whatever she is she's notofthis planet. It is too much,at least too much to encompasswholly, without someroughage. The most elaboratelystaged sequence in themovie is Joe's death, MC'edby an unctuous Negro modeledcruelly on SammyDavis, Jr., choreographed inand around the operatingroom where, at last, Joe'stoo tightly-strung life givesup the ghost. Well, not theghost; the corpse ofJoe Gideonobserves, and the spiritof Joe Gideon observes thecorpse ofJoe Gideon observing,and the friends and familyand exploiters and fans ofJoe Gideon dance gaily on.Fosse's lover while he wasmaking the movie, AnnReinking, plays Gideon'slover: she has been Fosse'sstar dancer before, she is hisprime support here. JessicaLange, last seen making thelatest King Kong weep, haslittle to do, as Angelique(who mayor may not be theangel of Death), but makeDeath look like the neatestitem since Wednesday matinees,but she provides theethereal magic againstwhich the earthy vulgarityand wit and sparkle of JoeGideon's extravaganzasplay. Cliff Gorman does thenightclub comic magnificently,manic in his showstopperon the stages ofdeath, deadly accurate whenhe puts Gideon down: "I gotinsight into you, Gideon.You know what's underneath?The dreadful fearthat you're ordinary!"Fosse/Gideon verifies thatmock-snarled insight withhis curtain scene, set to thetune of "Bye Bye, Love,"here "Bye Bye, Life," the entireroutine lovingly presidedover by Ben Vereen, whostarred in Fosse's Pippin.It's like a reunion of theFosse veterans, huffing andhoofing and beltin' outthose tunes; it's a two-hourresume of the career of theonly man ever simultaneouslyto win an Oscar(Cabaret), two Tonys (Pippin)and an Emmy (for aLiza Minnelli special), allthis in 1973; it's a fantasyabout going too far and deciding,what the devil, whynot?! You get your money'sworth in dance, in script,and especially in RoyScheider's surprising turn asSurprising becauseGideon~this actor has impressedAmerican audiences in Jawsand The French Connectionand other "serious" films,and here he is not only uncomfortablysimilar to Fossein looks, but scrappy andfunny and graceful andrakish.An immediate referencecomes to mind: Fellini, bothfor 8Y2, his own cinema autobiographicalpurge, andfor that maybe-yes-maybenoimage of Death. More tothe pointis the experimentationand the exuberance thathave typified the best ofFederico Fellini's pictures.Freaks are standard items inthose films, grotesques anduniques and loonies. In AllThat Jazz Fosse has surelyborrowed a great deal ofFellini'sway with a story, aswith his tendency to slipback and forth across a hazyline separating the real fromthe imagined. Gideon/Fosseis the most monstrous freakof all in All ThatJazz, carrying,if you will, a "Felliniesque"technique one giantstep farther than Fellini everdid, even in those brutallyself-taunting scenes in 8Y2.Fellini often returned to thescenes of his own experience,reworked the materialof his life, but retained agravity in depicting himselfthat Fosse wholly abandonshere. Fosse has created agloriously beautiful musicaland set it down inside ahideous evisceration ofhisexcesses. He has spared usnothing-not his talent asmovie-maker and choreographerand ,(with RobertAlan Aurthur) writer, norhis cold, far from enthusiasticappraisal of his majesticallyflawed character. BobFosse need have no fear thathis creative juices are dryingup, though only his cardiologistcan tell, for sure, ifhe's heading for an earlydeath.So where does that leaveChauncey Gardiner? I sawthe movies the same day,just before Christmas, intheatres across the streetfrom Bloomingdale's. MaybeI've put more in these twofilms than the juxtapositionof them here warrants. But Iwonder. Third Avenue wasthen, as it usually is, filledwith Fosse clones tightlystretched into their bootiesand black pants andturtleneck sweaters, theirladies and lovers hoppingalong on heels, their goldchains glistening, theirshort-cropped hair and neatlittle beards framing theirartificially tanned faces.(They look adorable.) I waswaiting in line to get intoBeing There, having justcome from All That Jazz,and a plain plump man in aneat grey suit walked by,carrying a sign that said "AllWill Be Made Plain Soon,"and handing out leaflets invitingpeople to sign up forsomething, a course of lectures,I believe, at someChurch of the EverlastingWhatever, or whatever-Ilost the leaflet. One of theFosse clones said to his date,or wife, or whatever, ablonde dressed all in white,standing just in front of me:"Well, who knows? I thinkhe was on Merv." The signman smiled and whisperedover his shoulder: "No, oncable." 0LR's film critic reviews also forWNAC-TV (CBS) and WHDH­AM in Boston; he hosts "TheDavid Brudnoy Show," NewEngland's leading radio talkprogram, on WHDH; and hewrites a thrice-weekly newspapercolumn.Heis also DeputySheriff of Middlesex County(Massachusetts).© Copyright David Brudnoy,1980. 49MARCH 1980

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