Kenneth Rexroth
Five More Columns from the San Francisco Magazine
Planned Chaos
Five More Columns from the San Francisco Magazine
Things are getting out of hand. A generation ago, for everybody even slightly right of center, “planning” was a dirty word, an eight-letter synonym for Communism. For better or worse, today we live in a planned economy in a planned society, but none of the plans seem to be working out, and the wrong people, whatever their position in the political spectrum, seem to be doing the planning. For six months before the assassination of Jack Kennedy, rumors were emanating from the inner White House circle that the President and his very brainy brain trust were in a state of profound depression in every department — foreign affairs, the economy, poverty, race relations. They were beginning to feel that they had done little more than uncover insoluble problems, most of which foreboded disaster. President Johnson had one problem he couldn’t solve — Vietnam. Over the others he rode roughshod, with typical cowboy bravura. He accepted an economy of deficit financing and controlled inflation, and the Great Society was constructed by a wholesale onslaught on all the problems that had stymied his predecessor. The important thing was to get something drastic done, on the assumption that if the solutions didn’t work, they could be corrected in the future. In his Christmas speech in the middle of his term, he made the dumbfounding claim that mankind had never had it better, that the Great Society had arrived. Utopia was here. The Vietnam War was raging and a dozen volcanoes were rumbling under his feet.
The first Nixon Administration promised to balance the budget, stop deficit financing, reverse inflation, stop crime and violent protest, and bring peace to the world. Although a great deal of propaganda of the American Right still talks as though we were living in 1850 in an economy of complete free enterprise, in fact controls in every department of life, let alone just economics, have increased. There are more planners than ever, but they seem to be planning wrong. The monetary system of the world is in complete chaos, and any attempt to reform it is blocked, first from one side, and then from another. Inflation is worldwide. In some countries it is fantastic.
In America it is not as bad as it is in many other places, but measured in the price of gold, which still, in spite of everything, is the only measuring rod we have, the drop in the value of the dollar is incredible. In the prices of many basic commodities, the dollar will only buy a quarter of what it did at the end of World War II price controls, and now the economic columnists are talking about one-dollar loaves of bread and more than one dollar a gallon gas for 1974. The price of bread in California is controlled, as is milk. Both were ten cents a loaf or a quart, for a generation. The price of gas, of course, is also controlled.
Somebody is planning. Certainly the energy crisis gives every evidence of very thorough planning indeed. Yet it is almost impossible to get reliable statistics. Estimates of the use of Arabian oil in the United States vary from 6 to 10 percent, with the lower the more probable figure. If that’s correct, you would think the loss could be made up by a couple of telephone calls to Venezuela. More and more people, industrialists, the editors of conservative newspapers, and conservative politicians have come to believe that the oil shortage is a complete fake, and the energy crisis is a propaganda stunt borrowed from the conservationists for the specific purpose of destroying them with their own weapons. Certainly at the moment they have been thoroughly routed. Strip mining, off-shore oil drilling, the burning of high-sulphur coal — all have been given a green light. Yet a highly respected economic columnist in one of the newsweeklies says that the country is awash in oil being held off the market.
On the other hand, there’s an old story that when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, Dulles wanted to go to war right then, but Eisenhower persuaded him to feed all the relevant data into the first great computer at Harvard, known as Mark IV. Mark IV answered: “You will win the war, but you may have to use the atom bomb, and you will have exhausted many of the natural resources of the country.” So they waited awhile, but finally they went, and, for one thing, the gasoline that you can’t get in your tank was burned up in air raids greater than all those of World War II.
Since Franklin Roosevelt’s “Quarantine the Aggressor” speech in Chicago, almost a lifetime ago, we have been living in a war economy. The significant thing about a war economy is that it reverses, at least for a very long time, the general tendency toward a falling rate of profit. What is happening now is planning to sustain the super-profits of a war economy. They never had it so good, and they don’t want it taken away. Yet what is happening is that we are building a society in which not just economic, but social and interpersonal relations are moving from dangerous to deadly.
San Francisco has all sorts of plans and planners. On paper, you’d think we were going about carefully and systematically constructing Utopia. Our planning may not be deadly or even dangerous yet, but it is certainly planning for economic dislocation, social tension, and confusion, if not demoralization. Welfare programs, far from curing social sicknesses, intensify them. The reorganization of traffic flow has made San Francisco one of the most congested cities on earth. Everything is overcrowded, restaurants or freeways, and the statistics compare with those of Tokyo’s Ginza or Munich’s Stockhaus. Urban renewal has led to the destruction of square miles of handsome, characteristically San Franciscan single- and two-family dwellings, has resulted in serious dislocation of populations, with resulting slummification in the surrounding areas, and has yet to result in a significant tax profit for the City as a whole. Almost every respected urbanist in the country has condemned the Yerba Buena project and has claimed that the public buildings are unnecessary, will be too expensive, and that the private construction will be slow to materialize and promises to be unprofitable. And of course, just incidentally, there is the inhuman treatment of the residents of the area, a large proportion of whom are elderly single people living on welfare or social security pensions. It looks as though the rebuilding of San Francisco was being planned all wrong, at least to an increasing number of professional urbanists, who presumably know what they’re talking about. Yet processes have been set in motion over which the public seems unable to exert any influence. 1974 may see $1 bread, but I think it’s also sure to see a general revolt against planned chaos, from Congressional investigations of the oil crisis, to local rebellion against the planners who have refused to listen.
The SLA
As this column is being written, there has been no resolution of the case of Patty Hearst. But whatever and whenever, if ever, there is a resolution, there are certain things that can be said about it that will not change. Long ago when the Movement of the ’60s was beginning to develop an uncontrollable lunatic fringe, I said in a column that just because somebody’s conduct was revolting was no sign that it had anything to do with revolution.
After the rash of assassinations in Russia in the 19th century, radicals of all types (except a small and isolated group of anarchists in France, most of them common criminals before they discovered an anarchist rhetoric to justify themselves) had given up individual terror. Not only that, but it was universally accepted, practically a dogma, that anyone who advocated assassinations and bank robberies and bombings was ipso facto, prima facie, a stoolpigeon and agent provocateur. They were proven right. The famous “Azef” was eventually unveiled as the chief stoolpigeon and provocateur for the Czarist police after a long career as the head of the secret terror organization of the revolutionary Populist Party, equally efficient at planning assassinations and turning in his comrades. Probably the principal reason why many students of revolutionary movements and most non-Bolshevik radicals believe that Stalin was a police agent, is that he seems to have been in charge of an “ex”-squad, “ex” standing for expropriation, that is, bank robbery. The assassin of McKinley, Leon Czolgosz, called himself an anarchist, but he was patently crazy and the anarchists repudiated him. Throughout the early 20th century individual violence was almost entirely confined to the more conventional labor movement. No acts of individual terror or even planned group violence have ever been proven against socialists, communists, or anarchists, and few against the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, and anyone in such groups who advocated such action was certain to be expelled. In spite of all their rhetoric, the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers have never been convicted of acts of planned terror.
Weathermen, White Panthers, Venceremos, a number of other fugitive local groups, and now the SLA — what do these people represent? Not revolution, certainly, but a kind of devolution. They are symptoms of the sickness of the dominant society, what Toynbee called “schism of the soul.” They are recruited from what is in fact America’s ruling class, the upper-middle class, and they are predominantly young women, who in the first instance are profoundly alienated from parents who have “given them everything their hearts desired.” Certainly it is obvious that it is the women — upper-class women, the old-time radicals would call them — who dominate the SLA. This is one of the few ways the SLA differs from the Manson Family.
As instruments of social change, such little groups are necessarily completely ineffectual — except, of course, when they do something which arouses the dominant society to wrath and repression. The murderous capers of a similar group that call themselves (using the English words) “The Red Army of Japan” left the entire Left of Japan shattered and demoralized (even though the Left was not subject to repression or even harassment). Here, the SLA and similar tiny groups have sown prejudice, fear and racism in what had been one of the most tolerant cities in the world.
Why is San Francisco giving birth to these monstrous babies? Even Manson formed his family here before he moved south. And it was he and his girls who introduced the custom of public fornication to the picnic grounds above the children’s playground in Golden Gate Park. Is it for the same reason that people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? For years, just beyond the Palace of the Legion of Honor, stood a life-size statue of a dying Indian, slumped over an exhausted horse, entitled “The End of the Trail.” It was the most famous statue of the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Skid Road, Haight-Ashbury, the high suicide and alcoholism rates are all symptoms of the end of the road — the end of the rope. They are the negative side of the phenomena which have brought thousands upon thousands of the Playboy Set to settle in luxurious villas in Marin County and the Peninsula, or to spend a quarter of a million dollars rehabilitating a Victorian slum and furnishing it with antiques, but they are a reverse reflection of San Francisco as the most liberal, enlightened, and oh-so-highly cultured city in the United States — the last stand of la vie Méditerranée — so tolerant that you can get away with almost anything.
That’s how the Haight-Ashbury came into existence. It was a neighborhood largely populated by “people of the ’30s,” intellectuals, trade union organizers, writers, artists, a successful bohemia that had migrated from North Beach, who were willing to rent to freaks who wouldn’t be allowed to light in more conventional neighborhoods. It’s the reason San Francisco must have almost as many gay bars as straight bars. It is this tolerance and atmosphere of unlimited freedom that reduces the New Left daughters of the rich, and the criminal sociopath, to impotent rage. They feel they are punching mattresses and stabbing fog. The community simply bends and lets them pass. Out of frustration comes wrath, and out of wrath comes terror.
Anything else is too much hard work. Actual social change is accomplished by long, hard, slogging work. Addressing cards, stuffing envelopes, running duplicating machines all night long, speaking to uncomprehending and indifferent audiences, organizing on the job as a worker amongst workers, getting into a legislature or a city administration body and struggling with corrupt politicians who think you’re a fool, and struggling to keep from becoming corrupt yourself. Careers like this are not very attractive to spoiled darlings of the rich or to chronic sociopaths who have spent half their lives in prison.
Yet these people truly suffer. They are alienated, far more than the proletarian on the production line, and they are incapable of persisting in large-scale positive social action. They are types which the orthodox radical groups soon reject. Almost all the SLA people have been, for a time, members of conventional radical groups which rejected them, until they found themselves alone. Being a member of a tiny terrorist group that must stay hidden 24 hours a day is certainly being very much alone. “I belong to nothing and I suffer,” said the crazy man who shot at Roosevelt. Our sick society no longer needs to hire agents provocateurs.
More on the SLA
As the inner workings of the Manson Family were being revealed in the press, many people pointed out that he must have been influenced by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a decidedly unpleasant science-fiction romance. It is hard to tell whether Heinlein was an advocate or a satirist. On the whole I think he was an advocate, primarily because he describes his perverted society in a prose saturated with generalized hostility. There is a similar and even more uncanny premonition of the SLA melodrama in a play by the black playwright Richard Wesley, On Black Terror, which can be found in the Anchor paperback edition The New Lafayette Theater Presents, edited by Ed Bullins. In the introduction, Wesley makes it very clear that he was not an advocate. He says:
“I wrote Black Terror because of certain things I saw in the political climate of 1969-70. I had noticed that the rhetoric of the late sixties was going off in a direction that was not beneficial at all to Black people. The late 1960s saw the concept of revolutionary suicide, urban kamikaze, rather than concrete political theories that would ultimately lead to the survival of our people in this society.
“So, I decided to write a play in which certain ideologies would be given, given a chance to be aired onstage, and the people, Black people, could come and see the play and observe these ideologies, and try to take from what they saw on stage an idea or hint as to what they had to do as people in order to free themselves of this rhetoric and move on to another method of action.”
It is the story of a tiny group of black terrorists dedicated to revolutionary suicide, who recruit the daughter of a successful member of the liberal Negro Establishment. She even changes her name to that of an underground African revolutionary martyr. The organization — if it can be called that, it seems to consist of less than ten people — orders her to assassinate her father as a “traitor to his race.” At the end, she does, and flees to the group’s “safe house,” where the police burn and dynamite them all out of existence, and precipitate a race riot. Wesley remarks that he doubts if the majority of his audience really understood the message he was trying to impart.
Suicidal terrorist groups like the SLA exist all over the world, and only amongst the Tupamaros of Uruguay do they have any political basis or social reality at all (the terrorism in Argentina is actually a sort of civil war between the left and right wings of Peron’s following). Their appeal lies precisely in their political irrelevance and their guaranteed doom. A process new to history is going on here. Even his own followers now admit that Freud invented the Oedipus complex — but his patients responded with enthusiastic Oedipus family romances of their own. There is very little trace of the characteristic Oedipus complex in world literature. Oedipus himself certainly did not have one, although Hamlet suffered from something like it. The revolt against the father and the symbolic rape of the mother begins with modern industrial/commercial civilization, with people like Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade, and grows steadily throughout the 19th century to become an overt literary mechanism in our time.
Far more important than any psychoanalytic theories is the simple fact that there exists nothing like this in the literature of any other civilization, even in its most advanced state of decay, nor in Western civilization prior to the French Revolution. Euripides and Catullus may have been neurotic, but they weren’t neurotic in the way Baudelaire was, much less many modern novelists. Something new has been added. The Russian 19th-century revolutionaries, the Naradnoya Volya — the People’s Will — were suicidal, as was the terrorist organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but like the Tupamaros, they were operating in a clearly defined political theater, dominated by terror from above. It is perfectly obvious that political terror by tiny groups of self-appointed executioners cannot demoralize conventional America enough to ignite a fuse which leads to revolution. It is hard to believe that any of these people believe this themselves. The political reality is masked for them by profound personal drives. The unaccountable thing is that this constellation of personal forces is new in history, at least as a widespread phenomenon.
As I have pointed out, most of these people have been raised in comfort, if not luxury. Even the blacks in Wesley’s play come from middle-class families. Proletarians are too busy working and too tired after work to get much pleasure out of terrorism. Television is a simpler discharge of accumulated hostility. But of course the hostility is different. In the millionairess with a machine gun, or blowing herself up making bombs in an expensive New York townhouse, it seems to come from something even deeper than the levels reached by Freud. The Oedipus complex is not enough. Is it the life tedium of a society with only purely material values in which the only satisfactions are commodities? But this isn’t really true of our society. We may be offered a commodity guaranteed to satisfy any need, but we soon learn to turn away, at least sometimes. There are plenty of spiritual transcendental values going around. Lots of people think there is altogether too wide a variety of them. Is it the lack of creative work and opportunities for self-realization? But these are precisely the people who have always enjoyed the most of such opportunities. Is it the profound immorality of the dominant society and its Establishment? Establishments have always been profoundly immoral. Neither Watergate nor Willie Brandt’s love life are unique in history. Furthermore, it is obvious that problems such as these are not going to be solved by immolating yourself in a burning building.
I think that melodramas like those of the Manson Family and the SLA are going to become more and more common. I am not personally acquainted with anyone who has read more about this type of social sickness than myself. I have certainly not found any satisfactory answers. It’s about time that people without pet theories and ready-made solutions begin to devote some serious scientific work to the subject.
The Breakdown of Education
I have just finished six years in academia. I used to think it was bad for writers to teach because too much of their time was taken up with people who were their juridical inferiors but who quite often were in fact their superiors in everything but specific chunks of information. The teacher’s podium is a platform of authority and the crippled furniture — the one-armed chairs — are positions of inferiority. Authoritarianism is built into every aspect of the educational structure. Certain kinds of authoritarianism have in the past worked very well to produce a highly cultivated administrative caste — 19th-century England, traditional China, the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious it doesn’t work today — not even in the colleges of the old-time liberal professions like law and medicine. The astronauts were educated men, yet their conversations came back from interstellar space resembling nothing so much as the talk of a couple of garage mechanics, one in the grease pit and one taking the lid off the engine. But we hadn’t heard anything until the White House tapes. The Watergate conspirators and their “co-conspirator” are all very expensively educated men. Perhaps a majority have six years of college. The whole Watergate imbroglio may demonstrate that the office of Presidency has gotten out of hand, that public morals are breaking down, that extortion has become an accepted perquisite of a political career. But what the tapes demonstrated conclusively is that our educational system has broken down. None of these people when teacher wasn’t listening, or now, when the ghostwriter isn’t writing, is able to speak English. What their grunts and curses, Damon-Runyan-imitation-underworld slang, and strange utterances devoid of the accepted parts of speech demonstrate is the common culture of the elite — at least what the electorate chose to consider the elite. Can you imagine Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, talking this way, even if drunk, even in locker rooms, if there had been locker rooms in their day? A cultural consensus has vanished and ultimately this is the fault of the educational system.
One of the nicest stories about Teddy Roosevelt: He captured a couple of bandits on his ranch in the Badlands, tied them to their horses and drove them ahead of him down the banks of the Missouri. Every night around the campfire he entertained them by reading aloud from Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, which had just come out in English. Always, night and day, keeping them covered, until he could turn them over to the law. It certainly was a different age. There are plenty of college graduates but there aren’t many cultured people running around. How many people have read the great world classics, any of them, for pleasure? How many people read books for pleasure? How many people read books? How many people read?
The trouble with higher education and most of all in the great universities, it that it is not designed to turn out cultured people; that is, people capable of getting the widest and deepest range of values available out of their civilization. In imitation of a kind of German university that no longer exists in Germany, our universities are designed to turn out something called “scholars.” Even the extremely popular courses in “Creative Writing” are not designed to turn out creative writers, but teachers of creative writing. Too true. Yet they are not designed to turn out teachers at all. From the Renaissance to the present time there has been a succession of educational reformers. “Progressive education” is not new but as old as modern civilization itself. The remarkable thing is that the great educational reformers are in substantial agreement. Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) in Germany, Jean-Henri Pestalozzi (1746-1827) in Switzerland, Maria Montessori (1870-1952) in Italy, Francisco Ferrer, who was executed in Barcelona in 1909, were all in substantial agreement as to the nature of learning and the practice of education. Progressive educational methods based on a consensus of their philosophies of education was characteristic of the public school systems of several states, most notably Indiana, and out of Chicago the educator-disciples of John Dewey were reforming teaching methods throughout the Middle West. The average college professor has never heard of any of these people except possibly Montessori, whom he may well believe is something eaten with tomato sauce.
College educators do not take courses in education unless they are Education majors. That’s not the way it works. You get a ticket called a B.A. and get on an escalator. At the next landing the ticket is punched. That’s called M.A. At the next landing the punch is called the Ph.D. The final landing and the final punch is called tenure and you’re fixed for life. These tickets are issued in various colors. Each color is called a “field.” For instance, “Early Middle English Falconry Manuals” or “The Later Novels of George Eliot,” and wandering from field to field is discouraged. Interdisciplinary activity confuses the budgets of the various departments and is always discouraged and often made impossible. Where is the student in this? He isn’t. The theory is that a great scholar profoundly researching the poetry of Elizabeth Goodge for his Ph.D. pays his dues to the taxpayers and parents by teaching, and the teaching is always organized in such a way as to encourage the student to climb on the escalator. This is true of the humanities generally and only the old professions like law, medicine, engineering and the sciences are exceptions, but here there are so many highly specialized required courses that the student emerges devoid of any general cultural education.
California universities are planned for “scholars,” and yet only a tiny percentage of the students will ever go on to the higher degrees. They will become, most of them, businessmen or housewives of businessmen and they should have spent four years being prepared to enjoy a rich, satisfying cultural life.
After four years of college, a student should be well-rounded in the appreciation of the arts, familiar with the basic works of the world’s great literature, have a general cultural knowledge of up-to-date science, should be able to read fluently and speak at least passably one foreign language, should be familiar with world history and geography, should have a sound knowledge of economics, sufficient to be able to read between the lies in the newspapers, and should have something which isn’t taught at all: four years of a mixture of health, hygiene, psychology, sex — the knowledge of the human self in all its relations with others. Beyond this, subjects like anthropology or animal psychology or something else nice you really don’t have to know should be available as electives. “The Major” pointing straight up the escalator to the final apotheosis of Emeritus should be abolished altogether for undergraduates. Where in California is it possible to get such an education?
More on the Breakdown of Education
Last month I started talking about the historically unparalleled breakdown in education and of the inability of educational reformers to make any serious dent in education, most especially at the university level, after 200 years of trying.
People have remarked of the September column that I talked mostly about university education, and the reformers whom I mention — Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Francisco Ferrer — concerned themselves almost exclusively with not just elementary education, but with the kindergarten. This was also true of the teaching of sensory awareness and esthetic order that budded off from the Bauhaus in Germany between the wars. The only progressive schools that have won widespread acceptance are those that follow the ideas of Rudolph Steiner, who broke away from the Theosophists to found a rather cranky religion of his own called Anthroposophy. They are dotted over Germany, and Dartington Hall in the west of England was originally a Steiner school. And there are some in America.
This drives home the point. The original reformers moved into unoccupied territory. They invented the kindergarten. Only in certain public school districts, mostly in northern Indiana, did their ideas ever have decisive, determinative effect. The Steiner schools exist as a kind of secession, really parochial schools, like the Catholics and the Lutherans. In the established system of education the inertia is so great that ideas two hundred years old are only rarely put in practice. The best of the kind are still in England: Dartington Hall, Bedales, Sherbourne and St. Michael’s Hall. The trouble with schools like this in the last ten years or so is that they have slowly become isolation wards for problem children. Summerhill, the most experimental of all, is close to being a psychiatric institution. This is a problem the progressive schools in the Bay Area have had to face and in some cases has led to their abandonment. It’s true even of summer camps. When my daughters were young I hunted around for the camp that had replaced “Singing Trail” of happy memory on Huntington Lake operated by the Blumenthals — he was director of the Jewish Center. I found it just opened up in Mendocino County. The first year was fine but by the third it had become a minimum-custody summer home for problem children, an extremely expensive “Correctional Facility,” as it says on the highway signs. (My daughter says this idiotic term sounds like a sadie-mazie brothel.) The fourth year the camp did not reopen. It had turned into something far different from what they had hoped.
This is the problem of progressive education generally. Sussex, which promised to be the best university in the English-speaking world, was overwhelmed by the most way-out freaks and hippies and is only recently recovering. Antioch, one of the great traditional progressive schools of America, along with Oberlin and Reed, may go under this year. The problem lies with the administrators and the teachers. There simply aren’t enough progressive educators to go around. In fact there is only a tiny handful at the college level who know what they are doing. This is the tragedy of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dean McHenry (his name is Dean) started from scratch with a couple of barns, some redwood trees, and a meadow, to building an educational utopia. As the school grew, faculty were recruited more and more by the most conventional standards of Ph.D.-mill scholarship. Students came expecting to find the progressive school of the publicity brochures and discovered instead that they were in just another University of California run by Herr Doktor Wissenschafts devoted, if they were devoted at all, to turning out lots of little Herr Doktor Wissenschafts.
What’s the solution? There really isn’t any solution. The educational system in America is an enormous mass of slowly decaying inertia. It is really doubtful if anything can be done about it. It is the largest heap of vested interests in the country. At the university level it is also the largest body of people who don’t know what they’re doing. It cannot be reformed via departments of education because they identify progressive education with group gropes, consciousness-raising circles, reevaluation therapy sessions, all run by group dynamics. Thousands of little Esalens are not going to solve the educational problems of America for the simple reason that when the victim has passed through them she or he has learned nothing whatever. Education courses, however freaky, have no effect on university teachers. The university is not set up in their opinions to educate, but to pay them for “scholarship.” If at the end of your seven-year apprenticeship you’re up for tenure, the criterion is “publication,” and this means not serious books which are a contribution to and extension of serious knowledge, but heavily footnoted, bibliographed and indexed trivia which a skillful newspaper man or researcher for Time or the Encyclopedia Britannica could put together in a couple of afternoons at the library. This kiss of death is to be liked by students. An award, “Most Popular Teacher,” is likely to get you fired.
There are possible solutions but it is certainly utopian to believe they will ever be put in effect, as long as this society endures. Not only should the demand “publish or perish” be abandoned, but university faculty should be actively discouraged from publishing anything except by reputable trade and textbook publishing houses, particularly the former. History, which the pedants now call by the barbarism “historiography,” should be history like it used to be, like Herodotus, Thucydides, Ssu-ma Chien, Livy, Tacitus, Froissart, Gibbon, Hume, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott. I list most of the greatest historians to drive home the point than not one of them could get a job in a history department of a major university. In the corridors of academia two of the most readable historians of our time — Barbara Tuchman and C.V. Wedgwood — are considered a disgrace to the profession, in fact, no members of it at all. We are historians, they are historiographers, an activity best left nowadays to women, like crewel work, or bearing children. Tenure should be abolished. It was invented to protect the academic world from the onslaught of reactionary politicians and McCarthyite investigators. It has produced a pandemic of civil service-itis. The is little difference in the attitude toward his job of a college professor and an orderly in the county hospital. The junior faculty on their way up are affected in exactly the opposite way than was planned. They are terrified to be caught in unconformity. To understand the modern world it is essential to have some sound information about Marxism. The Jesuits teach it. I wonder if there is a course in Marxism in any school in the state system. To the best of my knowledge there is not even a course in Walt Whitman. Meanwhile the educators’ educators babble about “relevance,” Black English, and feelies.
The first Nixon Administration promised to balance the budget, stop deficit financing, reverse inflation, stop crime and violent protest, and bring peace to the world. Although a great deal of propaganda of the American Right still talks as though we were living in 1850 in an economy of complete free enterprise, in fact controls in every department of life, let alone just economics, have increased. There are more planners than ever, but they seem to be planning wrong. The monetary system of the world is in complete chaos, and any attempt to reform it is blocked, first from one side, and then from another. Inflation is worldwide. In some countries it is fantastic.
In America it is not as bad as it is in many other places, but measured in the price of gold, which still, in spite of everything, is the only measuring rod we have, the drop in the value of the dollar is incredible. In the prices of many basic commodities, the dollar will only buy a quarter of what it did at the end of World War II price controls, and now the economic columnists are talking about one-dollar loaves of bread and more than one dollar a gallon gas for 1974. The price of bread in California is controlled, as is milk. Both were ten cents a loaf or a quart, for a generation. The price of gas, of course, is also controlled.
Somebody is planning. Certainly the energy crisis gives every evidence of very thorough planning indeed. Yet it is almost impossible to get reliable statistics. Estimates of the use of Arabian oil in the United States vary from 6 to 10 percent, with the lower the more probable figure. If that’s correct, you would think the loss could be made up by a couple of telephone calls to Venezuela. More and more people, industrialists, the editors of conservative newspapers, and conservative politicians have come to believe that the oil shortage is a complete fake, and the energy crisis is a propaganda stunt borrowed from the conservationists for the specific purpose of destroying them with their own weapons. Certainly at the moment they have been thoroughly routed. Strip mining, off-shore oil drilling, the burning of high-sulphur coal — all have been given a green light. Yet a highly respected economic columnist in one of the newsweeklies says that the country is awash in oil being held off the market.
On the other hand, there’s an old story that when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, Dulles wanted to go to war right then, but Eisenhower persuaded him to feed all the relevant data into the first great computer at Harvard, known as Mark IV. Mark IV answered: “You will win the war, but you may have to use the atom bomb, and you will have exhausted many of the natural resources of the country.” So they waited awhile, but finally they went, and, for one thing, the gasoline that you can’t get in your tank was burned up in air raids greater than all those of World War II.
Since Franklin Roosevelt’s “Quarantine the Aggressor” speech in Chicago, almost a lifetime ago, we have been living in a war economy. The significant thing about a war economy is that it reverses, at least for a very long time, the general tendency toward a falling rate of profit. What is happening now is planning to sustain the super-profits of a war economy. They never had it so good, and they don’t want it taken away. Yet what is happening is that we are building a society in which not just economic, but social and interpersonal relations are moving from dangerous to deadly.
San Francisco has all sorts of plans and planners. On paper, you’d think we were going about carefully and systematically constructing Utopia. Our planning may not be deadly or even dangerous yet, but it is certainly planning for economic dislocation, social tension, and confusion, if not demoralization. Welfare programs, far from curing social sicknesses, intensify them. The reorganization of traffic flow has made San Francisco one of the most congested cities on earth. Everything is overcrowded, restaurants or freeways, and the statistics compare with those of Tokyo’s Ginza or Munich’s Stockhaus. Urban renewal has led to the destruction of square miles of handsome, characteristically San Franciscan single- and two-family dwellings, has resulted in serious dislocation of populations, with resulting slummification in the surrounding areas, and has yet to result in a significant tax profit for the City as a whole. Almost every respected urbanist in the country has condemned the Yerba Buena project and has claimed that the public buildings are unnecessary, will be too expensive, and that the private construction will be slow to materialize and promises to be unprofitable. And of course, just incidentally, there is the inhuman treatment of the residents of the area, a large proportion of whom are elderly single people living on welfare or social security pensions. It looks as though the rebuilding of San Francisco was being planned all wrong, at least to an increasing number of professional urbanists, who presumably know what they’re talking about. Yet processes have been set in motion over which the public seems unable to exert any influence. 1974 may see $1 bread, but I think it’s also sure to see a general revolt against planned chaos, from Congressional investigations of the oil crisis, to local rebellion against the planners who have refused to listen.
[March 1974]
As this column is being written, there has been no resolution of the case of Patty Hearst. But whatever and whenever, if ever, there is a resolution, there are certain things that can be said about it that will not change. Long ago when the Movement of the ’60s was beginning to develop an uncontrollable lunatic fringe, I said in a column that just because somebody’s conduct was revolting was no sign that it had anything to do with revolution.
After the rash of assassinations in Russia in the 19th century, radicals of all types (except a small and isolated group of anarchists in France, most of them common criminals before they discovered an anarchist rhetoric to justify themselves) had given up individual terror. Not only that, but it was universally accepted, practically a dogma, that anyone who advocated assassinations and bank robberies and bombings was ipso facto, prima facie, a stoolpigeon and agent provocateur. They were proven right. The famous “Azef” was eventually unveiled as the chief stoolpigeon and provocateur for the Czarist police after a long career as the head of the secret terror organization of the revolutionary Populist Party, equally efficient at planning assassinations and turning in his comrades. Probably the principal reason why many students of revolutionary movements and most non-Bolshevik radicals believe that Stalin was a police agent, is that he seems to have been in charge of an “ex”-squad, “ex” standing for expropriation, that is, bank robbery. The assassin of McKinley, Leon Czolgosz, called himself an anarchist, but he was patently crazy and the anarchists repudiated him. Throughout the early 20th century individual violence was almost entirely confined to the more conventional labor movement. No acts of individual terror or even planned group violence have ever been proven against socialists, communists, or anarchists, and few against the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, and anyone in such groups who advocated such action was certain to be expelled. In spite of all their rhetoric, the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers have never been convicted of acts of planned terror.
Weathermen, White Panthers, Venceremos, a number of other fugitive local groups, and now the SLA — what do these people represent? Not revolution, certainly, but a kind of devolution. They are symptoms of the sickness of the dominant society, what Toynbee called “schism of the soul.” They are recruited from what is in fact America’s ruling class, the upper-middle class, and they are predominantly young women, who in the first instance are profoundly alienated from parents who have “given them everything their hearts desired.” Certainly it is obvious that it is the women — upper-class women, the old-time radicals would call them — who dominate the SLA. This is one of the few ways the SLA differs from the Manson Family.
As instruments of social change, such little groups are necessarily completely ineffectual — except, of course, when they do something which arouses the dominant society to wrath and repression. The murderous capers of a similar group that call themselves (using the English words) “The Red Army of Japan” left the entire Left of Japan shattered and demoralized (even though the Left was not subject to repression or even harassment). Here, the SLA and similar tiny groups have sown prejudice, fear and racism in what had been one of the most tolerant cities in the world.
Why is San Francisco giving birth to these monstrous babies? Even Manson formed his family here before he moved south. And it was he and his girls who introduced the custom of public fornication to the picnic grounds above the children’s playground in Golden Gate Park. Is it for the same reason that people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? For years, just beyond the Palace of the Legion of Honor, stood a life-size statue of a dying Indian, slumped over an exhausted horse, entitled “The End of the Trail.” It was the most famous statue of the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Skid Road, Haight-Ashbury, the high suicide and alcoholism rates are all symptoms of the end of the road — the end of the rope. They are the negative side of the phenomena which have brought thousands upon thousands of the Playboy Set to settle in luxurious villas in Marin County and the Peninsula, or to spend a quarter of a million dollars rehabilitating a Victorian slum and furnishing it with antiques, but they are a reverse reflection of San Francisco as the most liberal, enlightened, and oh-so-highly cultured city in the United States — the last stand of la vie Méditerranée — so tolerant that you can get away with almost anything.
That’s how the Haight-Ashbury came into existence. It was a neighborhood largely populated by “people of the ’30s,” intellectuals, trade union organizers, writers, artists, a successful bohemia that had migrated from North Beach, who were willing to rent to freaks who wouldn’t be allowed to light in more conventional neighborhoods. It’s the reason San Francisco must have almost as many gay bars as straight bars. It is this tolerance and atmosphere of unlimited freedom that reduces the New Left daughters of the rich, and the criminal sociopath, to impotent rage. They feel they are punching mattresses and stabbing fog. The community simply bends and lets them pass. Out of frustration comes wrath, and out of wrath comes terror.
Anything else is too much hard work. Actual social change is accomplished by long, hard, slogging work. Addressing cards, stuffing envelopes, running duplicating machines all night long, speaking to uncomprehending and indifferent audiences, organizing on the job as a worker amongst workers, getting into a legislature or a city administration body and struggling with corrupt politicians who think you’re a fool, and struggling to keep from becoming corrupt yourself. Careers like this are not very attractive to spoiled darlings of the rich or to chronic sociopaths who have spent half their lives in prison.
Yet these people truly suffer. They are alienated, far more than the proletarian on the production line, and they are incapable of persisting in large-scale positive social action. They are types which the orthodox radical groups soon reject. Almost all the SLA people have been, for a time, members of conventional radical groups which rejected them, until they found themselves alone. Being a member of a tiny terrorist group that must stay hidden 24 hours a day is certainly being very much alone. “I belong to nothing and I suffer,” said the crazy man who shot at Roosevelt. Our sick society no longer needs to hire agents provocateurs.
[June 1974]
As the inner workings of the Manson Family were being revealed in the press, many people pointed out that he must have been influenced by Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a decidedly unpleasant science-fiction romance. It is hard to tell whether Heinlein was an advocate or a satirist. On the whole I think he was an advocate, primarily because he describes his perverted society in a prose saturated with generalized hostility. There is a similar and even more uncanny premonition of the SLA melodrama in a play by the black playwright Richard Wesley, On Black Terror, which can be found in the Anchor paperback edition The New Lafayette Theater Presents, edited by Ed Bullins. In the introduction, Wesley makes it very clear that he was not an advocate. He says:
“I wrote Black Terror because of certain things I saw in the political climate of 1969-70. I had noticed that the rhetoric of the late sixties was going off in a direction that was not beneficial at all to Black people. The late 1960s saw the concept of revolutionary suicide, urban kamikaze, rather than concrete political theories that would ultimately lead to the survival of our people in this society.
“So, I decided to write a play in which certain ideologies would be given, given a chance to be aired onstage, and the people, Black people, could come and see the play and observe these ideologies, and try to take from what they saw on stage an idea or hint as to what they had to do as people in order to free themselves of this rhetoric and move on to another method of action.”
It is the story of a tiny group of black terrorists dedicated to revolutionary suicide, who recruit the daughter of a successful member of the liberal Negro Establishment. She even changes her name to that of an underground African revolutionary martyr. The organization — if it can be called that, it seems to consist of less than ten people — orders her to assassinate her father as a “traitor to his race.” At the end, she does, and flees to the group’s “safe house,” where the police burn and dynamite them all out of existence, and precipitate a race riot. Wesley remarks that he doubts if the majority of his audience really understood the message he was trying to impart.
Suicidal terrorist groups like the SLA exist all over the world, and only amongst the Tupamaros of Uruguay do they have any political basis or social reality at all (the terrorism in Argentina is actually a sort of civil war between the left and right wings of Peron’s following). Their appeal lies precisely in their political irrelevance and their guaranteed doom. A process new to history is going on here. Even his own followers now admit that Freud invented the Oedipus complex — but his patients responded with enthusiastic Oedipus family romances of their own. There is very little trace of the characteristic Oedipus complex in world literature. Oedipus himself certainly did not have one, although Hamlet suffered from something like it. The revolt against the father and the symbolic rape of the mother begins with modern industrial/commercial civilization, with people like Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade, and grows steadily throughout the 19th century to become an overt literary mechanism in our time.
Far more important than any psychoanalytic theories is the simple fact that there exists nothing like this in the literature of any other civilization, even in its most advanced state of decay, nor in Western civilization prior to the French Revolution. Euripides and Catullus may have been neurotic, but they weren’t neurotic in the way Baudelaire was, much less many modern novelists. Something new has been added. The Russian 19th-century revolutionaries, the Naradnoya Volya — the People’s Will — were suicidal, as was the terrorist organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but like the Tupamaros, they were operating in a clearly defined political theater, dominated by terror from above. It is perfectly obvious that political terror by tiny groups of self-appointed executioners cannot demoralize conventional America enough to ignite a fuse which leads to revolution. It is hard to believe that any of these people believe this themselves. The political reality is masked for them by profound personal drives. The unaccountable thing is that this constellation of personal forces is new in history, at least as a widespread phenomenon.
As I have pointed out, most of these people have been raised in comfort, if not luxury. Even the blacks in Wesley’s play come from middle-class families. Proletarians are too busy working and too tired after work to get much pleasure out of terrorism. Television is a simpler discharge of accumulated hostility. But of course the hostility is different. In the millionairess with a machine gun, or blowing herself up making bombs in an expensive New York townhouse, it seems to come from something even deeper than the levels reached by Freud. The Oedipus complex is not enough. Is it the life tedium of a society with only purely material values in which the only satisfactions are commodities? But this isn’t really true of our society. We may be offered a commodity guaranteed to satisfy any need, but we soon learn to turn away, at least sometimes. There are plenty of spiritual transcendental values going around. Lots of people think there is altogether too wide a variety of them. Is it the lack of creative work and opportunities for self-realization? But these are precisely the people who have always enjoyed the most of such opportunities. Is it the profound immorality of the dominant society and its Establishment? Establishments have always been profoundly immoral. Neither Watergate nor Willie Brandt’s love life are unique in history. Furthermore, it is obvious that problems such as these are not going to be solved by immolating yourself in a burning building.
I think that melodramas like those of the Manson Family and the SLA are going to become more and more common. I am not personally acquainted with anyone who has read more about this type of social sickness than myself. I have certainly not found any satisfactory answers. It’s about time that people without pet theories and ready-made solutions begin to devote some serious scientific work to the subject.
[July 1974]
I have just finished six years in academia. I used to think it was bad for writers to teach because too much of their time was taken up with people who were their juridical inferiors but who quite often were in fact their superiors in everything but specific chunks of information. The teacher’s podium is a platform of authority and the crippled furniture — the one-armed chairs — are positions of inferiority. Authoritarianism is built into every aspect of the educational structure. Certain kinds of authoritarianism have in the past worked very well to produce a highly cultivated administrative caste — 19th-century England, traditional China, the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious it doesn’t work today — not even in the colleges of the old-time liberal professions like law and medicine. The astronauts were educated men, yet their conversations came back from interstellar space resembling nothing so much as the talk of a couple of garage mechanics, one in the grease pit and one taking the lid off the engine. But we hadn’t heard anything until the White House tapes. The Watergate conspirators and their “co-conspirator” are all very expensively educated men. Perhaps a majority have six years of college. The whole Watergate imbroglio may demonstrate that the office of Presidency has gotten out of hand, that public morals are breaking down, that extortion has become an accepted perquisite of a political career. But what the tapes demonstrated conclusively is that our educational system has broken down. None of these people when teacher wasn’t listening, or now, when the ghostwriter isn’t writing, is able to speak English. What their grunts and curses, Damon-Runyan-imitation-underworld slang, and strange utterances devoid of the accepted parts of speech demonstrate is the common culture of the elite — at least what the electorate chose to consider the elite. Can you imagine Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, talking this way, even if drunk, even in locker rooms, if there had been locker rooms in their day? A cultural consensus has vanished and ultimately this is the fault of the educational system.
One of the nicest stories about Teddy Roosevelt: He captured a couple of bandits on his ranch in the Badlands, tied them to their horses and drove them ahead of him down the banks of the Missouri. Every night around the campfire he entertained them by reading aloud from Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, which had just come out in English. Always, night and day, keeping them covered, until he could turn them over to the law. It certainly was a different age. There are plenty of college graduates but there aren’t many cultured people running around. How many people have read the great world classics, any of them, for pleasure? How many people read books for pleasure? How many people read books? How many people read?
The trouble with higher education and most of all in the great universities, it that it is not designed to turn out cultured people; that is, people capable of getting the widest and deepest range of values available out of their civilization. In imitation of a kind of German university that no longer exists in Germany, our universities are designed to turn out something called “scholars.” Even the extremely popular courses in “Creative Writing” are not designed to turn out creative writers, but teachers of creative writing. Too true. Yet they are not designed to turn out teachers at all. From the Renaissance to the present time there has been a succession of educational reformers. “Progressive education” is not new but as old as modern civilization itself. The remarkable thing is that the great educational reformers are in substantial agreement. Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) in Germany, Jean-Henri Pestalozzi (1746-1827) in Switzerland, Maria Montessori (1870-1952) in Italy, Francisco Ferrer, who was executed in Barcelona in 1909, were all in substantial agreement as to the nature of learning and the practice of education. Progressive educational methods based on a consensus of their philosophies of education was characteristic of the public school systems of several states, most notably Indiana, and out of Chicago the educator-disciples of John Dewey were reforming teaching methods throughout the Middle West. The average college professor has never heard of any of these people except possibly Montessori, whom he may well believe is something eaten with tomato sauce.
College educators do not take courses in education unless they are Education majors. That’s not the way it works. You get a ticket called a B.A. and get on an escalator. At the next landing the ticket is punched. That’s called M.A. At the next landing the punch is called the Ph.D. The final landing and the final punch is called tenure and you’re fixed for life. These tickets are issued in various colors. Each color is called a “field.” For instance, “Early Middle English Falconry Manuals” or “The Later Novels of George Eliot,” and wandering from field to field is discouraged. Interdisciplinary activity confuses the budgets of the various departments and is always discouraged and often made impossible. Where is the student in this? He isn’t. The theory is that a great scholar profoundly researching the poetry of Elizabeth Goodge for his Ph.D. pays his dues to the taxpayers and parents by teaching, and the teaching is always organized in such a way as to encourage the student to climb on the escalator. This is true of the humanities generally and only the old professions like law, medicine, engineering and the sciences are exceptions, but here there are so many highly specialized required courses that the student emerges devoid of any general cultural education.
California universities are planned for “scholars,” and yet only a tiny percentage of the students will ever go on to the higher degrees. They will become, most of them, businessmen or housewives of businessmen and they should have spent four years being prepared to enjoy a rich, satisfying cultural life.
After four years of college, a student should be well-rounded in the appreciation of the arts, familiar with the basic works of the world’s great literature, have a general cultural knowledge of up-to-date science, should be able to read fluently and speak at least passably one foreign language, should be familiar with world history and geography, should have a sound knowledge of economics, sufficient to be able to read between the lies in the newspapers, and should have something which isn’t taught at all: four years of a mixture of health, hygiene, psychology, sex — the knowledge of the human self in all its relations with others. Beyond this, subjects like anthropology or animal psychology or something else nice you really don’t have to know should be available as electives. “The Major” pointing straight up the escalator to the final apotheosis of Emeritus should be abolished altogether for undergraduates. Where in California is it possible to get such an education?
[September 1974]
Last month I started talking about the historically unparalleled breakdown in education and of the inability of educational reformers to make any serious dent in education, most especially at the university level, after 200 years of trying.
People have remarked of the September column that I talked mostly about university education, and the reformers whom I mention — Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Francisco Ferrer — concerned themselves almost exclusively with not just elementary education, but with the kindergarten. This was also true of the teaching of sensory awareness and esthetic order that budded off from the Bauhaus in Germany between the wars. The only progressive schools that have won widespread acceptance are those that follow the ideas of Rudolph Steiner, who broke away from the Theosophists to found a rather cranky religion of his own called Anthroposophy. They are dotted over Germany, and Dartington Hall in the west of England was originally a Steiner school. And there are some in America.
This drives home the point. The original reformers moved into unoccupied territory. They invented the kindergarten. Only in certain public school districts, mostly in northern Indiana, did their ideas ever have decisive, determinative effect. The Steiner schools exist as a kind of secession, really parochial schools, like the Catholics and the Lutherans. In the established system of education the inertia is so great that ideas two hundred years old are only rarely put in practice. The best of the kind are still in England: Dartington Hall, Bedales, Sherbourne and St. Michael’s Hall. The trouble with schools like this in the last ten years or so is that they have slowly become isolation wards for problem children. Summerhill, the most experimental of all, is close to being a psychiatric institution. This is a problem the progressive schools in the Bay Area have had to face and in some cases has led to their abandonment. It’s true even of summer camps. When my daughters were young I hunted around for the camp that had replaced “Singing Trail” of happy memory on Huntington Lake operated by the Blumenthals — he was director of the Jewish Center. I found it just opened up in Mendocino County. The first year was fine but by the third it had become a minimum-custody summer home for problem children, an extremely expensive “Correctional Facility,” as it says on the highway signs. (My daughter says this idiotic term sounds like a sadie-mazie brothel.) The fourth year the camp did not reopen. It had turned into something far different from what they had hoped.
This is the problem of progressive education generally. Sussex, which promised to be the best university in the English-speaking world, was overwhelmed by the most way-out freaks and hippies and is only recently recovering. Antioch, one of the great traditional progressive schools of America, along with Oberlin and Reed, may go under this year. The problem lies with the administrators and the teachers. There simply aren’t enough progressive educators to go around. In fact there is only a tiny handful at the college level who know what they are doing. This is the tragedy of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dean McHenry (his name is Dean) started from scratch with a couple of barns, some redwood trees, and a meadow, to building an educational utopia. As the school grew, faculty were recruited more and more by the most conventional standards of Ph.D.-mill scholarship. Students came expecting to find the progressive school of the publicity brochures and discovered instead that they were in just another University of California run by Herr Doktor Wissenschafts devoted, if they were devoted at all, to turning out lots of little Herr Doktor Wissenschafts.
What’s the solution? There really isn’t any solution. The educational system in America is an enormous mass of slowly decaying inertia. It is really doubtful if anything can be done about it. It is the largest heap of vested interests in the country. At the university level it is also the largest body of people who don’t know what they’re doing. It cannot be reformed via departments of education because they identify progressive education with group gropes, consciousness-raising circles, reevaluation therapy sessions, all run by group dynamics. Thousands of little Esalens are not going to solve the educational problems of America for the simple reason that when the victim has passed through them she or he has learned nothing whatever. Education courses, however freaky, have no effect on university teachers. The university is not set up in their opinions to educate, but to pay them for “scholarship.” If at the end of your seven-year apprenticeship you’re up for tenure, the criterion is “publication,” and this means not serious books which are a contribution to and extension of serious knowledge, but heavily footnoted, bibliographed and indexed trivia which a skillful newspaper man or researcher for Time or the Encyclopedia Britannica could put together in a couple of afternoons at the library. This kiss of death is to be liked by students. An award, “Most Popular Teacher,” is likely to get you fired.
There are possible solutions but it is certainly utopian to believe they will ever be put in effect, as long as this society endures. Not only should the demand “publish or perish” be abandoned, but university faculty should be actively discouraged from publishing anything except by reputable trade and textbook publishing houses, particularly the former. History, which the pedants now call by the barbarism “historiography,” should be history like it used to be, like Herodotus, Thucydides, Ssu-ma Chien, Livy, Tacitus, Froissart, Gibbon, Hume, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott. I list most of the greatest historians to drive home the point than not one of them could get a job in a history department of a major university. In the corridors of academia two of the most readable historians of our time — Barbara Tuchman and C.V. Wedgwood — are considered a disgrace to the profession, in fact, no members of it at all. We are historians, they are historiographers, an activity best left nowadays to women, like crewel work, or bearing children. Tenure should be abolished. It was invented to protect the academic world from the onslaught of reactionary politicians and McCarthyite investigators. It has produced a pandemic of civil service-itis. The is little difference in the attitude toward his job of a college professor and an orderly in the county hospital. The junior faculty on their way up are affected in exactly the opposite way than was planned. They are terrified to be caught in unconformity. To understand the modern world it is essential to have some sound information about Marxism. The Jesuits teach it. I wonder if there is a course in Marxism in any school in the state system. To the best of my knowledge there is not even a course in Walt Whitman. Meanwhile the educators’ educators babble about “relevance,” Black English, and feelies.
[October 1974]
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