Left, Right, Gonzo!
FOR REASONS OF STATE by Noam Chomsky Pantheon, $12.95/$3.45
During dark winters in the 1960s each issue of The New York Review of Books seemed to bring a new article denouncing the war in Vietnam, and among these essays were some—full of passion and specificity—by Noam Chomsky. With them Chomsky became an inspiration for many people, especially student radicals, though for many others, particularly in the liberal community, he was an irritant.
The war was little less than a logical outgrowth of American capitalism, Chomsky argued, and he thereby angered those who shared his opposition to the war but resisted both his explanation of its origins and the coolly fervent certitude that often accompanied his ideas. Reviewing his first book of political essays, American Power and the New Mandarins, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote: “Noam Chomsky . . . is not a political analyst at all. Like John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk, he believes in reducing political questions to rather confident and facile moral judgments.” Schlesinger, who was one of the “New Mandarins” Chomsky had in mind, also remarked that before the war Chomsky had “quietly pursued arcane studies . . . in a highly specialized field“—with the clear implication that that was where Chomsky belonged. Chomsky has led a revolution in linguistics, countering what had been presumed to be the advances of the past decades. If the details of his work are abstruse, its implications are accessible. They don’t lead by any sure route to Vietnam, but they do reach far beyond his academic discipline. When Chomsky is speaking of language he is always speaking of much more: of what is unique and unalterable in the human mind. That such properties exist is his fundamental claim. He thus contradicts the whole of behaviorism. This collection includes his attack on B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which Chomsky claims that much of Skinner’s book is trivial and tautological. The thrust of Chomsky’s scholarship works against behaviorism; and so, too, do his feelings: “If in fact man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the ‘shaping of behavior’ by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.” Chomsky proposes a social science (and a society) that proceed from eighteenth-century ideas of the irreducible dignity and complexity of the human mind.
Chomsky’s celebrity depended in part on the sense that he was a political amateur who had strayed far from his scholarly work in linguistics. And yet, lives are seldom compartmental. One of the interesting things about Chomsky’s new collection of essays, For Reasons of State, is that it suggests relationships between his scholarly work and his social and political statements. Chomsky explores this question in an essay called “Language and Freedom.” Whatever one’s politics, the issues raised here are of interest and importance.
Chomsky disputes the behavioristic concept of language, which holds that language is simply acquired by response to external stimuli, like other, more trivial, forms of behavior. He raises troublesome questions for those who hold this view. He points out that their theories fail to explain such simple facts as a child’s ability to say and to understand sentences he has never heard before; that they fail to account for the everyday genius that allows human beings to create an infinity of unique sentences. Words and rules of syntax are, of course, learned, but Chomsky maintains that the capacity for language is innate. He postulates a structure in the mind that governs our use of language, a “universal grammar” to whose rules all human language adheres.
Bracing as Chomsky’s social theories can be, it ought to be said that a certain ideology plays throughout these pages, which can’t be derived unambiguously from his linguistic theories. Chomsky’s view of an ideal society is only hazily defined, and most often in terms of what he opposes, “predatory capitalism.” But it is clear enough that it rests on extremely hopeful assumptions about the prospects for human perfectibility. Chomsky is generally scrupulous in separating hopes from knowledge, and yet it seems that there are some dark possibilities he likes not to face. If you set out to map the mind, must you not prepare to find regions of malevolence?
Nevertheless, at his most impressive, Chomsky reaffirms a sense of the mystery of “human nature,” a phrase he rescues from the vulgarity and quaintness into which it has fallen.
SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution by Kirkpatrick Sale Random House, $15.00
Kirkpatrick Sale recounts the history of the Students for a Democratic Society year by year, from the organization’s beginnings in 1960, to The Port Huron Statement in 1962— which gave voice to discontents that hardly knew of their own existence—and on to the end of the decade, when the movement collapsed into legions of the disillusioned, packs of bombers. This chronological approach makes sense; it is virtually impossible to speak of SDS without placing it in time. The movement, spinning on the outside of the merry-go-round, changed faster than the society it sought to transform.
Sale has been remarkably diligent in reconstructing this story, and he takes pains to share his methodology: has read every issue of New Left Notes, interviewed scores; everything here derives from interviews or from documents, nothing is fictionalized. This is all admirable, and so is Sale’s straightforward identification of his sympathies: he was not a member but a deep believer in the goals of the early organization. Work shines on every page of this book, but unhappily work doesn’t prove to be sufficient. The democracy that Daniel Boorstin describes in this book (the last volume of his trilogy on American society) has relatively little to do with majority rule and minority rights. Boorstin is concerned instead with the growing commonality of experience in the United States over the past hundred years, a social change whose principal agent, of course, has been technology. It may be that Boorstin is simply overwhelmed by the sheer richness of data in which this book’s strength resides. Considerable evocative power lies in all that information, a catalogue of our efforts to translate a noble idea into merchandise.
The trouble in part derives from Sale’s role, which has left him with neither the detachment of an observer nor the intimacy of an insider, and which seems instead to have imposed a romantic solemnity on him. The young men and women, whose lives were being shaped by the movement they led, stride through this chronicle as if they were prematurely old statesmen. Sale is well aware of the fascinating social history that produced SDS-ers (children of the old left—“Red-diaper babies”—as well as sons and daughters of the suburban upper middle class). And he’s aware of the personal revolutions that occurred. But, though he alludes to all of this, he fails to evoke it.
The most engaging part of the book is the one least under Sale’s control, his account of the last years of the movement and the formation of its factions: the Revolutionary Youth Movement, Progressive Labor, and the Weathermen. It is the sheer stuff of this period that is fascinating: the desperate efforts at willed community, the absurdist Days of Rage, the attempts to elide classes and causes. Sale feels evident moral ambivalence about these days. He alternately scowls and sighs at the sight of the highminded ideas of the past crystallizing into rigid ideology and violence. He knows better than to forgive all on grounds of the government’s actions—and yet he wants to do so nonetheless, and so we have such sonorous and queasy sentences as “. . . President Nixon intervened to order ‘a new crackdown’ on those who would use bombs five thousand miles away from Vietnam.”
It may well be true, as Sale hopes, that SDS left a “legacy” from which “will evolve a new organization and a new leftward spirit.” In any event, in the organization that recently existed extraordinary human drama occurred, but much of it has slipped through Sale’s fingers.
THE AMERICANS:
The Democratic Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin Random House, $10.00
Inventors and entrepreneurs figure large in his study. Things are in the saddle. Boorstin can tell you about the impact of the sewing machine, the square-bottomed bag, the folding box, the streetcar and the septic tank, the lesson of the slaughterhouse: “These decades of experience in disassembling hogs would prepare the way for Henry Ford’s new way of assembling automobiles.”
He has a good sense of the reductiveness of invention. Gail Borden, the condenser of milk, was inspired by the Donner Party tragedy to find a way of preserving food, and he ended up proclaiming that he would make “attar of everything.” “I mean to put a potato into a pillbox, a pumpkin into a tablespoon. . . .” Food could go everywhere, people and products could go everywhere, until everywhere was nowhere. It is one of Boorstin’s themes that Americans continually invented new ways of becoming the same.
Not, of course, a new idea. Boorstin avoids deeper questions about the relationship between American things and American values, about the processes that keep the shelves of the Big PX full. Or he avoids answers. Questions are one of his favorite devices: “Was the brighter, richer, more open life that America promised a product, then, not of a high standard of living, but only of an always rising standard of living?” By the close of The Democratic Experience, he suggests that technological momentum is in control. And yet he is curiously undismayed by this grimly familiar idea, and I wonder if he wholly believes it. His account of the space program recalls how much of the decision to go to the moon relied on human motives, on an undisguised and naïve lust for international prestige.
A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEARS by Stefan Kanfer Atheneum, $7.95
Stefan Kanfer remarks that he has taken a lesson in perspective from the Tom Stoppard play of a few years ago: “If you are Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, Hamlet is only a walk-on.” The walk-ons in Kanfer’s account of the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Commiteee are such figures as Senator Joseph McCarthy; the central characters are the men and women of the entertainment industry who participated in various ways in the phenomenon known as blacklisting.
A peculiar nastiness adheres to this tale. Its villains were not simply political men on a power bender; they were crowds running scared; often they were friends and colleagues of their victims. This was a moment when the word “controversial” attached to a man was enough to end his career. A director could justify his cooperative appearance before HUAC by saying: “All right, I earned over $400,000 last year from theater. But Skouras says I’ll never make another movie. You’ve spent your money, haven’t you? It’s easy for you. But I’ve got a stake. . . .” Even people of invincible reputation could find it convenient not to run against the tide. Dalton Trumbo wrote a letter of appeal for a public statement against blacklisting to the following writers: William Faulkner, A. B. Guthrie, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams. He had no replies.
It is to Kanfer’s credit that he doesn’t pretend that vengeance loose in the land simply appeared, unoccasioned. He makes plain that if the reaction on the Right was immeasurably more dangerous than what it opposed, it had no monopoly on simplemindedness. Kanfer describes, for instance, that 1930s actor who objected to the evident class bias in Shakespeare’s treatment of Ophelia, and who found a way to give the anti-fascist salute in act V, scene I of Hamlet. The embarrassed often had something to be embarrassed about.
Beyond the public betrayals and self-serving confessions of these frightened years were, as Kanfer remarks, countless acts of private cowardice, of “self-censorship.” That is plainly true, and yet this book serves to remind us how much we depend in private and public life on self-censorship of a higher order— the restraint that operates out of respect for contrary opinion—and how much destruction can occur when that unwritten contract collapses.
Given its virtues, it would be nice to say that A Journal of the Plague Years makes compelling reading. It doesn’t. There is the essential melancholy of the events themselves. And there is Kanfer’s prose, which is often oblique and burdened with mind-numbing metaphor. (“But this gandy dancing on the grave was painfully small workmen’s compensation.”) The book, though, is a document of some power, and you can imagine without difficulty the situation in which it may be a useful reference work. It is illustrated with photographs. In one picture, four members of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee stare at the camera with steely directness. A fifth, Representative Richard Nixon (R., Calif.), looks away. Is that a smile on his lips? Is there innocence left behind that smooth young face? It would be lovely to learn what feelings a look at that photograph today would stir in the mind of the President.
THE NEW JOURNALISM by Tom Wolfe: with an anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson
Harper & Row, $10.95
FEAR AND LOATHING:
On the Campaign Trail ‘72 by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson Straight Arrow, $6.95
According to Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism has taken on the sacred trust abandoned by the novel, social realism. There is something to this idea, but the reader quails when Wolfe energetically compares the decade of such figures as Rex Reed, Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe to the age of Balzac and Dickens. A kind of poignance pervades this essay. It is written with the cavorting tricks Wolfe brought to journalism: ellipses and exclamations (“gork!”)—gimmicks that every feature ace on every small-town daily knows by now. But its implicit message is: I grow old, I grow old. Wolfe—when he’s good, a battler against vanity—now broods about his place in literature. Meanwhile the genre he has been so closely associated with goes on changing.
The New Journalist of the moment would seem to be Hunter S. Thompson. The exact term for Thompson’s work is Gonzo Journalism. “The Prince of Gonzo” Thompson is called by a more conservative but an admiring journalist, J. Anthony Lukas. Gonzo Journalism supplements the techniques of the novelist with the techniques of the lunatic.
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 is a collection of Thompson’s rather celebrated election-year coverage for Rolling Stone. He dwells on the intoxication of political campaigns, a quality that conventional journalism tends to overlook. Journalistic authority in election years, as in other times, depends on the pretense of unflappable knowingness. And all the while something gets squeezed out of the prose: the secret shared by journalist and candidate alike, that everybody is zonked on experience, the mindless exhilaration of travel, exhaustion, street theater, and delicious hypocrisy. Thompson is determined to dramatize this, and he also brings to the spectacle his own mannered oddity. He is an avowed user of “Dangerous Drugs,” a serious drinker, a wearer of Levi’s in the corridors of power, a sometime radical politician, candidate for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, on the “Freak Power Ticket.” He lacks what used to be called judgment. After an all-night drinking event he lends his press pass to a companion known as “the Boohoo,” who (according to Thompson’s account of his informant’s account) boards Muskie’s lugubrious Florida campaign train, “The Sunshine Special,” and runs amok. Crazed with gin, he assaults the Muskie “cheerleaders,” threatens journalists, and interrupts a whistlestop speech by clinging to Muskie’s pants leg and yelling, “Get your lying ass back inside and make me another drink, you worthless old fart!”
Now it also becomes plain that Thompson himself is a personable fellow who gets on well with the press corps and with McGovern and his men. He is also surreptitiously well connected. (We see him talking to McGovern at Max Palevsky’s swimming pool, where he happened to be because “my wife was one of the guests.”) Thompson dotes on himself as a traveler between what are presumed to be disparate worlds: “I hung around Washington for a few days after the DNC purge, buying up all the cheap smack I could find . . . and on Wednesday afternoon I stopped at McGovern’s office in the Old Senate Office building for an hour or so of talk with him.”
Thompson’s gift is for hyperbole and fantasy. (One of his more amusing flights involves his explanation of Muskie’s torpor: the candidate is deep into the drug “Ibogaine,” which allows African hunters to sit motionless for two days.) But when he wants to say something straight-and-heavy, he can’t always make it around the bend. At least I feel uncomfortable listening to the Prince of Gonzo on Eagleton’s mental health.
Much of this book is given to Thompson’s spoofing the conventional press, whom he calls the “wizards.” His relationship with his aboveground fellows is complex, laced with nuances of status-anxiety, a fit subject for Tom Wolfe. Network and newspaper people read Rolling Stone with care, as a telltale of emergent style, and Hunter Thompson’s work in particular caused currents of envy in the world of the straight journalists, who coveted his freedom from restraint. John Chancellor writes a rather deferential “Dear Hunter” letter protesting that Thompson mistakenly included NBC in his indictment of television’s failure to understand what was going on at the convention, when the McGovern forces deliberately lost a vote. Chancellor is right. Thompson admits this by way of a mock outrage: “Dear John. . . . . You filthy skunk-sucking bastard! What kind of gall would prompt you to write me a letter like that sac of pus dated Aug. 11?”
Well, freedom to write this is freedom all right, but of a self-limiting sort. This sentence represents a frequent device of Thompson’s, the pseudo-psychotic invective. Thompson calls various figures “scumbag,” “rat-in-heat,” “walking corpse,” “geek,” “waterhead.” After a run of this you believe his sincerity in protesting (on the dust jacket): “I’ve seen in some of the ad copy for this book that ‘only Hunter Thompson could forge such an astounding breakthrough in political realism.’ Which is ludicrous bullshit, because anybody could do it—and the reasons why they don’t still puzzle me . . .” But I don’t mean to suggest that the relationship between Hunter Thompson (or the generic New Journalist) and his audience is ever quite so simple as that between the preacher and his congregation. No, it is cozy and complex. This is a topic whose intricacies Tom Wolfe might have explored, had he been looking inward in his essay on the New Journalism. New Journalism proceeds from one sure piece of knowledge: that whatever audience there once was for the journalist has exploded into a multitude of audiences. Traditional journalism still tries to speak the language of consensus, a language whose vocabulary has steadily eroded. Hence the hollow sound on the evening news. The New Journalist takes on a considerable burden, which is to win his audience by creating himself in print. When this is done successfully it can approach the novelist’s work: dramatizing a full and subtle sensibility. But more often we settle for a caricature. Despite the moments of wit and shrewdness in Fear and Loathing, I’d say that is the case with Hunter Thompson, and that his stylized derangement ends up seeming convenient and cute.
But this is too modest. And not modest enough. Thompson can write as he does because (in roughly equal parts) he is blessed with talent, and recklessness, and he is writing for Rolling Stone. It is hard to think of another publication that could afford to pay his American Express bill and publish his insults and his long, comic introductions to articles that don’t quite get written. It is more important than it ought to be that he is writing to an audience that already shares his view. This takes an edge off his prose, and makes it easier for him to be self-indulgent. He says before Nixon’s victory: “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen, with all the money we need to buy guns. . . .”You may agree that Nixon represents a sinister tawdriness, but the sentence, in its easiness, doesn’t escape being tawdry. The need to persuade might have nudged it out of banality.