21.
RICHARD CHASE
my chest" and because of his feeling of "frank dismay for the
waste of our humanity." Mr. Goodman does not suppose it would
be easy to provide millions of publicly useful and morally re–
warding jobs. Certainly it cannot
be
done artificially, by inventing
more and more jobs. The desirable situation could come about
only if America should seriously decide to make herself over physi–
cally and spiritually. "The simple job plight of these adolescents,"
as he says, "could not be remedied without a social revolution."
The direction of this possible revolution is suggested in the many
fascinating proposals for radical changes in city and town planning
advanced in Goodman's earlier book
Communitas
(written with
his brother Percival). No traditional label, such as "socialism,"
can be attached to Mr. Goodman's "revolution." The ideology can
come later, he seems to think. What matters immediately is the
remaking of an increasingly abstract and inhuman environment
into a world that nourishes in the young their sense of the concrete,
the "on-going," the human, and the communal.
Goodman believes we have created another void for the young
to stare into by allowing the sentiment of patriotism to decline. He
is not talking about flag-waving, of course, but about the power
of "country, community, place . .. to animate." Patriotism may
be
the emotional debauchery of aging Legionaires, but basically, as
Mr. Goodman argues, it is "the culture of childhood and adoles–
cence." And "without this first culture, we come with a fatal
emptiness to the humane culture of science, art, humanity, and
God." Certainly we have blurred the image of patriotism. When
the young become accustomed to such phenomena as President
Eisenhower sending a well-publicized message of condolence to
Clark Gable after his heart attack, is
I
it any wonder that, asked
what living person they would most like to be, the boys at an
Oklahoma High School named Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, and
President Eisenhower?
Leaving aside the Beats (of whom Mr. Goodman gives a sensi–
tive and on the whole sympathetic account), we have, then, an
organized system which is "an apparently closed room" containing
the "rat race" of role-playing and status-seeking. It is characterized
neither by the idea of progress nor by that of the class struggle,
because both of these envisioned an open field of history, whereas
