656
SUSAN SONTAG
among the signatories of the earlier statements there are naifs and "Mao–
ists." But every political gesture which has any hope of effectiveness is an
exercise in coalition. And on the principle implicit
in
the first part of the
statement in PR, one would be unable in 1936 to express outrage over the
fascist insurrection
in
Spain without acknowledging the weaknesses of
the government, protest against the House Un-American Activities Com–
mittee without affirming that one was against Communism, participate
in civil liberties agitation without explaining that one deplores the mob
violence of Los Angeles, or oppose the death penalty without setting forth
a scheme for the reduction of violence in American life and the rehabili–
tation of murderers.
Petitions and ads taken out in the
New York Times
are, obviously,
only a gesture. While steering between the ineffectual and the desperate,
they do not supply information (at least, not much) or sustained analysis.
The existence of
1.
F. Stone, putting out his
Weekl'Y
and writing in the
New Yark Review of Books,
is probably worth more than all the state–
ments put together. The attitudes of the growing body of Peace Corps
veterans returning to America probably possess more depth and serious–
ness than the newly found political dissent of untraveled college students.
But the statements do have a certain primitive educational effect-if only
on the people who are moved to sign them, and then find themselves
"having" a position, having "taken" a stand.
BO,th the stupidity and
mena~e
of, and the hope for, American
foreign policy are rooted in the situation at home, in the fact that
foreign policy decisions are taken by the present administration mainly
because they are domestically popular. New Dealism at home and Gold–
waterism abroad is the magic formula which the President has found to
keep more people happy than ever before. Apart from the sustained
analysis of American foreign policy that can be conducted only by in–
formed students of world affairs like George Lichtheim and Oscar Gass
and Hans Morgenthau (it would be 'foolish for the average intellectual
or writer to claim competence in these! matters), there is a place for a
more emotional kind of appeal and attempt at reeducating America, as
represented by the earlier petitions and "tatements. Most Americans are
possessed by a profound chauvinism that is existential rather than ideolo–
gical: they really do not believe that other countries, other ways of life,
exist-in
the way that they, and theiI)l, do. (One saw this, for example,
in the pathetic rhetoric of Henry Cabot Lodge's address to the Oxford
Union in June; one sees it every day in the
malaise
and quotidian anxiety
about "foreignness" of most Americans who are traveling abroad.) What–
ever challenges this chauvinism, which is the basis of American consensus
on foreign policy, is good-however simplified and unelaborated.
