HAROLD ROSENBERG
utterly mad, though privately, as individuals like ourselves, they may
be
very nice fellows.
Here in the U.S. our orgmen check one another. Outside America,
however, they tend to see as a group. What they visualize are forces like
themselves but with possibly less power. To speak to these personifica–
tions about humanity is senseless. Humanity is simply another abstraction,
but an unorganized one--something like nature, which needs the tractor.
LBJ has
chosen
to represent the consensus of corporate personifica- ,
tions-political, economic, military (including the civil rights movement
in so far as it is abstract). I italicize
chosen
to emphasize that his behavior
is not forced upon him and that he is responsible for his actions. No one ,
could be forced to act as Johnson has been acting. LBJ is an original
creation, a self-contrived source. He could insist that all decisions include
consideration of human beings. Instead he is concerned only with abstrac- ,
tions. He listens only to the consensus of humanly vacant personifications.
For this concept of the nation he will have to answer to the future.
Returning to our politics of illusion-events are contrived out of the
whole cloth in order to provide occasions for actions or statements of
policy. Events are made to happen for the sake of words, instead of
words being used to give an account of events. History has been turned
inside out; writing it takes place in advance of its occurrence, and every
statesman is an author in embryo. (We have seen the results of rule by
failed painters and divinity students.) To complicate the farce, profes–
sional historians are brought in to participate in the action, and wind
up by getting into fights with politician-historians as to what actually took
place.
Current events may be defined as the means by which privileged authors
- Presidents, Generals, heads of secret intelligence agencies-confirm their
fictional creations by means of putting pressure on foreign governments
and by invasions, bombings, etc. The philosophy taught by the modern
superstate is that events are nothing but propaganda.
Naturally, this puts the government into unfair competition with
novelists, playwrights, critics, who have to be convincing through words
alone. Literature has the same complaint against Washington as any other
business or profession whose field of activity has been encroached upon
by the government's superior resources.
If
all lies are to be socialized what
chance has individual enterprise? To make matters worse, like all image–
makers the government demands an end to criticism-it wants "construc–
tive suggestions," in a word, assent. Those who personify abstract aims
have no use for people with doubts and who are professionally dedicated
to raising questions. The White House finds the intellectuals a nuisance
for the same reason that the Communist party did. The government would
