AMERICA II
267
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Sirs:
... Mr. Duberman feels that the potentiality of an SDS-type
youth movement is limited since students are overwhelmingly white and
middle-class, and very few of them can make an "emotional identifica–
tion" with the poor and the black. . . . There is a growing awareness,
in SDS particularly, that the deeper motivation behind our revolt is
the painful knowledge that even as white, middle-class students we are
in
a very real sense "deprived" in America. Deprived, that is, of the
possibility of realizing in any permanent way certain basic human values
in our own lives. The kind of life which faces most of us when we
leave the university-a life within the dehumanizing machinery of
modern technological bureaucracy-seems to offer very little in the way
of real satisfactions, and it is this realization, rather than "emotional
identification" with the poor, which is at the root of the student rebel–
lion. In other words, the activist feels that it is not only the salvation
of the poor and of the Negro which depends on radical social change,
but his own personal salvation as well. . . .
Miss Sontag speaks most eloquently of her own disgust with the
disturbing quality of American life ; she sees, quite rightly, the whole
spectrum of student rebellion-hair styles, dances, drugs, etc.-as symp–
tomatic of a general revolt against that way of life. Yet her now
well-known role as enthusiastic apologist of the avant-garde keeps her
from making distinctions or judgments. She seems to see all manifesta–
tions of student revolt as part of a unified upsurge, and as being all
equally laudable. Is she unaware of the fact that unification of student
revolt is a
problem,
not a
fait accompli?
She speaks of being a socialist
and taking drugs regularly as if this were the archetypal figure of stu–
dent revolt. She must know, however, that the activist and the hippie,
although there is some overlap, tend to face each other with distrust and
sometimes contempt. . . .
Sirs:
Robert Woods Sayre
New York, New York
... I was reading the symposium in the Winter issue on
the
train down from Cambridge to Hodderdon, the suburb of London
where I lecture for the Workers' Educational Association. I was very –
depressed by it; I had no idea of the intensity of the disaffection be–
tween the intellectuals and the government. I'm teaching a course -on
Baldwin, under the aegis, the Negro in American Literature, and
