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READERS
. . . My answers (though they're not really) to your questionnaire:
1.
No. As long as he's God how can we go wrong?
2. Inflation: Pretty good if you're Phineas Fogg. Poverty: Pretty
bad if you're broke. That is, if you're a schoolteacher, farmer, student,
hillbilly, Negro, social worker, six childrened divorcee, unemployed,
laborer or convict.
3. One is arrogant and the other is irreproachable. Hard to tell
which is which at anyone instant.
4. Yes, if whites grant equality like the Pentagon grants defense
contracts.
5. Back to pre-history.
6. Nothing really will ever happen in America. Illusions of progress
and events but only a TV image. The tubes haven't changed and
we're still plugged into the same socket. The United States will con–
tinue to exist in its present state of chaotic ennui until it blows the
world to kingdom gone.
7. Yes, there is promise in the activities of young people today,
but since you don't specify which young people I will consider both
groups. The majority of young people will fall blindly into the system's
pattern and promise, insure the events mentioned in response to ques–
tion 6. The minority (myself included) will be silenced by the monolith
in the most efficient manner possible and whenever necessary, which
might not be very far from now. It's a simple matter of philomethod–
ology. The media is the massage.
Sirs:
Robert M. Gerfy
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Maya passionately interested outsider throw
in
a few re–
marks mainly on the question of promise in the activities of the young
in America, and in the world at large,
since
USA sets the tone, par–
ticularly in this respect to the rest of the world....
Susan Sontag's sponsoring of the alienated youth
is
. . .
so sym–
pathetic that one would like to agree
with
her. . . .
[But] the whole Decline of the West romanticism-giving up the
boat before it is really sinking- behind her portraying of the young
dissenters is a
kind
of defeatism unlikely to help the soulsearching of
young
or
old.... And while granting the dissenting youth of today the
normal percentage of generous impulse, intelligence and disgust with
cant that has always been characteristic of the best of any young genera–
tion, one can safely assume, from direct and indirect evidence, that
there has been
no
mutation, endowing the present youth, in or out of
America, with new and supernatural powers of distinction, sophistication
and sensitivity. . . . And the last people who will be helped by over–
rating are the overrated young.
