AMERICA II
271
... There is, in America that has been so long under the tightfitting
lid of puritanism, currently an obsessive talking about what was obses–
sively not-talked about before, viz. physical sex, including deviations....
There is nothing to indicate that talking "sensibly" about sex, or having
it, as a means of communication or knowledge or whatnot, and admit–
ting to doubts about the ridiculous "Western masculinity" that nobody
but fools (who are, it is true, the majority) ever took seriously anyway,
or sporting a bisexuality that is no news to civilized people of any
generation, and was never a secret to artists in any age-that any of
this, or the spread of middle-class youth of promiscuous habits that in
earlier periods and other societies were reserved for the very rich and
the very poor, has solved more problems than it has created for the
young who have not yet begun to know who they are or what their
life is about or in what private coin they will have to pay for their
public privileges, sexual and otherwise. . . . Let, by all means, the
young
have
all the sex they can manage. . . . The more the merrier,
I'm certainly not against the sexually undernourished middle-class Amer–
ican youth( or so far a tiny section of it) getting their share of what
used to be the pleasures of the power elite. . . .
· .. Or
the drug-cult, mixed with undigested Oriental mysticism and
various instant philosophies contrived to disprove the existence of the
individual, with a dash of primitive socialism incongruously added for
spice
(all
American socialism is by definition primitive, so this is noth–
ing against the young) -do let them try it all....
· .. [Although] I don't share Mr. Fiedler's views on a lot of things,
his "tradition of the human" is a wide enough term for the ideals (and
ideals
are
realities) of respect for both the self and the others, of belief
in the critical clarity and the light of reason, of social understanding,
of a passion for justice, both in the Greek sense of the balance of
things and the general ethical sense, of personal conscience and responsi–
bility, of the saving grace of love, both as
agape
and as
eros-in
short
of the whole frame of reference in terms of which Susan Sontag herself
condemns the abominations the white race has also perpetrated on the
world.
It
might be noted that none of these traits are dominant in the
Eastern civilizations, whatever their other virtues may be.
· .. Western civilization, in its American form as in its other
forms, has been pernicious and is now foundering, if indeed it is, from
a betrayal of these values, not from a surfeit of them. . . .
If
the
dissenting young are half as good, beautiful, sensitive and full of complex
desires, as Susan Sontag thinks, and the plight of their society half as
bad, they are certainly worth criticism from and communication with
the rest of us, not just uncritical admiration for an "openness" they
have so far not been asked to pay for, or vague hopes for their salvation,
at the cost of the condemnation of the rest of the human race, or at
least its American constituents.
Elsa Gress
Glumso, Denmark
