118
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
had a lot to say about citizens (i.e., Negroes) obeying the law (i.e., the
Oakland cops), tried to give away the redwoods to the lumber compa–
nies - and the polls show only a modest drop in his popularity, in a
state where nearly everyone is either old or sick or in college or insane
or a fiscal troglodyte or Negro or a conservationist, and often most of
these at once.
Politics here has become what we fear it is becoming everywhere,
a play of images on the big screen we want to think public life is, quite
divorced from issues and honest (or dishonest) self-interest. But they
aren't true images. No one who really responds to images, appearances
taken as clues to inner life, could
look
at Reagan and still support
him.
As
I said, he looks awful, with the tense, purse-mouthed solemnity of
the junior executive called in to make his first big presentation to the
Board - none of the slick New Right skill one had expected and feared,
none of the boyish warmth of his old juvenile roles, just pomposity and
strain.
If
there is an issue here, it's Vietnam, which Reagan predictably
meets with cries of escalation and "total victory." San Francisco has just
voted on Proposition P, calling for American withdrawal without specify–
ing conditions. No one expected it to win, and it didn't; there were lots
of good, gray liberal consciences wrung out about the Extremeness of
its language, and the
Chronicle,
whose distaste for the war is clear on
most nonvoting days, editorially called for a "no" vote because passage
of the measure might seem to create a "posture of defeat" whereas our
aim should be withdrawal with "honor" - a word that Herb Caen's
readers must have been a little startled by in such a connection. (The
other papers of course took a firmly apocalyptic view of the whole idea.)
But while it failed, the proposition got nearly 40% of the vote, vague
and extreme as it may have been.
The war is of course abhorrent to the young and the radical, but
practical skepticism and even some moral concern is creeping into older
and more conventional minds too. In our neighborhood of engineers,
junior businessmen and professional people, one hears little enough about
it, and indeed this Peninsular suburb is heavily Republican and pretty
conservative generally. War is money, certainly for the engineers and
technicians and peripherally so for the media people and academicians
who more or less oppose it. But Vietnam isn't just a political, economic,
military idea in suburbia. It's also, or so I fancy, a center around which
to arrange one's other concerns, particularly about the young and their
rebelliousness.
People here seem apprehensive enough in general. Conversations are
friendly but guarded and a little distracted, with the self-assertive
