CALIFORNIA
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bonhomie of stereotypical suburbians not much in evidence. I perhaps
coarsely suppose that my quiet, withdrawn, tired-looking neighbors are
heavily in debt and that they haven't wholly adjusted their Depression–
formed consciences to such a condition.
If
life here is comfortable, it is
also expensive. And much of the expense goes to appease the young–
not just the overpriced ranch houses that provide entree to good (and
unintegrated) public schools and the sporty cars without which no
middle-class California youth can survive adolescence, but also the mod
clothes, the record-players, the guitars, the surfboards and tape-recorders
and walkie-talkies that (in their parents' darkest moods of prophecy)
they will carry off with them to Haight Street when the Big Drop Out
comes at last.
At any rate,
if
Vietnam provides intellectuals with a rhetorical
exercise that absorbs and purges other anxieties and guilts than the ones
the war itself so amply justifies, there may be a middle-class parallel in
a sense of parental inadequacy that feeds into unarticulated attitudes
toward the war and the Scene generally. I imagine a tangle of associa–
tions something like this: the kids are unhappy, and the more we try
to connect with them the unhappier they get; they get hung up on
clothes, music, hair, Negroes, drugs, and none of these seem open to
negotiation or even understanding; but Vietnam
is
understandable, and
even squares can feel disturbed enough about waste and aimlessness of
policy to make it a possible ground on which to approach the young
with signs of agreement.
If
Vietnam were taken away, would the young
be able to resist so intransigently on the issues that would remain? Would
the adult world, which having absorbed the music and fashion of the
young now shows at least some sign of trying to cope with the racial
problem and even of beginning to apprehend the drug thing, maybe
then seem a little less hopeless and alien? No one of course has said
anything like this in my hearing, but my having made it up may not
keep it from bearing some relation to the minds I'm talking about.
(That they are undoubtedly kidding themselves is another matter.) I do
know that people who turn apoplectic at the thought of long hair and
drugs (which of course represent sexual license to the respectable imagina–
tion) often surprise me by offering no resistance to my own disgust about
the war.
It
will be obvious that I've described a California that isn't much
different from the rest of America, climate and scenery excepted.
California isn't a comic
lusus naturae,
it's rather the condition toward
which America has always been tending, but with the virtue of being
