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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
open and insistent about things that the rest of the country has preferred
not to say out loud. It's the dream of liberation and flight articulated
in concrete and then immobilized as the "freeways" turn to solid steel
from dawn till midnight. It's the dream of noble human works in a
noble landscape shrouded in smog that obliterates the landscape and
smudges the works. It's the dream of progressive politics strangled by
the human comfort it worked so long to create - those millions of people
in little ranch houses who find themselves passing rich on seven or eight
thousand a year and are damn well going to stay that way, niggers or
no niggers. It's the dream of sexual freedom condensed to the wistful
Sadean geometries that beckon from the want ads of the
Berkeley Barb:
''NEED MALE roommate discreet semi hip gay grad student with broad
interest," "MALE WANTS 1 or 2 uninhibited girls 18 to 40 with big
derrieres for sex who are fond of fro and
gr.
cultures." "SEMI HIP
GRAD, 26, tall slim hung OK clean no grass date similar. Also date
liberal girl." Its the classless society where no one wears neckties and
everyone drives a new car and the very rich, like the very poor, are safely
hidden away in their ghettos, but built on a massive fault line and liable
to crack open almost any day now. In short (while my rhetoric holds
out), California is our secret fascination with pleasure, stripped of its cel–
luloid collar and stovepipe hat, but it is also our damnable conviction that
pleasure at best creates boredom and alienation, at worst instant death.
The suicide rate in San Francisco is incredibly high; this was recently
explained as what happens when you reach the end of the road, having
used up the whole continent and found that nothing has really changed,
but I guess we can go on assuming that the poor devils just were having
too much fun to live.
But
if
the national fate, to say nothing of personal fates, doesn't seem
much more hopeful here than elsewhere, it may seem a little clearer.
If
American politics is finally to be polarized into Right and Left, it begins
here, as the Birchers and the New Left go about dismantling the old,
misty political structures.
If
traditional "high" culture is finally to go
under, it begins here in the as yet timorous affair between the Holly–
wood mass r.ledia and the new pop styles.
If
we are to have a social
Armageddon, it may well begin here, where the cops are tougher, the
governors more reckless, the militants more numerous and doctrinaire.
If
after all nothing is to happen, it will be because nothing's happening
here. Nothing may be, but I shouldn't want to bet on it.
