MAKING IT
251
lngs of Molotov cocktails on the cover of
T he New York Review of
Books
-
the put-on is merely more timely. Is it revolution they are
advocating with the drawing, no, it is news. Is that really news? No, but
.it is an attitude. What's an attitude? That's for you to define, but why
are you upset by the drawing? So the new Establishment is ultra-Left,
yet not very left. They will talk of going to Hanoi to sit in cafes to be
;oombed, but they do not sign income tax protests against the war nor
are they ready to put their names to a number of causes which could
land them in jail. They are indifferent to power, they are resourceful at
gathering it. In fact, they have no attitude to power goes the put-on,
why do you? Where the old Establishment was often supercilious about
literary values, beating every writer to death with the standard of Henry
James until the moment came when the critic would say, " I can't bear
Henry J ames, can you?" so the new Establishment is supercilious about
power, success, and money. Success is not its dirty little secret, but its ball
of mercury. Do not trap the mercury it would say - my powers of
locomotion depend on its ability to keep me moving - I am a dead
man once I stop!
That is the anxiety of all Establishments. Stripped of all British
wickedness, their talents they believe are revealed as second-rate, they
are but flowers pressed
in
a book. So they will play the shell game, do
the dance of the veils, adore the put-on, elevate Camp, praise Pop, rush
' to install plastic in fashions, and avoid like demons and witches con-
frontation upon a point.
Can tha t be why
Making It
was so abominable to them? Because
Podhoretz was blind to the defenses of the put-on and had the idiocy or
the suicidal strength to move to the center of the stage, open his box,
exhibit his tricks?
If
mercury is your god, then self-exposure is like sand,
like sand up your ass, like bogging the armies of your friends in swamps
of sand - it was with all the fury of a military betrayal that the Estab–
'Iishmcnt turned on Podhoretz.
Yes. For indeed this Establishment began some thirty or thirty-five
years ago when a few timid intellectuals fierce in the power of their
,minds took a set of uncompromising attitudes on literary standards, and
discovered to their surprise that more than a few in America - that
bowl of the great undefined soup - listened to them as authorities,
followed them as though they might be high priests with an ear to the
murmur in the void.
It
had begun as a put-on. No one knew as much as they claimed
to know, no one could have passed through the galaxies of experience
they were ready to judge, authority was a mask they assumed as the
bravest assertion of their life (the ills and the terrors of the ghetto
