LEO BERSANI
certain charm: in danger of being clubbed by the police at Colum–
bia, he imagines himself years later "limping dramatically through
Leftist assemblies, people awed and drunk with sweet pity - the
Martyr! - as I, a one-man Abraham Lincoln Brigade, stumbled half–
wittingly through the crowd, a Crippled Veteran of the Columbia
Rebellion." Irony: our most civilized tactic for putting things back
into place, for seeing them, as we say, in the proper perspective.
These occasional self-exposures are devastating, not because Rader
may have had such fantasies, but rather because he thinks them
worthwhile reporting. To be willing to tell us these tiny secrets im–
plies a perhaps not too tiny desire to be approved by us, and when–
ever Rader's sophistication about
his
naivete gets the lead over
his
uncompromising anger, he is allowing us to forgive
him
for
his
"ex–
cesses"
and
to see those excesses as the comparatively hannless caper
of a boy with rather conventional ambitions.
The humor in
Do It!
is of an entirely different order. Rubin
is of course furiously anxious to get attention, and he is very un–
ashamed and very funny about it, unlike Rader, who either presents
his desire for more attention with self-deprecating irony or inflates
that desire to a tragedy of American youth emasculated by neglect.
Rubin gets a severe attack of "subpoenas envy" when he thinks that
he hasn't been summoned, along with Hoffman, to appear before
the HUAC. And his appearances there were revolutionary fashion
shows. "In two months I had my same old political problem: What
to wear to Congress?" The Congressional reaction to Rubin's costumes
(when he came dressed as Santa Claus, he was barred from the hear–
ing room) completely justify the word "political" here. And while
Rubin naturally knows that his sartorial anxieties are comical, he
also knows that they are potently realistic. The power of symbolic
protest is confirmed by the violence of the reaction against it. For
that protest, while it must of course include specific issues, is, more
fundamentally, against nothing specific. It creates a new social thea–
ter, and, like all social theater, it "solves" the issues it raises by the
manner in which it represents them. Finally, the yippie attacks the
myth that communication is limited to dialogue; he would commu–
nicate, in a way not alien to some respected traditions of art, through
insistent, offensive, militant seduction.
"To let the silence in is symbolism." Having ceased to have
fixed, single meanings, experience may open out into a field of shift-
