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implicitly accept given the limited nature of their protests against
American society. Rubin's version of this may strike us as a crudely
reductive view of liberal politics. The complicity between liberal
capitalism and repressive government is neither a new nor an easily
dismissable idea, and it certainly deserves more serious attention than
Rubin cares to give to the subject. At any rate, I find Rubin's own
position here less important than the self-criticism which such con–
nections, convincingly made, might promote in the liberal mind.
But Rubin is not just asking liberals to be more reflective in
Do It!
A primary purpose of that part of the radical strategy which
consists in enacting the rightist scenarios of radical strategy is to make
the liberals begin speaking - and acting - like the rightists. The
shaky assumption behind such tactics is that they themselves are
nonhistorical and nonpolitical. That is, Rubin and, more dangerously,
those on the Left who directly promote violence,
think
of themselves
merely as catalysts (they bring out the essential properties of liberal–
ism), whereas they are in reality part of a historical sequence and
therefore help to create the alignments they think of themselves as
merely unmasking. The ultimate purpose of living out right-wing
fantasies may be to eliminate politics altogether, to transform history
into a scenario of static confrontations. Rubin's is an old-fashioned
aesthetic which defines theater as the distribution of permanently
fixed roles. From this perspective, such acts as bomb-throwing need
no justification other than that of creating what the bomb-throwers
have already defined as appropriate poses. The ineffable satisfaction
felt by some radicals at having made a liberal take the
pose
of a
rightist is a natural consequence of their indifference to time. In
a truly alarming form of this indifference, our most radical fringe en–
tertains the extraordinary dream of a reign of fascistic terror finally
awakening the flowers of goodness in the human soul, as
if
fascism
could be simply another catalyst with no harmful effects of
its
own
on the society that would presumably rebel against it.
The exuberant mockery of petrified symbolism is liberatingly
critical. Rubin, however, is also tempted by the slavish enactment of
what his enemies enjoy thinking he is like. He runs the risk of putting
himself in the politically sterile position of imitating rather than ex–
posing a metalanguage-and his title invites us to imitate his flam–
boyant imitations of what he has taken to be the profound Arner-
