PARTISAN REVIEW
429
ever greater numbers break through the walls of mean Ananke. The
tremors are felt on all the seismographs.
And who owns the seismographs but those who
think
they risk to
lose the most?
Caveat:
As more people break through the walls of Ananke, domain of
psychic or material deprivation, the nature of militancy in any given
cause becomes narrower. Where vengeance once worked with justice,
new vengeance must work alone.
The fear of the spiteful revolutionary is like that of the avant-garde
artist: success of his cause spells his personal doom.
And the noble utopian? He, too, knows that his dream may serve
as the excuse of the past to mutilate the present in the name of the
future.
8
( I t is becoming more q.nd more complex to be American.)
We are constantly told - and we have eyes of our own to see,
ears to hear, noses to smell! - that we are a "dangerous nation." Amer–
ica serves the cause of reaction around the world at
the same time
that
it incarnates the futures of mankind in its midst.
(There is no contradiction here between Noam Chomsky and
Jean-Fran<;ois Revel.)
But the American psyche must suffer from this; its largess suffers. The
later writings of Norman Mailer show it, pain of the times, great gen–
erosity. Such suffering can also go wrong, become nutty, vicious, sick.
Ir can go wrong and smell wrong, yet it is still legitimate suffering.
(Ashes of the American Dream mingle with galactic dust; America
is still a possibility we can not expunge.)
The malaise is in the air or in print, scattered through pages of the local
newspaper,
Commentary
or
Rabbit Redux.
The Bottom of American society is rising - blacks, youths, women,
poor fo,lks, minorities of every kind - and this should be enough for
the Top, by the antiquated physics of Newtonian reactions, to push the
Bottom down. But this entire process coincides also with a transvalua–
tion of our values and a redefinition of our powers, our military, moral,
economic powers. Can we really wonder, when things are going so
strangely for us - going well, some say,. and others, going badly, but
going anyway - that the American psyche should resort to the ancient
defenses of every psyche: violence, rigidity, nostalgia, projection?
(In times of trouble, even scapegoats scurry about to find substitutes
and paracletes.)
Yes, we are told that we are the most dangerous nation on earth, and
none
0'£
us - the reasons differ - likes it a whit.
(Is the New Conservatism at least an alternative to self-hate?)
9
Button-down collars are coming back. Brooks Brothers: "We hadn't
noticed they passed out of fashion." Fixity.
But the blue whale - may he live - consumes fifty tons of krill
