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STEPHEN SPENDER
beauty of the monument to Queen Victoria and the moral turpitude
of the British government.
Yet the reaction of those American writers who left their coun–
try in the 1920s to get away from the scandals of the Harding and
Coolidge Administrations was fundamentally the same as that of the
publicized tearful touristic lady. American lives are, in some way dif–
ficult for a European to understand, transparent to the public state
of the nation.
During the late sixties the horrors of the war in Vietnam affected
many young Americans as drastically as if they had convinced them–
selves that they were possessed by demons whom they had to exorcise
before they would ever be able to experience their own humanity.
Through the ceremonial burning of draft cards and through private
rites of sex and communal living and smoking marijuana they
achieved, within the group, those expressions of anguished personal
values which made them abhorrent to the public nation. Their feel–
ings about Vietnam merged with those that they had about pollution,
until they finally persuaded themselves that America was doomed
to self-destruction. Hatred of the America of President J ohnson be–
came almost a religion with them. As one of them said to me: "This
country's certain to destroy itself, if not by the war, then by pollution
from all the fumes." They opted out of the country of bombs and
hygiene, and adopted a regimen of protest, "love," and not washing.
At the same time, they blamed their behavior onto the condi–
tions of the war and corruption in American life. They regarded them–
selves as a kind of punishment to America for its being what it was,
and they did not have to look for any further explanation of them.
Their belief even in "the revolution" was based on the idea that
America would produce it inevitably as a punishment for its wicked–
ness, which also accounted for them.
The trouble though with a "sick" generation that attributes its
sickness to the conditions surrounding it, is that it has no standards
by which to criticize a later generation which may produce quite op–
posite symptoms as a reaction to scarcely altered social circumstances.
Sickness is
all.
One year the social conditions produce "revolution";
the following year they produce a cynical conformism or apathy, a
state of disillusionment.
One excuse for the switch from protest to conformism was that
