PARTISAN REVIEW
355
the revolution, on account of some oversight on someone's part, did
not seem to happen. The drop-outs, as an ultimate expression of their
disgust with the society, dropped out from dropping out. Thus the
Johnson era led into the curious listlessness, among the young (who
of course were not quite the same young ) , of the Nixon era against
whose scandals (far worse than those of Harding and Coolidge ) they
scarcely protested.
The New York Times
published (April
30, 1973 )
a letter from
an ex-student which seems representative of listlessness. In her ac–
count of the reversal of behavior of her generation the only thing that
has not changed is the tendency to attribute the writer's reactions to
the sickness of the society:
We were politically active in the 1968 Presidential campaign and
again in the 1972 Presidential campaign. Both times we were de–
feated. Throughout the 1960's we demonstrated to end the war in
Vietnam; again we were defeated. ... And now Watergate ; our
failure to react to this outrage is based not on apathy but on the
knowledge that any action we mi ght take would bring no result.
The writer draws the moral that "the students today live in a
state of disillusionment." However exasperated one may feel by her
arguments, her conclusion
is
correct. What is revealing is the way in
which "protest" and "disillusion" are taken to be opposite sides of
the same medal, minted by the political system which - the writer
seems to feel- ought to have granted the students a Eugene Mc–
Carthy or a George McGovern as President, just to stop them getting
disillusioned. That the individual student
is,
at one phase of history,
in
revolt and, at another, disillusioned, is blamed on the public nation.
* *
English writers are, as I have pointed out, drawn to the United
States by its immediately contemporary energy, just as American writ–
ers were, a hundred years ago, drawn to Europe by its past. Yet al–
though American material greatness
is
always in some sense energetic,
on the level of its civilization the energy has to struggle against what
I can only call the still greater force of inertia. America has, spiritually,
the energy of its inertia and the inertia of its energy. Energy and
inertia are interrelated, negative and positive poles of the civilization.
The force of the inertia arises from the exposure of individual
consciousness and values to the public state of the nation. Sensitive,
