214
MARGE PIERCY
growing up lest they become drug-dealing preverts, but a posses–
sive mother kills ...
We had not the active paranoia we have learned through the
sixties and seventies, the Pychonesque government plot involving
the CIA, the Mafia, the White House, and ITT: the knowledge that
behind the bland or incoherent violent facade of newspaper
"events" lie unimaginable writhings of interlocked directorates of
multinational corporations. No, the facade was entire in the
fifties: every Corinthian column in its place and nobody on the
white marble steps but the D.A. taking his oath. Our paranoia was,
first, petty: that "they," i.e., the FBI, would immediately know if
I talked to a Communist or took Engels's
On the Family
out of
the library. While I was at Michigan there was a minor furor when
a student confessed to her boy friend that the
FBI
had scared her
into giving them a list of everyone who came to his many parties,
for he was ... an avowed Marxist! When I arranged for Pete Seeger
to give his first concert there in many years, I felt incredibly
cheeky.
It
was playing poker with monopoly money. The political
dimension had been crushed from our lives, making it impossible
to think about community, the state, the economy, history in any
vital way.
The paranoia was massive on another level: enemyless. Life
would get you. Life was obviously in the employ of
J.
Edgar
Hoover and the
Ladies' Home Journal.
The conception of human
nature was narrow: we are only now engaged in trying to knock it
more open again. People were cardboard good, or inherently
dark ly evil. People may kill themselves more now, but they don't
jaw endlessly about it.
The fifties, I cannot sentimentalize them . I hardly survived
them. The idea that they might come back in some forms appears
ahistorical to me but terrifying, like seeing a parade bearing my
coffin down the street. They were a mutilating time to grow up
female, and an ugly if more complacent time to grow up male. To
grow up a gay male was to fit yourself for the closet or a minute
bar world. To grow up a lesbian: you didn't ex ist. Without the
dimension of the possibility of loving each other, our friendships
among women were doomed to be shelved at the first approach of
a male. To say something nice about the fifties. Well, people read
