PARTISAN REVIEW
199
ask of the class that is running things is that they don't pretend to be
alienated, that they acknowledge that they are running things. And it
is this divided mind... this pretense that somehow the people who,
say, write in the
New York Times Book Review
are somehow writing
against the grain of the culture. Well they are not. They are the grain
of the culture. And for them to suppose otherwise is either hypocrisy
or an epistomological crisis.
DICKSTEIN:
It
seems
to
me that the phrase "running things" isa
puzzling one.
It
seems to me that the person who is running, say, the
book review page (of the
New York Times
or the art-critical page of
the
New York Times)
may also feel alienated even though he is, in a
sense, running things. He's running that, but he may be alienated,
for example, from other things in the drift of American society. He
may be alienated from American foreign policy. He may be alienated
from what the State Department has done in Chile.
KRAMER: But he shou ldn 't pretend to be alienated from the things he's
runnmg.
HOWE: Well, he may be running less than he thinks he's running. But
why don't we be quiet for a while and let people out there talk. I see a
lot of hands back there.
ROBERT LIFTON: I wanted to raise this question mostly
to
Irving Howe
but to the others as well. Actually Irving and I have talked about it
once before. I'd like to put it this way. Is it possible that the very
achievement in exposing Stalinism and in taking an anti-Stalinist
left position, has immobilized New York intellectuals to a consider–
able degree? After all, we're all creatures I think of our main survival,
of our main confrontation, and we tend to see a good deal of the rest
of existence through the prism of that survival or of that confronta–
tion. And if that's so, it could be that some of the immediate threats
to us and to the world may be erroneous ly perceived or distorted via
that prism of relatively simple or absolute anti-Stalinism. The work
had to be done and the problem of Stalinism is still with us.
Nonetheless there may be even graver problems such as annihilation,
or nuclear holocaust or various versions of genocide or mass
killing-the major reference point being the European holocaust–
but expressing themselves in new ways. Even the kind of point that
Hilton Kramer raised about our being the freest country on earth–
well, we are a rather free country and I was struck during the antiwar
opposition
to
Vietnam-the word should be mentioned somewhere
tonight, it seems to me-that we had a lot of freedoms in saying some
fairly harsh things-those of us who opposed the war. Nonetheless,
