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these American vices when the Russians are manifestly much more
vicious and much less free than Americans. This reminds me of the
nursery argument that you must eat your repulsive rice pudding
because millions of children are starving in China. It makes the worst
the friend of the bad. Nor does it help, indeed it may add to the
grimness of the situation, that the HUAC was, as Mrs. Trilling
emphasizes, a properly constituted and legal instrument of govern–
ment; for such institutions may be at once legal and infamous, and
even when they are not in their essence infamous they may be in the
hands of infamous men. The Court of Star Chamber is an instance of
one or the other case; and so, it might be held, was the HUAC. It seems
to me, though admittedly I speak at a comfortable distance from the
events and all subsequent controversy and risk, that an American
intellectual might, without being either weakminded or unpatriotic,
take a very different view of all this from Mrs. Trilling's.
Still, there it is, her view, boldly and carefully set forth, for
dissenters to consider. So with her central setpiece on the Columbia
riots. Is it too long, too obsessed with the record of personal fears and
observations? Or does its
thereness,
the sense it gives of a writer who
experienced the actual terrors and the possibilities of much worse
agonies that never happened, justify it? It is far from being a simple
document, counterpointed as the events at Columbia are with a
commentary on Mailer's
Steps of the Pentagon
and with memories of a
more natural catastrophe, a flood at the Connecticut shore. But some
things do emerge with a sharpness unaffected by these procedures.
There was no obvious or urgent cause for the disturbances. Neither the
gymnasium nor the IDA were more than handy excuses. The SDS
managed to "activate a campus which hadn't previously realized there
was anything spectacula.rly wrong with it."
And no doubt it is from such facts as these that the real horror
grows, the horror that Mrs. Trilling felt and perhaps still feels: the
apparently unpolitical may be politicized, and then violence flowers as
in a speeded-up film, involving the uncomprehending, destroying
ordinariness, as in the Dutch train hijacks. Minor violence can intimi–
date the powerful for a while; but it escalates to the point where major
violence is justifiable in retribution, and then comes the bust, the wall
of fire or the cops with their tear gas and nightsticks. You start by
pissing on carpets and end with crushed skulls, with nobody any
longer capable of rational thought, even in his own interest. It is even
part of the horror that the whole movement faded away, having shown
how fortuitous and yet potentially unlimited are the possibilities of
