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PARTISAN REVIEW
Fighting for Your Life-Style
Why is capitalism worth fighting for? You can read the answer in
Andy Warhol 's
Interview.
The glamorous life-style presented on its pages is
in many ways the American version of Nirvana. Warhol reveals the carrot
that awaits us at the finish line of the rat race.
quoted from
Art in America
in a double-page
advertisement by
Interview,
in the
Paris Review, #79.
Why Russia Is Scared of Israel
The ideology of Communism which energized the Bolshevik revolu–
tion and formed the basis of the Soviet state under Lenin was to a surpris–
ing extent Jewish in origin; experienced by Jews, transmitted by them. A
generation passed, and the Jewish state was created. A generation after
that,
and everyone was beginning to say : "No one in the Soviet Union believes
in Communism anymore.
It
is a bankrupt ideology," and so on. The sole
remaining locus of Communism's influence seemed to be the United
Nations. And there, significantly enough, the undermining of Zionism (in
reality, the destruction of Israel) was high on its agenda. It may be, then,
that Zionism, accused of racism, is seen as a threat at the UN for the more
relevant reason that it is eating away at Communism and gradually de–
stroying it. Zionism has diverted to Israel the crucial Jewish energy and
faith that was needed to sustain the ideology underlying the Soviet state.
This in turn is rapidly reducing that country to a decaying husk of tyranny.
Tom Bethell, "The Once and Future
Israel," in
The American Spectator,
September
1982. (Mr. Bethell holds the De Witt
Wallace Chair in Communications at the
American Enterprise Institute.)
Super Social Realism
I have thought for a long time that social realism provides a kind of
dialectical synthesis between the super-subjectivism of naturalism and the
super-objectivism of agit-prop. To explain public life in the theatre it is first
necessary to be recognizable, and only then, having won the audience's
trust, to place those recognizable phenomena within the context of a per–
ceived social truth. In my play
Destiny,
I included a scene where a group of
