584
PARTISAN REVIEW
result? Blacks make up the great majority of the permanent inha–
bitants of every South African city, and their proportion of the
urban population as a whole grows year by year.
In effect, I am suggesting that the relationship between entire
countries and peoples now resembles that which the whites of
Johannesburg, say, and its neighboring towns on the gold-bearing
reef of the Witwatersrand had
to
the blacks of the overcrowded,
impoverished reserves of "homelands." Everywhere is now no
more than a day and a night's plane journey from anywhere. The
pull of the wealthier areas of the globe is as inexorable as the push
from behind of the poorer. The results have already become evi–
dent in virtually every major city of the Western world: if South
African experience is anything to go by, the process has hardly
begun. In thinking about it, however, it will be necessary to get
out of our minds the notion that a single exercise of will, a moral
and political impulse in one direction or another ("expulsion,"
" integration," or whatever) will "solve the problem. " Obviously
governments on all sides will take the measures, with a greater
or
lesser degree of conviction, that seems appropriate to them. But
what we are faced with is not a problem but a vast system, each of
whose parts are in reciprocal relationship with one another. To
put it in its most neutral, skeletal form: the skilled workers in
Seattle who make jumbo jets, and the shareholders in Boeing who
draw dividends from the company's sales are no more or less to
blame than the unskilled migran ts who will spend all their savings
to fly in those very planes to the backstreets of the West. We must
also not deceive ourselves that the years of recession and depression
which probably lie ahead will greatly affect this movement of
population, or will even manage to reverse it.
It
is better to be un–
employed in Los Angeles or Manchester than in Mexico City or
Karachi; at any rate, that is what the unemployed of Mexico City
and Karachi are always likely to believe.
Not long ago I was travelling by car in the country which
invented the concept of the
Gastarbeiter,
as well as certain other
concepts. In some small town whose name I have forgotten-a
place in Baden-WUrtemberg like many others, which had the
usual banks and supermarkets in concrete and anodized bronze, as
a gabled, stuccoed
Gasthaus,
and a preposterously turreted
Stadt–
halle,
and a steepled church with its bell housed in a separate,
bonnet-shaped hutch or hive at the other end of the roof-in such
