ALFRED KAZIN
713
work. While the threat of war and world destruction hangs over our
heads, our leaders assure us in the same breath that we are the most
God-fearing people in the world, but that peace can be assured only
by accepting every social hardship, every cutback in education and
health, the erosion of our cities, roads, bridges, in favor of a massive
rearmament at the cost of almost two trillions . No one dare ques–
tion . Even experienced battleship admirals protested the outlay of
$383 million to put the
New Jersey
back into service, but to no avail.
A hundred million, not just sixty, will soon be sent down to shore up
the Salvadoran government, but this same government derides the
noble example of priests and nuns still trying to defend landless
peasants against a government whose military and security services
have committed thirty thousand unpunished murders, are respons–
ible for over ten thousand "disappearances" of civilians in custody.
There was a time when a Pope, like Pius XII, was so haughty
and secluded that he took all his meals alone. John Paul II, a native
of one of the most grievously wounded and suffering of all European
countries, rushes from country to country pleading for peace and
reconciliation. And the daily terror and outrage are made worse by
communications. In Alabama a desperate unemployed man sets fire
to himself, and the television cameramen allow him to burn for
eighty-two seconds so that the television viewers can get their eve–
ning cocktail of shock, horror, terror, surprise. The New York
Post,
a vile tabloid, headlines a murder every day, and for some reason it
gets more readers every day, either because people don't know
what
they are reading, or can't take it in, or perhaps don't believe any of
it. The media have a bad reputation now with everyone, but fasci–
nate even those scornful of it; it is impossible
not
to know what is go–
mgon.
Now what has this to do with the reading of books, literary
study, education itself in an age like ours? For most people, nothing
at all, for to read seriously nowadays, to take reading seriously, is to
believe that there is some necessary relation between literature and
the disorder in our age, the disorder in our hearts. It is to proclaim
one's membership in a so-called elite and adherence to discarded
culture . Everyone in a university knows nowadays that the sense of
tradition on which literature depends no longer exists, that certain
difficult modernist texts in the English Department curriculum are
never enjoyed as works of art but have to be elucidated, often word
for word. The greatest works of literature in English have become
