LIONEL ABEL
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but not for the United States, for we are the major military and po–
litical force in this part of the world .
And there is something else . Andre Malraux has said that
p"olitics is inevitably Manichean, but that this element in it ought not
to be overemphasized . The Democrats and their supporters are
overemphasizing the Manichean content of presidential politics ;
they have done this before, and they are doing it again. It is an error
which may cost them the election. The difference between a moral
and a political error is that for the first one can feel remorse, hardly
for the second. A political mistake has little impact on conscience;
thus it tends to be repeated. When the Democratic candidates say
that the moral imperative for the people of this country is to defeat
Ronald Reagan, they are overemphasizing the Manichean element
in the contest.
Lionel Abel's memoir,
The Intellectual Follies,
will be published by
W. W.
Norton this fall.
Morris Dickstein
ORIGINS
Migration and resettlement are crucial features of so
many modern lives, yet I'm surprised to discover how significantly
they have figured in my own. As young adolescents my parents were
wrenched out of small Yiddish-speaking towns in Russia and Po–
land, were brought to New York by distracted, heroic mothers amid
a babble of elder siblings and strange languages. Their fathers had
come many years earlier to try out the new world and drum up
money for their passage, but a world war had intervened and cut
