George Stade
CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL IMBECILE
My first proto-political thought, as I recall, came to me
shortly after World War II, when, like
Partisan Review,
I was on the
verge of adolescence. I clearly remember thinking how lucky I was: I
lived in the world's greatest nation, the United States of America, in
its biggest city, New York, in its best borough, Manhattan, and in
what was clearly to be the American Century. Adolescence cost me
my religion and my tacit acquiescence in public morality. Both of
them, so it then seemed to me, stood between my sexual fantasies
and their embodiment. From my Irish working-class friends, with
whom I played football, basketball, softball, stickball, stoopball,
Ringoleevio, andjohnny Rides the Pony (for starters), from whom I
later learned how to shoot pool and craps, how to drink and get my
nose broken, I also learned to feel contempt for anything upperclass,
genteel, or British:
0 , the Irish flag is a dirty old rag,
But a damn sight cleaner than the English.
(Sung to the tune of "The Mountain Dew.")
My Irish friends helped bring nearly to the level of consciousness
something I was already disposed to believe, that laws were made for
the benefit of someone else .
Our lumpen anarchism, however, expressed itself far more
often in action than in words.
(It
wasn't until the onset of middle age
that I learned the more enduring violences of
theoria
over
praxis,
among other failures of nerve.) Just the same, many of us in the af–
filiated Ramblers and Panthers, A. C., were pleased to note that the
professional hand-wringers had a fancy term for us, namely juvenile
delinquents. Those of us who could read were sure that
The Amboy
Dukes
was a very good book. We didn't know much, but we knew our
enemies: clergymen, social workers, do-gooder women, anybody
who affected Anglophilic vowels . "Beware of men with fat, and
women with flat, asses" is a fair summary of our political wisdom.
About the local pols, whom we thought of as crooks within the law,
and about the police, who raided our crap games for the sole purpose
of confiscating the pot, we felt pretty much as we felt about rival
