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PARTISAN REVIEW
- where they were welcomed as liberators - has been equated with
six years of exceptionally brutal and secretive Soviet warfare in
Afghanistan, involving approximately 120,000 troops and producing
millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
The impaired ability to discriminate (connected to the alienated
sensibility) is displayed in another context when New York literati,
led by Norman Mailer, misidentify a violent criminal (Jack Abbot)
as a great creative artist and authentic witness to the inhumanity of
American society; when Gore Vidal equates the military takeover in
post-Solidarity Poland with the "occupation" of the United States by
corporations; or when Arthur Millc:!r asserts that the controls (exer–
cised by
The New York Times)
over what is produced in American
theaters are tighter than the censorship in Poland, Romania, Czecho–
slovakia or the Soviet Union.
The powers of discrimination were also overwhelmed by social
critical passion when George Wald, Nobel Prize-winning scientist,
declared in 1982 that "we Americans ... are the most brainwashed
people in the world" and when Raymond Hunthausen, archbishop of
Seattle observed"... that Trident [the American nuclear submarine]
is the Auschwitz ofPuget Sound." Not to be outdone, Noam Chomsky
referred to American schools as ". . . the first training ground for
troops that will enforce the muted, unending terror of the status quo
in the coming years of a projected American century ..." while James
Baldwin, the black writer, opined that "the educational system of
this country is ... designed to destroy the black child.
It
does not
matter whether it destroys him by stoning him in the ghetto or by
driving him mad in the isolation of Harvard."
Reflecting on the enfeeblement of the powers of discrimination,
it may also be recalled that in the 1960s and early seventies not a few
academic intellectuals entertained the notion that college students
were a new class of"niggers," while Louis Kampf (former head of the
Modern Language Association) deemed the Lincoln Center such a
source of elitist corruption that he urged - in his "Notes Toward a
Radical Culture" - its defacement with substances rarely mentioned
in polite conversation.
Critiques of the evils of technology have also endured and
flourished
since
the Vietnam War up to the present. The propensity
to misuse technology was said to be a characteristic of American cul–
ture, predisposing to the gratuitous and massive use of violence, as
argued, among others, by Susan Sontag and more recently by Loren
Baritz. Other critics such as Richard Barnett and Marcus Raskin
