PAUL HOLLANDER
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(founders of the Institute of Policy Studies) preferred to look upon the
Vietnam War as a manifestation of "the disease of an entire ruling
class" and suggested that it was deliberate American policy "to create
widespread civilian casualties."
For Noam Chomsky the United States stood for a "commitment
to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation
and denial of elementary human rights," and he faulted American
foreign policy for the killings by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia
(while viewing these atrocities as greatly exaggerated by the Ameri–
can media) . Moreover he believed, in the words of a reviewer, that
". .. the U.S. Government favors client states with bloody-minded
dictators over Third WorId democracy. . . ."
Critiques of the domestic defects ofthe United States also contin–
ued through the 1980s. Expanded conceptions of the underprivileged
retained credibility not only in academic but also political circles; a
member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ronald V. Dellum,
asserted that "America is a nation of niggers....
If
you are black,
you're a nigger.
If
you're an amputee, you're a nigger. Blind people,
women, students, the handicapped, radical environmentalists, poor
whites, those too far to the left are all niggers."
In less colorful language college texts in sociology have identi–
fied the United States as the singular repository of social problems,
including racism, which, according to one, "... has positive conse–
quences for the maintenance of the status quo." Crime too has been
seen in a similar light, "sustain[ed] ... as a highly visible component
of the American experience . .." since "for many Americans criminals
serve as a negative reference group whose violations of common de–
cency render such decency uncommon and praiseworthy." Accord–
ingly, inequality or "the continuing victimization of the disinherited"
also has been deliberately maintained for the social-psychological
gratification of those better off.
The horrors of technology appeared in new incarnations in the
1980s. Marge Piercy, the feminist writer, said: "Technology is mon–
strous ... because our values are monstrous.... They are killing us
... with cancer, drugs, contraceptives, food, asbestos ... bad schools
and television." She too perceived American society teeming with
"'oppressed' peoples-women, laborers, blacks, the poor, native
Americans, older people - whose lives are controlled by the 'ruling
class'."
The popular writer E .
L.
Doctorow entertained an equally
gloomy vision of American society in the 1980s: "Our psychic dete-
