512
PARTISAN REVIEW
well, not only in him but throughout the entire community in which he
is now a revered elder.
Apart from Mailer himself, there was Noam Chomsky. I have to
interject here that
F.
Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he said that there
are no second acts in American lives. Chomsky, who was more or less
dead, is now back into bestsellerdom. There was also Susan Sontag-on
whom the curtain has never quite dropped-and there were hundreds of
academics of varying degrees of eminence. Together they made up what
Harold Rosenberg, in a different context, once called a "herd of inde–
pendent minds."
To them, the line on September II-implied or brazenly trumpeted–
was that America had had it coming. To them, America was not "our"
country and "our" culture; they were resident aliens who prided them–
selves on opposing the evils that had putatively created the suicide
bombers. To them, these evils were the unholy offspring of an incestu–
ous coupling by American political power with American popular cul–
ture. To them, it seemed never to occur that they themselves, through a
trickle-down process, had been the chief shapers and propagators of the
popular culture the Islamic fascists attacking us
really
regarded as deca–
dent and degenerate.
Admittedly, since September
II,
a few, a very few, writers and intel–
lectuals have come out in support of the American war against terror–
ism. Some have even chastised their fellow leftists for refusing to join in
the fight against "Islamofascism." Does this mean that we are witness–
ing the same kind of counterreaction provoked by the New Left and the
counterculture and that gave birth to neoconservatism? Possibly. Yet I
sense the same compulsion today to sign the same loyalty oaths to the
old-time religion of "critical noncomformism" that deprived the devel–
opment explored by the 1952 symposium of staying power. And it was
precisely this attachment to the old-time religion that made it so easy for
the radicalism of the I960s to blow that development away.
All of which reminds me of William
F.
Buckley'S famous crack that he
would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston
phone book than by the combined faculties of Harvard and M.LT. It's
a great crack, and what could be more appropriate than to conclude
with it while being right here in Boston?
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you, Norman. Next is Sanford Pinsker, Shadek
Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College.
