The Cavalier daily. :: Monday, October 14, 1968 :: University of Virginia Library

What is happening in America?
"Haig is happening is America,"
shouts The New Yorker in inch-tall
capitals, as he of the black tie and
she of the gossamer sheath sip their
Scotch with a nonchalance that
Hugh Hefner would envy. They are
The Beautiful People who appear at
the right places at the right times,
wearing the right clothes and
pronouncing "Jean-Claude Killy"
the right way. Tom Wolfe presents
a bird's-eye view of their Saturday
Art Gallery Tour, with the Jet Set
roaring, comet-like, down Fifth
Avenue, dropping names like
stardust and pausing only long
enough to change leaders - be they
Wendy Vanderbilt, Truman Capote,
or the "super-marvelous!" Baby
Jane Holzer. They are the "posh,
splendid, starched consumers of
culture," the pace-setters, the
fad-starters; and although they're
not quite sure where they're going,
"It has been fun, hasn't it?"

Suburbanites

But even if he can't match the
In Crowd in style, swing, and
savoir-faire, the middle-class male is
secure in the knowledge that
"Behind (his) great suit is a great
American fabric;": gray worsted,
that is, and "available in finer stores
near you." He knows further that
behind his desk is a job for him to
do, and a chance for a raise. And so
he dons his fabled gray flannel suit,
leaves his quarter-acre estate, and
heads for the glass beehive
downtown, to immerse himself in
the drone of typewriters and the
buzz of office chatter. Meanwhile,
back at the ranch-house, his wife
sends the pampered but prodded
children off to school and walks the
thirty-odd feet to the ritual
kaffeeklatsch next door. She and
her husband - the Suburbanites -
have become the Great American
Cliche - celebrated and sung,
surveyed and scrutinized by
everyone from John Kenneth
Galbraith to the Monkees. They are
the acquisitive, materialistic
residents of Pleasant Valley,
satisfied only when they "have a
TV set in every room" of their
houses "all built of tick-tacky" that
"all look the same." They are
shallow and hollow, satisfied and
superficial, we are told. And
although they are bombarded by
reports of their shortcomings, they
can see no reason to change - in
fact, wouldn't know how to change
if they wanted to. This is why,
when they see their children
running off to San Francisco or
Greenwich Village, they lament,
"The Youth of America is going to
the dogs!"

Wall Of Prejudice

On the contrary, respond their
hippie offspring, "America is going
to pot!" The Flower Children have
taken a Leary-eyed look at
middle-class America and have
decided to "Turn on, tune in, drop
out." With childlike abandon they
cavort across the TV news screen,
the grade-B movie screen, and the
pages of Esquire magazine -
scattering orse-petals and their ideas
for an emerging America.

But is an America of peace and
indolence possible if, as Rap Brown
says, "Violence is as American as
apple pie."? The Negro, unlike the
hippie, has not "dropped out" of
white society: he has been locked
out, enclosed behind a wall built by
centuries of prejudice. The great
question facing the Negro now is
"How will that wall be breached?"
Martin Luther King's moderates
would dismantle the wall stone by
stone, until full equality had been
achieved. But the Black Power
advocates, according to Charles V.
Hamilton, would gather their
forced behind the wall until the
Negro had gathered enough racial
pride and power to batter it down.
In any case, however the wall is
scaled, gone forever is the white
American's traditional image of the
Negro: happy-go-lucky, singing,
dancing, speaking only when
spoken to and then with a servility
born of "knowing his place." Amos
and Andy have been replaced by
Malcolm and Stokeley, haranguing
today's urban Negroes from a
street corner in Harlem or Watts.
The future of the Negro in America
lies with these slum-dwellers, the
"other America" of Michael
Harrington - the people who speak
a different language, adhere to
different morals, lead a wholly
different life from that of the
middle class. The problem of
bringing the poor - both white and
Negro - into the mainstream of
American Life is the second great
concern of the American people in
the Sixties.

The first is, of course, the
Vietnamese War - that conflict
that nobody wanted, that nobody
knows how to end. America has
watched as we have slipped deeper
into this tar-baby of a war, finding
that the harder we hit, the deeper
we are mired in a black mass of
confusion and doubt. It is this
doubt that characterizes America
today: the doubt of the words and
deeds of the President, the doubt of
a political system that can produce
no more viable a choice than that
between Johnson and Goldwater,
and the doubt that our institutions
can survive the scorn of the hippies
and the riots of the Negroes.

American Angst

Is this all that Americans have in
common today - this doubt, this
confusion? Time magazine, in an
article written in the early Sixties,
says that, indeed, the one feature
all Americans share is this anxiety,
this Angst, about themselves, their
goals, and their nation. It is a
confusion forced on us both from
within and without.

The anxiety from the outside
arises from essays such as this one
- the myriad studies, surveys, and
speeches that analyze the America
of the Sixties. The American people
are probed, prodded, and
proselytized by sociologists,
psychologists, and psephologists.
Christopher Alexander calls us the
most "self-conscious" people in
history. Margaret Mead attributes
this conscious self-study to our lack
of a relevant history: finding no
historical models to compare
ourselves to, we compare ourselves
to each other. And the resultant
conflicting opinions, disseminated
to all by the mass media, only serve
to increase the confusion they
analyze. Between William Buckley,
Eric Hoffer, and the Gallup Poll,
who knows what to believe?

As if this were not enough, our
external confusion is
complemented by an inner conflict
caused, as Time sees it, by a loss of
identity - the question of "What
am I?", Erich Fromm tells us that
we have been to concerned with
producing and consuming and not
enough with being. Anthropologist
Mead concurs: in Europe, she says,
a person absorbs a traditional
position and immerses himself in
that position, with all its
implications and parameters. He
knows his place and what is
expected of him; he knows who he
is, what he is, and where he is
going. But in America the
admonition "Cobbler, stick to thy
last" has been replaced by
"Johnny, be well-rounded." The
American, Time continues, tries to
be all things to all people. Even the
minister must now also be the
psychological counselor, the
community organizer, the civil
rights marcher. And more, the job
positions that industrial,
commercial American has created
are often so ambiguous that they
carry no stable implications at all:
just what is the ethos, the accepted
life-style, or an office-worker? And
even if he can find a position of
stability, the American cannot
"immerse himself" in his status,
because he is apt soon to be moving
on, both geographically and
economically, to a new position.
The sociologist would call this
condition a "lack of
role-definition" - the absence of a
specific, secure basis from which a
person can discover and develop his
self hood. The anxiety caused by
this lack of stability, this lack of
self hood, is the all-pervasive
characteristic of American in the
Sixties. It is the doubt, the
confusion, the Angst we cannot
escape.

Battle Within

America has her share of
national dissension, that is true. But
we recovered from the Civil War,
and we can survive the Negro
Revolution. We defeated Hirohito
and Hitler, and we will go on in
spite of Ho Chi Minh. The real
conflict in America - more
dangerous because of its hidden
nature - is the battle being fought
inside each of us. Abraham Lincoln
warned that a house divided against
itself cannot stand. Can that same
house remain intact if each of its
bricks is shattered?