America in Crisis?

I found America in Crisis by Tom Stacey (Salient, 10 June) to be superficial, misleading, and—I hesitate to say—intellectually dishonest. The author begins by telling us that "Americans arc a people about whom one can generalise" and proceeds to demonstrate that what he means to say is that "Americans arc a people one can stereotype." I am willing to concede that Americans are indeed a people about whom one can generalize. But since do Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America few have failed at the task so completely as has Mr Stacey. Like the pictures of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which gave pleasant relief to his prose, he offered a caricature of America, not a portrait. Unlike these graphic illustrations, his written treatment distorted his subject rather than capturing its essential features.

It would be absurd for me to suggest that there is no malaise in the middle class of America. But it is inaccurate to say that "In the lumpen middle there is no longer any conviction, courage, hope; no strength or direction at all." Mr Stacey should be less eager to play the harbinger of America's imminent doom. This crepe-hung characterization ignores the massive middle class mobilization which is currently sweeping the United States. (Sec, for example, "Americana: New Glory"; Newsweek June 15, p.24; "Workers Woodstock", Time, June 1, p.10)

It is not for me to deny that American society currently exhibits, in Mr Stacey's phrase "classic symptoms of decadence." This old bromide is always trotted out by America's critics. The French do it best. At the end of World War II, a grateful Georges Clemenceau held forth on the subject in these acerbic words: "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degradation without the usual interval of civilization." (Saturday Review Dec. 1, 1945).

It is, however, misleading, unfair and fallacious to go from this tenuous argument to the cosmic judgment that America is presently embarked upon some lemming-like march into a violent sea. Mr Stacey gives just this impression with such throwaway lines as "the ludicrous police, who like to play at storm-troopers and carry their presumption of hostility to the point of inciting it." There have been well documented examples of police violence in America. Indeed the Walker Report described a series of events connected with the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as "a police riot." But the very fact that these events provoked a Presidential Enquiry demonstrates their atypicality.

The Chicago riots cannot be ignored. They say something important about the society which produced them. But that society is comprised of 200 million people divided into 50 states and spread over a territory which is larger than Europe. What is more, there are two hundred years of less sensational data which point in directions other than toward the emergence of a police state and terminal decadence.

Easy distortion and sensationalism are not the most heinous vices for which Mr Stacey demonstrates an affinity. He can be dishonest too. One of several examples of this is to be found in his remarks concerning Eldrige Cleaver. He describes Mr Cleaver only as "a convicted rapist proud of his confessed crime." It may be useful to see what Mr Cleaver has to say about that:

"I became a rapist . . . I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically—though looking back I see I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind. Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon, his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge . . . After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and, for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray—astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized—for I could not approve of the act of rape." Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice: Dell Publishing Company, New York 1968, pp. 14-15.

From this excerpt it appears that Cleaver is not "proud of his confessed crime." In addition, anyone who reads his work quickly realizes he is much more than simply a "Negro militant and rapist". To reveal error heaped upon misstatement, it should be pointed out that Mr Cleaver has never taught a course at the University of California. What Mr Stacey may have meant when he referred to Cleaver's "course of lectures on Afro-American studies" was a non-credit course taught by two members of the Letters and Science faculty. Mr Cleaver was one of several noted authorities who had agreed to deliver guest lectures.

It is interesting, however, that Mr Stacey does not confine his taste for facile distortion to the radical left. He demonstrates an egalitarian eagerness to play fast and loose with the facts regardless of his subject. He is quite content, for example, to label the Wallace vote as reflecting "an attraction for the simplistic responses of the Far Right." This glib generality, itself simplistic in the extreme, cannot go unnoticed. Perhaps Senator Fred Harris in his article "The Making Of A Majority" (Harpers Magazine, May 1970, p.49) most clearly pointed up Mr Stacey's error when he wrote:

"The fact is that Governor Wallace made strong endorsements of labor unions and the right of collective bargaining, demanded massive increases in Social Security benefits, and advocated important and meaningful tax reform—and these were by no means all of the non-conservative positions which he took. In my own state (Oklahoma) a national pollster recently ran a poll in which the persons interviewed were quite accurate in listing all major political figures in either liberal, conservative, or moderate columns, but were confused about how to list Mr Wallace; one-third thought he was conservative, one-third thought he was liberal, and one-third was unable to say which he was." (At pp. 51-52).

Mr Wallace is the product of a latter day populist movement in American politics. He is a racist and a bigot, but that does not in itself grant him voting rights in the John Birch Society. It is a measure of his ignorance that Mr Stacey fails to comprehend this fact.

Some of Mr Stacey's comments are more difficult to challenge. At one point, for example, he mentions a gathering of some "members of the teaching staff of California University." He asserts that none of the staff members present "had heard of" or were "particularly interested in" incidents of political repression in the Soviet Union. I find it difficult to challenge this statement for two reasons. First, there is no California University. He may have meant University of Southern California, California State, California Western University, the University of California or who knows what. Second, it is simply inconceivable that any semi-literate American could be that ignorant.

Both the student press and the national news media carry frequent references to these incidents. The latest issue of Newsweek, for example, contains an account of the Mededev affair (June 15, p. 13). A recent issue of Time described the arrest of Andrei Amalric, the author of Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? in these words.

Can there still be doubts that Russia has shed its brutal Stalinist past? Not after what happened last week, In the course of arresting a noted Soviet author, two carloads of tough KGB agents stopped everything, piled out of their autos and waded into a field to pick bunches of wild lilacs. Dissidents may be tossed into prison or insane asylums under Leoned Brezhnevs regime, but this is repression with hearts and flowers," (June 1, 1970, p. 24,)

Nor are these reports a recent phenomenon. A few years ago, the Singavoky and Tarsis affairs seriously undermined the V.D.C. (Vietnam Day Committee—(successor in interest to the Free Speech Movement) at Berkeley and elsewhere. In Berkeley, these incidents posed an embarrassing challenge to such Communist apologists as Herbert and Betina Aptheker. It is all very well documented in the columns of The Daily Californian.

Very few people understand what is going on in the United States. I certainly do not. Perhaps Mr Stacey has sufficient socio-political perspicacity to entitle him to pontificate in his ex cathedra style about the American scene. But with this privilege must go the collateral responsibility of doing his homework. It is unfair of Mr Stacey to impose upon his readers the difficult task of unlearning his misinformation. And, not to ignore the obvious, I suggest that your efforts at social enlightenment are poorly served by printing this sort of article.

In conclusion, I hope that in the future you will be exceedingly suspicious of anyone who has the temerity to claim any understanding of contemporary America. I agree with Warren Burger, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, that "this is an era we will not fully understand until it is over." (Time, June 1, p.7). In evaluating articles such as "America in Crisis" you might well ask, as Carl Sandburg once did, "When have the people been half as rotten as what the panderers to the people dangle before crowds." (The People Yes, 1936).

What indeed?

What are university politicians doing to us?

The lunacy of the comments attributed to Colin Knox in the last Salient are paralleled only by the ludicrous statement which Professor Percy of Auckland made at the conclusion of his negotiations with the Government for an increase in the salaries of university teaching staff.

What Mr Knox said at the June 10th Meeting of the Joint Committee was a blatant contradiction of the Students' Association's policy and was in opposition to the statements of the other student representatives on the committee. Surely his job as a student representative is to reflect our policy.

The Committee of the Vice-Chancellor and Deans is a non-representative, anti-democratic anachronism, yet its power in this university is unrivalled. Far from letting it pontificate, unmolested by students, we must continue to push for representation on it, and for the election instead of the appointment of its members, or else for the removal of its policy-making prerogatives.

The second matter: Professor Percy is clearly past it. Asking for university salaries which are on a par with those in Australia, is not like asking for New Zealand to have its own moon shot, as Percy was heard to remark. We are losing staff more quickly than they can be replaced and the exodus will continue until some incentive to stay is offered. Of course, increases have been awarded since that foolish comment was made, but the dailies reported across the board increases of 25%. Bilge! Three lecturers in my experience alone have received increases of 9, 15 and 20% respectively.

If the university is to survive the 70's, its organization must be much more flexible and democratic and its funding must be assured. The organization is in disarray and the pittance we are getting is in jeopardy. Both staff and students must be represented by people who will take a firm stand in the interests of the survival of the university.

Benson Booms out

Mr Benson's reviews of Boom and Elvira Madigan tell me nothing except that when it comes to film, this particular reviewer is extremely confused and simply lacks the ability to adequately express in words, the 'feel' of a film. His aimless, meandering review' of Boom is little more than a written description of his inability to respond to it and is of no real interest to anyone, except himself; as for Elvira Madigan, ceaseless confusions blur any of the solidity of point of view he might have in the first place.

Film has changed considerably over the last few years; Mr Benson's reviews suggest an inability to keep up with it all.