Gore Vidal is "Someone to Laugh at the Squares With."

As I write this sentence, again, on September 17, 2007 at 11:20 A.M. I am in receipt of a distracting phone call from 402-727-2510.

Probably only a coincidence. Telemarketer? I will receive such calls throughout the day.

On November 10, 2007 at 9:14 P.M. I blocked:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/4652.Vendare/B245... (Miami?)

http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90x... (Senator Bob and the Floridians? CUSA?)

I invite people to experience this harassment with me so they can come to their own conclusions about its legality. This is mild in relation to what I have known in the course of writing these essays.

Gore Vidal, United States: Collected Essays 1952-1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), $37.50.

Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1999).

"The Humanist Interview With Gore Vidal," in The Humanist, January/February, 2010, at p. 22. http://www.thehumanist.org/

Who is Gore Vidal?

During my sophomore year in college I studied one weeknight for a test in a subject that I did not find particularly interesting. "Sociology" was taught by having students memorize long lists of names and complex terms.

This experience was excellent preparation for my law school education which often consisted of professors turning material that was fascinating -- usually in a single lecture -- into the epitome of dullness.

The third floor of the library was empty that night, as usual. I did not attend an "elite" (very expensive) institution. Actual studying in the library was a rare phenomenon and actively discouraged among students for the sensible reason that, if some of us genuinely studied, it might lead professors to expect equally outlandish behavior from the rest of the student body.

I wandered through the ailes of books in the literature section and came across a novel entitled: The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal.

I'd read Vidal's play "Visit to a Small Planet" in high school. I was one of the few students in my English class who caught on right away to the biting political satire in the work. The satire along with the controversial edge was removed from the film version of this play, naturally, which starred Jerry Lewis in a forgettable performance.

I agreed with the author's less than starry-eyed view of human nature and delighted in the sparkling wit found in Vidal's clear and sharp prose.

At about the same time, as a teenager in high school, I also read Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie."

Williams and Vidal were good friends, alike in some ways and quite different in others, both men were routinely described in Time magazine and in other publications of the period as "sexual outlaws." Worse, their work was said to consist of "fetid swamps" of "illicit sexuality."

This was exactly what I was looking for in life and literature as a horny teenager during the late seventies, a "fetid swamp" of sexuality, licit or illicit. In fact, I am still seeking such a thing as a horny middle-aged guy, but then aren't we all?

I must admit that my life has always been filled with wild and steamy sex -- except that most of it was, and still is, with myself. But then, Oscar Wilde was right to conclude that: "to love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."

I read most of The Judgment of Paris that night awed by the quality of the writing (Vidal had revised his first novels that were re-issued sporting lurid covers in the early sixties).

I pondered protagonist Philip Warren's dilemma and determined, like him, to choose love over wisdom and power -- as soon as I could find some love that was reciprocated, or at least that involved another person.

My guess is that the youthful Vidal may have made the same choice for love. Later in Vidal's life the temptations of power may have overwhelmed him. Although, after reading his memoirs, I am not so sure.

Parts of Vidal's novel were gloriously over the top, laugh-out-loud funny, sending up everything from American politicians and their wives (the novel first appeared in the early fifties when politics was a male preserve) to tourists and archaic Euro-aristocrats, sexual mores at mid-century, pop-cinema, and the Americanization of the world.

The middle section of The Judgment of Paris, which is set in Egypt, is still my favorite.

Judgment was the book of a young man "on the make" who explodes with literary talent and charm. It was also the first novel of ideas that I read. I was shocked to learn that the novel was not a great success at first, probably it was ahead of its time, and might have gone out of print except for the steady attention of mostly British readers.

We members of the "Vidal cult" (Gore has no objections to being regarded as a "Messiah") will always keep the book alive. Vidal is not alone among writers in his messianic ambitions.

Vidal is fairly unique in American letters in developing an equal talent for polemics and ideas in literary fiction combined with the greatest talent for high comedy among all American novelists, in my judgment, of the second-half of the twentieth century.

Norman Mailer has written a novelistic re-telling of the Gospel story in the first person. Reviewers commented that, for Mailer, it was a step down being only the son of God. Consider these reflections which are typical of Vidal's early novels:

"But, being a child or the grandchild of the Romantic Movement, living in a culture still dominated on a vulgar level by the high romantic poets of the nineteenth century, he longed instinctively for the flames, for the one attachment: 'my last and only love,' the love which increased from moment to moment until the lovers strangled for lack of air among those peaks which touch the edge of heaven, close to the consuming sun in whose fire, united at last, they perish to the accompaniment of French horns and frenzied woodwinds, the voice of Isolde, strong and pure, lingering in the vast golden dome of heaven where angels, out of sympathy, deluge the earth below with their pity." (pp. 230-231.)

And again:

"Yet for Philip, for the realist who recognizes the obvious limitations of both flesh and spirit, the hope of a great romantic experience is tempered always with the grim knowledge that nothing is constant and that even though a certain height might, temporarily, be attained, descent from it is inevitable and painful, unless one chooses to perish at the grand moment, a gesture which did not attract Philip. Although the rich dark tragedy at Mayerling had fascinated not only him but others of his generation, as directionless as he, all of them like compass needles gone awry, awaiting the pull of some magnet to set their courses for them, true north no longer the center it had once been." (p. 231.)

There are many other passages in this novel that are equally fine. Vidal's prose always delivers an aesthetic thrill besides the intellectual fireworks.

Unlike some readers who fail to get the point to Vidal, especially by overemphasizing his derisive laughter at shallow understandings of romantic love (see the essay "Love, Love, Love"), or at naive talk of love as a panacea prescribed by the "feel good" therapists of this world ("... use a cucumber!" says Dr. Ruth), it is always clear to me that Vidal possesses great depth of feeling (his emotional wisdom and perceptiveness concerning the arts told me that much) along with a first-rate intellect.

It is the combination of the two -- literary taste and compassion -- that makes Gore Vidal rare, or even unique. I would say the same of Henry James or Charles Dickens, even (this may surprise you) of Jane Austen, whose affinities with Vidal are greater than many people imagine and, to my knowledge, have not been noted by any critic.

Among the novelists who will please you (if you are a Vidaliano), I suggest Barbara Pym, Evelyn Waugh, the much-dreaded Truman Capote, Elaine Dundy, and others, like Alan Holinghurst and Edward St. Aubyn today.

Vidal is not dismissive of human affection and genuine love between people, but he certainly is impatient with those shallow substitutes for the real thing that serve as bandages for people who wish to solve all problems with a word as opposed to acknowledging the need for thought or the reality of a quite expensive emotion. Yes, we die for love. Yet we must not forget that this dying must take place every day:

"Do not wait for the last judgment," Albert Camus writes, "for it takes place every day."

Love her when she's sick, angry, bed-ridden, or wants to be alone, not only when she's all dressed up for the Oscars. Love her even when she is absent, maybe forever, despite overwhelming pain. Love her and make her laugh when she's tired after a long day and in a foul mood.

Readers who love Vidal's wit and elegance will enjoy Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Jacobson's book is concerned with themes of mortality, loss, and identity -- themes that are prominent in Vidal's works. None of the reviews of Jacobson's novel have seen the long shadow of Derrida ("Circumfession") and postmodernism on the self-aware examination of Jewishness ("Duddy Kravitz" by way of Mordechai Richler). Mordechai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (New York: Ballantine, 1959). (Plagiarists writing a review of Jacobson's book should turn to the Anglo-Canadian "wits.")

It occurs to me that my comment about Vidal's affinities with Jane Austen may have sparked some curiosity. If you care to follow-up on this brilliant observation please compare Ms. Austen's portrait of "Mr. Collins" in Pride and Prejudice with Vidal's depiction of "Marietta" (based on Anais Nin) in his novel, Two Sisters:

In what ways are the portraits similar? Do you detect affection for the objects of satire on the part of their creators? Come to think of it, do you think that God (the ultimate "author") is having a chuckle right now at our expense?

I am pretty sure that Vidal usually does manage to laugh at human foibles, beginning with his own -- though some things are far from comical -- and he always shares that laugh with the rest of us. Vidal's laughter is never cruel or vindictive and is never directed at those less fortunate than himself. Vidal's satire is a weapon aimed at powerful and pompous persons who can always use some humility. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")

Love is no panacea. Love hurts and often costs us a great deal even if we agree that it is, nevertheless, uniquely worthwhile. After all, it is also Vidal who wrote that "two can face the darkness better than one."

Norman Mailer was mistaken to suggest that Vidal "lacks the wound" that might give to his sharp mind the profundity for the deepest insights. Read Vidal's memoirs. The wound is there. It has to do with the loss of the great romantic love of his life to the stupidity and horror of war which may explain his life-long opposition to stupidity and horror in politics, to the pointless loss and suffering caused by pointless wars, like Vietnam and Iraq, or Afghanistan and who knows how many other "secret" military adventures of the U.S. governement. ("George Santayana and the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.")

Christopher Hitchens, who is another of our best essayists, is insightful in his discussion of Vidal's passion and genius. I met Hitchens, briefly, suggesting that he should write his own political novel, after mentioning Vidal. (I have also met Vidal at a book signing and we entered into a long and meaningful conversation and exchange.) Hitchens smiled and said that he had "thought of it, but ..."

I understood the unspoken remainder of the sentence: " ... when considering the work of someone like Vidal, I don't know if I have much to add."

The answer, Chris, is that you certainly do have a lot to contribute and to say, especially these days. Hitchens is one of the few people influenced by Vidal, immersed in literature, currently at work in American political journalism. I would certainly buy Chris's novel on the first day that it appears. See Christopher Hitchens, "After Time," in Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 83. Vidal has said of "The Hitch":

"I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delphino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens."

Despite a recent falling out over the Iraq issue my guess is that Vidal recognizes literary talent when he sees it, and Hitchens has it, superlatively.

Vidal's losses and experiences also explain his opposition to social injustice and abuse wherever it occurs. Vidal's highly poignant essay "Police Brutality" may be cited in support of this interpretation of his commitment to the cause of powerless people, including the struggle for civil rights, of which Vidal was an early and quiet supporter.

Gore is and has always been a brave man, who is politically engaged and on the barricades, also deeply patriotic. Although Vidal may hate to admit this, he is on the side of the powerless and excluded in his own society.

Vidal is a literary Muhammad Ali who "shook up the world."

Despite the accusations of the envious and rumors started by political enemies, Vidal is not and never has been a racist nor an anti-Semite. To live with the tragedy and pain of a great loss of love in one's emotional life -- I can relate to this! -- when it is the result of war is one thing, but to have to endure separation from a lover (or the suffering of loved-ones) as a result of human stupidity, malice, or envy, can only be infuriating and a spur to action. One must become harder than steel and fearless in the struggle against what opposes love, in any form, and in opposition to what separates lovers.

Some of us realize, usually too late, that our lives are about very few passionate relationships, often a single relationship with a person we have known not very well, or only intermittently, and that everything else, including other relationships and activities that we pursue -- money, fame, and life's other trinkets -- pales by comparison.

To be deprived of that one person (or those very few persons) who makes (or make) everything else comprehensible and tolerable, is like the loss of all light on a distant planet. It means that all things wither, atrophy and die in a cold and bleak landscape. To find oneself in such a landscape, being required to live on for the sake of others whom one also loves, is to reach for the consolations of art while growing accustomed to suffering. "Whither thou goest ..."

Beneath the humor and wit in Vidal's prose one perceives great suffering and practical intelligence. Most surprisingly, the reader also finds compassion and an insistence on justice, with great tenderness felt for those less fortunate than himself.

It angers Vidal that so much money is wasted or stolen by governments when people are denied health care and education. I concur. Somehow, Vidal's pain has not become hatred. This alone is an achievement of heroic proportions. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")

It boggles the mind that a small group of Right-wing lunatics headed by some "Cubanoids" from Miami is seeking to undermine Mr. Obama's efforts to rescue the national economy and restore America's image in the world. For an elected official to ignore executive foreign policy decisions and formulate a "personal" strategy that involves embracing a fascist takeover of a Latin American government that overthrows a duly-elected Constitutional leader is dangerous for America.

We are identified with people killing their peacefully protesting citizens and discarding the rule of law in Honduras because some minor American politicians have chosen to embrace these thugs. Compare Gore Vidal's Bright Green, Dark Red with Elizabeth Malkin, "State Forces Are Accused Of Abuses In Honduras," The New York Times, October 6, 2009, p. A4. (Vidal lived in Guatemala and is one of the best "Latin American novelists" of the so-called post-war "boom.")

Vidal tends to write his novels in pairs dividing them neatly into "inventions" and "meditations." Examples: Messiah and Live From Golgotha (meditations on the theme of religion and Christianity in particular) and Kalki (invention of a possible end of the world, death, and exploration of the theme of universal cycles in Hindu mythology); Myra Breckinridge/Myron (inventions, constituting a single masterpiece on the theme of the plasticity of identity in a media age which provides examples of the transformations of language resulting from such new and bizarre circumstances).

Vidal's historical novels are the best examples of the genre by an American author. The Judgment of Paris is best thought of as an invention despite being a picaresque novel. This is because of the delight in imagination and brilliance in the prose that reveals a genius becoming aware of himself through the full maturing of his talent. Vidal's Philip Warren is "Lazarillo de Tormes" in the twentieth century as an American traveler and student.

Run and purchase one or more copies of any or ALL OF VIDAL'S BOOKS. You will laugh out loud as you read them and you will learn a great deal. You will also be moved by the beauty of the prose that you discover which will take your breath away. For instance, here is the first paragraph of Messiah:

"I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere abandon: 'I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus.' Now I too, in every sense, was there, yet I cannot trust myself to identify with any accuracy the various events of my own life, no matter how vividly they may seem to survive in recollection ... if only because we are all, I think, betrayed by those eyes of memory which are as mutable and particular as the ones with which we regard the material world, the vision altering, as it so often does, from near in youth to far in age. And that I am by a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions when I find myself attending inadvertently the body's dissolution, a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window facing, aptly enough, the West where all the kings lie buried in their pride." (p. 1.)

I quickly read all of Vidal essays, nearly all of his novels (the last two works in the American cycle have yet to be read by me), all of his published short stories and plays, and I have seen all of the films which he has written. My favorites are "The Best Man" and "Suddenly Last Summer."

I have read the books written under pseudonyms, including the Edgar Best mysteries, which are hysterical. There is no doubt in my mind that Vidal is one of the best American writers of our times. He is now also a world writer who is much admired in Latin America ("A great man of letters" was the judgment of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who also said, bluntly, Gore Vidal "is a genius.")

Vidal is also studied in Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in the countries of the former Soviet Union. He should be. He's great.

Do not assume that Vidal's lack of solemnity means that he is anything less than highly serious about art and advocacy. Like George Bernard Shaw, Vidal has figured out that by "sugar-coating" the pill of his philosophical and political advice the reader is more likely to swallow it. The clever reader who disagrees with the Master on a particular issue -- a rare occurrence for me -- can always lick off the sugar and spit out the pill.

Vidal is great fun too, and I mean fun to read or listen to in conversation. Do not underestimate the importance of pleasure in literature. Very different writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Luis Stevenson, Steven King, even Leo Tolstoy are all fun to read -- so is Shakespeare, by the way. Vidal is in good company. Besides, it is only those who are read "for" fun, who will be read at all, at least voluntarily, in the future.

Unless future generations are made up entirely of illiterates, a distinct possibility, or of lawyers and politicians (which may be a redundancy!), Vidal and Mailer, Updike and Roth, Bellow and Jong, Sontag and Morrison, Franzen and Baldwin, Styron and Foster Wallace, Garcia Marquez and Fuentes will probably be among those who are read, as will Steven King and (for me) Richard Matheson, Raymond Chandler, Donald E. Westlake, John Banville. They will be read by the few who continue to read. Do not allow the snobs in universities to convince you otherwise. I am sure that the first duty of the writer is to engage the interest of the reader, a lesson learned from Vidal. All of these writers do that "seducing" of the reader. My heavily "footnoted" essay on Foster Wallace is coming up.

I cannot begin to do justice to Vidal's influence on my writing and thinking within the space limitations of an Internet essay. The most important lesson to be learned from his writings is to appreciate the freedom that we possess as human beings -- freedom to define ourselves, sexually and in every other way, even if we happen to be boringly ordinary. ("The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem" and "Master and Commander.")

Vidal's ideas fit some existentialist and pragmatist themes in twentieth century thought and place him, like me, among the freedom-loving democratic socialists along with academic philosophers, such as Cornel West, Richard Rorty and Noam Chomsky as well as many others. In other words, we are two of the good guys. And Vidal is great in a literary bar fight. You definitely want him on your side.

Vidal wrote the first literary novel published in the United States by a mainstream publisher about openly homosexual characters who were otherwise "normal" young men, The City and the Pillar. Although I am not homosexual (feel free to call me what you like), the liberating aspect of Vidal's work for me was the sense that a strong sexual drive and desire was a normal aspect of myself to celebrate and not a source of shame despite the grim lessons of my Catholic schooling.

Gore Vidal is, and has always been, the most free person in American public life, even at a time -- well before the sixties' cultural revolution -- when this was not an easy thing to be and when the price that he paid for his freedom was ridicule and a lack of respectful attention to his work. Freedom is also part of what I see and admire in Erica Jong's and James Baldwin's writings and personalities. For Vidal, "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are adjectives alluding to activities and not nouns describing rigid categories of persons. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay.")

Vidal was born October 3, 1925 in West Point, New York. Within a year Vidal's family moved to Washington, D.C., where his father was an influential early advocate for the flight industry. Vidal's grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served in the U.S. Senate. His grandfather's blindness meant that that the young Vidal read to him for hours, everything from the Congressional Record to Shakespeare, making the boy a voluntary reader and writer early in life.

After divorcing Vidal's father, his mother (Nina) married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jacqueline Bouvier's stepfather. Hence, the much noted connection to the Kennedy clan as well as to the Gores. Vidal is a well-established member of America's "ruling class," political division. And yes, there is such a thing. He attended Philips Exeter Academy at Andover, but skipped Harvard after service in the Second World War when he took up the pen.

Neither Vidal nor the world has yet recovered from all that has since emerged in his writings.

"I do not know what I really think about a subject," Vidal says, "until I have written about it."

The two emotional relationships that must be understood by any prospective biographer (or critic) are Vidal's union of many decades with Howard Austen -- who happened to be a Jew -- and his intense and tragically brief relationship with Jimmy Trimble, who was killed at Iwo Jima, a relationship and loss described with unforgettable lyricism in Palimpsest.

It is the presence of Mr. Trimble and his memory in Vidal's life, before and after Iwo Jima, which is crucial to understanding both Vidal's persona and his literary work. I urge those interested in the literature of courtly romance to study The Search for the King.

The second volume of Vidal's memoir chronicles the illness and death of Mr. Austen. I was reminded of Vidal's famous metaphor borrowed from Shakespeare -- "Time is a thief." That thief has now taken Vidal's closest partnerships and loves along with much of what he defends about America in this dark age for civil liberties.

You are witnessing at this blog sanctioned criminality and censorship that would have been unthinkable in America only twenty years ago.

Vidal's struggle against depression is intense. Mine too.

Vidal seems to have felt that he was a subject of "secret" monitoring by intelligence agencies in the U.S. Given his presence on Mr. Nixon's enemies list and controversial views it is difficult to doubt Vidal's sincerity on this matter especially during America's post-9/11 paranoia phase. Vidal was not much-liked by Republicans who tend to cluster in police and intelligence agencies to say nothing of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Perhaps this tendency towards fascism among our boys and girls in blue explains why officials are ignoring me.

Vidal's books have now sold in excess of thirty million copies worldwide. By comparison, my self-published essay received a grand total of 540 "hits" in a year. I have no idea how many hits my books have received now. Thousands? Many thousands it seems. Hackers are obstructing my access to "Lulu." Also, my second book, deliberately, will not be distributed to book sellers by government censors. It's all part of the N.J. government censorship and disruption of my life. I am getting used to the bullshit. For example, several "errors" were inserted in this text after I posted the essay earlier today. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")

I have already posted the equivalent of a book of short stories and three additional volumes of essays. I will begin work on a novel on my birthday this year. I will finish that book by next year at the same date. I hope. How (or whether) I will manage to publish these works I cannot say. I am encouraged by the discovery that this essay was less damaged than I expected it to be.

In a long life that has been filled with literary success Vidal has known absolutely everyone in Hollywood -- where he wrote for the movies and the dollars ("just the dollars," he says), sharing a house with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward -- and in New York, where his plays were successful for years on Broadway, in the literary world, and in Europe, where Fellini persuaded him to appear "as himself" (how else?) in the film, "Roma." He has lived in Ravello, Italy; Beverly Hills, California; Edgewater, New York and traveled everywhere.

It is Gore Vidal -- never Truman Capote -- who knows and has always known everybody and all the best gossip.

Vidal is not revealing the contents of his journals "until after [his] death or the second coming of Christ, whichever arrives first." That question (as to which would come first) has been answered with Gore Vidal's death, but we have yet to see his diaries published.

If it is true that every writer selects his predecessors then Vidal's are easy to spot: In the American tradition, one sees the influence of everyone from Mark Twain to Henry James and Edith Wharton, from Henry Adams to John Horne Burns; among the Europeans, setting aside the ancients, a line of ancestry can be traced from Samuel Johnson's elegant barbs and Jonathan Swift's mad inventiveness, from Lord Chesterfield's cool Enlightenment skepticism to the barbed witticisms of Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw.

Vidal's friendships and rivalries with Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr. (who appears, very thinly disguised, as "William De La Touche Clancy" in Burr), also surface -- often surreptitiously -- in his work.

Vidal cannot be bought and he cannot be intimidated. As he once said, "the only 'thing' that I have ever done is my own." He is (and he would smile at this phrase!) "the patron saint of controversialists." In 1969, he said to an interviewer from Playboy:

"I think of myself as cheerful, even on the attack, and though I am not gregarious nor anxious to be loved, I have quite enough company out there on the edge of things. For me, the only danger is a tendency to drift towards the center -- which means that at some point, I must make my get away, whether it be from the White House or from literary respectability. At one time or another, I've had a number of fine conventional careers within my grasp: the popular theater, Congress, television performer. But once each of these exercises had served my purpose -- or perhaps once I had got the range of it -- I always found some way of getting out. I'm not a courtier, I'm a critic -- something most people who find power exciting find difficult to understand. At the time of my break with the Kennedys, Arthur Schlessinger told my sister that he feared I had a death wish. To which I answered, 'I have a life wish -- and I can't live vicariously.' But most people are like Arthur. They want to belong -- in his case, to be a Kennedy; it is a touching, even a sweet instinct -- but not for me. I can only breathe outside."

Vidal's literary mastery and novelistic technique, knowledge of history and world culture, political acumen and independence as a controversialist make him America's finest essayist. He is the undefeated world champion, in Norman Mailer's terms, of the essay form and one of our best literary critics in the twentieth century, besides his genius as a novelist.

Perhaps this recognition of genius was the source of Mailer's hostility to Vidal. Vidal is the best writing teacher anyone can have. Study his work and you will be a better writer. ("Dormi Bene Gore Vidal" and "Book Chats and 'Chits.'")

I will focus here on only one of his essays. Given some discussions of French literary theory and philosophy that I have engaged in recently it seems most fitting to focus on "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel."

If you accept no other literary advice that I offer please believe this: You should own the collected essays of Gore Vidal, a copy of the Bible, a complete edition of the plays of William Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, and the great documents of the United States of America. If you are forced to choose between these books do not give up Vidal's essays without a fight.

Vidal's Literary Theory.

There are essays by Vidal that are light, amusing explorations of distinctions in literary quality, i.e., "The Top Ten Bestsellers," others are more political and polemical, for instance, the "State of the Union" speeches that Vidal delivered in different parts of the country during the seventies and eighties. There are also more personal or autobiographical essays; "West Point" is one such essay.

I have selected "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel" for my focus because that essay illustrates Vidal's talents as a "serious" critic who manages to beguile and charm the reader into following along while getting him or her to absorb some pretty heavy theory along the way.

I have tried to do the same "seducing of the reader" in a number of essays and short stories dramatizing complex ideas, for example, in "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." ("What you will ...")

I should note that Vidal's "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star" may be the most important essay written by an American in the twentieth century that is on the same level with Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" or James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time." Vidal begins on a wistful and sad note:

"To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of 'fact.' But then, Americans have never been enthusiastic readers. According to Dr. Gallup, only five percent of our population can be regarded as habitual readers." (p. 89.)

The number of serious readers of quality literature is now closer to one percent of the population, if that many. Vidal is led to some dismaying conclusions:

"... the novel as currently practiced does not appeal to the intellectuals any more than it does to the large public, and it may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age that Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed 'post-Guttenberg.' Whether or not the Professor's engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college [December, 1967] is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today's student often experiences difficulty in reading and writing." (p. 90.) ("America's Nursery School Campus" and "Why Jane can't read.")

Things have degenerated substantially since Vidal's essay appeared as demonstrated by some recent published complaints by Jonathan Franzen and the criticisms of many others.

Most people no longer read serious literature for pleasure, not even the supposedly "educated" among us. A recent contestant on the television program "Beauty and the Geek" explained that: "1942 is when Columbus sailed the ocean blue." (Vidal would ask: Was she the "beauty" or the "geek"?)

In a nation in which more than 50% of the population will not read a single book during their adult lifetimes perhaps this sort of remark is not surprising.

Vidal suggests that part of the problem is the decline in educational standards. Also, the attempt to turn literature into something like nuclear physics, requiring experts with their own technical jargon commenting on the arcane discipline for the general public, is just not very helpful. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

The tendency to "theorizing in a literary mode" is termed by Vidal "the French virus" and traced to the post-war generation of French intellectuals:

"Since the Second World War, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, among others, have attempted to change not only the form of the novel, but the relationship between book and reader ..." (p. 91.)

These were the teachers of our teachers, that is, of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other post-structuralists. No longer the master of the text, the writer becomes a sort of doorman or -woman, inviting the reader to "enter" the literary premises and reshape its reality to his or her liking, deciding what a text means, if anything, and what parts of it or what writing is "good" and why. None of this is very surprising:

"The proof that human life can be as perfectly meaningless in the scale of human society as it is in eternity stunned a generation, and the shock of this knowledge, more than anything else (certainly more than the discoveries of the mental therapists or the new techniques of industrial automation), caused a dislocation of human values which in turn made something like the New Novel inevitable." (pp. 93-94.)

For these literary theorists, Adorno's question lingers in the air: "How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?"

My response is: How can one not write poetry after Auschwitz? ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")

Literature is the only way to try to come to terms, publicly, with our reactions to such events. Rather than accepting their destinies as "powerless" humanists wielding only fragile and clumsy weapons -- like pens and paper in the pre-computer age -- writers, unwisely, sought to don the mantle of science so as to steal some of its power:

"... we are living (one might even say that we are trapped) in the age of science. Miss Sarraute particularly delights in using quasi-scientific references." (pp. 96-97.)

The result is collections of essays in literary theory featuring graphs, charts and formulas, theories of language and literature suggesting that authors, then readers, then language itself, have all "disappeared" as demonstrated by a particular formula, or deconstructive technique, thus confirming the darkest fears of our antihumanistic age in which genius too can be isolated under a microscope, perhaps, and masterpieces -- like nuclear explosions -- produced on demand, for a small fee, by "experts" in white lab coats. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" then "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

"For it is obvious that both [Nathalie Sarraute] and Robbe-Grillet see themselves in white smocks working out new formulas for a new fiction. Underlying all their theories is the assumption that if scientists can break the atom with an equation, a dedicated writer ought to be able to find a new form in which to redefine the 'unchanging human heart'[.] Since the old formulas have lost their efficacy, the novel, if it is to survive, must become something new; and so, to create that something new, they believe that writers must resort to calculated invention and bold experiment." (p. 97.)

Vidal commented to an interviewer in 1974:

"All of the arts [philosophy?] reflect this state of mind, this waiting for the end. A kind of interior deterioration is taking place, a drive on the part of almost every artist to blow up his own art form, sometimes in the interest of novelty ... to explode it, to shit on it."

And again:

"A lot of this comes from the dreadful effect of science on the humanist tradition. In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. [But not quickly enough?] New formulas -- just like the scientist. But that isn't science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road." ("Is Humanism Still Possible?")

Did Vidal arrive at John Barth country before the good "postmodernist" professor? (See Vidal's essay on "The Hacks of Academe.")

Vidal now shifts gears in this great essay and strikes out on behalf of the humanists:

"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise." (p. 98.)

This sort of belief and the attempt to be a scientist or at least "scientific" in understanding the literary mysteries -- let alone the depths of the soul -- is lethal to the artist-creator and maybe to the critic or therapist. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")

Writers, literary artists, even philosophers and psychologists cannot be scientists. Their concern is not so much with facts, but with truths about the human condition. It is to decide what the facts mean by interpreting them for us:

"Meanwhile, [for the New Novelists or writer-scientists,] only that which is verifiable is to be taken seriously; emotive meaning must yield to cognitive meaning. Since the opacity of human character has so far defeated all objective attempts at illumination, [emphasis added] the New Novelists prefer, as much as possible, to replace the human with objects closely observed and simple gestures noted but not explained." (p. 107.)

You cannot create great literature if love, for instance, is reduced to what one recent "scientific" psychobabbler described as a "defense mechanism." Romeo turns to Juliet and says: "What we feel is really only a 'defense mechanism' curable with some Prozac and a little therapy."

Perhaps a little "aversion therapy" or other behaviorist conditioning associated with Juliet's picture can lead Romeo to throw up whenever he thinks of her liberating him from this "dependency relation" for a productive life in the wonderful world of accounting. No doubt Dr. Phil would approve of such tactics.

All of this scientific reductivism when transported to the realm of human relations, which is the primal source of literature, is nonsense and yields nothing in terms of literary quality. Vidal explains:

"Since human behavior is notoriously irrational and mysterious, it can be demonstrated only in the most impressionistic and unscientific way; it yields few secrets to objective analysis." (p. 107.)

What Vidal did not bother to explain is that this is how it must be if we are to remain, as I believe that we are, free persons, doomed or privileged to construct our meanings in and through our deepest relationships, ourselves, through telling one another about them in stories -- written stories meant to defeat time and death like Crusoe's footprints in the sand as the tide rolls in.

Even if literature is at an end Vidal invites us to continue to read and write, as an act of defiance maybe, or as a final doomed assertion of our humanity. For Vidal, the literary "act" is a Pascalian gesture of hubristic rebellion:

"Even as the universe destroys man," Blaise Pascal writes, "he will remain superior to it -- because he will be aware of his fate and the universe will be oblivious to its victory." (See my dedication to "Master and Commander.")

Vidal takes his leave of the reader with a brave admonition together with scorn and defiance of the antihumanists and scientific reductivists:

"Our lovely and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words." (p. 110.)

It was with these caveats in mind that I began to write. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

"Someone to laugh at the squares with ..."

In his portrait of Tennessee Williams Vidal noted that America's greatest playwright once spoke, wistfully, of finding "someone to laugh at the squares with" which was a way of asking for love. This request is not difficult to find in Williams's wonderful plays.

Vidal provides exactly that love and solidarity for readers as I suspect that he did for Williams. Vidal is "someone to laugh at the squares with"; to chuckle with over the banalities of "therapists" and the pomposities of politicians; to stand with against the evils of corruption, greed, and oppression as well as sadism. This is the hydra-headed monster fought by every generation of writers and readers, artists and thinkers, or just good men and women.

Gore Vidal has been with me in adversity and struggle for several decades now. And he always will be. Vidal can be with you, too. At the worst of times, in my moments of rage and frustration and bitter despair, I recall his words and smile a little while remaining hopeful, always hopeful:

"If we survive," Vidal writes, "we may yet be civilized, and that is something to work for."

Three Cheers for the Rule of Law!

October 5, 2009 at 5:55 P.M. Numerous attacks on these essays may have resulted in severe damage to several essays. I will do my best to make all corrections. What is "Operation Heldentenor"? How about "Chivalry Film Productions"? Terry Tuchin, can you help us out? NSA? CIA, Terry? It is still illegal for the CIA to operate within the nation's borders, right "gentlemen"?

" ... former [NJ] Democratic Chairman, Joseph Ferreiro, has just gone on trial, and ... Mr. Corzine had given Mr. Ferreiro more than $500,000 in political contributions over the years. 'Is that the kind of example we're talking about setting -- enabling corruption with your own personal money?' [Mr. Corzine has not responded.] ..."

David M. Halbfinger, "In New Jersey, a Sharp, Scrappy Debate," in The New York Times, October 2, 2009, at p. A24. (New arrests are expected soon in New Jersey.)

September 30, 2009 at 3:18 P.M. Numerous essays have been damaged today. I have struggled to make all necessary corrections. I cannot say how many more works have been vandalized.

September 19, 2009 at 5:57 P.M. a letter was just deleted from this text as I was writing a correction of the essay. This is very upsetting. In response I will focus on the all time moron judge in Jersey City, Ms. Tolentino, and on further allegations of bias in the Hudson County prosecutor's office. How's Louisa doing? Long time no see. Nydia Hernandez, Esq.? Do we begin to see a pattern? Are indictment decisions based on political favors, Ed De Fazio, Esq.?

September 9, 2009 at 10:00 P.M. An advertisement was attached to this blog against my will, purporting to come from http://www.normansiegel.com/ I do not believe that this advertisement by adhesion complies with election laws. This is especially sad on the day of President Barack Obama's wonderful health care speech. Additional arrests of N.J. mafia and political figures are expected soon. How are my old pals, Howard and Alex, the "Hope and Crosby" of Hudson County?

Is it true that lawyers in Hudson County falsely stamp complaints as "filed" when they haven't been filed? I never did that? Somebody stole the necessary stamp? Maybe for a small fee, you don't have to worry about "filing" anything, like tax returns showing actual fees from "contractors," huh, Bobby? Hey, Albio -- do they still have the gambling machines that were protected by West New York's former police chief, Mr. Oriente? I hear the illegal numbers game is doing great in Hudson County. Is that true, caballeros? You wanna get it into, boys? Nydia and Luisa, Mary Anne ...

September 8, 2009 at 9:27 P.M. "The nearly two year probe grew out of a 2007 New Jersey case involving a Luchese [mafia] family faction that ran a staggering $2 BILLION-a-year gambling operation" -- with an alleged child porn component, right Debbie Poritz? -- "and supplied drugs and cellphones to Bloods gang members in state prisons." ("Does New Jersey's Mafia Informer Know Jaynee LaVecchia?" and "How Many New Jersey Judges are in the Mafia?" then "Mafia and Street Gang Alliance Broken Up in New Jersey.")

Noise fills the room in which I write. Coincidence? Arrests in New York TODAY resulting from the New Jersey-based family's operations will lead to further arrests of Luchese family capos and others, including (allegedly) New Jersey political officials. Anthony M. Suarez, Esq.? It is not clear and I cannot say whether there is any relation between Senator Bob's little friend "Kay Li Causi" (Luchese?) and these events. Xanadu? ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles" and "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")

Is it true that you guys were paying people to bring false grievances against me? Were you writing grievances and letters on behalf of persons unable to read them bearing their names? Manufacturing false statements from "witnesses" against me, persons who smiled to my face, and then lied on paper for a fee? What does the "E" in OAE stand for, Mr. Rabner? Anne Milgram, Esq.? Boys? How is it possible for legal officials to cover-up such criminality? Do you speak to me of "ethics," Mr. Rabner? Mr. Corzine? Why not insert another "error" to help prove my point, Ms. Milgram?

OAE incompetence and (possible) complicity in this corruption -- much of this illegality is made possible by New Jersey lawyers -- is in keeping with the grotesque failures of that corrupt agency. What's that smell? It must be Trenton's "walking turds." When New Jersey's lawyers, privately, refer to their own ethics enforcement mechanism (appropriately) in such terms, you may safely infer that a state's legal system has collapsed into chaos. This is the unhappy fate of New Jersey's legal system -- collapse into corruption and incompetence as well as criminality. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics.")

Are you not sickened by New Jersey's legal paralysis as you witness this display of public criminality emanating from Trenton's government computers? I know that I am. Senator Bob has issued a statement supporting the rule of law in America. The Senator explained that he is "for" that. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?") Way to go out on a limb, BobbyM!

"That probe -- which netted 32 wiseguys -- soon spread across the Hudson River into the family's Big Apple hierarchy, prompting surveillance and wiretapping by the NYPD [and the feds] and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office ...." Murray Weiss, "City Graft Shocker: Mob-Tied Building Inspectors in Bribe & Drug Scandal," in The New York Post, September 8, 2009, at p. 5. ("New Jersey Mafia Alliance With Street Gang Broken Up.")

New developments are expected in the weeks ahead, as every cop in the area seems to visit my sites. Perhaps they are interested in philosophy. Will we be hearing soon from Tommie ("TommieC") Camarata, Esq.? Joe ("The Enforcer") Doria, Esq.? Good luck with the new clients, boys. Hey, Big Nicky Sacco, what're ya up to five public jobs now? Heh, heh, heh ... Dem guys. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "North Bergen is the Home of 'La Cosa Nostra.'")

I wonder whether Jay Romano is still at The New York Times? Maybe Romano writes under different names.

I hear the IRS is really busy in Hudson and Bergen Counties. FBI is next. Badda-bing, badda-boom. Ridgewood, New Jersey has become a hot bed of tax evasion and criminal fraud. Shame on you, "Doc." Were you ever a fully licensed physician, as you claimed to be, Terry Tuchin? Did you really work for the C.I.A., Terry? Where did you learn hypnosis, Terry? How many innocent people are sitting in prisons because of you, Terry? Diana? Whatta-ya say? Don't be bashful. ("Is Union City, New Jersey Meyer Lansky's Whorehouse?" and "New Jersey is Lucky Luciano's Havana.")

How about that, "disappearing" money that precludes needed pay raises for teachers and cops in New Jersey. Luckily, they have that new invisible shopping mall in the Meadowlands that was not built for $2 BILLION. Jeanette Rundquist, "Teacher Contracts Feel The Recession: Talks Stall as Pay, Benefits Squeezed," in The Star Ledger, September 8, 2009, at p. 13. ($4.5 MILLION in the exploding Equinix scandal.)

September 8, 2009 at 6:25 P.M. Earlier today, at 5:55 P.M., interference with my signal prevented me from signing off on my computer. I am now at a public computer. I will access my site from another computer later this evening. These attacks are usually accompanied by defacements of my writings, again, which may be a response to new allegations of "unusual" sexual relationships involving Ms. Poritz and very young women, also to further inquiries concerning Senator Bob and the gleaming Xanadu mall which does not exist. But then, the $2 BILLION belonging to the taxpayers and some public investors also does not exist any longer. I wonder what could have happened? Perhaps the money is sitting at a South Beach resort. Right, "BobbyM"?

The goal of these frustration and anxiety-inducement efforts is to inflict serious psychological harm on a victim leading to collapse, especially when combined with financial pressures and destruction of relationships through slanders, right boys? Good luck.

If these allegations of "strange relationships" exist throughout the state and are true, then shame on you Ms. Poritz. Any new cyberattacks, boys and girls? How's Diana, Debbie? ("Neil M. Cohen, Esq. and Conduct Unbecoming to the Legislature in New Jersey" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.") Let's get tough on crime!

I am told that more scandals will be reported soon in The Star Ledger and other publications. Stay tuned to this station for more cyberwarfare. I am running a new scan at my home computer. Cybercrime may prevent me from regaining access to blogger at any time. Further vandalisms of my essays are always expected. ("Another Mafia Sweep in New Jersey and Anne Milgram is Clueless.")

Have you no shame or appreciation for your incompetence, Ms. Milgram? Mr. Corzine, did we wake you up? (One letter removed from the foregoing sentence is disappointing by way of a cyberattack from the "walking turds.") David Kocieniewski, "Corzine's Wall Street Resume Loses Value for Voters," in The New York Times, October 5, 2009, at p. A17. (Collapsing New Jersey economy is bleeding jobs as employers flee mafia's state government.)

Nationally, 283,000 jobs were lost in September. This is the true legacy of the Bush/Cheney administration: 5,000 + casualties in the various wars, not counting hundreds of thousands of non-American deaths, plus a disintegrating economy, combined with massive corruption in Democrat-mafia states like New Jersey. $8 BILLION deficit; $1 BILLION tax increase for New Jersey in 2009-2010.

September 7, 2009 at 10:24 A.M. A notice (ostensibly, from Google) informs me that "Google detected a change in your settings"). Numerous essays and short stories have been altered, defaced, or vandalized through the removal of letters from words by making use of state action. I will gradually make the necessary corrections. Strangely, these "errors" are not found in other versions of these same texts. ("God is Texting Me!")

No images can be posted at blogger. MSN is "closed," I am told. My second book will not be sent to on-line booksellers. No valid ISBN number has been issued to the manuscript, despite my payment of the necessary fees to receive such a number. "Frustration-inducement" and censorship tactics continue to be used against this site. "I have reason to believe" that the true number of hits at this blog may be approaching 25-50,000. ("Debbie Poritz Likes the Ladies!" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Hey, how's "Lourdes-the-Lawyer" doing? How's the "Lesbian love-fest," Anne Milgram, Esq.? Isn't it demeaning to be described in insulting terms, Anne? ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?") I know a woman who has been described by pillars of the community in very insulting terms. These pillars of the community are much worse persons (I use the word "persons" loosely) than she could ever be. Let's introduce Lourdes Santiago, Esq. to Nydia Hernandez, Esq.!

September 7, 2009 at 8:42 A.M. Arrests were anounced yesterday (by feds) concerning theft (again) from the Pleasantville School District, in New Jersey. Further arrests elsewhere in the state are expected soon. Look for coverage in MSNBC. Joe ("The Enforcer") Doria, Esq.? Senator Bob? Getting nervous, boys? (Again: "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "New Jersey's Political and Judicial Whores.")

Stealing money from handicapped kids, boys? That makes you "ethically superior" to me? Tell me again why you are my ethical superiors? Don't you claim to be intellectually superior to little old me, Stuart?

September 5, 2009 at 12:38 P.M. My home page was changed by hackers. I have just restored that home page. I cannot say what damage and/or alterations to essays have taken place during the interval. I am running a second complete scan of my computer, after removing 13 viruses earlier today. The true number of visitors to this blog is still unknown, "approximately."

I wonder whether "Ginger Thompson" (Lourdes? Nydia?) can clarify this situation? Cubanaza? "Manohla Dargis"? "Alina Falcone"? Univision? ("What is it like to be plagiarized?") Nydia Hernandez, Esq.? Jose Ginarte, Esq.? I understand that both of you fine people have some problems with the OAE, perhaps also with the F.B.I. Is Gloria still at Univision, Senator Bob? Perhaps she can help with this situation.

Sadly, it appears that more Hudson County Latino lawyers are about to be DISBARRED: How's my old buddy, George Rios, Esq.? Edgar Navarrete, Esq.? Gonzales? Garcia? Lourdes and Mary Anne? Louisa? Ladies? How are "tricks" at the Union County Prosecutor's Office? Hey, Ed De Fazio, Esq. -- How's Lieutenant Andriani? Is he a buddy, Ed? You aiming for a judgeship, Ed?

"Guantanamo Must Be Closed," (Editorial) in The New York Times, December 18, 2009, at p. A42. (Comparable facilities in the U.S. must also be closed and victims of psychological torture must be told the truth concerning what has been done to them.)
Ginger Thompson, "U.S. Suspends $30 Million To Honduras," in The New York Times, September 4, 2009, at p. A6.
David Johnston & Mark Mazzetti, "A Window Into the C.I.A.'s Embrace of Secret Jails," in The New York Times, August 13, 2009, at p. A1. (Corruption at C.I.A. contractors and kickbacks.)
"Dick Cheney's Version," (Editorial) in The New York Times, September 3, 2009, at p. A30.

The U.S. decision to suspend $30 MILLION in funds due to flow to Honduras is widely supported in Latin America. This is true despite the obfuscation and protests of Florida's Right-wing Cubanoid fascists, who are probably responsible for "Ginger Thompson's" byline at The New York Times.

I suspect that "Ginger Thompson" is one of the names used by promiment politicians in the Cubanazo community to disseminate their hateful views through the American media. "Manohla Dargis"? There is no other explanation for the presence of such illiterate people in any newspaper, let alone America's premier daily newspaper. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

I love The New York Times. I have been reading this newspaper since high school. It is obvious to me when a person (or "byline") does not belong in the Times. Incidentally, the Washington Post and Boston Globe, I believe, are just as good. This person is hurting America's premier newspaper, perhaps other publications as well. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")

The admirable goal of Obama administration efforts in this matter is to encourage reforms (by Hondurans) that will prevent Honduras from returning to the bad old days of "Banana Republic" status. Many Hondurans have used exactly this term, "Banana Republic," because they rightly fear that, with the success of a military-intelligence coup at the request of the tiny percentage of the population that usually runs the country on behalf of American corporations, Honduras will become a satellite state of America's corporate oligarchy. Come to think of it, this is a good description of America during the Bush/Cheney nightmare -- an adjunct of the corporate oligarchy.

The masters of this take-over in Honduras have now been responsible for the killing of several peaceful protesters seeking the return of their constitutional democracy and the rule of law. It is absurd to suggest that the people ousting a duly elected official prior to the end of his term at the point of a gun "are for the rule of law." American politicians meeting with these people, in violation of the foreign policy of the nation, are legitimating atrocities and associating the United States of America with these policies and the sort of fascists who implement them.

Is this likely to win us friends or influence people, Ms. Ross-Lethinen? I doubt it. Elisabeth Malkin, "State Forces Are Accused Of Abuses In Honduras: Rights Groups Denounce Repression and Impunity," in The New York Times, October 6, 2009, at p. A4. (President Obama's policy is shared by the overwhelming majority of nations in the area and world community.)

1% of the Honduran people who work for "American Fruit" companies can not, legitimately, derive most of the benefits of the wealth of that society. Reforms are needed. Alternatively, you can expect another Cuba in Honduras in about a year. The duly elected president of Honduras had a year left on his term. Populist reforms did not meet with the approval of Hondura's military or the Cubanoids in Miami Beach. The rest of the population of the planet welcomed those reforms.

New Jersey has been accurately described as a mafia-saturated "Banana Republic." Florida may be just as bad. In both states, there are people who do not understand that we believe in the rule of law in this country. Mr. Holder, it is time to do something about the shameful spectacle that New Jersey has become. We have our own problems in the federal system concerning the rule of law:

"In Mr. Cheney's view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to [sic.] the interrogation rules set down by President George W. Bush's Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded their guidelines." (This language appears in The New York Times.)

A former Vice President of the United States of America has "no problem" with criminality by government officials who did not "stick" to executive orders. What the hell, right Mr. Cheney? Mr. Cheney is "unstuck" from the rule of law. I believe the Times reporter is alluding to the ability (or inability) of officials to "follow" or "abide" by the law. Anne Milgram, Esq. says: "Whatever!"

"It is easy to understand Mr. Cheney's aversion [psychobabble] to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it [what?] stopping with the interrogators. He's right."

"The government owes America a full investigation into the orders to approve torture" -- New Jersey, are you getting this? -- "abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to ... look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured."

New Jersey will not succeed in "twisting" my legal briefs, especially when I am wearing them. This writer is an editorialist for The New York Times. Amazing. I would be surprised if my phone has not been tapped.

New Jersey's torture techniques are the product of a Democrat-mafia partnership. They are just as much a threat to the rule of law in America and, equally, to be investigated. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Are you aware of this situation, Anne Milgram, Esq.? Each day that the cover-up continues is a renewal of the tortures, Mr. Rabner. Have you no sense of decency in Trenton? How does a Jew become Mengele? How does a Jew become Eichman?

"All you need is love."

September 20, 2009 at 11:25 A.M. "Errors" were inserted and corrected, again.

September 3, 2009 at 11:08 A.M. "Errors" were inserted overnight in this essay. I have done my best to correct them. This vandalism suggests the continuing use of government resources in New Jersey to engage in cybercrime and censorship. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "How Censorship Works in America.")

September 2, 2009 at 9:20 A.M. This has been a difficult month in terms of cybercrime. I will continue to struggle. It is reported in today's newspapers that the C.I.A. is stonewalling in response to the U.S. Attorney General's requests for information concerning torture and interrogation techniques, apparently in response to criticisms of the White House by Mr. Cheney. These techniques of obstruction and obfuscation are common in Anne Milgram's office in Trenton.

If an agency of the federal government can ignore requests for information from the U.S. Attorney -- an agency operating secretly within the nation and beyond the boundaries of law -- then we have lost the Constitution along with the rule of law. Where are those reports by Tuchin and Riccioli, Mr. Rabner? Mark Mazzetti, "C.I.A. Resists Disclosure Of Records On Detention," in The New York Times, September 2, 2009, at p. A11. (Deliberate disregard of legal orders combined with crimes like theft, obstruction of justice, and much worse.)

August 14, 2007 at 9:26 A.M. I discovered new "errors" inserted in this essay since my last reading of it. I will now correct them, then re-post the essay, only to find these "errors" again when I next read this work. Frustration and exhaustion are commonly used techniques of psychological torture. They are intended to discourage or eliminate dissent in many societies. How does a Jew become Mengele, Terry? How does a Jew become Eichman, Stuart? For my opposition to antisemitism, see "Martin Buber and Diet Judaism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist."

My experience is not unique. In recent years illicit governmental tactics are more blatant in America. Due to viruses, the formatting and template of this blog/group and some posts have been affected. I have tried to keep the site going as best I can, despite my daily battles with censors. In light of the events of the twentieth century, it is mind-boggling that any Jewish person would wish to assist with the torture and censorship of others in America -- or anywhere. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

On February 18, 2007 at 1:12 P.M., I re-posted this essay after correcting "errors" in the posted version that were not found in my saved copy or in the print-out of this same text. Spacing may be affected and new "errors" may be inserted at any time.

Please get James Baldwin's The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin's, 1985). These are some of the finest essays in American literature, as good as the best of Mailer, Vidal, Updike, Morrison, Sontag, Franzen, Foster-Wallace, Lurie, Styron.

I. "Make Love, Not War."

At the center of the raging political and cultural controversies in the United States today is a sharp disagreement about the meaning and significance of the decade of the nineteen-sixties. The fundamental underlying issue, which is often unstated by those who disagree politically and with regard to cultural matters -- usually dividing neatly along party lines -- is whether that decade should be seen as a time of liberation and cultural renewal, or whether the sixties should be viewed as a period of cultural and moral collapse, responsible for the visible decline in standards of public behavior and in the quality of aesthetic and intellectual life in contemporary America.

My answer to this question will please no one, certainly not ideologues of the Left or Right. I think that the sixties have left us with an ambiguous legacy, one that is to be celebrated in some ways while being deplored in others. Those seeking simple slogans and party-lines will be disappointed in this response -- and in anything that I write, for that matter -- since I have no desire to please anyone by my opinions, which are bound to be complex and nuanced when dealing with such a subtle and difficult issue as this.

Do not look for "bumper sticker solutions" to complex issues. And feel free to put that slogan on a bumper sticker.

To the extent that the sixties were about liberation from the straitjacket of outdated sexual mores and vicious racism, while ensuring civil rights for previously excluded people, gender equality, and an end to the Vietnam struggle, then I am an admirer and a proud child of sixties' values.

However, if by the sixties we refer to a "Yippiesque" attitude of dismissiveness towards all values, whether aesthetic or ethical -- or to an irrational anti-Americanism and embrace of nihilism that would undermine the very sixties values of freedom and equality that I celebrate -- then I am not an admirer nor an adherent of this extreme form of so-called sixties' radicalism.

During the sixties both of these strands or sets of messages were woven together. The task for us is to disentangle these strands or "mixed messages" from that period, so as to see whether we can learn what is of continuing value in the radicalism or revolution of that important decade, and what lessons of the sixties are worth preserving now, as we enter a new century and millennium. Just as 1848 is the crucial year to understand the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century, so it appears that 1968 is the most important year for appreciating the cultural revolutions of the late twentieth century and beyond.

One glance at the way that people appeared and dressed in the late fifties and early sixties is enough to make it clear that imprisonment in nuclear families, girdles, helmet-like hairdos, suits and ties at the dinner table on a daily basis, and "teen wildness," as defined by the likes of Pat Boone or Perry Como, was doomed from the start -- or at least from the election of President Kennedy as he flashed that friendly smile at the unforgettably attired Marilyn Monroe's rendition of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President!" ("Miss Monroe, uh, I don't think that I have ever heard 'Happy Birthday' sung in quite that way before ...")

I have no doubt that President Kennedy had a very happy birthday on that occasion. (I have just corrected this previous paragraph in the same way for the tenth time, possibly, and it will be necessary for me to do so again.)

Sexual freedom was long overdo as the sixties arrived. As a matter of fact, by 1962, everybody was pretty much ready to put down their briefcases and take off their clothes. And they did. President Kennedy's assassination was a collective reminder of mortality, and of the folly in the fifties' creed of deferring life until a mythical trouble-free future time when the mortgage would be paid and the kids would be in college. This new awareness may have provided the final shove into the boudoir for America's middle class white couples. The best chroniclers of the suburban bedroom, incidentally, are John Updike and John Cheever, both of whom, evidently, "got some" during that decade. ('Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

African-Americans, despite the agonies of the civil rights struggle, arrived at sexual freedom long before white suburbia did, assuming that it has even now. In his great essay, "The White Negro," Norman Mailer, controversially, spelled it all out for the "squares":

"Since the Negro knows more about the ugliness and danger of life than the white, it is probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential [sexual] superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground drama of domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of unforeseeable consequences, for the Negro's equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every white alive. [Notice Mailer's most important point:] ... With this possible emergence of the Negro, Hip may erupt as a psychically armed rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound against the antisexual foundation of every organized power in America, and bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, and new conflicts of interest that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work."

African-Americans are natural existentialists, according to Mailer, because they have been forced to live with the realities of danger on a daily basis. African-Americans are forced to discover their courage and find their freedom in the passion of the moment, and in the assertions of a self-made imperative against the attempted imposition of a false and stereotypical identity.

To be an African-American -- male or female -- is to understand Hemingway's definition of courage as "grace under pressure" very early in life.

This radicalized existentialism is also a protest against the ever-present possibility of early death. Sex matters because it is freedom -- if only briefly -- from an oppressive social order, and not because of any inherent physical superiority in African-American males.

This claim to physical difference is another racist myth, which is really an attempt to demean people of color. Sexual bliss is the only paradise that we are likely to experience. Yet that bliss is not about physical attributes or sexual gymnastics, sexual ecstasy (or love-making) is about the achievement of connection and meaning through "touching" or contact with another human being. It is essentially spiritual.

There is nothing all that new in this universal yearning for eros as freedom and as the "home-coming of the soul," as Opera fans will know. Think of the first act love duet in Verdi's Otello. Listen to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, "Bess, you is my woman now..." begins an aria and duet with all the lyricism and lush melodic power of the best of Puccini. From this music to earlier work by Scott Joplin, followed by Luis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, the connections between African-American music and European Romantic Opera come down to the expressions of eros and tragedy in accessible music. They are easily found by anyone who cares to look and listen for them. (Read Oscar Wilde's short story "The Nightingale and the Rose," then listen to any good recording by Miles Davis: What "associations" or comparisons can you make?)

The real "black superiority," if it exists (and I think that it does in some areas), is spiritual and it is acquired, because it has to be, by young people who refuse to be destroyed by racism. More than athletics, spiritual and aesthetic life is an arena for African-American genius. In the film Bulworth, Amiri Baraka sings it for the audience: "We don't need no ghosts now, we need spirit."

Such superiority is indeed what "psychobabblers" describe as a "defense mechanism." People develop spiritual resources when survival requires them to do so. No wonder these thoughts are dangerous and hateful to some powerful people -- an entire worldview based on race is challenged and opposed by me in every word that I write. Some of those words will have to be lynched, brutalized, scarred ... like me. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?" and "America's Holocaust.")

Eros is life-force, as Marcuse and Reich, along with many others have demonstrated. Eros cannot be confined within the prison-house of politically correct panaceas nor in the nostrums and platitudes of Christian fundamentalist repressions. To deny the life-force in you is to embrace death whereas to choose love or life-force -- which is creativity -- is to choose transcendence over violence. For this reason and many others, I am in favor of gay marriage rights. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison" and "Is there a gay marriage right?")

It is impossible to miss the presence of eros in African-American music, which is the source of just about all of the good music in the United States, including Rock music today. As a Cuban-American, I am aware that Afro-Cuban music comes from a similar territory of the soul. Anyone who has not discovered the voice of Ibrahim Ferrer or the sounds of "The Buena Vista Social Club" is in for a treat. Next you may want to listen to Perez-Prado's "Mambo Number 5" or Nat "King" Cole's Spanish-language recordings of classic Cuban ballads from the forties and fifties. Anything by Celia Cruz and the Fania All Stars is recommended. And the relationship between jazz and rap should be obvious to the most casual observer and listener. If poetry is alive anywhere in contemporary America then it must be in rap and in the street corner "poetry slams" that are "real" literature by anyone's estimation.

To the extent that the credo "Make Love, Not War," is attributed to the sixties' cultural revolution, then it is my mantra in life, now and always. Love is better than hate. It really is not much more complicated than that. Freedom is as necessary as air to breathe, and with love and freedom, we can create satisfying work and express what we have within us as opposed to wallowing in a tempting rage and violence.

We have it within our power to contribute to our communities, constructively and creatively, by focusing on energies of connection rather than division. We can choose to feed the hungry and heal the sick, or we may lash out at perceived enemies, but we cannot do both at the same time. Whether you like it or not, I am going to write my story and put it out there somehow. ("How Censorship Works in America.")

More than focusing on revenge for past slights, insults, and torments, we can give -- and in giving, we receive -- while always insisting on justice. We can hope to do good work that will be useful to others, deriving satisfaction from that feeling of usefulness. This is my interpretation of Dr. King's message and of the meaning of the civil rights movement that he led on behalf of all Americans, but also as an example for humanity.

I can hear the fashionably cynical chuckle of the nihilists and postmodernist professors, "Make Love, Not War!" is too simple, my boy. It is impossible in this time of false images and media domination of the subject. My answer: "Why, then, are you trying to get laid like everybody else? Who floats your boat when things get tough on the tenure committee? Do you not live your life in search of love and beauty in opposition to hatred and violence? And if you do, then why be so hostile to sharing such ideals and to the existence of hope for the young?"

To borrow James Baldwin's question, "Would you care to explain to my twelve year-old nephew that it is hopeless to work for peace and social justice in order to build a better world?" I thought not.

To see the world from the point of view of an American "street kid" (which is what a part of me will always be), whether you are male or female, whether you like it or not, is to possess -- to that extent and for the rest of one's life -- a black or African-American "sensibility" in what is still a racist "white" society.

If you are a hipster of any complexion or ethnicity in America then you are, unavoidably, a black man or woman and you did not know it. Congratulations.

In my experience it is not (for the most part) African-Americans who react with hostility to such a claim. They are usually amused by it. The typical response from African-Americans is something like: "You don't know what you're letting yourself in for!"

I know what they mean. Many whites still find a person's CHOICE to identify with the African-American experience, for the lessons to be found in that experience about coping with suffering, both unbearable and offensive. Not surprisingly, much the same may be said about identifying with the Israeli experience -- with the history of the Jewish people -- and for the same reasons. There is nothing and no one more despicable (to me) than a Jewish Nazi or an African-American racist. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel heightens Gaza Crisis.")

"None of you white guys want to change places with me," Chris Rock says in his concerts, "and I'm rich!"

Again: To choose the company of oppressed people -- to prefer slaves to their masters -- is to call into question an entire philosophy of racial supremacy. This challenge against racism is an unforgivable offense to some powerful people in New Jersey. My essay on the work of Amiri Baraka has been hacked into and defaced at least fifty times, so far. Mr. Baraka was "poet laureate" in New Jersey, forced to leave his position because people cannot understand the difference between a poem and a police report.

Terry Southern said that a hipster is someone "who has deliberately decided to kill a part of himself to make life bearable."

Well, every African-American person who has to function in a white society, whether professionally or socially, has to do exactly that. To be a hipster is to be an underdog, a dreamer, an outsider, a romantic -- African-American culture is highly romantic. It is "to rage against the dying of the light," as Dylan Thomas, a "white negro" himself and a Brit, expressed it.

Mailer was right to see himself and outsiders like him and me -- you too, if you're white, since you are reading this! -- as "White Negros" in the American context, that is, as persons of an indestructible African-American sensibility, however you may feel about it. Congratulations, again, folks. Incidentally, you may wish to recall Toni Morrison's description of President Clinton as "our first African-American president." One begins to see what she means.

Peter Gabel, in his wonderful recent book The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, speaks of the theme of the last forty years of American history as the "struggle between desire and alienation." I am on the side of a "Streetcar Named Desire." So were the sixties. I believe that African-American culture expresses that side of the American psyche -- love and life-force, desire, passion as methods of survival -- better than any other. To desire is to hope. This choice of desire over alienation is not a difficult decision for me. When you listen to Barack Obama speak of hope, think of this source which, I am sure, few people in this country (even in Senator Obama's staff) thought of when discussing his primary campaign theme:

Our "purpose," Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez writes, "is to let ourselves be judged by the word of the Lord, to think through our faith, to strengthen our love, and to give reason for our hope from within a commitment that seeks to become more radical, total, and efficacious."

A Theology of Liberation (New York: Maryknoll, 1993), p. xiii.

Father Gutierrez includes gay men and lesbian women in this teachings concerning love and hope in Catholicism. This shared insight concerning "hope" for those with nothing else is why President Lula of Brazil offered a handshake to Mr. Obama that very few other American public officials would receive.

Secretary of State Clinton and Vice President Biden are among the politicians getting that handshake because they understand one important thing. People who have nothing still have love and they can, therefore, hope. With hope, you can get up in the morning and deal with your reality, whatever it is. Without hope, you won't bother to get up in the morning.

I trust that Marilyn -- and every person I love -- will continue to hope. Never give up, Marilyn.

This moment between Obama and Lula (a brother's handhake) captured in an already historic photograph was the recognition of solidarity between rich and poor, suffering and struggling people, powerful and powerless segments of our world. The image means a lot to people in many parts of the world.

Do you begin to see why "President" Obama has a credibility that many other American politicians do not have in the developing world? That handshake should be on t-shirts.

You are witnessing a form of censorship and psychological torture directed against someone who has experienced much worse with the cooperation of political power in America. What does this tell you about U.S. society today? ("Is This America?" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

The first draft of this essay was written during the presidential campaign. I have changed the title of "Senator" to "President" several times when describing Mr. Obama, only to discover that the correction has been nullified when I next review the essay. This is meant to be amusing or discouraging. I will continue to write. I will no longer make this correction, but I will transform the inserted "error" into a weapon against those engaging in cybercrime. Lo que no perdonan es la dignidad ... (Fidel Castro in "Memories of Underdevelopment.") (No accents available when I wrote this essay.)

In reacting against Mailer's essay, James Baldwin (who did not like it, though he agreed with much of it) and Gore Vidal (who did like it, though he rejected most of the rest of Mailer's work) agreed on the importance of sex as liberation. In his classic essay, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" James Baldwin says:

"... to become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneself up as one went along. This had to be done in the not-at-all-metaphorical teeth of the world's determination to destroy you. The world had prepared no place for you, and if the world had its way, no place would ever exist. Now, this is true for everyone, but in the case of a Negro, this truth is absolutely naked: If he [or she] deludes himself about it, he will die." (emphasis added).

Sexual liberation always implies political liberation. By the same token, attempts to suppress sexual freedom and sexual forms of expression, always becomes a mechanism of wider social control. This is especially true when it comes to the sexuality of women, about which we are still shrill and divided as a nation. It is time to recognize (and to ask why we have not yet done so) the equal sexual need of women, a need for meaning as well as satisfaction. This is the sort of feminism that I respect, the insistence that women be seen as fully equal PERSONS, for it is a feminism that does not involve any effort to demonize men nor excessive attention to the bogus issues of political correctness.

Political correctness is a distraction from fundamental questions of power to which women must turn their attention.

The feminism that I admire is concerned with social justice, power, and freedom as belonging (equally) to women and men. Political correctness issues are derivative from the resolutions of those fundamental questions of power in society. The terms "masculine" and "feminine" must not become prisons that determine sexual possibilities, or the form and scope of desire, or the range of emotional options for either men or women. The theoretical work of Judith Butler, can be brought into dialogue with the writings of my earliest teachers on this subject Susan Sontag, Angela Davis, Erica Jong, Germaine Greer, not to mention Myra Breckinridge.

Women should not be stigmatized for active and intense sexual lives; neither should men become objects of ridicule for choosing to limit sexual life, for the sake of fidelity in a loving relationship, or very few relationships over a lifetime. The crucial question is whether such choices are expressive of the persons making them.

The work of Michel Foucault has been found helpful by feminist scholars seeking to explore these issues in a context of entrenched sexist repressions (impositions of power) that become pervasive and invisible, even within feminism. My greatest concerns as a father raising a daughter -- a daughter taught to be free and strong -- was to cope with all of the subtle bullshit in culture aimed at diminishing my child's status as a PERSON, who is a woman. I wanted to be the person she asked to iron a shirt that she would wear for a party. I intended to be the person to whom she brought her clothes for washing. It was my goal to play in the park with her and help with schoolwork. Nothing means more to me than having done those things for many years. ("Not One More Victim.")

Deleting a letter from one of my words or inserting any other "error" in this essay has no effect on these arguments, except to demonstrate (once again) your inability to respond in a meaningful way to what I am saying. Lois McNay, "From the Body to the Self," in Foucault and Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), pp. 83-116. One way of highlighting the arbitrariness of traditional sexual roles is to reverse them. (See my story "The Taming of Somebody.")

The goal for men and women who love one another is simply a sharing in freedom. This is true however each of them defines freedom. I learned from John Lennon that artistic creation, poetry and painting as well as music, and early child-rearing, might be more satisfying work (and yes, home and child-care is work) for a man than more traditional forms of "office work." John never regretted his decision to turn over his finances to Yoko Ono, who was actually good with money, devoting himself to mastering the intricacies of diaper-changing, a subject on which we might have compared notes, in order to make his own art.

A woman burdened with familial responsibilities -- against her will -- must always be much easier to control (for this reason, I am pro-choice) than someone without such concerns. She will dress conservatively, so as not to alarm the boss and in order to inspire confidence in the "client"; she will be "unprovocative," so as to be deemed safe in the boardroom; and she will only invoke her sexuality, discreetly and unoffensively. Just the opposite is the case when it comes to the sexuality of men: aggressiveness is encouraged as a sign of "drive" and "ambition." It is time to be free of such nonsense. In defense of Henry Miller's frank eroticism and plea for artistic freedom, Erica Jong writes:

"[Miller] understood that we would rather relegate sex to a commodity -- alternately condemned and slavered over [we disapprove of "sex workers" and yet instill in our daughters, through our media, a desire to achieve the appearance of an impossible sexuality much too early in life!] -- [rather] than try to understand its deep and pervasive power in our lives. He became, like so many prophets -- the victim of his own predictions. He railed against America's sexual schizophrenia and he was rewarded by being banned, burned, pirated, deprived both of his [earnings] and [of] his power to reach his potential audience. He railed against the conformity and ugliness of America's treatment of the non-conformist, the poet, the artist, and became the victim of that treatment. Ironically, he was silenced first by ... feminists pursuing sexual honesty and gender fairness. It fell to him both to express and to exemplify the role of the creative artist in a world that has increasingly little use for dissent, for art (except as a saleable item), for honesty, for any kind of entertainment or information but that which lulls the senses or sells a product -- from a president to a war to a pair of jeans." ("Quills" and "Shine.")

The sixties as liberation from sexist or racist, religious or ethnic, militarist and marketing stereotypes, in the quest for authenticity and freedom, for a more honest and just society, must be seen as the great cultural revolution in our lives. But the struggle went too far when the impulse to destroy, out of frustration at the lack of comprehension and the slow pace of change, led to the neglect of the principles and hopes that had inspired cultural revolution in the first place. It may sound naive and unrealistic -- which has no bearing on its undeniable truth -- yet this is the greatest wisdom of the sixties and we owe it to the Beatles, spiritually, "all you need is love."

April 1, 2010 at 12:20 P.M. besides the obscene phone calls earlier this morning, a call was received from 732-649-6125 at 11:54 A.M.

August 14, 2007 at 10:04 A.M. New "errors" and defacings of these writings have taken place. I wonder why Barack Obama's photo was blocked in my essay on Cornel West's writings? Perhaps Bernard Kerik's photo in my 9/11 essay will be next. I previously posted this section of my essay, but hackers altered it. Luckily, I kept a copy of my original text, which I will now re-post.

February 17, 2007, at 11:58 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected. I fully expect to have to do the same "correcting" again in the future.

II. "Love is War."

The conservative reaction when it came was hot and heavy (no sexual innuendo intended). Richard Wolin quotes Michael Kramer of The New Criterion:

"We are still living in the aftermath of the insidious assault on mind that was one of the most repulsive features of the radical movement of the Sixties. The cultural consequences of this leftward turn in our political life has been far graver than [is] commonly supposed. In everything from the writing of textbooks to the reviewing of trade books, from the introduction of Kitsch into museums to the decline of literacy in the schools, [from] the corruption of scholarly research to the effect on the life of culture has been on-going and catastrophic."

What conservatives object to is a sixties-inspired hostility to the very idea of intellectual and aesthetic standards, loss of civility, loss of respect for all authority -- including the notion of legitimate authority in some areas of life, in culture and academia, for example -- and a visceral hatred for the founding principles of American society and its institutions, which are alleged to be implicated in "evil" worldwide and nothing more. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

I think there is a deeper suspicion on the part of conservatives concerning the "realities" of human nature. They are proud of their worldly "realism," which is the most unrealistic thing about them.

"Love is not enough," conservatives warn, "because most people are not to be trusted with power, or will be grasping and self-seeking, incapable of altruism or respect for duty and the claims of others."

It is difficult to be an optimist about human nature after the events of twentieth century. Politics in America -- in fact, the Constitutional experiment as a whole -- is a wager on the possibility of human goodness. It is the expression of an Elightenment hope that persons can be made or become good, through the elimination of what makes them evil, social injustice, corruption, bad government, all attempts at indoctrination and conditioning. American law is trust in reason. In a better social setting, better persons emerge. The obvious philosophical sources are Rousseau and Marx, but also (this may surprise you) Kant and Jefferson. The word that you will most encounter in reading American law is "reasonable."

Are "reason" and "reasonable" understandable in exclusively racist and sexist terms?

I refuse to accept such a claim. Out of "the crooked timber of humanity," it is at least possible to carve subjects abiding by the moral law, endowed with rights that are reflective of their dignity. This is a Kantian-Jeffersonian sentiment that I share. It demands that we respect the creative and intellectual work of critics. Conservatives as well as liberals are encouraged to read Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (new York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 1-20 and Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118-173 ("Two Concepts of Liberty"), finally, you will thank me for this classic: Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in Russian Thinkers (London: Pelican, 1979), pp. 22-81. If you are still confused about these arguments, please consider this Kantian observation underlined by me at age nineteen:

" ... no theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behavior, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record."

Ibid., at p. 35.

Theory provides only the foundations or "groundwork for the metaphysics of morals." Theories allow us to make meaningful (or "interpret") our facts. Allan Bloom's best work is a protest against the sixties' alleged betrayal of eros:

"The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment, is a complex phenomenon. It seems to result from a combination of causes -- our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by 'the death of God' and of the subordinate god, Eros."

Love and Friendship, p. 15.

Some of the more irresponsible statements of leading sixties radicals might be quoted to support the case for the Right. It was not unusual to find even so intelligent a critic as Susan Sontag bemoaning the "malignancy," "evil" and "greed" of the American administration. Jane Fonda's well-meaning pacifism was manipulated by the Vietnamese Communists in ways that she may now regret. Other examples are available. There is nothing "un-American" about eros or the satisfactions of libido, about dumping the Brooks Brothers' suit and opting for cheaper and more comfortable fashions. Listening to Hendrix and patriotism are entirely compatible, so is opposing a particular policy of the government, while loving America.

Ms. Fonda's greatest achievement in the sixties was reminding us that protest for civil rights and love of America were and are compatible. I am sure that Jane Fonda would have fought, as she said in the sixties, in the war her father fought in -- World War, II. I suggest that we take on the conservatives on the meaning of America and patriotism. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Is Bloom's veiled attack on feminism as the murderer of eros and romance justified? I think not. However, there are tendencies in feminism -- and throughout American culture -- that are hostile to excellence, beauty, classicism, Romanticism, especially chivalry -- and these tensions are damaging to love in our times. Chivalry (like every other inherited value in our civilization) is subject to reinvention. ("Master and Commander" and "The Taming of Somebody," then please see the films "The Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "The Crying Game," then the Mel Gibson classic, "Gallipoli.")

Gender freedom and unfettered sexual preference are entirely compatible with a commitment to social justice in the United States and in the world, both are expressions of patriotism because they are celebrations of freedom.

The Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate is one of the bravest works of art ever created in Cuba which serves as an illustration of this point about the ubiquity of post-sixties' freedom. It is not a film that could have been made prior to 1959. Although it appeared much later, it is a product of the flowering of the director's (Tomas Alea Gutierrez) sixties' sensibility.

September 20, 2009 at 10:57 A.M. "errors" were inserted in this essay, again, after my previous review of the work a few days ago. For a discussion of the tactics and goals served by psychological torture methods, see the introduction to "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory." Please see also: "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me'" and "American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles."

A Cuban-American community that tolerates or seeks to protect a mass murderer has lost all credibility on human rights issues in Cuba or any other country. If it is true that Mr. Posada-Carriles is responsible for placing a bomb in a jet airplane that caused the deaths of 77 persons -- many children and old people, Cubans as well as non-Cubans were among the victims -- then his continued presence in America stains all of us with moral blame. Mr. Posada-Cariles should be deported for trial to Venezuela. No more phone calls today? I call upon Mr. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Ms. Iliana Ross-Lehtinen, Mr. Robert ("Bob") Menendez to join me in demanding the arrest and deportation of this alleged "terrorist" (Posada-Cariles) and the freeing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.")

Those of us who are critics of the human rights record of the current Cuban government should also acknowledge and applaud human rights and creative achievements, such as Strawberry and Chocolate. For purposes of comparison and as a measure of just how impressive is the film's mere existence, see a work addressing the same themes by a critic of the regime Before Night Falls. A culture that produces Strawberry and Chocolate has come a long way in the struggle for liberation whatever legitimate human rights criticisms may be raised against it.

The sixties mood was international. It was defined at one extreme by Paris, in May of 1968 (read the autobiography of Angela Davis for an eyewitness account of those years), but also by the violence of the Democratic convention in Chicago. People said and did silly things during the sixties, which may have had something to do with all of the new substances being ingested during that decade. Young peoples' anger and frustration is understandable. Vietnam clearly was a terrible and tragic disaster for all concerned, not least for the damage to America's own sense of community and prestige in the world. The delays in the implementation of civil rights legislation and the disregard of Supreme Court decisions striking down racist laws, eventually required federal enforcement, conveying (I hope) a false impression of the extent of corruption in American institutions.("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")

It occurs to me, since I am now reading Janet Todd's excellent biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, that there is an analogy between Ms. Wollstonecraft's experiences living through the key events of the French Revolution in Paris, at the end of the eighteenth century, and Angela Davis, also in Paris during the events in May, 1968. These philosophers were afforded a "front-seat" at the fulcrum of historical events at a crucial moment in the development of Western thought. Wollstonecraft was present at the maturing of Enlightenment thought (Modernity); Davis was a witness and participant at the alleged demise of Modernity and emergence of something new (postmodernism). An interesting dissertation in intellectual history would compare and contrast these women's experiences leading to some conclusions concerning revolutions and women. A young feminist scholar may wish to take up this challenge.

Make no mistake about it, there was and is corruption in local settings throughout the nation -- especially in some of the least enlightenned jurisdictions with a history of corruption in politics, like New Jersey, but there are powerful forces for legality and the defense of Constitutional principles -- even within those jurisdictions. It is the ultimate test for American institutions whether concern for human rights and the protections of the Constitution are only a matter of "lip service," or something for which the nation will continue to make the ultimate sacrifice. I will always bet on the U.S. national commitment to the Constitution and to "doing the right thing," in Spike Lee's terms, which -- slowly and falteringly to be sure -- is what the United States does to the best of its ability, over the long run, in my opinion. Sometimes after a much needed shove in the right direction from protesters. (See Mr. Lee's "Malcolm X.")

We live in a nation where state governments too often are tainted by corruption. Decisions by organized crime-political bosses, and not the law, explains what happens in some county courthouses -- including some that are closer than you think, like in New Jersey -- "occurences" which can then be denied, publicly, by officials. Anthony Suarez, Esq.?

This reality of "power through intimidation" is more important than anything that takes place in public hearings or in courtrooms that is aimed at public consumption. These realities are countered by an ever-vigilant federal and local law enforcement establishment, attempting the difficult task of protecting against itself together with the misuses of power by other forces in society.

Perhaps it takes a "law-enforcement-military-industrial-complex" to guard against misdeeds by the "political-industrial-corporate-complex" in society. Think of this as the principle of "fighting fire with fire." You cannot consistently object to giving greater resources to the Justice Department and FBI, while at the same time asking those agencies to protect against corruption and the misuse of power by ever-more powerful and subtle forces in society. Trust (but verify) and give them the tools they need.

Over the long run, America will always be a safer and more free society. The framers designed a self-correcting system for fallible human beings, so that, if we are fortunate, there is always someone observing and reporting on the (mis)uses of power. They never imagined that they were constructing a Utopia and were far from starry-eyed about human nature. By this understanding of American politics, the institutions of society -- like each of us -- is engaged in a never-ending project of self-correction. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

Ronald Dworkin has spoken of American law working itself "pure." The metaphor seems most applicable to our Constitutional tradition. ("Ronald Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Interpretation.")

A healthy part of the spirit of the sixties is shining the light of public scrutiny into those dark places and smoke-filled rooms of the past and present where political decisions are made, "unofficially" of course. We can use some of that light right now. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?")

H.L. Menken described America's Supreme Court Justices as "nine old metaphysicians" burdened with the project of achieving ever-better definitions and understandings of our great Constitutional principles and values, through a sometimes painful process of conflict and advocacy, argument and reflection. In that process, the sixties were a crucial decade of growth and maturity for both Court and nation. My "feeling" is that we are living through a similar time right now. Oliver Wendell Holmes more accurately described America's Supreme Court as a "gathering of nine scorpions in a bottle."

As a child in the late sixties I recall the traumatic effect of seeing newsreels depicting the violence in the streets. The fear of becoming the next victim of police wielding billyclubs was very real for me. In a way, those fears may have been confirmed by many of us who never realized to what extent the police might become criminals and the violence perpetrated upon us might become much more subtle than anything we saw on television then. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Foucault's writings on the pervasiveness and internalization of power may be cited at this point. Terry Eagleton's book on "ideology" comes to mind, so does much of the work of Antonio Gramsci on "hegemony" and Lukacs on "class consciousness." Yet we also absorbed a fear of the police in the late sixties that is not always warranted in today's reality. It is the police who protect us from the police, while keeping us from hurting one another, which is no easy job. The extent to which this is accomplished -- while preserving civil liberties in the majority of cases -- is a great achievement of the U.S. political and legal system which merits recognition, with all exceptions granted. There are lots of exceptions to the norm of legality and transparency in government, especially in America's "Soprano State."

This is not to deny the constant struggle against insidious racism that wears a friendly smile and appears as a friend concerned for our welfare. That political protest was and still is possible in America, and that a largely peaceful (and very rarely, anything but peaceful!) revolution in politics and in the courts literally transformed society over a short period, I think, for the better -- making it a more open and less racist nation -- is one of the most powerful things to be said for the greatness of American society.

It is true that such phenomena as "Star Trek" programs are now deemed college courses, allegedly, over and above Shakespeare seminars. And the dismissals of the crowning achievements of Western civilization as merely the works of "Dead White European Males" is a dismal and unsettling side-effect of the sixties' revolution for many traditionally-minded intellectuals, or just for rational people.

With the freeing-up of the curriculum in universities, strangely, many formerly prized works were displaced or declared irrelevant overnight. This is ill-advised and sometimes disastrous for the education of young people. The art created by white males in other epochs is an invitation to a conversation -- an opportunity to improvise -- extended to young people, including African-Americans, today. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

The disdain for philosophy spoken by teachers (or "others") and repeated by trusting young people on their way to colleges and universities is distressing and sad (for me) because of all that is denied or surrendered by those young people before they can appreciate the error of their ways:

"It is easy to deride philosophy as the search by a blind man in a dark cellar for a black cat that is not there. But there is one argument for philosophy to which I do not know any answer, namely that it is unavoidable, and that if one must do it, it is better to do it well. Almost every issue we talk about runs out into philosophy in the end. We try to get clear what in a given case we ought to do, and the question arises how we know when anything is our duty -- and that is ethics. We wonder whether we can hold on to a certain religious belief, and the question arises how we can know that any belief is true -- and that is epistemology. We start wondering about the meaning of the great little words of the language -- 'I,' 'time,' 'space,' 'cause,' 'life,' 'mind,' 'God,' -- and at a step we are in metaphysics. The question is not whether we shall think about these things, but whether we shall think about them in a disciplined and responsible way or in a loose and hit-or-miss way. 'Metaphysics,' said Bradley, 'is the finding of bad reasons for what believe on instinct.' Philosophy is not at enmity with common sense or science. It is the attempt to carry through to the end lines of reflection that arise in those fields inevitably."

Brand Blanshard, "In Defense of the Humanities," in The Uses of a Liberal Education, pp. 71-72 (emphasis added).

For those still upset at my views expressed in "Why I am not an ethical relativist," see: Tom Stoppard, "Professional Foul," in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul (New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 43-93. (Is it all relative?)

What Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci and Austen or Plato and Kant are saying to you is this: "Here's my music, now you take it and play yours." No wonder they want to destroy this essay and essayist. When disdain for the achievements of the past is combined with a lesson of hatred directed at fathers, uncles, or all men (primarily), something has gone seriously wrong with so-called "feminism." Or is it "feministing"?

Legitimating obnoxious behavior is also unnecessary, as are ridiculous "politically correct" attempts at censorship. (See the film Blast From the Past for an amusing defense of what used to be called "manners," but which is now known simply as "being old-fashioned.")

How polite you are or should be depends on how politely you are treated by others. Never resort to violence. On the other hand, make it clear to people that you are to be respected in order for others to be respected by you. "By any means necessary!"

Let us admit that there are indeed "timeless" cultural and intellectual standards. Some artists and thinkers are better than others, even if they happen to be (in some cases), much-dreaded white males. In referring to Jonathan Franzen's recent novel The Corrections, one brain-dead critic said that "it is an important book right now, but ten years from now it won't be." Well, if it is really an important book right now, speaking to the human condition, then it will always be an important book. Look up Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes or Fitzgerald -- Aren't they still "important"? I sure think so. And so does Harold Bloom, who refers to academic nay-sayers on the subject of the canon as: "The School of Resentment." This may be a good time to insert another "error." ("Barack Obama and 'The New Yorker.'")

There is indeed such a thing as truth (Terry Eagleton says so), including ethical truth. Try denying this while remaining logical. Everybody knows this at some level. Except for professional philosophers, of course, who are usually beyond rationality. ("Cubanazos Pose a Threat to National Security" and "Miami's Cubanoids Protest AGAINST Peace!")

"What is rationality, Glaucon?"

"Who the hell knows, Socrates!"

And they're off.

Philosophy does not require solemnity. If we decide to live by the sixties' maxim "Do Your Own Thing" and your own thing turns out to be crime, then the State has the right to punish you for it, without itself committing a crime of course. This is not only legal, but ethically correct, even when the crime is corrupting local politics or stealing from the public treasury, time-honored traditions in certain parts of the country -- like Jersey City -- you will deserve what you get if you are caught and you probably will be. There is nothing anti-sixties in this notion. The State must not become a criminal in order to punish crime. OAE? Only in New Jersey does law enforcement commit crimes to punish the innocent. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

Also, the role of the United States in the Vietnam conflict simply did not fit into the picture that most people had absorbed of the United States and its mission of extending the scope and applicability of human rights in the world. Evidence of U.S. torture of persons within and outside of its borders -- which is still dismaying and even more so now! -- has forced us to recommit the nation to the cause of human rights in this country and throughout the world, especially when it comes to the rights of the most powerless members of society, such as the mentally-ill or incarcerated persons, also members of minority groups and the poor. Again, the problem of racism is always with us. ("New Jersey Covers Up Immigrant's Torture and Murder.")

If the United States or local governments are involved in the deliberate torture of persons, including psychological torture anywhere (even in prisons) and nothing is done about it, then we are no longer the society that we hope to be or have thought ourselves to be in the past. For then, we will have betrayed our most fundamental principles. I do not accept that this is the case. The United States will always "do something" about such evil. We will not be silent, as a people, or cease our protests until it does. I will not be silent. This is one legacy of the sixties.("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

A puzzled generation of parents in the sixties sighed: "We did not question authority." And their children a generation later abandoned idealism all-too quickly, finding it necessary to sell stocks and bonds or insurance in order to preserve the "lifestyle" for themselves and their children to which affluence has accustomed them, helping to underscore -- in the public's mind anyway -- the immaturity and ephemeral quality of many of the sixties' gestures of defiance, like the burning of draft cards and bras.

"We were so impractical then," everyone says. "We need more than love. We need a Mercedes Benz and two weeks in Barbados." I say : No, we need love, but it would be nice to have the car and the vacation, after we are all fed and sheltered.

"That's just idealism," you say. My answer is: "I hope so, because we need ideals." Boy, do we need ideals. The tension in the American dialectic between need and desire is eternal. At the moment, we have forgotten this distinction and debate.

Before anyone points to Bill Gates or "The Donald" and starts whining about how evil the rich are, let me emphasize the Rawlsian point that those gentlemen have made it possible for millions of poor people to live better lives, to eat and learn in ways that would have been impossible without them by increasing the total wealth in our society. Rather than demonizing the wealthy, let us hope that there will be more of them, paying their taxes (sometimes!), and creating revenues and opportunities for others.

You tell me that wealth should be better distributed. I answer that it would not exist at all, there would be nothing to distribute, but for its creators. If the scriptures are correct that the "rich and the poor are with us always," then let us encourage the rich to make the rest of us richer while they are at it.

In the immortal words of Mae West, "I've been rich and I've been poor ... and rich is better."

Sixties' values do not require us to hate the rich. As for the ethics of wealth, much depends on the uses to which that wealth is put. Is it possible to hold on to the idea of standards in intellectual work and in the arts, while democritizing universities as well as publishing and the media, so as to make "culture" available for, and reflective of, all people in our society? Can we be civil to one another and respectful in disagreement? Can we recognize the difference between legitimate authority conferred by the democratic process and assumptions of cultural power that are illegitimate and to be trashed? Can we criticize those aspects of American society that are in need of reform while admitting that we live in a great country for which we must be grateful? Can the two U.S. political parties stop their bickering and mutual attempts by politicians at personal destruction long enough to cooperate in accomplishing what needs to be done for the country? I still hope so.

Saul Bellow writes: "The heat of the dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another. It would be a pity if intelligent adversaries were not to read Professor [Allan] Bloom's book [The Closing of the American Mind] with disinterested attention." ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" then "Whatever" and "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")

American intellectual life has indeed suffered as a result of the necessary sixties' revolution in sexual mores and inclusiveness. Civility has suffered in some necessary and also some unnecessary ways.

What can we do to keep what is best about sixties' values and discard what is not so great?

Let's start by trying to understand one another.

III. "Love is War Against War."

One of the things that love -- or just caring about and for people -- teaches is that there is always so much that needs to be done, in a practical sense, if people's lives are to be made better. Foucault said to an interviewer: "You want something to do? Very well then, start with prison reform and an end of torture."

There is always a need for more education and health care, food and water, housing, and an end to avoidable military conflict and yes, an end to torture.

The largest issues on a global level have not changed much since the sixties. And the militants who get distracted by "ego issues," such as the political correctness nonsense or the more irrational forms of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, are as counterproductive as the reactionaries -- and more stupid, too.

Cynicism about love itself has become fashionable, as I say, together with ludicrous forms of ethical and cultural relativism, as a reaction to the sixties, from both Right and Left. "Love is a battlefield," sang Pat Benatar in the eighties. Many self-styled "radical feminists," in particular, now seem to agree. The trashing of romantic love, but (evidently) only among heterosexuals, by Shulasmith Firestone, being a case in point.

Kate Millet's attack on Mailer and Miller falls into the category of overstated and overgeneralized criticism leading to absurd results. Mailer's counterattack in The Prisoner of Sex scores a knockout. I will pass over in silence Andrea Dworkin's and Susan Brownmiller's alleged claim that all heterosexual intercourse is a form of rape by a man of a woman. Hatred directed at men is just as deplorable as hatred directed at women. Feminists must be among the first to recognize this. Andrea Dworkin stated that "intercourse is a means of physiologically making a woman inferior"; that romance is "rape embellished with meaningful looks"; and that "all men are shits and take pride in it." (O.K., when she's right, she's right.) Ariel Levy's "The Prisoner of Sex," in New York, June 6, 2005, at pp. 34-35.

Scholars and political activists, who happen to be women, should be among the first to say that such statements are not acceptable and do not represent mainstream views among women, activists, or liberals. Everyone should refrain from censorship. Imagine those same statements made by a man about women. The abandonment of "values issues" by the Left in the United States, so that no one will be offended, is a colossal blunder that has already cost Democrats more than one election. It will continue to do so, until people in the party realize that leaving ethical values out of politics is like baking a cake without flower, eggs, sugar or water. It is the best way of allowing the far Right of the political spectrum to define values for the nation. Peter Gabel writes:

"There is only one way to combat the power of the religious Right, and that is to recognize that they are addressing something real and valid in people's experience and to challenge them on the merits. If the spiritual/emotional/intuitive dimension of reality is acknowledged as an aspect of the world [that is real and important, and] that can be known, then we no longer have to stand idly by and listen to these lunatics tell us that God doesn't want us to sleep together before we're married or that the Bible must be read as literally true."

The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, pp. 64-65 (emphasis added).

Democrats and liberals also have values. In the sixties people knew that.

Leftists should not be afraid to enter into ethics debates that voters insist are important to them. To put this in terms of a bumper sticker for political pundits: "You can't beat something with nothing." Mere criticisms of the values of the opposition will not win elections if you fail to articulate, persuasively, values of your own and also to acknowledge the reality of the need for those values. Ms. Clinton's "advisers," please remember this next time: "On the one hand, but on the other hand ..." is not going to do it (it will not "be sufficient") in the future for most voters. Right Senator Bob? ("Senator Bob Struggles to Find His Conscience" and "Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?")

Please do not try to prevent Secretary of State Clinton from speaking of values and principles. Ms. Clinton is exactly the American public official who should speak of values to the world. The Obama administration (thank goodness) is not afraid of values issues and debates. I have been trying to make the point that we not only need values, but that we cannot escape valuing. This need for values is something for the next Democratic candidate for the U.S. Presidency to bear in mind.

Ethical relativism, hostility to the symbols of the nation and disdain for patriotism -- core values that are dismissed as "corny," hatred of American institutions as "evil," will not win elections. This is fortunate. Both Mailer and Miller, regardless of their opinions, are simply better writers than Kate Millet, but neither one is a better critic than, say, Toni Morrison.

Recognition of standards of excellence -- even in moral life -- allows us to make comparative judgments.

Duncan Kennedy agrees that not all hierarchies are evil. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that he is a tenured Harvard Law Professor, but it's the thought that counts.

Love is always the best force to call upon to clear the battlefields and halt the carnage. We do not need more hostility and hatred -- nor more "macho" posturing by women, BY WOMEN! -- who should know better. Women especially should appreciate the ways in which so-called feminine "quiet" power can be so much greater and more effective than aggression, as a response to aggression. Maybe that very idea of love's ubiquity is one of the most important lessons of the sixties. ("Skinny People Dressed in Black.")

I remember former Texas Governor, Ann Richards (I would've voted for her for anything!), who responded to a hostile and aggressive male heckler with a beatific smile: "Does your mamma know you go 'round saying things like that?"

The heckler was silenced, with a laugh, and he probably voted for her.

We need new forms of loving activism now, more flowers placed in the muzzle of a rifle, and much less violence. In the spirit of that great decade, we always need more peace and love.

Are these the thoughts that you wish to suppress and censor in America? Any more death threats aimed against me? How about another inserted "error" in one of my writings? All such tactics are and can only be the ultimate "cop out."