Between first publication in 1966 and 1978, when it went out of print, Harrad sold three million copies and was translated into most major languages, including Japanese and Korean. It was made into a movie that featured Don Johnson (later of Miami Vice fame). Because Johnson and his costar appeared frontally naked, the movie was rarely shown on network television or else the nude swimming pool sequence was omitted. In the final printing the cover still proclaimed that Harrad was the “Sex Manifesto of the Free Love Generation.”
If you have just read Harrad for the first time, your reaction may vary all the way from great enthusiasm to a frightened, “I might like Harrad; but I don’t think I’d dare go to a place like that” or “Harrad might be okay, if I could choose my own roommate.” If you’ve been raised in a family where sexual discussion is still taboo, you may be a little shocked.
If you are a college sophomore, junior, or senior, you may be reacting, “So what’s new? No one gets married today without screwing a bit beforehand, or even living together unmarried for awhile.” You may be thinking that Bob Rimmer was ahead of his time in 1966 and helped pave the way for relaxed rules. The norm at most colleges and universities today is dormitories where men and women live together on the same floor, and in some schools the two sexes use the same toilets and showers. You may not live in the same room with a member of the opposite sex, but you can easily work out a sleeping arrangement. By your junior year, you may live off campus and share an apartment with a man or a woman, as the case may be.
The only ones who are still worrying may be your nervous parents, who pray that you are using birth-control pills and condoms so you won’t get pregnant and/or AIDS.
Although you may have experienced sex with more than one person before you graduate from college, one thing hasn’t changed. Despite the grim facts that almost 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce, that in the past 25 years—in order to retain 1966 family purchasing power—most women must be working wives, and that 50 percent of American males experience at least one adulterous relationship during their married life and nearly as many females take at least one extramarital fling—despite these realities, you still believe in the daydream of the rose-covered cottage occupied by a nuclear family (a husband, wife, and two children).
Maybe you’ll be lucky and this will happen to you. Maybe you’ll find the one and only person. You’ll get married and never have sex with anyone else again. Maybe you’ll have two kids and can afford to send them to college, at a cost of $100,000 each by the end of the century if they go to private schools. And maybe, Norman-Rock-well-style, they’ll replicate your family life. You’ll have grandchildren, and they’ll join you for the holidays and celebrate your 50th anniversary of wedded bliss.
Some Background. Twenty-five years ago, if I had believed these things would happen I would never have written Harrad or many other novels exploring what I predicted would become alternate lifestyles by necessity.
The realities facing the 21st-century family were explored by Newsweek in the spring of 1990. The dream-style American family doesn’t exist; maybe it never existed. As Newsweek pointed out, we still have fathers working while mothers keep house and take care of the children, but these are now a small minority. Most families today are dependent on working mothers and fathers, with day care for the kids or a latchkey. The divorce rate, still close to 50 percent of the marriage rate, is creating stepfamilies, which more often than not do not provide emotional or intellectual stability for children. We have single-parent families, in which the mother is the chief cook and bottle-washer, and we also have the horrendous problem of senior citizens whose children have no room for them in their high-rise apartments or condos, or can’t afford to support them in independent housing.
These are only a portion of the “future shocks” that we are witnessing. Within the next fifty years the world’s population may exceed nine billion. With four billion more on the planet than there are now, your lifestyle is going to change dramatically. In the United States we have a growing ethnic population that refuses to melt, an African American population that has never been absorbed into the mainstream, and an alarming total of 700,000 high-school dropouts annually. Fifty percent of the 17-year-olds who apply for jobs are unable to read at the ninth-grade level and are virtually unemployable in the skilled labor market.
America is becoming a new kind of class society. Ultimately, the undereducated will become completely powerless. If we don’t change the educational process drastically, the skilled and better-educated will be swamped by taxes to save the poor, while those who actually own the United States (only about 5 percent of all Americans have any real financial equity in the capitalistic democratic system) will stand on the ramparts, wave the flag, and declare wars on poverty and drugs.
During the past twenty-five years top educators from John Dewey to Robert Hutchins and James Conant, along with presidential commissions from Truman to Reagan, have presented various proposals to solve our educational problems. They had one idea in common: If democracy is to survive and the U.S. is to maintain its high standard of living, we must, as the Carnegie Commission reported, “graduate a vast majority of students with achievement levels long thought possible only for the privileged few.”
Unfortunately, despite thousands of community colleges that offer vocational education beyond high school, begun as a result of the Truman Commission Report on Higher Education (1948) or Terrel Bell’s report, A Nation at Risk (1983), for the Reagan presidential commission, the nation’s educators still haven’t been able to translate the proposals into educational reality.
Since World War II we have “popularized education” so that today approximately 75 percent of all Americans graduate from high school and nearly 20 percent complete four years of college, but the level of education has dropped—indicated by declining SAT scores—and as many as twenty-three million Americans (many of them high-school graduates) are functionally illiterate.
In the 1990s we have a president and Congress who give lip-service to the problems of educating the next generation. But thus far both have failed to endow the education of present and future generations with a real sense of national purpose. Instead of getting to the root of the drug problem, which stems from a lack of education and a need to escape, even momentarily, from the grim reality of being a “have-not” in a society that extols having everything, like his predecessors, President Bush declares a billion-dollar war on drugs—his particular bugaboo. But this is a “war” that can only be won when a vast majority of people live fulfilling lives, when they aren’t conned by the unreal worlds of “Dynasty,” million-dollar-lottery jackpots, or dreams of becoming a superstar overnight.
A National Purpose. The basic problem facing the United States today is that we have no sense of national purpose. We are drifting into the future on a come-what-may basis. In late 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev yanked the seat out from under the Yankees. Our enemy, the “evil empire” with communism as its political and economic system, collapsed. During the past twenty-five years we have spent quite a few trillion dollars making the world safe for capitalistic democracy. Historically, controlled laissez faire capitalism has provided the best of all possible worlds for human beings. But an every-man-for-himself kind of greed doesn’t provide a lasting sense of human purpose or even a continuing sense of well-being.
No one knows yet what glue will hold the U.S. together during the next century. Unless there is a crisis of frightening proportions, it won’t be environmental problems. What pollutes and doesn’t pollute is a subject of endless controversy. Jimmy Carter proved in the seventies that Americans refuse to accept a pessimism that affects their pocketbooks or constrains their lifestyles. Despite warnings and mounting evidence that Mideastern oil reserves are not infinite, we continue to believe that Americans are smarter and more creative than Asians or Europeans and that somehow they’ll underwrite us forever by buying our Treasury bonds or our Rockefeller Centers.
With no sense o
f national purpose, we are on a “DDD” course—democracy drifting to disaster. Wars, hot or cold—unless we are attacked by nuclear missiles (increasingly unlikely)—will never again provide a sense of national purpose. There is only one sense of national purpose that can unite a democratic society. It’s the belief that life is not an endlessly repeating circle. Whether it be true or not, we must have the notion of making progress toward a more individually fulfilling world—if not for ourselves, then for our children.
A national philosophy that would make such a belief possible is not so much that all men and women are created equal (genetically or environmentally, for one reason or another, we may not be) but that all people have an equal right—and the money to pay for it—to as complete an education as they can absorb. We must take America’s historical commitment to a guaranteed education through the secondary level one step further.
We must devise a holistic concept of lifetime education that includes a new type of undergraduate education available to every citizen, followed by a financially guaranteed postgraduate education for those who qualify on merit. If every person who graduated from high school were guaranteed another four years of college which, in addition to vocational skills, would offer everyone a broad humanistic, historical, liberal perspective on his or her own life and “indoctrinate” them (I use the word benignly) into the joys of lifetime learning, we would have a new sense of national purpose that would inspire the world.
This essay is intended to point the way. Before I show how this approach is the real key to democratic survival, let me give you my perspective on our century.
A View of the 20th Century. During the affluent 1950s, the United States ruled the world technologically, but there was an underlying malaise. The nuclear family living in tiny “tacky Levittown” housing, made it possible for millions of GIs to buy their own homes. But “having it all” by the end of the 1950s wasn’t producing happiness but rather a “lonely crowd,” and the divorce rate was slowly rising.
Jack Kerouac hailed the new “beat generation.” This was composed of “people who never yawn and say commonplace things, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous Roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pip and everybody goes ‘Awwww!’ ” A few years after Kerouac wrote that, the “beats” would become hippies and flower children. By this time they had discovered that pot instead of booze, used by their parents to escape reality, was a new kind of turn-on. In the late 1960s, the only sense of national purpose was to “turn on” and “drop out.”
Life magazine (then selling millions of copies each week) recognized the problem and called upon national leaders to enunciate national purpose for the United States. From its series of articles came many platitudes as well as a recognition that man “satisfied with goods” needed more from life than the “pursuit of happiness.” But no thinker in the U.S. seemed able to propose a unifying concept for this country and/or for Western man. We had lost an overriding sense of mission. No one could answer the questions that every man and woman who has enough to eat eventually asks: “Why am I here? Where am I going? What is the purpose of my life?”
By contrast, the English Puritans who arrived in the New World in the 17th century and the “huddled masses” who arrived over the next two hundred years had much better defined purposes. Trusting in God, they were going to improve their own lives and make a better and more affluent world for their children. By the middle of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of the new arrivals from Europe and China were being exploited by robber barons (newly created American “royalty” that began with the Astors, Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Morgans). First-generation Americans still believed they could make the world “safe for democracy,” and in 1916-1917 we were eager to stop the Kaiser and the German Reich from again trying to rearrange the borders of Europe.
The sense of national purpose that motivated the country during World War I dissipated in the Jazz Age and was completely wiped out by ten years of Depression in the 1930s. But then, in 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we faced the grim necessity to rid the world of Hitler and his master-race henchmen, Americans were united once again around a common cause. However, it’s worth remembering that in the middle thirties and the years prior to World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans singing “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” were intrigued by Marx and Lenin. Many became so-called “fellow travelers,” intent on convincing Americans that socialism and the Communist Manifesto provided the missing sense of purpose. Believers in socialism and communism haunted the government well into the Eisenhower presidency.
In the late 1960s, our political leaders tried to create a sense of national purpose around Vietnam. But the “domino” theory that the loss of Vietnam to communism would eventually trap us in a Third World War, didn’t convince most Americans. If we couldn’t save Hungary and Czechoslovakia from communism in the 1950s and 1968, the domino theory and President Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf resolution didn’t make much sense in 1964.
Fortunately, The Harrad Experiment was written prior to Vietnam, so I didn’t have to deal with a growing antagonism among the younger generation, who were soon to be drafted into a war they didn’t believe in. But most of their fathers, veterans of World War II, were under the delusion that they could turn a 15th-century agricultural society into an Asian democracy.
While I was a long way from being a hippie, like the young people in the 1960s, I enjoyed the Beatles and wondered if “you’d love me when I was 64,” and thought we were living “on a yellow submarine.” In 1967, when the first Bantam Press edition of Harrad appeared, the younger generation hadn’t turned their anger against the Vietnam War into a temporarily unifying “purpose” for part of the nation. They did believe that the “greening of America” was soon to occur. They were living their version of it in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco or in the East Village of New York. Or they were living in communes in New Mexico, where they called themselves “love children” or “gentle people.” They extolled love, smoked pot, and believed as one male communard suggested: “All the girls are my wives, the guys are my brothers and all the babies are mine—it’s true love!”
In the words of Mick Jagger, they were “all together” and tried to prove it at Woodstock where 400,000 gathered in 1969 seeking a sense of purpose that eluded them. In addition to smoking grass, they tried to find their true selves and a new kind of spiritual uplift with LSD, or else they sought “soul experiences” in communes like Drop City and Hog Farm, which offered “hog consciousness.”
It was a mind-blowing world, where the true color was psychedelic. It was the Age of Aquarius, Marishi Mahesh Yogi, and Esalen at Big Sur, where the groundwork for the Human Potential movement was being laid. It was the age of the generation gap. You couldn’t trust anyone over the age of 30. If you were under 30 and “with it,” you adopted the mod look from Camaby Street. Women flattened their breasts, and men grew their hair long and wore ankh symbols and love beads. Psychologists were proclaiming that sexual differences were disappearing and the world of unisex was just around the comer. It was also a time of student strikes against Vietnam, of the Black Power movement, and of a conviction that a free style of education developed by students themselves was superior to anything offered in college or university catalogues.
It was a time of awakening to the direction that the U.S. government was taking. We were suddenly spending billions of dollars annually on defense and to achieve military superiority. We were blithely interfering in other people’s civil wars in the name of democracy, and napalming innocent victims. It was a time of growing realization that no one knew how to stop the military establishment, or if we ever achieved an agreement with the Soviet Union, how we would lower military spending and employ millions of Americans in peaceful and perhaps less profitable endeavors.
Few remembered President Eisenhower, the man who knew better than anyone else, who had said: “Every gun that is made, ever
y warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed . . . this world in arms is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists and the hopes of its children.”
The “feminine mystique” had been discovered, and it gave birth to the equal-rights movement, which was eventually sabotaged by conservative politicians. Dropping out, living communally, and giving up certain kinds of material goods (with the exception of fast automobiles and hi-fi equipment) were the messages. The designations “hot” and “cool” applied to books and television, as well as sexual relations. It was a world of “future shocks” and the realization that no one knew how to cope with the implications of our scientific breakthroughs, which continued unabated into the 1990s.
Those who tried to lead with new “trendy” ideas quickly discovered that the commercial business world could coopt their ideas so fast that they could become obsolete or “dated” before the originator even got off the ground. With million-dollar advertising campaigns, “living healthfully” became identified with breakfast cereals and even smoking certain kinds of cigarettes.
All the surface confusion produced billions of words of “interpretation”—mostly misinterpretation—while millions of Americans sat by their television sets for an average of more than ten hours a day and tried to ignore the real world by watching thousands of murders and acts of violence every week.
In the midst of assassinations and wars, astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, although thanks to the blurring effects of television viewing, some people believe it never really happened but was a television spectacular devised to keep people’s minds off their troubles. We discovered lasers, DNA, and the possibilities of genetic manipulation, and computers moved from tubes to transistors, to silicon chips and bubble memories. Later, in the 1980s, we hadn’t even begun to face the main problem of the computer age: whether the vast amount of information generated by computers and by television was producing an avalanche of facts and ideas no one could absorb. We were on the verge of an automated society, which would elimate most unskilled labor and create unemployment for millions of undereducated people.
The Harrad Experiment Page 28
