by Tom Wolfe
And now many dare it! In Democracy in America de Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous de Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about … Let’s talk about Me!
De Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave of the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.
But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940’s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes … Me … Me … Me … Me …
The Famous Writer on the College Lecture Circuit
“ … so we are confronted once again with the duality, the bifurcation, the existential dilemma of the writer’s task in America, and …”
(“The little blonde bud from the creative-writing class is a sure thing, but she’ll insist on a lot of literary talk first … The big redhead on the lecture committee will spare me that, but she talks to me as if I’m seventy years old … Little Bud? … or Big Red? …)
THE INTELLIGENT COED’S GUIDE TO AMERICA
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1. O’Hare!
O Mother O’Hare, big bosom for our hungry poets, pelvic saddle for our sexologists and Open Classroom theorists—O houri O’Hare, who keeps her Perm-O-Pour Stoneglow thighs ajar to receive a generation of frustrated and unreadable novelists—
But wait a minute. It may be too early for the odes. Has it even been duly noted that O’Hare, which is an airport outside Chicago, is now the intellectual center of the United States?
Curious, but true. There at O’Hare, on any day, Monday through Friday, from September to June, they sit … in row after Mies van der row of black vinyl and stainless steel sling chairs … amid soaring walls of plate glass … from one tenth to one third of the literary notables of the United States. In October and April, the peak months, the figure goes up to one half.
Masters and Johnson and Erica Jong, Kozol and Rifkin and Hacker and Kael, Steinem and Nader, Marks, Hayden and Mailer, Galbraith and Heilbroner, and your bear-market brothers in the PopEco business, Lekachman & Others—which of you has not hunkered down lately in the prodigious lap of Mother O’Hare!
And why? Because they’re heading out into the land to give lectures. They are giving lectures at the colleges and universities of America’s heartland, which runs from Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the east to the Hollywood Freeway on the west. Giving lectures in the heartland is one of the lucrative dividends of being a noted writer in America. It is the writer’s faint approximation of, say, Joe Cocker’s $25,000 one-night stand at the West Springfield Fair. All the skyways to Lecture-land lead through O’Hare Airport. In short, up to one half of our intellectual establishment sits outside of Chicago between planes.
At a literary conference at Notre Dame, I (no stranger to bountiful O’Hare myself) ran into a poet who is noted for his verse celebrating the ecology, née Nature. He lives in a dramatic house nailed together completely from uncut pieces of hickory driftwood, perched on a bluff overlooking the crashing ocean, a spot so remote that you can drive no closer than five miles to it by conventional automobile and barely within a mile and a half by Jeep. The last 7,500 feet it’s hand over hand up rocks, vines, and lengths of hemp. I remarked that this must be the ideal setting in which to write about the ecological wonders.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I do all my writing in O’Hare.”
And what is the message that the bards and sages of O’Hare bring to millions of college students in the vast fodderlands of the nation? I’m afraid I must report that it is a gloomy message; morose, even, heading for gangrene.
2. The Frisbee ion
If you happen to attend a conference at which whole contingents of the O’Hare philosophers assemble, you can get the message in all its varieties in a short time. Picture, if you will, a university on the Great Plains … a new Student Activities Center the color of butter-almond ice cream … a huge interior space with tracks in the floor, along which janitors in green twill pull Expando-Flex accordion walls to create meeting rooms of any size. The conference is about to begin. The students come surging in like hormones. You’ve heard of rosy cheeks? They have them! Here they come, rosy-cheeked, laughing, with Shasta and 7-Up pumping through their veins, talking chipsy, flashing weatherproof smiles, bursting out of their down-filled Squaw Valley jackets and their blue jeans—O immortal denim mons veneris! —looking, all of them, boys and girls, Jocks & Buds & Freaks, as if they spent the day hang-gliding and then made a Miller commercial at dusk and are now going to taper off with a little Culture before returning to the coed dorm. They grow quiet. The conference begins. The keynote speaker, a historian wearing a calfskin jacket and hair like Felix Mendelssohn’s, informs them that the United States is “a leaden, life-denying society.”
Over the next thirty-six hours, other O’Hare regulars fill in the rest:
Sixty families control one half the private wealth of America, and two hundred corporations own two thirds of the means of production. “A small group of nameless, faceless men” who avoid publicity the way a werewolf avoids the dawn now dominates American life. In America a man’s home is not his castle but merely “a gigantic listening device with a mortgage”—a reference to eavesdropping by the FBI and the CIA. America’s foreign policy has been and continues to be based upon war, assassination, bribery, genocide, and the sabotage of democratic governments. “The new McCarthyism” (Joe’s, not Gene’s) is already upon us. Following a brief charade of free speech, the “gagging of the press” has resumed. Racism in America has not diminished; it is merely more subtle now. The gulf between rich and poor widens daily, creating “permanent ghetto-colonial populations.” The decline in economic growth is causing a crisis in capitalism, which will lead shortly to authoritarian rule and to a new America in which everyone waits, in horror, for the knock on the door in the dead of the night, the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck—
How other people attending this conference felt by now, I didn’t dare ask. As for myself, I was beginning to feel like Job or Miss Cunégonde. What further devastations or humiliations could possibly be in store, short of the sacking of Kansas City? It was in that frame of mind that I attended the final panel discussion, which was entitled “The United States in the Year 2000.”
The prognosis was not good, as you can imagine. But I was totally unprepared for the astounding news brought by an ecologist.
“I’m not sure I
want to be alive in the year 2000,” he said, although he certainly looked lively enough at the moment. He was about thirty-eight, and he wore a Madras plaid cotton jacket and a Disco Magenta turtleneck jersey.
It seemed that recent studies showed that, due to the rape of the atmosphere by aerosol spray users, by 2000 a certain ion would no longer be coming our way from the sun. I can’t remember which one … the aluminum ion, the magnesium ion, the neon ion, the gadolinium ion, the calcium ion … the calcium ion perhaps; in any event, it was crucial for the formation of bones, and by 2000 it would be no more. Could such a thing be? Somehow this went beyond any of the horrors I was already imagining. I began free-associating … Suddenly I could see Lexington Avenue, near where I live in Manhattan. The presence of the storm troopers was the least of it. It was the look of ordinary citizens that was so horrible. Their bones were going. They were dissolving. Women who had once been clicking and clogging down the avenue up on five-inch platform soles, with their pants seams smartly cleaving their declivities, were now mere denim & patent-leather blobs … oozing and inching and suppurating along the sidewalk like amoebas or ticks … A cab driver puts his arm out the window … and it just dribbles down the yellow door like hot Mazola … A blind news dealer tries to give change to a notions buyer for Bloomingdale’s, and their fingers run together like fettucine over a stack of New York Posts … It’s horrible … it’s obscene … it’s the end—
I was so dazed, I was no longer wondering what the assembled students thought of all this. But just at that moment one of them raised his hand. He was a tall boy with a lot of curly hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.
“Yes?” said the ecologist.
“There’s one thing I can’t understand,” said the boy.
“What’s that?” said the ecologist.
“Well,” said the boy. “I’m a senior, and for four years we’ve been told by people like yourself and the other gentlemen that everything’s in terrible shape, and it’s all going to hell, and I’m willing to take your word for it, because you’re all experts in your fields. But around here, at this school, for the past four years, the biggest problem, as far as I can see, has been finding a parking place near the campus.”
Dead silence. The panelists looked at this poor turkey to try to size him up. Was he trying to be funny? Or was this the native bray of the heartland? The ecologist struck a note of forbearance as he said:
“I’m sure that’s true, and that illustrates one of the biggest difficulties we have in making realistic assessments. A university like this, after all, is a middle-class institution, and middle-class life is calculated precisely to create a screen—”
“I understand all that,” said the boy. “What I want to know is—how old are you, usually, when it all hits you?”
And suddenly the situation became clear. The kid was no wiseacre! He was genuinely perplexed! … For four years he had been squinting at the horizon … looking for the grim horrors which he knew—on faith—to be all around him … and had been utterly unable to find them … and now he was afraid they might descend on him all at once when he least expected it. He might be walking down the street in Omaha one day, minding his own business, when—whop! whop! whop! whop!—War! Fascism! Repression! Corruption!—they’d squash him like bowling balls rolling off a roof!
Who was that lost lad? What was his name? Without knowing it, he was playing the xylophone in a boneyard. He was the unique new creature of the 1970’s. He was Candide in reverse. Candide and Miss Cunégonde, one will recall, are taught by an all-knowing savant, Dr. Pangloss. He keeps assuring them that this is “the best of all possible worlds,” and they believe him implicitly—even though their lives are one catastrophe after another. Now something much weirder was happening. The Jocks & Buds & Freaks of the heartland have their all-knowing savants of O’Hare, who keep warning them that this is “the worst of all possible worlds,” and they know it must be true—and yet life keeps getting easier, sunnier, happier … Frisbee!
How can such things be?
3. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-ssssssss
One Saturday night in 1965 I found myself on a stage at Princeton University with Günter Grass, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, and an avant-garde filmmaker named Gregory Markopoulos. We were supposed to talk about “the style of the sixties.” The auditorium had a big balcony and a lot of moldings. It reminded me of the National Opera House in San José, Costa Rica. The place was packed with about twelve hundred Princeton students and their dates. Before things got started, it was hard to figure out just what they expected. Somebody up in the balcony kept making a sound like a baby crying. Somebody on the main floor always responded with a strange sound he was able to make with his mouth and his cupped hands. It sounded like a raccoon trapped in a garbage can. The baby … the raccoon in a can … Every time they did it the whole place cracked up, twelve hundred Princeton students and their dates. “Dates” … yes … this was back before the era of “Our eyes met, our lips met, our bodies met, and then we were introduced.”
Anyway, the format was that each man on the stage would make an opening statement about the 1960’s, and then the panel discussion would begin. Günter Grass, as Germany’s new giant of the novel, the new Thomas Mann, went first. He understood English but didn’t feel confident speaking in English, and so he made his statement in German. I doubt that there were ten people in the place who knew what he was saying, but he seemed to speak with gravity and passion. When he finished, there was tremendous applause. Then an interpreter named Albert Harrison (as I recall) delivered Mr. Grass’s remarks in English. Sure enough, they were grave and passionate. They were about the responsibility of the artist in a time of struggle and crisis. The applause was even greater than before. Some of the students rose to their feet. Some of the dates rose, too.
The moderator was Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine. I remember looking over at Krassner. He looked like one of the trolls that live under the bridge in Norse tales and sit there stroking their molting noses and waiting for hotshots to swagger over the span. Krassner had to wait for about two minutes for the applause to die down enough to make himself heard. Then he leaned into his microphone and said quite solemnly:
“Thank you, Günter Grass. And thank you, Albert Harrison, for translating … Mr. Grass’s bar mitzvah speech.”
Stunned—like twelve hundred veal calves entering the abattoir. Then came the hissing. Twelve hundred Princeton students & dates started hissing. I had never heard such a sound before … an entire hall consumed in hisses …
“S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sssssss!”
You couldn’t hear yourself talk. You could only hear that sibilant storm. Krassner just sat there with his manic-troll look on, waiting for it to die down. It seemed to take forever. When the storm began to subside a bit, he leaned into the microphone again and said:
“For two years I’ve been hearing that God is dead. I’m very much relieved to see he only sprung a leak.”
For some reason, that stopped the hissing. The kid up in the balcony made a sound like a baby crying. The kid on the main floor made a sound like a raccoon in a garbage can. The crowd laughed and booed, and people tried out new noises. The gyroscope was now gone from the control panel … Our trajectory was end over end …
The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an ac
count of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights.
