Cry, the Beloved Country by Alfred Kazin

Literary critic, essayist, journalist, author of On Na­tive Ground and A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin is one of America's most distinguished men of letters.

I have lived 77 years of what Henry Luce once grandly called "The Ameri­can Century," and I know I am old because the century was once rich in utopias that are now meaningless to most Americans. We did not call them "utopias"- we called them The Classless Soci­ety, The Melting Pot, The Abolition of Race Prejudice, A New Republic, Progressivism, The Promise of American Life, The Equality Of The Sexes, The New Freedom, A New Deal, The Fair Deal, The New Frontier.

Some of these hopes, ideals, reform move­ments were effective and absorbed into Ameri­can life. Socialism, promising a thorough over­haul of the "system," had its brief moral mo­ment here before World War I. Too often confined to immigrant communities, it lacked the messianic fury, the spirit of total condemnation that, exploiting the horrors of the "Great War," transformed itself into totalitarianism that has taken the best part of the 20th century to defeat. What has not remained anywhere is the "utopian" drive and confidence in the future that sparked the early 20th century. We live in an age of unparalleled technological power and scientific advance, but the spirit is tired, political authority is discredited, civic violence is on a mass scale, race relations are at their worst in the vast underclass, public education is a catastro­phe; the general dependence on commercial television sets the tone, the speech, the morale of our national life toward an irreversible medi­ocrity. The only thing a lot of people seem to devote their intelligence to is their personal bookkeeping - and much good this does many of them. "Americans seem to live life as a game of chance," as Stendhal observed. I believe many Americans feel that way today.

To begin with, there is the meanness, callousness, the sheer inhumanity of public life in America just now. Maybe it doesn't altogether start with our leaders and their famously hard-nosed advisers, but they can't seem to open mouths without sounding like cynical croupiers in Las Vegas tearlessly watching the losers slink away from the tables.

"What I want to see above all is this country remains a country where someone can always get rich," Ronald Reagan told us. Who could quarrel with that except to wonder what kind of national leader it was who wanted that "above all" for a country that ranks last among 19 nations in its infant mortality rate; in which one in four homeless people in cities is a child?

"We haven't got our priorities right,” a teacher in Campbell County, Tenn, declared. The county had grown so poor it couldn't afford school buses, so many of the kids didn't go to school. Some promising kids had given up entirely, no longer wanted to go to school. The story of Campbell County was brought to national a­ttention by Peter Jennings on ABC. We were given views of the governor, who didn't seem particularly concerned, and of the state legislature in session, where nothing seemed to be happening. The plaintive voice of one citizen: “If the federal government can spend so much on ‘defense,' why can't they do just a little something for the children?"

One reason for our present condition is that almost half a century we were preoccupied by the Cold War. Maybe it couldn't have worked any other way, given the dangerous rivalry of the two great powers at the conclusion of the Second World War. Maybe even Vietnam couldn't have been avoided, to say nothing of McCarthyism, "the scoundrel time" of the great anti-Communist crusade at home, the heavy presence of nuclear weapons, the youth revolt of the Sixties, the sickening underhand power of a presidency that made possible Water­gate. But as the powers that be were always too powerful, the people themselves were too divid­ed, too disorganized, too wrapped up in their personal concerns to challenge the Moloch of national "security" in any fundamental particu­lar. Where people were not just easily crushed, they were hopelessly angry. There was a leaching out of morale, of mutual concern, of active citizenship, of civility

Here is where we are now. Our latest economic boom has burst, the streets of every big city - and many a small town - are filled with the homeless, junkies, criminals, unemployed peo­ple standing in front of empty shops. And the malaise is even more cultural and spiritual than it is economic.

On the fashionable right as on the defunct left there is unwearied extremism, the violence in human relations one associates with totalitarian states. James S. Brady, the Reagan White House press secretary who was shot in the head and permanently disabled, was booed off the stage in Las Vegas along with his wife by angry opponents of gun control. The Bra­dys were appearing at the University of Nevada, where they had been invit­ed to speak on the "Brady Bill," proposing a very moderate measure toward gun control. Most of the 500 people in the audience appeared receptive to the Bradys, but sat in si­lence during outbursts by the heck­lers, who had just come in from a rally against gun control. Mrs. Brady was heckled throughout her 40-minute speech. The heckling began (Brady on stage in a wheelchair) after Mrs.Brady said there were laws to make sure cars were used safely, but no such laws for guns. "That's the way it should be!" one person shouted, starting a chorus of taunts and boos.

Mayor David Dinkins of New York, a city in a financial bind, proposes spending millions for metal detectors of guns in New York schools after two students at Thomas Jefferson High School were shot. One in every five American students has handled a gun or rifle at some time. In Chicago a "gun man" salesman openly goes around poor neighborhoods offering his wares. I have heard on every side: "This country is not recognizable any more."

Enough comment, for the moment, on guns and violence. The U.S. Department of Educa­tion's 1991 Digest of Education Statistics shows that only a minority in the age group 21-25 has the literacy skills necessary to survive in our modern society, and 4% of the young adult population is totally illiterate. Only 20% can use bus timetables, which means that the majority cannot follow work manuals. Only 22.5% can figure out the percentage for a restaurant tip; 44% cannot locate information in an almanac or news story.

“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?”

“the negro.”

– Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1856)

Melville's tale describes a mutiny aboard a slave ship that was overcome only with help of an American skipper, Captain Delano who cannot understand why the Spanish captain remains haunted by "the negro.” That was before the Civil War. Americans just now, whether they acknowledge it or not, have for a long time been equally "haunted"- and more so than now.

Government statistics: 15.8% of black men of working age are jobless, more than twice the rate of unemployment among white men. One in every four black men age 20 to 29 is in prison, on parole or on probation, accordingly to a private study conducted in 1990. The homicide rate for black males 15 to 24 has increased by 132% since 1984 and is now leading cause of death in the group. In 1990 the New England journal of Medicine estimated that black young men in Harlem are less likely to reach the age of 40 than young men in Bangladesh.

The United States imprisons a larger share of its population than any other nations. It has widened its lead over the second-ranking country, South Africa. The American incarceration rate is 455 people per 100,000. This is ten times higher than those of Japan, Sweden, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

The black situation in America (12% of the population) is very complex. Millions of earnest churchgoers, an ever-growing middle class. The total of black elected officials has risen in 20 years -1970 to 1990 - from 1,479 to 7,335. Yet dozens of urban mayors despair while ­crime and a host of complex sorrows stifle the inner cities. I have counted four and five beggars to a block, block after block, on the streets of the Upper West Side in New York. You cannot out walk without being afflicted, and you are spiritually worse off if you manage to pass unscathed.

Is the idealizing of Africa a solution to the racial torment of America? At my alma mater, the College of the City of New York (more Nobel scientists than most America universities), I hear that I would be excluded from certain classes in Black history by Professor Leonard Jeffries. My skin is the wrong color and even my religion is objectionable to Professor Jeffries, for he insists that my ancestors were in the slave trade.

I am truly sorry to hear this about my ancestors. I had no idea. Professor Jeffries is telling me things - at the top his voice - I didn't know before. People of European ancestry are "ice people" who grew up in caves and have brought the world the three Ds, “Domination, destruction and death." Africans grew up in sunlight, are "sun people" whose skin pigment, melanin, makes them superior intellectually and physically. In America it is only white oppression that has kept them down.

Duke University is a famous university in Dur­ham, N.C., munificently endowed by the ciga­rette kings James Buchanan Duke and his broth­er Benjamin. Its basketball team is national champion, its medical school is extremely distinguished (I owe my life to one of its cardiac surgeons), and its nearness to the National Humanities Center and the famous Research Triangle makes it one of the most attractive as well as powerful institutions in the country.

In this academic paradise some of the most prominent Duke professors are bitterly divided over the issue of multiculturalism in the curricu­lum. At the center of it all is Professor Stanley Fish, former head of the English Department, an extremely bright, agile, self-confident intel­lectual radical who, without any visible ties to any social or political group outside academia, reminds me of Lenin in exile, living in public libraries and laying down the law to his little band before the Revolution gave him his chance to dominate the mind of Russia.

To understand Professor Fish you have to understand that the most advanced literary critics in the university are no longer interested in literature, "mere" literature, but in the devalua­tion of prevailing systems of thought that rest on our unthinking respect for words. Language is not just a "tool"; it is a human faculty in itself that shapes and dominates the innate dis­positions in ourselves to express our­selves in expected ways.

We can resist this only by "showing up" the presumed correlation of lan­guage with the outside world and with truth. By relentless interpreta­tion of even the most respected text, we can show that there may be noth­ing inevitable and incontrovertible in what it says. We have to unearth the hidden language strategy that really goes on in a piece of writing in order to shake off its authority over us.

So the political world always reveals itself to rigorous language analysis as a very shaky edifice indeed. The political world, these critics take it, is nothing but a competition of private interests, prejudices and "truths." Nothing and no one dare claim objective truth. There is no objective truth, no literal meaning, from which it follows, in Professor Fish's usual diffident way of putting things, that "there is no such thing as intrinsic merit" The books most established in our esteem just reflect particular interests. The great reputations are confined to "dead white males." Women, blacks, Native Americans, His­panics, homosexuals and other "marginalized” portions of our society have been too much excluded from our idea of culture. Multi culturalism seeks to broaden the curriculum especially at privileged places like Duke.

What angered the scholars opposing Professor Fish's group was hardly the idea of studying from other cultures. It was the plain fact that issues of race and sex were being introduced in the curriculum primarily for political reasons. They noted in a formal protest that "an examination of many women’s studies and minorities studies courses discloses little study of other cultures and much excoriation of our society for its alleged oppression of women, blacks and others." Professor Fish, in turn, dismissed the group, warning that it was "widely known to racist, sexist and homophobic." In a letter to the university provost he contended that members of the group opposing him should not be eligible to serve on major university committees. Since that time he has also become celebrated for explaining that "there is no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too."

Don't for a second think this is all a tempest in a teapot. In the name of class-race-gender equality, teachers and students all over America are being trained in such intolerance to defame exclude those who do not follow the party line. To this teacher, old-fashioned enough to believe, in an age of widespread illiteracy, manufactured mass culture and mercilessly driving commercials, that literature, creative literature, is necessary to a civilized life, the culture seems irrevocable. What a relief it is to encourage a brilliant new black writer, Darry Pinckney (High Cotton, Farrar Straus & Giroux), who says that he wants "his book to be testimony not only to his race but of his devotion to literature as well. The book you try to write is in some funny way a love letter to the books you've loved. You want in your book to honor literature as an idea. You want to write for literature, for other books.”

Why don't our politically correct professors of humanities think of literature as a way of a feeding hunger in their minority students - If they have any - for the great world outside instead of flattering them that many classics can be discarded for books about their own experience? Black Studies, Women's Studies, Jewish Studies, Homosexual Studies all have their use in opening up long-suppressed fields of knowledge, in giving needed self-respect to people exposed to the derision and indifference to society. But when you begin to rewrite history and culture entirely in terms of the victim, who supposedly lives only at the "margin” of society, nothing can stop you from making up the terms as you go. There are no longer objective facts. Values sicken. You write trash.

The Modern Language Association is the largest professional organization of its kind in the country, including as it does not only schol­ars of every Western literature but teachers of foreign languages. It used to be fuddy-duddy in its devotion to the classic texts, but no longer. At MLA's 1990 convention one was privileged to hear that the secret of Emily Dickinson's poetry was her addiction to clitoral masturbation and that the Jane Austen who wrote with such wit and truth about love between men and women "disapproved of heterosexual love as a matter of aggression and conquest through which women learn to accept the superior judgment and pow­er of men." A protest against these bizarre statements was countered by the president of the MLA as nothing more than an attempt "to preserve the political and cultural supremacy of white hetero­sexual males."

What drives these folks? Social rage, of course, nostalgia for the Sixties, when the outrage of the Vietnam War pressed especially on young college men of the privileged classes. They sense that the humanities (that's where the academic left mostly re­sides) with their hierarchical "canon" of supposedly immortal masterpieces don't apply to minorities of every sort, not to say a society increasingly in crisis. But the basic reason is perhaps not "political" at all, in the classic sense that the Greek polis represented a common sphere, a meeting place for the community as a whole, a symbol of our endeavor as a people.

What is mostly happening now is that every­one, left and right, is doing his and her own thing and to the hell with anything beyond our own and sacred selves. Narcissism is our reigning ideology. The country is full of pro-life activists ready to commit murder on their "enemies," pro-choice women unwilling to hear religious considerations and family objections, feminist nuts seriously advocating race suicide (all sexual intercourse between men and women is rape), black and white zealots in the university deter­mined to drive out of the university anyone who does not meet their measure of racial exclusion. At the University of Texas the Black Faculty Caucus proclaimed, "If American literature, for example, is to be enlarged so as to include representative texts from ‘minority' groups, how do those groups' perspectives get into the course if the person teaching American litera­ture is a ‘nonminority' person? A critical mass of ‘minority' people empowered at all levels could contest unfair and inadequate representation."

Don't think for a moment that the right is more public-spirited than our academic ideo­logues. Antonin Scalia is said to be the most acute mind on the Supreme Court, and (with a little competition from the Chief Justice) probably the most illiberal. Unlike other justices; he is honest and forthright about his indifference "restorative justice" for blacks. Before he went on the court, he admitted in an interview to the Washington University Law Quarterly.

"It seems to be the fact that the decisions by each of the Justices on the Court are tied together by threads of social preference and predisposition.

"My father came to this country when he was a teenager. Not only had he never profited from the sweat of any black man's brow, I don’t think he had ever seen a black man. There are, of course, many white ethnics that came to this country in great numbers relatively late in its history - Italians, Jews, Poles - who not only took no part in, and derived no profit from, the major historic suppression of the current acknowledged minority groups, but were, in fact, themselves the object of discrimination by the dominant Anglo-Saxon majority…But compare their racial debt - since the concept of ‘restorative justice' implies it; there is no creditor without a debtor - with those who plied the slave trade, and who maintained a formal caste system for many years thereafter is to confuse a mountain with a molehill. Yet curiously enough, we find that in the system of justice ... it is entirely these groups that do most of the restoring. It is they who, to a disproportionate degree, are the competitors with urban blacks and Hispanics for jobs, housing and education."

This argument is impeccable, but mean. It reminds me of what a former chairman of Philip Morris had to say about the statistics tracking deaths from cigarette smoking, environmental hazards and other 20th-century afflictions. "The only pure people are the monks on top of the Himalayas."

The great Russian writer Solzhenitsyn exiled in Vermont, is a Russian monarchist at heart. His narrow views are likely to remind many Americans of what led their grandfathers to leave Russia in the first place. But he is one of our century's great voices because of his genius for spotting what underlies a country’s social reality. His comments on the difference between communist Russia and free America. “ In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or a dragon - not imprisonment, hard labour, death, government harassment, censorship - but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness and indifference. Not the acts of a mighty all-pervading repressive government but the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom that is its birthright."