The Country That Wasn't There

The Liberals did not desert: they were deserted--that is what made the whole thing so painful. After the martyrdoms of Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner, white kids were told to get out. It was like a scene from Mad magazine, with Indians pouring in on the Lone Ranger: "We're surrounded, Tonto." "What's this we, white man?" Liberals who wanted to sway, holding hands, as they sang We Shall Overcome, found the black hand withdrawn and a sneer that said, "You are what we'll overcome." SNCC rhetoricians took to saying the white men they liked to deal with were Goldwater and Wallace--you knew where you stood with them. Anything you can wrest from a Wallace is no favor but concession to an opposing power. Black power early came to prefer demanding to begging.

It is hard to remember, now, how the mere term black sent shivers down liberal spines, making the very N in SNCC obsolete, and the CP of NAACP--all the good work disowned or undone, integration halted or reversed. "Black and white to-geh-eth-ther-ur"--no more. "God is on our si-ihe-ide-uh"--whose side? And which God? God is black, man. He's got to pass a color test to get on the "Black man's side. White liberals flunked the test.

A horrible vision was called up, the "two nations, separate and unequal," of the Kerner report. The new blacks even called themselves a nation, and "the blood." Racism had returned on the other side of the barricades. And if there were to be two nations, then why not more? Not only black against white but cracker against bleeding heart, Carmichael against King. Our country had never been united on what we had. But now it was divided on what we wanted. We did not lose unity (not having it to lose) but the very ideal of being united.

And just as things were coming unstuck at home, they fell apart on the international scene. In the early Sixties, a horde of new nations thronged colorfully to the General Assembly, a whole Third World in that organization balanced between the Free World of Kennedy rhetoric and the Russians' satellite system. Tribesmen were assembling to let us know the Congo was no longer ours for the disposing. (Too bad they didn't convince us that the same was true of Vietnam--but the tribes invited did not yet include the Chinese.) Strangers had taken over the big powers' forum: The big powers took revenge by ignoring the forum.

But though the UN faded in importance, those first African arrivals stayed vivid in the memory. They came with exotic titles and costumes, registered at the best hotels and were treated with all diplomatic courtesy. Cabdrivers might still think them jigs, but these were official jigs--and they had to be treated civilly. Harlem would never be the same. Castro thought he could impress black Americans by camping out on 116th Street and scattering chicken bones around; but some younger activists were more interested in those foreign dignitaries eating the Americana Hotel's pâté. Soon Harlem kids were choosing African ancestors and shopping around among languages (Swahili was a favorite) for resonant new names. Little Leroy down the street was now called Burning Spear, and where would it all end?

Most of the worries were groundless. Leroy had gone clangorously after prophets who--when they got him out in the wilderness (or in jail)--taught him the Protestant work ethic. The Muslims might speak in a mystical way, but they were banking solid cash. And some of the younger militants began equating black power with green power. When they said that, any Imamu or Amari was talking good American, our basic language of the buck. Most Muslims, with bared teeth and flashing scimitars, were fighting their way into the middle class, using the African bush as a springboard into the bourgeoisie. Africa was the route, but America was the goal--a place they could reach only by this detour.

For these people were not Americans, not yet. They had not been let in. They were withdrawing from us, therefore, to come back at us fresh from Africa, landing on our shore and wanting in; but really in this time--in on terms, and they would set the terms. They were so anxious to tell us they had just come from Africa that they tried to look like the bush, with Afros and naturals like explosions of black consciousness fuming out of their heads. They had to have a whole new language to show us they were not just up from the plantation, their hand-kerchiefed heads newly conked. On the other hand, the things they had avoided when they were asked to be off-white were now being flaunted, such as soul food and the preacher's style. It was a psychic maneuver both startling and subtle. It almost gave us a reprieve from history, a second chance. "Don't botch it this time," was the real edge on their threat.

Mainly, of course, man being what he is, we botched it. At least part of the reason is that white students, expelled from the blacks' movement, misunderstood the advice to go take care of their own. James Baldwin said race is the white man's problem, not the black's. But the white students did not so much open their society to racial pariahs as discover they were pariahs themselves, in need of a movement all their own. Mario Savio came back from registering blacks in the South and decided to liberate from its bondage to official scorn the oppressed word fuck. This seemed at first a satire on democracy--equal rights for all men; equal rights for all words. But a different logic was at work here, one entirely missed by those who said the free-speech kids lacked civility. They were not lacking in civility but at war with it--with the authorized charm of words that strands them for ten years in politely scheduled irrelevance. Sociologists call ours an interstitial society; and students fall into one of the greatest interstices, drift there weightless, falling, for a decade or more of their lives. They mesh with no part of the world's workings; their gears do not mesh but spin wildly, disengaged; no wonder, when the gears were pushed against social reality, they just chewed into the scenery. Outside their parents' homes, without families of their own yet, transient, with young energies unrecruitable for serious enterprise, the students move aimlessly home and back, to school and out on vacation, resentful, yet guilty at their resentment.

The civil rights movement had given some of these young people a purpose; but now that was withdrawn from them. And they felt, like the blacks, out of place. They were not oppressed; they simply did not belong to the society in any immediate sense. They were comfortably functionless. So they, too, came at us in outlandish ways, from out of our land entirely. From Africa, wearing white Afros somehow teased high up over bespectacled white faces. From Asia, trailing their swamis and clattering beads. From European dreams of anarchic plots. From outer space, weird and zapped, star-trekking in. But the farther out they came from, the more urgently they wanted in--into Sproul Plaza, or the administration building, or the R. O. T. C. office. They "occupied" the places they had merely camped in, nomads threatening the ranchers, gypsies come to kidnap other children, swelling their own ranks. They took possession of their own files, the school records, deportation slips from school to school, certifying "rights" for these displaced persons of privilege.

They were gratuitously rude in the same way blacks had been. The blacks laid claim to African energy. The kids liberating words expressed the sexual drives and violence of adolescence. They were barbarians landing, not children asking for bigger allowances: "Accept us or we'll sack your city." Black hostility had been mobilized to get compensatory treatment for the underprivileged, while avoiding the taint of condescension. The kids' crudity was meant to take possession of favors without feeling guilty, anymore, that these privileges had not been won. They were now being stolen. Mr. Chips had to be stung into violent reaction of his own--much as Rap Brown wanted to deal with Wallace, not some bleeding heart. So the kids arrived, unruly strangers, with nonnegotiable demands. As blacks emphasized their own harsh side--"I'm a baaad nigger"--so the kids called themselves "motherfuckers" and "the freaks." The crazies. The kids.

It was harder for students, whose real (and recent) past was spent in middleclass homes, to come up with a history of themselves as foreign. Ghetto blacks could dream a Technicolored Africa. The kids had to settle for dim scraps of Marxist theory--themselves the proletariat, employed by teachers, grades their wages (slavery's chain) and lack of student control on campus a sign of class exploitation. Actually, as Robert Paul Wolff points out, academic wage slaves are all on the faculty. Students are a privileged class for whom these employees are hired by parents and the state, acting through a managerial class of administrators. The real history of academic freedom was a process of liberating the teacher from state-alumni censorship. (continued on page 212)Country that wasn't there(continued from page 174) But now students turned these wage earners into oppressors, berating their own trapped employees. Economic analysis was never the kids' strong point. What mattered was to have some kind of history as outsiders that would give them a leverage for breaking inside--on terms, of course, nonnegotiable terms. And, after all, the professors dressed like factory owners, in suits and ties, while students wore drab prole dungarees. The Sixties campus imposed factory clothes on young men and women at their most peacocking time of life. When the kids stumbled across a real proletariat, they were quick to pigify it, turning Chicago's cops into members of a ruling class. Max Yasgur, on the other hand, was symbolically blessed at Woodstock, since he was a farmer (i.e., a large agricultural businessman), glowing in the kids' minds like some new social-realist poster of The Man with a Hoe.

These maneuvers had a less compelling quality than those of the blacks, since the students' experience of repression was more psychological than economic, the unintended result of affluence, not a deliberate imposition of poverty. But psychological affronts are real, and can be crippling. What was interesting was the sense of departure ("We are leaving; you don't need us") and wandering ("We've all gone to look for America") and the invasion of what was found at last ("We'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls").

The feminist movement also talked in Marxist terms of liberation. It even picked up the Thirties charge of male chauvinism--i.e., treatment of a class as if it were a nation; the confusion of tribal symbols with economic reality. These women needed a new language, reflecting secret history; and they were uncivil on principle. This last note of ferocity stunned many sympathetic observers. After all, civility was supposed to be an invention for protecting women, favoring human qualities that go beyond brute strength. Indeed, women seemed to be on their strongest ground when criticizing the macho traits of competitive and warring males, the cult of the tough guy. Then why come on like so many tough gals, using karate and weapons to license insults and obscenity?

For the same reason blacks did not ask favors or kids want their allowance upped. The old rules can be exploited--by Tomming it, or teacher's-petting, or little-womaning the husband. That would improve the game a bit, as played by those old rules. But this just ameliorates the treatment of outsiders; it does not bring them inside. Blacks had stayed outside the system of dignifying symbols. Students were still outside the familial and public worlds of responsibility. Women were outside the world of the Sérieux. They were not taken with full seriousness as students or employees, much less as professionals or employers. It did not make sense to ask for the pale recognitions of civility, exacting deference to womanhood as such. By that standard, academic and other work was commended as good (for a woman), the damning parentheses always half-voiced, depriving women of a language that would stamp their work as good tout court. Thus, the feminist movement was obliged to advance by denial of femininity--just as the kids had by affronting academic decorum or the blacks by never "knowing their place." The women had to get outside the structure entirely to force their way back in. The very fact that this confounded those well disposed under the old rules showed that the tactic was working--it was meant to shatter their framework, disorienting them.

The sisters had to be wild outsiders arriving, not "little women" restive in the home. They must be strangers before they could again be lovers. They looked on the native culture of America like discoverers amazed at our odd language, full of gaps where female pronouns should be. The insistence on terminological nicety surprised, provoked or struck men as trivial. Who cares whether it is chairman or chairperson? But we should not have been surprised. Blacks and students had had their own language, and insisted on it.

In some ways, it was harder for women than for blacks or students to demand liberation, since the ropes that bind them seem made of silk and velvet. Women as such are not minors in the way that students were; certainly not deprived in the literal manner of blacks. But these very advantages lead to irritation. The most educated woman is the one trammeled in subtlest disqualifying bonds--never quite man's equal as a student, faculty member, professional, colleague, editor or boss. Education, which is supposed to be the great equalizer in our society, points up the culture's inequalities. That is especially true for women, who have been educated to a level of expectation, work and independence not supplied by the culture after they leave school--not, anyway, for the normal run of women. (There are exceptions, the house woman, like the house black--e.g., Midge Decter.)

Where did the new women come from? Not simply out of the kitchen. They needed a foreign history to make them true immigrants. Their "herstory," truly formidable, came from the traces of matriarchy, gynecocracy and Amazonian tribes in myth. This suggests that lesbianism, too, is essential to the feminist movement, like the kids' cheerful obscenities or the blacks' glowering savagery. All our internal immigrants have had to make some claim of self-sufficiency in order to pose a credible threat. For the blacks, the threat was to make cities uninhabitable. For the students, to use their interlude from real life as a sanctuary for raids upon politics and the military. In both cases, there was a separate base from which the threat was issued--the ghetto or the campus. But woman has been both more intimate with her oppressor and more dependent upon him. Her only base for separate action was the kitchen--and the bedroom undermined that bastion within the home. Women had to declare themselves more subtly autonomous, psychologically independent. Since the basis for both dependence and power within the old rules was sex, woman's independence had to be asserted sexually. Lesbianism as a threat or possibility was therefore always implicit in their stand and was reinforced by their chosen prehistory.

Lesbianism was not a thing that could be lightly added to the feminists' program, or lightly subtracted from it, as a matter of day-to-day tactics. It was a necessary part of their psychological package. Unless women can be taken as a separate tribe, the whole logic of internal immigration fails.

The similarity of gay liberation to all other "lib" movements is obvious. The homosexuals have their selective reading of history, all of which comes out a story of pederastic genius, from Socrates to André Gide. There is the same stress on language. Some words are out: fag, homo, dyke. Others are in: gay, homosexual, bisexual (the innest word of all). But words that are out can be used by people who are in: Just as blacks can call themselves bad niggers, so dykes, can call one another butch. The gays also share with other movements an urge to gratuitous affront. They will not settle for a civil-libertarian permissiveness (to "do their own thing" undisturbed as long as they are inconspicuous). They must establish a right to do openly what heterosexuals do (e.g., kiss and hug in public). They will call attention to themselves.

This shows the difference between being gay and being a gay activist, part of the tribe, the incoming solid mass of invaders. (Not all Negroes are black.) The old liberals' best bargain went like this: "We won't bother you if we don't know who you are." Kinkiness, like religion, should be a private matter, outside the public business. But gay activists want to be recognized in two senses--seen for what they are and accepted into the public business (e.g., by tax and property rights within homosexual marriage). Civil liberties are granted to the individual. The immigrants' powers come from being a group: "Look how many of us there are!"--the last thing straight society wants to hear. How many canoes have the savages got? If they keep coming in, we natives will be forced to bargain.

There is no end to the movement of internal immigrants, as we see from (continued on page 265)Country That Wasn't There (continued from page 212) chicano and American Indian activism. These, too, purify the language of terms that are degrading; resurrect a flattering history; take on separatist truculence; confront occupants of power with an ultimatum, leading to truce and final acceptance on their terms. The acculturation of literal immigrant groups (as in city machines) involved the same kind of confrontation leading to accommodation. But now the process takes place in a social metaphor acted out with surprising consistency by groups very different in kind.

This sameness may itself throw doubt on the authenticity of each group's promptings. Aren't they just imitating one another? More specifically, have not all later radicalisms imitated the first and most successful (because most necessary) movement of the blacks? No, there is a separate ethos at work in each group, making its own demands. The proof of this is that one tactic cannot be moved out of its psychological package, to perform the same function in another group's set of reactions--as feminists have discovered when they try to recruit black sisters. Sexual apartness does not mesh with racial separatism. By stressing the menace of African maleness, black activists cultivate a certain macho against white society's effort to dominate black men. Women in such a movement must play a supportive role, dissociate themselves from the semimatriarchy whites have fostered in the ghetto (hiring black women over men, favoring the women in welfare schemes, relying on her registration as the ghetto voter). It was found that black female dominance within the ghetto furthered white male dominance over it. Thus, feminist goals were achieved by black women, in a vitiating context.

Each immigrant tribe has its own set of priorities, though it may find grounds for tactical alliance against the common enemy, the "continent" it is invading. In the same way, a lesbian who is primarily a feminist cannot function without certain changes as part of an activism that is primarily gay. In the former context, she will often be opposed to the marriage institution, while those in the latter camp are claiming legal marriage rites for the gay. Each group re-enacts an immigration on its own terms, by a dynamic intrinsic to itself.

Another argument against mere external imitativeness among the groups is the fact that some traces of internal immigration had shown up even before the civil rights movement was filled with specifically black consciousness. On the campus, for instance, faculty members felt left out of the American consensus during the Fifties, resenting their treatment as "eggheads" rather than efficient pragmatists. So they declared an end to ideology, struck a zealous anti-Communist stance and tried to outtough the businessmen and hard-nosed politicians. Professors did not achieve the tribal solidarity of blacks. They stuck more at the stage of their own NAACP, the American Association of University Professors. But a sympathy for aliens and immigrants, best symbolized in Harvard's fight for Sacco and Vanzetti, is inherent in the whole of American education. Schooling was intended as an induction into American consciousness. That is why public funds could be forcibly exacted for the process, and all children compelled to undergo it. Schools were to impart not only the skills (e.g., literacy) demanded for self-government but the attitudes (pluralistic) and propositions ("All men are created equal") that give voting its importance. Indeed, the equalizing process was in time concentrated almost entirely in the schools, where it would teach cooperation between blacks and whites, men and women, Protestants and Catholics. If this process failed to take, then the whole recruiting of citizens had failed and should be repeated--the immigrant should be allowed to "arrive" once more, this time successfully.

Such images were always latent in our concept of American identity. But they pushed up with great new force in the Sixties--not only among radical minorities but even in the large mid-area of our people. Here is the supreme proof that internal immigration was not mere fashion among radicals. Even those who did not admire blacks, and certainly would not imitate them, were clamoring to be let in. This last wave of internal immigrants was made up of those external immigrants whose assimilation had been boasted of for years. The new ethnic consciousness was a protest voiced by old ethnic groups, saying they had not been admitted to this land of American promise. Enough of "Black is beautiful!" Now it was "Polish is peachy!" Ethnic groups found they had a history to refurbish--Green History for the curriculum, instead of Black History. A nicety of language had to be enforced. No more Polack jokes. Italians made sure The Godfather never breathed the forbidden syllables of Mafia across the screen. Even the uniform of working Americans took on ideological significance; the hard hat was a tribal helmet of war, presented to ethnic heroes such as Nixon and Agnew.

It can be urged that this is nothing new. We always had ethnic neighborhoods and an ethnic politics. Just look at Mayor Daley's ruling structure. The real policeman's day in New York is March 17. But now the emphases were new. The ethnic groups were not just asking to continue their particular heritage, have soul food at home and some singing by the piano--they did not need to ask for this. What was preached as ethnic politics was a demand for change in public standards, for recognition of a group, for political clout--to be achieved, if necessary, by intimidation (picketing, demonstrating, taking to the streets). The hard-hats first became a symbol, after all, when they broke up a Wall Street peace march with their wrenches. Whites who once criticized blacks for making politics in the street were demonstrating against busing, against abortion, against The Godfather by the end of the activist decade. The same people who criticized TV for making instant heroes out of Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael were happy to see their own self-appointed spokesmen (such as Barbara Mikulski) getting media attention. They even accepted as their own some heroes not on good terms with the law, such as Albert Gallo and Joe Colombo. As with the gays, this was not just a question of civil rights but a public demand for recognition as a force to be reckoned with.

President Nixon was quick to respond to these signals from his constituency. While he and Agnew piously deplored the McGovernites' appeal to voters by category or "quota," they ran the most ethnically cross-referenced race in the history of national campaigns. Nixon, who hid in the White House for most of the 1972 contest, picked an Italian fiesta for one of his rare epiphanies. After re-election, the President sponsored things like his Italian night, with Frank Sinatra on hand to serenade Premier Andreotti.

Some thought that Sinatra might be disinvited after boorish conduct at the inaugural party. But Nixon can rise above censoriousness when he recalls Sinatra's ties with Italian "antidefamation" groups. Middle America, shocked by the morals of kids and blacks, has never been too hard on Kiwanis Club indiscretions. But no one can imagine Sammy Davis Jr.'s getting called back to the White House if he shouted "Cunt!" at a white newswoman in Washington. The new ethnics will indulge their own kind of aggression and public incivility, just like the other tribes now washed up on the shores of our national awareness.

This fact alone raises the matter of internal immigration above the level of odd radical outbursts. It is not only the Afro-American or the Mexican-American who wants to reverse the liberal condemnation of hyphenating our citizens. People now want to be known as Polish-Americans or (in a triple play, to head off Canuck) as French-Canadian-Americans. Perhaps, soon, as Lesby-Americans or Bisexual-Gay Americans. Being simply American was simply not enough anymore. That is why each group engages in "consciousness raising." One must think black, or female. One must become radicalized. One must regain an ethnic heritage. People were asking for something more than recognition of what they were. They were trying to become what they claimed to be. They must achieve an outlandishness sufficient to break in on the nation's outlandishness with great force.

But this raises the question, How can a silent majority, the vast median lump of Americans, be outside clamoring for entry? Granted, they feel neglected and look around for oppressors--who seem oddly peripheral: newsmen, campuses, the "Eastern establishment." If TV really oppresses them, why not turn it off? Instead, they try to get on the tube themselves, replace with their own fiestas the Indian raids and chicano strikes. They voted the Eastern establishment out. The campus is easily ignored. What gives minorities such power over this majority, which has the President on its side? Middle America claimed that student demonstrators were fringe unrepresentative types--yet that these few kooks could oppress the mass of ordinary people in their homes. Middle Americans outnumber the blacks ten to one, and outrank them in wealth and privilege--yet feel menaced and controlled by the disadvantaged few. It has been Nixon's gift to cultivate these resentments and embody them. Even after a landslide victory, he represented himself as an underdog, always picked on. At the center of world power, he rails against the establishment. His followers tell us they are America, the good people, the real electorate--yet they somehow feel deprived of their own land, locked out and looked down on.

Some ethnic analysts still fear a WASP citadel unfallen and think power is locked up in it. Then why doesn't Nixon bomb it? Because it is not really there. The only way to find a concerted directorate of WASPs at the helm of the nation is to spread and fuzz the definitions so as to make them meaningless. In fact, we are probably doomed to have WASP lib in time, and its first act will be to send the word WASP to that limbo where Polack and Canuck already languish.

Others recognize that WASP power is faded or mythical now--storm the citadel, and where are you? But they believe the WASP retains a psychological advantage that outlives his actual political and economic dominance--over the years he trained ethnics to think badly of themselves, take on WASP traits and despise their own. He alienated them from their past. Michael Novak, for instance, describes the psychological "colonization" of ethnics in terms borrowed from Frantz Fanon. His Middle-European middle Americans have WASP masks on ethnic faces. Liberation demands a spasm of recoil from WASP values into the ethnics' authentic selves. But what is a heritage, once it is lost? Besides, Italian-Americans do not want to become Italians again--as Fanon's blacks wanted to be simply black. That is why the colonization metaphor will not fit the immigration scenario. The ethnics want in--onto the tube, close to the President. They want to be Americans; the detour through Italy is meant to end inside what they have been kept outside. But what is that? If they break into the citadel, they will just be more WASPlike. And if there is no citadel to take, where will they get the American component in their Italian-Americanism?

In a sense, they already have it. Middle America's patriotism, its views on crime, on war, on censorship are not handed down from the Ivy League. Why not settle for what they already have? What is the thing they still must get inside? If they aren't in, who is?

No one. The tribes have all assembled on the shore, eying one another, and looked for the huge native force to be invaded--but there is no one there. Once middle America has undertaken its immigration, we must confess we are all immigrants toward a nonexistent country.

What made us think there was something else out there, that America was anything but us? Perhaps the insistent calls telling us to "belong." We should participate, take our destiny in our hands, work within the system (and so with all the system's power). That was always the summons--from Kennedy's inaugural, from the Port Huron Statement, the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns, the Neo-Populists. Even Nixon talked of "a piece of the action." The McGovern platform echoed Tom Hayden on the right to "participate in the decision-making process." Richard Goodwin put it this way: "The nature of our role in world affairs must pervade every man's sense of himself...." That is really as much a prescription for totalitarianism as a cure for boredom (one of the few promises total government can fulfill).

But short of dictatorship, the thing we participate in is just us. Participation, like liberal democracy itself, is just a voting procedure. Those who go to it seeking substance instead of machinery must, for the most part, be disappointed. The electoral process tells you how to go about getting certain things (in moderate degrees). It does not tell you what to get, or want, or be. Citizenship does not create the man, but vice versa. Yet men went to politics in the Sixties, not for this program or that but to receive a self. "Power to the people!" was an attempt not to seize power but to call up a people; and the incantation did not work. The busyness of public life will not fill up private emptiness. It was the measure of our desperation that we asked it to.

The ethnic felt neglected because he, and Archie Bunker and Kelsey at the bar, were not consulted on the six-o'clock news; only demonstrating chicanos and the like. All right, put Mr. Middle America on the tube. Has he been given, by that act, a fullness he did not formerly own? Not bloody likely. Perhaps he lost what little remained of a self. Inside the TV set, he may be powerless to get out again. Emigrated off to unreality, he cannot escape the goldfish-bowl tube in his own room, regain full possession of that room. He has joined the system at last, diminished himself outward toward a public life. But why did he want to? The sad thing is that when the public machinery has failed to give meaning to men's private lives, those with some remaining inner richness are eager to drain it out toward politics and the reality-dispersing process. If ethnic life were still satisfying, why did it ache for the superficial legitimations of the ethnic politics?

We all went looking for America. But since we were it, our wanderings just scattered what we traveled toward. Monumentum requiris? If you really want to find America, stand still--which is why so many people desperately scurried off. The excitement was all one of departure, not arrival. And there is less to arrive at, now, than when we left.