Letter from the University of California

I have been watching the left wing from afar, said the young man in the cotton cord coat, and I don’t mind admitting I’m distressed. (His diffident smile was like a slice of yellow melon.) They all gather around the same table on the terrace, every day at noon, and yet they are far from being children of the sun. Their faces are always turned away from the sun, hidden behind dark glasses; and their heads are bandaged by bandannas and their mouths are grown over with beard, and long hair mats about their ears and is pressed into soiled locks and curls on their foreheads and temples. Their clothes are always brown or black, as if they seek by their very apparel a negation of the sun, of the cleanliness (implying godliness) that surrounds them, lapping at them. It is not for me to suggest that they never take baths. But their determined drabness indicates this. Their dull color, the dark clothes and the paste-faces screwed up at the headlines make them seem dirty, and they wear this implicit uncleanliness like a badge. It identifies them, because cleanliness is a middle-class virtue, and their flight from the middle class of their fathers is a frantic, panicked thing. Cleanliness means shower stalls and tract homes, bathtubs and bars of soap, soap opera and afternoon radio and television and mass values like that.

They are always reading newspapers, and rummaging in brown spotted lunch sacks for apples and obscure sandwiches. They peruse the papers with a certainty and a selfsatisfaction which seems to say to those who watch them: We own the truth, we are merely inspecting the daily journals to see how they distort it; we know what will be said, we merely read to affirm ourselves; we have the answer, we merely pluck up the front page questions and fit our answer to them. They read sections of the newspaper aloud, and they laugh, and occasionally they stumble upon some fresh outrage perpetrated in the dim foggy bottom of Washington, and gleefully they construct the wording of their next petition. It is difficult (said the young man) to take their indignation seriously, because it is such a facile thing. Whatever conscience they have seems, through constant use, to have become a handy faucet, turned on with a twist of the wrist, attached to a tank of truth as depthless as the sea. Perhaps their indignation seems formularized because it belongs to a committee. Perhaps, the young man admitted, I allow myself the old illusion that outrage should be spontaneous, that its voices should not be quite so carefully stationed—one at the newspaper, one beside the radio, one among a stack of news magazines, one by the telephone, and another at the end of the telephone line waiting to give the signal to type the stencil to mimeograph the protest which will then be briskly distributed at the campus gates early the next morning, the fresh ink and clean paper smelling of innocence. Perhaps because ad hoc indignation has become a standing committee, and bureaucrats have taken over innocence, and public relations men stand watch over the national morality—perhaps that is why it is all so unconvincing.

JL

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John Leonard

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I have been watching the left wing from afar, said the young man in the cotton cord coat, and I don’t mind admitting I’m distressed. (His diffident smile was like a slice of yellow melon.) They all gather around the same table on the terrace, every day at noon, and yet they are far from being children of the sun. Their faces are always turned away from the sun, hidden behind dark glasses; and their heads are bandaged by bandannas and their mouths are grown over with beard, and long hair mats about their ears and is pressed into soiled locks and curls on their foreheads and temples. Their clothes are always brown or black, as if they seek by their very apparel a negation of the sun, of the cleanliness (implying godliness) that surrounds them, lapping at them. It is not for me to suggest that they never take baths. But their determined drabness indicates this. Their dull color, the dark clothes and the paste-faces screwed up at the headlines make them seem dirty, and they wear this implicit uncleanliness like a badge. It identifies them, because cleanliness is a middle-class virtue, and their flight from the middle class of their fathers is a frantic, panicked thing. Cleanliness means shower stalls and tract homes, bathtubs and bars of soap, soap opera and afternoon radio and television and mass values like that.

They are always reading newspapers, and rummaging in brown spotted lunch sacks for apples and obscure sandwiches. They peruse the papers with a certainty and a selfsatisfaction which seems to say to those who watch them: We own the truth, we are merely inspecting the daily journals to see how they distort it; we know what will be said, we merely read to affirm ourselves; we have the answer, we merely pluck up the front page questions and fit our answer to them. They read sections of the newspaper aloud, and they laugh, and occasionally they stumble upon some fresh outrage perpetrated in the dim foggy bottom of Washington, and gleefully they construct the wording of their next petition. It is difficult (said the young man) to take their indignation seriously, because it is such a facile thing. Whatever conscience they have seems, through constant use, to have become a handy faucet, turned on with a twist of the wrist, attached to a tank of truth as depthless as the sea. Perhaps their indignation seems formularized because it belongs to a committee. Perhaps, the young man admitted, I allow myself the old illusion that outrage should be spontaneous, that its voices should not be quite so carefully stationed—one at the newspaper, one beside the radio, one among a stack of news magazines, one by the telephone, and another at the end of the telephone line waiting to give the signal to type the stencil to mimeograph the protest which will then be briskly distributed at the campus gates early the next morning, the fresh ink and clean paper smelling of innocence. Perhaps because ad hoc indignation has become a standing committee, and bureaucrats have taken over innocence, and public relations men stand watch over the national morality—perhaps that is why it is all so unconvincing.