Witness for the Prosecution

Roger Kimball’s “The Long March,” which originated as a series of articles in The New Criterion, purports to demonstrate just how, in the period from the mid-’50s to the early ‘70s, a cabal of narcissists, perverts, drug addicts, “political activists, blatant poseurs, and professional gurus” led us to where we are today. And where precisely are we? In “a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned.” A “hedonistic antinomianism” that wedded total self-indulgence and total self-righteousness has poisoned the moral wellsprings of our culture: such is the often reiterated import of Kimball’s single-minded polemic.

Kimball defines his book as “part cultural history, part spiritual damage report.” I’m not sure what a “spiritual damage report” is, and he does not enlarge on what exactly his conception of spirituality entails; but as cultural history, “The Long March” is a thin and scattershot affair. The background out of which the countercultural upheavals of the ‘60s emerged figures as no more than a mistily evoked domain of moral order, intellectual legitimacy and economic prosperity whose virtues make it all the more puzzling that anyone should ever have thought of troubling the waters. As for spelling out the decade’s pervasive aftereffects--even though Kimball assures us that “the radical ethos of the Sixties can be felt throughout public and private life”--he doesn’t spend much time making a case he presumes to be self-evident. After all, he says, just look around: There’s the Clinton presidency (“a monument to sordidness”); the inclusion of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry in literary curriculums; MTV and gangsta rap; the academic reign of deconstruction and cultural studies; and the intolerance of politically correct campus speech codes.

Where Kimball’s charges are most specific, in the area of higher education, he seems largely to be recycling the material of his previous book, “Tenured Radicals”; for the rest, his putative catastrophe resolves itself into a patchwork of gripes. Things used to be great, today they’re lousy, and it’s all because of those people in the ‘60s (starting with the Beats, “one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history”) with their drugs and their orgies and their horrible ear-splitting music. To help sustain this thesis, he interpolates a stream of soundbites from a “Who’s Who” of conservative talking heads--Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, Dinesh D’Souza, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Silber, Harvey Mansfield--as if to carry the day by acclamation.

The bulk of “The Long March” consists of a series of prosecutorial thumbnail portraits of individuals whom Kimball regards as prime instigators of the great collapse of values, among them Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Paul Goodman, Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver. It’s a peculiar list in many ways. Kimball seems to think that most of what went wrong in the ‘60s emanated from the world of New York writers, intellectuals and publishers; he belabors the moral crimes of The Village Voice (“a megaphone barking New Left thought, such as it was, into the mainstream culture”), The New York Review of Books (“a journal of blithe political opportunism, ready . . . to embrace extreme, even revolutionary, ideas”) and the fashionable progressive circles already excoriated, to far greater effect, in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” (As a disclaimer, I should note that I have written for the above-named journals and have been a colleague of a number of those indicted by Kimball.) His main focus, for instance, in discussing Eldridge Cleaver is not Cleaver’s misdeeds but the enthusiastic tenor of the original reviews of “Soul on Ice.” William Shawn becomes an agent of cultural revolution for the sin of publishing Charles Reich’s “The Greening of America,” a book that even when first published was widely perceived as a joke by the youth on whom Reich showered adulation.

One of Kimball’s chief devices is to dredge up bombastic or fatuous remarks made by his targets, including such well-worn mots as Sontag’s “The white race is the cancer of human history” and Ginsberg’s “War is just a hang-up.” Since many of the comments that Kimball highlights were exercises in deliberate provocation to begin with, the book has the peculiar feel of someone rising to a bait dropped 30-odd years previously. The period outrageousness of the material Kimball incorporates undermines his central argument: that we live in a world still shaped by the imperatives of the ‘60s, and that, as he puts it, “the radical tenets of the counterculture have become . . . thoroughly established and institutionalized in cultural life.”

It would be more accurate to say that the “counterculture” did not exist except as a pigeonhole for lazy journalists trying to encapsulate a range of disparate and frequently self-contradictory social phenomena, and that therefore it could hardly be said to have “tenets.” It--that surging and amorphous current that began to subside almost as soon as it was given a name--had cliches, rumors, catchphrases, bumper stickers, running gags, a kind of extensive mangled folklore: It had precious little to do with the literary world of Mailer or Sontag, as much as that world may have felt and responded to the ripple effects, and a good deal more to do with local and unclassifiable subcultures in thousands of towns, downtown neighborhoods and campuses.

But Kimball has virtually no interest in the actual texture of life in the ‘60s. He doesn’t want to acknowledge complexity or variation or ambiguity; he simply wants to engage in ritual finger-pointing. His obsession with New York intellectuals, for example, leads to an almost complete neglect of the various Californian subcultures without which the ‘60s are inconceivable. Had he attempted a broader canvas and actually traced the interconnections and metamorphoses of that uniquely chaotic period, perhaps he would have come up with the kind of persuasive social indictment intended. As it is, he merely registers a series of none too surprising opinions: He doesn’t like “Naked Lunch” or “Kaddish,” hates the Rolling Stones, finds no intellectual merit in the writings of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, is appalled by the self-righteousness of antiwar activists like the Berrigans, and doesn’t approve of the notion of mind expansion through psychedelics.

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It is astonishing that, after reading a book of this length, one should have so hazy a notion of what sort of world Kimball either inhabits or would like to inhabit, indeed so little sense of what sort of worldly experience has shaped his perceptions. The values he holds dear are endlessly alluded to but never defined or described. He is in favor, by his own tally, of circumspection, responsibility, restraint, prudence, duty, rationality, critical discrimination, fairness, sympathy, taste and what he calls “the ordered enjoyments that civilization makes possible.” He speaks at one point of “the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom” as if no one would dream of questioning or requiring a more detailed cataloging of the wisdom reposing in those churches. He alludes to “sex as ordinarily understood,” as if on Mr. Kimball’s planet this were a cut-and-dried matter requiring no further elaboration.

In a book largely given over to ad hominem attacks, the attacker remains disembodied, a censorious wraith. A pitch of spluttering indignation is sustained nearly from first page to last, long past the point of rhetorical overkill. When Kimball gets going on his favorite targets, rock music (“a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive”) and unbridled sexuality (especially if it is “polymorphous,” “promiscuous,” “pornographic” or “hypertrophied”), he assumes the tone of H. P. Lovecraft describing the depredations of some extragalactic interloper, or of the high school principal in a 1950s rock ‘n’ roll movie, the one who cancels the senior prom in order to shield the students from “that mindless jungle tom-tom music.” As in many sermons, virtue here is primly boring, but vice provides for enlivening surges of invective.

Where would Kimball be without his bile? Take away the rolling thunder of his tirades and there’s no book there at all. He has dug up a bunch of press clippings, resurrected some suitably outrageous quotes (though a more imaginative research job would have yielded far more divertingly extreme examples), and, in his final pages, engaged in some inconclusive throat-clearing about What Ought To Be Done to clear out the moral rot. What he signally fails to do is demonstrate the continuity between the ‘60s radicals and utopians he deplores and the world we live in. That the Whitney Museum puts on an exhibit about the Beats does not signify that the Whitney is an extension of Beat values, only that enough time has passed for Beat culture to serve as a nostalgic lure for the crowds that the Whitney, in good capitalist fashion, feels obliged to cultivate. If academics approvingly teach Kerouac and Burroughs (and only some do), does anyone think that a ‘90s English department, with its layers of bureaucracy and careerist infighting, resembles on any level the improvised anarchies of be-in or crash pad? That the icons and anecdotes of the ‘60s provide fodder for television shows and university courses does not mean that the ‘60s live, only that they are being cannibalized along with all other available cultural content.

Kimball goes on repeatedly about “the tremendous moral damage that the sexual revolution has inflicted,” but looking for instances he comes up with “the highly eroticized advertisements festooning billboards, or the sorts of graphic sexual fare available even on network television today,” as if sexy ads and heavy-breathing love scenes, no matter how graphic, were not a direct extension of a glossy Hollywood culture long predating the ‘60s and far removed from the distinctly hairy and unglossy ‘60s version of sexual liberation. Because he wants to see the ‘60s everywhere, he loses all sense of what the era was actually like; and because he wants to blame everything on the ‘60s, he seems blind to most of what came before it. The superior virtue of earlier eras and the unspeakable moral squalor of our own are propositions too axiomatic to need the slightest demonstration. That (in the poet Robert Southwell’s phrase) “times go by turns,” and that forms and assumptions and standards of conduct are swapped and altered and retro-fitted from decade to decade, often in the most elusive and contradictory ways, altogether escapes him.

But of course Kimball has no stake in trying to achieve a measured sense of what happened in the ‘60s and how the aftereffects of what happened continue to infuse our lives. That’s what historians do, and the best of them try to do it without moralistic preconceptions. “The Long March,” by contrast, is a pure exercise in preconception. There is no sign that Kimball at any point entertained the possibility that any of the figures demonized here, and all the others condemned by implication, might at least have had comprehensible motives (other than perverse willfulness) for what they said and did. To admit even that much would be to make himself vulnerable to the same insidious infiltration that has taken over the rest of the culture. Like Saint Anthony beset by devilish tempters, Kimball stands firm in the desert of his righteousness.