We bought-or tried to buy-time in which America would become good enough to justify its ruling the world instead of Russia. To do what? To survive, certainly: but we bought much more expensive time than that. They cost next to nothing and drive us Americans out of our minds.” He is superbly himself, at his best, when in several choice lines he capsulates the issue of “wars of national liberation”-which Vietnam is, but not the last, since the Soviet Union will certainly continue to stoop to pick up this loose change: “From the Soviet point of view, they are irresistible. But he wrote it for himself, and he goes on to note the importance of television (and the violence of it) that “kookiness of every sort is alarmingly on the rise” that “there is building up in this country a powerful sentiment not simply against the war in Vietnam but against war itself” (I personally lost twelve months on this idiotic point alone, in my own readjustment) that all this is-let's not kid ourselves-a return to isolationism and that certainly this society is racist, but that there never has been one that wasn't. In his second chapter (of four), “The People We Have Become,” Rovere talks about the independent significance of “affluence as an agent of change.” I agree and wholeheartedly when he points out that “this is the first war of the century of which it is true that opposition to it is not only widespread but fashionable.” Writing his book for him, I would have begun with this perception, and worked my way back, carefully, to the socialist tradition, its middlebrow fate in America, and so on. It's much easier to understand the modern world in terms of The Bomb and The Bomb, it turns out, provides an intellectual writ of greater jurisdiction than the Bolshevik Revolution ever did. Naturally, those whose thought did not begin with October 1917 noticed the final flop ahead of time. (Meanwhile, like other Americans, we got rich.) Containment, and this special support of it, finally flopped in Vietnam. In the United States, the majority so disposed decided to support the American containment of Communism as a desperate, interim measure. The true issue is-and has been since October 1917-what those in the socialist tradition, or naturally attracted to it, would do once that tradition had been taken over, in historical fact, by the future monstrously-arrived ahead of schedule. That, it seems to me, is a rather special view of the relevant “past” and “present” which must now be squared, if only because the current past/ present turnabout has much deeper roots than the issue of Communism in Asia. His own effort commences with a chapter comparing Truman and Johnson, Korea and Vietnam. “Some of us who were well beyond the age of consent in 19 must now square past and present,” he begins. It certainly is not, as the dust-jacket argues, “one of the most agonizing documents to appear in recent years.” I found it a different kind of reading. His current effort will only put him back in touch with his constituency, however it will not anoint him, in the Thoreau-Muste-Good-man tradition. The ostensible subject is how Richard Rovere, certainly no “premature anti-Vietnamer,” came to oppose the war in Vietnam. But it is the first of what is sure to become a deluge, and it is very interesting-mostly mood and implication, everything pregnant-with-meaning. And here he makes a brief, strenuous effort to face up to the Big New Mood that we are all compulsively preoccupied with, that none of us has adequately characterized-Vietnam, riots, the election, boredom, drugs and drop-outs, the hysteria of One More Federal Program, marches against this-and-that, youthful mish against aging mash. Richard Rovere can write he can think he's sensitive he's been around. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy: Personal Reflections on 1968.
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