Authors: Gore Vidal
Unlike so many Jewish left-leaning journalists of that period, Kopkind never bought into Jewish nationalism, which means wholehearted support of Pentagon, Christian right, as well as of those legions of anti-Semites who support Israel in order to benefit, if not from Rapture at Armageddon, military procurement. He regarded Israel as any other polity.
After some police trouble in California (he had been caught practicing same-sexuality, which is an abomination not only in the eyes of the Lord but, rather more important, in those glazed mica-like orbs of Henry Luce), Kopkind was obliged to turn “straight” with the aid of a psychiatrist paid for by
Time
. Despite prayers to Freud as well as the numerous ritual dances and dietary observances necessary to achieve that state of heterosexual grace which has made the United States a thigh-slapping joke in the Western world,
he failed to Mature
. At twenty-nine, Kopkind left
Time
.
Time at Berkeley. Some writing for
The New Republic
before it became press office for the Israeli Embassy. Then, early 1965, the march on Selma in Alabama. This was the beginning of the latest but, alas, so far unconcluded phase of the black attempt to achieve parity in a society where whiteness is compulsory if one wants to be a full citizen. Suddenly, there was an eruption of radical political activity—SNCC, SDS—and Kopkind plunged in: “I was still the journalist, but I was part of the movement too. The genie was out of the bottle,” and for the next thirty years the genie was on duty.
It is odd to note the change of words over the years; in 1965, Negro starts to change to black. The times really seemed to be changing with Jack Kennedy murdered and Martin Luther King moving, in triumph, to the same slaughterhouse that awaits all agents of change in our imperial history. Kopkind is more kindly than not with such enemies of change as the ADA liberals: “It is hard for liberals, traumatized by both Stalinism and McCarthyism, to understand the new left’s attitudes about communism.” That is to riot in understatement. The radical activist takes far more fire from the liberal establishment that so loyally upheld the right of the United States to be in Vietnam than ever it will from the likes of George Wallace.
In due course, after the April 17, 1965, March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam, the movement splintered and the war went on for another decade, making it possible for a radical movement to pick up the pieces. But no such movement has ever, thus far, been able to get through to—much less rationalize—our society. As for promoting economic justice . . . that’s really un-American. To understand why it is not possible to do anything is the burden of Kopkind’s genie-hood. Meanwhile, he hates the absurdities of official rhetoric: “The best that can be said about the domino theory is that it works in reverse. The deeper America’s involvement in Vietnam becomes, the less effective is its deterrence value. It is one thing to lose a war with 17,000 advisers and quite another to lose it with 125,000 battle troops” (this was written in 1965); “to win it (whatever that means) with a land army of half a million would be worst of all. That kind of victory is the
death of policy, not the foundation of it.”
He quotes Carl Oglesby (president of SDS), who “accused the liberals of underpinning the elements of the very system that the New Left attacked: the military and industrial ‘corporatism’ that keeps . . . the poor alive but powerless and, in the end, still poor.” Plainly, we live under a malign star: thirty years later this analysis still describes our estate.
The genie hovers over the Watts riots and notes the obvious: there is more fire to come. In 1966 he was one of the few who thought that “mini-star” Reagan would beat Pat Brown and become governor of California because Reagan’s “philosophical line is an entirely incomprehensible jumble of every myth and cliché in American life.” But there are the odd small victories along the downward way: the House Un-American Activities Committee takes a well-earned hit. “The kids” were out in force, mocking the committee. Not only did no one take the Fifth, no one showed anything but contempt of Congress. One youth said, “I will not answer that question on the grounds that it nauseates me and I might vomit all over the table.” Times a’changing? Well, they did change, in this instance. No more HUAC.
Kopkind’s pieces for the
New Statesman
are brief but elegant. In
The New Republic
he is more thorough but not as lively. In
Ramparts
he now has an unmistakable voice; read a sentence or two and you know who wrote them. For a time, he pins his hopes on Senator Robert Kennedy, but even in
The New York Review of Books
(Bobby-enthralled as of 1967), Kopkind suspects that there is not much substance behind the rhetoric; that he is not an “insurgent,” since the official liberal line was that Bobby is in place to “save” the system the way that the New Deal “saved” the system. But Kopkind sees that this wouldn’t work even if there was a system worth saving. He has radically grasped the point: top-down reforms are bound to fail. “It is not Kennedy’s fault that he can do no other; it is his situation.” This is generous. He does not note Kennedy’s presumably deep conviction “that we have every moral right to be in Vietnam.”
There are crucial moments when Kopkind was not on the spot. The two Kennedy assassinations are not recorded, only referred to. The rise of Nixon happens in the margins of his prose. But he keeps a close eye on those in the ranks (down-top) who are for civil rights and an end to war and to the militarized state. Along the way he makes a disturbing sketch of Allard Lowenstein’s politics and death, bringing together Kopkind’s two central themes—radicalism of politics (we must go to the
roots
of our distress) and same-sexuality, which tormented Al, or so Kopkind thought. Al’s first political campaign was, briefly, for me in 1960. I found him bright but consumed with a sort of ambition that I don’t think Andy could have imagined, so alien was it to his own serenely balanced communal nature. Al realized that without a sacrifice of his true nature on the altar of Family, he could not be president or even an influence on one. He was not tortured by
who
he was but by
what
he had to do in order
to rise. He married (happily, I am told) but continued to burn; and was burnt, as it were, to death. Also, there is the troubling possibility that overwrought ambition had made him a double agent, or, as Kopkind puts it, “Lowenstein was part of a cultural and ideological nexus that sanctioned covert operations and mounted public movements against radicalism at home and abroad.” If so, his radical death was grimly ironic.
May 1968 finds Kopkind in North Vietnam. He is impressed by how well people are coping with enforced decentralization. He captures the differences: “Our questions often made no ‘sense’ to the Vietnamese because they assumed a context of issues in our own society, not theirs.” If only McNamara had had the slightest of clues! He captures the spirit of the Republican convention at Miami Beach (it is here, I think, that we met). “The party found its perfect hero in Barry Goldwater because he expressed the inevitability of human defeat; now its choice of Miami Beach . . . completes the metaphor.” He did not share my sudden vision, as the born again and yet again R. M. Nixon lurched forward to accept the nomination, that here was our thirty-seventh President and that we hadn’t seen nothing yet. In the fall of that crucial year, Kopkind goes to Cleveland to visit white blue-collar Wallaceland. Again he zeroes in on the real people as opposed to the PR simulacra at Miami
Beach. One worker muses aloud: “Humphrey—everything good . . . but he’s too easy on race, that’s a minus. (Boy, am I making myself out a racist?) Wallace—I only like him 40 percent . . . but the fact that he won, or got a lot of votes, would get people together. So I’m for Wallace. . . . But you know, sometimes I’m not sure why I vote for someone. Does that make sense?” It did to Henry Adams and it does to our current landslide Republican Congress, elected by only one-third of the electorate: Two-thirds thought that it made sense to give up on a system from which they are excluded.
Here comes (and there goes) Gene McCarthy. “Are we in the middle of a revolution?” is the title of one of Andy’s pieces from the front. “Those who hold steadfastly to the old values are true conservatives; those who only sense the new are worried liberals; those who see the whole pattern very clearly are radicals, and they don’t know what to do about it.” This is Sartre’s
No Exit
Americanized. It was also Sartre who once observed that the bourgeois theater will put up with the most harshly accurate depiction of the human case, as long as there is no hint that a solution might exist. What is, is, and must ever be.
Americans land on the moon and the war goes on. Woodstock . . . and the war goes on. Judge Julie Hoffman versus Abbie Hoffman
et al.
, at Chicago . . . and the war . . . Weathermen . . .
Sgt. Pepper
. . . Black Panthers murdered by the state. . . . But Andy is tiring now.
At the beginning of 1970 he withdraws to a sort of commune in Vermont. Where “I was taking a lot of acid.” He also met John Scagliotti and, as they say, “came out,” though I never suspected for a moment that he had ever been in, but then I’ve always been closet-blind. Andy and John remained together until the end. Happily, Andy did not retire, though, for a time, there was a hiatus “when I stopped writing and I stopped doing politics the same day. I couldn’t figure any of this out. I couldn’t figure out who I was, and what I was doing this for and this movement that seemed to have gone completely out of control, disappeared into a million crazy bits.” Gradually, he started to “do” writing and politics again but in a less urgent style since the disparity between what the United States thinks it is and what it actually is is now too great to be reconciled. One can only chip away at the edges. “I was lucky, too: I learned enough to make myself
permanently and constitutionally unable to accept America and its internal and external empires.” So, at the end, he was to make not a separate peace with our evil empire but a separate war, the best that any of us can do in what Jack Kennedy used to croon, “this twilight time”—presumably before midnight comes up like thunder over D.C.’s Federal Theme Park.
In Andy’s last years, he was much involved with sexual politics—as I write these words I cannot believe just how absurd a country has to be to insist on so categorizing its inmates. Cunnilingus over here . . . buggery to the right . . . frottage on the floor . . . keep moving. Bisexuals, stop it! Right now.
But Andy charges in. Present, as he puts it, “at the creation.” “There were millions of homosexuals before Stonewall, of course, but there was no coherent, self-aware gay community.” This is more or less true, but one wonders what sort of country needs a “gay community”? Although there are prohibited sexual acts (for everyone) in Catholic Mediterranean countries, no one is shocked or even interested in the fact that the shepherd Silvio likes to bugger young Mario (at least, when the ewes are menstruating) nor does Silvio’s pleasure in Arcadia—young Mario’s too—prevent either from being good or bad family men, something that the old culture expected them to be but did not fuss about if they decided not to breed. Anglo-Saxon attitudes were—and are—more crazed and punitive: particularly when sex becomes an exercise in control; hence, sexual politics, alas. Hence, some of Andy’s best writing as he describes the luna-tic bleatings of the Pentagon
generals and psychically challenged Congresspersons, most of whom, as kids say nowadays, have “seen Dorothy,” and given her a big kiss—in Oz if not Kansas.
The last time Andy rang me, officially—that is, as journalistic quarry—it was for a magazine piece that he was doing on Tim Robbins. Tim had produced and directed and starred in the film
Bob Roberts
, in which I appeared. He had also written the script and the lyrics for the songs and, as I recall, organized the catering for cast and crew. Andy’s usual opening was always reassuring. “Don’t worry. This interview’s absolutely pointless,” my favorite kind. “I’m doing this piece for one of these magazines . . . you know, they pay you all this money for stories about Mike Ovitz and they look like those giveaway magazines you get on airlines.” We both went on journalistic autopilot. But suddenly, trying to explain what made the youthful Robbins tick, I heard myself say, “I suppose it’s just natural
wu-wei
.” Andy’s voice became alert. “What’s that?” I chided him for having read so little Lao Tzu. I then gave
an English approximation: “passive achievement.” The archer who isn’t worried about going for the gold can pick up his bow and hit the bull’s-eye easily. If he strains—is jittery—he will miss. “Tim has natural
wu-wei
.” And so, I thought, as I hung up, do you. In due course
wu-wei
appeared, for the first and last time, in an airline-type magazine, two shriveled small words between the Gucci and the Lancôme ads.
Although the perhaps mythical sage Lao Tzu meant
wu-wei
as a goal for the individual, he does see its application to the state. In
The Way of Acceptance
, he observes: “The more the people are forbidden to do this and that, the poorer they will be. The more sharp weapons the people possess, the more will darkness and bewilderment spread through the land. The more craft and cunning men have, the more useless and pernicious contraptions will they invent.” Even using homely fertilizer. “If I work through Non-action the people will transform themselves.” So either Andy Kopkind
wu-wei
or—
Oklahoma OK
!
The Nation
12 June 1995
*
B
AD
H
ISTORY
Shortly after the publication of David McCullough’s prizewinning biography
Truman
, an ad hoc committee of concerned historians was formed to ponder how any historian, no matter how amiably “in the grain,” could write at such length about so crucial a President and reveal absolutely nothing of his actual politics, whose effects still resonate in the permanent garrison state and economy he bequeathed us. Since this question has many answers, we continue to meet—in secrecy: Tenure is at stake in some cases, while prizes, grants, fellowships, hang in a balance that can go swiftly crashing if any of us dares question openly the image of America the beauteous on its hill, so envied by all that it is subject to attacks by terrorists who cannot bear so much sheer goodness to triumph in a world that belongs to
their
master, the son of morning himself, Satan.