After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction

The very fact that radicalism leans so comfortably, half-consciously, upon the System and its laws, goes on almost risk-free, beside Another World, confirms that the System’s thrust is still, on an unprecedented scale, democratic and benign.

The new enemy was boredom, in the sense of lack of drama. The new currency was fame.

breakthroughs, only gesture, celebrity quietism, rage, symptom, backlash.

Our values are corny ones, reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity, contact, the finest, broadest possible America.

radicalism that draws its terms from the System’s violence in Vietnam, then claims to be driven to revolutionary violence of its own, and, as an act of revolution, turns upon the liberal universities has an inauthentic ring, a ring of sublimation, theater.

There is an authentic radicalism in this country now, but it does not abuse the metaphor of revolution. It is not the radicalism of rhetoric, theater, mannerism, psychodrama, air. And it is not paralyzed in its own unconsummated moral impulses by viewing every human problem at a single level of atrocity.