If some critics are right, Black Humor may be the only new or important development in American fiction since World War II. The important writers are John Barth, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon—but also James Purdy, Joseph Heller, J. P. …
Surely, the time has come to end the Vietnam War. Leave aside, for the moment, the urgent moral considerations. Leave aside, also, the incontestable political reasons. The point has been reached where even motives of what might be called national …
The war in Vietnam has given rise to more agonies of conscience than any conflict in which America has participated during this century. The reason for this moral anguish is not hard to find. In the First and Second World Wars …
Peter Weiss writesat the edge of the bearable. Marat/Sade, his best-known play, assaults us mainly through the perpetual motion and emotion of a background of actors imprisoned in lunacy. Weiss’ scenic directions emphasize their shock function: “Their presence must set …
The movie How I Won The War is a cartoon using live actors instead of animation. Director Richard Lester, full of what one reviewer calls “aesthetic consciousness,” props up a group of wooden soldiers who drag a roller across the deserts …
In that best and worst of times for the South, the decade from 1955 to 1965, a remarkable drama unfolded. The best came out of “The Movement,” the loose coalition of civil-rights groups. The Movement’s young people, black and white, …
If anything troubles me in Michael Walzer’s thoughtful discussion of civil disobedience, it is the suggestion that those who use civil disobedience may “have to give way,” because they may be hurting the antiwar movement. I don’t believe that civil …
During their visits to Hanoi David Dellinger (editor of Liberation), Tom Hayden, and Nick Egleston (recent chairman of SDS) were invited to gather a group of about 40 American radicals in order to arrange a meeting with a group of …
A strong case could be made to show that America is a land that was won, expanded, divided, and healed by violence, a land in which a premium was placed on a readiness to fight and on a capacity—when necessary—to kill. …
Civil disobedience should pose no problem for the antiwar movement. The problem is insurrectionary violence (and the attempt to create a climate for insurrectionary violence) masquerading as civil disobedience. Those who hold the mask but do not in fact accept …
“History,” said Stephen Daedalus, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” But first it must be fully dreamed, in all its implications. And this is what William Styron has set out to do in The Confessions of Nat …
“The emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. One of the tragic paradoxes of the Marxist movement has been that impatient revolutionaries—appalled by the sluggishness of history …
Perhaps the best way to break through the perplexities which arise when we compare Charles Beard’s simple view of the Founding Fathers with the more complex view that closer inspection reveals is to start, once again, free of his categories. Let …
Objection after objection has been made that by obstructing [Dow Chemical] recruiters, we have been denying others—the recruiter and those who wish to see him—the right of free speech and assembly. In a sense, this is true. . . . …
Just one year ago, after a week of visiting I.S. 201 in East Harlem and talking to community leaders there, this reporter warned that conflicts centering around ghetto schools would mushroom unless teachers and parents could get together. As it …
