After the Fall

By Melvin Maddocks

CONSEQUENCES OF FAILURE by WILLIAM R. CORSON 215 pages. Norton. $7.95.

Recent diagnosers of the national psyche have asked, and partly answered, the questions implicit in their titles. Will America's 300-year-old marathon, The Pursuit of Loneliness, never stop? inquired Philip Slater. Theodore Roszak wondered whether the counterculture of the '60s could lead to a Promised Land, Where the Wasteland Ends. Half autopsy-reporters of the American Dream, half scenario-writers of America 2001, watchers for the new greening (or the last withering) form a kind of avant-garde of prophets-in-waiting.

William R. Corson, the newest recruit, stands in curious contrast to his brethren. A retired Marine Corps colonel--a veteran of World War II, Korea, Viet Nam and duties with the CIA -- he is a clean-shaven, shorthair type. His level stare could still panic any ex-G.I. who meets him with shoes unpolished. But Corson's bill of particulars against the republic is far from novel. In fact, it is sobering to recognize how closely his analysis resembles that of the New Left six or seven years ago, minus the hysterical rhetoric.

Corson's premise is that Viet Nam was a psychological disaster, and that Americans have not yet fully registered the trauma. When we do, will we recover --ever? Corson is not optimistic. In words that might have come from Tom Hayden in a somber moment, he writes: "Our final innocence was lost in Viet Nam, and from here on it is likely that those who stand in the way of action deemed necessary for our national security or 'advancement' will be ground up like leaves in a backyard shredder."

Corson offers variations on two basic scenarios for the future: one hopeful, one not. He judges the "gloomiest" to be also the "most likely." He foresees no World War III, rather, a sort of new isolationism. Americans will develop a hatred of economically competitive Europeans, who will become "the bete noir of our domestic difficulties." The Third World and our own civil liberties will be equally slighted as we accept "creeping fascism" in exchange for preserving our "economic status and stability."

Native Stoic. Why would a nation that once dreamed so grandly settle for so little? Viet Nam, as Corson sees it, was something worse than a defeat: it was a failure. And this failure, like a bad marriage that does not end, has demoralized, corrupted and embittered, as a simple defeat would not have. Viet Nam is the name of a catastrophe to the spirit. A fatally casual adventure-in-excess has done to America, he argues, what crossing the Rhine did to the Roman Empire in 6 A.D., what invading Holland did to Spain in the 16th century. The final consequence is a "devaluation in national identity," a collective loss in self-esteem that has left Americans profoundly confused about just what to do next.

The author's "hopeful" scenario requires neither a new morality nor even a new lifestyle. Instead Corson prescribes a '70s revival of old-fashioned American character. Lots of hard work, lots of sacrifice. Like a native Stoic--a Marine Corps Marcus Aurelius-- Corson sees no true alternative to doing one's duty abroad to the Third World and doing one's duty at home to the Other America of the poor and the disenfranchised. Nothing less can exorcise the failure of Viet Nam.

Domestically Corson's marching orders are as old as the Great Society; diplomatically they are as old as the Marshall Plan. He tends to be stronger at invoking duty than at discussing practical details. But his insistence that the U.S. must try to do out of a sense of responsibility what once it tried to do out of a sense of ambition is gallant as well as quaint. Can post-Viet Nam America manage what he asks, even if it is willing? Corson is really certain of only one thing: if Americans survive by meaner stratagems, their lives will not be worth living.

Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.