War Against the '60s

By LANCE MORROW

THE SPOILED CHILD OF THE WESTERN WORLD

by HENRY FAIRLIE

350 pages. Doubleday. $8.95.

TODAY AND TOMORROW IN AMERICA

by MARTIN MAYER 217 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

Editorial writers, Columnist Murray Kempton once wrote, are the men who come out of the hills to shoot the wounded after the battle. For some time, many American thinkers have been picking through the still-smoking carnage and rubbish of the '60s, finishing off ideas --for example, Consciousness III and the millenarian pretensions of "the movement." This is not necessarily a dishonorable exercise, although sometimes it is a little too easy, like hunting from a helicopter. But there is a danger in it. A repugnance for the Yippie idiocies of the '60s can too often turn into a backlash against such concerns as clean air, equal rights and the lessening of poverty. Beneath the current indignation about Big Government there can lurk a regressive social meanness.

Both Henry Fairlie and Martin Mayer engage in a savage debunking of the '60s. Fairlie especially starts with an oft-heard Bicentennial premise: the U.S., reeling from Watergate and Viet Nam, must recover its morale and equilibrium. The idea could smack of mere inspirationalism, but Fairlie and Mayer approach the thought with original and even eccentric minds.

Self-Gratification. Fairlie, a British journalist who has lived for the past ten years in the U.S., can be severe and very rigid about America as a "spoiled child." Despite that tone, he is basically a classic liberal, worried about elitism and the decline of equal education and opportunity. His New World symphonette is delivered in elegant cadences. "The future of the world lies with America," Fairlie believes, and "it would be a tragedy if, in the rage that must be endured, America wearied of its own idea." Much of Fairlie's book is a rich and occasionally cranky meditation on the ways in which Americans have retreated into self-gratification and a kind of infantilism. The popular culture, says Fairlie, has thoughtlessly absorbed an art and literature of turbulence that are the art and literature of Europe in decline. Fairlie sounds like Nikita Khrushchev at an exhibition of modern art when he talks of attitudes of alienation that represent a "sickness of the imagination." With an outsider's desire to think better of Americans than they think of themselves, Fairlie endorses the idea of America as a promised land enjoying historical dispensations.

America's great difficulty now, says Fairlie, lies in the people's neglect of their relationships as citizens and human beings. His solution would have Americans stop worrying about the tainted civilizations that they have too willingly accepted from Europe and return to the country's original and innocent vision. "The alienation of man from god, or man from nature, ought not to preoccupy us. The only alienation that matters is that of men from their society . . . It is only as a social being that the individual can be truly liberated." He is a little like the first mate Starbuck in Moby-Dick, who tries to get the cosmically obsessed Ahab to steer for home.

Martin Mayer's Today and Tomorrow in America is harder and more brisk, crackling with intelligence and a certain contempt for what he sees as the stupidities of American public policy. Ideologically, his book will probably be read by some as a callous, you-can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs dia tribe against social planners, academics in public life and environmentalists. Among his dicta: "Adjustments that take the reward structure too far out of line with contributions produce economic decay . . . An entirely disproportionate share of medical attention goes to the chronic, hopeless ills of the aged at the expense of children and young adults, whose needs would be a much wiser investment of the resources . . . In the real world, limited resources impose choices; in the world of government, everyone can play Let's Pretend."

Mayer, free-lance social critic and author of The Bankers and Madison Avenue, U.S.A., has a shrewd eye for the absurdities of government and other bureaucracies. In his view, lawyers and academics, starting in the 1960s, have fallen into the habit of legislating or planning outcomes in defiance of the actual world: "Nondiscrimination became equal opportunity became affirmative action became goals became quotas became equality of outcomes." He does not say at which link he would have interrupted the chain. Mayer does argue that government's tasks are to "harness greed," to lay a deft hand on the economic system but never so heavily as to interfere with the basic logic of the marketplace. As for politics, Mayer says irritably, "I could not care less whether the government calls itself conservative or liberal or radical, Democratic, Republican, American, Socialist, Worker or Libertarian. If we can get the substance right, I can put up with almost any style." In a period of muddled political impulses, Mayer is a valuable man to listen to--a clear-eyed, irascible independent. Lance Morrow

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