Confronting Moloch

GIVE ME A hero. Someone willing to throw his body on the line, who will feel the cutting edge of politics and jackboots and patriotic propaganda and do more than bleed. Heroes who don't sign advertising endorsements when their hour is over. America needs her heroes.

Milton Viorst is a liberal. He is a journalist--in name and spirit--who knew some of America's heroes. His book is an ambivalent portrayal of America in the '60s, a series of profiles of 14 heroes of the time. Some of them are still heroes. Fire in the Streets is honest history, good American story-telling, but there are no judgments or conclusions, and little adulation. Remember, Milton Viorst is a liberal.

Tom Hayden, E.D. Nixon, Allen Ginsberg, Allard Lowenstein, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Jerry Rubin, Clark Kerr, James Mellon, Alan Canfora, Paul Williams, Joe Rauh, Bayard Rustin, James Famer. There were different heroes for different people. And though Viorst claims not to have written another history of the '60s, in a superior and unconventional way he has. The history is grounded in the civil rights movement, in Brown vs. the Board of Education, in E.D. Nixon and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It is grounded in the "new values" of Jack Kerouac's prose--an inspiration for Tom Hayden--and of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, particularly his seminal work, Howl. And from those seeds, Viorst says, "the Movement" rose up, at times singularly eloquent, at times wanton and reckless. In an epilogue, Viorst says the '60s taught Americans that their country was not immune to social disorder--the kind of disorder that titillated Viorst's instincts and offended his middle class values at once. And given "the right provocation," he says, America could once again take its politics into the streets.

By his own admission, Milton Viorst is an outsider looking in. And while he learned a lesson from the '60s, he betrays a naivete about the heart of America and its prodigal sons. After more than 500 pages of detailed interviews and timeless quotations. Viorst concludes that the movement died because the civil rights movement was no longer around "to enrich it." because the dissidents had alienated the liberal establishment sympathizers who legitimized the protest, because America was tired of it all. Though Viorst never sees the depth of the dehumanization in America that throttled the Movement and killed it in the end. Fire in the Streets is saved by its heroes, who identify the antagonist of the Movement, the thug who aroused the civil rights movement, the assassin who cut them all down, and who lives today. Allen Ginsberg found the villain--the cause and effect--that Viorst gropes for:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imaginations? Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!...

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Note: Moloch is an archaic Semitic deity worshipped through the sacrifice of the young.

HE TELLS THE great story of the tense year the entire black population of Montgomery, Alabama boycotted their racist bus system. Saintlike in their patience and non-violence. E.D. Nixon, Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and isolated Blacks of Montgomery waited for the wisdom of the Supreme Court.

"No one can understand the feeling that comes to a Southern Negro on entering Federal Court," Viorst quotes King, "unless he sees with his own eyes and feels with his own soul the tragic sabotage of justice in the city and state courts of the South. The Negro goes into these courts knowing that the cards are stacked against him...But the Southern Negro goes into the Federal Court with the feeling that he has an honest chance of justice before the law."

The non-violent civil disobedience of Thoreau, Gandhi and King has a sacred aura in this book, and it is vin dicated by its political and spiritual triumphs. But when the affluent college students of the '60s seize the revelations of the civil rights movement, the drama and courage of the protest, the transcendent irreverence of the beat generation, Viorst sees pretension; there is validity to the rancor, but will anyone die for it?

"Most of these students lived in campus communities segregated from the working society. They had little need to earn money, few mundane responsibilities and plenty of leisure time."

Viorst sees students pitying themselves, when perhaps they were just looking out the window, reading the newspapers, opening letters from the Selective Service, watching the death toll on the nightly news. They did not live in a campus vacuum, and too many students today know the terror of being 22 years old and leaving a sombre campus with nothing to do in the world.

Though every hero in the book exposes him, Milton Viorst never seems to confront Moloch. Instead, he credits the success of the Movement to good liberals and dedicated reformers, and he blames the disintegration on cynical militants and radicals.

Once grace had left the movement, the game was wild-eyed confrontation. Chicago. May Day. Kent State. Mark Rudd. Reform had become revolution, Eisenhower's "silent generation"--in which Viorst claims membership--had become "the silent majority," and an American President had promised to end the war. It took time, however, and during that time Viorst believes the Movement burned out.

Kent State was the final stand. According to Viorst, it was the test of how revolutionary the left was, and how far they would go. But "few were ready to die, so the decade reached its end." Viorst says that by this time, the country had reached agreement that America had blundered in entering the war. But the animus of the Movement, vibrant in all of Viorst's heroes, was not the nemesis of one war, of one minority--it was the nemesis of an entire machine, the ideals and values of America which caused the country to blunder into war, oppress peoples, and poison the environment. The Movement was out to get Moloch, the institution of dehumanization that is lighted on billboards and written on paychecks and that drafts the young to fight for vital interests and economic growth.

"But, as Orwell said," Viorst quotes Ginsberg, "a functioning police state doesn't need police to enforce. They get people to internalize. In 1984, the people don't realize there's a war at the other end of the planet. Then, suddenly, they wake up to the fact that there has been some vast conditioning. Brainwashing may be too strong a word, but it's accurate. It was a conditioning so that the public was able to amnesiaize vast areas of its own consciousness.

"So once there was a breakthrough in that central area, and a breakthrough in the gray room, then everything was called into question. After sex was made conscious, what about money? What about capital exploitation? What about plastic? What about tearing up the earth and replacing it with asphalt? What about the murder of one hundred million buffalo?"

AND WHAT ABOUT the '60s? Viorst is a good journalist, and like a good journalist, he has written a good story, a collection of informative and deeply moving profiles of America's heroes. But as an outsider, he does not share their stirring disillusionment with America, with its institutions of democracy and justice. He does not see the ultimate goal of any social movement, taken to its wildest extreme; he does not feel the urgency to change--the fire in the streets. Viorst is content to believe that the Movement ran out of steam and conviction--and something to complain about.

Viorst never says much about the FBI's attempts to "destroy and neutralize the New Left" through its counterintelligence programs. He doesn't mention its plan to divide and dissolve the New Left through a campaign of misinformation, instigation, and harassment. Nor does he mention that J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI and the de facto trigger of American justice, instructed his agents to "prevent the rise of the messiah who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist group. Martin Luther King...aspires to this position. King could be a very real pretender for this position should he abandon his supposed obedience to 'white, liberal doctrines,' and embrace Black nationalism.

"Take him off his pedestal," Hoover said, "and reduce him completely in influence," and replace King with another, more impotent Black leader.

Milton Viorst knew King, he knew some of the heroes, talked with them, held hands with them, wrote a book about them. But Milton Viorst's a liberal, and there is one thing he never shared with them--he never confronted Moloch.