White Guilt (7 page)

At King City, Highway 101 takes an abrupt leftward turn as if to move you quickly away from something unsightly. You see a Denny's sign, a Shell or Exxon sign looming over the highway, and then you are suddenly headed due west over more ravines of rock and scrub, a bank of coastal mountains in the distance. The tiny agricultural town of King City is gone before you can adjust yourself to look for it. And when the turns finally point you northward again toward San Jose and San Francisco, you are let out on the fertile plain of the Salinas Valley—Steinbeck country, and one of California's great breadbaskets to the world. Between low mountain ranges on the east and west the earth is as flat and black as an Illinois landscape. Long, freshly planted rows are engineered for perfect drainage, sprinkled with water, and dusted with chemicals into a perfectly bankable fertility. There are no farmhouses in sight.

In this landscape, with its clear radio reception, Clinton is again ubiquitous on the car radio. At first his troubles seem especially shameful in this valley where people live so directly off
the land. But, of course, this is no longer the small-town world of pernicious gossip and bluenosed fundamentalism suggested by Steinbeck's early fiction. These fields are a high-tech factory laid out on the land, and the people who own and manage them are no more likely to be scandalized by Clinton than Chicagoans or Atlantans. Baby boomers are in charge pretty much everywhere these days, and Bill Clinton is not foreign to them. He is as familiar as the sixties consciousness itself and, thus, the first president they know as a peer.

Toward the end of the age of racism, at the height of the civil rights movement, there was a moment when progressive black and white youth seemed to share an “integrationist” consciousness. White college students flooded into the South and onto the front lines of the struggle against segregation in the early sixties. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was as white as it was black. But in the mid-sixties, as the age of white guilt was launched by the civil rights victories, blacks began to expel whites from the cause of civil rights. This racial divergence was not only the beginning of the militant black consciousness that I fell in thrall to in the late sixties; it was also the beginning of a progressive white “youth” consciousness that was no longer centered on the struggle of black Americans.

Young whites politely accepted that blacks would have to run their own movement, and then raced to the cause of the Vietnam war. In time, many other causes—particularly feminism and environmentalism—became themes of this new youth consciousness, which ultimately became known as the “counterculture.” This was the cultural and political consciousness in which Bill Clinton came of age, just as I came into black militancy in my twenty-first year.
And driving through the rich Salinas Valley, I hear this same baby boomer–counterculture consciousness on the radio, tempered very little by the decades. It is now the establishment consciousness, while traditional American values now constitute a kind of counterculture. And listening to these callers, it becomes clear to me that there is not enough raw indignation in America over Clinton's behavior to truly empower the traditionalists. For the first time since the wagging finger, it seems almost certain to me that this sex scandal will not bring down the president.

 

It was Vietnam that pushed the youth consciousness of the sixties far across the continuum of disaffection into possibly the worst case of generational alienation in American history—bad enough to spawn an essentially anti-American counterculture with greater moral authority than traditional America. Of course, this consciousness clearly began in civil rights because this was where America effectively confessed to profound moral corruption and hypocrisy. This was the confession—the crack in the facade of American greatness—that was then held against America as the Vietnam War escalated. Thus, it enlarged from a localized confession of racism into a broad confirmation of America's inherent evil and oppressiveness.

And then, simmering away behind all this from as far back as the fifties, was the idea that America, with its greedy “military-industrial complex,” was essentially a “repressed” nation. Here a little bastardized Freud was mixed with Marx to make a rather neat formula: a sexually repressed society was necessarily a bigoted and oppressive society. Thus, the underside of postwar America's “gray flannel” conformity was social evil. But this pairing of sexual
repression and social evil also had an especially appealing upside: it linked sexual openness to social virtue. The idea that a lack of sexual inhibition signified a deeper and more compassionate humanity became one of the more fabled ideas of the counterculture. Here casting aside one's sexual inhibitions was a way of opening up to one's deeper humanity and, thus, separating oneself from the dark human impulses to racism, sexism, and militarism that plagued the repressed, bourgeois world of one's parents. At the center of the sixties consciousness was always this confluence of the personal and the political where freedom from bourgeois repressions was always somehow an aspect of social responsibility. This was the counterculture consciousness that Bill Clinton encountered in the mid- to late sixties.

I believe that the most important—if seemingly incongruent—point to understand about the sixties youth consciousness is that, like the sixties black militant consciousness, it was largely a response to white guilt. This guilt is the vacuum in moral authority created by
all
of white America's moral failings and infidelities to democracy: racism, sexism, imperialism, materialism, conformity, environmental indifference, educational inequality, superficiality, greed, and so on. Thus, white guilt is a much broader phenomenon than the “race problem” from which it takes its name. Race provided the first and most conspicuous instance of infidelity to democratic principles, and the first instance where the wrong was openly acknowledged. But then the Vietnam War, escalating almost simultaneously with this acknowledgment, further injured America's moral authority in the eyes of many young people. And, in quick succession, other issues—women's rights, the plight of farm workers, degradation of the environment, black and white poverty—converged rather
spectacularly to give the impression (especially to the young) that oppressiveness, greed, exploitation, and violence were the essence of the American character. The sixties were simply a time when seemingly every long-simmering conflict, every long-standing moral contradiction in American history, presented itself to be made right even as an ill-conceived war raged on. And the resulting loss of moral authority was the great vacuum that literally called the counterculture consciousness into being.

The ideas and ideologies that shaped this consciousness no doubt came from many sources—Marx, Freud, Martin Luther King, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Chairman Mao, Lao-tzu, to name only a few. But it was white guilt—this enormous vacuum of moral authority—that called out the counterculture and the black militancy that I encountered in the sixties. Both these “counter” movements were new assertions of moral authority that hoped to combat the illegitimate authority of racist/imperialist/sexist traditional America. But if the new black consciousness wanted only the fruits of white guilt, the counterculture wanted to remake America altogether. And in many ways it succeeded.

 

I remember first noticing this counterculture consciousness when it seemed to enter and then take over the life of a college classmate. We had come to college in the same year but knew each other only in that small-college way in which you know all about people you don't really know. I knew that John (as I will call him) was from a well-to-do military family. He was as clean-cut as a marine and yet he dressed with just the right dash of patrician disregard. He was the first person I ever saw wear
a jacket, tie, and Bass Weejun loafers with no socks to Sunday dinner—a little subversion of our midwestern dress code that spoke of an East Coast prep school background. But there was also an inescapable sense of angst about him that seemed quite real, and thus made him all the more appealing to girls. People said it had to do with a far-off father whom he seemed to both hate and admire—a figure he sometimes excoriated and at other times, rather reflexively, showed reverence toward.

This was the John we all knew, or knew about, for the first two years of college. But at the start of our junior year, John did not show up. Someone said he had gone out to California and become a hippie—a new word, as well as concept, at that time. And, as unimaginable as this seemed given the John we all knew, it was nevertheless confirmed a month later when he reappeared on a huge black motorcycle to retrieve a girlfriend before heading back to the hippie life in California. His blond girlfriend had not yet been “hippie-ized,” and they made quite a sight racing around the day or two before they left—he now rather dirty-looking in jeans, fringed Indian jacket, and bandanna; she still in the tailored skirts and prim blouses of a Tri Delt, striving on the back of his powerful bike to show an excitement equal to the grand gesture they were about to make while at the same time struggling with the propriety of her skirt.

Of course, their rebellion had no connection to the social and political upheavals of the day. It was only a rather histrionic version of what psychologists call adolescent rebellion—a normal feature of human development by which the young (teen years to early adulthood) separate from parental authority to experience the world on their own. Maybe it was the far-off father—an
unbending set of expectations—that pushed John to a more dramatic rebellion than most. But whatever the motivation was, it was not political. John's eyes rolled whenever a discussion veered toward politics. And without the gravity of political or social themes, it was hard to see his rebellion as anything more than an action taken to enrage an overbearing father.

What made John's rebellion seem so much grander than this was the turbulent, fast-changing world that surrounded it. In the fifties adolescent rebellion met a society that still had a strong sense of its own moral authority. Fifties rebels like James Dean and Elvis Presley were not the popular vanguard of a new dissenting politics. And Elvis only enhanced his celebrity by serving honorably in the military—thus acknowledging the moral authority of his country. But John rebelled into the age of white guilt and, thus, into a society that was growing less and less certain of its moral authority. If John's rebellion had no political motivation, if it was simply personal, it met a society where political forces and social upheaval suddenly justified—even glamorized—all kinds of rebellion. Rock stars, black militants, antiwar leaders—all their rebellions touched a broadly anti-American politics that gave them a special charisma in the sixties.

So the sixties were a time when even the most ordinary and personal acts of youthful rebellion were aggrandized by a powerful new dissenting politics that let you rebel against “the system” rather than merely your parents. In that first decade of the age of white guilt, when America's moral authority began to weaken, youthful rebellion suddenly represented a further challenge to the moral authority of American society and its institutions. Like the protests against racism and war, it seemed
to represent a
historical judgment
against America. It seemed to be yet more evidence that there was something soulless and avaricious at America's core that was now coming home to roost in the rebellion of an entire generation of young—just as America's racism and militarism had come home to roost in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Thus, adolescent rebellion in the sixties, because it coincided and melded with such great transformative movements, took on a historical resonance it would never have had outside the reflected light of these movements. It came to seem like a social
movement
in its own right, a broad and happily amorphous youth movement taking on the injustice of America's soullessness.

Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one's self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one's self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past.

The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn't matter, for example, that there was honor in America's acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved. And when you added to civil rights the Vietnam War, feminism, the plight of farm workers, a new environmentalism, a deepening animus toward materialism and corporate power, and a “credibility gap” between young and old, you could easily make a damning case against adult authority. No previous generation had been served up a richer menu of social and moral “contradictions” and “hypocrisies” with which to hammer away at the moral authority of adult American society.