Word: fooled
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...kind of animated cartoon Ralph Bakshi has made of Crumb's world is something else again. Fritz, the hero, is what the average campus revolutionary was in the late '60s-a fool tabby, living off vicarious experience, with his head full of windy sub-Marcusian rhetoric and only one ambition: to swive. Fritz gets involved in a hilarious orgy in a Village bathtub, is nearly busted by two cops, drawn inevitably as pigs, takes off to Harlem after an interminable chase through a synagogue, and is turned on to grass. Stoned, he makes inadequate love to a blimplike...
...tens his life story in a simple, modest account in Organize! My Life as a Union Man. His unique capacity for personalization may fool the reader into discounting Mortimer's role in the UAW. No one should be mistaken: Wyndham Mortimer was a giant of the labor movement. He was so effective an organizer that his so-called allies in labor had to silence him. His fighting spirit shines in Organize! He recalls an incident when he first arrived in Flint, Michigan, to organize the GM plant there and was greeted by a phone threat on his life. "How would...
Still, I never thought I'd ever see a Yankee pull off a fool stunt like that...
This is a remarkably contorted way of getting at some simple truths. Orwell was, indeed, a virtuous man; many of his values, in fact, were those of nineteenth century Britain. But Trilling and many others seem to have made Orwell into a sort of holy fool, driven toward truth and morality for reasons he could not understand. It is a relationship a little like that of a nine-year-old boy to Batman; in a tight spot, he will ask himself, "What would Batman do?" If Orwell would have done it, it must have been all right...
...ORWELL was not a holy fool. Trilling and many others have presented him as a naive figure, who blundered upon the crucial questions of his age without understanding them and then passed through successive waves of disgust and disillusionment, finally reaching a nadir of despair at which he wrote 1984 and died. There is a grain of truth in this concept, but only a grain. Orwell picked up his political education in bits and pieces, on the run; he toyed in print with ideas he would later reject. But he came to understand political life in its concrete details...