Word: gardner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gardner's critique of the excesses of radical demonstrators was a telling one. He hit most of the vulnerable points of such protest--their theatricality, their callous manipulations of officials and police, their irresponsibility, and their numbness to the hostile and repressive reaction of the mass of United States society. But why did Gardner decide to abuse the worst of the radicals for the better part of his final speech and cast only an occasional critical sentence at what he called "that complacent lump of self-satisfied Americans who fatten on the yield of this society but never bestir themselves...
Guerrilla demonstration tactics have been steadily losing their base of support, even among leftishly inclined students, since Columbia and Chicago. So Gardner's indignation at "the politics of derision and provocation," has a certain bandwagon quality, and his long tirade against abusers of dissent was effectively, if not intentionally, demagogic, especially when delivered from the sanctuary of a television studio...
...manners of the protestors Gardner was eloquent; on the substance of their discontent he was considerably less cogent. He was quick to attack the Marcusian concept of a "directed society" as being authoritarian and wishfully elitist. But his own prescription for such fundamental problems as the alienation of the individual was that society be "redesigned." He did not specify by whom, but did several times suggest the need for an ever-growing class of professional "problem-solvers...
...purposes are running things behind the scenes." Leaders, including the much-abused military-industrial complex, are doing about the best they can within an inherently defective problem-solving system, the first two lectures seemed to say. But in taking some querulous swipes at the new morality and radical lifestyles, Gardner suggested that this is "a world of imperfect people, some of them savage, some foolish, some undisciplined, some rapacious." And in his third lecture he reproached revolutionaries for falling victim "to an old old and naive doctrine--that man is naturally good, decent, humane, just and honorable, but that corrupt...
These confusions were at least partially resolved in the extraordinary view of power in United States society which permeated Gardner's three lectures. Here he was explicit: we should stop abusing political leaders and the military-industrial complex and admit that "perhaps no one is in charge." And in the first lecture he commented ominously, "Only those who know the Federal Government very well indeed know how disinclined it is to think in the largest terms about the nation's future." Right or wrong, the theory is an ingenious one, and like much of Gardner's writing it rings with...