Word: goodmans
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Unveiling a Tree. In the course of his career, Goodman has made his anarchist's pitch from many platforms: as novelist and short-story writer, poet and playwright, community planner, sociologist, psychotherapist, teacher (mostly at Columbia University). He began his fulminations against organized society in his fiction, in which a jumble of ideas is loosely arranged into plots. All the characters talk the same Goodmanese, part slang, part preaching. "Allow me. I will explain it to you" is a typical conversational gambit. Horatio Alger, the hero of Goodman's biggest novel, The Empire City, pilfers all the cards...
Overrun by Administrators. Goodman is best known for his writings on the plight of modern youth. Growing Up Absurd argues that today's problem children are the fault of a society that offers them squalid ideals and dull jobs. The behavior of juvenile delinquents and the beats, wayward as it is, is in fact a wholesome protest against adult mores. Writes Goodman. "Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skilled and spirited men to run that system with...
...Goodman's latest book. The Community of Scholars, quite brilliantly attacks the colleges for failing today's youth. The college, writes Goodman, was once a self-sufficient community of teachers and students that preserved its independence from the state much like a medieval walled city. Now the walls have been breached by the state and the campuses overrun by mediocre administrators who truckle to outside pressures and intimidate the teachers. There are more administrators in New York State alone, writes Goodman, than in all the school systems of Western Europe. "The ultimate rationale of administration," writes Goodman...
Cold War Therapy. When Goodman writes on politics, he secedes not only from society but sometimes from the facts. In Drawing the Line, a collection of essays on civil disobedience, Goodman scarcely mentions Communism as a cause of the cold war. By Freudian analysis, he traces the origins of the cold war to the pent-up emotions of Americans that must have aggressive outlets. After damning nearly everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt for continuing the cold war, Goodman announces his own cure for cold war tensions: "An occasional fist fight, a better orgasm, friendly games...
Like other romantics before him, Goodman is too prone to exaggerate the badness of government-politicians, generals, police-and to find too much goodness in everybody else. When human beings are freed from the restraints of government, as Goodman would like, they often turn into beasts, as they did in the French Revolution in spite of the Goodman-like optimism of the French Enlightenment philosophers. Goodman's ideas would be more useful if they were less apocalyptic. But in democracy's never-ending dialogue, Goodman's is an always provocative-if never level-voice...