Word: moralisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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November 20: Even though the SDS anti-ROTC position had lost in the SFAC, a Faculty member said he would present the resolution at the Faculty's next meeting. Hilary Putnam, professor of Philosophy, said he would argue that ROTC had no :moral or political legitimacy" at Harvard...
Virginia Woolf once wrote that after reading certain novels she felt as if she were expected to write out a check. Such sermonettes, with their demand for moral reparations for evil deeds of the past, infest the modern theater. If one were really to believe Hochhuth (The Deputy), Weiss (The Investigation) and Arthur Miller (Incident at Vichy), one would conclude that the playgoer is responsible for every human crime and flaw since Adam ate the apple. The latest playwright to join this tiresome mea culpa crew is Arthur Kopit. His play Indians argues that Americans were once beastly...
...Moral Search. Dave, the numbers king, is a forebear of today's black radicals, a sort of "new Negro" whose drive for power and respectability is born of pride, anger and an awareness of his heritage. At best, his racket can bring him power only at the cost of respectability, and even that power is sharply circumscribed...
...plot springs from his search for moral equilibrium. Each of the characters closest to him seems to have found a partial solution. His partner, Blueboy, a shrewd, gamy con man, will play whatever role the whites expect of him with a comic and cynical flourish. His mistress, Kelly Sims, a college-educated chemist, bravely but quixotically banks her hopes for Negro progress on intellect. His eventual wife, Lila, a wise but unlettered country girl, has the "black granite" endurance that was once popularly thought to be the essential quality of the Negro race...
...characters are destroyed in one way or another, even Blueboy. "We made a terrible mistake," he says on his deathbed. "We forgot that white folks is still here. We forgot we was operating in America." Less totally true than it once was, perhaps, the author's inescapable moral still seems timely enough: crime may sometimes pay, but being black never does...