Word: utopias
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American readers will turn these pages with wry signs of recognition. Beyond the particulars of its message, what The Israelis keeps saying is this: A fellow utopia has arrived at that ironical point where success and lost innocence coincide; the dreamers begin to complain about the Dream...
...Israelis in 1970, the author writes: "Ethnically, Israelis may be a hybrid; as political creatures, they are children of 19th century Europe." Aglow with humanitarian socialism, Zionists also dreamed of a morally perfect society rather than just one more chauvinistic nation-state. They discovered their image of Utopia in the kibbutz. Puritans as well as prophets, they made physical labor "the beginning and end of morality...
...which to live-any one of the past 500. But as Marie Twain, Lord Byron and countless other writers suggest, they would soon repent upon discovering that there is no such thing as a golden age. The past is an illusion just as much as the future; it is Utopia in reverse...
...Your article on suburbia [March 15] confirmed my suspicion that human nature is the one constant in a world of rapidly changing variables. The changes are not surprising; they are bound to happen. Perhaps some day soon we will all recognize our common ground and begin again. Utopia cannot exist in suburbia (zoning ordinances will not permit it), but somewhere between the city block and the country lane, a sense of unity can exist...
...universal catharsis is a short commodity lately. Everyone seems to end up in their own Edge City, and allowing Time magazine to push debauch one week and utopia the next without contradicting itself. Mailer suggested a few years ago that war may be the final tonic, that we should "buy a tract of land somewhere in Amazon . . . and throw in Marines and Seabeas and Air Force . . . invite them all, the Chinks and the Aussies, the Frogs and the Gooks and the Wogs . . . We'll have war games with real bullets and real flame throwers, real hot-wire correspondents...