Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1991 Page: 26
244 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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26 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
university professor and a garage mechanic talking together informally as
complete equals. But that is not true in England. That's a very positive
thing about the United States. Intellectuals in the United States are
always deploring the fact that intellectuals here aren't taken seriously the
way they're taken seriously in Europe. That's one of the good things about
the United States. There's absolutely no reason to take them seriously for
the most part. I remember in the 1960s, sometimes I would sign an
international statement against the war in Vietnam-signed by me here,
Sartre and some other person in Europe, and so on. Well, in Paris there'd
be big front-page headlines; here nobody paid any attention at all, which
was the only healthy reaction. Okay, so three guys signed a statement; who
cares? The statement signed by 120 intellectuals in the time of the
Algerian War was a major event in Paris. If a similar thing happened here,
it wouldn't even make the newspapers-correctly.
All that reflects a kind of internalized democratic understanding and
freedom that's extremely important. One shouldn't underestimate it. I
think that it's one of the reasons why we have the Pentagon system.
Compare the United States, say, with Japan. How come we had to turn to
the Pentagon system as a way to force the public to subsidize high-
technology industry, whereas Japan didn't? They just get the public to
subsidize high-technology industry directly, through reduction of con-
sumption, fiscal measures, and soon. That makes them a lot more efficient
than we are. If you want to build the next generation of, say, computers,
the Japanese just say, "Okay, we're going to lower consumption levels, put
this much into investment, and build computers." If you want to do it in
the United States,you say, "Well, we're going to build some lunatic system
to stop Soviet missiles, and for that you're going to have to lower your
consumption level and maybe, somehow, we'll get computers out of that."
Obviously, the Japanese system is more much efficient. So why don't we
adopt the more efficient system? The reason is that we're a freer society;
we can't do it here. In a society that's more fascist than state capitalist, and
I mean that culturally as well as in terms of economic institutions, you can
just tell people what they're going to do and they do it. Here you can't do
that. No politician in the United States can get up and say, "You guys are
going to lower your standard of living next year so that IBM can make more
profit, and that's the way it's going to work." That's not going to sell. Here
you have to fool people into it by fear and so on. We need all kinds of com-
plicated mechanisms of propaganda and coercion which in a well-run,
more fascistic society are quite unnecessary. You just give orders. That's
one of the reasons fascism is so efficient.
Q. You've even expressed fear that the U.S. is ripe for a fascist leader. You
write, "In a depoliticized society with few mechanisms for people to
express their fears and needs and to participate constructively in managing
the affairs of life, someone could come along who was interested not in
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1991, periodical, 1991; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28604/m1/32/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .