The new Ides of March
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Princeton, NJ—Veil, what do you think of our great country today?' The interrogator was a sardonic, handsome Irish-American colleague - and I could only answer that I thought.little of it.,And, at the moment, many Americans think liitle..of their country and have good reasons fa; Jheir lack of -faith in 'the last, best hope-of earth.' Of course, part of the shock, part-of the • not always concealed terror, is due to the terrible destiny of the House of Kennedy. Four ot,the children. of Joseph and Rose Kennedy haye now died violent deaths and one searches histqry for parallels—the House of Atreus, the as Plantagenets, the last Valois, the Stewarts? The, dynasty will have an even deeper hold on the „American., imagination; it will be mote I:wet:II-land, at least -as much hated—as it -was
'IL PP. • ,hut, the more intelligent and less sentimental. reaction is one of terrible anxiety.. As it happened I was reading Frank Adcock's admir- able lectures on Roman history and had come to ,,his description of the breakdown in the Roman order, beginning with the murder of . the Gracchi. Already the conspiracy theories are beginning. The Negroes, not un- naturally, regard the murder of their chief champion as no accident even if, at the moment rwrite, Robert Kennedy seems to have been the victim of Arab resentment of the anniver- sary of their agonisingly humiliating defeat. The Sixth of June was the new Ides of March.
But there are other reasons for the new wave of pessimism. The simple explanation of a new Sarajevo is not enough. Like Casca, many, many Americans think there is more to be pondered on than an Arab avenging in Los Angeles the humiliations of last year—and the arrogance of many Israelis being paid for by one of their most vocal champions. Like Casca they do not accept the new crime as natural:
For I believe they are portentous things Unto the climate that they point upon.'
The climate is pestilential. And one of the most marked signs of it is the role of the Senate, full of envious Cascas, full of equivalents of the Roman boni. At this moment, the Senate has again refused to pass an effective gun control Bill. It has, at last, legislated to ban the sale by post of hand guns but it will still be easy to huy..by post the rifles like, that which killed John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The odious National Rifle Association has been true taits base self and one spokesman for the gunlovers, who;. debated the topic with Robert Kennedy in Oregon just before his . death,.is extremely alarmed that something rash, will be done, such as limiting the right of free-. born Americans to own and use guns as part of their constitutional right. The belief that the Constitution guarantees the right of any Ameri7 can citizen to have as many weapons as he likes seems to be ineradicable. A colleague of mine yesterday innocently asserted that you, couldn't jggislate against:42e Aral* irt.arms. as the Constitution forbade it, That some states do legislate and that.the Supreme Court has upheld, this legislation is part, of the American arcana imperil. So ,ffiere are, it is estimated, forty million gun owners in this great nation. That this is unusual, that the American murder rate has no equal in the world, is still a truth too painful for the American people to accept. Or . is it? Is there not a certain, smug pride in the old pioneer spirit etc, in 'how the West was won'? (Often basely and meanly.)
But the Congress that has not even now dared to .defy the gun lobby, has had no hesitation in taking away the frail guarantees the Supreme Court has erected to protect the poor, the ignorant, the 'coloured.' That a great part of the legislation passed this week will probably be found unconstitutional is true, but the American police, many of them, in most states, important crime creators themselves, will have the green light for a while. So will the National Guard whose record in the riots of last year in the neighbouring city of Newark was far worse than anything charged against the Negroes.
For there is no doubt that there is a passion- ate desire to 'crack down.' This is natural and not, in all cases, wicked. I dislike very much the preaching of heroic Negro city guerrilla action by White 'liberal' journalists who are very unlikely to take to the streets themselves. But I also dislike the WASP complacency that suggests that America is in for a long hot sum- mer and a long and cold winter, with hearts as cold as the weather.
On the day that Robert Kennedy won in the Democratic primary in California, Dr Max Rafferty won the nomination as the Republican candidate for the Senate. Dr Rafferty defeated one of the most useful, gener- ally admired Republican leaders in California —or the nation : Senator Kuchel. And that triumph is portentous, for the votes for Dr Rafferty came from Southern California, where there is the biggest concentration of members of the John Birch Society, of Vigilantes of all kinds, of passionate believers that Senator Goldwater was cheated of his rightful victory by traitors like Governor Rockefeller and Senator Kuchel. Many of these do not in the least regret the murder of Senator Kennedy. Many more will be sorry for his family but not sorry for the nation. And this is the area that has elected Dr Rafferty.
Already, Southern California had elected Dr Rafferty State Superintendent of Public Instruc- tion. Dr Rafferty is above all a sound man. He is, after all, a 'Doctor of Philosophy in Physical Education.' This is the lowest type of PhD, well below PhD in Education or Home Eco- nomics. Indeed, a colleague -of mine here at Princeton firmly refused to • believe that there was such a degree. And indeed, it is hard to imagine exactly what one does to acquire it. Dr Bannister ran the four minute mile. Dbes Dr Rafferty explain, after the event, how it was done?
But as an educator, Dr Rafferty is an enemy of the modern age. He is a passionate defender of the mos maioram as he no doubt would put it., For a plat many Americans-have suddenly be- come sour on education. Who has been putting ideas into people's heads? • Teachers—and that is the last thing that is wanted-by the voters of'. Orange Country. One of the enemies of -the Christian Republic is the new method of teaching reading. Things were better in the good old days of the McGuffey Readers. Per- haps they were but, alas, it is, hard ,to have a. technocratic society on no wider.base than the McGuffey Readers. (To .avoid confusion, the McGuffey Readers have no connection with.the- McGuffey Society founded round 1936, by that admirable thriller writer, Jonathan Latimer, for 'the study, classification and improvement of the female breast.' As Mr Latimer worked for the National Resources Board, he suggested that this showed zeal beyond the line of duty.) But it is akind of zeal for which. Dr Rafferty has no enthusiasm. Indeed, I learn from that eminent sociologist, Mr Charles McCabe of the San Francisco Chronicle, that the doctor puris- simus, among many other crusades, has been running on the ticket of 'down with pre-marital sex.' For some unexplained reason, this is far more exhausting than marital sex. Mr McCabe suggests that the long life of some debauchees suggests that the Doctor of Philosophy is mis- informed. But his horror of sex is partly due, I suspect, to his remote Irish ancestry; even being a Protestant won't wash all of the Rafferty out.
I fear that Dr Rafferty will become the junior Senator to Mr George Murphy, one of the non-Catholic Irish trinity which Governor Reagan heads. But he will find the Senate far more tolerant of guns than of snide remarks about the debilitating effect of pre-marital or extra-marital sex. It's going to be hard on the Senate, although perhaps education in Cali- fornia will gain. But I suspect that another son of Southern California, Mr Nixon, will wish that the Senator-elect will keep his trap shut or confine his oratory to the dangers of modern spelling books.
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