Marcuse and the gospel of hate
Sir: As John Sparrow's eulogistic quotation from the Times Educational Supplement demonstrates, the motto of our progressive- permissives would appear to be: If You Can't Beat Them, etc. Another exquisite example of the same betraying benevolence is to be found in a paragraph contributed to 'Views' in a recent number of the Listener where the writer sees in Mick Jagger's notorious Hyde Park application of Shel- ley's 'Adonais' lines to a deceased drug-de- pendent submusician only evidence that 'the old intellectual and class barriers are break- ing up'! On the same level of destructive trahison was Joan Bakewell's recent chatty session with Piccadilly derelicts in an ex- tended edition of Late Night Line-up. Slowly but surely the degenerate, the drop-
out, the beatnik element is being elevated into a sort of fourth estate in our society, its favour courted, its ego flattered, its views deferred to and its facile nihilism taken seriously.
As to Marcuse's actual gospel one might think that after John Sparrow's exposure nothing remained to be said. But what is perhaps underemphasised is the element of sheer mental dissolution and disorientation entailed. Everyone knows about the neo- nazis who were an ingredient in the Hyde Park pop rally mentioned above. Today it was given to me to see two ragged foreign holiday-making youths in this area. As they stood on the kerb thumbing lifts there could be seen hanging on chains from their grimy necks large bright expensive-looking silver swastikas.
G. Reichardt 12a Mount Pleasant Road, Poole
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