In Alone Against Tomorrow, I had included as a dedication for a book of stories about alienation, these words:
And among the letters I received on that book, was this one, reproduced exactly as I received it:
[June 10, 1971; 1554 Columbia Drive; Decatur, Georgia 30032. Dear Mr. Ellison, In your dedication of Alone Against Tomorrow, you mention the “four Kent State University students senselessly murdered…”. Please be informed that these hooligans were Communist-led radical revolutionaries and anarchists, and deserved to be shot, whether by a firing squad or by the National Guard. Your remarks ruined an otherwise good book. Nevertheless, I am happy for the opportunity to correct your thinking. Sincerely yours, James R. Chambers.]
I receive a lot of mail these days. Time prevents my answering very much of it-if I did, I'd have no time for writing the stories that prompt the mail in the first place. Some of the mail is pure, hardcore nutso. I roundfile it and forget it. More of it is reasoned, entertaining, supportive or chiding in a rational tone, and I read it and consider what's been said and usually reply with a form letter I've had to devise simply as a matter of survival.
Occasionally I get a letter that gives me pause. Mr. Chambers's letter was one of those. If I didn't know purely on instinct that he was running off jingo phrases that he'd swallowed whole, if I didn't know he was wrong purely on gut instinct or by my association with student movements for ten and more years, the reopening of the Kent State Massacre case by the Attorney General would convince me. So it's too easy merely to disregard a letter like that, and say, “What an asshole.” But consider the letter. It isn't illiterate, it isn't rancorous, it isn't redneck or written on toilet paper. It is a simple, polite, straightforward attempt to straighten out what the correspondent takes to be incorrect thinking on my part. One cannot dismiss this kind of letter. It is from an ordinary human being, speaking about extraordinary events, and genuinely believing what he writes. Chambers really does believe those poor, innocent kids were Communist tools who deserved to die.
Now that scares the piss out of me.
That is approaching oblivion. It is reaping the whirlwind of half a decade of Nixon/ Agnew brainwashing and paranoia. It is a perfectly apocryphal example of the reconditeness to which The Common Man in our time clings with suicidal ferocity. I won't go into my little dance about the loathsomeness of The Common Man, nor even flay again the body of stupidity to which “commonness” speaks. I'll merely point out that the Ellison who believed in the revolutionary Movement of the young and the frustrated and the angry in the Sixties, is not the Ellison of the Seventies who has seen students sink back into a charming Fifties apathy (with a simultaneous totemization of the banalities and mannerisms of those McCarthy Witch-Hunt Fifties), who has listened long and hard to the Chambers letter and hears in it a tone wholly in tune with the voice of the turtle heard in the land, who-when the defenses are down in the tiny hours after The Late Late Show--laments for all the martyrs who packed it in, in the name of “change,” only to turn around a mere five years later and see the status returned to quo.
No, it is an Ellison closer to that scabby kid in Lathrop's dust who confronts you now. When I signed the contract for this book, I was prepared to ring out clarion calls about keeping the heat on The Establishment, making a better condition of life for everyone. But it's four years later and Vacca's The Coming Dark Age has been published which, if you haven't read it, you should go out at once and get it, and it plays the final notes of the death rigadoon for Society As We Know It…so why should I bother.
We are clearly on a slide-trough to destruction.
Watergate, the energy crisis, apartheid, holy wars, venality, vigilantism, apathy, corruption, fanaticism, racism, the deification of stupidity…none of these would be so terrifyingly prophetic of our rush to the grave were it not for the capabilities we possess to do ourselves in so efficiently and swiftly. The great lizards owned the planet for something like 130,000,000 years, but they didn't have slant-well drilling, pesticides, pollution, fast breeders, defoliants, demagogues, thermonuclear warheads, nonbiodegradable plastics, The Pentagon, The Kremlin, The General Staff of the Peoples' Army, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and the FBI.
Poor lizards. What joys they missed. Had they not been so culturally deprived, they might have sunk into the swamps in a mere three thousand years.
If it sounds as though I still care, disabuse yourself of the idea. I've done too many college lectures. I've seen too many classrooms filled with the no-neck children of parents whose motivation in life was, “My kid's gonna have the education I dint have.” I've seen too many of those kids nodding off between Chaucer and Suckling, and I have grown disenchanted. You've let it ride too long, troops. You've frittered and fiddled and enshrined the hypocrites and slaughtered the dreamers, and now you can only get five gallons in your gas tank.
And if I've learned a lesson from that terrible time of fire and blood, it is that most reformers in the pure sense are clowns, shouting into the wind, blaming their own guilts and making no ripple whatever. For every Gandhi or Nader or Bertrand Russell or Thoreau, there are a hundred thousand Nixons to stifle freedom of expression, joy of living and preservation of the past. (My self-disillusionment in this area shows itself in the story “Silent in Gehenna,” included in this collection.)
As for the future, well, I'm brought in mind of a quote by Albert Camus:
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”
And the present is being ripped-off and screwed-over by the omnipresent philosophy of I'm all right, Jack, which is a working-class Englishman's term for screw you, baby, I've got mine. It's your future, and you don't seem to give a royal damn what happens to it.
So the Ellison who writes this is a little more calloused and tougher than the one who went to Selma with King in March of 1965, less hopeful and prone to sweeping gardyloos. The Ellison sitting here now is an older version of the kid from Painesville who stopped trying to buck the tide of bigotry and stupidity and merely cut out to find the rest of the world.
Had I done this book in 1970, as originally planned, you'd find in this space a clarion call to revolution, a resounding challenge to the future. But it's four years later, Nixon time, and I've seen you sitting on your asses mumbling about impeachment. I've gone through ten years waiting for you to recognize how evil the war in the Nam was. I've watched you loaf and lumber through college and business and middle-class complacency, pursuing the twin goals of “happiness” and “security.”
What fools you are. Happy, secure corpses you 'll be.
You're approaching oblivion, and you know it, and you won't do a thing to save yourselves.
As for me and you in this literary liaison, well, I've paid my dues. Now I'm going to merely sit here on the side and laugh my ass off at how you sink into the quagmire like the triceratops. I'm going to laugh and jeer and wiggle my ears at your death throes. And how will I do that? By writing my stories. That's how I get my fix. You can OD on religion or dope or war or toadburgers, for all I care. I'm over here, watching you, and giggling, and saying, “This is what tomorrow looks like, dummy.”