Fighting words.

By 'paradise,'" Paul Goodman wrote, "I mean nothing but the world practical." Anarchist by temperament, Goodman was not opposed to electoral democracy - if only there were more democracy and initiative in daily life! A life-long pacifist, he also understood how "an occasional fist fight, a better orgasm, friendly games, a job of useful work . . . diminish the spirit of war because they attach people to life." He died in 1972 and is already unknown to many young activists - yet his books would belong in the basic curriculum of any good school for radicals. So it's a blessing that his work is being published anew, in several collections edited by his friend and literary executor Taylor Stoehr. These include Format and Anxiety: Paul Goodman's Critique of the Media (Autonomedia); Decentralizing Power: The Social Criticism of Paul Goodman (Black Rose Books); and Crazy Hope and Finite Experience: Final Essays of Paul Goodman (Jossey-Bass). Stoehr also has written his own book on Goodman, Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy, recently published by Jossey-Bass.

Goodman's influence on my own work has been profound and comprehensive. Through him, I also discovered the varied tradition of the libertarian left, including Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Wilhelm Reich. Recently, I kept Goodman in mind while writing a political pamphlet, Fighting Words: An Open Letter to Queers and Radicals, which will be published by Cassell this August. My argument - as the following excerpt shows - is not simply directed at the far right. Robert McNamara remains (even to this day) a fine example of establishment "pragmatism a true progenitor of today's New Democrats; and therefore Goodman's words also remain good medicine. Once again, the American Humanist Association and The Humanist are not responsible for my own views.

Fighting words, some would say, risk ending all conversation. That's a hallowed liberal argument that radicals would also make in many cases. As a general rule, civility is preferable to confrontation. But when civility becomes yet another cynical excuse for the most brutal business as usual, then we ought to give our own good reasons for an open struggle. Radicals are citizens, so our work includes forming neighborhood and workplace councils, nonviolent direct action for health care and housing, resistance to the media, labor strikes and occupations, and even the selective sabotage of machinery and property whenever corporate and military policies become unbearably destructive.

Though a constitutional structure of legal rights and representative democracy is well worth defending and extending, we also need to create a more truly communal culture. Law may be a useful limit upon greed, discrimination, and violence, but what really matters in our lives is love. And not so much love for humanity in general - a doctrine that many preach and that only saints really practice - but love closer to home: love of friends and neighbors. Charity should begin at home, and so should justice. This is one source for the less intimate civility we show to strangers and for solidarity with people we may never meet. This is broadly what we call common decency, and radicals will agree with many conservatives that it is eroding in America.

For certain political "realists," the previous sentences will already sound dangerously utopian. Politics, they argue, is properly the realm of power and calculated advantage. Preserve the class system, or pursue the class struggle, and please leave love out of it. This is the Machiavellian tendency among some Marxists and among many professors hired by the State Department. In this country, the bipartisan consensus is that the social gospel is best left to preachers, though it can also be used to good rhetorical effect in campaign speeches. Mix it up too much in politics, however, and you end up with too many prophets making public trouble. You might get the Reverend Martin Luther King - or the Reverend Pat Robertson. You might get loveless fanatics promising heaven on earth but making daily life more hellish.

Yes, that's the risk, and such "realists" are very proud of their own disillusioned and debunking spirit. But the true technocrats among them are by no means opposed to all utopian blueprints; they are capable of imposing their own as ruthlessly as any Central Committee. In certain cases, they are so loyal to the occult inner circles of government that they refuse to resign in open protest even when they know that their own plans have resulted in unplanned catastrophes. In domestic policies, this often means reckless urban planning and the destruction of small farms by agribusiness. In foreign policies, the effects are often more removed from the daily concerns of citizens, and the government remains unaccountable. But in war, the disaster also strikes back home.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confessed his great regret over the Vietnam War in his recently published memoirs and in tearful public appearances. But to this day, he believes it was also his duty simply to step aside, let the war rage on, and keep silent over all the following years - until now. To this day, he remains loyal to a technocratic code of honor, the imperative to serve as a dutiful cog in the machinery of "the military-industrial complex," in the words of President Eisenhower. In this way, the policymakers create their perpetual-motion machines, and in this way, McNamara now sets a moral example no less atrocious than in the past. Remember: 58,000 Americans died in that war and around 3 million Vietnamese. Those who refused to fight also remember the FBI agents who visited our homes and workplaces or the exile from home or the time in jail. Some of McNamara's critics have said, "Too late!" Yes, but better late than never - if he had only, at long last, really broken away from this bloody idolatry of the state.

In the wake of criticism, Theodore Draper came to McNamara's defense in the May 25, 1995, issue of the New York Review, taking care to note his own early opposition to the war: "My sole reason is that I have been dismayed by the abuse of Robert McNamara." Draper argues that McNamara did nothing to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers - government documents which revealed McNamara's doubts about the war - and therefore "the New York Times enabled him to share his policy disagreements with the country. . . ." Furthermore, "McNamara's behavior reflected the political culture of the United States. . . . For McNamara to have acted differently would have represented a breach with the American political culture."

That is true, and that is the point. Here we have another fine example of reckless "realism." Draper's solidarity with such a political culture - and thus, incidentally, with servants of state such as McNamara - is shared by battalions of "the best and brightest" graduates of higher education, well trained by equally loyal professors and well rewarded when they, too, receive academic tenure or are recruited by various think tanks, policy kitchens, and corporate boards. The far right is very zealous to expose "tenured radicals" who practice every kind of sinister subversion of Western civilization, but the Ivy League remains the finishing school of the American ruling class. Even know, nothing right-wing populists know this, and in this matter the right is right. Alas, like certain leftists, the far right is far too enamored of conspiracy theories to examine the real complexities of class.

Which brings us again to Paul Goodman. In 1962, before the full escalation of the war, Goodman wrote a short, sharp meditation on "The Ineffectuality of Some Intelligent People" (to be found in the pamphlet, Drawing the Line). He had in mind "Unitarians, Universalists, humanists, members of the Ethical Culture Society, many Quakers," and many educated citizens "with considerable moral courage and high ideals of life. Why do they throw so little weight?" Playing by the rules in some very rigged games was one reason he gave, and also the bad example of public figures. Opportunism is common enough among folks climbing up in society and politics. "But," Goodman noted, "in general in America - perhaps because of the methods by which people get office - it is almost out of the question for anybody indignantly to resign; and our intellectuals agree that it would be imprudent for him to give up his chance of exerting influence! But of course his not resigning is what exerts a discouraging influence, for it means that no issue is really in earnest."

Goodman's original question was, in one sense, unfair. Outstanding courage is generally uncommon, even among uncommon citizens. The real question is why the prophetic minorities among such citizens often did their best to encourage effective action - and often failed. Goodman's bleak conclusion was that many citizens are hypnotized by the general gospel that "nothing can be done." Yet curiously, a quite different gospel is equally all-American: namely, "do it yourself." So what is really going on in American political culture?

The paradox is based upon real frustration and "realism" and also upon a revolutionary residue of practical idealism. Both are true. The passion which Americans often devote to dozens of weekend hobbies (indeed, to "do-it-yourself" kits and crafts of all kinds) or to the PTA and the Little League is not contemptible. The roots and fruits of democracy are also homely. But when the roots are cramped and the economy erodes and the cultural climate is toxic, then we also get the fruits of fanaticism: paranoid paramilitary groups, parents on schoolboards who insist that Genesis beats Darwin flat, and vindictive crusades against fellow citizens.

Of course, as we are seeing now, disaffection with the bipartisan charade is interpreted by many liberals as an attack upon democracy as such - but reactionaries have a democratic right to split. So do radicals, which liberals insist only encourages "polarization." As though the brutal class and cultural divisions in this country are simply a matter of ideological ill-will, and all might be resolved if all parties would only listen to reason!

Goodman wrote: "I am again and again baffled how persons of intellect, of good intention, of strong conviction, reason in a way that must logically lead to an action, and yet do not act. This seems to me profoundly pathological." He believed "this pathology of professors and scientists" could be traced to an erosion of common humanity and therefore also of common sense. His argument was not at all anti-intellectual, but he acknowledged that intellectuals also suffer from professional deformations and from the sheer priestcraft involved in current divisions of labor.

This raises questions about the very ground and roots of reason. For what counts as a strong reason to one person may count as no reason at all to another. Citizens who inhabit the same country may not inhabit the same worlds, and the common sense of 1776 means little or nothing to many in 1995. Incivility and irresponsibility are greatest precisely among those with the greatest wealth and power; they simply depend upon others to use force and to do their dirty work. But those who are most exposed to abuse and danger may also reason their way toward action without, finally, being able to act in common. Anxiety often overwhelms and paralyzes them at the critical moment. Or else they turn upon each other.

Politics, like all other human ventures, may be open to reasonable investigation without ever becoming entirely rational. What drives much of our political culture is a resigned dependency upon great leaders and remote powers, along with deep longings for apocalyptic change. As though only a great catastrophe could end the many chronic crises which are the daily news. As though anything must be better than what we tolerate all the same.

Apocalyptic politics are by no means accidental. For a long time many citizens regarded the two-party system as an act of God; you might pay your respects by visiting the voting booth, but politics was really the business of politicians and even higher powers. That faith has worn very thin, and what is left is habit. Now, the majority of eligible voters don't vote at all; they strongly suspect the whole game is rigged against them. The religious right, however, has become a strong electoral force and now threatens that its members won't vote for big business Republicans until they get right with God. Liberals may not like it, and neither do radicals. But that's democracy, and the Democratic Party has proven that it can offer precious little resistance.

Radical democrats and democratic socialists - let us name ourselves as we please and find as much common ground as possible - must now defend democracy independently. Then if we do cast tactical votes for Democrats, it will be clear to all that we do so only to stop Republicans. But our real efforts and loyalty should go into movements for social change and into local political campaigns. Only real conversation among citizens and local accountability will get us in the habit of democracy again. Later - with luck, time, and trouble - we might even make some big changes in Congress. Locally, there is much cause for hope. As for the next national election, here is one good last quote from Goodman:

Our Unitarians, etc., are balked also by their false Realism and Practicality. They remain in a framework of action even when it offers no possibilities for their kind of action. This occurs at every election. Our friends have an obsessional inability to refrain from marking a ballot, though they are offered no relevant candidates and though their voting confirms the system that has given them the bad candidates. They will not vote for a minor candidate because they do not want to throw away the vote; and they reason that not to vote at all is a futile protest. But the practical alternative is to actively not vote, to campaign against voting with an ad in the press and on TV, and picketing one hundred feet from the polls, crying DON'T Vote till we get a candidate representing what we believe. This would, of course, be scandalous - but not so scandalous as having to choose between a Kennedy or a Nixon.

Or, in 1996, between a Clinton and who? - Wilson? Dole? Gramm? Buchanan? We have seen how Generalissimo Gingrich rules Congress, even with a Democrat in the White House. If we remain loyal to democracy, we must also break the bipartisan stranglehold upon the electoral system. Our own declaration of independence is the strongest challenge we can now offer the forces of the far right.

Scott Tucker is an artist, activist, and writer, as well as a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of ACT UP.