As impossible as I find it to believe that some of this horror may not be new, I find myself returning to the introduction of Harlan Ellison’s short story collection aptly named “Approaching Oblivion”:
And among the letters I received on that book, was this one, reproduced exactly as I received it:
June 10, 1971
Dear Mr. Ellison,
For 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,
— ----------
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 was written in the year I was born. And now in the current day - forty five years later- as often as may feel ready to lay down and die, I read the next paragraph of that introduction and feel as if we may have some faint, twisted sense of hope to survive this current ordeal as well:
That is approaching oblivion. It is reaping the whirlwind of half a decade of Nixon/Agnew brainwashing and paranoia. It is a perfectly apocalyptical 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, or 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.
And I hope that perhaps these are larger cycles within cycles that we only catch a glimpse of in our small, mortal lives, and something like hope flickers within my chest.
Every time is new. Every time is different. Every time is the same. Maybe this time will be different. Maybe it won’t. Either way, we must try to live through it.
