Centenary.
Happy birthday, Reagan (curséd be thy name hock-phthooie!). —It’s easy to laugh, isn’t it? Hollowly, bitterly, bleakly, ha ha:
But now, seven years later, Reagan’s inquisitorial zealots are being decisively rebuffed in Congress, in the courts (even the “Reagan Court”) and in the court of public opinion. The American people may have been deluded enough to vote for him, but they are clearly unwilling to lay their freedoms at the President’s feet. They will not say goodbye to due process of law (not even in the name of a war on crime), or to civil rights (even if they fear and distrust blacks), or to freedom of expression (even if they don’t like pornography), or to the right of privacy and the freedom to make sexual choices (even if they disapprove of abortion and abhor homosexuals). Even Americans who consider themselves deeply religious have recoiled against a theocratic crusade that would force them to their knees. This resistance—even among Reagan supporters—to the Reagan “social agenda” testifies to the depth of ordinary people’s commitment to modernity and its deepest values. It shows, too, that people can be modernists even if they’ve never heard the word in their lives.
—Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air,
Preface to the Penguin Edition (1988)
But! But. Oh, oh, but:
The great critic Lionel Trilling coined a phrase in 1968: “Modernism is in the streets.”
—ibidem, motherfuckers; ibid.
The whipsaw’s back, in full force: on a bad day, oh Lord, most days I’m laughing, ha ha. —On a good day, though? From up there, up on a steep hill, with the right kind of eyes? I can almost see the glimmer of the goddamn Shining Sea.
I’m not going to forgive Berman his denunciation of Times Square Red Times Square Blue any time soon.