The Old Mole

IN AN ARTICLE entitled 'Sexual Role Exploitation,' in the first issue of The Old Mole, the writer suggests that one way of restoring dignity to male-female relationships is to have girls pay their own expenses when they go out with boys. This idea is sensible since it would assure that girls would go out only with people they genuinely liked. Besides, paying for a girl does, in some vital way, destroy her standing as an individual. The French copains after all operate on the principle of sharing expenses and they know more about love than most.

Granting the value of such a code of behaviour, how is one to put it into practice? One person's isolated resolve to treat his next outing with the opposite sex as a shared endeavor would be instantly misunderstood and ridiculed. Such an action constitutes too violent a rejection of the generally accepted value-system of this society. No matter if the courtesy of paying for the girl turns out to be malignant, no one person can make a dent in the established way of doing things. Imagine going up to the average slick Cliffie intimating that she pay for herself and the magnitude of the undertaking will be apparent.

The solution if there is one, is to establish a community of men and women who think alike and have made a clean and total break with the 'established way of doing things.' The reformation of the outside society can only be accomplished as the community grows, perhaps gathering newer members simply by the force of example.

The political radical sees society in need of an equally profound uprooting of the entire value-structure, replacing the capitalist ethic of each-man-for-himself-and-God-help-the-one-who-fails by the ethic of service for the universal good. The radical is led, in turn, to the inescapable conclusion that the only tactic open to him is to stake out a community of people who share the same life-style. Such a community would tend to have the same political beliefs as well because one's individual orientation towards one's fellow beings cannot help but influence one's political and social outlook.

THIS REALIZATION that a spiritual community is the first requisite for success in radical politics permeates the whole of the first 'Old Mole' (appropriately their issue includes a record review and a movie review because rock and roll and movies are the strongest cultural ties binding the political young of today). The theme of community is most sensitively stated in an article by Jon Supak called "The Hip Radical--what's ahead?"

Supak characterizes three possible life-styles: the hippie, the 'bourgeois' in the sense of a reluctant acceptance of the system to work within it to cure its 'most obvious evils,' and thirdly that of the full-time revolutionary. He points out that, "Most of us take all three. We are more or less hip, more or less establishment, more or less revolutionary."

Supak feels that this "trifurcation" of self leaves one worse than useless and he urges for a start, a complete rejection of the "path of least resistance" which leads one into what he terms a hopeless compromise that destroy one's psychic well-being as its inherent contradictions emerge. He acknowledges the temptation to stay "in" since "you not only have to give up less; you won't be beat up, rejected by your parents and their friends."

Nevertheless, Supak argues, the choice must be faced and one must give up the community of the nation's establishment in favor of a community of hippie-radicals, creating a new life-style in which the best aspects of the hippie movement can be fused with the best of the radical. Supak urges "We must start to build counter institutions now:

Free health clinics run by radical doctors, free lawyers, community kitchens, schools, day-care centers, coffeehouses, community sports, picnics, music concerts, art exhibitions, bookstores, houses."

This is the counter-community of the dispossessed and it requires a sacrifice. There is no equivocation possible--either you are a corporate lawyer or you are a free lawyer.

The vision is unsettling and thought-provoking. Its still difficult to accept wholly but it is clear to me at least that self-searching along these lines will be necessary, a steeling of the mind to reject any lavish but corrupt opportunities that may beckon in favor of a simpler and more frugal, but more satisfying, life.

'The Old Mole' is a valuable and much-needed addition to Harvard's media. The first issue was reasonably interesting in layout and style, and one hopes the content will remain as rich in its occasional yield as this issue has been.