Refusing the 'Base Compromise'

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Perhaps this letter should be addressed directly to Professor Blumenthal. But if the word is out on my generation, I would at least like to get my own in edgewise before the word, at least among Harvard students, becomes Professor Blumenthal's "Base Compromise."

Professor Blumenthal will understand, I hope, my dwelling for a moment on his occupation. As a Social Studies concentrator (the closest approximation I have to a job) I am responsible for understanding the intricate social relationships that underlie the received opinions of our society. This analytical proclivity explains my fascination with Professor Blumenthal's occupation, and my objections to the opinions I am receiving from him.

Lest we, as the "youth" he addresses, assume that Professor Blumenthal has emerged from the perfectly passionate, if otherwise imperfect 1960s with a ready quotation and an even readier generalization, or that Professor Blumenthal stands ready to receive the eucharist of a "devoted, consuming,...human" love, I suggest we understand what his argument represents.

Leaving the passions of the '60s aside, let us realize just where these omnipresent literary phrases originate. Professor Blumenthal is an associate professor of English, and to pretend that these quotations are his ready witticisms is to ignore the critical fact that they are also his stock and trade, the entire basis for his job here at Harvard. Freud's word was und, not oder.

His innocence removed, we can now understand precisely what is implied in his associate professorship and the "certainlicense" of his 40th year. There is, to my mind, something inherently parental--or, anagramatically, paternal--about both the stature granted by his academic position and the stature concomitant with his age. His "certain license" is more a "certain censure" should we not take up his passionate lance. Nor would Professor Blumenthal want it any other way.

Professor Blumenthal is wary when he laments the "deglandularization" of youth, that no one kisses "(dry or wet)," that we write Mac-poetry. He has reason to be so. Professor Blumenthal wants us to understand that he has thought this through, that this is wisdom, that this is reasoned. But if the youth of the '60s were "at-least-passionate," then the youth of the 1980s--my peers who watched the divorce rate among their parents skyrocket (at-least-passionate), who watched AIDS claim the lives of thousands (at-least-passionate), who came to view successful marriages as the exception to the rule, who came to understand that, for their parents' generation, passion and durability were a trade-off--the youth of the '80s are "at-least-surviving." Before I engage in a generalization as broad as Professor Blumenthal's, let me stress that the one-night stand still exists, that many or most look with admiration on those who have managed to balance school and love and those who plan to marry. The youth of the '80s are not monolithic in their "deglandularization," but if we must have a tendency, it is to avoid the wreckage of the "love-the-one-you're-with" generation.

About the "MAKE BUCKS, NOT LOVE" bumper stickers which Professor Blumenthal would stick on the BMW s of our generation (and given our single-mindedness, we will, I read, all have them). To begin with, Professor Blumenthal assumes that the decision "not to crowd the other one" is necessarily selfish. On the one hand, the decision "not to crowd" is an economic reality. The American dream of living better than our parents, or living as well as our parents, simply requires more effort today than it did. The dual-career family, which only became the norm with our parents' generation, is a reality far removed from the free-loving ideal Professor Blumenthal's youth experimented with in the '60s. And on the other hand, as a result of the gains by the Women's Rights Movement in the last two decades, the domestic tyranny of the '50s is behind us. Freud's und is now gender neutral.

Which brings us to our "epitaph." After reading an article that assumes that Romanticism died somewhere in between Woodstock and the Reagan years, and in which my generation is an MBA-armed phalanx of investment banker wanna-bees, and in which the analytical core consists of William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and W.B. Yeats, I hope the poet-legislators of the world remain unacknowledged; my epitaph is not their concern. J.D. Connor '92