How to Be a Culture Hero

The Performing Self By Richard Poirier Oxford, 203 pp., $6.50 The blurb implies that Mr. Poirier is a cross between Prometheus and Sigmund Freud, but we might better think of him as an academic Coco Chanel. What an eye for the season’s skirt-length: he hates Nixon, Agnew and Reagan; deplores our acts of genocide in Vietnam; proves that the Beatles are the equivalent of T. S. Eliot; and informs us of the middle-class War Against The Young. What a trial it must be to defend views as heterodox as these. After all, who at a university is going to believe all this? Some professors just don’t care about popularity as long as they’re honest.

I’ve heard the Renaissance described as a time of Great Questions, but I don’t think it had anything on this: “Before asking questions about the propriety of young militants who occupy buildings, burn cars, and fight the police, let’s first ask what kind of world surrounds these acts.” It seems a pity to bring reason into this discussion, because it flourishes so beautifully without it. But, if only to be tiresome, we ought to refer to actual events over the past two years. What if the buildings have been burned, with people in them? What if the cars have been loaded with explosives and blown up? What if the police, in fact, have been assassinated in numbers, which in any other country would have brought on a suspension of civil laws and the customs of toleration?

RB

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Ronald Berman

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The Performing Self By Richard Poirier Oxford, 203 pp., $6.50 The blurb implies that Mr. Poirier is a cross between Prometheus and Sigmund Freud, but we might better think of him as an academic Coco Chanel. What an eye for the season’s skirt-length: he hates Nixon, Agnew and Reagan; deplores our acts of genocide in Vietnam; proves that the Beatles are the equivalent of T. S. Eliot; and informs us of the middle-class War Against The Young. What a trial it must be to defend views as heterodox as these. After all, who at a university is going to believe all this? Some professors just don’t care about popularity as long as they’re honest.

I’ve heard the Renaissance described as a time of Great Questions, but I don’t think it had anything on this: “Before asking questions about the propriety of young militants who occupy buildings, burn cars, and fight the police, let’s first ask what kind of world surrounds these acts.” It seems a pity to bring reason into this discussion, because it flourishes so beautifully without it. But, if only to be tiresome, we ought to refer to actual events over the past two years. What if the buildings have been burned, with people in them? What if the cars have been loaded with explosives and blown up? What if the police, in fact, have been assassinated in numbers, which in any other country would have brought on a suspension of civil laws and the customs of toleration?