Books in Brief: Being Busted

Being Busted, by Leslie Fiedler (Stein and Day, $5.95). Not long ago, when my favorite cousin lost an accident damage suit, her mother, my aunt, thought anti-semitism was Behind It All. Leslie Fiedler suffers from the same malady, an old paranoia now unfashionable for Jews, but still popular (Revised Version) among Negroes. From boyhood days in Newark, through his Asian military hitch and first teaching job in gentile Montana, and finally to Buffalo, Mr. Fiedler has felt put upon. His book’s theme is “the endless war between the dissenter and his imperfect society,” the latest imperfections being Draconic drug laws and electronic surveillance. By the late 1960s, Prof. Fiedler’s persecutors were no longer Western “small-town lunatics and back-country Right radicals.” Instead, upstate New York’s hatred of Hebrews and “damned wishy-washy eggheads” did him in. Just what happened isn’t clear. He says a sick girl stooge of the cops bugged his house and planted pot there; the police denied this. Therefrom, the book, a clever if soggy and predictable comédie larmoyante, both tearful and humorous because Fiedler was hounded for a ludicrously overblown crime: “maintaining a premise where marijuana was found.” Literary critic and friend of Youth, Fiedler thirsts for Relevance; he can’t resist such asides as: “the war of whites against blacks . . . exported to Vietnam,” “Can the university prevail over the closed industrial-military order?,” “the marriage of the Drug Movement and the New Left,” etc. Still, he delineates a major subject: “Not only does the drug problem conceal the more important matter of freedom to dissent, but the issue of dissent itself tends to conceal the underlying question of whether a society technologically able to destroy the privilege of privacy will choose todosoor not.” Even before the age of bugging, Justice Brandeis put it nicely as “the right to be let alone. . . .”

DB

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D. J. C. Brudnoy

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Being Busted, by Leslie Fiedler (Stein and Day, $5.95). Not long ago, when my favorite cousin lost an accident damage suit, her mother, my aunt, thought anti-semitism was Behind It All. Leslie Fiedler suffers from the same malady, an old paranoia now unfashionable for Jews, but still popular (Revised Version) among Negroes. From boyhood days in Newark, through his Asian military hitch and first teaching job in gentile Montana, and finally to Buffalo, Mr. Fiedler has felt put upon. His book’s theme is “the endless war between the dissenter and his imperfect society,” the latest imperfections being Draconic drug laws and electronic surveillance. By the late 1960s, Prof. Fiedler’s persecutors were no longer Western “small-town lunatics and back-country Right radicals.” Instead, upstate New York’s hatred of Hebrews and “damned wishy-washy eggheads” did him in. Just what happened isn’t clear. He says a sick girl stooge of the cops bugged his house and planted pot there; the police denied this. Therefrom, the book, a clever if soggy and predictable comédie larmoyante, both tearful and humorous because Fiedler was hounded for a ludicrously overblown crime: “maintaining a premise where marijuana was found.” Literary critic and friend of Youth, Fiedler thirsts for Relevance; he can’t resist such asides as: “the war of whites against blacks . . . exported to Vietnam,” “Can the university prevail over the closed industrial-military order?,” “the marriage of the Drug Movement and the New Left,” etc. Still, he delineates a major subject: “Not only does the drug problem conceal the more important matter of freedom to dissent, but the issue of dissent itself tends to conceal the underlying question of whether a society technologically able to destroy the privilege of privacy will choose todosoor not.” Even before the age of bugging, Justice Brandeis put it nicely as “the right to be let alone. . . .”