The Drifters (104 page)

Often as I walked back to my hotel at night I reflected on the discussions I had heard in Inger’s and I was amazed at how vocal the young people were in stating their opinions and how little they read to support them. This was a generation without books. Of course, everyone had handled volumes by Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon, but I found no one who had actually read even the more easily understood works like
Essay on Liberation
or
Toward the African Revolution
or
The Wretched of the Earth.
It was also true that most of the travelers had read newspaper reports of Marshall McLuhan’s theories, and hardly a day passed but someone would proclaim, ‘After all, the medium is the massage,’ but I met no one who had read the book of which this taut summary was the title or who knew what it meant.

There was always a dog-eared copy of the
I-Ching
somewhere in the hotel, and many had dipped into it, but no one had read it, not even Claire from Sacramento. The strong books of the age were unknown to this group, and I often wondered how they had got as far along in college as they had. On the other hand, their verbal knowledge was considerable and they could expatiate on almost any topic. Six pronouncements I noted one night were typical of the conclusions reached every night.

‘We have entered what Walter Lippmann terms the New Dark Age.’

‘Before 1976 an armed showdown between races will be inevitable in American cities.’

‘The military-industrial complex rules our nation and dictates a continuance of the Vietnam war.’

‘A permanent unemployment cadre of seven million must be anticipated.’

‘By the year 2000 we will have seven billion people on earth.’

‘Universities are prisoners of the Establishment.’

But in spite of these statements, I found that most Americans overseas were hard-line conservatives; of the many in Marrakech, the majority had supported the Republican party in 1968 and would do so again in 1972. I took the trouble to check the six young people I had seen unconscious on the floor of the Casino Royale; Claire took me back one morning, and I found that four were solid Republicans, one was a neo-Nazi, and Moorman, the honor student from Michigan who sang ballads with Gretchen, said, ‘I don’t know what I am.’

I found more than a few supporters of George Wallace, and Constitutionalists, and crypto-fascists, and backers of other ill-defined movements. The basic ideas of the John Birch Society were often voiced, but I met no one who admitted membership.

Most older people who visited Marrakech were surprised to find that among the young Americans, there were practically no oldstyle American liberals. This was true for obvious reasons. To get as far as Marrakech required real money, so that those who made it had to come from well-to-do families of a conservative bent, and throughout the world children tend to follow the political attitudes of their fathers. A boy of nineteen might rebel against Harvard University, country-club weekends and the dress of his father, and run away to Marrakech to prove it, but his fundamental political and social attitudes would continue to be those his father had taught him at age eleven. In my work I constantly met conservative adult Americans who, when they saw the young people with long hair and beards, expected them to be revolutionaries; they were pleasantly gratified to find that the young people were as reactionary as they were.

Harvey Holt exemplified this response. When he first met the gang at Pamplona he was positive they must be revolutionaries, but after several long discussions involving politics, he told me, ‘You know, apart from Vietnam and this nonsense about brotherhood between the races, these kids are pretty solid.’ Later he said, ‘You could be misled if you listened to their songs. You’d think they were going out to burn down New York. But when you talk to them about economics and voting, you find they’re just as conservative
as you or me … but they do it in their own way.’ I asked him how he thought I voted, and he said, ‘Oh, you sympathize a lot with the young people, but I’m sure that in a pinch you can be trusted.’

‘To vote Republican?’

‘How else can a sensible man vote?’ he asked.

I was constantly appalled by the poverty of language exhibited by many of the young people, and these from our better colleges. Claire, as I have said, sometimes talked for a whole hour saying little but ‘you know’ and ‘like wow,’ but this had a certain cute illiteracy. More intolerable was the girl from Ohio who said at least once every paragraph, ‘You better believe it.’ Whenever one of the boys from the south agreed with one of my opinions, he said, ‘You ain’t just whistlin’ “Dixie,” bub.’ A college girl from Missouri introduced every statement with: ‘I just want you to know,’ while a young man from Brooklyn related everything to André Gide—he seemed quite incapable of any other comparison.

Two aspects of the intellectual life of these young Americans surprised me. The first was politics. Not one person I knew ever mentioned the name Richard Nixon; they rejected Lyndon Johnson and ridiculed Hubert Humphrey, charging these men with having betrayed youth, but Nixon they dismissed. They would have voted for him, had they bothered to vote, and would vote for him in 1972, if they happened to be registered, but he played no role in their lives. A whole segment of American history was simply expunged by these people; they had opted out with a vengeance.

I say that they would vote Republican in 1972, if they voted, and by this I mean that of all the young Americans I met over the age of twenty-one, not one had ever bothered to vote, and it seemed unlikely to me that any would do so much before the age of thirty-two or thirty-three. To hear them talk, you would think they were battering down the barricades of the Establishment, and some few I suppose would have been willing to try, but they were not willing to vote; in fact, I met none who were even registered.

In spite of this seeming indifference, there were those few I reflected upon that morning when I stood in the Casino Royale amid the stenches and the fallen forms, the few who were painfully carving out an understanding
of their world, and their place in it. Because they came from families with income and advantage, they tended to be Republican, and when they settled down, they were going to be good Republicans. Some, like Gretchen, had worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy, but not because he was a Democrat; they would quickly return to creative Republicanism and the nation would profit from the forging process they had gone through.

But when I have said this about politics, I have still not touched upon the mighty chasm that separated them from me: they honestly believed that their generation lived under the threat of the hydrogen bomb and that consequently their lives would be different from what mine had been. They were convinced that no man my age could comprehend what the bomb meant to them, and even when I pointed out that a man of sixty-one like me had been forced to spend nearly half his adult life under the shadow of nuclear bombs and had adjusted to it, they cried, ‘Ah, there it is! You’d enjoyed about half your life before the bomb fell. We haven’t.’ It seemed there could be no bridge of understanding on this point, and after several futile attempts to build one, I concluded that on this topic we could not talk together meaningfully.

The second surprising aspect was religion. It was rarely mentioned. Occasionally Cato referred to his hatred of what Christianity had done to the Negro, but he was speaking sociologically; Yigal sometimes spoke of the problems faced by the Jews in Israel, but only their political problems, never their theological. I would go for a month without hearing God mentioned, not even as a curse word. With this generation He had become an expletive, used primarily by girls, as when Monica or Britta cried, ‘My God, look!’ He was used to draw attention to camels or especially beautiful mosques, but His ancient relationship to eschatology or morality was not referred to. I think if some college girl from our midwest, sitting on the bed at Inger’s, had asked, ‘Do you believe in God?’ the crowd would have passed out stone-cold, as if hit by an extra strong cookie. About half the young people, especially those from Australia and Canada, were Catholic, but they were as indifferent as the others.

There was talk of morality, but only in the form of ethical conduct; the old problems of sexual morality that had plagued us so much when I was young no longer
existed. If someone in the night sessions happened to tell a friend that ‘Margot moved in with Jack from Glasgow,’ it was descriptive and not pejorative. In fact, the news was disseminated principally so that others might know where to find Margot without wasting a trip to the third floor.

I found myself becoming more and more irritated by the casual assumptions of these young people concerning their easy matings and unmatings. Margot would move her gear down to Jack’s room, and he would accept it and her as if no obligations were involved; she did not have to pass muster with his mother, and he did not have to support her. They seemed unaware that over a period of ten thousand years, mankind had evolved other patterns of mating which in all societies and all climates had more or less worked. I found it presumptuous that they should think they had discovered an escape from the involvements that human beings had traditionally engaged in, but apparently they had, for the ebb and flow of matings throughout the various rooms of the Bordeaux were as difficult to keep track of as those in Pamplona had been.

I was amused at my own conservatism on this matter and once or twice tried to analyze my reactions. I supposed I was a lot like the fundamentalist in Texas who railed, ‘I am agin’ the new morality for three reasons. It’s contrary to the law of nature. It’s destructive of the family. And I ain’t gettin’ none of it.’ What complicated my reasoning was the fact that I in no way resented Gretchen’s successive affairs with Clive and Joe, nor Britta’s with Joe and Holt, but I did object to Monica’s involvement with Cato, when she was only seventeen. At first it was easy to rationalize this as a result of an intuitive anti-Negro prejudice, and I so dismissed it; but beginning in Moçambique and now in Marrakech, it was becoming evident to me that I had a special interest in this frail girl. Part of my feeling stemmed naturally from my long association with her family; I had often referred to her as my daughter and in a sense she was. But in addition, there was the inescapable attraction she held for me. I never, so far as I could judge myself, loved her in the traditional way; I would have been embarrassed had there been any physical relationship between us, but I did love her. She had become a symbol of the unfolding of youth, its headstrong will, its perpetual skirting of the edge of doom. Even her
addiction to heroin was part of her allure, for in this she represented the temptation of her age and showed it in high relief. She was a remarkable girl, uneducated in the formalities, profoundly learned in the essentials. If I could have summed up my feeling about her in Marrakech, it would have been: ‘I wish her well.’

I wished her very well, and when I saw her lying inert from green cookies or falsely exalted from heroin, it was as if my own daughter were lying there, or some girl I had loved forty years earlier.

My working days were occupied by the three government engineers from Casablanca, capable men who understood Morocco’s economic needs. They interposed no objections to plans I had for a big new hotel in Marrakech, supported by a chain of farms throughout the lower slopes of the Atlas to ensure a constant food supply, but they did have a plan of their own which they wanted World Mutual to finance, and from the first moment they proposed it I was excited about the possibilities.

To the north of Marrakech, but so close to the walls of the city that one could drive there in a few minutes, lay one of the gems of Africa, a vast palm-tree plantation that covered thousands of acres. It had accounted for the wealth that had built the walls of Marrakech.

Some years ago someone in the government had had a clever idea, and I often wondered how he had sold it to his superiors, for basically it was preposterous. A single-track macadam road had been built, running in great meanders through the grove, going nowhere and serving no visible purpose except to carry visitors through the palm plantation. Thousands who had come to Marrakech, attracted by the Djemaá and the mountains, would find that their most vivid memories were of the red walls and the palm trees, and any who had an appreciation of natural poetry would discover to their surprise that it was the palm trees which dominated.

When I found that Gretchen and her companions had not visited the grove, I proposed a way by which we could combine two obligations into one, so I invited the troupe to breakfast at my hotel and had the three engineers join us. The latter were delighted, since they wanted to talk
with an American Negro and to see what our notorious hippies looked like at close quarters. I reserved a corner of the dining room; and when the three Moroccans arrived, I handed them slips of paper I had prepared, telling them who the Americans were. I indicated that Britta was Norwegian and Monica English, but I listed Bruce as an American, for if it became known that an Israeli national—and a soldier to boot—was in Morocco, he might find himself in trouble.

Holt and Britta were first to join us, and she was stunning in blue miniskirt and yellow band through her hair. The engineers were much taken with her, and she spoke with such frankness and in such an attractive accent that they hammered her with questions about her homeland, but I noticed that even though they were impressed with her as a beautiful girl, this did not prevent them from posing practical questions, such as: ‘Do you think many Norwegians would fly to Moroccan cities … along our Mediterranean or Atlantic … for vacations?’

After breakfast half the crowd piled into the yellow pop-top, the other half into a long black limousine driven by the engineers, and we started our tour of the palm plantation. Monica, Cato and I rode in the black car with the engineers, who peppered Cato with questions: Were American Negroes serious about Islam? Would they enlist in a jihad against the Jews? Would they ever have enough political power to force the American government away from its pro-Israel position? If the Jews were driven out of American life, would the Negroes take their place as financial leaders? Would the Negroes one day own the
New York Times
and what changes would they make in its policies?