The Pied Piper of Amerika

The Reichist is courting all the despair and nihilism implicit in Blake's idea of innocence confronted by experience The vision Reich's most famous and most rhetorical sections create is that of an innocence not merely touchingly childlike lull tragically childish. His peroration present us with motor ways transformed into highways to the millenium by a decorative arrangement of hitch-hikers, street people growing like flowers on the pavements, official buildings having their steps warmed up by rock groups, every barrier falling. The Corporate State will apparently cower away and quietly disintegrate in a dark corner. But perhaps it will invent traffic officers and policemen to move the decorations and flowers along; perhaps the hearts of the officials inside the buildings won't be warmed, perhaps stronger barriers will be erected. Just perhaps the truth is that no revolution ever comes about without more pain and self-conscious effort than that involved in letting your hair grow long. The ending of the book has the same high sinister note of the Pied Piper instinct that leads happy-children to the Dreamland over the mountains and far, far away.

Were much more sexually, socially and politically enlightened then our parents

Reichism claims to represent the true revolution that will liberate the individual and society finally and eternally from the dictates of slaveries of various kinds, and lead to a wholly human way of life. But because it does not exclude those who are actually fashion-slaves and because its practice can be, and most often is, blindly irresponsible to the wider concerns of humanity, these claims are at the least suspect. To shoot the latest dope, turn on to the latest rock group with the latest stereo equipment, tour the latest Jerusalems, groove on the latest commune and spout the latest jargon of the latest guru I take to be fashion-slavery, especially if these are imposed by the dictates of the latest revolutionary consciousness. To do your own thing in your own lime (as informed by the mass media all the time) without regard to the needs and plights of others, to suck the material benefits of an affluent economy without regard to the workings of that economy and its consequences for the rest of the population of your own country and that small fraction of mankind not in your own country, I take to be blindly irresponsible. And these are truer pictures of Reichism than its visionary perorations.

Worse, what is it but repression when the bald are induced to be guilty about their baldness, the Schubert-fanciers are mocked for their fancies, and old age has become a disease suitable only for an asylum? What is it but Fascism when 'proper taste' is that prescribed by a certain group in society and those with other tastes are socially crucified? Reichism does not embrace or liberate mankind at all, it reveals an aristocratic arrogance over those who don't measure up to the standards set by whizz-kids, and an undeserved contempt proceeding from an abject ignorance of the balance of mankind.

We're the beautiful people...