Letters

Do I have your attention, son? You are not the half-orphan you have believed yourself these many years to be. I know who, I know where, your mother is. When you shall have represented yourself to me, when we are at one with each other and with the Second Revolution, I will bring you and her together. She has awaited that reunion for 29 years! For a certain reason (call it the Anniversary View of History) I propose we keep her waiting until November 5 next, your 30th birthday — and no longer.

Thus my plan. But events have accelerated and changed that original schedule. Lady Amherst’s defection (and that earlier-mentioned novelist’s lack of interest) obliged me to transcribe and attempt to send you Andrew IV’s “posthumous” letters, you having somehow acquired “on your own” some version of the “prenatals.” And Jane wants us married three weeks hence, at September’s end, instead of in the New Year. Andrew Burlingame Cook VI has therefore but a few days more to live. On our drama’s larger stage, the death of Ho Chi Minh, and Nixon’s announcement of further troop withdrawals from South Viet Nam and Thailand, signal that the war in Southeast Asia is grinding down to some appropriately ignominious dénouement, and with it the mainspring of our First 7-Year Plan.

On then to the Second! No more mass demonstrations, riots on the campuses, disruptions, “trashings,” “Fanonizings”; no more assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings, heavy drugs. All these will live their desperate half life into the 1970’s, as the 18th Century half-lives into the 19th, the 19th into the 20th — but they will not be Us. Our century has one “Saturnian revolution” to go. Its first fetched us out of the 19th Century, through the cataclysms of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the explosion of hard technology and totalitarian ideology, to the beginning of the end of the Industrial Revolution, of nationalism, of Modernism, of ideology itself. Our First 7-Year Plan marked, in effect (not to boast that it itself effected), our transition from the second to the third third of the century: the revolutionary flowering, scarcely begun, of microelectronics; the age of software, soft drugs, smart weapons, and the soft sell; of subtle but enormous changes in Where the Power Is; of subtle enormities in general: large atrocities in small places and small print.

This morning’s three headline stories reflect and portend these things: VIET CEASE-FIRE ENDS: U.S. “MAY RESPOND” TO DE-ESCALATION. ISRAELI PLANES RESUME ATTACK ON EGYPT. NIXON YIELDS TO CONSERVATIONISTS, NIXES EVERGLADES JETPORT. Note especially that second: it wants no prophet, Henry, to foresee that one day soon the nations of Islam will employ their oil production as an international diplomatic weapon. Just as the arrival of the sultan’s seneschals in Constantinople on a certain afternoon in 1453 may be said conveniently to mark the end of the Middle Ages, so that day just predicted will mark the beginning of the end of the 20th Century, and of many another thing.

What exploitable convulsions lie ahead, forecast on every hand but attended seriously by few save Us! Fossil-fuel reserves exhausted before alternatives can be brought on line; the wealthy nations poorer and desperate, certain poorer nations suddenly wealthy; doomsday weaponry everywhere (Drew Mack speaks of dynamiting certain towers and monuments; but you and I could build a nuclear bomb ourselves); intemperate new weather patterns in the temperate zones; the death of the Dollar, a greater bereavement than the death of God; old alliances foundered and abandoned, surprising new ones formed! The American 1950’s and 1960’s, that McCarthy-Nixon horror show, will seem in retrospect a paradise lost. The 1980’s and 90’s will be called the New Ice Age — and who can say what will be crystallized therein?

Why, we can, Henry.