The Conscientious Objectors

BUT WILL IT SELL? by Marya Marines. 240 pages. Lippincott. $4.50.

WHAT CAN A MAN DO? by Milton Mayer. 310 pages. Chicago. $5.

Gadflying is an honorable calling, but it has its pitfalls. The truly conscientious gadfly is apt to run out of material at around age 33 and find himself in the embarrassing position of gadding at the same old targets. The less conscientious gadfly may even invent new subjects to gad about.

Marya Mannes, 59, and Milton Mayer, 55, are two of the more durable gadflies of U.S. letters--lifelong, card-carrying conscientious objectors. Between them, they provide a sort of check list of the more hoary cliches of Instant Social Criticism.

Public Slugging. Of the two, Mayer is both the more messianic and the more corrosive. A wisecracking, easygoing chap, he was a protege of the University of Chicago's Robert Maynard Hutchins, taught in Mortimer Adler's Great Books program before launching a career as a freelance writer and fulltime polemicist. He has been flailing away at his chosen targets--war, racial prejudice, big government--for something close to a quarter of a century. The secret of the art, he understands, is to avoid the complicating thought and the qualifying phrase; indeed, few writers have his knack for reducing problems of considerable complexity to aboriginal simplicity.

U.S. society, he declares in this collection of magazine articles, has "a record of private and public shooting, slugging, mayhem, assault, battery, contusions, abrasions, lynching and vigilantism unmatched by any people who come readily to mind, except, perhaps, the ancient Cossacks." With that vision of the violent society in mind, he goes on to argue that the U.S. gives away a little bit more of its "liberty" every time it yields to its fatal impulse to "horn into every war within reach." In fact, says Mayer, after two world wars, both of which he regards as U.S. defeats, "freedom is less well preserved than it was before those two wars began." He has no doubt that "Hitler indeed imposed Prussianism on us, but he was dead when he did it." Americans, says Mayer, "love war so much that we are willing to lie to our young men in order to persuade them to be killers."

Conformity is the U.S.'s worst social evil. In "The Case Against the Jew," Mayer argues not that the Jew has failed to become assimilated but that he has assimilated too much, placing his faith in "the grand fallacy of adjustment." The most insidious ally of conformity is the "Giant Economy-Size" government, which, "as it fends every evil from us, will end by fending every virtue from us, too."

The Old & Rich. Marya Mannes is a stately, handsome, sharp-tongued woman who enjoys nothing more than rising at a banquet table and flailing the be-jeesus out of her hosts. She once told the Women's National Press Club that, in most cities in America, the public "buys your papers to hold up at breakfast or to line the trash can or to light a fire, but not to learn."

The villains in U.S. life are "the old and the rich, who have come to think of our way of life as the only way." The advertisers, particularly television advertisers, play so insidiously on the emotions of America "that they must bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills or the bottle." They have foisted on women a vision of themselves as homemakers that has crippled large numbers of them intellectually as well as emotionally.

Concludes Feminist Mannes: "We are neither accessories, instruments, nor objects, although in the wide range from housekeeper to whore we have for a very long time been used as such."

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