Jeers or Jeremiads?

THE NEW LEFT READER edited by Carl Oglesby. 312 pages. Grove. $8.50.

REBELLION AND REPRESSION by Tom Hayden. 186 pages. World. $5.95.

As an all-purpose rhetorical style --overstatement for an overstated time --New Leftese is shared by everybody, including the Old Right. If you are against the System and for authenticity (and who isn't?--even Bill Buckley these days), then you are talking a mild New Leftese without knowing it.

To bone up properly on New Leftese, one must go to the sources, to an anthology doubling as a style manual like The New Left Reader: all dialectics illustrated from late-model Castro to early Rudd (Mark I). And for training the ear, there is a living-vernacular record: Rebellion and Repression, onetime S.D.S. President Tom Hayden's testimony before the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and the House Un-American Activities Committee. At times the work is a near masterpiece in the invective of martyrdom.

A few lessons for New Leftese stylists may be deduced:

> Keep in mind that the primary purpose of words is not to express meaning but to pump adrenalin. Use active, blood-tingling verbs like "smash" or "liberate." If anybody disagrees with you, call him imperialist, authoritarian or at least manipulator for the power elite.

> Even if you are middle-class white, try to sound like the member of an oppressed racial minority: "Nobody in the world is safe from the 'ugly Americans' who come to take their land, their resources, and their cultural identities" (Tom Hayden). This is what is known as the Sitting Bull gambit.

> Drop sacred names, but be sure which names to drop. Remember the basic rule: the safest saint is a dead saint --Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon. Be particularly careful about bringing up Herbert Marcuse. His importance, Carl Oglesby warns, may have been "badly overstated." "He is not the kind of writer whose books explode one out of the study." (The cardinal sin of the New Left writer is to keep his readers off the streets.)

> Favor the first-person plural and the future tense, as in sentences beginning "We will . . ." If absolutely necessary, the present tense is permissible, but almost never the past. The past tense is history, irrelevant for the young.

> Put down the Old Left, or even the earlier New Left--S.N.C.C., the budding days of the S.D.S. Could one really have hoped that anything good would come from the Kennedys, for instance, or from the march on Selma, Alabama?

The fact is that New Leftese--a combination of evangelism, German sociology and Madison Avenue--does a marked disservice to itself and the ideas of the people who use it. For the New Left has made substantial contributions, particularly in painfully rubbing the American conscience on a number of issues--Viet Nam, poverty, racism--where pain is appropriate. When the cant is dropped, moreover, The New Left Reader provides brilliant and striking perceptions. In The May Day Manifesto, a trio of British New Leftists write against empire, the cold war and the concept of consensus with wit, clarity and a cutting edge that once would have deserved to be called Tory. Frantz Fanon is ingeniously convincing on the subtle significance of the Algerian woman's veil, first in the tyranny, finally in the overthrow of French colonial control. In an interview, Black Panther Leader Huey Newton is equally to the point, perhaps never more so than when fingering the dilettantism of young white radicals: "I call their rejection of the System somewhat of an abstract thing. They're looking for new heroes."

As of now, though, the New Left is one part idealism, two parts the posture of idealism. Pretensions exceed performance, and New Leftese is one measure of the distance between the two. The New Left justifiably aspires to regenerate the body politic. But all too often New Leftese turns out to be a jeer trying to do the work of a jeremiad. The New Left prides itself on having, in Oglesby's words, "restored the possibility of ideological thought." But New Leftese mostly favors ideas that can be daubed on a placard. American radicalism is in danger of making itself voluble without making itself articulate.

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