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SUPERNATION AT PEACE AND WAR by Dan Wakefield. 252 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown...
There are many splendid absurdities in Dan Wakefield's book, as well as horrors, ironies, incongruities, hypocrisies and examples of pathological normality. All were lovingly culled by Wakefield, a freelance journalist, during a four-month discovery tour of the state of the nation, or supernation, as he archly calls...
...Nations. The Atlantic allots an equal amount of space to an assessment of the national mood under the stress of the Viet Nam war. The onlooker: Freelancer Dan Wakefield, 35. While Mailer indulges in broad polemics, Wakefield prefers quiet irony. Roaming the U.S., or the "Supernation," for four months, he discovered within it two nations. Not the traditional rich and poor. Not even the generation gap, though that exists. But what might be called the organizational gap. The well-organized, Wakefield found, generally support the war in Viet Nam; the organizational dropouts...
...Wakefield deftly shuttles back and forth between the two nations, from the cops to the hippies, from Kiwanians to the ghettos, from an energetic retirement village to a listless Indian reservation. The organization men, rich or poor, high or low, spout a lifeless, insensitive jargon. The unorganized are often speechless. Wakefield could hardly coax any words out of a young Indian man at a Phoenix school. But a white teacher was full of answers, such as "There are ten sociological variables which influence why Indian students become dropouts." Yet, Wakefield found grounds for hope. An Indian militant was distributing cards...
...this is less an eye-witness report than a very private vision. As Wakefield sees it, present-day U.S. society is so stringently regimented that it is marching inexorably to war. Viet Nam is no aberration: it is U.S. destiny. Readers may draw different conclusions, but in personal journalism, the writer is paid for expressing his emotions-and even fiction is a vital form of human perception...