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A companion to the film Paul Goodman Changed My Life
published by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas/DissentMagazine
Casey Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks,Deborah Meier, and Michael J. Brown on
Paul Goodman for Today
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Dissent(ISSN 0012-3846) is published quarterlywinter, spring, summer, and fallby the University of Pennsylvania Press for
the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc ., 310 Riverside Drive, #2008, New York, N.Y. 10025. Phone:
212-316-3120. website: http://www.dissentmagazine.org.
2011 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. (FSISI).
Permission to reprint must be obtained from the publisher.
Reprinted from the Fall 2010 issue ofDissent
The publication of this pamphlet was made possible by a grant from the JSL Foundation.
Cover photo used in Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman.
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C A S E Y N E L S O N B L A K E
The young are honorable and see theproblems, Paul Goodman wrote in 1968, but
they dont know anything because we have not
taught them anything. Michael Browns wiseand eloquent essay proves him wrong. The young
know quite a lot, but their elders (including the
very students Goodman described) have deprived
them of a sturdy tradition of social criticism that
should be their birthright. The tradition of
Thoreau, James, Veblen, Addams, Dewey,
Bourne, and Mumford that Goodman kept alive
in the postwar years has apparently become an
embarrassment to those aspiring to global citi-
zenship and a post-national consciousness: its
masterworks barely figure in humanities courses.
As a result, young Americans find themselves
exiled from their countrys moral narrative.
Tradition has been broken, Goodman wrote
fifty years ago, and yet there is no standard to
affirm. Culture becomes eclectic, sensational, or
phony. With luck, Jonathan Lees forthcoming
film Paul Goodman Changed My Life will leadviewers back to Goodmans work and that of the
critics who inspired him. The new editions of
several of his books brought out by PM Press are
a good place to start.
Irving Howe observed that Goodman
continues to write as if it were still possible to
move people: perhaps not sufficiently or in
sufficient numbers, yet with some sense that
speech remains a power. Goodman had an
uncanny ability to make the most radical
suggestions sound eminently reasonable, as if
Disappointed but Not Resigned
P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y
Introduction
In 1960, Paul Goodmansocial thinker,activist, poet, and novelistpublished his
groundbreaking book Growing Up Absurd. An
examination of youth disaffection in our
affluent but spiritually empty society,
Goodmans work inspired and galvanized a
burgeoning generation of sixties students and
intellectuals. Forty years later, though hisinfluence is felt throughout our culture, his
books are mostly out of print, and his name is
all but forgotten by those under the age of
forty-five. Goodman wrote some of his most
provocative and far-sighted essays for Dissent,
including one co-authored with his brother,
Percival, in which he called for the banning of
all cars in Manhattan. It was reprinted in a
collection called Utopian Essays and Practical
Proposals. This spring, Dissentand JSL Films,
creator of the upcoming documentary Paul
Goodman Changed My Life, sponsored an essay
contest in which people under thirty were
asked to name the most pressing social and
political issue of our times and write a utopian
essay that included practical proposals. More
than eight hundred young people respondedwith essays. Judges for the contest were Casey
Nelson Blake, Dick Flacks, and Deborah Meier.
We are pleased to print here the essay of the
winner, Michael J. Brown, along with essays by
the judges, all of whom were influenced by
Goodman. Essays by the two runners-up, John
Connelly and Cameron Quinn, are available at
www.dissentmagazine.org.
D ISS EN T 3
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they were projects that free people could agree
on and pursue that very day. His criticism was
an appeal to Americans horse sense, the
imperiled habit of making independent judg-ments and in democratically rubbing shoulders
with all kinds and conditions. The title of one
of his collections, Utopian Essays and Practical
Proposals, captured what was unique about the
man. Who else moved so easily from calls to
abolish nuclear weapons and ban cars from
Manhattan to a plan to replace hospital nurses
starchy whites with easy-to-wash seersuckers?
All were steps citizens could take to live more
human lives.
Because he was an anarchist from the outset,
and never a communist, Goodman didnt wastethe cold war years apologizing for having been
nave about the Soviet Union. Nor did he beat a
familiar path from Left to Center or Right.
Instead, he dispensed with traditional political
formulas as he sorted through the cultural
wreckage left by the missed and compromised
revolutions of modern times. His penetrating
indictment of our abundant society in Growing
Up Absurdstill stands.
It is lacking in enough mans work. It is
lacking in honest public speech, and people
are not taken seriously. It is lacking in the
opportunity to be useful. It thwarts aptitude
and creates stupidity. It corrupts ingenuous
patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles
science. It dampens animal ardor. It
discourages the religious convictions of
Justification and Vocation and it dims the
sense that there is a Creation. It has no
Honor. It has no Community.
Goodman was obtuse in thinking the
maladies he diagnosed in that book were irrel-
evant to the experiences of girls and women.
But he was not obtuse in insisting that all those
capitalized words mattered, and that their
waning was a source of profound sadness for
many Americans. The difficulty Goodman had indefining his own position over the yearsa
community anarchist, a Neolithic conser-
vative, or (my favorite) an anarchist patriot
speaks more to the uselessness of political labels
than any uncertainty in his thinking.
Goodman saw more clearly than most of his
crazy young allies in the 1960s that the
United States suffered from a crisis of meaning
that could not be resolved by politics alone,
least of all the politics of revolution. The
elevation of consumption over satisfying work
had fostered a base cynicism among Americansof all backgrounds. Seemingly at odds, the
corporate executive, the juvenile delinquent,
and the Beat were united in thinking that role-
playing comprised the sum total of human rela-
tions. An organized system of reputations had
displaced older standards of excellence that
challenged the young to master and surpass
what they had inherited from previous genera-
tions. They had lost the very idea of an
objective changeable world, the conviction
that there is a Creation of the Six Days, a real
world rather than a system of social rules thatindeed are often arbitrary. As young people
they were early resigned and stayed that way.
Goodman admitted his tone was that of an
Angry Middle-Aged Man, disappointed but not
resigned. Todays disappointed but not
resignedwomen and men of all agesshould
hunt down his fugitive writings and read them.
Casey Nelson Blake teaches history and American Studies
at Columbia University. He is writing a longer essay on Paul
Goodman for Raritan.
P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y
4 D ISS EN T
Photo by Paul Hawken, included in Paul Goodman Changed
My Life, a JSL Films production. Courtesy of Sally Goodman.
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Paul Goodman and the Old New Left
D ISS EN T 5
P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y
D I C K F L A C K S
Im still puzzledfifty years later by what it wasabout the climate and the culture in 1960 that
encouraged many young people to think they
could make the world over. That was the year
when little groups of black students brought down
entrenched segregation by putting their bodiesover lines they werent supposed to cross. In that
same year, students rose up en masse in Turkey,
South Korea, and Japan; a host of African coun-
tries declared their independence from colonial
rule; John Kennedy became the first person born
in the twentieth century to take over the U.S.
presidency; Bobby Zimmerman started to perform
as Bob Dylan. A strong sense of youth rebellion
and generational cleavage was emerging, and it
was in that year that Paul Goodman succeeded in
publishing Growing Up Absurd.
Goodman was by then a mature intellectual,who prolifically produced serious and often
profound social criticism, illuminating fiction,
and poetry. But no one outside of a small circle
of New York intellectuals had heard of him,
until that book appeared. Its very title resonated
with the growing cultural mood among intel-
lectual youth; its argument about the ways in
which bureaucratic, consumerist, overde-
veloped society was destroying the sense of
useful work and right living struck home.
Goodman soon was a sought after campus
speaker, and as the sixties rebellions becameorganized and focused, his way of thinking was,
I think, deeply influential.
Goodman fused two philosophical streams
that were central to the early sixties outlook of
young new leftists like myself and other
founders of groups like Students for a
Democratic Society. He, like another intellectual
hero, C. Wright Mills, was a pragmatist. Our
generation saw the established Left as defined
by ideology rather than lived experienceand
this was just about as true for the whole gamut
of those who identified as socialist. Deriving
ones political strategies and analyses from ideo-
logical foundations resulted in what Mills called
futilitarian politics and in a vocabulary unin-
telligible to the masses. The main point of
claiming the need for a New Left was to
envision a way of acting and speaking politically
that connected with experience, that was exper-
imental, that had effects on the world thatcould be seen as good for peoples lives.
SDS, the Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee, and other expressions of the New
Left were anarchist without at first even knowing
anything about the anarchist tradition. Paul
Goodmans use of anarchism was very instructive.
To make change you join up with friends and
neighbors and try to create alternatives that meet
needs blocked by the big institutions. Or you
demand new rules that can make life more
livable directlythese modes of action are more
practical and effective than appealing to author-
ities and institutions to bring the change.Rather than spend primary energy to get the
university to become a community of scholars,
create your ownand by so doing you may af-
fect the institution as well as making a practical
difference. To oppose war, refuse to fight it.
Goodmans fusion of the utopian and the practi-
cal, in a series of essays during the sixties, pro-
vided substance for the impulses of resistance
and the visions of a decentralization and com-
munity that defined the youth counterculture
and the early New Left.
If we could figure out why Paul Goodman
is now forgotten, we might get a better
understanding of whats happened to us
all in these last decades.
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Restoring the Spirit
D E B O R A H M E I E R
Our public officials are not much concernedabout the waste of human resources. But
the big causes of stupidity, of lack of initiative
and lack of honorable incentive, are glaring,
noted Paul Goodmana half-century agoin
Growing Up Absurd. Our society cannot have it
both ways: to maintain a conformist and
ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited
men to man that system with.
That word, spirited, is where I rest the heart
of our case. Spirited students require spiritedteachers, of course. And we are killing off the
spirit in the most deliberate wayfifty-five years
after Goodman published these words.
We have a chance now to recapture the
language of change and invest it with
Goodmans spiritbefore the new reformers
destroy the remnants of Goodmans dream. Its
hard to distort Goodmans ideas, which was part
of the strength of his languageand its value
for us again today lies in the power of his
description of the emptiness of growing up.
Of course, on occasion we will winceasGoodmans words were quite clearly largely
addressed to boys and men. Did he mean it that
way? Quite possibly.
All we need to do is add women and we
can take almost any page of that great treatise
on raising the young in the fifties and translate
it easily into raising the young in the twenty-
first century. As we enter a new age of low
wages and unemployment, Goodmans rele-
vance is striking. Whats missing? he asks.
And he answers for our time as well as his: a
community worth growing up into. The actual
resultbut not intent, says Goodmanofprogressive education was to weaken the
academic curriculum and foster adjustment to
society as it is. Surely he is right. So too the
twenty-first-century reforms The more radical
goals of the progressive education movement
were compromised until they served the
opposite purpose that John Dewey had in
mindstrengthening its intellectual content
and producing students who found it hard to
adjust. So too the radical reforms of our day
have compromised the egalitarian goals they
claim drives them. Goodman ends on acautiously optimistic notein 1957in support
of the crazies. But the organized system is
very powerful and our aspirations, like theirs,
may serve to widen the intellectual gaps not
close them in the name of equity!
Our common wealth, he says, must be
devoted to cultivating freedom and civi-
lizationthey arent inevitable if we dont
consciously nurture them when our children
are young. Goodman would be horrified to
watch this relentless march into orderly
conformity, schools organized as boot campsand test-prep academies, searching for methods
to instill right answers into our young in the
name of equity. We need to revive Goodmans
spirited defense of a spirited citizenry.
Deborah Meier, starting in 1965 as a kindergarten teacher,
went on to create innovative public schools that served all
children in New York City and Boston until her retirement in
1998. She is a longtime editor ofDissentand the author of
many books, including The Power of Their Ideas.
6 D ISS EN T
P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y
I wish he were here to challenge the Left we
now inhabit. We have largely fallen back defen-
sively to support of the welfare state and elec-
toral strategies. Goodman would say that we are
blocked by the decline in utopian thought andcreative direct action. If we could figure out
why Paul Goodman is now forgotten, we might
get a better understanding of whats happened
to us all in these last decades.
Dick Flacks s books include: Making History: The American
Left and the American Mindand the forthcoming: Playing
for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social
Movements (with Rob Rosenthal). He was active in the
founding of Students for a Democratic Society.
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M I C H A E L J . B R O W N
When I tell people that I live in my hometownof Rochester, N.Y., their most common response
is, Why? Rochester is the fifty-first largest
metro region in the United States, a tad smaller
than Buffalo and a tad bigger than Tucson. Thelocal delicacy is called the garbage plate and is
best served after 2 a.m., with a side of Lipitor.
Rochester is a snowy place. It is a place where
corporate giantsKodak, Xerox, Bausch and
Lombonce stalked the land but now skulk
amid layoffs and falling profits. Rochester is a
city with grinding urban poverty, but its suburbs
are rather prosperous places from which crops
of upwardly mobile students are harvested each
graduation season. These students often leave
the region, either for college or for work, and
many never return. The city elders wring theirhands over this brain drain. The downtown
core of the city is deserted after dark and,
increasingly, during the work day. Large
suburban business parks with rolling green
lawns and constructed drainage ponds are
luring businesses from the central skyscrapers.
Some have characterized Rochester, along with
cities like Buffalo, Detroit, and Baltimore, as
dying. If I lived in New York, Washington,
Boston, Seattle, or San Francisco, no one would
ask me why. And yet when people ask how it is
that I live here, I am eager to tell them.Perhaps I should first say why many people,
and I include myself, have left the places they
come from or at least seriously contemplated
doing so. Moving from small places to larger
ones is a major theme in American life. People
from farms and towns, from other regions and
other nations, have come to large American
cities for work. They have also come to expe-
rience the buzz of such places, to be a part of
it as Frank Sinatra sings of New York. As a kid
reading books on ancient history, I wondered
about the people alive at the height of the
Roman Empire who didnt live at the center,
who werent among the bread and circuses, the
politics of the forum, the enormous power of
the city of Rome. Such people were, I later
learned, described by the term provincial. Not
only were they people living in the provinces,
they were also people whose world was thought
to be narrowermaterially, intellectually, andculturallythan those living at the center. I
wondered whether some future kid reading
history would ask how a person living in my
own time could have made a life somewhere
other than in the great metropolises of our age.
Would such a person even be a part of history?
If the glamour of the center pulls us in, the
reputation for dullness that surrounds
remaining at home pushes us away. At the
holidays, Ive sat in airplanes listening to my
fellow twenty-somethings commiserating with
each other: I liked going home, but if I had tostay there one more day Id shoot myself.
In a culture where helicopter parents can
extend adolescence well into the third decade of
an offsprings life, there is undoubtedly merit in
striking out on ones own. But whats at issue
here, I have come to believe, is not simply inde-
pendence. Whats at issue is the tension
between belonging to a rootless professional
culture and a rooted local one. The price of
holding on to the latter may be exclusion from
the status, power, and income the former offers.
Its not the case, however, that those leavingtheir childhood homes in places like Rochester
are lighting out for wide open spaces where
opportunity abounds and careers are simply
open to talent. My peers are not leaving to
pursue Jeffersonian independence; theyre
leaving to enter large professional organizations
in which they often become quite dependent
on the caprice of bosses, the vicissitudes of
markets, the shifting terrain of mergers and
acquisitions.
And this brings me back to how eager I am
P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y
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In the Flower City, Take Root
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to tell people why I live in Rochester. It is not
because Rochester affords me economic inde-
pendence (though the low cost of living helps).
There are surely capricious bosses and volatile
markets here, too. But there is something else.There are the faces and the names of the people
around me, each of which has a story behind it,
each of which is a buoy anchored in the social
sea, helping to orient me. There are the old
buildingsthe grand facades of high culture,
the battered storefronts of the inner city, the
sentinel-like pump house on the reservoir hill
to remind me of history and time. What is
different in Rochester is that I own a piece of
this place, and this place owns a piece of me. Id
like to suggest that this relation is the grounds
for a special kind of independence.
As a boy I learnedof ancient Rome; as acollege student I learned of ancient Greece. In
Athens, the citizens of thepolis are thought to
have experienced what the eighteenth-century
French thinker Benjamin Constant called the
liberty of the ancients, and what more recent
political theorists label positive liberty.
Athenian citizens were selected for public office
by lottery, and their assembly comprised the
entire body of citizens (though women andthose not born of Athenian parents were
excluded from citizenship, and much of the
hard labor was performed by slaves). The
essence of this Athenian liberty was the citizens
freedom to determine the policies of their city,
to shape the course of the common life. Such
positive liberty differs from the negative
liberty that Constant called the liberty of the
moderns. This liberty is negative because it is
the absence of intrusion upon private life.
Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the
presence of self-governance. It is notfreedomfrom external constraints; it isfreedom tobe a
self-determining person or community, to
partake in public life. In Athens, the freedom to
participate in the life of the city was regarded as
a defining characteristic of human beings. To
live outside the city was to live outside the
political and cultural community that allows
humans to exercise their capacities for reason,
rhetoric, imagination, and artistry. He who lives
outside the city, Aristotle said, must be either a
beast or a god. For Aristotle, man is by nature
a political animal. And he who by nature and
not by mere accident is without a state, is either
a bad man or above humanity; he is like the
Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom
Homer denounces. To denounce someone forliving without an attachment to a city seems
harsh to contemporary readers, but the very
forcefulness of this language tells us that the
Greeks took their civic communities seriously.
Athens was not simply a place where people
lived; for the citizen, Athens was life itself.
Though the liberty of the ancients may
sound alien to us today, it is nonetheless
appealing. In fact, its appeal lies in our sense of
its absence, our lack of civic self-determination.
We too seldom experience commitment to
something outside the self (but that serves self-development), something larger than the indi-
vidual (but that tangibly involves individuals we
know and value). Yet we yearn for it. Witness
the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. It
brought young Americans off campuses and
into the streets. They went on the road to
campaign in places like Dayton, Ohio, Wilkes-
Barre, Pennsylvania, and Sarasota, Florida. I
was one of them. The day of the New
Hampshire primary, I knocked on doors in the
towns of Antrim and Hillsborough. Obamas
primary defeat was heartbreaking, but thecampaigning was not. The way it called upon
my strength of mind to make the case at every
door, my strength of body to trudge through
snowy back roads, and my strength of will to
approach isolated houses whose owners, I antic-
ipated, had had enough of political canvassers
all this made for a sense of a days labors done
well and for a worthy purpose. But presidential
campaigns are fleeting things. If they leave us
inspired, they leave us wanting more.
The positive liberty of the ancients was not a
function of the political season; it was a way oflife. The small scale of the polisestimates put
the population of Periclean Athens at 250,000,
of which far fewer than half were eligible
citizensfacilitated civic participation. Surely
the endemic warfare among Greek city-states
and the hard work performed by slaves also
played their part in laying the foundations for
the positive liberty of the citizen, for these
offered him ample questions of great moment
to deliberate onnothing less than war (alas)
and peaceand the freedom from labor
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necessary to do so. But political participation
can also perpetuate itself. A virtuous circle
forms that quickens the bond between citizen
and city: the dearer the city becomes to the
citizen, the greater the citizens zeal for lendinga hand in its affairs.
Today, its as though this virtuous circle has
become a vicious one. People stand in relation
to their political community as spectators stand
in relation to spectacle. They are observers
rather than participants, and they are often
disgusted observers. When they do participate,
it is often simply to display this disgust. Witness
the Sarah Palin rallies, which amount to the
venting of spleen. To the extent that the Tea
Party calls forth a response from the Left, it is
likely to come in the form of shouts. The twosides are more apt to cover each other with
spittle than convince each other with smarts.
Whats missing is a field for meaningful action,
a forum for the public use of reason, a pathway
to civic life.
I think I have foundsuch a pathway here inRochester. I feel a sense of ownership over this
place; I feel committed to it. I am rooted in it
not simply because of the accident of birth. The
people I know and love are scattered all overthe world, but the highest concentration of
them in any one place is in Rochester. It is here
that abstractions become tangible realities.
Community is not an ideal of political theory; it
is the brush of elbows and the rush of friends
faces amid the Saturday crowds at the
Rochester Public Market. The environment is
not some photo of a distant stream with a bear
pawing for salmon; its the Genesee River
flowing north into Lake Ontario and passing by
Kodak factories and the Genesee Brewery.
Politics is not shouting faces on television; itsthe forum on violent crime with the mayor and
the police chief at the single-screen movie
theater two blocks away.
In Rochester, life moves along tracks other
than the career track. People have their jobs,
and they work hard at them. But they also have
projects outside their jobs. They start discussion
clubs, urban farmers markets, political action
groups, and new schools. There is a conscious
sense here of building the community: one
vacant lot converted into a neighborhood
garden, one old factory turned into an art
gallery, one letter to the editor at a time. This is
the difference between a rootless professional
culture and a rooted local one. For those in the
former, the city they live in is the site of theirjob. For those in the latter, it is the site of their
civic life. The tradeoffs involved here are very
real. The price of living in a place like Rochester
might be the curtailment of ones career. There
simply arent the opportunities here that there
are in the larger cities. It is this reality that has
led some to characterize Rochester and other
mid-size cities in the older, non-Sunbelt
portions of the country as dying places.
Ironically, civic life springs from this
perception of urban death. In the spring of
2008, I attended a conference in New Orleans.Our group heard from local leaders on the effort
to rebuild the community following Hurricane
Katrina. Expecting them to be marked by the
tragic blow their city had suffered, I was startled
by their sense of hope and their enormous
energy. They were thankful for the opportunity
to renew their city. Katrina was terrible, but it
was also an opportunity for new thinking, new
projects, and new collaborations. Most strik-
ingly, I could see that these civic leaders were
ignited by the very real way in which their city
needed them. It was time for all hands to be ondeck, for all who loved New Orleans to rally to
it, for the citizens to find in the rebuilding of
their city something like what William James
called the moral equivalent of war. We dont
need hurricanes to arouse this sentiment in the
people of our cities, nor do we need the wars
that plagued the Greeks and ultimately struck
down their ancient liberties. What we need is a
sense that our efforts are meaningful, and this
sense is to be found in our left-behind home-
towns and dying cities, in places like Rochester.
These places are fields for our civic action, andthey are places where our efforts can be vital,
direct, and discernible in their results.
William James wondered what might
happen if there were, instead of military
conscription a conscription of the whole
youthful population to form for a certain
number of years part of the army enlisted
against Nature. I think James was on to some-
thing. But what Jamess proposal mayand its
latter-day descendants the Peace Corps and
AmeriCorps domiss is the opportunity to
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mobilize (or foster) the affective bonds that
young people have to the places theyre from.
Instead, these programs often uproot people
from the communities theyre in and place
them in new locations. My proposal is for anational youth service program that gives
participants the chance to shape the future of
their own communities. Dispensing with the
martial metaphors, Id call this program
(C)itizens (I)n(V)olved (I)n (C)ommunity, to be
known by its catchier acronym CIVIC. As Paul
Goodman observed fifty years ago in Growing
Up Absurd, We have to learn again what city
man always used to know, that belonging to the
city, to its squares, its market, its neighbor-
hoods, and its high culture, is a public good; it is
not a field for investment to yield a long-termmodest profit. CIVIC aims to make good this
lesson.
This program would address the constellationof social problems Ive laid out. It would stem
the brain drain from places like Rochester by
retaining young people, at least for a time.
During that time, however, CIVIC participants
would either strengthen or form the civic spirit
that promotes the virtuous circle I have
described. Participants would experience thenatural environment by clearing trails, cleaning
shorelines, and maintaining parks. They would
learn the infrastructure of their community by
installing solar panels and creating urban
gardens. They would staff farm markets and
beautify bus shelters. They would immerse
themselves in the community by collecting oral
histories from elders in nursing homes,
providing transportation for those who cannot
transport themselves, and tutoring elementary-
school children in literacy and math. In the
second year of CIVIC, they would be handedsome of the keys to the city in addition to their
ongoing community work. Here is where the
proposal differs from the youth work camps
that Paul Goodman and others have discussed.
CIVIC participants would have regular jury
duty. They would be elections inspectors. They
would have column space in local newspapers.And they would enjoy voting membership in
municipal legislative bodies. In Rochester, for
example, the second-year CIVIC class would
have one voting seat on the city council. They
would attend all meetings of the council and
deliberate about the matters before it, choosing
a different delegate to cast their collective vote
at each meeting. The same arrangement would
apply to the county legislature, school boards,
and the various town councils. At the
conclusion of their time, CIVIC alumni would
be able to say that the community had owned apart of them and that they, in return, had
owned a piece of it. CIVIC members would
perform useful work and would be affected by
it. They would be students of and participants in
the life of the community, with their classroom
the city itself.
CIVIC will counterbalance the call of the
highly mobile and therefore rootless profes-
sional life, which has the full weight of cultural
power, social prestige, and material wealth on
its side. CIVIC will offer youth a taste of the
liberty of the ancients by placing their handson the rudder of the civic ship. The career aspi-
rations that drain the young from Rochester
impoverish the city, but they also impoverish
the young. They too often deny them the
opportunity to realize an aspect of our human
potential distinct from our professional and
private selves: our civic self.
Michael J. Brown is a graduate student in the department of
history at the University of Rochester, where he studies the
place of intellectuals in American political culture. He is the
founder of Flower City Philosophy and the coordinator of
Rochester Educators for Obama.
P A U L G O O D M A N F O R T O D A Y
1 0 D ISS EN T
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PAUL GOODMANCHANGED MY LIFE
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His impact isall around us.Noam Chomsky
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