Easy enough to point out and condemn the faults and crimes of other nations. There’s something relaxing in such exercises. But what about the writer’s job in our own country, the US of A? To even mention the word hero in connection with the writer’s lot in America invites laughter. The freelance writer in this country enjoys so much freedom in his work, by contrast say with the dark plight of the writer in Central and Eastern Europe, that the American writer’s chief concern is—and should be—to avoid making a fool of himself. The typical American writer has knowledge of very little but opinions on everything. Leaping to conclusions is his favorite calisthenic, snap judgments an intellectual reflex. The literary interview is a popular device through which the supercilious author provides facetious answers to superficial questions from skeptical reporters for the momentary entertainment of the bored and indifferent. In general the serious writer should avoid interviews and the serious reader should avoid reading them.

Nevertheless, I reassert with only slight modification my beginning announcement: the American writer, precisely because of his freedom, his unique position, his audience, his many and ample rewards, has the moral obligation to act as a critic of his own society, his own nation, his own civilization. Or abandon his pretensions.

Have I said or even hinted that social criticism is the writer’s only duty? Or his primary duty? I have not. But it is, I repeat, one of his duties. And what should the critic criticize? What do we privileged Americans have to complain about?

But first: We have many critics of the critics, especially loud and dominant in this regressive, guilty and servile decade. George Will, for example; William Buckley, for another; Tom Wolfe, for a third—and rising above mere columnar journalism, such distinguished literary gentlemen as Saul Bellow, John Updike and the late John Gardner. To name but some. There are dozens of them. Hundreds. Their argument, compacted, amounts to this: communism has proved so gross an evil, the Soviet Union so dangerous an enemy, that by contrast America and its Allies appear as continents of light, exploding with human happiness. Therefore it is the writer’s simple duty to condemn the former, praise the latter. Furthermore we exist in a state of ideological war with the powers of totalitarianism—the “present danger”—which makes it not merely heretical but treasonous to question our own government’s policies, to doubt the glory of planetary capitalism, to object to the religion of endless economic growth or to wonder about the ultimate purpose, value and consequences of our techno-military-industrial empire. Those who persist in raising doubts and questions are attacked by defenders of order as the “adversary culture.”

Very well: let us be adversaries. If the writer should be, among other things, a critic of his society, what does the American writer, in this best of possible American worlds, have to complain about? Why the constant whining and carping by these literary pests who live in the richest, freest, happiest, big nation on earth? Who enjoy in addition the curious distinction of being paid, honored, even sometimes read, by inhabitants of the very nation-state which they seek, in their peculiar way, to sabotage, undermine, halt in its tracks, turn around?