高级英语(上)

Lesson 1: Rock Superstars: What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society? Rock is the music of teenage rebellion. - John Rockwell, rock music critic By a mans heroes ye shall know him. - Robert Penn Warren, novelist It was mid-June, 1972, the Chicago Amphitheater was packed, sweltering, rocking. Onstage, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was singing “Midnight Rambler.” Critic Don Heckman was there when the song ended. “Jagger,” he said, “grabs a half-gallon jug of water and runs along the front platform, sprinkling its contents over the first few rows of sweltering listeners. They surge to follow him, eager to be touched by a few baptismal drops”. It was late December, 1973, Some 14,000 screaming fans were crunching up to the front of the stage at Capital Center, outside Washington, D.C.Alice Cooper, Americas singing ghoul, was ending his act. He ends it by pretending to end his life with a guillotine. His “head” drops into a straw basket. “Ooh,” gasped a girl dressed in black. “Oh, isnt that marvelous?” Fourteen-year-old Mick Perlie was there too, but his parents werent. “They think hes sick, sick, sick,” Mike said. “They say to me, How can you stand that stuff?” It was late January, 1974. Inside the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, Bob Dylan and The Band were tuning for a concert. Outside, in the pouring rain, fan Chris Singer was waiting to get in. “ This is pilgrimage,” Chris said, “I ought to be crawling on my knees.” How do you feel about all this adulation and hero worship? When Mick Jaggers fans look at him as a high priest or a god, are you with them or against them? Do you share Chris Singers almost religious reverence for Bob Dylan? Do you think he or Dylan is misguided? Do you reject Alice Cooper as sick? Or are you drawn somehow to this strange clown, perhaps because he acts out your wildest fantasies? These arent idle questions. Some sociologists say that your answers to them could explain a lot about what you are thinking and about what your society is thinking in other words, about where you and your society are. “Music expressed its times,” says sociologist Irving Horowitz. Horowitz sees the rock music arena as a sort of debating forum, a place where ideas clash and crash. He sees it as a place where American society struggles to define and redefine its feelings and beliefs. “The redefinition,” Horowitz says, “is a task uniquely performed by the young. It is they alone who combine invention and exaggeration, reason and motion, word and sound, music and politics.” Todd Rundgren, the composer and singer, agrees. “Rock music,” he says, “is really a sociological expression rather than a musical force. Even Elvis Presley wasnt really a great musical force. Its just that Elvis managed to embody the frustrated teenage spirit of the 1950s.” Of course Presley horrified adult America. Newspapers editorialized against him, and TV networks banned him. But Elvis may have proved what Horowitz and Rundgren believe. When he appeared on the Ed.Sullivan Sunday night variety show in front of millions, a kind of “debate” took place. Most of the older viewers frowned, while most of the younger viewers applauded. Between Elvis and Alice, rock critics say, a number of rock stars have helped our society define its beliefs and attitudes. Bob Dylan touched a nerve of disaffection. He spoke of civil rights, nuclear fallout, and loneliness. He spoke of change and of the bewilderment of and older generation. “Somethings happening here,” he sang. “You dont know what it is, do you, Mr.Jones?” Others entered the debate. The Beatles, Horowitz said, urged peace and piety, with humor and maybe a little help from drugs. The Rolling Stones, arrogant street-fighting men, demanded revolution. The Jefferson Airplanes “We Can Be Together” and Volunteers (Got a Revolution)” were two further statements of radical youth. But politics wasnt the only subject debated in the hard rock of the sixties. Feelings, always a part of any musical statement, were a major subject. Janis Jophin sang of her sadness. The Beatles showed there were a range of emotions between love and hate. Then came The Band, mixing the more traditional ideas of country and western music into the more radical ”city” ideas of the hard rock. This country element, Horowitz feels, helped its audience express an urge to “get away from it all,” to “go back to the old day.” One of the best current examples of what Horotwitz is talking about is John Denver. His most notable songs “Sunshine on My Shoulders”, “Rocky Mountain High”, and “Country Road” combine the musical drive and power of folk rock, while the lyrics celebrate the simple joys of “the good old days.” The list could go on and on. Like all artists, these rock musicians mirror feelings and beliefs that help us see and form our own. What do we give them in return? Applause and praise, of course. In one 1972, national opinion poll, more than 10 percent of the high school boys and 20 percent of the girls said their hero was a rock superstar. We also give them money. “The fastest way to become a millionaire these days,” says Forbes, a business magazine, “is to become a rock n roll star.” Todays heroes some of them, anyway tell us they enjoy their rewards. “And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies. Who never conceived of us billion-dollar babies.” The particular “culture here” who sings that is Alice cooper. The big question remains: Why is he a culture hero? What does he or any other current rock success tell us about his fans? About ourselves and our society? Where it is, where it was, where its heading? Lesson 2: Four Choices for Young People Shortly before his graduation, Jim Binns, president of the senior class at Stanford University, wrote me about some of his misgivings. “More than any other generation,” he said, “our generation views the adult world with great skepticism there is also an increased tendency to reject completely that world.” Apparently he speaks for a lot of his contemporaries. During the last few years, I have listened to scores of young people, in college and out, who were just as nervous about the grown-p world. Roughly, their attitude might be summed up about like this: “The world is in pretty much of a mess, full of injustice, poverty, and war. The people responsible are, presumably, the adults who have been running thing. If they cant do better than that, what have they got to teach our generation? That kind of lesson we can do without.” There conclusions strike me as reasonable, at least from their point of view. The relevant question for the arriving generation is not whether our society is imperfect (we can take that for granted), but how to deal with it. For all its harshness and irrationality, it is the only world weve got. Choosing a strategy to cope with it, then, is the first decision young adults have to make, and usually the most important decision of their lifetime. So far as I have been able to discover, there are only four basic alternatives:1. Drop OutThis is one of the oldest expedients, and it can be practiced anywhere, at any age, and with or without the use of hallucinogens. It always has been the strategy of choice for people who find the world too brutal or too complex to be endured. By definition, this way of life is parasitic. In on way or another, its practitioners batten on the society which they scorn and in which they refuse to take any responsibility. Some of us find this distasteful an undignified kind of life. But for the poor in spirit, with low levels of both energy and pride, it may be the least intolerable choice available.2. FleeThis strategy also has ancient antecedents. Ever since civilization began, certain individuals have tried to run away from it in hopes of finding a simpler, more pastoral, and more peaceful life. Unlike the dropouts, they are not parasites. They are willing to support themselves and to contribute something to the general community, but they simply dont like the environment of civilization; that is, the city, with all its ugliness and tension. The trouble with this solution is that it no longer is practical on a large scale. Our planet, unfortunately, is running out of noble savages and unsullied landscaped; except for the polar regions, the frontiers are gone. A few gentleman farmers with plenty of money can still escape to the bucolic life but in general the stream of migration is flowing the other way.3. Plot a RevolutionThis strategy is always popular among those who have no patience with the tedious working of the democratic process or who believe that basic institutions can only be changed by force. It attracts some of the more active and idealistic young people of every generation. To them it offers a romantic appeal, usually symbolized by some dashing and charismatic figure.It has the even greater appeal of simplicity: “Since this society is hopelessly bad, lets smash it and build something better on the ruins.”Some of my best friends have been revolutionists, and a few of them have led reasonably satisfying lives. These are the ones whose revolutions did not come off; they have been able to keep on cheerfully plotting their holocausts right into their senescence. Others died young, in prison or on the barricades. But the most unfortunate are those whose revolutions have succeeded. They lived, in bitter disillusionment, to see the establishment they had overthrown replaced by a new one, just as hard-faced and stuffy.I am not, of course, suggesting that revolutions accomplish nothing. Some (The American Revolution, the French Revolution) clearly do change things for the better. My point is merely that the idealists who make the revolution are bound to be disappointed in either case. For at best their victory never dawns on the shining new world they had dreamed of, cleansed of all human meanness. Instead it dawns on a familiar, workaday place, still in need of groceries and sewage disposal. The revolutionary state, under whatever political label, has to be run-not by violent romantics-but by experts in marketing, sanitary engineering, and the management of bureaucracies.For the idealists who are determined to remake society, but who seek a more practical method that armed revolution, there remains one more alternative.4. Try to Change the World Gradually, One Clod at a TimeAt first glance, this course is far from inviting. It lacks glamour. It promises no quick results. It depends on the exasperating and uncertain instruments of persuasion and democratic decision making. It demands patience, always in short supply. About all that can be said for it is that it sometimes works that in this particular time and place it offers a better chance for remedying some of the worlds outrages that any other available strategy.So at least the historical evidence seems to suggest. When I was graduating from college, my generation also found the world in a mess. The economic machinery had broken down almost everywhere: In this country nearly a quarter of the population was out of work. A major was seemed all too likely. As a college newspaper editor at that time, I protested against this just as vehemently as student activists are protesting today.At the same time, my generation was discovering that reforming the world is a little like fighting a military campaign in the Apennines, as soon as you capture one mountain range, another one looms just ahead. As the big problems of the thirties were brought under some kind of rough control, new problems took their place the unprecedented problems of an, affluent society, of racial justice, of keeping our cities from becoming uninhabitable, of coping with war in unfamiliar guises. Most disturbing of all was our discovery of the population explosion. It dawned on us rather suddenly that the number of passengers on the small spaceship we inhabit is doubling about every forty years. So long as the earths population keeps growing at this cancerous rate, all of the other problems appear virtually insoluble. Our cities will continue to become more crowded and noisome. The landscape will get more cluttered, the air and water even dirtier. The quality of life is likely to become steadily worse for everybody. And warfare on a rising scale seems inevitable if too many bodies have to struggle for ever-dwindling shares of food and living space.So Jim Binns generation has a formidable job on its hands. But not, I think, an insuperable one. On the evidence of the past, it can be handled in the same way that hard problems have been coped with before-piecemeal, pragmatically, by the dogged efforts of many people. Lesson 3: The Use of Force They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. “Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.” When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic who merely said, Is this the doctor? And let me in. In the back, she added. You must excuse us, doctor, we have her in the kitchen where it is warm. It is very damp here sometimes. The child was fully dressed and sitting on here fathers lap near the kitchen table. He tried to get up, but I motioned for him not to bother, took off my overcoat and started to look things over. I could see that they were all very nervous, eyeing me up and down distrustfully. As often, in such cases, they werent telling me more than they had to, it was up to me to tell them; thats why they were spending three dollars on me. The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression on her face whatever. She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. But her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly, and I realized that she had a high fever. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers. Shes had a fever for three days, began the father and we dont know what it comes from. My wife has given her things, you know, like people do, but it dont do no good. And theres been a lot of sickness around. So we thot youd better look her over and tell us what is the matter. As doctors often do I took a trial shot at it as a point of departure. Has she had a sore throat? Both parents answered me together, NoNo, she says her throat dont hurt her. Does your throat hurt you? Added the mother to the child. But the little girls expression didnt change nor did she move her eyes from my face. Have you looked? I tried to, said the mother but II couldnt see. As it happens we had been having a number of cases of diphtheria in the school to which this child went during that month and we were all, quite apparently, thinking of that, though no one had as yet spoken of the thing. Well, I said, suppose we take a look at the throat first. I smiled in my best professional manner and asking for the childs first name I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and lets take a look at your throat. Nothing doing. Aw, come on, I coaxed, just open your mouth wide and let me take a look. Look, I said opening both hands wide, I havent anything in my hands. Just open up and let me see. Such a nice man, put in the mother. Look how kind he is to you. Come on, do what he tells you to. He wont hurt you. As that I ground my teeth in disgust. If only they wouldnt use the word “hurt” I might be able to get somewhere. But I did not allow myself to be hurried or disturbed but speaking quietly and slowly I approached the child again. As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor. Both the mother and father almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology. You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking here by one arm. Look what youve done. The nice man For heavens sake, I broke in. Dont call me a nice man to her. Im here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it. But thats nothing to her. Look here, I said to the child, were going to look at your throat. Youre old enough to understand what Im saying. Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you? Not a move. Even her expression hadnt changed. Her breaths, however, were coming faster and faster. Then the battle began. I had to do it. I had to have a throat culture for her own protection. But first I told the parents that it was entirely up to them. I explained the danger but said that I would not insist on a throat examination so long as they would take the responsibility. If you dont do what the doctor says youll have to go to the hospital, the mother admonished her severely. Oh yeah? I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me. The father tried his best, and he was a big man but the fact that she was his daughter, his shame at her behavior and his dread of hurting her made him release her just at the