The modern bourgeois world has convinced itself that it has conquered all need- all you need is money. Money- the mysterious element- and its transfer thus stimulate the real rituals of our civilization. The most deeply felt ceremony in today's churches is not the Communion but the collection. It is in money that people find their meaning.

Some of the most essential needs, like love and friendship, are ignored because they are not material and can not be purchased by money. Or they are considered real only to the extent they can be purchased by money.

So then we agree, we have conquered all need, and we can purchase everything we want, provided we work hard enough. Of course, the things we want the most will cost more, so we will have to work harder for them, like jewels and cars. There is no longer any need to transcend the material because we have conquered it. Everyone agrees this is "The Greatest Nation On Earth."

We are not yet, though we are soon to be, at a place where everybody, oh everybody, can enjoy riches. But at least for now, the fact that some have permanently conquered want shows that everyone will very soon. But until that time, until pie-in-the-sky, which is not too far off, if we are to believe Lyndon J. and Richard N. and Time and Life and maybe the Good Lord Himself, some of us will have to undergo ultimate purchase vicariously.

We will get to go into Saks and watch a fluffy, fur-covered, fifty-year-old divorcee hand lots of green across the counter. The more she pays and the smaller her purchase, the happier we can be. That proves that she has almost conquered need for good. Just a little, ever so little more and it will be done. Ten million trillion zillion dollars for a jeweled silk-and-leather nail file case. Phew! We're almost there. Very soon we'll never need anything more ever again. We have solved necessity and in those very stores, the richest and the plushest ones, we are about to become God Himself.

AS I watched the construction workers eat lunch in downtown New York. I began to understand why they wanted to beat up college students. They have to build buildings that no one wants, and then they have to eat lunch on the smelly, steaming tar and blacktop. Or they have to sit on concrete steps, eating a mushy egg salad sandwich about two feet from blaring car horns and smoking exhaust pipes. It they work near Fifth Avenue, they may have to watch women- the models that TV has told them to call beautiful- parade in front of them. Magazines, TV, and Fifth Avenue stimulate, over and over again, a sexual desire that they can never satisfy. It grows in them until it kills their insides, overwhelming the more subtle need for companionship. They turn into mindless animals, hungry hyenas looking for a kill.

When these same construction workers try to bury a monkey wrench in some peacenik's head, they're trying to expel some frustrated sexual energy, and it comes out in pure class hatred. They see an affluent generation of college kids who never had to make any money on their own, and whose education, in fact, the workers themselves are paying for. They see these kids screaming about how hard life is, and the workers are furious. As far as they can tell, they certainly wouldn't be where they are now if they had had a chance to go to college. And to their minds, college is just a place where everyone sleeps together anyway. Kids nowadays get to romp and stomp for four years and then slip into some easy manager's job while they have to build these hideous monsters in the stinking city.

The luxury and privilege gnaws at them even more because of the lack of any real life around them. The textures and rhythms of human existence are nowhere to be found. Unable to find any real life around them, and needing something to relate to, they are forced to find what life they can in the cement, glass and steel. They lavish eight hours a day, a quarter of their life, on those structures, forcing part of themselves into the buildings. But the part of their personalities they invest in the buildings, and the part they pull out for sheer companionship, begin to stare back at them through every window. If you hate what you create, then you hate yourself, but trying to love the skyscrapers of New York must be like kissing a rock. So unlike Pygmalion, the construction workers cannot even fall in love with their work- which is, in part, themselves- and therefore they must either hate themselves of try to become ever more like their creations- hard, faceless, and unfeeling.

WHEN I was a freshman, I thought that I didn't have many friends at Harvard because people in the East were just different from people in the West. Later, with my more sophisticated radical consciousness, I decided that it couldn't be true, since all of us suffer under the same brand of advanced corporate capitalism. But in New York this time, I understood that it really is different in the West. You just don't have to turn off as much to stay alive. All of my friends from New York are either sick or weary or impregnable, and mostly cynical. If you still respond personally to the ugliness and the sadness and the poverty in New York, if you don't seal off every entrance into your emotions, then you are driven out of the City by the spectacle. If you live in New York, then you have

to develop a certain kind of self-containment, and you either turn off your nerve endings or you turn them inside and let them play with your mind.

Kurt Vonnegut tells about some secretaries he knows who live in New York, alone, somewhere in the jungle, and carry around Valley of the Dolls. (imagine 900 pages of Jaqueline Susan), in the hope that some man will walk up to them and say. "Wow, you're reading that too. huh? Where do you want to go for lunch?" I guess you just don't accidentally bump into someone twice in New York.

And then other friends of mine tell me about the Lower East Side where half the people on the street are just leaning against some boarded-up store front, expressionless, shooting heroin into their arm through a dirty needle. Or a woman yelling at her husband on the third floor of some tenement. "Jesus. I gotta seventy-dollar-a-week habit. How do you expect me to live on that?"

I've tried to purge myself of everything I remember of New York. I'll certainly never go back. But as hard as I try, I still have one image left. It's a view from the Staten Island ferry. Just as our boat passed in front of the Statue of Liberty, two little tugs pushed four barges over laden with trash through the iridescent, oil covered water in front of the Statue. I looked back at Manhattan and saw some awful, mysterious yellow cloud gobbling up most of the buildings in the City. It had already devoured the George Washington Bridge and it was biting off the top of the Empire State Building. New steel towers reared up crane-covered heads along the waterfront, ready to nourish the cloud in their turn.

So WHEN New York puts on an exhibition about American architecture, it should be like a prostitute talking about male sexual fantasies- she's seen them as bad as they can be. But, unbelievably, the exhibition at the Met seems to have missed the whole point of living in the City, Seventy years ago, what they've set up could have passed for myopic. No one could have been expected to fore-see the horrors that would develop from the humble beginnings. But now, in 1970, only someone who has never been to New York could construct such a vision of dreams-come true. I would have set up an exhibit pretty much like it five years ago, from my dreams of the East before I got here.

The exhibit communicates through large posters somehow illuminated from the back. It introduces itself: