This is the way things are in the middle of the night, and this, I more and more believe, is the way things truly are. Only the stoned moments allow you the luxury of lying to yourself about life. Then the little pictures fit together to form a coherent story that is funny and grand and only a little sad. But that is not the way it is.

(Or...?)

VI

American history, I have been told, is a coherent story that is funny and grand and only a little sad. Of course that is not really the case. American history may be funny, may sometimes be grand, is more than a little sad-but, make no mistake about it, it is no more coherent than I am. Or you.

(I can no longer put the pictures together. What does the American Civil War have to do with Vietnam? What does Warren G. Harding have to do with Malcolm X? These are only silly technical questions.)

If there is any pattern in the madness of American history it is only the pattern of rape. We raped the Indians, the women, the blacks and the land. Once all that rape had been accomplished, the white men began to rape even other white men.

Hence, The Burning of Los Angeles.

VII

Arthur Penn does not attempt to come up with anything resembling a coherent structure for his Little Big Man. It is a movie full of many little stories. Jack Crabb does many different things during his life (or he does none of them or he does some of them or he dreams them all up), and each thing he does is different from the next. Indeed he tries to take advantage of each and every alternative available to the American frontiersman. Things you or I could do, have done: Make money, go West, get drunk, find God, make love, kill.

But the fact is that though he tries all these things and does most of them well, this is no Horatio Alger story. Because in the end all the Indians are dead and Jack Crabb is going to die in an old-age home, surrounded by plastic and human garbage.

VIII

Incidents of the closing off of the West:

1. The New York Times termed the national television audience for the latest moonwalk "disappointing."

2. Old people, the Nixon administration and the media seem more truly interested in ecology than anyone else.

3. The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times.

4. The perfection of color television.

5. The film industry's failure to offer Charles Manson a contract.

6. The arrival of "Future Shock."