The passages below come from Kenneth Rexroth’s fabulous autobiographical novel, a book that was really a memoir though Rexroth changed names and created some compound characters—protecting people against the witch hunts of McCarthyism
IN this section of the book Rexroth recalls being 14 years old and living on his own in Chicago in the 1920’s.
We admire particularly this sentence:
Rather than being converted to the deliquescence of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, so characteristic of our time, I was inoculated against it.
**
More than any of the official education and cultural institutions my favorite school was the Washington Park Bug Club. This was a spontaneously evolved public forum which met every night except in the dead of winter in a shallow grassy amphitheater beside a lagoon off in the middle of the park. Years later it was to be moved to another part of the park and equipped with a concrete floor, benches, a podium, and an all-powerful Party faction. In those days it looked like something in ancient Greece, very sylvan and peripatetic, and I suppose, if the truth be known, it really was like ancient Greece, of which possibly the cynical Jewish doctor St. Luke was a better judge than Plato or Pater. Here, every night until midnight could be heard passionate exponents of every variety of human lunacy. There were Anarchist-Single-Taxers, British-Israelites, sell-anointed archbishops of the American Catholic Church, Druids, Anthroposophists, mad geologists who had proven the world was flat or that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, and people who were in communication with the inhabitants of Mars, Atlantis, and Tibet, severally and sometimes simultaneously. Besides, struggling for a hearing was the whole body of orthodox heterodoxy — Socialists, communists (still with a small “c”), IWWs, De Leonites, Anarchists, Single Taxers (separately, not in contradictory combination), Catholic Guild Socialists, Schopenhauerians, Nietzscheans — of whom there were quite a few — Stirnerites, and what later were to be called Fascists. There were even leftover apostles of Free Silver and unemployed organizers of the Knights of Labor. It was better than Hyde Park. In fact, the only place I have ever seen anything as good is Glasgow. […]
I don’t want to give the impression that I had become a self-educated antiorthodox precocity, because I had not. I spent my time reading history and the sciences and philosophy. The lunatic fringe of radical Chicago in those days — the Hobo College, the Bug Club, the Dill Pickle, Bughouse Square — taught me one thing, that the orthodox view of the universe, although acceptable and empirically satisfactory, was probably so only because millions of men had devoted their work and their attention and their consent to seeing the universe in that way. If it were possible for a ragged hobo in a gaslit room off West Madison Street to work out a fairly adequate world picture, it is obvious that if historically men had worked along lines which had in fact diverged from the accepted orthodox path to the understanding of reality, they could have evolved an equally acceptable but radically different scientific universe.
Rather than being converted to the deliquescence of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, so characteristic of our time, I was inoculated against it. The radical disbelief which has been characteristic of all my contemporaries I shared from the beginning, but I was never led by it to embrace any of the extraordinary follies which were to become fashionable in intellectual circles in the next thirty or forty years. I have known Socialist-Realist novelists who religiously consulted the astrology column in the daily newspapers every morning before breakfast. The whole Socialist movement after the First War, led by Frank Harris and Upton Sinclair, embraced the Abrams electronic diagnosis machine. Twenty years later, after the Second War, the reborn Anarchist movement committed suicide in the orgone boxes of Wilhelm Reich. Anyone who had taken a course in high school physics would have known that this stuff was arrant nonsense but the trouble was that these people had lost belief in high school physics along with their belief in capitalism or religion. It was all one fraud to them.
**
Reading the passages above one is reminded of a strain in American Puritanism—ironic, ingrown, historicized, and palpable—and vagrantly democratic with a small “d”. It matters not whether we choose to speak of the left or of the right. What is true is that whenever a crowd gathers in these United States it must disregard itself in rhetorical terms. Americans distrust every impulse that seeks to defend individuality. The Glenn Beck march or the Million Man march are only the latest examples. In the end, the participants of these parades will see everything as a fraud, just as the world trade protestors must imagine that both capitalism and religion are co-conspirators. Such heterodox positions hail from the pulpit of Cotton Mather and are conspicuously American in their mass applications. One mustn’t think for a moment that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t understand this full well.
May the workers of my nation respect themselves enough to distrust the "it's all one fraud" school of American public gatherings.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Hetero-, orthodoxies — whatever the -doxy might be it sure beats having to actually THINK!
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