Myra Breckinridge Read Online Free PDF

the farthestout of all for they are, reputedly, the drug-takers. Of course all the students smoke pot and experiment with LSD but only a few main-line, and of those few the Easterners, to a man, are thought to be totally hooked. As a spiritual child of the Forties, I cannot give my imprimatur to this sort of behavior. The drug-taker is a passivist. I am an activist. Yet to be fair--how can the average person make a meaningful life for himself in an overpopulated world? There is very little of interest for him to do in the way of work, while sex is truly absorbing only for those who possess imagination as well as means. With these young people one has the sense that they know instinctively that there are plenty more where they came from and so why fuss? They'll soon be gone, their places taken by others so closely resembling them that only a mother's eye could tell the difference. They are an anonymous blur, even to themselves, which explains their fitful, mindless shuffling of roles. In the morning Gloria will wear a silver lame' gown complete with Miriam Hopkins cocktail shaker; in the evening her ensemble may consist of leotards and a sunbonnet. It is easy for these young people to be anything since they are so plainly nothing, and know it. Their metamorphoses, however, seldom involve more than a change of clothes and the affecting of certain speech mannerisms, appropriated from Western or Eastern stars of television series, liberally sprinkled with jokes told late at night on television by nightclub comedians. Mimesis is normal, particularly in youth, and my only demur is that today's models are, by and large, debasing. In the Forties, American boys created a world empire because they chose to be James Stewart, Clark Gable and William Eythe. By imitating godlike autonomous men, our boys were able to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. Could we do it again? Are the private eyes and denatured cowboys potent enough to serve as imperial exemplars? No. At best, there is James Bond... and he invariably ends up tied to a slab of marble with a blowtorch aimed at his crotch. Glory has fled and only the television commercials exist to remind us of the Republic's early greatness and virile youth. Of all the students at the Academy, only one has sought to model himself on a Forties star: the sickest of the Easterners is currently playing Humphrey Bogart, and he is hopeless in the part. The rest are entirely contemporary, pretending to be folk singers, cowboys and English movie actors. Needless to say, all attempts at imitating Cockney or Liverpudlian accents fail. For one thing the accents are too much for them; for another, any evidence that there could be a real world outside Southern California tends to demoralize our students. Of course they can observe other worlds on television but then that is show business and familiar. Even the Martian landscape of Southeast Asia loses all strangeness when framed by the homey plastic of a television set, while the people involved in that war are quite plainly extras lucky enough to be called upon to fill in prime airtime with the appearance of people dying and living. Naturally, the Vietnam exercise appeals enormously to the students. "I mean," said one of them, "if we don't stop them there--you know, where they are now they'll be right here in L. A." To which I answered, "This city could not be worse run by the Chinese than it is by the present administration and, frankly, if the Chinese could be persuaded to take on the job--which is doubtful--I think we should let them." Since that exchange, Myra Breckinridge has been thought by some to be a Commie, not the worst thing to be known as at the Academy since the students are scared to death of Communism (like, man, they make you work!), and so regard any alleged conspirator or sympathizer with awe... which I like. As for the theory of Communism, they have not a clue. In fact, the only book any of them has read is something called The Green