THE ANTITHESIS OF DEATH The grass covered last year's grave sunday morning 4 By HOWARD KOHN THE CALF died during the night, strangling at birth on the umbilical cord which had been its lifeline. In the morning we found the cow nervously trying to tear herself out of the stanchion. We let her loose and she lunged out to sniff mean- inglessly at her never-born calf. Our dog stayed away from the barn that morning. He was part-Husky, but very gentle. After breakfast, we dragged the dead calf to a dray and hauled her into the field, where we spaded out a deep grave in the sandy soil to dis- courage marauding dogs. The cow walked between the barn and the pasture, mooing in low moans. She paused at the grave only to kick dirt on her back, not under- standing its significance and too absorbed in her hurt feelings. Her milk was not fit for human use for a few days. But we had to milk her and slop the milk to the pigs, A cow has a calf once every 10-11 months. After giving birth milk fills her udder for 7-9 months, drying up slowly in abeyance to her next calf. After her calf died, the cow stubbornly re- fused to be milked. Finally we borrowed a three- week-old calf from another cow and tried to de- lude her into thinking her child had survived. * * * WE HAVE ABOUT 20 cows on a small farm of 120 acres. We also have chickens and some- times pigs. One spring we accidentally killed a wild Mal- lard duck with the blade of the mower while cutting hay. We found the duck's nest and took her eggs home to a babysitting hen who hatched out nine ducklings. All summer long she paraded them around the yard, cackling and hissing at our dog who was usually only curious. In the fall we butchered the ducks. IN THE WINTER snows drifted over the grave, hiding the scar. The cow had forgotten her sorrow and was contentedly growing another calf in her belly. One of our neighbors died suddenly and we worried that it might mean trouble. On the farm you try to outlive nature. When someone dies the land and the animals seem to seethe forth with latent fury, belying a superficial peace, and you try harder to stay alive. Our dog, who had always slept calmly under the front porch, began roaming the neighbors farm with a small beagle and an aged German Shepherd. In March the dogs attacked our late neigh- bor's pigs, wantonly killing six and slashing the dead carcasses with bared fangs. We shot our dog. He whimpered a little but did not beg for his life. He knew better. ** IN THE SPRING the cow gave birth in the field and walked home with the calf following behind. Grass covered last year's grave. (And the meaning of 1i f e remained the antithesis of death). 4 ~iffr Sin4itan Daily Seventy-eight years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan under authority of Board in Control of Student Publications Daily-Jay L. Cassidy In which a man becomes a mute diploid genotype 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily exp ress the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1968 NIGHT EDITOR: MARCIA ABRAMSON On the seventh day, they gave up, Daily-Peter Dreytuas Talking to the White Rabbit By MARCIA ABRAMSON IMET the White Rabbit Friday night. I had heard about this mysterious creature because he called The Daily to explain that he has going to an-' nounce sometime during the week on the Diag that there would be no next President. But no one was surprised when he never appeared. I picked him up in front of The Daily, where he was shooting off his capguns. "Don't do that," I yelled from across the street. "Those people in there are all paranoid. You'll scare them." He crossed the street and shot me. "Hi," he said. "I'm the White Rabbit." "Hello," I answered. "Weren't you supposed to announce sometling on the Diag the other day?" "Yeah," he said. "But the pigs wouldn't let me." "Who said?" "People." "So yoi quit?" He told me couldn't afford angother bust. In the light in front of the Union, I could see his red Amzac hat, his striped bells, his Indian vest. He had three "I am the Ameri-cong" buttons, two "It sucks" buttons and one "I am the enemy of the state." He also had two cap pistols, a Mattel rifle in jungle green, and a green rubber knife slung around his neck in a sheath. "DO YOU KNOW any crash pads around here?" "It isn't like that around here. It was sort of like that in the summer, but it isn't any more. We all live off our parents in semi-respectability." "Yeah, I know. We were trying to start a free store up here, but it just didn't work." He then explained that he represents the Diggers, New York YIP, Ann Arbor YIP and the Panthers. "I'm living at Guild House-some crash pad. But they let me stay there, even though some of the Resistance guys don't like it very much. They leave the door open and I can come in two, three o'clock," he added. But he only said, "You ever been in Berkeley?" Yes,# said. Yes San Francisco. Loved it. "The Haight?" The question threw me off. I mean in San Francisco, you only go to the Height if you are 15 and have to be home at midnight or if you're a tourist. Tub istmrme t-~ / c.n- +h The worst place I can think of I ran away back to Berkeley after two years. I had to." "Where did you live?" I knew what was coming. "Oak Park." "You don't have to say anything else. I understand you. I really under- stand you. I ran away from there my- self two gears ago." We looked at each other like long- lost brothers "Where did you live?" I asked, in a new context, and we played who-do-you-know, when-did-you-grad- uate for a while. "You know, I went back there like this and some of the high school kids called me a fascist commie, because I think I'm the only one right. We've got to get to those kids." OAK PARK is not really an explain- able phenomenon unless you've been there. Once a swamp, it now contains 40,000-people worth of identical three- bedroomredbrickranchhouses. The men think about making money and their wivesworry about diets, kids and get- ting Valley of the Dolls off the rental waiting list at the library. They all expect their kids to marry each other and move into the house next door. Anyway, he didn't have to say another word. "What were you going to say 'on the Diag, huh?' "Oh. I was going to announce the Yippie plan to destroy the inaugura- tion and the next President. National YIP is sending me around the country to tell all the people. But I gotta leave here tomorrow; it's getting cold in this town." I then explained how I happened to be allied with The Daily and he re- sponded by calling a press conference the next day to make his announce- ment. "But who'll come to it?" I asked. "You will, won't you?" "Who else?" "WHO ELSE." It wasn't a question or an answer. He just said it, like he wasn't thinking at all. He didn't seem to like the realization that part of the reason I was talking to him was pro- fessional, just as I didn't like the idea of him coming from around the block. Finally we got the UGLI, and he made a last ditch effort at kissing me passionately-I started laughing, be- cause he was putting such an unneces- sary ending on the whole encounter. T Mils] +.allrb r ith he A White THE GIRL scampered by with a te book under her arm. The black co read "Governing Urban America." .Of all the quixotic dreams that pre cupy mankind, few seem m o r e absi than the idea t h a t we can govern densely-packed urban centers. One w+ ders how much effort is wasted every s gle day by both men and machines in futile struggle to control the actions other men and machines. We all must recognize that there I point - rapidly approaching if not ready upon us - when events and in. tutions become so' massive and comp their ongoing momentum complet dwarfs any human efforts to alter th- path. So it would seem thereapeutic toR ourselves at least one day a week howc we pretend to control complex organi tions -- be they governments, business or universities - when we can't even1 gin to manage our own lives? AT TIMES like these we are soi tempted by the appeals of those v see a return to the soil as a refuge fri complexity and our futile struggle to m; ter it. There is a certain simplicity ab, a small farm that seems to preserve Y manistic values ordinarily lost in a w ter of complexities. We sympathize with those who hav vision of a few congenial p e o ple or small farm in Nova Scotia. We are She undL By BILL LAVELY IF THE INTEREST and reaction of the passers by was any indicator, I would guess that it was the first time that a live model had danced in the window of a State Street boutique. The little group of people there were fas- cinated but embarrassed. A husband and wife team stood be- fore the window for a full five minutes, the wife disgusted and glaring, the husband leering stupidly and staring. Nobody, not even the hip, passed the_ window without a second glance. A lit- tle boy pressed his nose to the glass. It was an attractive girl in the win- dow. Standing there under the colored lights, it was vaguely reminiscent of certain streets in the city of Amster- dam.! Yet there was a decidedly dif- ferent flavor to this affair. Perhaps it was the music. Perhaps it was the dance. The dance was soniewhat inhibited tracted to their image of an idealized past although we recognize that a farm means hard work and long hours, But at least there is some satisfaction in knowing that almost all the toil exact- ed by a farm is productive effort. Milking cows requires few interoffice memos. Har- vesting a field of grain does not even de- mand bureaucratic flow charts. And little' merchandizing goes into marketing to- matoes. Of course, we recognize t h a t we are fatally trapped by our own fixation with the tawdry tenticles of our ultra-modern society. While our televisions go unwatch- ed and we rarely visit art galleries, none- theless we are still permanently bound to the prepackaged frenzy of our irrational culture. But wouldn't it be wonderful one morn- ing to escape it all and head north with the cry, "What the hell?" -THE EDITORIAL DIRECTORS Editorial Staff MARK LEVIN, Editor STEPHEN WILDSTROM URBAN LEHNER Managing Editor Editorial Director, DAVID KNOKE, Executive Editor WALLACE IMMEN ..................... News Editor PAT O'DONOHUE.................. ... .News Editor CAROLYN MIEGEL ......Associate Managing Editor DANIEL OKRENT...............Feature Editor WALTER SHAPIRO . .. Associate Editorial Director HOWARD KOHN .. .,.Associate Editorial Director AVIVA KEMPNER ............Personnel Director By JIM HECK I HAVE ALWAYS believed that the Uni- versity was a dehumanizing institution, but I blamed it mainly on its size. But I never view the University as a de- humanizing institution because of the stal- warts of academic life. It always seemed relatively easy to lure even a dedicated chemistry professor into an aesthetic dis- cussion. However, several weeks ago I began to. change my mind. In a course I'm taking as a prerequisite for my major there is a lecturer who, due to the nature of t h e course, must discuss the differences be- tween'the whites and the blacks. When he does, his voice becomes fright- eningly cautious, as though he were un- veiling truths about differences that really exist, at a time when the world doesn't want to know this -kind of thing. So he makes jokes much of the time. I get the impression, he quips incessantly be- cause he wants people to think of him as a clown rather than a bigot or a scientif-' ically determined pathological segregation- ist - which he is. His jokes follow explicit scientific con- clusions that he apparently fears jar the congenial rapport he spends so much time building. For example, he will crack 4 joke after he has just said blacks carry more affinity for an AB blood-type or that black pigment is dominant to white. He makes jokes, be- cause he is hungup - and know his stu- dents are hung-up - on words that in his science really mean entirely different things than when!they are used idiomatic- ally. But he couldn't reconcile this during an hour lecture 'with a philosophical or so- cio-philosophical argument, and he knew that many students wouldn't understand. He was a scientist, not a human being; his job was to teach anthropology, not; soci- ology. So he made jokes, and sometimes we laughed because they were funny. When/ he said that we should consider the whole human world a bunch of diploid genotypes, I laughed - I thought it was grotesquely hilarious.'I contemplated walk- ing out of the auditorium and seeing mas- sive globs of hemoglobin walking around displaying their diploid genotype. It was really funny. But curiously I was the only one in the massive lecture hall who laughed. The oth- ers didn't think it funny. They all thought it quite natural to consider the whole world a bunch of diploid genotypes. He explained how you recognize a per- son by his diploid genotype and how you determine exactly what kind of a person he is. IS- I wrote the phrase dowh in my notebook and put a star by it, hoping to draw atten- tion to it from those seated next to me. But no one ever laughed. Everyone just listened, and then wrote very academically in their notepads, "If all the world were a diploid genotype..." Under that subhead he began to divide the world into percentages and numbers and letters. "Let's consider the whole hu-4 man population a collection of diploid gen- otypes,' he began. Fine. "Then," he continued, "we have the gene frequency in' this segment of the popula- tion equal to p', here, to 'q', and here to 'r'. And that means that the expected dip- loid genotypes of AB-blood allele would be' necessarily p-squared to 2 pq to q-squared." I began to become awfully scared. "Didn't you think that was funny'" I nervously asked the mute A-diploid geno- type next to me. He didn't answer. It was then that I panicked. It was then that I realized that size is only one factor in dehumanization. The world is KJ-26 recessive. The slums are a result of an inbreeding of black dom- inants w i t h recessive mental capacities. ,Death is but an end of metablosim. War is a sociological outgrowth of adrenalin anxi- eties. Hitler was a TOD freak. Stalin wasn't really cruel, it was just his adanine deficiency. Hunger is the absence of an impetus for interphase. Pain is the interruption of mi- tosis. Hate we don't understand, yet. But love - ah love - when a sperm and an egg fuse into a xygote. War, rebellion, social revolution, blood- just a simple mixture of casual circum- stances. Apparently, I reasoned, that a chem- istry ptpfessor who is easily lured into aesthetic discussions must have never at- tended this University - or any one like it. There were 750 of us that day. Seven hundred forty-nine, I heard returned for the next lecture. gently .. 3 V 1ated back and forth, bumped THE EXPRESSION on her face, or the lack of expression was striking. Her eyes were fixed forward, making no contact, focusing on nothing. Her face was carefully made up, eyes lined and painted dark and contrasted by white powdered cheeks which made her look like a plastic doll. There was nothing happy or nothing sullen about her. There was nothing matter-of-fact or nothing angry about her performance. She could have been brushing her teeth or having her hair k . done or being raped, for that matter. She was alive but somehow her emo- tions were suspended. She undulated back and forth, bumped gently, but there was nothing erotic about it. It was a sadistic re- versal of sex. She was hard and cold, a, symbol of sterility in' the midst of the whole artificial scene. BUT WHEN THE MUSIC was over, I found out that she really wasn't like thaIt Tt a aimmir after all.Tt,.