Mobilization:
An
American arousal
Ely r Miigan Daiy
Seventy-nine ears of editoril freedorn
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1969
NIGHT EDITOR: DANIEL ZWERDLING
Curbing U.S. imperialism
in South America
NELSON ROCKEFEL4ER'S recommend-
ations for future U.S. policy toward
Latin America, based on the findings he
made following his whirlwind tour last
winter, should be subjected to careful
scrutiny by Congress and the admin-
istration before they are adopted. While
most of the New York governor's sugges-
tions would prove valuable in improving
inter-American relations, one at least
- the escalation of military aid to gov-
ernments facing "Communist subver-
sion" - is incredibly ill-advised a n d
should be rejected out of hand.
Briefly, Rockefeller has recommended
that the Nixon administration follow a
three-part program to revitalize L a t i n
America's economy:
--Reduce tariffs so as to grant Latin
American exports preferential t r e a t -
ment;
-Embark on a "generous" refinancing
of the huge foreign debt owed the U.S.
by the hemisphere's nations;
-Reduce "impediments in the flow
of economic aid."
In addition, the Rockefeller report re-
commended that the United States
suspend or modify punitive legislation,
reserve the entire sugar quota for the
area, allow Latin Americans to use aid
funds to buy goods everywhere in the
hemisphere instead of just inside the
U.S., disregard domestic special-interest
groups in formulating policy, provide
more military aid and reorganize com-
pletely the policy-making apparatus in
Washington.
Stone free
AND SO now Canada, haven of draft-
resistors, is talking seriously about the
legalization of marijuana.
America is alive and stoned in Canada.
-J. S.
Ldiforial Sta/1
HENRY GRIX, Editor
MOST OF THESE measures, which in-
volve modifying aid and trade pro-
visions -- perhaps at the expense of some
American economic interests - in order
to benefit Latin America, are so laud-
able that it would probably be a good idea
to adopt them not only in our dealing
with our neighbors in this hemisphere,
Inut also with underdeveloped countries
in Asia and Africa. For example, the re
quirement that American aid funds be
used to purchase goods in the United
States and to transport such goods on
American ships prevents many aid-re-
ceiving nations from spending such funds
in the most efficient manner. By allow-
ing Latin American countries to use aid
dollars to purchase goods and shipping
from each other at competitive prices,
United States aid would be more produc-
tive to the entire region.
PRESIDENT NIXON has already taken
an admirable first step in asking the
world's developed nations to join us in
tariff reductions to the less developed
countries. His further pledge to, unilater-
ally reduce American tariffs to Latin
America is both evidence of his good faith
and a positive move toward reducing in-
ter-American tensions.
It would be even more admirable if
the President would reject Rockefeller's
recommendation that military aid to re-
gimes fighting "Communist subversion"
be stepped up. It is time that the United
States stopped supporting undemocratic
military regimes facing popular uprisings
which may or may not be Communist-in-
spired. Vietnam should have taught us
by now that the government of a foreign
power is not our business; our aid to
Latin American - as elsewhere - should
be confined to helping the people of the
area achieve economic development if
they so wish.
ALTHOUGH ANY program of economic
aid to the underdeveloped nations is
likely to face increasing opposition in
Confress and among the voters - to
whom the prospect of aiding other na-
tions has never been attractive - t h e
Nixon administration should strongly
support the economic recommendations
of Gov. Rockefeller's report, while reject-
ing its military aspects. All the economic
help in the world is not going to increase
rmur prestige in Latin America if we
continue our century-old policy of mili-
tary meddling in the internals affairs of
our neighbors to the south.
-JENNY STILLER
Editorial Page Editor
By FRANK BROWNING
Daily Guest Writer
FIVE MINUTES before the final bell sev-
en years ago our high school principal's
voice squeaked through the loudspeaker:
"Soviet warships are 200 miles from the
U.S. Cuban blockade, and President Ken-
nedy h a s been meeting continuously
throughout the day with State Depart-
ment officials over the chance of massive
nuclear .
Bus rides take an hour and a h a 1f I
thought as the big yellow t a n k started
moving. ICBM's take 20 minutes. If the
blast comes first, will we be 'just pulling
out of Flemingsburg, The Friendly Town
That Hospitality Built, or be on the mud
road where the little idiot kids in the Sec-
ond Grade get off. Or maybe I could get
off early to use a telephone to say goodbye
to my aunt in New York, or she could run
and get a plane before they came because
maybe Kentucky might not get bombed.
FIVE YARS LATER, standing in the
campus coffee house (U. of Kentucky) a
whispy little blackhaired girl in a peacock
cape cried about her brother who had just
left for the March on the Pentagon.
She was trembling for fear he would be
beaten or killed, and I kept asking her
wasn't there any way to catch them before
they got all the way out of town. There
was. I went. He wasn't h u r t, and the
moutains were lovely, like the last nastur-
tiums slyly slipped into some GI's M-14 on
the Pentagon steps. General Hershey-Bar
wore a cap of pink plastic fighter bombers.
Dick Gregory kept telling the LBJ Barba-
cue story, and folk songs trickled down the
grass into the Potomac.
Five hundred thousand, or maybe two
times or maybe three or maybe a fifth that
many people, will go to Washington Fri-
day. It will be the last march of the Sixties
and Tricia Nixon will probably go tuna
fishing off Florida. The next day David
will probably sleep late because it's Sun-
day morning.
Half those people at least will be march-
ing for the first time. Last time there weit
maybe 100,000 at best. So, if the skys don't
break Friday. the New Mobilization to End
the W a r March on Washington should
make itself one of the signal phenomena
of the century.
THEY HAVE TOLD US, in their own
tight lipped faith, what Dwight Eisenhow-
er said on his first Inauguration S t e p s:
"America is Great because She is Good.
and if She ever Ceases to Be Good, She
Will Cease to Be Great." These 500 thous-
and, the ones who sell fish and insurance
around the corner, are leaving with the
certainty that because America is s t i1
Good, that they, through the personal pow-
er of their own goodness, can set her aright
this weekend.
Immaculate in dress, clean of heart, they
will march forth to make an act which
would demonstrate the system's wayward
innocence and their own collective potency:
a psychic organsm, long on foreplay; an
ejaculated lunge by Gene Gladstone and
others to prove that by God this country
still is theirs. The thrust, 1 o n g delayed,
when decent people finally put it to the
Capitol Dome, slap the Pentagon back In
place and stride home confident t h e r e
won't be anymore fooling around.
'T'HREE HUNDRED YEARS in the mak-
ing, rising up from Ypsilanti, Northhamp-
ton and the sod of Arlington Cemetery, al-
ways before coyly interrupted by a slight
hand of an insensitive master, it is to be
the consommate act of a people's glory.
That is what Gene Gladstone is jabbering
about, each phrase punctuated by excited
distress. So too a prim, armbanded Chi-
cago Catholic Suburban mummy spilling
her soul to Time The Weekly Newsmaga-
zine: "As my husband and I have grown
older, we have become increasingly aware
of our Christian responsibilities and more
deeply committed to our moral obligations,
and this, too, led to my decision to par-
ticipate."
No: Indian Summer is g o n e. It is a
month before midnight. The march is of
Death, to deny Death, to plant the last
seed so that tomorrow will not be peren-
nial necrophelia. No new deals for Jack-
sonian and Johnsonian prophylacta. No
more misty ,dreams: It is a dance without
thalidomide to conceive and bring forth
the child of a Dream lodged in the heri-
tage of a rotting Puritan.
What is it that is our climax: that we do
still possess that rod, as Cleaver calls it,
which will impregnate our destinies with
the will of our own humanity. Long limp,
lovingly tucked i n t o impotency at the
mildest moment of arousal, this the last
march of the Aroused Sixties, shall bear
the child of a New Life, genetically en-
dowed but historically denied.
Those are at least the chances. But there
have been those chances of a coital con-
scious before. There have been those crises
where there was the chance of stripping
before one another and discovering a char-
acter that something in the soul demands
must be there, the crises in the girders of
the American Dream where we risked fac-
ing ourselves in a vision built of our own
sense of human value.
IT WAS THE CRISIS of Puritan Ameri-
ca, where within three generations of its
landing the vision of a shining new city, of
even a new man, the very embodiment of
the American ,hope, seemed to be sinking
into a quagmire of lost divinity. The very
virtues of salvation founded on postponed
life appeared to be crashing on the faith-
less bodies of the First Fathers' grand-
children: that the first indigenous popula-
tion would devise a human order to serve
the needs of their own lives indifferent to
divine election. Their arousal was to the
necessity of constructing a union through
which each man could come to understand
his relationship to himself, his brothers,
and the nature which surrounded him.
The response, Cotten Mather's response,
is that of Richard Nixon and the New York
Times. It is a way of response to funda-
mental crisis on which we have relied ever
since, a simple proposal for conditioning of
the wayward spirits back into the fold, to
explain that there were no real conflicts of
human freedom and action which the wiser
church fathers, the true elect, could not
resolve.
Mather was able to persuade his people
that they really had no fundamental prob-
lems which needed deep scrutiny, that they
had only gone astray. Further they could
be saved without even joining the ordain-
ed elect which had so far been essential for
salvation. And perhaps m o s t important,
one should ever be kind, gentle and neigh-
borly to those who refused to join the fold,
for by such good hearted education would
their dissonance with the Truth be washed
away.
James Reston does tell us precisely that
in his prescriptions f o r an enlightened
American Dream: the earthly Good Life is
a Sunken Heaven which in its fundamental
vision is but little altered from the ether-
ial and impotent slums of lock-laced an-
gels and billowy clouds: not Pepperland.
not even a stable fixture but a tissue-like
atrophy set upon a grid of trap d o o r s
where any who should dare challenge his
right to any of the Power of the Godhead
is tossed flaming, without parachute, to the
pits below. (And on we dream of Heaven
on Earth!)
THE PARALLEL IS VITAL. For from
both institutional men do we the commun-
ity of people accept not a but the divinely
inspired solution to the issue of our con-
tinued survival. No less to the men of the
Seventeenth Century Massachusetts than
to us in Twentieth Century Technamerica
was the continual struggle to maintain life
against the awesome force of entropy at
the crest of our consciousness. The evil
glens where Hester Prynne roamed are but
little removed from the chaos of the Con-
crete Jungle, the threat of chaos and dis-
organization which surround us each as in-
dividuals and as moral communities.
In either case what lies at stake is our
power of survival, and the chilling fear
that we are impotent before Nature to pre-
vent our own demise. The solution Cotten
Mather and James Reston offer us to beat
the entropy trap, a solution which c a n
bear no violation, is the terrestrial City of
God or better now the celestial C i t y of
Man, Werner von Braun its proud author.,
Then as now the only important issue
for Americans was whether they were in-
nately capable of building a mode of life
and a system of values responsive to their
own particular existential condition. But
the issue was denied for the collectivity,
denied before it had a full chance as a pro-
found consciousness.
THOSE BUDS OF AMERICA'S New
England Establishment, symbolized by
Mather and later to flourish in the Adams
family, threatened by material emascula-
tion from a growing secular power a n d
confronted full force by a disintegrating
religious ideology, used the weapon at their
easiest disposal: the pulpit.
As now the pulpit is indeed the N e w
York Times, no less was the New York
Times then the pulpit. For if there was
any organ of mass communication which
still reached into the soul of Puritan
America it was the Sunday Meeting House,
j u s t as the proclamation of Bonifacius
constituted a verbal News of the Week in
Review. What might have been 1o s t in
spiritual or m o r a I fervor still remained
deeply engrained as a social form. It form-
ed not only'the most regular media of so-
cial communication with a once or twice
weekly frequency, but also its ministers and
authors were by far the most articulate
users of the language: they were the offi-
cial interpreters of social reality. In that
sense the fact that the Sunday morning
congregation learned of t h e i r brothers'
trials, sorrows, and striving from the head-
lines of the minister's tongue is but little
different from the sermon on the Ameri-
can Dream heralded from the h a n d of
James Reston.
From both alike do we learn of the life,
death, conflict and exaltation of a people
convinced they are pursuing haltingly but
truly the path to the Last Best Hope for
the Glory of Mankind. And from both alike
have we learned to receive, but not to cre-
ate, an image of ourselves and a potency
to deliver ourselves into some future ter-
restrial City of God.
Mather stole the seed from a not yet
erect Puritan community just as surely as
the veteranarian's electrodes steal it from
the unknowing ram. And in doing so he
denied not the certainty that a successful
union between mans body and his spirit
would be spilled out. Who is to say that we
are not In fact barren, incapable of bear-
ing a child which is human unity, or that
the child would be but our finest encepha-
litic mongol? But the denial is to the pos-
sibility of having that knowledge, a knowl-
edge which at the very least must deflate
our faith in either celestial or terrestrial
Godhead.
TO SUPPOSE we are victims of a simple
class elite, founded upon economic or po-
litical manipulation alone is not only too
great a simplification of our condition, but
it importantly misses the point. The bar-
renness we suffer, be it of Route 66, of the
Military Pentangle, or of Sunset Strip, is
our own failure to conceive (of) a new life
which is fully our own.
Those who would throw off the chains
are ourselves, but the chains are not of
economy nor are they of polity: to the
extent that we bear these chains they but
decorate a thicker chastity of the soul pro-
hibiting self-conception internal to each of
us as men and pervading us generally as
communities. A self-imposed frigidity cele-
brated in its antithesis to the blast of
fusion; Mather and Reston-and Jackson
and FDR-are but frigidity made carnate
out of our collective drugstore impotence.
They are the expression of the dream we
fear to break, prophylactics made carefully
and with scientific precision, by the art
of our own hands. Our barrenness is in-
stead the paradox beneath the class strug-
gle wherein we dash about frantically to
construct stronger and stronger prophy-
lactics in the Dream that all we need is
better material, a more sensitive touch, and
an evener, more harmonious rhythm to
provide the eventual progeny its glory.
AND NOWHERE, almost by definition,
can we break through the Plastic Sunset
Strip to conceive what it is we must do for
our own conception. We try instead to fill
rivers with celluloid misconceptions of an
apparent efficiency aimed at irrigating
more orchards full of seedless apples.
Yet if our apples are seedless, and if
their only fruit are eunuchs, they are not
yet (aroused hope) sown with such fine,
chain-linked stitches that our psychic
fabric compells us to eat them.
If the Sixties have been that arousal
whose heat even Reston senses, then the
sperm has not yet died within us just as
whithering roots in California orchards
manage to send up valiant sports. There
is, however, no reason to suppose the roots
will survive the rancid irrigation indefi-
nitely or that the sperm will not live to be
succeeded. Only on occasion have we in the
American past gained a strength possess-
ing the internal force to penetrate-and
fundamentally evaluate-the Dream.
NOVEMBER 15 then must not be a
moratorium: it is just that alternative
which is a moment of death which we have
continually stacked one upon the other,
death upon death, when a life climax has
offered itself. A mobilization is all that we
may hope for, a hope that within us lies
the strength to mobilize the power, in this
ninth year of what we had hoped was the
decade of deliverance, for our gown collec-
tive spiritual orgasm.
z
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1
I
STEVE NISSEN RON LANDSMAN
City Editor Managing Edtor
MARCIA ABRAMSON Aocriate Managing Edituor
LANIE LIPPINCOTT . A.sociate Managing Editor
)TEVE ANZALONE.............Editorial Page Editor
JENNY STILLER Editorial Page Editor
LESLIE WAYNE s....ts Editor
JOHN GRAY .. ............... Literary Editor
MARY RADTKE..........C.....Contributing Editor
LAWRENCE ROBBINS... n.Photo Editor
WALTER SHAPIRO.. Daily Washington Correspondent
NIGHT EDITORS: Stuart Gannes, Martin Hirschman.
Jim Neubacher, Judy Sarasohn, David Spurr. Dan-
iel Zwerdllng.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
On methods of defense and combat for the war in
Washington
y 4c h
06
z ._
v
To the Editor:
WASHINGTON will be the big-
gest anti-war demonstration yet.
Since the Pentagon in 1967, the
pigs have come down on demon-
strators in an attempt to prevent
further mass demonstrations. The
ruling class and their front-man
Nixon will continue to use any
means necessary to stop us. They
will stop us because we support
the NLF and we demand the im-
mediate withdrawal of all U.S.
troops from Vietnam. We under-
stand that Nixon has no intentions
of changing his Vietnam policy.
Our answer to Nixon is that we
will continue to demonstrate with
increasing numbers and by raising
the level of struggle. Realizing
this, we know that the pigs might
come down.
The way we can struggle with
this and win is by moving in af-
finity groups and pairs. This way
people can be together and not
be isolated. When pigs come down
and try to bust a brother or sister
there will be 10 or 20 people to
fight and free him. People should
form affinity groups and pairs on
their buses and at the movement
center. These groups should march
and move together in the streets.
Wa h p1,na.-, 1 ihnldhave'n np~
fore and they have proved suc-
cessful. Washington will be our
victory. We will struggle and we
will win,
All Power to the People!
-SDS
Nov. 10
Old Glory
To the Editor:
SUPPORTERS of American in-
volvement in Vietnam have devised
a shrewd tactic to discredit the
Nov. 15 protests, and the Mora-
torium leaders seem to have
acquiesced!
By urging administration back-
ers to fly the Stars and Stripes as
an indication of national unity,
they are attempting to define the
Inoratorium activities as anti-
American. That strategy, and
Transportation Secretary John
Volpe's labeling of demonstration
organizers as "communist or com-
munist inspired," will "prove" to
the nation's newspaper readers
that all war opposition is un-
patriotic.
Participants in this week's
Moratorium activities should not
fall rav to the Agnew men ~ytality' t
tary intervention
ideals.
with American
-Joe Winer, Grad
Nov. 11
Honors for BIGS
To the Editor:
LAST YEAR the BGS degree
was established in the LSA College
to permit students to earn a de-
gree without any distribution or
concentration requirements. One
obvious drawback to this degree
is the inability to receive recog-
nition forconcentrating ina
single department, even if a stu-
dent meets the requirements that
department normally holds for the
BA degree.
Now it is proposed by the LSA
Honors Council to allow depart-
ments within the College to grant
an honors citation upon gradu-
ation to those BGS students who
do honors work in their particular
department. This citation would
also effectively grant recognition
by the College that the student
receiving it has concentrated in
that department from which he
received the citation.
Presently only individual de-
citation, and not one that would
circumvent the original spirit of
the degree.
ANOTHER alternative would be
to allow an honors citation from
a particular department, but at
the same time permit College rec-
ognition of non-honors BGS con-
centrators in any department.
--Anthony P. Jiga
Sociology Students Union
Nov. 8
Blac discordant note
To the Editor:
I TAKE fundamental and seri-
ous issue with the Jim Neubacher
column (Tues., 11/11) covering
the Educational School Retreat,
where he states that the "major
discordant note," of what he
chooses to term a quiet weekend,
came from the Black student-
faculty causus.
The Black request for adequate
time and attention to their long
neglected education needs was no
doubt the most creative act, in
terms of the basic social needs of
U.S. Society, that occurred during
the retreat as a whole, it pro-
bothered to look into the history
either of Black educational prob-
ceived President Fleming's support.
WE HAVE a sad record of little
effort and outright lack of inte-
rest in even that effort. As for
the Retreat as a whole, it pro-
duced some of the most promising
kinds of commitments to change
that have ever been heard in the
school. And the Black part in that
process is hardly a "discordant
note." Discordant to whom?
-Prof. William K. Medlin
Nov. 11
Perversion
To the Editor:
I'D LIKE to apologize for ever
having agreed with Gore Vidall's
evaluation of William Buckley
Jr. After Sunday's session with
Mr. Buckley there is no doubt in
my mind that he is not a crypto-
Nazi. A Nazi is a German fascist,
Buckley is an ordinary American
fascist. Besides, Buckley is much
better than a Nazi. When Hitler
told us that the Jews were an in-
ferior race and began to kill them,
he employed little charm or
grace. Buckley is more careful-
when he asserts that the black
man in the South is incapable of
governing himself he does no t
openly, advocate genocide, he