Seventy-Sixth Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD m CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS Expedience, Pathology and Morality WherreOpinionse F ree. 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH. NEWS PHONE: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1965 NIGHT EDITOR: JOHN MEREDITH The Indonesian Rebellion: The Power Balance Shifts S HERECENT COUP and counter-coup in Indonesia, along with an impending civil war, can be analyzed with respect to their manifold political, military and social consequences. The most notable political implica- tion is the inevitability of an ensuing, behind the scenes tripolar power struggle among the armed forces, the Communist party and President Sukarno himself. It appears certain, as one Southeast Asian expert has noted, that because De- fense Minister Nasution, and more re- cently, army chief Maj. Gen. Suharto were the chief forces for Sukarno and against a Communist takeover, they will emerge as the most powerful figures in the country. Evidence of this is Suharto's denuncia- tion of the air force in spite of Presi- dent Sukarno's statements to the con- trary. In a broadcast to the Indonesian people, according to the Associated Press, Suharto denounced the army and then "pointedly noted that Sukarno, in a ra- dio message earlier Monday, had absolv- ed the air force of any involvement in a coup attempt." This successful insubordination on Su- harto's part can only lead one to con- clude that Sukarno has lost for the mo- ment his previous effective control of the political-military apparatus. IN ORDER to reconsolidate his own pow- er, the president will have to effectu- ate a two-pronged effort to undermine the position of Nasution and Suharto and to reduce the power of the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party). Success in this effort would enable him to reas- sert his paramountcy within the govern- ment complex. Sukarno will doubtless attempt to con- tinue playing off the PKI against the ar- my. In light of the now-complete rupture between the two, however, this may no longer prove operational. Ever-increas- ing pressure from either side may compel him to abandon his middle-of-the-road policy and'align himself with one or the other. Should events come to this, Sukarno might feel the necessity of throwing his weight behind the army. Such backing of the conservative faction could conceiv- ably force him to rethink his foreign pol- icy into lines more conducive to re-estab- lishing pro-Western, and in particular, pro-American relations. The other, more realistic, alternative would be for him to enact a series of pro- Communist coups within the armed forc- es and ally himself with the PKI. The predominant factor arguing in support of this is the current rift between the army and air force. Sukarno may conclude from this inter- military split that the combined stabil- ity of the armed forces is too precarious and that therefore it would prove dis- astrous to back them over the popular, well-organized PKI. THE MILITARY implications are essen- tially twofold. If the fighting contin- ues only sporadically throughout the country's 2500 islands, it should prove no significant threat to the government. On the other hand, the Communists may carry out a concentrated, unified effort on islands remote from Jakarta. Seymour Freiden of the New York Her- ald Tribune recently wrote the following in relation to this possibility: The PKI "has caches of automatic weapons and- small arms smuggled into Indonesia over the last few years. The paramilitary units of 'peasants and workers,' so described by party chief D. N. Aidit, have been or- ganized into a table of organization drafted by staff officers, guerrilla ex- perts and army commissars of the Red Chinese army." Thus Sukarno may find the situation deteriorating into an un- managable civil war. LASTLY come the social implications of the current unrest. Numbering close to three million are the latently power- ful, predominantly middle class, overseas Chinese residing in Indonesia. They are among the principal financial supporters of the PKI and will thus be looked upon with increasing suspicion and hostility by Sukarno's government. Their assimila- tion into the Indonesian community be- ing thus forestalled, they will continue to pose an ever-greater threat to inter- nal stability. -NELSON LANDE THERE WAS this buff at a party Saturday night who is just like what America is today-will- ing to do almost anything which "freedom," "necessity" or his own nonmorality say is good. In political science today there is a dominant fascination with how our various values, institu- tions and arrangements operate interdependently to maintain equilibrium in a "complex" sys- tem. Theory and methodology sup- port this glorification and mere justification of all the "intrica- cies." Eventually, academics and laymen alike can talk of little else but how the system does work and occasionally how it might work better. In sociology, the dominant school of thought-functionalism -is merely the same thing. In both disciplines, one rarely asks to what end the system's elements operate, in what areas these opera- tions have detrimental effects even while upholding equilibrium, how things might be arranged al- ternatively or what the workings of the components are functional for. PSYCHOLOGY becomes more "experimentalist" - more frag- mented, more isolated from men. It focuses on the micro-level of stimulus-response chains, moving from a wholistic, environmental laboratory to the controlled steril- ity of the "scientific" laboratory. Studying English or philosophy we do, perhaps, get a notion of priorities and alternatives, but somehow it is all too nicely ir- relevant and unimmediate. If his- tory has lessons about the past, one applies them to the present too much as exercises. It is not for real. Education as a whole seems little but more processing of func- tional components for the system. To be sure, an increasing number of youfg people say they do not care to participate -in the more usual elements of that system- business, public relations, gov- ernment, the military-and in- stead go into social service occu- pations like the Peace Corps or possibly teaching itself., BUT THIS does not really mean there is going to be the renais- sance some people predict or that there is already more freedom for courageous and self-fulfilling ac- tivities which are not directly functional. Most of these occupations are themselves merely functional. Those who formulate and control them need to maintain, expe- diently, the arrangements from which that power derives in the first place, and the programs are carefully limited to simple social work (one can teach the "natives" how to grow more potatoes on their land but should never in- troduce the question of who con- trols where the profits from pota- to-growing go.) One may deal with problem children or problem families, but because there is only the ethic of contributing to the smoothfunc- tioning of the system it is in- expedient and therefore incon- ceivable to ask if the moral im- peratives are perhaps centered someplace else. THE "SOCIAL SERVICE" jobs therefore offer little that is dif- ferent. Given the safety of these jobs, their acceptableness and the fact that it is plenty hard to find decent jobs anyplace else, one wonders if the supposed "altru- ism" with which they are under- taken is at all what that term has traditionally meant. And Daniel Bell, noted sociolo- gist at Columbia University, has written of the End of Ideology. The American experience, he says -the dominantly administrative requirements of its present com- plexities, the diminution of class differentiations-has invalidated all those previous conceptions of social change and of current con- ditions which were expressed in terms of universal laws and which aroused men's passions. IT IS'ALL RELATED, and I am afraid it shows that for most people Bell is all too accurate. Our condition in America today kills our capacity to act as complete and moral human beings. Instead, there is the ethic of necessity- WHY NOT? By JEFFREY GOODMAN not humanistic necessity, but ex- pedient necessity. The buff at that party told us it was immoral to kill (as in Viet Nam) but that he would kill any- way. Somewhat to preserve his creature existence (personal self- defense or the self-defense of "freedom" against "Communism") but mostly because he could not maintain "face" if he became a protestor. It wasn't that we asked him not to shoot back at the man who would fire upon him. It was simply that we wanted him to consider that action, to stop rationalizing it lamely as "necessary because I was sent there by my government," to ponder actually (instead of at a party) alternatives to his govern- ment sending him there (and his going) in the first place. NOR DO OUR academic dis- ciplines (which are supposed to be ahead of current thought styles) consider alternatives in this way. Ills are merely malfunctions, merely pathological (caused by foreign bodies in the system), as opposed to fundamental. The basic questions are assumed to be answered (instead of having again to be asked). The problem is how to reduce the needs of the system to more quantifiable and administrable terms, rather than to examine, courageously, the re- lation between these problems and what the system is in the first place. Thus the notion of moral or humanistic end (and of how so- ciety should operate to be func- tional for these ends) seems to have evaporated. This, in turn, creates the end of ideology. In personal as well as social think- ing one must always be "realistic," and the realism is always in terms of minimum disruption, personally and socially. One may believe that killing is immoral, but one soon sees that it is nevertheless "necessary." Or, on the other side of the coin, one loses the capacity to think that there might be more to eliminat- ing poverty, to improving the mass media, to upgrading cities, to dealing with the new leisure or to elevating men's spirits than simply a larger and more efficient Wel- fare Service; with all its sickness of nonmoral limits to expression, its dependencies and its sad lone- liness from oneself and others. IT IS NOT EASY to know what .is doing this to us. My first guess is that it is the combination of the size of the units (political, educational, religious, corporate) in which we all serve and our complex technology, which re- quires size, and a good fitting of all the "parts" to operate effi- ciently (if at all). One's vote truly does not count. There is a real and perceived in- ability to make any basic altera- tions in or stands against arrange- ments which confront us (the same thing as acting courageously or morally). This isultimately generalized to problems whose locus is very immediate to us. If there is 'an Establishment, then, it is certainly no conspiracy, for the ethic of expedient neces- sity which it hands us is itself expedient and necessary: the ma- chine could not operate otherwise. Moreover, those in the Establish- ment are Just as much captured by circumstances as we little people. THIS VIEW seems at first to destroy the 'basis on which social protest is based. The moral vacuum of our society is an inevitable consequence of the need to co- ordinate an overly-large, over- technologized social system. There is, then, not much to do but destroy the machines and/or revert to feudal-sized units (States' Rights, the Black Mus- lims, communities like Green- wich Village to an extent) which are relatively free of interlockings with the outside world and there- fore relatively free to organize around different ethics. But as more people move to higher density areas, become more dependent on each other and have more leisure time to be structured by the functionalizing media and entertainment agencies, this ex- pediency ethic is likely to control one's life even more pervasively. THIS IS the dilemma which must inevitably face the sensitive person today, the person who still feels the need and has the capa- city to act morally and to express what is in his guts. He can protest for education which is free to make people who will not fit (but who will know why and who are capable of hap- piness in consciously not fitting); he can seek the freedom of the Negro and the poor to achieve a better status for themselves while still maintaining their culture and their spontaneity; he can try to convince potential soldiers to act courageously on their distaste for America's wars and to consider alternatives; he can seek social control of production and distri- bution. To some extent he may succeed and the society may be humanized. By and large, how- ver, he will have to love the struggle itself, for there will not be many accomplishments to push him on. On the other hand, he can limit his humanizing efforts to himself and a few friends, to pre- serving his irreverence and his sense of self, to working within the society only to the extent that it is necessary to survive. (If he is a talented artist or even a good teacher he can perhaps earn cleaner money, but this is much more difficult.) He can thus try to create his own (semi) autonomous, commun- ity, perhaps even to recruit new members. In a way, he will still be a "revolutionary."' Merely by humanizing himself he creates one more person, one more commun- ity which will remain independent against the tightening days ahead. LISTENING to that buff Sa- turday night did not tell me which alternative to choose (I think it is possible to pursue both simultaneously), but it did con- vince me to hang onto my insan- ity. Generation, I-Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry Birth Control and U.S. Policy TEW CONTEMPORARY problems have greater import and arouse more con- flicting opinions than the issue of birth control. Not only has it seriously influ- enced the thinking of college students throughout the country, but it has po- tentialities of affecting citizens in every nation throughout the world. The basis for the growing concern and interest in the problem is economic, on a national and individual level. The world is rapidly approaching the point where it could be faced with drastic shortages of natural requirements as the rate of consumption surpasses production. Many areas, such as Latin America, Pakistan, and India are already so over- crowded that they cannot support their present populations. These countries face a future of even more people with trepi- dation and alarm. Their vast population creates tremendous tensions within their borders with an accompanying growing desire to alleviate the problem. COMPREHENSIVE program of birth control, involving distribution of con- traceptives and instruction in their use, would be an important step in solving the problems of these areas since it would reduce population growth or at least hold the population level steady. The ability to limit offspring to the number that *the parents can adequate- ly support would, in alleviating the popu- lation-vs.-resources problem, benefit chil- dren by giving them greater opportuni- ties in terms of education and health. Countries whose populations are ex- panding at alarming rates are in most cases too poor to carry on effective na- tional programs of birth control. Presi- dent Johnson clearly recognized a need for the United States aid when he said t... L.S. - I - .L-4" n - - '.^f +k . . . .'. I- n that the U.S. would "seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources." ALTHOUGH there has been a vigorous increase in tax supported birth con- trol programs within the U.S., relatively little has yet been done to help impov- erished and desperate nations. India presently has a population of 460 million. In 1949, the birth rate of 40 per 1000 people was somewhat balanced by the death rate of 30. By 1961, the birth rate was the same but the death rate had dropped to 18. Experts expect that at this rate, India's population will double by the turn of the century. In Latin America, the population is in- creasing at the rate of 3 per cent each year. By the year 2000, it will exceed 600 million at the present rate. The stand- ard of living in both India and Latin America is low. In the latter, some pri- vate family-planning clinics are giving out birth control information, but in many cases the clinics are too expensive for the average person to afford. The Agency for International Devel- opment, the organization in Washington in charge of giving foreign assistance in order to ease the population problem, makes it clear that United States funds will not be used to supply contracep- tives to other nations, but will be used for "research, training and communica- tions." RANTED, these are valuable objectives, but they become almost meaningless when the U.S. does not distribute the de- vices themselves. "Research, training and communications" should be used to sup- plement a vigorous distribution of effi- cient methods of birth control and con- EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of three separate reviews of the current issue of "Gen- eration," covering the maga- zine's general fiction, nonfiction and poetry selections, an article on avant-garde music and an essay on American involvement in Viet Nam. The next two re- views will appear later this week. By PROF. ALAN T. GAYLORD English Department THE CURRENT ISSUE of "Gen- eration, The Inter-Arts Maga- zine" offers 168 pages, the most yet, for 50 cents, with the as- surance of Editor David L. Birch that quality accompanies quantity. Despite their tendency toward pretentious self-congratulation, the editors' claims about the grad- uate and undergraduate contribu- tors (whom they classify as "reli- able greatness" and encourageable "catalysts"!) may be allowed: within the magazine's categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography, there is both dis- tinguished and promising work, well worth anyone's time and money. I am not sure, however, I un- derstand Birch's definition of quality as that which "experi- ments and promises a future qual- ity." If he speaks of the product, not the writer, it is hard to find much in this issue which is for- mally or stylistically radical. It might better be said that the lines from Wallace Stevens, for all their banality, which have been set over the table of con- tents point to a feature of the magazine which becomes its most distinctive virtue: "It made him see how much/ Of what he saw he never saw at all." The best work here sees, deeply and clearly, and makes us see, too. FOR EXAMPLE: H. Ramsey Fowler's "Silences," a gathering of six photographs. Is it possible to see Silence? Not always-some pictures cannot escape the auto- matic literalness of the camera lens and the exposed plate, and one is aware that, in one instance, it is simply that there are no people on the tree-lined lakefront; ergo, it must be quiet there. This is not poetry. Another shot is of a section of sidewalk and storefront, one pe- destrian; this works a little better -there is detail, human artifacts, posters and yet an abscence of life, so a certain kind of silence. But even here, the lens is still at the mercy of every detail, and one is reminded more of the bleak gaze of the Ashcan School than the blank eyeball of Zen. identify the real world as cover in the ambient strange new relationships familiar things. to dis- silence in old THAT KIND of heightened awareness where common objects are thrown into preternatural vividness illuminates the maga- zine's first piece, John Conron's "The Prize." A boy, out for crabs, discovers an eel in a tidepool. What follows is neither particularly remarkable nor conclusive on the face of it; yet Conron etches the boy's com- pulsion 'so sharply against the deserted and alien beach, the sea, the littered rot of seawrack, the seductive but deadly eel, that one senses archetypal rhythms behind his ritualistic account of the hunt and the two predators. Heavy with that basic intuition of life which can create symbols, the story yet refrains from impel- ling the reader toward allegory; the world is metamorphosed into something both familiar and strange in a way which commands an immediate emotional response. Part of its magic lies in that too-much-neglected capacity of the artist to evoke by invoking, to name things by their names; this is how the spell works: The bottom, oddly magnified and distorted by the water and' the white light, was spotted with tentacled anemones and fringed and turreted moss, stone lilies and purple sun stars; scat- tered periwinkles, their shells encrusted with white sea mat, clambered over thick ridges of barnacles. Bits of dark blue and pearl shells were strewn about. There were mussels, he noticed, but no crabs feeding on them. The crevices lay in a murky gray shadow, its static forms blurred; as periodic gusts of w i n d stirred the surface; splotches of dim light danced into the shadow, mottling and rocking the forms. THE THREE other stories in the fiction section (edited by Me- gan Biesele and George A. White) also offer more vision than mes- sage, which I find commendable. Megan Biesele writes good like a Fiction Editor should, in her "The Absence of Pigeons"; revealing, in her account of a young novitiate's state of mind the second week at a convent, that she has had to write her way into a balanced and watchful sensitivity without being able to eliminate altogether those traces of over-writing which over- load the nerves. But if there are hackneyed pieces of expressionism like "the alarm just outside the door at the end of the room ticked om- zled. She shut - her eyes and thought of tiny leaf-shaped pigeon tongues moving liquidly in tiny beaks. JEFFREY MITCHELL'S "The Tree's Flight" offers a fantasy which treads the razor's edge be- tween whimsy and sureal fable. The donnee seems unpromising: a tree uproots itself and flies away, sap chuckling in its veins, leafy arms flapping-like the D.T.'s by Disney; it observes clouds, among which is one wearing horn-rimmed glasses. As an exercise in mood and tone, the story deserves praise, but its allegory, even though com- municated in a sentence rhythm which persuades the senses before the mind, is the less significant part of Mitchell's accomplishment. Barbara A. K. Adams, in her "For the Wonder of Love," writes vividly of a young unwed mother suffering a very maculate parturi- tion; but the effective simplicity of narration and realism of de- scription are at odds with the plot, which depends upon a peri- pateia involving our surprised re- classification of the story's type, and the rushing in of magic: a mixture of 0. Henry and Pre- Raphaelitism, if you will. I FIND the poetry section the least satisfying, and, ironically, I suspect it is because Poetry Editors Merrill Gilfillan and James B. Greenberg were not able to claim their share of the maga- zine's general copiousness. That is, there is not enough room given to Steeve Bronson for one to dis- cover whether the melange of impressions in his "Southwest of Four Corners" (Navaho phrases, highway signs, desert flora) could fall into a collage which makes sense-lacking a larger context, lacking other related poems, his verb-poor, noun-stuffed column of words does not come off as a poem, visually or aurally. Nor can one tell, from Theodore Hall's "August" and "Meeting," whether his talent for making an image particular and relevant will marry itself to that talent for placing the. right word in the right place which turns prose to pros- ody. Nor can one tell if the frag- ments of Joel Greenberg's "Frag- ments from Troilus in Hell" could,. within an unfragmented whole, capitalize upon the intriguing pos- sibilities the title suggests-al- though one might guess from his "All About Alice" that he can control what he wants to say and is aware of the themes of inno- cense and experience which can be developed through juxtaposing nursery-rhyme to the recollections of irony in tranquility, seeing the Yet despite the momentary breaking-in of sound and sense with sightings like "the night hawk/ scoops through lamplight loops/ over dark roof-tops," or the metaphysical wit of "a moth ticks at god/ who squints quivering threads of glass," I am at a loss to sift through these dreams of solitude: I do not know his "three dear girls," nor who Rabbi Hiyya of the Inscrutable Quote was, nor how, finally, it is with him. But I am willing to divide the blame equally. FINALLY, the seven poems translated by Konstantinos Lar- das from the Greek of C. P. Cafavy would seem generous quantity; -yet even here one needs more because, lacking their original expression, these phantoms of poems need a -great deal of company to assume adequate substance. More impressive for their tone than their images (as in "Manual Komnenos" and "The Ides of March"), they do suggest the res- onances of a unique and authentic voice, a poetic "presence" which compensates for lack of poetic in- tensity. Furthermore, Lardas can write a poetic line with just the right amount of heft and can look beyond it to a developed thought or sentence (Milton would have called it a "period") which moves across lines with that sense of pre-ordained rightness which Yeats described as satisfying "like the click of closing a box." THE NONFICTION section, edi- ted by Donald Rothman, has the greatest elan. Of the two pieces I shall consider, the first, "Exis- tentialism and the Work of Emily Dickinson" by Maurice Benznos, may be politely dismissed: its scope is too large for a 15-page article, its perspective too dim, and we do not need the elegant cliches of Sartre to make us see the existential agonies of Emily's verse. But with the second, Tony Stoneburner's "Sermon for the Funeral of Hosea Victor Stone- burner, The Methodist Church, Salesville, Ohio, 2 April 1963," all the "Generation" editors' pride be- comes pardonable. Here is something novel but not truculently avant-garde, a ,private vision in a public form, a dis- covery of self within a memorial tribute to the farmer-grandfather who was the kind of hero "equal to his epoch" which the poet sings. Long (because expanded since delivery), it builds upon a variety of materials-grandfatherly auto- biography, the writer's journal entries, earlier verse, memories meaing grows out of the whole like green fields from rocky soil. OF STONEBURNER'S aware- nes, his gift of vision' which can touch one's self and others with undestructive humor, the follow- ing testifies, even as it helps to account for the elaborate length of his sermon: Grandfather could be succinct but often he enjoyed being long- winded Grandmother asked me not to be longwinded but I am grand- son of longwinded Grandfather, whose prayers in this place (the Methodist Church, Salesville) we learned to join, rather than try to outwait them, for only if we added our energies to his (reader of Bible and new- spapers, he had the sum total of everything to pray to God about) was there hope of reach- ing the conclusion and AMEN. That I, too, may reach con- clusion and Amen, I offer another passage which will at once illus- trate the's form of the sermon's narration and bring together mov- ingly the poet's eye and the par- son's faith; here we see as, indeed, we can see in much of this "Gen- eration") that it 'still is gratify- ingly possible for the artist to say a new thing without abandoning what he learns from, loves, in the old: Although Grandfather was pre- pared for his death, we were not grief a bereavement emphasized be- cause the farm is lovely with the signs and traces of new life. the spring, like the cup of the psalmist (Psalm 23 was read during the service), overflowing; willows filming with first leaf and daffodils blooming; leap- frogs croaking and bird chirrup- ing (perhaps the whippoorwill "hollered" last night) a central emptiness yet his Lord is our Lord How Many. AMERICAN correspondents are wrangling with American mili- tary headquarters here (in Wash- ington) over the release of casual- ty statistics which some newsmen consider to be deliberately mis- leading. Sharp questioning of a military spokesman by correspondents caused a United States Informa- tion Service official to chide the reporters for acting "like certified public accountants." A few days earlier, at a briefing on the U.S. Marines' tough battle with the Viet Cong around Chu 1i 4 I A * 9 i