Ehe gthgau Batty Seve'ty-.Third Yeer EDITED AND MAGWAED 3Y STUDENTS OF'THE UNIVETITsY OF MICHIGAN - NDER AUTIHORITY O BOARD IN CORTKOL Or! STUDENT PUBLICATIONS 'W 'e Px°ArI Pe STUDENT PUBLICATIONS LDG., Amr AIioi, MICH., PHONE NO 2-3241 Truth Wil 'PrewaiV' Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in at; reprints. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Readers Comment on Abortion, Reviews UESDAY. APRIL 14. 1964 NIGHT EDITOR: KENNETH WINTER The Civil Rights Movement And the Southern Stand TE SOUTH is fighting a losing cause. That much at least is evident. But the cause is not necessarily as perverted as the massed propaganda sources of the country would have us believe. It might even, in fact, be legitimate. The whole history of the United States is based upon the philosophy of change, the idea that if we change what we have we might arrive at something better. It all started with the eighteenth century philosophers - Voltaire was one - who spelled out the idea of rational progress. This idea has supplied the very founda- tion of our nation. AND IT HAS PROVED a very resilient foundation indeed. In a constantly changing world of hairsbreadth escapes from oblivion and ever-developing pat- terns of social, political, philosophical and economic ideas, the ability of a nation to accept and adapt itself to these changes is crucial. It is the main determinant of how long a country is to survive, at least in our Western civilization. But the trouble is that no one has ever proved that the eighteenth century philosophers were right. We still aren't sure that there really is such a thing as progress or that the constant change which masquerades under this name prog- ress is really "good." EMERSON made a valid point when he said that "society never advances." Progress in one area can easily be coun- terbalanced by reversals in another. Much of the South, the areas putting up the greatest fight against civil rights, is closed and static as a society. The system has been refined and made to work. The peo- ple within it see no reason why they should have to change it to suit a social philosophy developed elsewhere in the country. Who can say that the goals of the Ne- gro revolution are good per se? Who can say for sure that when some Negroes find they are no more liked by unprejudiced white neighbors than by prejudiced ones, they will be any happier than they are now? Who can say that they will find a hotly competitively world any easier to take than a prejudiced one? There are, after all, a great many unhappy white people. AFTER THE CIVIL WAR-that cata- clysmic expression of the Southerner's, faith in himself and his society - the South was brutally handled and then de- serted by the North in a manner hardly calculated to bring on desirable results. The Southerner was left with a ruined society which he had to rebuild and very little to rebuild with. He quickly reverted to a. tenacious .vision of the pre-Civil War concepts of peach trees and Southern hospitality, and it is there that much of the South has remained to this day. Florida, North Carolina in parts, At- lanta, Tennessee and Kentucky to some extent, and Texas are some of the excep- tions. For the rest, white supremacy is the law of the land, one of the major building blocks for people that have very little to biuld upon. Make no mistake about it, most of the South is dismally poor. There is everywhere the upper- crust elite preserving the old white col- umns and mint julips for the rest to pay homage to, but for the rest there is prac- tically nothing. The Negro has, perhaps, his rights to gain, but there is next to nothing that these rights can provide him with. Enter now the North or, at the least, Northern ideas. Concepts of ambition, change and new political and social proc- esses and ideas begin to intrude, threaten- ing the society the Southerner has built up and lived with for a hundred years. He is told to build new schools, factories and homes so he can compete in the feverish world of the market economy. He is told to change his political processes because they are hopelessly outmoded. And most importantly, he is told to change his re- lations with the Negro because, for some reason, his current system is somehow "bad." IT IS HARDLY STRANGE, then, that he reacts and fights back. What gallan- try there may once have been in his de- fense has long since been eclipsed by the bitterness and nastiness engendered by the struggle. Nevertheless he is fighting a very real struggle for nothing less than the preservation of his own society. He is fighting it over a concept that the rest of the country happens to have currently espoused and wishes to force upon him. In many parts of the South it will be a struggle to the end. It will not be over until the last Southerner of the old South is made by federal marshals and the National Guard to give up the last tattered remnants of the flag of the old Confederacy and surrender them to the consecration of a dead history. THE PRICE of trying to maintain the status quo will prove very costly. In the face of the Negro revolution, the old South will not, in fact, survive. -ROBERT JOHNSTON To the Editor: THE ARGUMENTS against le- galized abortion presented by both Mr. Williams and Mr. Gordon seem to espouse as a moral ideal the concept that one who enjoys sex must pay the consequence in children. This concept ignores any issues of good or harm for the child, the parent or society. The argument that abortion should be labeled murder is a shallow one and only clouds the real issues. The line of reason which says that preventing the development of an embryo is mur- der would logically extend to say that preventing the sperm and the ovum from uniting is murder, and this reasoning will lead to the con- clusion that it is murder for un- married people to not be promis- cuous. Furthermore, our society has never treated a miscarriage, induced or otherwise, as a death. The laws do not treat abortion as murder. We don't have funerals for miscarriage, and we start counting the age of a human being from the day of his birth and not from nine months before. * .* * would be best treated by some sort IT WAS also suggested that the problem involved in abortion of moral reform rather than a legalization of abortion. The im- plication was that if promiscuity was eliminated there would be no need for abortions. But this argu- ment ignores the case of the mother of seven children who can- not afford to feed another, and the case of the 12-year-old girl who has been raped. It also ig- nores the statistics that indicate that as many, if not more, abor- tions are done on married women. To suggest that some sort of moral reform will eliminate the need for abortions shows a failure to view the situation honestly or prac- tically. If it is morally wrong to not punish a women for enjoying sex, it would seem far more wrong to force her to bring into this over- populated world a child that she and no one else wants. It is sug- gested that we should learn to adjust to the illegitimate child, but the fact is that the child is not wanted and will feel the resent- ment from the parents and the rest of society. Forcing the mother to have the unwanted child often results in serious emotional harm to the parents and the child; it also harms the society that must support the misfit. A timely abor- tion performed by a qualified doc- tor is generally safer than a live birth; yet enforcement of our pres- ent abortion laws may create a danger by forcing the pregnant woman to go to a quack who has no medical qualifications. WHILE I DO NOT begrudge the right of anyone to believe that abortion is immoral, I do challenge the right to impose this belief on others. The raison d'etre of any criminal law is that it prevents some harm to society or to the person committing the crime. No law should exist solely because of certain moral beliefs when the law perpetuates a harm rather than prevents one. -Bruce Laidlaw, '66L Symbol of Society To the Editor: IT IS CURIOUS that Mr. Haller, who, in the past, has been at such pains to defend the lives of wild animals, should now under- take so easily to dismiss the pos- sible lives of human beings. I do not necessarily oppose legalized abortion itself-I suppose that our society has no right to dictate popular morals. What I do oppose is the philosophical and psycho- logical sickness which Mr. Haller's widely held viewpoint signifies. It may well be our political and legal right to be sick; nevertheless the sickness ought 0o be pointed out. If human eggs are like chicken eggs, then how are human beings different from chickens? May we then kill them and eat them as Jonathan Swift once modestly pro- posed? As to whether the human foetus is a human being or not, I think it is obvious that the only thing which will prevent it from becoming a human being is its death. Adults, too, cease to be human beings at death; unless Mr. Haller can offer another cri- terion of distinction, we must as- sume that the foetus is "human." THE REAL POINT, however, is much more profound, much less hazy. Whether or not foetuses are human, Mr. Haller's casual at- titude towards possible human be- ings is the identical attitude which underlies the philosophy that makes all all punched-out com- puter cards in our world. If our criterion for the value of human life, possible or actual, is its use- fulness or convenience, it is easy to see why, abortion is acceptable. The illegitimate child or the child born in poverty is likely to be in- convenient. Therefore, let us be rid of it. It may very well be true that human life, or the possibility of it, is meaningless, particularly when such as "legalized abortion" is dis- cussed publically, as was the case in the April 2 Daily, there will appear loud, vehement cries of protest from someone who has be- come so emotionally involved with the subject that he fails to gras the ful significance of the dis- cussion, and is protesting without really understanding why. Such is the case with both Miss Williams and Mr. Gordon whose letters ap- peared in the "Letters" column of the April 8 Daily, and whose short-sightedness and almost total lack of realism readily exemplify an emotional commitment to a premise or premises which have little, if any, bearing on the dis- cussion. I concur with Miss Williams and Mr. Gordon in that I feel that abortion has, in fact, very much to do with morality, but perhaps not for the same reasons. Is it "moral" to bring an unloved, un- wanted, fatherless child into an unsympathetic, in fact, contemp- tuous world? Is it "moral" to mark, maim and ruin the life of a young girl who has no desire whatever to become a mother? Is it "moral" to allow a young wom- an to bleed to death on the kitchen table of some incompetent "doctor?" These are the symptoms of a neurotic society that the legalization of abortion would help erase. And yet, Miss Williams does not want to treat the symptom which "may arrest, but hardly cure the illness." She wants, as a solution, to "be puritanical enough to emphasize that a woman is more than a bundle of sex awaiting the exploitation of man." * * * HOW CAN you be so naive? Set aside your Victorian ideals for a moment, Miss Williams, and look at the reality of the world. Pas- sion is real, sex is real, pregnancy is real and abortion is real. You want to change the American morality, to "wage an all out campaign against the double standard of morals in our coun- try." This in itself is certainly commendable, but is this all we are to do? While you are waging your cam- paign, several thousands of un- wed mothers are going to produce several thousands .of misunder- stood, neurotic and vengeful chil- dren; several thousands of young girls are going to dies or become permanently crippled at the hands of irresponsible "do-it-yourself" surgeons; and many thousands of parents are going to die a slow death submerged in their own misery, never understanding what it was that "they" did wrong. This is real, Miss Williams. is it "moral ?" *. * * BOTH MISS WILLIAMS and Mr. Gordon attribute the moral issue to the overused but highly emotive notion of "murder." However, both have made an unsupported and therefore unjustified assumption. They have both assumed that "murder," a term which is usually applied to human beings, can equally well be applied to human embryos, which they are including in their definition of human be- ing, i.e., homo sapiens. The question as to when we should begin calling a living or- ganism a "human being" has been thoughtfully answered for us by Miss Williams who says, "If a human being is killed at 20 days or 20 years, just what is the dif- ference?" The difference is every- thing, Miss Williams; what makes that 20-day old organism a "hu- man being?" What qualities does it possess which we normally as- sign to our species that distinguish us from other species? Does it breathe? Does it talk? Does it love? Does it (as Prof. White would say) symbol? Does it re- member? Clearly, there is no moral ques- tion here. Morality is meant to deal with and for people; it as- pires to help them to live peace- fully together in their respective communities. It should do no more than this, and an attempt to cor- relate a humanistic term such as "murder" with a non-humanistic entity such as an embryo, and further to attempt to apply this to the social concept of "morality" is to confound the original intent of the word. * * * LEGALIZED , ABORTION, if fully instituted, could make very positive contributions both to the individual and to humanity in general. But legalized abortion is no cure-all, no miracle. It is simply a practical and moral solution to a problem whichehas as its foun- dation a vast set of ambivalent, out-moded attitudes which char- acterize our sex-ridden society. It should be instituted in addition to the moral reforms which both Miss Williams and Mr. Gordon profess to advocate ( however improctical or difficult they might, in this case, be). However, to think that the symytoms consequent to the il- legality of abortion might be eradicated by "increasing counsel- ing servicesr to families and in- dividuals," or "increasing social services to unwed mothers," is to attack the foundation of it by the handing out of "spiritual help" to the mothers of fatherless chil- dren, is a failure to view the situ- ation as it really exists. Sex is not a problem for the church, Miss Williams, it is a problem aecause of it. --James R. Benson, '64 Baseball, Trimester To the Editor: MR. BLOCK'S column of Wed- nesday, April 8, indicated I held the notion that the new tri- mester system wil not be detri- mental to the University of Michi- gan baseball team and, in some ways, may even be advantageous to it. No doubt, I did not make clear that my comments applied only to the trimester schedule as it existed for this year. It may well be that any revision of this year's calen- dar may result in the spring se- mester ending earlier. If this de- velops, the baseball team (as well as other spring sports) will face many insurmountable problems. ' Therefore, it was not my inten- tion to imply that any new sched- ule will benefit the team in seasons after this one. -Milby Benedict Baseball Coach Symbols in 'Silence' To the Editor: ROBIN DUVAL'S review of Ing- mar Bergman's new film, "The Silence," is perceptive in 'some ways but, in others, totally inept. His treatment of some of Berg- man's symbols, for example, strikes me as being particularly lacking. Anna's feigned nymphomania and Ester's fits of masturbation and drinking are not symbolic of anything. More correctly, they are symptomatic of the sisters' inabil- ity to communicate and their in- dividual weaknesses. This distinction does not amount to hair-splitting, for symbols tra- ditionally stand for something oth- er than what is implied by their face values. Nymphomania. and drinking are not symbols, simply because they stand for themselves and nothing else. Rather, they are symptoms of easily diagnosable inner sickness. Nor . are these symptoms particularly Freudian, nor do they "run amuck" by dis- tracting the audience. They are pertinent and suggestive and con- tribute to the unity of action in the film. MY OTHER objection to Mr. Duval's critique is his sudden, brief and transient mention of the film's theme. With all his talk of Bergman's many symbols, one would expect Mr. Duval to arrive at a conclusion which servesto unify these symbols. Sadly, he does not, and, rather than facing the problem of theme squarely, he sidesteps by saying that the theme is "(broadly) the decay of-the in- dividual under certain reasonably normal stresses." Mr. Duval seems to have dis- missed the fact that the sisters have already decayed fully at the film's outset and that their action reflects the depths of this decay rather than its actual process.. Perhaps the film is more con- cerned with the circular, self- generating nature of isolation and lack of communication. "The Silence" is, as Mr. Duval points out, different from Berg- man's past films in that it relies less on melodrama. In this re- spect, it is superior to its predeces- sors. At any rate, it is a good film with, perhaps, "more memor- able material" than Mr. Duval suggests. -David Andrew, '65 Paradoxes To the Editor: ALTHOUGH any person in his right mind cannot, of course, help but take frequent exception to views expressed in The Daily, especially in regard to the movie reviews, I have nonetheless kept my opinions to myself up to now. Bergman's "The Silence", however, deserves a better review than it received and I have been strongly enough moved by this movie that I feel it worthwhile to dispute sev- eral points brought out by your re- viewer who, I feel, missed the main significance of the picture. I haven't read Betty Friedai's "The Feminine Mystique" yet and am no authority on the subject, but I am pretty sure that the con- trasts of this movie concern the unresolved paradoxes involved in the conventional roles of the sexes, especially with the problems of women. The two sisters are iso- lated from each other all right, but they also represent the conflict between the so-called masculine and feminine principles within what might have been a single per- sonality. The country they are moving into is not, as your reviewer sug- gested, Finland, nor does it pri- marily symbolize isolation; but is rather -the harsh war-like, unfeel- ing world of traditional masculini- ty. They do not know the lan- guage in this country and it is significant in this respect that the sister embodying the most mascu- linity is a professional translator. THE MEN in the picture repre- the same paradox. The man most able to communicate with wo- man exhibits selfless giving and tenderness but is impotent. His op- posite is found in the animal ag- gressiveness and complete lack of feeling of Anna's "lover." Without going into a detailed analysis to prove these points, a few other things in the review ought to be mentioned. To the extent that she represents an un- thinking point of view, Anna does not necessarily, as the review sug- gests, despise the man she "squan- ders her magnificent body on." Al- so Ester's "inherent humiliation" has little to do with her drink- ing. The review also failed to make the connection between the boy, Johan, and the music of Bach. The dwarves are not "evidently" sym- bols of purity, but I think more likely to have the function of a chorus, Greek style. I could go on in'this fashion, but my idea in writing this is not to tear apart a review, but rather to call attention to a significance in the movie, of which I think people need to be awareand which was completely evaded by the review; probably because of the high emo- tional content. -Myron Brownie, '64 The Political Issue To the Editor: WILL NOT QUIBBLE with Hugh Holland's judgement that "Dr. Strangelove" is one of the greatest films of recent years-for my own part I feel that it sur- passes the French and Italian films that I take as the Holy Text -but I do feel that he did not identify the political import of this film which is the essence of its greatness. "Dr. Strangelove" is the first and only film to deal adequately with the overriding political issue of our day. That the movie is such great entertainment is evidence that is has found the only re- sponse that can cope with the subject: total, anarchic, apocalyp- tic humor. THE PROBLEM is that our technology has outstripped intel- lectual and emotional capacities. Just as the newsreels of the Nazi death camps'numb the sensibili- ties, so the contemplation of "Megadeaths" obliterates our ca- pacities for humane response. Realism of ,the "On the Beach" variety is inadequate; surrealism as employed by "Dr. Strangelove" is the adequate response to an international situation that is an inhumane nightmare masquerad- ing as logic, reasonableness and pragmatism. "Dr. Strangelove's" 'greatest con- tribution is its demolition of the liberal-internationalist belief that men are reasonable and can con- trol the bomb. In being logical, reasonable and pragmatic the lib- eral-internationalists have betray- ed humanity and have capitulated to the mightmare of mass an- nihilation. The ineffectuality of these men'is demonstrated in Peter Sellers' marvelous caricature of Adlai Stevenson as President Mer- kin Muffley: "One of our officers, he . . . uh . . . went and did a silly thing." "DR. STRANGELOVE" will be branded subversive by conserva- tives and irresponsible by liberals, but it is the only document that sweeps away the miasmatic Cold War rhetoric and lodges an an- archic protest in the name of hu- manity. -Sam Walker, '64 Hippler and Stone To the Editor: REGARDING R. Hillper's editor- ial in the April 7 Daily, it may be that he learned little in fresh- man English; at least he ought to know that, when quoting, one is unlikely 'to footnote a reference as "one obscure, left-wing anarchis- tic journal." In fact, the quote that Mr. Hippler uses is from I. F. Stone's Weekly, March 23, 1964, page 2. Further, the gist of his entire editorial concerning "two new innovations in . . . South Viet Nam" is lifted, gently, from the same issue of Stone. I do not know whether Hippler's indirect reference to Stone is meant to be cute, but it is certain- ly inaccurate. Describing Stone's Weekly as "obscure" is a reflec- tion on Hippler; not on Stone or his paper. The,,use of the slurring "left-wing anarchistic" needs no comment. MR. RIPPLER cannot have it both ways; if Stone's opinions are worthy, so is his name. Sadly ironic, too, that someone named R. Hippler finds I. F. Stone "ob- scure." -Robert McCabe, Grad EDITOR'S NOTE: The quoted sec- tion was from Stone. The editor- ial director knew this, but thought most readers would guess it. And if you detected any real'scorn in my semi-facetious editorial toward that liberal and respected journal (see Esquire's survey of the Washington Press Establishment), yours is a far subtler mind than mine. R. H. Dearborn Suit To the Editor: T HE ARTICLE by Barbara Sey- fried in the April 4 Daily on the recent suit instituted by the Dearborn professor against the ap- propriation of public funds to a religious society, Religious Center for the Dearborn Campus, Inc., was remarkably well done. In all the controversy which has been stirred up in the Dearborn com- munity, little attention has been fixed on the important area of responsibility for such action. Miss Seyfried put the matter most suc- cinctly when she wrote: "Recently the center's board of directors de- cided the center needed a full-time coordinator." I do believe that in all the talk about church-state relations this important element in appointment and responsibility has been lost. One might think that the inaugur- ation of a new position and an expanded program would have been decided by the academic community - it would allegedly serve, the faculty and administra- tive officers of the college, and not by the center's board of directors. The fact that the religious center made no presentation to the fac- ulty or the religious organizations presently serving the campus was remarkably ungracious for a*group whose ultimate success denends in v :i j Couriers in a SumIer Camp T IS A SUDDEN JOLT to the well-pre- served, fully adapted college senior that there is really such a world as "off-cam- pus." It is a world far from the gaiety and security of the University. It has none of the attributes of this big year-round sum- mer camp experience many students un- dergo for four years. It's time to take our- selves more seriously, for the world off- campus is a cold, unfair and-much to the shock of the naive student-offers very difficult security. The University provides a fine four- year refuge from the world. It is a giant playground of ideas, a bath-tub of bril- liance where all "the best that has been said and done" can saturate within all students' unsuspecting lives. But for what purpose? To insure a place of even greater security after graduation, making this whole thing a trade school for the ex- pansion of the "firm?" Or to insure a place in.one's own mind for the hope of a spiritual attainment, the approach to Universality, Individuality and an evolu- tion of full consciousness? AN INDIVIDUAL is a man who thinks and creates, who seeks perfection and who can even sacrifice the false virtues of security for what he believes in. The big problem for the University student is to define what he believes in. Students can spend innumerable hours discussing sex, as if they are somehow compelled to talk about it. They can spend hours at meaningless TG's drinking barrels of what?" has become the motto of this shel- tered generation. Is this what we actually believe in? Would we rather go along with the crowd for four years than forge our own indi- vidual paths? Is this the kind of security -indifference-we are so desperately seeking? N OMAN CAN AFFORD to hide behind the false security of indifference; this only corrupts him as well as everyone he encounters. If we do not revolt from indifference now, we may be in that class of individuals that are simply called ro- bots. As Prof. McConnell of the psychol- ogy department has said, "We are all robots programmed to think that we are not." Yet there must be someone to assume the responsibility of programming these robots. Though they can be useful to so- ciety as a typewriter is, robots--like a typewriter--are solely dependent on the operator. The problem is to find enough Individuals who can become operators and lead us forward. If this isn't done, we may very well find ourselves hopeless, much like the helpless people of Kafka's parable of the couriers. Offered the choice of being kings or couriers to the kings, no one would venture to assume a king's responsibility, and so all men became couriers and spent their lives shouting meaningless mes- sages to one another. Are we all becoming couriers or are there perhaps a few who 'KINGS OF THE SUN': Easily Maligned Film Is 'Fun' at Own Level At the State Theatre T IS THE FASHION to malign Hollywood potboilers, as if they were somehow a degenerate form of the cinema. But the cutting, photog- raphy and general direction of even a second-grade spectacular like "Kings of the Sun" is streets ahead of the Dino di Laurentiis-type Goliaths, Gladiators, Hercules that issue in such abundance from Europe. There is a professionalism, an organization of film with an eye for exact utility which distinguishes Hollywood from its most direct rivals. Hollywood seems to have a much clearer preception of its chief assets. Like a recent Italian confection called "Gladiators Seven," "."ings of the Sun" is an excuse to show off manly chests. But whereas the former film squandered its opportunities on a flock of middle-aged pigeons, "Kings" parades its manhood to a degree that-were it an "art-film"-would be considered frankly pornographic. .'* * YUL BRYNNER'S BODY has never been displayed to such an advantage. Most of the time he wears the most fragile apology for a loincloth, he glistens with ersatz sweat, he lies prone on a mattress while the camera lopes self-indulgently about him. When he walks, his knees are turned slightly towards each other so that his upper body seems subtly to sway upon its axis; the result is one of the most explicit visions of motive sensuality I have ever seen. The story is the feeblest kind of vehicle, about a central American tribe (led by pretty George Chakiris) that flees an invader to start life anew on the shores of Mexico. A local tribe, under Yul Brynner, opposes it. There is a love interest, played with unsmiling boredom and a North England accent by Shirley Anne Field. * * * * IT'S ALWAYS a good idea in a mass audience film, especially one whose plot is as disjunctive as this, to leaven the action with a bit of morality. Here there are all kinds of stirring references to "m- ane -if -h n h aetity ofthe human nerson."Living I