Page 4-Saturday, November 3, 1979-The Michigan Daily
et 3tian uQ
Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom
Connally: A
djfferent Republican
Vol. LXXXX, No. 51
News Phone: 764-0552
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
By Ira Allen
United Press International
Wayne county must
reorganize for aid
W AYNE COUNTY is now flat
broke, the county government
has already missed two payrolls and
has no chance of making another.
payroll in this fiscal year, and the
county has been told it cannot borrow
money until it reorganizes its large and
unruly system.
Wayne county's fiscal woes stem
directly from its cumbersome system
of elective government, where 27 elec-
ted commissioners and nine indepen-
dently elected department heads make
everyone from the drain commissioner
to the dog catcher an independent elec-
ted official. without a single county
executive-elected or appointed-to
bring the various units of the county
government together and demand ac-
countability, the business of running
the nation's third largest county is
something akin to a Keystone Kops
caper. Small wonder Wayne county
as come to make Cleveland look like
the prototype of fiscal responsibility.
Gov. Milliken and Detroit Mayor
Coleman Young have come to
agreement on a reorganization plan,
and the compromise seems the most
sensible and fair thing to do for the
people and employees of the
beleaguered Wayne county. That is, let
the voters decide whether the county
executive should be appointed or elec-
ted.
The state has already relented
somewhat in a $4 million aid package
for the county, but the county must
now show that it is willing to solve its
own prdblems by reorganizing its
government and replacing its current
mismanagement with a responsible
county nanager.
The Wayne county crisis closely.
resembles-the fiscal crisis of another
large local corporation, Chrysler. Like
Wayne county, the giant number three
automaker went begging to the gover-
nment--in its case, the federal gover-
nment-once their own managerial
blunders forced them to the brink of
bankruptcy. Like the federal gover-
nment in the Chrysler case, the
Milliken administration here has
refused a blank check to bail out the
county until the county government is
trimmed back. That request seems
reasonable enough, since the current
failings are proof of the unmanageability.
of the existing system.
The county must be helped. Only an in-
fusion of state money can bring Wayne
county off itsd knees. But that aid can
only come once the country shows it is
responsibleenough to not let the current
mess happen again.
WASHINGTON-The first thing about John
B. Connally is his looks. He is a Hollywood
version of a president-tall and substantially
built, wavy silver hair, self-assured stride
and a tone of voice to go with it.
He speaks with Harry Truman's cadence,
John Kennedy's hand gestures and Lyndon
Johnson's voice. But he is a Republican,
albeit like no other presidential aspirant the
GOP has seen.
HE WAS, OF COURSE, once a Democrat.
An LBJ protege and aide, Connally was-Ken-
nedy's navy secretary and three term gover-
nor of Texas. He led the conservative wing of
the divided state party that Kennedy was
trying to heal when he went to Dallas in 1963.
The assassination, in which Connally was
wounded, first brought the millionaire Texas
lawyer to public attention.
The second thing about Connally is his
breath-taking transit between political par-
ties. He headed Democrats for Nixon in 1972,
became Richard Nixon's treasury secretary,
switched to the Republican Party at the
height of Watergate and was Nixon's choice
as a successor had not events taken away the
president's option.
It was Connally who told Nixon early on in
Watergate to "burn the tapes.''
Connally was indicted on bribery and con-
spiracy charges, accused of taking $10,000
from the dairy industry in exchange for his ef-
forts to get price supports raised. He was in-
dicted the day Nixon announced his
resignation, and was lated acquitted.
BEFORE ANY VOTES are cast in the 1980
GOP presidential contest, Connally is one of
the major candidates challenging front-
runner Ronald Reagan.
He has raised an astounding $4 million,
mostly from big businessmen who consider
Connally their spokesman. He demonstrated
his "leadership" theme by proposingda plan
for the Middle East peace that had other
Republicans as well as Democrats howling
objection.
That plan, which also brought down the
wrath of Jewish groups, would require Israel
to give up Arab land it has occupied since
1967, allow the Palestinians an autonomous
state, depend on Saudi Arabia to lower oil
prices to the West and station American
troops in the region to guarantee regional
security.
LIKENED BY MANY to a riverboat gam-
bler, Connally was betting the whole boat
when he made that suggestion. Now Connally
is preparing to bet the river in a coming
speech on the economy an aide says will be "a
departure from the conventional norm."
"Our objective in presenting the Middle
East plan is to make certain this is a two-man
race and to do that you have to separate
yourself from the pack, and I think we've
achieved that," explains Connally spokesman
Jim Brady.
That is Connall's overall strategy against
Reagan. He must overcome high negative
ratings in the polls and demonstrate he-not
Reagan-is the dynamic leader Republicans
want against President Carter or Kennedy.
At age 62, seven years younger than
Reagan, Connally has started to make a point
of the Californian's age, saying whoever is
nominated "ought to be able to serve.''
CONNALLY' OIL company connections
and big business rhetoric will not help him in
the first few New England primaries, but he
is counting on the next round in Florida,
Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina to give
him a victory.
Connally
Connally has attracted top political talent to
his campaign, and, if party pros don't trust
him because of his recent conversion to the
GOP, he does excite audiences with the
catechism of corporate ideology and old
fashioned jingoism.
To the Japanese, who are stingy about U.S.
imports, Connally threatens: "Be prepared to
sit on the docks of Yokohama in youy Toyotas
eating your own mandarin oranges, watching
your own television sets because they're not
coming in here."
To those who question the future of nuclear
power, he advises: "We have to make aup our
minds that we're going to quit taking scien-
tific advice from the Ralph Naders and Jane
Fondas and listen to the Doctor Edward
Tellers for a change. "-
To the World Affairs Council, he prescibes
abandoning "Tiptoe diplomacy" and "casting
out the devil of defeatism and recapturing the
dynamism that once made this country into
the world's first superpower."
To critics, however, Connally may have
been describing his own problem when he
cast this gibe at Kennedy: "The trouble is
is that what he is speaks more loudly than the
words that he uses to try to tell us what he is.
Cannibalism-the myth of flesh-eating
Harold Shapiro
By David Hicks
A FTER 15 YEARS, Harold Shapiro
is taking two months off. If any-
one deserves it, he does.
Shapiro has done just about
everything for the University from
assistant economics professor to his
most recent role as vice-president for
academic affairs. In each position, the
44-year-old economist has added to the
prestige of this University. As vice-
president, Shapiro was well-known for
his administrative efficiency and craf-
ty handling of bureaucratic details.
While chairman of the Department
of Economics, Shapiro earned a
national reputation for his ability to
analyze current economic indicators.
Along with other University
professors, Shapiro worked on a com-
plicated but usually accurate study of
the national economy.
The two-month vacation could not
y come at 'a better time because
Shapiro's biggest challenge lies just
ahead. In January, he will assume the
most difficult job of them all -
president of the University.
He has already had more than three
months to prepare for the job by
meeting with countless University of-
ficials and others in the local com-
munity. Now that he has some time off,
the president-designate plans to put it'
to good use. Next week, he'll begin a
tour of other universities to see how
administrators deal with the same
kind of problems Shapiro will face.
He will try to see how other presiden-
ts combat the soaring tuition rates,
housing problems and general
economic constraints. As he has
reiterated so often, the 1980s will be the
decade of program cutbacks and
bureaucratic reorganization. Many
tough decisions will have to be made
early in the Shapiro administration.
In this tour, Shapiro will search for
some answers. He will spend the
remainder of his vacation seeking as
much advice as possible.
However he encounters future
University problems, Harold Shapiro
deserves a lot of credit for his past ser-
vice in the University. His experience
can only be a huge plus factor in his ef-
forts to lead the school through the
next decade.
(EDITOR'S NOTE:Even as
new reports about cannibalism
in distant places surface in the
news-an anthropologist
argues that there is no reliable'
evidence for believing that any
people anywhere has eaten
human flesh as a matter of
custom. David Hicks is
professor of anthropology at
the State University of New
York at Stony Brook, and the
author of "Tetum Ghosts and
Kin: Fieldwork in an In-
donesian Community" (1976)
and "Structural Analysis in
Anthropology: Case Studies
from Indonesia and Brazil"
(1978).
When the Emperor Bokassa of
the Central African Empire was
deposed, it was reported that
human bones had been found in
his refrigerator. And when an in-
ternational expedition recently
discovered the remnants of a
Stone Age tribe in Papua, ew
Guinea, word came that the area
was "renowned for can-
nibalism."
There is reason to be skeptical
of both reports, if past experience
with allegations of cannibalism is
any guide.
JUST ABOUT EVERYONE,
including anthropologists,
believes that cannibalism has
existed in various parts of the
world. Yet now it appears that
the grounds for this belief are ex-
tremely shaky. No anthropologist
has personally witnessed one
single act of the practice, and the
places where it allegedly has oc-
curred were always conveniently
remore and inaccessible.
My colleague, Dr. W. Ahrens,
here at the State University of
New York, Stony Brook, has
tracked down the most famous
reported instances of can-
nibalism and found everyone of
them highly dubious. What he has
found is an amazing readiness by
anthropologists and other
scholars to take stories about the,
eating of human flesh at face
value.
For instance, consider those
favorite cannibals of the Western
imagination, the Aztecs. They
were subdued in 1521 by 600
soldiers led by the Spanish ad-
venturer, Hernando Cortes.
During the 'Conquest of Mexico'
several of the soldiers jotted
down notes on events they had
witnessed, but few mention can-
nibalism, and none claims to
have observed it.
THE AZTEC'S reputation for
man-eating was foisted upon
them as the .result of accounts
written decades after the
Conquest by these soldiers,
whose genocidal achievements in
America became a target for
disapproving comments at home.
In his recent book, The Man-
Eating Myth: Anthropology and
Anthropophagy, Arens reasons
that the conquerors sought to
justify their wanton slaughter of
the Indians by making them so
inhuman as to eat people.
Even the two authoritative
sources for Aztec cannibalism,
the Catholic missionaries Diego
Duran and Bernardo da Sahagun,
never witnessed it. The custom
was supposedly abandoned
decades before they made their
inquiries. Their information
came from Indians interviewed
about a generation after the.
conquest.
As many anthropologists know,
to rely on memories for infor-
mation about past customs is
dangerous. Old men not only
forget, they invent. Particular
caution is needed in this case
because these reports were of
eyewitness' accounts, but rank-
and-file Indians' guesses about
what Aztec priests used to do with
the corpse of a sacrificial victim
after it was carried from public
view. Sahagan did not interview
Aztec priests.
More copious, but just as am-
bigious, is Duran's evidence.
Arens suggests it is about as
reliable as Duran's report that
Jews murdered,. people to con-,
sume their blood.
UNACCOUNTABLY, this
reliable material has convinced
one anthropologist , Michael Har-
ner, at the New School for Social
Reseacrh, not only that the Az-
tecs were cannibals but that his
fellow scholars have conspired to
cover up the real extent of Aztec
human sacrifice. Harner's
revisionary arithmetic has
recently increased the estimated
consumption of bodies from the
conventionally accepted 15,000 a
year to a quarter of a million.
Faced with the ' difficulty that
Sahagun says little about man-
eating, Harner conjectures that
the Indians took cannibalism for
granted. This is an argumen-
tative ploy which fully merits
Arens' caustic rebuke: '. . . in a
singular inversion of the
scholarly method, the lack of
documentation is actually offered
as evidence for the existence of a
custom.'
Sahagun's informants did men-
tion, however, that when the vic-
torious Europeans entered their
capital city, Tenochtitlan, after
having besieged it, they saw hun-
dreds of corpses strewn about the
streets, and survivors so
emaciated even Cortes' men
pitied them. Yet with the means
of satisfying their hunger, and
even saving their lives, before
them, the Aztecs had preferred to
be starved into submission and
death rather than eat human
flesh.
It is mystifyiung just how
elusive dreaded cannibals are
when threatened by the ap-
pearance ofaan anthropologist.
They come and go like a sea-
monster in the fog, as the story
one anthropologist, Klaus-
Friedrich Koch, demonstrates.
This intrepid fieldworker
somehow managed to survive
among the 'man-eating' Jale in
New Guinea in the 1950s by san-
dwiching his expedition between
their purported eating of people
just before he arrived on the
scene and their consumption of
two missionaries just after he
left!
Arens contends that people of
every culture, sub-culture,
religion, sect, and secret society
have at some time or other been
labeled cannibals by other
peoples. For if they are can-
nibals, by definition they are
inhuman and may therefore be
exploited and even exterminated.
The willingness of an-
thropologists to suspend the skep-
ticism proper to scholarship
when confronted with the can-
nibalism myth suggests to Arens
that it is a myth they also need.
Now Ahrens is not, we should
realize, arguing that cannibalism
has never existed, or even that it
does not exist today. But his fur-
vey of the evidence prompts him
to conslude that no plausible
case-study has yet been
published.
Spacy Jane
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