I heard the news today oh boy ...
By ZACH SHILLER
THE UNITED STATES and an-
other nation "joined today in
an expression of continued deter-
mination" to maintain strong for-
ces here "capable of deterring ag-
gression." Sounds like something
out of Vietnam, 1966 or so? Well,
it's July 12, 1971 in Seoul, South
Korea, and Secretary of Defense
Melvin Laird is the U. S. delega-
tion leader.
IN ANOTHER corner of the
world, 2500 South Africans are ar-
rested under the pass laws there
each day. A writer for the New
York Times reports, "The pass
laws are designed to keep the
blacks without rights anywhere,
and on sufferance everywhere. The
black person is not considered a
person, but a labor unit. His wife,
children, old father and mother are
not members of his family but are
described as "superfluous appen-
dages." A 'labor unit' may stay
to work. A, grandfather too old to
work is sent out of the area."
You never cease to wonder how
the U.S., the most technologically
advanced country in the world,
with immense economic and po-
litical power, is helpless to do any-
thing about this situation, It is ig-
nored and therefore tacitly accept-
ed.
BACK HOME at the Capitol, Sen.
James Buckley of New York was
disclaiming that the nation has
been on an "antimilitary binge,"
forcing sharp cutbacks in large
areas of defense spending essential
to its security.
"As a result," the Conservative-
Republican declared, "we are not
only falling critically behind in the
necessary business of military re-
search and development, but we
have allowed our existing forces
to deteriorate to a point where
-
-
"Because I'M the EM
the EMPLOYEE - TH
the ability of the President of the
United States to assure the de-
fense of vital national interests is
in jeopardy."
Unless "our compulsive anti-
militarism is not soon brought to
heel," the Senator said, the na-
tion will find its foreign policy ob-
jectives "irrelevant because we
will be without the means of im-
plementing thenm."
THE CONTRADICTIONS latent
in statements such as thishave
never been adeutely spelled out.
One the one hand, senators such as
Buckley point with horror to our
impending doom at the hands of
expanding Soviet military might;
on the other, they say that socialist
countries can never develop to the
extent the United States has be-
cause socialism inevitably treads
the path to failure.
This dichotomy leaves you fear-
ing an imminent Soviet nuclear
strike and at the same time con-
soling yourself that the 'reds" can
never catch up. The inanity of such
a position should be obvious to
even the casual newspaper reader,
AND WHILE this support of dic-
tatorships and outright repression
g4;A . Ufr4it oa anDti
420 Maynard Street, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Edited and managed by students at the
University of Michigan
Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual
opinions of the author. This must be noted in all reprints,
Tuesday, July 27, 1971 News Phone: 764-0552
NIGHT EDITOR: TAMMY JACOBS
i --r4 , 1.4 E . - - t M£ , - - ,
Agnew says U.S. black leaders could
learn much from African leaders.
continues abroad, surveillance and
harrassment of 'subversive groups"
reach new heights in this country.
Papers taken from the files of
the FBI in Media, Pa.,Rsaythat
20,000 Boy Scouts in Rochester,
New York, have become the eyes
and ears of 'the Bureau.
Candidates for public office,
speakers at Earth Day rallies last
year, and members of such groups
as Students for a Democratic So-
ciety have all been subject to in-
vestigation or at least observa-
tion by the FBI.
PLOYER and YOU'RE
AT'S why!"
And now it appears that people
living in the area around Media
are being harrassed by govern-
ment agents. Plaintiffs in a suit
brought against the FBI have
asked a Federal Court to enjoin
as unconstitutional "continuous
and malicious harrassment" by
agents since the theft of F.B.I.
files at nearby Media in March.
THE COMPLAINANTS say in
the suit that FBI tactics included
physical violence, bribery, threats,
illegal searches and seizures, illegal
wiretapping, electronic surveil-
lance and denial of the right to
counsel during the raids and in-
terrogations, and intimidation not
only of themselves but also of
friends and relatives and em-
ployers.
So, hit by bit, various govern-
ment surveillance techniques are
uncovered. We are obviously far
from knowing the full story; there
are hints of a file of about 20,000
people who would be considered
"dangerous citizens" should there
be an attack on the U.S., and the
number of individual dossiers in
the possession of the government
is unknown.
MEANWHILE, there may be' a
poker game going on in the Capi-
tol. High administration officials
seem to think so, according to a
recent statement of the deputy
secretary of defense.
Theroyal flush, however, ap-
pears to be on the cheeks of one
of our highest officials in the De-
fense Department, David Packard.
His latest argument to the Senate
Foreign Relations subcommittee
on arms control is that the United
States must proceed with deploy-
ment of offensive and defensive
missiles as "bargaining chips" in
the strategic arms talks with the
Soviet Union.
This argument, perhaps the
oldest trick in the Cold War book,
seems to have lost none of its
ability to smite down the foes of
spiraling nuclear acquisition.
While the administration travels
down the same hard line of its
predecessors on issue after issue,
Nixon is lauded as the president
to re-establish normalcy in our
relations with the Peoples' Repub-
lic of China. Normalcy has already
been established in every other
field of foreign policy: the "nor-
malcy" of Truman - Eisenhower -
Kennedy-Johnson.
It will only be when this status
quo is challenged and finally
changed that the U.S. government
can claim success in the foreign
policy field.
THE ADMINISTRATION'S sud-
den veer towards rapprochement
with the ,People's Republic of
China has momentarily obscured
the rest of Nixon's policies from
view.
But when a vice president of
the United States comes up with
a statement admiring the dic-
tators of Africa and recommend-
ing them to this country's black
leaders, it is obvious where t h e
government stands.
The vice president has run the
dictatorship circuit from o n e
corner of the globe to the other.
Mobutu, Selassie, Franco an d
Hassan are the biggest recipients
of American praise, in keeping
with the rest of our foreign pol-
icy.
ON THE HOME front, the July
19 New York Times reports that
life in the inner city is continuing
to tecay at such a rate that it is
becoming a magician's trick to
f in d supermarkets, drugstores,
taxis, parks, restaurants "or even
a good corned beef sandwich."
In the same issue, the Times
reports that over a million inhabi-
tants of the South are unable to
read or write.
These two facts barely scratch
the surface of the stagnation and
decay which afflict the American
people. And buried under the rub-
ble of the ghettoes which litter
the landscapelies what remains
of the American dream.
The Editorial Page of The
MichiganDaily is open to any-
one who wishes to submit
articles. Generally speaking, all
articles should be less than
1,000 words.
Cellar controversy:
Underlying issues
By SIMON BADDELY
Daily Guest Writer
HERE ARE ALWAYS explanations for why censorship occur-
red if you have the chance to ask for them, and few
were more reasonably and gently argued than those put forward
at Saturday's public meeting of the University Cellar's Executive
Committee.
I was expecting to hear a rather stentorian lecture from
Prof. Bulkley (surely I though a misprint for Buckley of whom
he was probably a cousin) on why he was against being able to
buy any more kill-it-yourself literature. I was waiting to hear
a denunciation of The Sensuous Woman as a rotten little book
that I shouldn't even be able to leaf through on the bookstands.
To such suggestions I could have responded with the cool fury of
the liberal who knows here at least he can be an absolutist.
As it turned out, there were not the real issues that came up
at the meeting. Sure, they were mentioned. Several of us in
the audience of about 20 were waiting to guard the First
Amendment as eagerly as any active member of the NRA to
guard the right to bear bazookas. Some of the committee in-
clined to ask why it needed a newspaper story to bring us out.
This was the first time, it seems, more than two people have
been present at a scheduled public meeting of the committee.
The real issues seemed to be some way ahead of the public, and
members of the committee spent a good part of the meeting
admitting responsibility for that.
PROF. BULKLEY in particular commended The Daily for its
editorial on the subject. It emerged that "yes," there had been
censorship, and steps would be taken to see that censorship did
not occur again. The issues, however, stem from the way the
censorship occurred in the first place. They bear examination
as an example of the pitfalls that await experimental institu-
tions
Of course, it all comes down to ecology. The bookstore only
has so much space. Result: selection involves more and more
rejection. The great debate: When does selection become censor-
ship?
We are all used to the informal censorship imposed by high
initial cost and low re-sale value, but this is something new. A
direct refusal to display certain books. The operative term is
display. Anyone can order anything; the question is how the
choice is made about what books will be displayed to custom-
ers.
The way this choice was made is now admitted by the
committee to have amounted to censorship. The bookstore man-
ager ordered The Sensuous Woman. When it arrived the em-
ployes, acting in consensus, stated that they did not want to be
responsible for selling it, and asked him to take it off the shelves.
THE MANAGER ADMITS that if he hadn't taken The
Sensuous Woman off the shelves things would have been dif-
ficult with his fellow employes for a while. He happens to be
talking about a value placed on the quality of relationship
among employes, which organizations throughout the nation are
spending millions of dollars each year to create. They are re-
cognizing that given fulfillment or indifference as the main
determinant of a job's value to employes, the success of an
organization or even its survival may depend on the quality of
its social relationships
What may be forgotten now that due process is served is
that there are not many bookstores where the employes are
sufficiently involved to care about what books they are respon-
sible for selling or indeed to consider that it has anything to
do with them.
The people have now entered the scene for a couple of hours
and quite predictably have told them, "You may not exercise a
discretion which you have chosen to make a part of your
work ..." " . . . sure the store manager has to select books, but
so long as he does it in his bureaucratic role as a book selection
operative, then he isn't acting as a censor..."
This is quite convincing and acceptable if the manager is
seen as an entrepreneur who will be guided in his decisions by
the market. But the whole idea of the Cellar is that it can
better serve the needs of the public than organizations that must
make a profit. The exercise of censorship by profit making or-
ganizations is a contradiction in terms of a free market.
IF YOU CHOOSE to ignore the market, to move away from
a policy of serving the mean, then you cannot use the odd
contingencies of the market as an excuse for selection. The re-
maining criteria for selection for display can all be called cen-
sorship. What we have here is a failure of semantics; nor do
I see answers in a dialectical exercise about the ubiquity of
censorship,
If there is no market, the distinction between censorship and
selection lies in the quality of the relationship between the enter-
prise and the constituency it claims to serve. The store carries
an image of its universe of customers, and mismatches between
that image and its reality can occur. If due process occurs, such
mismatches are resolved and a new image of the public is
created in the selectors' minds - as happened during the past
week.
*k